FAQ: Disable Port 137, 138 and 139

"There’s No Such Thing As A Silly Question" -- does the cliche sound familiar? In this part of pimp-my-rig reloaded, technical questions are answered. Mail them to me and I will post the answers here. If you have a better answer, by all means share it with us. In one of our...

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HOW-TO: Resolve Slow CD/DVD Burning Speed

I have had a unique experience today (or at least unique is what I thought it was). I booted my Dell Latitude D630 with the secondary bay battery in. When I tried to swap the secondary bay battery with the NEC 6500A DVD-RW drive to burn a DVD, I noticed that the DVD burning...

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FAQ: C Compiler Cannot Create Executables

"There’s No Such Thing As A Silly Question" -- does the cliche sound familiar? In this part of pimp-my-rig reloaded, technical questions are answered. Mail them to me and I will post the answers here. If you have a better answer, by all means share it with us.FAQ: A friend came to me to ask for help trying to troubleshoot a configure error that he...

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FAQ: Download Embedded Flash SWF Files (via Firefox)

"There’s No Such Thing As A Silly Question" -- does the cliche sound familiar? In this part of pimp-my-rig reloaded, technical questions are answered. Mail them to me and I will post the answers here. If you have a better answer, by all means share it with us. FAQ: Most likely...

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FAQ: PERL CPAN Error "Undefined subroutine &Compress::Zlib.."

"There’s No Such Thing As A Silly Question" -- does the cliche sound familiar? In this part of pimp-my-rig reloaded, technical questions are answered. Mail them to me and I will post the answers here. If you have a better answer, by all means share it with us. FAQ: While trying to build and upgrade PERL modules for a new box a friend came across this...

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FAQ: ACPI Multiprocessor HAL Upgrade Script

"There’s No Such Thing As A Silly Question" -- does the cliche sound familiar? In this part of pimp-my-rig reloaded, technical questions are answered. Mail them to me and I will post the answers here. If you have a better answer, by all means share it with us.It came as as surprise...

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FAQ: Disable Port 135 (Disable DCOM)

"There’s No Such Thing As A Silly Question" -- does the cliche sound familiar? In this part of pimp-my-rig reloaded, technical questions are answered. Mail them to me and I will post the answers here. If you have a better answer, by all means share it with us.FAQ: One of the...

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REVIEW: GELID Wing12 Silent Fan

As complicated as making a choice of a heatsink, is the choice for the fan to couple that heatsink. Although generally, some heatsinks are already pre-packaged with fans, that doesn't limit the end-user from tweaking with the stock fan or even upgrading to a better one. When...

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REVIEW: WD Caviar 640GB WD6400AAKS SATA II Drive

In the previous review (Seagate ST3640323AS 640GB), we found out that the cache and platter areal density contributes or influences the overall performance of the drive. And, from the results, it is quite clear that the trend is a direct proportion.What we will see in this review...

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FAQ: Tame the Time of a Virtual Machine?

"There’s No Such Thing As A Silly Question" -- does the cliche sound familiar? In this part of pimp-my-rig reloaded, technical questions are answered. Mail them to me and I will post the answers here. If you have a better answer, by all means share it with us. FAQ: The current...

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REVIEW: WD Caviar Black 1TB WD1001FALS SATA II Drive

A few years back, having a hard drive that boasts 250GB of capacity is the bomb. To conform to uber standards computers need to have hundreds of gigabytes of storage. Nowadays the mention of gigabytes is a common thing, nothing out of the ordinary. Gigabyte is out.. Terabyte...

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HOW-TO: Disable USB Storage Devices

IT infrastructure engineers install firewalls to protect the intra-net from outside. Mail filters on SMTP servers are there to protect users from SPAM. Anti-virus software are deployed to further boost protection on the workstation itself. Regardless of whatever software or...

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HOW-TO: Reset Root Password (addendum)

It can happen to me.. to you.. or to one of your clients, where a machine will have to be worked on but the root password is somehow lost or forgotten. Pretty basic you might think, but you might be faced with this hurdle sooner than you think. The above statements might already sound familiar to you. It is mentioned in the post tackling how to reset...

