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I have a friend whose laptop screen is in the process of dying. She's going to get it replaced, but they told her all of her data will be lost and that she should backup first.

I really like G4L for something like this. It's a bootable CD image that loads a lightweight version of linux and lets you take the entire hard drive partition and dump it on an FTP server. (It offers more than that with NFS, etc., but I use the FTP mostly).

It only comes in a CD-ROM ISO download, though. I was able to find some instructions on how to make the ISO bootable from a USB memory stick at this website: Look at the 3RD post, though - the first one is way too involved:

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1224777260

To summarize:

1. Download the G4L ISO from http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l
2. Download syslinux from http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/boot/syslinux/ (I used 4.02 at the time)
3. Extract the G4L ISO to the root of your memory stick. You can use http://7-zip.org/)
4. Delete syslinux.cfg from the root of the USB stick
5. Rename isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg on the USB stick
6. Extract syslinux-X.XX.zip to somewhere on your harddrive (make it somewhere you can get a DOS prompt to easily) e.g. c:\syslinux
7. Start a command prompt and change to the directory where you unzipped syslinux (e.g. cd c:\syslinux) and then go to the win32 subdirectory (e.g. c:\syslinux\win32)
8. Type: syslinux.exe -m -a -d /boot F: (where "F" is the drive letter of the USB stick).

It's a little involved, but easily and quickly done with free tools. In a matter of minutes I was backing up the hard drive!

We use Windows Media Center at our house. It's currently Vista Media Center, but as soon as my Ceton Cablecard Tuner arrives, I'll be switching to Windows 7 Media Center.

I love the Microsoft Learning Remote Control and was quite disappointed when they discontinued it. I picked up a box of 10 on eBay, just for a day like today. It's been 3 days since we last saw the remote. I'm sure the couch ate it or the baby threw it in the garbage.

In any event, I pulled a new one out of the box and had a horrible time trying to get it to learn a Vizio remote control. I finally got the proper sequence of learning down:

1.) replace the batteries with fresh ones, both remotes
2.) use a dark room
3.) hold DVD MENU and OK button on MS remote until light turns off
4.) press button on MS remote that you would like to train (TV PWR, VOL UP/DOWN), it will flash once.
5.) Press and hold the corresponding button on the Vizio remote.

If it flashes twice, you're good. If it flashes 4 times quickly, you must start over at step #3. I also found it helpful to move the remotes closer together/further apart during the actual learning process. Hope it helps someone out there.

We recently moved and my TVs are still wall-mounted in the old place. The house looks better that way, so hopefully it sells quicker.

Anyways, the kids have been begging for me to hook their video games back up. Since I don't want to buy new TVs until the old house sells, I looked at what I had laying around. I have an HP 2709m 27" computer monitor which should do the trick, but it only has HDMI/DVI/VGA inputs. The XBOX/WII have component and composite video outputs. I also have an Onkyo TX-SR607 receiver which upscales all the inputs to HDMI - PERFECT! This means I can hook the monitor up to the receiver with the single HDMI cable and let the Onkyo handle the input switching. I plugged it into the Onkyo, turned on the old XBOX, and all I get is a blinking display. That's it, nothing else. I tried the WII, which uses component video cables instead of composite... same thing: blinking monitor. Once in a while I will see the display for 3 or 4 seconds, but then it goes back to the on/off cycle. I even tried forcing the Onkyo HDMI output/upscaling to 480p/720p/1080i settings and nothing worked.

I tried the XBOX 360, at least that works. The original signal source is HDMI, so it's not really upscaling - just HDMI switching. So, long story short... Onkyo TX-SR607 doesn't like to upscale composite/component video to an HP 2709m monitor. Either that or I one of the two in the move. :( Only time will tell.

I work in the networking industry and have a 19" rack in my home office. I've gotten tired of having to string serial cables across the room to a specific device in order to get a basic config on it.

I picked up Web Power Switch from digital-loggers.com to handle Ethernet-based power control. I also picked up an Avocent/Cyclades ACS32 serial console unit on eBay ($150-ish). They both work great, although I couldn't get console access to the Foundry / Brocade gear working.

I pulled out the user guides and through some trial and error finally figured it out. You'll need some DB9 Female to RJ45 Modular Adapters, and an "insertion and extraction" tool if your dongles have the pins already inserted.

You can use a standard CAT5 Ethernet cable for the RJ45-side of things. On the DB9 dongle, you'll want to map the following colors to these pins:

DB9 Pin - Color
1 - White (not needed)
2 - Yellow
3 - Black
4 - Orange (not needed)
5 - Red
6 - Brown (not needed)
7 - Blue
8 - Green
9 - no connection

The "not needed" lines came from the Foundry manuals. It looks like their serial console ports only need TX/RX CTS/RTS and GND. The other pins needed to go somewhere, and since I didn't want to cut them off, I just plugged them in the other ports randomly.

