I recently installed Solaris 10 06/06 x86 on my desktop machine, a Compaq Evo with an onboard Intel 10/100 network card. At first the Solaris installation seemed to hang while trying to find a network configuration from a non-existant RPC boot server. In retrospect, I think the problem was that Solaris didn’t find an…

If you’ve ever tried to use CFEngine for package management, you know that it is basically useless. CFEngine only supports installing packages and not removing them (yet). It has some crazy limit defined at compilation time which limits the number of packages you can install. (see Google://cfengine “Too many arguments in embedded script”) It…

Someone recently asked me how to setup redundant power for a rack of machines without relying on all the equipment to have dual power supplies. The answer is called an Automatic Transfer Switch. Depending on the sensitivity of your equipment to momentary losses of power, you can choose between an Open Transition Transfer Switch…

Here is a quick howto on installing and setting up PPTP on Ubuntu.Specifically I’ll be attempting to configure this machine to use the Israeli ISP 012 over a cable modem. 012 provides some sort of installation package for Linux but it doesn’t support Ubuntu. Anyway- here are my steps:xhost +sudo su-export DISPLAY=’:0′echo ‘deb http://quozl.netrek.org/pptp/pptpconfig…

I recently started using Symantec’s Backup Exec for Windows to backup files from a Samba share. I joined the Samba machine to the domain and gave the backup user permissions to the share but the backup kept getting access denied errors. It turns out that Backup Exec doesn’t connect directly to the share (at…