Anyone interested?

 

Specs:

 

P 150

32mb ram

1.5gb hdd

13" display

 

Great Laptop, I have debian on it currently.

[/url]http://boss.streamos.com/wmedia/spirit/int...star_runner.wax

 

part1

 

[url=http://boss.streamos.com/wmedia/spirit/int...ner_dot_com.wax]http://boss.streamos.com/wmedia/spirit/int...ner_dot_com.wax

 

part2

 

 

I only got it to work with media player 9. Someone download the stream and save to a more popular format.

Just want to display a test.

 

<?php

$foo = "Hello,";

$bar = "world";

 

echo $foo; echo $bar;

?>

 

Certainly it is not just I that think business in America has gone sour. My main focus for this topic, is going to be in the IT world, and how Big Business has gone bust.

 

Working as a full time network administrator for a hospital and clinic's I have learned much about running an IT budget, and the do's and dont's of spending your monies. However, after careful thoughts, and ideas I still have to come to the conclusion that every CEO and CFO has to have some working idea of how important the technology age of our future is.

 

As I sit behind my little desk and type this story, I've got some interesting points that I would like to touch upon. Some facts that might give you some insight on how IT budgets are proposed, and who infact is proposing those budgets.

 

First let us analyze our Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Although good with numbers and financial decisions this person normally does not quite understand the TCO for IT. Most CFO's will have to do a case study on why you need another person, or why you need to upgrade your servers, why you need redundant power supplies, etc. This is the first and foremost importance in the IT department.

 

First let us analyize staffing. Staffing is very important in the role IT plays. If you have non-technical people working on servers, you are going to have problems. When a company hires someone, they first look for technical skills. If they have a technical background then we can move on to the personality of the individual. Of course this is all after you've done your case study on why you need another tech.

 

If a department is understaff it is added stress to the already stressed IT departement. If something doesn't work right, it's the computers fault. We all know everyone has done away with "Garbage in, Garbage out." I feel that is almost rather non-existent in todays society. It is not longer the users that are being blamed, but rather the IT staff, and computers. So by adding to the stress level by being understaff, the IT department gets angry easier. They get more on the defensive, causing users, to get defensive.

 

As you can see there is an issue that needs to be dealt with. Cutting staff, doesn't help the issue. It "might" raise the profit margin, but actually by how much.

 

As stress increases, work decreases. Stress creates unhappy environment, which then can cause people to not want to come to work. With people not wanting to come to work, they may decide to look for another job. So their work level decreases again. I think that point has been made fairly clear.

 

In order to wrap this up quickly I'm going to skip to why people need to be technically savy to run a business.

 

1. Stress = Loss of people

2. Loss of people = Loss of $$

3. Loss of people = Loss of production

4. Loss of production = Loss of $$

5. Loss of production = Loss of profit

6. Loss of profit = Loss of jobs

7. Loss of jobs = loss of team moral

8. Loss of team moral = loss of more $$

 

I certainly think that these principles apply to more than just IT, however, IT controls the cashflow. Sure, they can do it on paper, sure they can do without a computer. However, TCO, for all of that is much higher than if they would hire someone for the extra help.

 

Bleh... o_O

 

I'm tired now.....

Every wonder why sometimes you get this message when you try to un-mount a NFS drive or cdrom drive

 

Not really quite like "Task Manager" for windows, but it does have a similar look to it. This will display your process' and the amount of memory, CPU usage, time, Priority, user, PID, and command that are running on your system. Looks similar to the "Process List" within Task Manager.

 

[root@intmail root]# top

 

 

65 processes: 63 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped

CPU states: 0.0% user, 0.6% system, 0.0% nice, 99.4% idle

Mem: 1031436K av, 729368K used, 302068K free, 0K shrd, 80216K buff

Swap: 1044208K av, 15656K used, 1028552K free 516692K cached

 

PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND

1 root 15 0 404 404 356 S 0.0 0.0 0:07 init

2 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:08 keventd

3 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:06 kapmd

4 root 34 19 0 0 0 SWN 0.0 0.0 2:38 ksoftirqd_CPU0

5 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:17 kswapd

6 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 13:37 bdflush

Quick way to view your hdd stats.

 

 

[root@intmail root]# df -h

 

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/md0 73G 2.8G 66G 4% /

none 504M 0 503M 0% /dev/shm

 

 

The -h is for "Human readable" basically tells us GB verse MB etc.

 

[root@intmail root]# df --help

 

This will display more information about the df command.

This article is not aimed at absolute beginners. Once you are familiar with the basics of Linux, you would be in a better position to use the dd command.

 

The ' dd ' command is one of the original Unix utilities and should be in everyone's tool box. It can strip headers, extract parts of binary files and write into the middle of floppy disks; it is used by the Linux kernel Makefiles to make boot images. It can be used to copy and convert magnetic tape formats, convert between ASCII and EBCDIC, swap bytes, and force to upper and lowercase.

 

 

For blocked I/O, the dd command has no competition in the standard tool set. One could write a custom utility to do specific I/O or formatting but, as dd is already available almost everywhere, it makes sense to use it.