Now I can sit at my desk and power on a network device, remote console into it, give it a config, do my testing, and power it off again, all without having to leave my desk.

Hope that helps someone out there. Good luck!

I've loved using Dropbox. It's small, quick, and unintrusive. You install it and it does its thing in the background, without any user interaction. Dropbox has released iPhone/iPad and Android clients, and the "public" sharing option is excellent. I'm currently using Dropbox to synchronize some documents, things I need to read from my iPhone, small files I wish to share with friends/co-workers, Filezillla sitemanager.xml files, etc.

My only complaint is that there's not more space available for free. :) Their plans are rather reasonable ($99/yr for 50GB)... just a little too rich for what I would expect for that type of service.

I've been looking at different file synchronization programs, but nothing has jumped out as the perfect solution, until now.

iFolder is an open-source project originally created by Novell and still available as part of their Open Enterprise Server product. It has quite a few similarities with Dropbox, with the added benefit of being able to run my own server at home, provide as much disk space as I wanted, and get the LAN-based synchronization solution I was looking for.

I currently have a virtual machine image of a SuSe Linux server running the iFolder service and have synchronization with virtually unlimited space (only limited to the size & number of drives I throw in the iFolder server).

My next post will be more of a "how-to" which will walk you through downloading, configuring, and using iFolder... The information's out there on the Internet, but nothing in an "all in one page" that I've found so far.

I love synchronization! One of my favorite synchronization plug-ins is xmarks. It synchronizes my Firefox bookmarks between the computers I regularly use.

In building a new computer, I wondered if there existed a similar plugin for Filezilla. There was nothing to be found. However, I did find someone who placed their Filezilla sitemanager.xml file into their dropbox folder, and then created symbolic links pointing to the file in their dropbox. Now, any time that a site is added or deleted, the file gets updated in the dropbox and ultimately replicated to the other computers. Absolutely brilliant!

Syncing Filezilla Sites Across Computers with Dropbox

I recently purchased a brand-new MacBook Pro. I've never had a Mac before, and many of the programs I use in my "day job" require Windows applications in some form or another. Most games need Windows as well, and while I don't play on a daily basis, I at least wanted the flexibility to use Windows when needed.

Apple has a great utility built-in to Mac OS X called "Boot Camp". Apple lets you install Windows onto your Mac and run all of your applications. I had read about Apple's Boot Camp software which lets you install Windows one one part of your hard drive. It was super easy. Run the Boot Camp utility, follow the instructions, install Windows, add a few drivers, and things were up and running. I'm really liking Windows 7, and since I only had 4GB of RAM in the MacBook Pro, I used a 32-bit version of the operating system.

WRONG CHOICE.

Everything was working great... but as I dug around into the internals of the operating system, something didn't look right. Under the system section of control panel, I saw:

Installed memory (RAM): 4.00 GB (2.18 GB usable)

2.18 usable?!?!? For some reason half of the memory wasn't available Windows. It knew the ram was there, but wasn't able to address it. Now, I know that 32-bit operating systems can access somewhere between 3.5 and 4GB worth of RAM, but 2.18 GB was unacceptable.

I didn't find much out on the internet (thus, this particular post), so I decided to give 64-bit Windows 7 a try.

RIGHT CHOICE.

Much better... Now the situation looks like this:



Installed memory (RAM): 4.00 GB (3.86 GB usable)

So, moral of the story is this... If you don't want to lose access to half your RAM in Boot Camp, use a 64-bit version of Windows.

So, my home network (aka HomeNet) has enough gear to rival a medium enterprise. One of these days I'll do a post on what's up and running.

In any event, something that's troubled me for quite some time is a 3Com/TippingPoint Firewall/IPS device. Every time I tried to load a Digital Vaccine into it, I would see the following in the logfile:

119 2010-05-14 12:32:14 INFO SYS tarExtracteFile: error writing file
120 2010-05-14 12:32:35 ERR UDM UDM load failed (190)
121 2010-05-14 12:32:35 INFO UDM Completed UDM Load request (force = 1)

I originally wondered if the flash drive in the box was on its way out the door. I pulled it apart, stuck the 512MB CF disk into my desktop, ghosted it onto another CF card and stuck it back in. Still no luck. I factory-defaulted the unit and re-built the config. Still no luck.

Come to find out it was a simple bug in 3.2.0.2318. It was fixed in release 3.2.0.2322.