Alfred's Ramblings

A file server running on Linux with Samba is an attactive option to reduce license cost. Samba is configure is easy enough. To get the user permissions right, you will need to join the Linux sever to the Active Directory domain.

If you need to manage a Linux server and you hate the CLI interface, check out Webmin. It really rocks for Windows savvy users. You can access Linux and all its guts without figuring out how Gnome works.

The VMTools required installation of kernel headers for Fedora Core 9, after a bit of head scratching, I managed to find it. This is done by Googling on compiling kernels and kernel headers.

In Windows you can change IP address, all in one place. For Solaris, it is slightly different.

Solaris is a mature operating system and some of the old versions are still alive and kicking. So the commands used are different.

For M64 graphics card run

/usr/sbin/m64config

For GFX graphics card run

/usr/sbin/fbconfig -i

For Solaris 10 on x86 hardware run

kdmconfig

According to Wiki, there are over 300 different Linux distributions. Some of the more well known are: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian, Suse, Ubuntu, Fedora, Centos, FreeBSD etc.

So here is the famous question which one to use? I was faced with same question and could not find a definitive answer. After some hours Googling, the result.

I am using Fedora 9 as a client to connect to a Solaris 9 machine. Strangely it kept failing and after some Google time, all is revealed.

NFS is logged as a bug in Bugzilla.

How to find an Solaris command for ??? in Linux? or vice versa? or AIX, BSD?

Check out the Rosetta Stone for Unix.

Disk to disk cloning a server is a really old way of cloning. Insert a new disk of similar size, boot an independant OS eg Live CD, Ubuntu or Knoppix to clone from old to new disk.

Except that the CD drive is not working and I cannot power down the really old server. So it is single user mode time.

Recently I have the chance to create a Fedora 9 virtual machine on VMware server. This is to replaced a crashed server that ran out of disk space. Since it was running off a Compaq ML server. I thought this is an excellent opportunity to remove the hardware element by converting it to a virtual server.

Over all, it was a most interesting experience for a Windows geek. Mundane things that are taken for granted requires lots of typing in the Linux world. In the end it still might not work.