computoman

You just bought a new computer and the first thing you want to do is to turn it on and play with it. DON'T. You will want to make a pristine duplicate of your computer's hard drive first. Why? Because that way you can be sure that you can go back to the beginning if you need to. In fact, I recommend getting two extra drives unless you have a server with plenty of space. Why two drives?  The first drive will be a duplicate of the virgin hard drive. The second drive will be a duplicate of the modified and  setup system you can use as a base in case you have problems.  After setting up thousands of systems in the corporate environment, the words come from experience. You will also need software to back up your drives without it having to be installed. You will have to do some research as they change all the time. The two I have used most is Clonezilla and Ghost. Clonezilla is free for personal use. Best to read the manual before using the software. Eve...

According to this news report from https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9221717/PC_makers_should_brace_for_drive_shortages , hard drives will be in short supply for about a year. How can you get around that? There are several ways to do it. Some of which I have talked about a little before. Well you operate the computer without a hard drive. At first that seems ludicrous. but it is actually very viable. There are two ways that this can be done. Both are based on what is known as the PXE or pre-execution environment where the hardware in the network interface card can load all or part of an operating system into a computer from the network. A major advantage of using diskless clients is that all software management can be one from virtually just one point. All software maintenance and upgrades are done on the server(s). That means, you do not have to send out a software technician to a user's desk to maintain the software on their system. Reduced Information technology suppor...

Well fortunately, I had a system I was building to replace oesrvr1. Pulled the hard drive from that machine and installed it in oesrvr1. After making a few adjustments, The system was serving the main page and a few other things. Since I needed to replace a lot of software anyway. It was not a big deal all the applications were not installed. The lamp services and phpmyadmin were installed and they was the most important. Began to restore files.  Etc etc etc. Anyway, the real reason I needed to have to old server back up again was to take advantage of what is known as GPXE. Gpxe is the open source version of the pre-execution environment that allows a computer to boot into a working environment without a storage system in use or enabled. This usually entails having special network card in a computer system that contains enough information to boot into the network. PXE has been around a long time. Normally if you turn on your computer, you will hear a hard disk drive whirl up to spe...