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).

Installing a USB attached printer as a network printer

Posted on February 1, 2012 by mark

First of this is for Linux, specifically I did this on Fedora Core 16. Secondly I was using a Brother DPC-150C printer. On the actual server the USB printer was to be connected to I updated the /etc/cups file /admin … Continue reading →

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MultiTail – what a find

Posted on January 20, 2012 by mark

I wasn’t looking for this, I was actually looking for a log parsing tool, just hoping somebody had written one to meet my needs before I start to look at enhancing mine. Didn’t find any. Lots of log analyzers but … Continue reading →

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Experiences with Synergy – cool

Posted on December 15, 2011 by mark

Synergy is a free application to allow a ‘server’ to provide the mouse and keyboard input to other machines. So if you have a lot of machines around you and can see all their screens then synergy will allow you … Continue reading →

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Bacula backup application, I like it

Posted on October 19, 2011 by mark

I have been playing with backup software to determine a good way of backing up my servers; other than the unorigional tar and scp method I have been using until now. I did investigate TSM server/client (tested with a version … Continue reading →

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ntfs disks under linux are slow

Posted on October 8, 2011 by mark

I never really noticed before, but external disks formatted as ntfs are really slow to access under linux. I got a new 2TB external disk to use for backups as all my 1TB disks were around 90% full (I was … Continue reading →

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More expense, another burst pipe

Posted on October 8, 2011 by mark

What a morning. Sleep interrupted by my pager, all that was sorted. Then I got up this morning, and realised I had to interrupt someone elses day, an urgent call to a plumber; there is not supposed to be water … Continue reading →

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Another disk failure, must be that time of year

Posted on September 12, 2011 by mark

Another expensive few weeks, lots of bills all at once. And now it appears I have had another disk drive failure, a 320Gb (boot and OS disk) one in my main patching server; fortunately the patching components are mirrored to … Continue reading →

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MHVTL Virtual tape software, take 2

Posted on July 17, 2011 by mark

I wanted to see if I could get iSCSI tape workingi on fedora, it had been a while since I last tried and I thought maybe tape support had been introduced to Fedora by now. It is, although I had … Continue reading →

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lvm note for my reference

Posted on July 3, 2011 by mark

Still playing with iSCSI, so needed to enlarge the logical volume now I am actually using it. This post is just for my reference as for years I have been running resize2fs manually after resizing an LV, but I noticed … Continue reading →

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Using iSCSI disks under Fedora 15

Posted on June 25, 2011 by mark

My main development server had 80Gb unused in one of the PVs; so I thought how can I use that. It wasn’t needed on that server but it was part of a large internal disk so I couldn’t just physically … Continue reading →

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