Showing headlines posted by tuxchick

I was already mourning the destruction of my Saturday, thanks to some blown deadlines, and was resigned to spending at least part of the day working. Then I made a fatal error: I read my email. There were two messages from readers that said, in essence, another article about RAID 5 was about as interesting as yet another fawning review of Ubuntu Retching Rabbit or Pooping Penguin or whatever the newest coolest release is, and RAID 5 has some serious flaws anyway, and if I really wanted to be hip and helpful I would write about RAID 10.

If you've considered a free DNS service for your client resolving needs, there is more than one game in town, now. DNS Advantage, a NeuStar, Inc. service, has just come online. Should you think about switching away from OpenDNS? Should OpenDNS be worried?

Even though VoIP is one of newest, most revolutionary networking and telephony technologies, people still want faxing, only now they want to do it via IP. Which to me makes as much sense as demanding Morse code-enabled telephones. Me, I keep a plain old analog fax machine just to humor other people. Which is like heating bathwater on the stove even though we have modern plumbing and a water heater.

If you've been thinking of building yourself a dedicated storage server, this is a good time to do it. Prices are so low now that even a small home network can have a dedicated storage and backup server for not much money. SATA hard drives have large capacities and high speeds for low prices, and you don't need the latest greatest quad-core processor or trainloads of RAM. The ultimate in flexibility and reliability combines Linux software RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) and LVM (Linux Volume Manager).

We've covered a lot of ground in the first three parts of this series. Today we stride down that last mile: setting up 802.1Q VLANs, and making configurations permanent...Client configuration is always the same, but switches and routers vary. I'll show you how it's done on the cheap, with a low-end smart switch and an inexpensive, but powerful router built with Voyage Linux on a PC Engines WRAP board.

With graphical user interfaces becoming more and more friendly and easy to use, new users of GNU/Linux and the BSDs can now get their daily work done without having to tinker around (very often) with a terminal. However, many users don't like to use a GUI for every task, and find that they necessarily need to depend on some terminal, or shell. Sometimes, one has to log in to a remote machine, without a GUI. At other times, we just have to run a `console' based application. Under such situations, there are several ways in which a utility like screen can be put to efficient use.

Have you ever dreamt about booting Linux in less than one minute? Now this dream can come true: in less than 40 seconds after pressing the power button, you will have a perfect fully-functional operating system, exactly as you left the last session. Even better than you thought, right? Now you could say: "Crazy boy - I don't believe you!" Well then, check it out for yourself.

So I spent the best part of the morning troubleshooting. Is it the SATA cable? Try a different one. Boot. Nope, that’s not it. Shut down. Is it the power connector? Try a different one. Boot. Nope, that’s not it. Shut down. Is it the SATA port on the mobo? Swap with the other SATA drive. Boot. Nope, that’s not it. Shut down.

We'll talk about Linux in the motion picture industry, especially its use at the major studios. This community is an upside-down parallel universe where Linux is everywhere, and Windows and Mac are niche operating systems. We'll talk about how the movie Titanic touched off a mass migration to Linux, what Linux tools are used and how. The result is virtually every blockbuster or animated feature in theaters today is made using Linux tools.

What can a Linux geek do for that special someone on Valentine's Day? Create a gift using open source software, of course. One of the easiest and most heartfelt things to do is make a love note with Audacity and put it on your significant other's portable music device or smart phone. The note does not need to say much -- just let her (or him) know that you appreciate and enjoy having her around. Audacity makes this task easy -- just hook up a microphone, click the record button, and off you go. If your valentine doesn't have a music player, you can put the audio track on a CD and slide it into her car stereo for the Valentine's Day morning commute.

Missed out on the top news this week? Here it is for you: Run Ubuntu and Windows together Ubuntu this week included the Parallels virtualistation software in its partner repository. It;s the first time Ubuntu has included paid-for proprietary software in its software lineup and it is stirring up much debate.

So vishing is not very exotic from a technical perspective, because it's just another form of social engineering, and it's been going on as long as there have been telephones. But VoIP offers some powerful tools to make vishing a more attractive endeavor over VoIP than the old-fashioned PSTN. It's a lot easier to hide your back trail over the data networks (thanks to the the World Wide Botnet), it's easy to spoof Caller ID: Automated calling tools are cheap and easy, and it's dirt cheap to call anywhere.

My (decidedly personal) conclusion:This is one cool platform. The idea of accessing files, pictures, videos and music files anywhere on any computer is appealing, especially to hardcore geeks. Just think of a combination of iPhone + eyeOS, or Archos + eyeOS , or Wii + eyeOS(provided the Opera support improves).

But thanks to some cool folks at Linuxchix.org, I learned of two excellent resources for recycling or adopting out old stuff. Costco will give members a few bucks trade-in value on their old electronics, and if your stuff has no trade-in value they’ll send it to a recycler at no cost to you....

When is a Switch Like a Router?

Port-based VLANs are specific to their switches, and cannot cross multiple switches. However, you can make a smart switch function like a router. Let's say that three ports are not enough for VLAN East; you want to connect more hosts. You could buy a bigger smart switch. Or you can uplink a second switch to one of VLAN East's ports, like this:

It's possible to carry out an ARP poisoning MITM attack manually using Wireshark (Ethereal) to intercept and edit ARP requests, but actually it's very easy for anyone who can get on to your network (using Aircrack-ng to get on wirelessly, for example) to carry out such an attack using automated open source tools. The best known one of these is called Ettercap.

I spent some time compiling this list and seeing how many nice games are available for Linux I couldnt help but wonder: why are we still using Vista? There are so many Windows advocates who bring as anti Linux argument an “absence” of games for Linux. Well, they are wrong! There are enough games from Linux and the great news is that they are free and fun!

Ubuntu Tweak is a tool that lets you change hidden Ubuntu settings, for example: hide or change the splash screen, show or hide the Computer, Home, Trash, and Network icons, change Metacity, Nautilus, power management, and security settings, etc. Currently Ubuntu Tweak is available only for the Ubuntu GNOME desktop, i.e., it will not work on Kubuntu or Xubuntu. This short guide shows how to install and use Ubuntu Tweak.

Well if you are like me you have installed Linux and opted for the 64 bit edition, there is only one problem with this Flash does not work with the 64 bit Linux kernel. So there are work arounds and here is the simplest and my favorite.

With the latest release of VirtualBox, Windows and Linux can be run together simultaneously, and you don't even need to switch between the two. Using the seamless Windows feature of VirtualBox, you can run two different operating systems simultaneously on a single PC and you can use the applications of both operating systems from the same desktop simultaneously.