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HOW-TO: Reset a Forgotten Root Password

It can happen to me.. to you.. or to one of your clients, where a machine will have to be worked on but the root password is somehow lost or forgotten. Pretty basic you might think, but you might be faced with this hurdle sooner than you think. With the number of hosts to administer, the burgeoning problem of recalling passwords escalate. Discipline...

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REVIEW: Seagate ST3640323AS 640GB SATA II Hard Drive

Hard drives have become cheaper by the day. Bigger sizes, bigger caches, faster spindles, you name it.. On the perspective of cost, price per gigabyte has gone down and is continuously doing so. It would not be a surprise if another release of a bigger, better hard drive happens...

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FAQ: Workaround to Error Deleting File or Folder

"There’s No Such Thing As A Silly Question" -- does the cliche sound familiar? In this part of pimp-my-rig reloaded, technical questions are answered. Mail them to me and I will post the answers here. If you have a better answer, by all means share it with us.FAQ: Have you ever...

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FAQ: More Secure Password-less SSH -- Windows to Linux

"There’s No Such Thing As A Silly Question" -- does the cliche sound familiar? In this part of pimp-my-rig reloaded, technical questions are answered. Mail them to me and I will post the answers here. If you have a better answer, by all means share it with us. The password-less...

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FAQ: Password-less SSH -- Windows to Linux

"There’s No Such Thing As A Silly Question" -- does the cliche sound familiar? In this part of pimp-my-rig reloaded, technical questions are answered. Mail them to me and I will post the answers here. If you have a better answer, by all means share it with us. Password-less...

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FAQ: Password-less SSH -- Two Distinct Accounts

"There’s No Such Thing As A Silly Question" -- does the cliche sound familiar? In this part of pimp-my-rig reloaded, technical questions are answered. Mail them to me and I will post the answers here. If you have a better answer, by all means share it with us. FAQ: The previous FAQ outlined password-less ssh setup for a single account. Another scenario...

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FAQ: Setup Password-less SSH

"There’s No Such Thing As A Silly Question" -- does the cliche sound familiar? In this part of pimp-my-rig reloaded, technical questions are answered. Mail them to me and I will post the answers here. If you have a better answer, by all means share it with us. FAQ: The age of the use of telnet has gone past. Although it is still used in some applications,...

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HOW-TO: Mount ISO Images

There are a million reasons (perhaps exaggerated, but you get the point) why you should mount an ISO file. To name one, access to the harddrive is way faster than access to the optical drive. Another would be, not all hosts have optical drives or access to the physical host is restricted. Or perhaps, the device can read optical media but could not...

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HOW-TO: Mount USB Thumbdrives in Solaris

USB thumbdrives have become mainstream. And most of the portable tools and utilities are stored in them. This is true for both Windows and Unix/Linux. But I recently was asked a question on how to mount USB thumbdrives in Solaris. Indeed, how is a thumbdrive mounted in Solaris? Aside from the knowledge of mounting the USB thumbdrive, a more important...

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FAQ: BIOS Detects 1066MHz Memory At Only 800MHz

"There’s No Such Thing As A Silly Question" -- does the cliche sound familiar? In this part of pimp-my-rig reloaded, technical questions are answered. Mail them to me and I will post the answers here. If you have a better answer, by all means share it with us.FAQ: A friend of...

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HOW-TO: Replace Failed Drives Under SDS

In order to protect the operating system, avoid serious downtime, and most of all save previous man-hours, implementing RAID 1 (or mirror) using SDS was a very viable solution. Not only that, the solution is quick to execute and with considerable success at that.There are a lot of reasons disks and partitions fail. But when this happens, it should...

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HOW-TO: Mirror Boot Drives Using SDS

Making use of RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is a logical thing to do, especially in implementation of architectures for data sensitive systems, especially servers. Another reason is avoid downtime in the event of a failure of a boot disk or the disk that stores the operating system. The latter is what this post wants to outline -- mirroring...

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