• Installing Windows 7 Without a DVD Drive

    18 May | 12
    • in Computers • 
    • by FozzTexx

    We have an old Dell PowerEdge 2650 that has been sitting unused and now needs to be setup as a FileMaker server. We couldn't find a Windows Server edition that was 32 bit, but FileMaker will work fine with Windows 7, so we ordered Windows 7 Professional 32 bit. The 2650 does not have a DVD drive, but no problem, we have an external USB powered DVD drive. Unfortunately the 2650 has no USB boot options. Win7 booted via PXE A few weeks ago I needed to install Windows 7 Ultimate on a...

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  • Has Microsoft been overrun by script kiddies?

    02 May | 12
    • in Computers • 
    • by FozzTexx

    Woke up this morning to find one of my servers was under a DDoS attack. Not just any attack, but one that was originating from Microsoft. There were hundreds of requests per second coming from a lot of very very large blocks of IPs from Microsoft. All the requests had one thing in common: they all claimed to be Bing. It created a major load on the server trying to serve that many requests and my only solution was to block all of the IP ranges at the firewall. I'm not sure what Microsoft is...

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  • More complicated doesn't mean better

    29 Mar | 12
    • in Computers • 
    • by FozzTexx

    I'm setting up a computer for my parents that will be running Windows and I thought that I'd also throw Linux on there for emergencies. It would give them something that they can plug things into that I can remote into and run diagnostics on. I don't want it to boot Linux unless they choose it from a menu, so after installing Ubuntu 11.10 I needed to change Grub to boot Windows by default. Normally I would just modify /etc/grub.conf or /boot/grub/grub.lst and shift things around...

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  • Thirty Years Ago I Became a Programmer

    20 Mar | 12
    • in Computers • 
    • by FozzTexx

    Thirty years ago I became a programmer. (My sister did too.) On Saturday, March 20, 1982 my parents bought an Apple II+. I remember spending a long time in the store dreaming about all the great programs I was going to write. Getting a computer was definitely one of those life changing events. Both my career and my favorite hobby revolves around programming computers. Here's what my mom wrote in her journal that day: We took the big step into Computerland today! After breakfast we...

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  • I hate LDAP. NetInfo was awesome!

    26 Aug | 09
    • in Computers • 
    • by FozzTexx

    I'm building a new "NeXT lab" at work and this time around it's mixed with Macs, Windoze, and Linux computers. I want to share accounts and home directories on them all. The only choice is with LDAP. On Monday I started hammering away at getting the LDAP server setup on the Linux server with openldap. I was able to get a test Mac running Leopard to see the LDAP server and the accounts. The next battle was to get home directories to mount under /home. I was able to do that...

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