Tips, Tricks and Information for the Modern Technologist

Category: System Administration


UbunTOS – Ubuntu 9.10 + TinyOS 2.x VirtualBox Image

Posted 8th February in Programs, Software, Ubuntu. 63 Comments

This is my admittedly minor but I hope useful contribution to the TinyOS development community. TinyOS is an Operating System and development framework for Wireless Sensor Networks and other platforms which has a small footprint and is very energy conscious. The TinyOS source code is available for free online for many operating systems, however it takes [...]



Linux Command Line, Generating a Random File

Posted 31st January in Code Samples, Linux, Security, Shell. 1 Comment

It is very easy to create a random file using the linux command line. Much like the command to fill a file with all zeros, for example a 1 Meg file: dd if=/dev/zero of=zero.filename bs=1024 count=1000 You do the same using /dev/urandom: dd if=/dev/urandom of=random.filename bs=1024 count=1000 Resulting in a 1MB file: 1000+0 records in [...]



Canon CanoScan LiDE 50 Scanner and Windows 7 (32 or 64-bit) Driver Fix

Posted 24th January in Hardware, Other Technology, Windows. 30 Comments

Canon’s site for the LiDE 50 does not list any Windows 7 drivers for download, nor Vista 64-bit drivers. However, I did find that you can use the CanoScan LiDE 60 drivers in place of the LiDE 50 drivers, and they do have options listed for Windows 7/Vista in both 64-bit and 32-bit varieties.  Do do [...]


What I recently learned about EDID, Windows 7 and nVidia

Posted 22nd January in Hardware, Other Technology, Windows. 1 Comment

EDID stands for Extended display identification data and is what many computer monitors and televisions with a VGA/HDMI use to tell the PC what resolution they support. Which, in theory at least, is great. However what I recently found out is that many LCD and Plasma televisions do not broadcast the correct 16:9 resolution via EDID, [...]



Tweaking TCP for Fast (100mbps+) Connections and Transfers on Linux

Posted 23rd December in Linux, Software, System Administration, Ubuntu. 5 Comments

We recently did some speed testing on a few of the servers on our network, and we were not receiving the speeds expected considering they were sitting on a physical 100mbps ethernet port. The servers were indeed on physical 100mbps connection, however wget (TCP/IP, HTTP Port 80) download tests showed only a max of about 1.5MB/sec (note the 8bit/byte conversion, so this translates to about 12mbits).


How To Reset Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 Passwords with Ubuntu 9.10 Live Image and a USB Drive

I put this together for a project in a class I am taking, and thought it would be handy for others as well. The goal is to access a Windows filesystem and reset the password for a user, for example if someone forgot the Administrator password or the account is locked out from too many [...]


A Poor Man’s VPN: Proxy Web Connection to Remote Server (via SSH and Tunnel)

Did you ever have a situation where you needed to access a website that had an IP restriction in place? I recently had a situation where I needed to access the web via my university connection (due to IP restrictions placed on accessing databases of research papers). They do not have a VPN setup so [...]