Storage

I’ve been trying a dozen different configurations of my 2x500GB SATA drives over the past few days involving switching between ACHI/IDE/RAID in my bios (This was after trying different things to solve my problems with Ubuntu Lucid Lynx) ; After each attempt I’ve reset the bios option, booted into a live CD, deleting partitions and rewriting partition tables left on the drives. Now, however, I’ve been sitting with a /dev/mapper/nvidia_XXXXXXX1 that seems to be impossible to kill! ...

My lil-NAS has plenty of space but is maddeningly underpowered. I came across a permissions issue where, depending on how the files in question got there, they would not be accessible to my windows boxes because they were owned by root (I have no doubt that its my fault!) So, first attempt was nice and easy. $chown -R smbusr:smbusr * But this was taking a horrific amount of time, so I thought “There must be a better way”. ...

I am shamed. I’ve let this blog slip in the midst of coming back to the real world of Uni. A week without something useful going up! Terrible… stands in corner Fact is I’ve been experimenting with so many different things that nothing cogent has come out of it yet. Some of the things I’ve been working on: Virtual Lab- Walk through of the setup and playing with of a virtual computer lab using VirtualBox including Windows, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Fedora, and Debian servers/clients ...

Take one Dual-Boot laptop, with three partitions: /dev/sda1:Windows File System /dev/sda2:Linux File System /dev/sda3:Data Partition I already had Dropbox installed on the Windows side and didn’t want to have things duplicated on the linux side, problem is Ubuntu currently does not mount internal drives automatically on boot, so every time I fired up Ubuntu, I had to re-mount the drive, password and all. Easy enough fix: Make a new /etc/fstab entry for the shared drive and define a mount point. ...

As was noted in my LENOVO ROCKS post, I recieved a virgin hard drive for a laptop with no disk drives. This is a problem that has been long solved in Linux Distros but is not so good for Windows, but i did find this brilliant guide by Sandip from earlier this year, i just wanted to point out a few difference that i made to the process that i think make it slightly more transparent whats going on. ...

I’ll try and keep this as short and sweet as possible. From the looks of my google analytics page(if anyone has a blog or site, i hightly recommend it) people were very interested in my experiences with lenovo, and I’m sorry for not updating. About a week after my previous post, the problem continued to get worse until it simply wouldn’t boot. I called Lenovo Ireland and (after a suprisingly short hold time) as soon as i said the magic number “2100” I was asked for my product and serial numbers and an address i wanted the new hard drive shipped to. Now, there was a slight hiccup where the outsourced phone operator recorded my serial number incorrectly, but that was fixed very speedily. ...

Recently the only additions I’ve been making to this blog are presumptious ' I’ll be doing this’ messages, and this is no excection. I’ve been living and working in Athlone, Ireland for the past year and have really learnt alot and very much enjoyed myself, but however much I will miss the place, academia drags on; it sounds like a campaign slogan but I’m back in Queens for ‘TWO MORE YEARS…TWO MORE YEARS’ ...

So, I love my lenovo tablet, so far through all the trails, tribulations, transcontinental visits, banging, bashing, bumping, swinging, twisting, scribbling, et al, its survived and become a near essential piece of my working and personal development. Famous…Last…Words. Appear back at the house last night after a fwe bevvies with the guys and loe and behold, “Error 2100 - Hard drive initialization error” The BIOS cant see the harddrive. But wait, lenovo built in that seemingly pointless blue button to do recover right? Recovery off the hard drive… That it cant see. ...

Last week or there abouts, there was a big buzz around the interwebs revisiting Dan Kaminski’s OzymanDNS tool, a perl based toolkit for tunnelling TCP traffic over DNS requests (technically its TCP over SSL over DNS but whos counting) That was originally released mid-2004. I never really found the true source of the new hype surrounding a “old” project (it may have been HAK5’s episode 504 that demonstrated the tool, mubix has put the write up in at room362) ...

The Fuel gauge on the front of my MBWE is fairly useless, noone cares, so why not repurpose it as a speedometer? first, stop it displaying the “fuel” Stolen from http://kyyhkynen.net/stuff/mybook/reduce_disk_usage.php Disable the service that displays the disk usage with the leds in the front panel of your MBWE. Admit it, the feature is pretty much useless and because the service has to check the amount of free space on the disk(s), it is causing disk access. ...