I try my best to stay away from Windows. I wish my clients did the same. The usual difficulty of troubleshooting elusive network performance problems is amplified many-fold when there is a Windows computer at the end of the line. With Unix it’s relatively simple: run tests “a”, “b”, “c”, etc and follow the familiar process of elimination. With Windows in the picture the number of steps uses up all of the English alphabet and spills over well into the Russian one. And when you finally reach step “я”, you have to pull out your Chinese dictionary.

I am sure this will sound familiar: you are copying a large amount of data – either locally or over the network – and you are wondering how long it will take and if there is a way to make things go faster.You may be surprised, but it does matter what type of files you are copying: 1Gb-worth of many small files will take considerably longer to copy than two 500Mb files. The hardware you are using is an important consideration, but it’s not the only factor limiting data transfer speed.

The following document explains how to configure your SuSE or SLES system to be able to print to a remote printer shared from a Windows server. The first step is to install Unix print support …

When using RDP, sometimes the session may lock up and you may need to reboot your workstation remotely. This can be done using the “shutdown.exe” command from your local PC. First, make sure you can …

Starting with SuSE 10 and including both openSuSE and SLES an annoying SSH problem appeared. When you SSH to the server (via PuTTY and such) you get the “login” prompts right away, but the “password” …

Let’s say you downloaded a long list of Web proxy servers. Now you are stuck with the task of weeding out the proxies that are dead, slow, fake, or otherwise unusable. There are some applications …

Xbox 360 uses UPnP protocol to stream multimedia files from computers on your home network. Normally, you would have a Windows PC running WMP and sharing files. But what if you have a Linux box …

Below are some basic steps to secure a wireless access point (WAP). The screenshots are for Linksys WAP54G v. 3.04, however, the same steps will apply to wireless access points from other manufacturers. Understand this: …

Recently I ran into a small problem. A customer of mine was moving her site to a new hosting provider. Her old provider was Windows-based and her new provider was Linux-based. The old provider did …

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"eMule is a peer-to-peer file sharing application that works with both the eDonkey network and the Kad network. The distinguishing features of eMule are the direct exchange of
sources between client nodes, fast recovery of corrupted …

In the Spring of 2005 Comcast experienced a major DNS outage. Since then many Comcast users have switched to DNS servers that belong to Verizon and other ISPs. Comcast started taking a lot of flak …

Download the Companion CD for Solaris 10 GA on: Solaris 10 Companion cd download

bunzip2 software_companion_sparc.iso.bz2 #unzip the file
 
lofiadm -a /export/data/software_companion_sparc.iso #mount the ISO image
mount -F hsfs -o ro /dev/lofi/1 /mnt #mount the ISO as a …

This note explains how to access a Samba server located on the “orange” DMZ subnet from a Windows PC on the “green” LAN. The problem for Samba is caused by the firewall blocking NETBIOS responses. …

What’s the best Linux distro for desktop applications? My subjective opinion based on years of Linux experience is that SuSE 10 at the moment offers the best combination of features and user friendliness. The latter, …

This article explains how to configure a network interface to support virtual IP addresses. This is useful in a cluster environment or in any high-availability service cnfiguration, when you need to ensure that at least …

The following document provides a general overview of the network configuration process for Solaris. For a detailed review of Solaris network configuration please see Chapter 4 of the O’Reilly Solaris 8 Administration Guide by Paul …

An example of an FTP script with Korn shell.
For “$CONFTMP” input file of format: hostname username password

cat "$CONFTMP" | fgrep -v "#" | while read LINE
do
FTPHOST=$(echo "$LINE" | awk ‘{print $1}’)
FTPUSER=$(echo "$LINE" | awk ‘{print …

Pipe in Unix is a method of passing information from one command to another. The pipe take the output of the first command and sends it as input for the second command. The a second …