I rescued this 800mhz iBook G3 from the recycle bin. It didn’t even have OSX installed, the battery was nearly shot, and the case was scarred, but it was functional. The 12 inch screen is pleasant to look at and the keyboard is condensed, but it is a full size. This iBook is somewhere between a netbook and a notebook. But with old MacOS is mostly worthless, and even MacOSX isn’t very functional for my needs as a Computer and Network Technician.
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If you are stuck using ntbackup as your only backup software. There is still hope. As much as ntbackup sucks, with the proper commands ntbackup can actually behave well. With some work you can create a decent backup script and schedule it with schtasks or at. And with added programs like blat, you can even have the script email you like the expensive stuff.
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I looked at MS and other solutions for a way to save on the power bills and to get the computers to shut down at night. I couldn’t find anything that could fulfill my needs. Using AutoIT I wrote a Shutdown program. I called it ShutITdown.exe.
My Needs
What I did not want to do is shutdown the computer on someone who is actively working and cause them to loose their work. I wanted to give them a sufficient warning and a chance to cancel the shutdown. I wanted the Deployment, and the shutdown time, to be centrally managed. I wanted the computers to shut down instead of hibernate or suspend so a new GPO or other update would only be a day’s power on away.
cloning VMs and imaging ubuntu break the networking. This has something to do with the MAC address changing, and the OS thinks there is a new eth device.cloning VMs and imaging ubuntu break the networking.
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I run my VirtualBox VMs in headless mode. So a user need not be logged into they system for the VMs to run. I wanted my VMs to auto power on. Not only that, in the event that they were shut down, I wanted them to turn back on. A production server should have this sort of assurance.
My tar script ( work in progress) backs up my shares on my file server from /data/shares to /backup. both /data and /backup are separately mounted hard drives.
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This proxy is a Dell Optiplex 740 with 5 gigs of RAM and it has a 1TB drive mounted as /cache. I think that the hardware especially the size of the cache drive was a bit overkill. But I wanted to build something that could keep on caching for an entire school year.
We use a lot of imaging using Altiris Deployment Solutions. Apparently computers do not report to the WSUS console as computer name, but some other special identifier. And imaging just copies this identifier. The symptom was that one computer would show up in the console, and then vanish and replaced by another. And then vanish and re replace by another. The script below runs as a start up GPO and fixes the imaging issue as well as a other issues with windows update and WSUS. The script looks for errors in the update logs and if finding them performs corrective measures. Remember, be sure to test it thoroughly in your environment before moving it into production.
For samba beginners, or some one just wanting to get up a simple file server for home or small office. Here is samba quick and dirty.
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