average admins

Originally posted at cocoacrusty.com on Wednesday, March 21st, 2007.

I have been fascinated with the Mac Mini for quite sometime and actually thought that this piece of hardware would be my entrance into the world of Macintosh due to its size, price, and the fact that you can use your already existing DKM. When I purchased my MacBook from the Apple Store in Plano, Texas, I talked with a salesperson about the Mac Mini. She said that a lot of people were purchasing the Mini for use as a server. I thought that was an extremely cool idea.

Think about it. Most data centers aren’t getting any bigger. Every server manufacturer out there is trying harder and harder to cram more and more into 1U rackmount servers. Even so, the length of these machines is way too long. I mean, you took a tower server and squashed it down to like an inch to an inch and a half tall but the rest had to be flattened out and spread over a larger footprint. The Mac Mini measures 2 inches tall and is 6.5 inches square. How many of those things can you fit on the real estate a 1U server takes up?! A lot!

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Originally posted at cocoacrusty.com on Wednesday, March 21st, 2007.

I have had my 30 GB Video iPod for a while and have been using my MacBook since late 2006. I bought my iPod at WalMart and it came formatted for a Windows machine. This was fine and all when I used a Windows machine and FreeBSD because I could read and write to the iPod with no problems as well as update the iPod via my Windows PC (yes, I have one… I’m sorry…). However, since I have been using my MacBook full time I haven’t been able to update my iPod’s software from 1.2 to 1.2.1 because it was formatted for Windows, I was too lazy to boot up my Windows machine, and I was honestly a little afraid to click on the “Restore” button within iTunes for fear of hosing my iPod.

Today, while working at a remote disaster recovery location, I had a few minutes to spare while a server booted up and recognized some new tape drives to press that “Restore” button within iTunes. I was scared, yes, but I did it. I clicked it! As soon as I did, iTunes told me that all of my music would be deleted from the iPod and the iPod would be returned to the factory settings. I accepted this and told iTunes to continue with the restore. As it was wiping my iPod it also upgraded my iPod to the latest version of the iPod software, version 1.2.1, and obviously, formatted the iPod with a Macintosh file system.

Now, as software updates are released for the iPod I don’t have to feel left behind due to laziness and fear any longer. I always use my Mac and can just update it inside iTunes at the click of a button. I’m glad I “made the switch” to Macintosh, both in my normal computing environment (i.e. my laptop) and in my iPod file system.

Until next time…

You have probably noticed the recent influx of BSD-based distros and livecds on DistroWatch. Here’s one that caught their attention in a recent issue of DistroWatch Weekly:

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I have been running Microsoft Windows XP in Parallels, a virtual machine application for Intel based Macs, on my MacBook and have been very pleased. I do however have a question about Windows XP specifically, although this question may apply to other versions of Windows. Why does Windows XP seem to run better in virtual machines than on actual PC hardware?

I use Win4BSD, a virtual machine application from the makers of Win4Lin for FreeBSD, on my FreeBSD 6.x laptop to run Windows XP and have experienced the same result there. I ran Qemu before that with the same results.

I know Chris uses VMware Workstation on Debian Linux with Windows XP installed and has expressed the same thing about his experiences. Actually, Chris said he had even better performance out of Windows XP by running Windows XP in his VMware virtual machine and then using rdesktop, an open source Remote Desktop Connection client, to connect to the virtual machine. Crazy!

I haven’t used VMware on a Windows box in quite sometime so I don’t know if there are performance gains by running Windows XP in a virtual machine on Windows XP. So, maybe someone out there in aa land can chime in on that. But, the question remains: why does it run better? Is the virtual hardware more fine tuned to run the necessities of Windows XP? If anyone out there has any knowledge behind Virtual Machine internals, please let us in on the secret.

I am also very interested to see if anyone else’s experiences mimic my own. Is it just me? Am I getting lucky? What’s the 411?!

