TOCPCs – The Elite Geeks Blog

I had an issue recently where I wanted some data to get to all machines, all at the same time. The data would not be requested – I needed the data as it came in – from my CurrentCost meter – for purposes of testing around the house on the laptop. The solution was to [...]

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I spent much of yesterday afternoon and night trying to locate a RS232 or RS485 to bluetooth circuit that needed to be, cheaper than $50 (the cost of running the cable myself), could be powered by a 9V battery or a combination of AA batteries, and the result at the other end had to be [...]

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A boo-boo! (See the end, I found a solution). I was testing an upgrade for MySQL, from 5.0 to 5.1, to gain Row Based Replication instead of Statement based replication (as statements are a cause of SBR breaking, and it doesn’t proceed til I tell it to). So, in my usual lazy, just do it, [...]

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After travelling 460KM today, I’ve discovered how annoying a hardware failure can be. My colocation box is a HP DL360, G3, so it’s not exactly bleeding edge, but it’s a fantastic server, does it’s job and does it reliably. Last night, we had a planned outage for just a short time to move the box [...]

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I was bored this weekend, so after finding some YouTube traffic occurring from one of the PCs on the network, I decided that I’d play with Squid, which is a very powerful, and flexible proxy server. It has many different methods of operation, and can be used in different ways, such as a simple proxy, [...]

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For a while this afternoon, the wireless network was being used and the user was a victim of an MSN virus – this is easily identified by the links to ‘naked pics of me’ – as if they exist on the internet, I thought my servers were more secure than that (no, there are no [...]

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One of the reasons I can see spammers continually trying to connect to a server, is because they get rejected quickly, and have more than one bot to go and retry. I think the better solution to this issue (and issues related to SMTP auth attacks, and 550 errors), are having an error counter in [...]

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At the end of last year, I concluded that I would want my Diploma in IT, and was certain to acheive that. I enrolled into the course then, and have found that I have a total of 800 hours (in TAFE terms) of study to complete to get my Diploma in IT. The hours are [...]

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For some reason the drop outs we were experiencing nightly on the ADSL2+ service have improved, such that we haven’t had a drop out since 7AM, and before that, it was 6PM the night before. That looks to be improving, but we won’t have anything definite til tomorrow, after tonight, so that we can see [...]

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Virtual Machines are a great way at hosting multiple services, and keeping your overall costs low. Computers have become very much so beefed up that the grunt they have spends a lot of time idle, and only peak loads when you are doing intensive tasks, even then, they generally keep within 50% of the processors [...]

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I think that when you look at a computer, you are looking at a rapidly devaluing asset. Technology evolves very quickly, so quickly that what is the latest and greatest quickly becomes the oldest. I was working with an old machine today that presented itself with symptoms of rebooting, crashing and a general slowness. I [...]

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There was an article published in Australian IT, located here: http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,23021828-15306,00.html Essentially, the author claims that filters are ‘needed’ to battle child pornography. I disagree, it is not filters that will stop the distribution of child pornography, and it is not filters that will protect children from finding inappropriate content. Filters will simply not do [...]

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This morning I woke up intent on a lot more progress with my work on a server. And, it happened. I set out to complete something, and for the most part, it is completed. I started today from yesterday, working on fattening a linux partition. The process was pretty much where my thoughts were yesterday. [...]

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… Or so I meant. Today, I was discussing with someone, how to connect a router to their ADSL modem, and then setup wireless. I figure that’s not really that hard, so set about helping him out. The PC was nice and easy to setup, though I did think his purchase of TP-Link (Toilet Paper [...]

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I can’t find any reliable information on how to ADD larger disks to a SCSI RAID array. Essentially its only capable of 2 disks, and it has 2 disks. I’m unhappy with the sizing of those looking long term, so I want to fatten it up now. I can’t fatten it up now, because I’m [...]

