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SysAdmin: When your computer becomes forgetful
Sometimes your computer crashes without reason. It happens at any time, for no particular reason. Other times you’re trying to install a new OS on a brand new PC and at some point, it fails, reboot...
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MediaWiki: Formating and colouring Code
MediaWiki is the wiki software behind WikiPedia. The issue, when using it as a software development tool, is formatting code in a pretty way. As we did with WordPress before, here are some details to...
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“Apple’s OS Edge Is a Threat to Microsoft”. Really?
Business Week has a recent article where the author foresee the demise of Windows in favour of Apple’s OS. Reading it, I couldn’t help thinking I was reading one of these overenthusiastic 1925...
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MS Access: Restarting and compacting the database programmatically
In my previous article about changing the MS Access colour scheme I had the need to allow the user to restart the database after the colour scheme was changed. (Article and Code Updated...
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Linux sysadmin: a short RAID trouble-shooting story
I recently had an issue at a remote location (12000km away) where the old multi-purpose Linux server that had been working for the past 5 years wouldn’t boot again after a nasty power failure. The...
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SysAdmin: Installing Windows Server 2008 x64 on a Macbook Pro
My trusty old gigantic Sony Vaio is about 4 years old. It served me well and still works but it’s about to become my main development machine for the next couple of months and I can’t afford to have it...
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Sysadmin: Macbook Pro, after the honeymoon
I’ve been using the MacBook Pro I introduced in my previous blog entry for a few weeks now. Between love and frustration I hang… Here is a review of our relationship so far.The GreatHardware...
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Windows 2008 / Windows 7 x64: The ‘Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0′ provider is not...
There are times when the coexistence of 64 and 32 bit code on the same machine can cause all sorts of seemingly strange issues. One of them just occurred to me while trying to run the ASPx demos from...
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Sysadmin: Recovering deleted Windows partitions
I made a mistake the other day: I wanted to delete the partition on an external drive and in my haste ended up deleting the partition of a local hard drive instead…The good thing is when you delete a...
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Sysadmin: file and folder synchronisation
Over the years I’ve struggled to keep my folder data synchronised between my various desktop and laptops.Here I present the tools I’ve tried and what I’ve finally settled on as possibly the ultimate...
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Sysadmin: Multiple ISP firewall – The setup
After suffering broadband trouble for the past 9 months, including interruptions that lasted a few days, I decided to get an additional line installed by a different ISP. I could have bought one of...
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Sysadmin: SQL server performance madness
I’ve just lost 2 days going completely bananas over a performance issue that I could not explain.I’ve got this Dell R300 rack server that runs Windows Server 2008 that I dedicate to running IIS and...
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A story about exceptional service
Recently I found myself constrained by the puny 200GB of my Mac Book Pro and I bought a 500GB Seagate drive to replace it (a fast 7200 rpm one). The Macbook Pro has no easy access for the drive so you...
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Admin: Linux file server performance boost (ext3 version)
Using a Linux for an office file server is a no-brainer: it’s cheap, you don’t have to worry about unmanageable license costs and it just works.Default settings of most Linux distributions are however...
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Admin: Linux file server performance boost (ext4 version)
In the previous article, I showed how to improve the performance of an existing file server by tweaking ext3 and mount settings. We can also take advantage of the availability of the now stable ext4...
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