Author Archives: mark

About mark

At work, been working on Tandems for around 30yrs (programming + sysadmin), plus AIX and Solaris sysadmin also thrown in during the last 20yrs; also about 5yrs on MVS (mainly operations and automation but also smp/e work). At home I have been using linux for decades. Programming background is commercially in TAL/COBOL/SCOBOL/C(Tandem); 370 assembler(MVS); C, perl and shell scripting in *nix; and Microsoft Macro Assembler(windows).

Thunderbird for Linux… gave up.

Thunderbird used to be my favourite email client many years ago when I used windowze as an OS. I wanted to try to get it running under Linux (Fedora, installed from repositories). I just had to give up. It has … Continue reading

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Installing bfgminer bitminer for Linux users

As always this is a post to myself as a reminder. I had to bare metal restore one of my servers and lost the setup. So saved here for posterity. Installing bfgminer from github; for Fedora Linux users. Assumes you … Continue reading

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RAKF is now available on the CBT site

MVS3.8J/Turnkey3 news. The RAKF security product that three of the enthusiasts have been working on that until now had only been available by joining the yahoo hercules-390 usergroup (you had to join yahoo, and who needs yet another email address) … Continue reading

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OpenStack experiences so far

I have been getting interested in openstack. I don’t have the hardware to run a full openstack environment, so I have been using the devstack development environment (available from devstack.org in a Ubuntu virtual machine. Sooo… memory-wise I have a … Continue reading

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LUKS encryption for multiple internal hard drives

Having fun again. Purchased a new PC from TradeMe, had a internal 80Gb SSD (boot device) plus two 80GB hard drives. A few other things like 6Gb of memory, bargain for $270 really. But them I bid on the machines … Continue reading

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Setting up an external disk for LUKS encryption

Should you encrypt external disks ?, why not as they are normally used as backup devices, and if you encrypted the data to be backed up it would be pointless to then store that on an unencrypted backup device. The … Continue reading

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The copyright/three-strikes bill in NZ only applies to the public apparently

Interesting article on stuff, http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/7054878/Dotcom-info-not-physical A few direct quotes from that article FBI agents who copied data from Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom’s computers and took it overseas were not acting illegally because information isn’t “physical material”, the Crown says. However, … Continue reading

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Windows7 usb drive issues, are common

The trouble with microsoft is they think they know what is best for people. I had an external maxtor 1tb USB drive that just stopped working after a windows (win7) update; it still worked fine when plugged into a linux … Continue reading

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Automatically starting turnkey3 – Windows7

I had a need to do this, and this is my solution for running a “live” hercules system running turnkey3 from either a USB stick or a DVD image. The only difference between the two is that if the .bat … Continue reading

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GDB Debugger, great if you know how

Ok folks, head over to http://direc.org/linux/gdb/ for the best tuturial I have ever come across on using GDB to debug C programs. I wish I had seen that years ago, it would have saved me a lot of time and … Continue reading

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