While testing the NIC connectivity and speed for my HTPC / Home Backup system, I get this unpleasant surprise.  Needles to say the issue was really due to the high transfer speeds on my 1GB/s network that that intel card has appeared to have a bit of difficulty with.  The difficulty has now been resolved […]

Here's how to enable core dump files to write for analysis on application crashes: # cat  /etc/sysctl.conf|grep core # Controls whether core dumps will append the PID to the core filename. kernel.core_uses_pid = 1 # Core patterns, if you want to write to directories other then where the process is currently running from (which could […]

Now, arguably, the art of auto login and automated access may be frowned upon if not done securely but the concept of doing so is in itself something of a could-it-be done question that can simply be too tempting not to answer.  Long time ago I decided if beyond the easy approach to this using […]

DD-WRT run what's known as a busybox, which is a single tiny executable designed to run on enbedded devices.  busybox provides common UNIX utilities normally found on larger UNIX / Linux installations such as desktop computers.  Unfortunately it's limited and even with the shell it provides, alot of functionality such as common shell loops no […]

So I bought myself an intel GigE card with the 82574L chip to deal with a certain problem I've been having with the RealTek one (cough).     So I wanted to try another chip other then RealTek ones to see if that would make a difference.  I suppose one could argue I should have done more […]

When trying to change the port server name (I have a USB printer hooked up to a router) for the network attached printer, you get this message, Windows Port Error: 0x000000aa when trying to change printer properties in Windows 7.  What to do?

Time to setup some APC ( Battery bacup or uninterruptible power supply – UPS ) monitoring for the home equipment.  The tool we’ll use for this is the APCUPSD daemon available in RPM format. We’ve set one up for our HTPCB server for a home redundancy / backup solution to protect against power surges and […]

While setting up my gigabit ethernet network, during simulataneous Windows 7 file transfers to the HTPC+B setup, I've received a number of disconnects, virtually every time while transferring my files.  At the point, I not only lost connectivity with the HTPC+B but also my web access most of the time.  Here are the culprits and […]

VNC or the Linux equivalent of Remote Desktop Connection in Windows, allows us to establish a GUI connection to our remote Linux machines as if we were sitting at the machine itself.  Here, we'll undertake the task of configuring this sort of connection to allow us to remotely interact with the Gnome Desktop.

While configuring SAMBA / CIFS and file sharing over the network, the following errors popup eventually after the HTPC is restarted.  A bit baffling at first since SSH works just as it did before the restart.  However the problems persist and look like this: Windows cannot access \\192.168.0.14\HTPCBackupXFS Check the spelling of the name.  Otherwise, […]