 

 

Like most well-behaved commands, dd reads from its standard input and writes to its standard output, unless a command line specification has been given. This allows dd to be used in pipes, and remotely with the rsh remote shell command.

 

 

Unlike most commands, dd uses a keyword=value format for its parameters. This was reputedly modeled after IBM System/360 JCL, which had an elaborate DD 'Dataset Definition' specification for I/O devices. A complete listing of all keywords is available from GNU dd with

 

 

$ dd --help

 

Some people believe dd means ``Destroy Disk'' or ``Delete Data'' because if it is misused, a partition or output file can be trashed very quickly. Since dd is the tool used to write disk headers, boot records, and similar system data areas, misuse of dd has probably trashed many hard disks and file systems.

 

 

In essence, dd copies and optionally converts data. It uses an input buffer, conversion buffer if conversion is specified, and an output buffer. Reads are issued to the input file or device for the size of the input buffer, optional conversions are applied, and writes are issued for the size of the output buffer. This allows I/O requests to be tailored to the requirements of a task. Output to standard error reports the number of full and short blocks read and written.

 

 

Example 1

 

 

A typical task for dd is copying a floppy disk. As the common geometry of a 3.5" floppy is 18 sectors per track, two heads and 80 cylinders, an optimized dd command to read a floppy is:

 

Example 1-a : Copying from a 3.5" floppy

 

dd bs=2x80x18b if=/dev/fd0 of=/tmp/floppy.image

1+0 records in

1+0 records out

 

The 18b specifies 18 sectors of 512 bytes, the 2x multiplies the sector size by the number of heads, and the 80x is for the cylinders--a total of 1474560 bytes. This issues a single 1474560-byte read request to /dev/fd0 and a single 1474560 write request to /tmp/floppy.image, whereas a corresponding cp command

 

 

cp /dev/fd0 /tmp/floppy.image

 

 

issues 360 reads and writes of 4096 bytes. While this may seem insignificant on a 1.44MB file, when larger amounts of data are involved, reducing the number of system calls and improving performance can be significant.

 

 

This example also shows the factor capability in the GNU dd number specification. This has been around since before the Programmers Work Bench and, while not documented in the GNU dd man page, is present in the source and works just fine, thank you.

 

 

To finish copying a floppy, the original needs to be ejected, a new diskette inserted, and another dd command issued to write to the diskette:

 

Example 1-b : Copying to a 3.5" floppy

dd bs=2x80x18b < /tmp/floppy.image > /dev/fd0

1+0 records in

1+0 records out

 

Here is shown the stdin/stdout usage, in which respect dd is like most other utilities.

 

 

Example 2

 

 

The original need for dd came with the 1/2" tapes used to exchange data with other systems and boot and install Unix on the PDP/11. Those days are gone, but the 9-track format lives. To access the venerable 9-track, 1/2" tape, dd is superior. With modern SCSI tape devices, blocking and unblocking are no longer a necessity, as the hardware reads and writes 512-byte data blocks.

 

 

However, the 9-track 1/2" tape format allows for variable length blocking and can be impossible to read with the cp command. The dd command allows for the exact specification of input and output block sizes, and can even read variable length block sizes, by specifying an input buffer size larger than any of the blocks on the tape. Short blocks are read, and dd happily copies those to the output file without complaint, simply reporting on the number of complete and short blocks encountered.

 

 

Then there are the EBCDIC datasets transferred from such systems as MVS, which are almost always 80-character blank-padded Hollerith Card Images! No problem for dd, which will convert these to newline-terminated variable record length ASCII. Making the format is just as easy and dd again is the right tool for the job.

 

Example 2 : Converting EBCDIC 80-character fixed-length record to ASCII variable-length newline-terminated record

dd bs=10240 cbs=80 conv=ascii,unblock if=/dev/st0 of=ascii.out

40+0 records in

38+1 records out

 

 

 

The fixed record length is specified by the cbs=80 parameter, and the input and output block sizes are set with bs=10240. The EBCDIC-to-ASCII conversion and fixed-to-variable record length conversion are enabled with the conv=ascii,noblock parameter.

 

 

Notice the output record count is smaller than the input record count. This is due to the padding spaces eliminated from the output file and replaced with newline characters.

 

 

Example 3

 

 

Sometimes data arrives from sources in unusual formats. For example, every time I read a tape made on an SGI machine, the bytes are swapped. The dd command takes this in stride, swapping the bytes as required. The ability to use dd in a pipe with rsh means that the tape device on any *nix system is accessible, given the proper rlogin setup.

 

Example 3 : Byte Swapping with Remote Access of Magnet Tape

rsh sgi.with.tape dd bs=256b if=/dev/rmt0 conv=swab | tar xvf -

 

 

The dd runs on the SGI and swaps the bytes before writing to the tar command running on the local host.

 

 

Example 4

 

 

Murphy's Law was postulated long before digital computers, but it seems it was specifically targeted for them. When you need to read a floppy or tape, it is the only copy in the universe and you have a deadline past due, that is when you will have a bad spot on the magnetic media, and your data will be unreadable. To the rescue comes dd, which can read all the good data around the bad spot and continue after the error is encountered. Sometimes this is all that is needed to recover the important data.

