Three cheers for the built-in burning support in Windows XP. It writes files to the disc in IS9660 format, and you can repeatedly drag and drop files to add to CD content. That is one great feature Mr. Microsoft, and it blows away the horrible piece of software that is DirectCD.
I have been having some trouble with Now Up to Date Contact server to work properly on the Mac. NUD can be a good calendar and contact manager IF you can get it to work. Here’s the inside scoop…
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Way back when I was making my first forays into the UNIX world, I shunned IRIX for systems I believed more deserving of my attention, among them Solaris, GNU/Linux, and BSD to name a few. I even went so far as to get my work study student to install Debian on my Indy machines a couple of years back. Canceling all my support contracts, I was determined to stamp out the inferior menace (the computers, not the student).
I’ve grown a lot since then, nowadays believing that even Windows has its place (maybe a dark corner, but a corner nevertheless). And within the past few days I’ve had the good fortune and horrible luck of having to develop my own IRIX crash course. It hasn’t been pretty, but I’m finally gaining an appreciation for the niceties that enthralled SGI enthusiasts. In a lot of ways this hardware-software pairing was ahead of its time. The graphics engine is impressive, the GUI tools for software management are attractive and logical, and so far the only hiccup to getting started has been a networking issue that was quickly solved by inserting era-appropriate cabling. Certainly not a server OS, but I wouldn’t mind resuscitating a few as workstations.
I think I’ll keep this one.
I was using the Knoppix disk to offer up some recovered data to a user this afternoon. I turned on SSH and created an account for them, copying their password hash from the NIS store (wasn’t that going away?). I linked their home directory to the mounted hard drive, but they couldn’t log in. It turns out that Knoppix mounts its disks with a rwx permission for the user only. Instead of taking the defaults, remounting the drive with a different umask (below) allowed the incoming user to read the files.
mount /dev/hda? /mnt/hda? -o umask=022
I held off on lunch today because I was determined to get an Indigo 2 running IRIX 6.5 to work behind my firewall, or more generally, on a network via DHCP. I was able to do it, but not without a great deal of hair-pulling. Note that the notes I make here are part of a vague notion of which steps were essential to a positive outcome. An overwhelming feeling of obsession had gripped me this morning, so it wasn’t a breeze recalling precisely what I did. You know the feeling.
I believe the entire success story can be boiled down to the few steps that follow.
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A revision in TSM policy is coming up fast and furious. There are three essential questions from my perspective that will determine my departments’ level of satisfaction with the new service.
1. What portion of the existing network charge goes toward backup?
2. Will one be able to reallocate unused backup space?
3. Under what circumstances will an individual be charged additionally for backup?
I’ve registered my feedback. It will be interesting to see how things shape up.
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