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Check out the Advent System Administration tips at sysadvent.blogspot.com
Day 1 – Software Installer Management
Day 2 – Zen and the Art of Troubleshooting
Day 3 – Development for Sysadmins
Day 4 – Communication and Organization of Changes
Day 5 – Storage Availability: DRBD
Day 6 – Storage: ATA over Ethernet
Day 7 – Active Directory naming is easy, right?

For those of you paying attention, back in January of 07 I started a test to compare the longevity of Compact Flourescents with Incandescent light bulbs.
So far the results have been heavily in favor of the CFLs. In the test I have replaced two different bulbs at the same time, one with [...]

We have all seen Apple’s Mac/PC commercial’s slamming Windows 7 as being a disappointment. Is that true? Are we being given the same promises as always without delivery by Microsoft? Let me relate my experiences.
A friend came to me with a Vista laptop that was having problems. My suggestion was to [...]

When converting documents from customer word format to html it seems inevitable that there will be extra characters provided by Microsoft. Unfortunately this expanded character set is not supported by many web browsers and email clients, so we have to go through and clean all of this out of our html files.
I normally use [...]

This morning, after a software update and reboot, one of my LCD monitors went all white. This is the second time since 2009 started that this has happened to me. Both monitors were 2 years old or more and had almost daily use, but it seems strange that they have both failed within [...]

I love it when we see government and military officials make ridiculously absurd statements. In an article today on the obsolescence of the US missle defence system. In it he compares the out-datedness of ballistic missles with that of e-mail.

Marine General James Cartwright told an audience invested in missile-defense that the bad guys [...]

Saw this, and it reminded me of the Wii Opera interface…
Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

I hate upgrades. I don’t care what it is, upgrading software sucks.
I’ve worked in the tech industry for a while, and the nemesis of every IT person in the world is the software upgrade.
Since I hate it so much, all my blogs have been running on a Wordpress 2.2 version. If [...]

Patrick Volkerding has announced the release of Slackware 12.2

Yes folks, ’tis the season to announce a new release of Slackware. With a shiny new kernel, many package updates, and the newly added ability to install from a Samba share, we bring to you the latest in the stable Slackware 12.x series.

OK, it’s not really broken, but I have had a problem on my Slackware 12 Linux machine where the keypad suddenly stops working. The only way I have been able to fix this, until now, is to restart KDE.
This happened to me today, so I did some research.
KDE provides a handy mouse emulation [...]