 

Example 4 : Error Handling

dd bs=265b conv=noerror if=/dev/st0 of=/tmp/bad.tape.image

 

 

Example 5

 

 

The Linux kernel Makefiles use dd to build the boot image. In the Alpha Makefile /usr/src/linux/arch/alpha/boot/Makefile, the srmboot target issues the command:

 

Example 5 : Kernel Image Makefile

dd if=bootimage of=$(BOOTDEV) bs=512 seek=1 skip=1

 

This skips the first 512 bytes of the input bootimage file (skip=1) and writes starting at the second sector of the $(BOOTDEV) device (seek=1). A typical use of dd is to skip executable headers and begin writing in the middle of a device, skipping volume and partition data. As this can cause your disk to lose file system data, please test and use these applications with care.

 

Credits

 

The dd command has been around since the 1970s, ported to many systems, rewritten many times, and tested by time as a useful tool. The current Linux version is GNU dd GNU fileutils 3.12, written by Paul Rubin, David MacKenzie, and Stuart Kemp, Copyright

This tutorial is aimed at those who have just started using Linux. Generally when users from the Windows background enter the Linux scene,they are totally stumped by the software installation method. They were used to the luxury of double clicking on a single file and getting their software installed. But now they have to type cryptic commands to do the same.

 

Though the installation instructions tell them what to do, they have no idea what those steps actually do. This article shall explain the basics of software installation. After reading this article you would feel more at home when installing your next software.

 

Generally beginners tend to search desperately for RPMs since installing RPMs is a real simple task. But this article doesn't talk about RPMs. It deals with the softwares that you generally get in the zipped formats as tarballs.

 

 

Details :

 

Generally you would get Linux software in the tarball format (.tgz) This file has to be uncompressed into any directory using tar command. In case you download a new tarball by the name game.tgz, then you would have to type the following command

 

$ tar xfvz game.tgz

 

This would create a directory within the current directory and unzip all the files within that new directory. Once this is complete the installation instructions ask you to execute the 3 (now famous) commands : configure, make & make install. Most of the users do this and successfully install their softwares. But most of the newbies have no idea what this really does. The rest of the article shall explain the meaning of these 3 commands

 

Each software comes with a few files which are solely for the purpose of installation sake. One of them is the configure script. The user has to run the following command at the prompt

 

$ ./configure

 

The above command makes the shell run the script named ' configure ' which exists in the current directory. The configure script basically consists of many lines which are used to check some details about the machine on which the software is going to be installed. This script checks for lots of dependencies on your system. For the particular software to work properly, it may be requiring a lot of things to be existing on your machine already. When you run the configure script you would see a lot of output on the screen , each being some sort of question and a respective yes/no as the reply. If any of the major requirements are missing on your system, the configure script would exit and you cannot proceed with the installation, until you get those required things.

 

The main job of the configure script is to create a ' Makefile ' . This is a very important file for the installation process. Depending on the results of the tests (checks) that the configure script performed it would write down the various steps that need to be taken (while compiling the software) in the file named Makefile.

 

If you get no errors and the configure script runs successfully (if there is any error the last few lines of the output would glaringly be stating the error) then you can proceed with the next command which is

 

$ make

 

' make ' is actually a utility which exists on almost all Unix systems. For make utility to work it requires a file named Makefile in the same directory in which you run make. As we have seen the configure script's main job was to create a file named Makefile to be used with make utility. (Sometimes the Makefile is named as makefile also)

 

make would use the directions present in the Makefile and proceed with the installation. The Makefile indicates the sequence, that Linux must follow to build various components / sub-programs of your software. The sequence depends on the way the software is designed as well as many other factors.

 

The Makefile actually has a lot of labels (sort of names for different sections). Hence depending on what needs to be done the control would be passed to the different sections within the Makefile Or it is possible that at the end of one of the section there is a command to go to some next section.

 

Basically the make utility compiles all your program code and creates the executables. For particular section of the program to complete might require some other part of the code already ready, this is what the Makefile does. It sets the sequence for the events so that your program does not complain about missing dependencies.

 

One of the labels present in the Makefile happens to be named ' install ' .

 

If make ran successfully then you are almost done with the installation. Only the last step remains which is

 

$ make install

 

As indicated before make uses the file named Makefile in the same directory. When you run make without any parameters, the instruction in the Makefile begin executing from the start and as per the rules defined within the Makefile (particular sections of the code may execute after one another..thats why labels are used..to jump from one section to another). But when you run make with install as the parameter, the make utility searches for a label named install within the Makefile, and executes only that section of the Makefile.

 

The install section happens to be only a part where the executables and other required files created during the last step (i.e. make) are copied into the required final directories on your machine. E.g. the executable that the user runs may be copied to the /usr/local/bin so that all users are able to run the software. Similarly all the other files are also copied to the standard directories in Linux. Remember that when you ran make, all the executables were created in the temporary directory where you had unzipped your original tarball. So when you run make install, these executables are copied to the final directories.

 

Thats it !! Now the installation process must be clear to you. You surely will feel more at home when you begin your next software installation.