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No room for Vista in the business world

A survey by king research has shown that there is some pretty tight denial against Windows Vista in Business environments by IT administrators.

Some of the biggest marketing aspects of Vista are Direct X 10 and improved client security – two factors that are absolutely useless in a business environment. With the industry standards pointing toward open source technology and a very comprehensive use of Windows XP ( post SP2 release of course 😉 ) there is no real reason for any sane IT admin (hm ok that was a discrepancy there 😉 ) to currently migrate to the nextgen Windows.

Perhaps this is a good timing to migrate to open source software…

Neither or less you will have hell of a time with either Vista or OpenSource software migration so why not use something you can save licensing fees on and invest the savings into your employees or IT admin training.

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Nokia N810 to be released soon

Not much time for playing around with the internet tablet lately but quite some news…

Nokia is about to release its third generation Internet Tablet device – which in my opinion is quite strange, since the N800 was just released this year. Looks like Nokia is pushing for improvements on ultra mobile computers.

The Device will be equipped with the new Linux based OS2008 Operating system and features some minor improvements such as an integrated keyboard.

Product Demo on Youtube by Thougthfix

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Free networking video tutorials

Had this one on quite a while ago, but since it got lost with my old s9y stuff ill repost it 😉

cbt4free.org features some very good video tutorials for various network administration tasks such as DNS and Webservers in both Linux and Windows environments. These videos will only supply you with very basic knoledge but are a good start.

You will also get an impression on the differences of administrating a Linux and a Windows Server (in case you havent noticed yet 😉 )

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Asus Eee sales starting in Taiwan

Asus has released its ultra mobile low cost notebook eee 701 in 4 different versions varying in the amount of Ram and the size of the solide state hard disk. Sales are so far limited to Taiwan but the eee will definitely hit the European market this year.

The cheapest eee features 256 MB of DDR2 ram and a 2GB solid state disk at around 170€ whereas the top model consists of a 4GB solid state disk and 512 MB ram at around 300€. So far, these are the prices in Taiwan so there is no definite price tag for the market in Europe yet. The batteries will be between 4800 and 5200 mA which should keep the notebook powered on between 2,8 and 3,5 hours.

Check out these videos on youtube on the eee presentations so far:

Asus Eee 701 Preview

Asus Eee PC Live Demo

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Visualizing logfiles

glTail is an attempt at visualizing logfiles in an interesting, animated way.

The script was written in ruby and uses opengl to display the log animations.

Not quite informative put perhaps a nice artistic attempt. In the real world, nothing beats the standard tools such as grep, tail and otherswhen it comes to analyzing log files.

Check out glTail at fudgie.org

Here is a video to get a first view…

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[q&d] annoying system bell

The system bell is one of the most annoying features on many Linux installations. When an error occurs regarding keyboard input, the system will response with an annoying beep. If you use the tab function on the console this feature can drive you crazy….

There are 2 ways to shut up your box:

In order to change the setting system-wide, add following line to /etc/inputrc:

bell-style none

you can also receive a visible response (flashing screen) by setting the parameter to:

bell-style visible

If you want to change this setting for a specific user, go to a users home directory and create the file .inputrc and add one of the above options to the configuration file.

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[q&d]: Generating a squid acl arplist from dhcp.conf

Here is a quick and dirty method for creating an arplist for a squid acl rule from static dhcp.conf entries:

cat /etc/dhcp3/dhcp.conf | grep 00: | cut -d " " -f5 | cut -d ";" -f1 > /etc/squid/arplist

Lets take a closer look at a default dhcp.conf entry for static adressing:

host mypc {
hardware ethernet 00:01:02:03:04:05;
fixed-address 192.168.1.10;
}

  • grep will fish out the mac addresses with the identifier 00:
  • the first cut will reduce output to 00:01:02:03:04:05;
  • the second cut removes the semi column from the output
  • output is written into a file

If you are using customized config files, you will need to apply the command properly (duh!)

Including the acl list in your squid.conf

acl mylist arp "/etc/squid/arplist"
http_access allow mylist