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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.