K’s Weblog

Technology and the Interweb for the Real World

New Box – Dell Vostro 430

January 14th, 2010 by Keith
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I’ve got no doubt I’ll take some heat for going this route, but my solution to the build it or buy it dilemma was in fact to buy a new box. I decided to go for a machine from their business lineup, the Vostro 430 MT. This machine comes with a bunch of cores and an ample amount of RAM will allow this box to become the base for my home computing activities.

This machine’s primary duty will be to take over the day-to-day computing tasks from my Macbook freeing it up for mobile-only duties so that I’m not carrying around the primary copies of most of my data every time I leave the house.  In addition, I’ll be virtualizing the two desktop machines I have in the basement today, one of which has succumbed to old age in the past couple of months.  The VMs will provide some added flexibility as far as Operating Systems and some single-duty machines.

For now I’m evaluating a couple of virtualization options to use on the new box when it arrives, and I’m re-working the layout of the home network, splitting out VLANs for the servers to help isolate them a bit from the rest of the network. The main goal of some of this is to play around and learn the technologies, of course.

Some of the VM applications I’m considering include test machines for development, SSH tunnel/proxy for remote access, web server, Mozilla Weave server, secure machine for my office VPN and whatever else my dreams, or nightmares (or conversations with Knightwise) inspire.

The machine should arrive in the next week, unboxing and other additional posts will follow.

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Google Docs Adds Cloud Storage

January 13th, 2010 by Keith
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Google Docs today expanded the functionality of the service by offering 1GB of cloud storage for any type of file you want to upload. The only restrictions seem to be the 1GB cap on storage (you can buy more at $0.25 USD / GB) and the limit of 250MB per individual file.

Though it doesn’t quite match some of the other features we’ve become accustomed to seeing in cloud storage like an OS client with drag & drop functionality, it certainly provides a reliable place to store some of your larger files that won’t fit under the smaller 20MB cap that Google places on email. This is quite possibly the precursor to the much lauded and speculated about G-Drive cloud storage service.

via LifeHacker

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Creating ISO Images from the OSX Command Line

January 9th, 2010 by Keith
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A super fast way to create ISO images (or any kind of bit for bit copies) from the OS X (or linux, or unix) command line is to use the DD command. This isn’t without it’s risks since the DD command will duplicate byte for byte all data from one location to another, but once you’ve found the necessary information you can easily replicate data.

I needed to create a copy of my Windows XP installation CD to use for setting up new virtual machines. Since it’s quicker to install VMs from an ISO image rather than from the installation media I wanted an ISO of my CD. The built in OS X disk utility can make this work… in theory. My copy of disk utility (on Snow Leopard) didn’t want to recognize the CD. So I turned to my command line knowledge.

I should also note that before you can read the CD using DD, you will need to unmount it:

sudo umount /dev/disk1s0

You’ll be prompted for your administrator password, then you’re in business.

To create an image of a CD (or DVD or anything else…) use the following:

dd if=/dev/disk1s0 of=/Users/kdmurray/Desktop/WindowsXP.iso bs=64k

  • if= input file, in this case our Windows XP CD
  • of= output file, the actual ISO file you want created
  • bs= block size, the size of chunks the tool will work with

I did a few speed tests at 16k, 32k, 64k, 128k, 256k and 1M and found that the 64k seemed to be the ideal block size on my machine. This will vary by CPU, and possibly by hard drive controller, so do a few contolled tests first. To do a test, start the copy process, then stop it after 20-30s (ctrl-c). Whichever one copied the most in 30s is the one you should use.

That’s all she wrote, folks. Happy command-lining. :)

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Build it or Buy it — The Technologist’s dillemma

January 1st, 2010 by Keith
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The time has finally come for me to pick up a new system. This is usually a very happy moment in a geek’s life; the time when you get to spec out a new system with some of the latest tech. Reading product reviews, selecting components… it’s fun!

One of the true marks of geekdom is the ability to build your own machines from the ground up. Everything from ordering the parts, to gingerly placing in the CPU and glopping on just the right amount of thermal-conductive paste right through to powering up the system for the first time then installing and pimping out the OS of your choice. I’ve been there, its a ton of fun when you finally get everything working just right. It’s also a fair bit of work.

The more pragmatic geek can also buy a system, spec’d to order from companies like Dell or Lenovo. These systems still have pretty much everything you want, professionally assembled and sent to your door. These usually take a few weeks to ship so you need to be a bit more patient but there’s a lot less work involved.

So, what about price? Most of the time the price is pretty comparable for a complete system. I priced out a system with the following basic requirements from both Dell and a local computer retailer:

  • Intel Core i7 860
  • 8GB of Memory
  • Windows 7 Pro

The two systems came out less than $80 apart with some minor differences in specs, hard drive size, optical drive, video card etc. For the most part it was the same system, and essentially the same price.

So what does it come down to? Is one option truly better than any other? The best advice I can give is that you need to get yourself a system you can trust. If that means you want professionals to put the system together for you and certify it, then that’s the route you need to take. If, however, you’re the Richard Stallman of computer builds and you feel that you need to free each of the components and build a computer that’s independent of “the man” and that’s where you derive the most value, then that should be your choice.

Image courtesy Frigante on Flickr.

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Fixing Bootcamp Clock Issue on Windows 7

November 1st, 2009 by Keith
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win7transparentFor the longest time I simply lived with the fact that my system clock didn’t behave properly in my Windows partition when I had BootCamp setup on the macbook. It didn’t matter what I did, I couldn’t seem to find a way to keep the clock properly synchronized.  The problem stems from how Apple decided to implement the system clock which is different from the way that most PC manufacturers do.

Apple’s hardware always returns time in UTC, most PCs update the system clock to local time and won’t require a conversion of that time so of course the default Windows settings aren’t really set up for BootCamp (though you’d think the BootCamp installer could correct this…)

The solution, as it turns out, is a simple registry key change to tell Windows that the system’s clock is using UTC time.  One value in one key, that’s all it takes:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation]
"RealTimeIsUniversal"=dword:00000001

BootcampUtcClockFix.reg

Another solution that I found over at superuser.com is to modify OS X to change the time at startup and at shutdown. To me, this seems like more of a hack than the “unsupported” registry key. Windows 7 has been working well under this configuration and has even successfully interpreted the daylight saving time change.

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