Until next time…

It has been quite some time since I did any serious wardriving. I used to use NetStumbler on my Windows XP laptop but when I started using FreeBSD I never really did any wardriving, just the occasional snooping with Kismet. It’s been well over a year since I did the whole wardriving thing with a GPS and everything… and that’s too long!

When I was doing my wardriving in Windows I used NetStumbler, as I stated before, and a Garmin eTrex Legend handheld GPS to capture the GPS coordinates every time a wireless network was detected. I used the GPS data to make custom Google Maps of my journeys.

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I have been interested in and using computers since I was like 11 or 12. I have personally owned many computers over the years and used a number of different operating systems personally and professionally. My first PC was an IBM 8088 running various versions of DOS, then on to Commodore with an Amiga 500 and then an Amiga 1200. I got my first 486 PC after graduating high school in 1995. From that point forward I have used a number of operating systems and platforms.

I have used different versions of DOS, every version of Microsoft Windows from 3.11 for Workgroups to Windows Vista Beta, Amiga Workbench 1.2 and 1.3, various flavors of Linux like Mandrake, Red Hat, and Fedora, Solaris 2.6 and 2.8, IBM’s AIX (4.3.x - 5.x), OS/2 Warp, and am now extremely satisfied with and a “fanboy” of FreeBSD.

I have enjoyed the different environments, windowed or command line, that each of the operating systems has offered. In the *NIXs, specifically FreeBSD, Fluxbox is my window manager of choice. Gnome and KDE are great window managers but a bit too bulky for my taste these days. I have customized my Windows XP desktop to be as minimal as possible, and enjoy it like that, but the underlying system is still not my operating system of choice for daily personal use.

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I figured I would post this here for the archives…

I spent most of last night and a better part of this morning trying to get my personal desktop configured with a dual-head X display. I thought I would just use the configuration for the ATI FireGL V3100 that I had used yesterday at work with some minor changes for device BusID’s and what not. However, that didn’t work.

I tried a number of configs on my personal box and most of them would lock up the machine. Not just X Windows, but the machine itself requiring a “poke in the eye” to reboot it. I finally went through the config line by line and found the culprit. The AGPFastWrite directive that worked like a champ on the FireGL card hosed up the x800 box. Once I commented that line out in the config my X Windows session fired off and worked as expected.

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I finally had a chance to install FreeBSD on my work desktop today. I have been working on my FreeBSD laptop for the past 2 weeks or so and with the help of Win4BSD I can do everything I need.

Today after work I spent a little time trying to get a dual-head setup for my X desktop. I mean, it’s cute and all when one monitor clones the other one but it doesn’t really make good use of two 17″ flat panels and a dual-head video card. I went through a number of configs, changing this, adding or removing that, and nothing seemed to be working. I had some pretty strange setups from time to time where my desktop would be spread across both monitors, I could swing my mouse from one to the other, but I had two taskbars in Fluxbox and when I pulled up the right-click menu, it would display on both screens. At one point I also had the same setup I just mentioned but when I would move my mouse to the left monitor the mouse cursor disappeared and I had a big light blue square with which to use as a pointer… and it wouldn’t do anything. It wouldn’t pull up the right-click menu, move through the workspaces by clicking the numbers and arrows on the taskbar, nothing.

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I have been working on getting my home desktop ready to dual boot Windows XP and FreeBSD 6.1. I have been working on pushing all the data on the Windows partition to the front of the drive (not optimized, I know) so that I could resize the partition. I ran into a couple of snags that I easily worked around with a few helpful resources and tools.

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Long live the original average admins blog! I recompiled my kernel this evening for my laptop and in the process wiped out my NDIS driver for my built-in wireless card. Guess what?! I blogged about how I got that working back in the day, my 5th entry in “My FreeBSD Diary” to be exact.

There is some good stuff over there at the old AA blog! Check it out! Here is a link directly to the search page… Don’t laugh too hard. I made that blog from scratch! I think I did quite well considering I am one guy with a limited amount of time for maintenance (which is why I switched to WordPress).

Until next time…