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Telstra will be facing tough competition in the 3G arena, after Vodafone announced it will boldly go where no one else has gone to yet. Creating a competitive, fairly priced 3G mobile network that will rival Telstra’s. Amazingly, reports from Vodafone indicate such an upgrade to the Voda network would cost less than $500 million. [...]

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I didn’t really post these up before, didn’t consider them relevant, and was too busy getting a licence to drive to actually run the tests. But today, out of curiosity, among others, I decided to determine what uses how much power, and found some rather interesting results. We did the testing by finding the base [...]

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News out of the Optus pricing arena, seems to suggest they are trying to fight an inevitable network saturation issue. Recently, the optus website has new conditions added which state that you will be charged excess usage on new signups to fusion plans, before shaping to 64kbps is applied for the 2 and 7GB plans. [...]

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That’s right. I did it. It took a fair while, but I finally did it. I went to the RTA today, and got my provisional license. There was no bribery involved. So it’s real. I do have my licence, and it only took 6 weeks to get it. It’s fantastic. No longer must I have [...]

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The excellent part of having identical (or near identical) hardware is when something cops a nice drink of Sprite, you can simply swap the components over, and power it up and your good to go again. You can’t generally do that when swapping between say an Intel 865PE chipset, and an Intel P35 chipset, simply [...]

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Unfortunately (and its very unfortunate), the update I planned to release tonight isn’t going to go ahead as planned due to an issue with a particular provider. The particular provider issue wasn’t determined until just recently, but has been fixed. The reason for the delay? Well, I was investigating that issue and the time it [...]

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Recently, we had a item of hardware fail in my internal server (my in house server). Essentially that was just my older 2 year old machine, which unfortunately, had an accident. It wasn’t the servers fault however. Unfortunately, a Pop Top bottle filled with a bit of Sprite came into contact with the Zalman fan [...]

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There was three seperate topics I wanted to write about tonight. Problem for me is, writing three seperate topics would take considerable time that I could be doing other things with. I’ll do short recaps of the two items I was going to do this post on, and focus primarily on the next Telstra scam [...]

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Participating in a whirlpool thread recently, as to whether a Linksys WRT54GP2 is better than a Billion 6404VGP, I chose the Linksys over the Billion, for a few clear reasons. 1. Many Linksys devices have Open Source firmware available, so you aren’t pestering the manufacturer for a fix, and you can customise the firmware as [...]

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Is our broadband future fixed? Or are we going to move towards alternatives? I thought I might cover a few possible outcomes! 1. Nationwide WiMAX The possibility of Nationwide WiMAX networking immediately sparks up with the consideration of the Unwired sale to Channel Seven, and its keen interest in investing Unwired into WiMAX networking by [...]

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Tonight I thought I’d look at structural seperation, the advantages and disadvantages of tearing a Telstra’s thorax away from the rest of its body, and what that might have as flow on effects.. Now, I’m not a corporate pro (far from it), so as is always welcomed, comments on any missed item will be both [...]

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I’ve been in the process of setting up a Windows Hosting setup. The idea here is that I can host a few sites of people I deal with seperately so that they aren’t affected by NetLogistics email issues and so forth that seem to infest their windows hosting operations using Plesk. I’m not sure whether [...]

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… Presenting the next possible Google, GoogleCable. Google are believed to be investing in a undersea cable running over the Pacific Ocean. The cable project, which apparently has a project name of “Unity” is expected to be completed and launched in 2009. There’s no direct confirmation from Google about the GoogleCable, however, it does make [...]

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I figured I will put something different out on the FTTN proposal I put up last night, simply because where I got to, I thought.. Wouldn’t it be good to try and answer the majority of the questions based around the same model that is based around open source. The idea is sparked essentially from [...]

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I’ve finally been able to set up my new Windows server, and it runs fantastically. I’ve actually not done much in the way of Windows in a hosting setup when it comes to establishing DNS, and POP3 and SMTP. I’m amazed at how simple it is to setup DNS, Mail and Websites under windows. I [...]

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