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Showing posts with the label system

Operating system upgrade.

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Before you start, make sure the operating system you want to upgrade to will work on your computer. General steps for operating system upgrade. 1. Backup    A. Save data files and program settings.    B. Make a system image aka duplicate if possible.  (requires special software)    C. Get list of installed files. 2 Get operating system.    A.Traditional method.     1, Download new media. (up to several gigabytes.)         In some cases this could take several hours.     2. Burn new operating system to media.     3. Install operating system,  B. Ipxeboot. (MSWindows may require a special server, but Linux and BSD do not)      1. Boot with minimal media. (i.e. floppy, usb stick, or minimal cd)      2. Downloads and installs minimal OS for install control.      3. Downloads and installs the rest of the OS a...
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Using legacy ports.

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No-solder-parallel-port-break-out (Great for home control) We are going to take the parallel port breakout cable and have some fun with the following code (which I may rewrite) and use some extra parts. Part 1 C code Code source Note asm/io.h s/b sys/io.h in parcon.c Part II Basic code: Freebasic: (code snippet) (Note: Compiled code on linux must be run under sudo or root unless special rights are given to the program via chmod +s.) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 rem turn on D0 (pin 2 on the parallel port) out 888,1 rem get status and print to terminal ? inp(888) rem turn off D0 (pin 2 on the parallel port) out 888,0 rem get status ? inp(888) Code Source Circuit for testing the code. With the cable it will be easier to set up. Simple LED driving circuits You can make simple circuit for driving a small led through PC parallel port. The only components needed are one LED and one 470 ohm resistors. You simply connect the diode and resist...
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How do you boot?

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Biztools.

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Happy sys admin day.

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System administrator day.

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Friday July 26, 2013 is system administrators day. Yes, take care of present and former (if you want to find out if there are any backdoors) system administrators.
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Port of call.

One thing that is good for an network administrator is to be able to see if a web server is up without having to load a browser. Of course the web browsers usually run on port 80. Here is a short script to do that. Grab a root webpage and save the code. Great for seeing if a server is up. Usage:  ./webpageget.sh site outputfile ./getwebpage.sh oesrvr1 oesrvr1_rootpage rm: cannot remove `oesrvr1_rootpage’: No such file or directory <html> <head> <title> Offshore Educators (Main Page) 1 </title> <base href=” http://oesrvr1/oe/”&gt ; </head> <FRAMESET ROWS=”15%,*”> <FRAME SRC=”title.html” NAME=TITLE SCROLLING=NO> <FRAMESET COLS=”20%,*” FRAMEBORDER=no> <FRAME SRC=”tools.html” NAME=SIDEBAR noresize> <FRAME SRC=”notes.html” NAME=NOTES noresize> </FRAMESET> <NOFRAMES> <H1> Offshore Educators</H1> No frames? No Problem! Take a look at our <A HREF=”plain.html”>no-frames...
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Banner year for Linux!

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What a banner year for Linux and it's derivatives. The computer landscape has changed. And in other news... Linux Torvalds the creator of linux dropped linux support for the old i386. Not a big deal. Probably use free dos and opengem if I had to use one of those units anyway. People sometimes ask me what linux distro I use. Underneath the hood they are all basically the same. Thought I do use Debian the most as it is uniform over different hardware platforms. I.E. Arm, X86, X86_64 and etc.
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What's on your network?

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Ever wanted to know what is on your network graphically? There is a program that works on most platforms that support the java gui. Your best chance to document your home network. The program is jNetMap. The java version seems a lot more stable now. You can find it on sourceforge.net You can start up the the program very easily from the command line with (if you have java installed): $ java -jar jNetMap.jar or  C:\> java -jar jNetMap.jar The instructable: http://www.instructables.com/id/Map-your-network-visually/ has more information also. Once you run the software on your network and scan for devices, you can get a roadmap of what is there. What is really neat about it is, you can see what devices are up or down on the network and it makes trouble shooting easier. You can also see rogue devices on the network also that need to be investigated. You can use the mouse to move all the icons around to make the map more readable. You can even add notes to define wher...
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Android a unix device?

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To be honest, I do not spend that much time on Unix history. You could probably get a better idea of the history at:  http://www.robotwisdom.com/linux/timeline.html or www.groklaw.net Android was originally very loosely based on Linux at it's start. Now who knows. What is ironic is that Microsoft according to news reports allegedly earns almost a half billion dollars each year off of Android with their alleged software patents. Not so long ago A company called SCO claimed ownership of Unix via Novell and also claimed that Linux was directly a copy of unix. That assertion was clearly rebuked by the courts. SCO now allegedly in bankruptcy still wants to assert the same argument. They are still in Court with IBM over that assertion. www.groklaw.net has all the details. See also www.eff.org . Linux was developed by Linux Torvalds who still has a great say in how linux is developed. Since it is a free as in speech operating system, many derivatives have been developed. In fact, if you ...
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Duplicate linux box.

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Say you want to have several machines to be exactly alike that run Debian or Ubuntu Linux.  You will want to set up the first machine the way you want it. Now we need to get the list of packages that have been installed (software installed via ppa's may still have to be setup manually.) $ dpkg -–get-selections > installed-software.log installed-software.log: [code] ... ... x11-common                    install xauth                        install xfonts-encodings                install xfonts-utils                    install xkb-data                    install xml-core     ...
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