Posts Tagged windows
Geek Porn
All geeks drool over various bits of kit and, knowing full well they are totally impractical for their own particular circumstances, still wish it was theirs.
Here are a couple of my recent geek porn moments. Yes, I fully understand that they’re completely impractical for my requirements. I also understand that they’d be wasted in any role I could find for them. But, that doesn’t change the fact that they’re seriously cool bits of kit and if someone wanted to give me one I wouldn’t turn them down.
First up, how about a super computer in your own home (or office)? Enter the Silicon Graphics Octane III. Look a bit blade-like? Yep, it is. Chunky? Apparently dimensions are roughly 1ft x 2ft x 2ft so, yes, a little bit. But check the specs:
- Up to 20 Xeon Quad Core Processors
- Up to 960GB (yes, that’s a G) of Memory
- Up to 10 SATA hard drives
- Graphics with your choice of NVIDIA® Quadro® FX1800, FX3800, FX4800, FX5800. NVIDIA® TeslaTM C1060
- Up to 4 1000W power supplies
…and yes, it’ll run Vista and Windows 7.
In reality it looks to be set for three distinct roles with each role having different capabilities based on the way the slots are used – as a “deskside cluster” based around either Xeon or Atom processors and as a “graphics workstation” with fewer CPU cores but having graphics capabilities and other features. I couldn’t see any mention of pricing but I’d hazard a guess this is in the category of “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it”.
For my second item of drool today, here’s a nice little number in red. Stuff-all processing power but if you really need some storage for your warez and torrent downloads, this might just suit your requirements:
Yep, serious drive storage and what is apparently a not so serious price. It’s a full 4RU rack case storage unit designed to be stacked in a standard 19″ rack and provide OMG levels of storage space. What’s really great in this case is that the guys who created it (BackBlaze) have released a complete how-to as open source hardware. They include parts lists and instructions on how to put it all together.
What have they done? Basically, they put a relatively standard computer (motherboard, cpu, etc) in a case together with up to fourty five 1.5TB hard drives and some software to tie it all together. Seriously nice bit of kit, and, IT’S RED!!!
Windows Home Server – Read Only Permissions
My SBS server developed a hardware fault recently. While I diagnose the fault I needed to move data from the SBS box to my Windows Home Server box. I wanted this to happen fairly quickly and didn’t want to copy via network (network being part of the fault) so I used an external hard drive. Copied the data from SBS to external drive and then from external drive to WHS.
This is where I ran into a problem. Just copied directly to the DATA drive on WHS and then found that permissions on everything I copied was stuffed up – mostly, files were read-only or restricted. WHS seems to lock out most of the permissions controls you’d normally use on SBS to fix this sort of problem and I was at a loss as to how to fix it without access to this mechanism.
Don't copy from external drive straight to the "DATA" drive
Copious Google searching didn’t really find a solution but I picked up enough hints from various sources to try some things. What worked? Use the WHS console to create the share you want. Set permissions in the WHS console. Then, instead of copying directly to “DATAsharesyour new share” you need to copy to the network share name (e.g. \serveryour new share).
Copy to the network share (even though you're on the local computer)
There you go. Hope that saves someone else out there some time and trouble.
Life with Mac – Stuff that didn’t work
As much as I’d love to say that everything Mac is going swimmingly, there’s been a few obstacles to true OSX bliss.
My day to day life includes the businesses that I’ve been running for years (one of them over ten years, the other one about four years). They are established and have fully developed processes that are followed by everyone. While I can adjust some of these processes to take into account my Mac, there are limitations on what I can impose on others.
In a previous post I talked about what worked out well for me. This post, however, is about the parts that didn’t work, what I’ve done to work-around for now and what I plan to put in place to completely resolve the issues as I move forwards.
The first obstacle has proved to be email. I’ve used Microsoft Outlook for many years (and Outlook 2007 for the past couple of years). With this kind of longevity of use I’ve arrived at ways that I handle email (and contacts, calendars, to-do lists) that are dependant on Outlook. Read the rest of this entry »
The Build Disc – Part 5b (Extras – Office 2003)
Posted by David in Build Disc, Unattended Installs on April 8th, 2009
A fully standardised install only takes us so far. At some point you have to cater to the stuff that doesn’t fit in with the standardised stuff. This article is about the extra bits that help Office 2003.
What do I install? Pretty much just the file format converters to allow Office 2003 to read files created with Office 2007.
(As an aside, the Office viewers normally only open Office 2003 files but if you install them and then install the converter, they will also read Office 2007 files.)
I’ve worked out an unattended install but for only one install it’s not really all that relevant.
For what it’s worth, this is the unattended install command:
Office2003-FileFormatConverters.exe /quiet /passive /norestart
This article is part of a series dealing with my standard system build. It starts with this article and the post you’re reading now is directly related to this one.
The Build Disc – Part 5a (Extras)
Posted by David in Build Disc on April 7th, 2009
A standard install is all very well but you reach a point, at least at the home user/small business level, where standardization falls down. Not every computer is going to have the same version of MS Office installed (or even have Office), some computers will not already have Acrobat Reader (or have an older version pre-installed).
Having already dealt with service packs, Windows/Microsoft Updates and standard utilities, now it’s time to come up with a good way of handling these extra items. I’ve set this up with our typical customers in mind and it handles the stuff we usually need. Obviously once you get to this level there is almost infinite scope for how you might handle things.