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).

Windows XP problem. Keeps finding new IEE1394 devices.

Posted on May 29, 2009 by mark

Really getting annoyed with Windows XP. The problem I mentioned in the post on April 10 keeps coming back. It keeps reporting it has found new hardware and adding lots of IEE1394 Texas Instruments devices, and I mean lots, over … Continue reading →

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Backups, the sheer joy (not)

Posted on May 26, 2009 by mark

I was working on a nice complicated backup strategy where every server would do regular backups (full and partial) to its local filesystem; and every XXmins my master backup server would suck them up using SCP and then remove the … Continue reading →

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Installing TrueCrypt on Fedora Core 10

Posted on May 18, 2009 by mark

I wanted to play with TrueCrypt on FC10. No RPM for fedore, so source is needed. I used version 6.2 Lots of errors trying to compile with “make WXSTATIC=1”, tried that as I know I didn’t have wxWidgets installed. Next … Continue reading →

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Another MMPF enhancement

Posted on April 26, 2009 by mark

Well I needed to make a modification to my MMPF utilty over the last few days, finished it off yesterday and finished testing it today. Works a treat. For first time readers, while I enjoy using MVS3.8J under hercules at … Continue reading →

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Love TradeMe

Posted on April 11, 2009 by mark

Got a bargain on trademe today. A desktop with 1GB memory, twin 40GB hard drives (with bays for two more disks), cd writer plus dvd write (plus bays for two more of those as well, why would anyone want to … Continue reading →

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Well yesterday was interesting

Posted on April 10, 2009 by mark

Up until now the only external storage I had (apart from the DVD and CD backups) was a 320GB external disk drive on my desktop system. I had been booting into linux (it’s a dual boot desktop) and mounting that … Continue reading →

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Finally got all my servers using ntp

Posted on March 27, 2009 by mark

Sidetracked again. Was helping getting some NTP stuff going at my real job today, when I thought maybe I should get my own home servers setup for ntp as well. So I did. The Linux side was easy A quick … Continue reading →

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Sendmail configured to forward mail to one server

Posted on March 24, 2009 by mark

Well in an earlier post I mentioned on my todo list was to setup all my Linux servers to forward emails from all servers onto one ‘collection’ server so I just had to read the emails in one place instead … Continue reading →

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ToDo: setup my own central mail server

Posted on March 18, 2009 by mark

Getting sidetracked again. Found an interesting article on linux.com on how to build a local IMAP mail server, or in english how to use fetchmail to pull mail from multiple pop3 servers down to a local imap server so you … Continue reading →

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Using WINE to play Windows games under Linux

Posted on March 6, 2009 by mark

Now I’m really impressed with WINE. Thats the windows emulator for Linux, not the stuff in bottles. It’s been a long time since I tried it (many, many years), tonight I tried the latest version for FC10. Basically on my … Continue reading →

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