HowTo: Get an Ubuntu Live CD to boot off a PXE server
Following my article about creating your own PXE network boot server, here is the first practical use you can put it to – taking the Ubuntu Live CD and turning it into a network-bootable version!
Network booting the Live CD has obvious advantages – aside from booting faster than CD (especially on a gigabit network), it is indispensable as an emergency boot medium in a workplace environment, especially for broken Windows systems, and allows for Ubuntu effortless installations on netbook PC’s that don’t have optical drives and saves you having to have a USB stick handy.
HowTo: Setup your own PXE Boot Server using Ubuntu Server
The Preboot eXecution Environment (PXE) provides a means of starting up a PC using a network adapter instead of the traditional method of hard-drive, USB flash stick, CD or floppy disk.
Why would you want to boot a PC from the network? Well, it opens the door to booting diskless workstations, eg: Internet Cafe PC’s, or if you regularly install tens or hundreds of PC’s, you can start the installer on all those machines at once without needing to have individual boot/install media for each machine. You can even use Linux PXE for starting Microsoft Windows network installers and tools.
This article is going to show you how to setup a standard Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Server to respond to a PXE boot request and present a boot menu ONLY. I will put practical applications such as installing Ubuntu over the network or booting a Live CD over the network into separate future articles.
Mini-Review: Generic hot-swap eSATA Docking Bay with Ubuntu
I regularly deal with external hard-drives, be it for data backup or if I’m rescuing a client’s hard-drive from uncertain death.
Since the idea of opening my PC on a regular basis to connect a drive is a bit of a turn off, I used to use an external USB drive enclosure. This works fine, but it’s a bit slow (well, at least until USB 3.0 makes its debut). The eSATA standard allows you to connect external drives at full SATA speed, but it’s not cost-effective to buy an enclosure for every external drive you have.
Enter the Docking Bay. This is a simple weighed base that allows you to connect a hard-drive in a similar way to how you used to plug in game cartridges into a classic game console like the Atari 2600. You can then eject the hard-drive and plug another one in, all without restarting the PC.
This is a review of one such Docking Bay and how it works with Ubuntu, including the wonders of hot-swapping.
HowTo: Quickly transfer files from an Ubuntu box to another PC over a network without installing Samba, SSH or FTP.
Let’s say you have an Ubuntu PC and a second Windows PC or Mac. You need to do a quick transfer of a file or two from the Ubuntu box, but you really don’t want to go through the hassle of installing and configuring Samba or FTP just for the sake of transferring a couple of files.
Of course you could use a USB flash drive, but it takes twice as long to copy a file that way because you have to copy it to the flash drive and then copy it again from the flash drive to the destination PC. Besides that, what if you don’t have a flash drive big enough to transfer the files you want? Is there a quick and dirty way to transfer some files over a network without the need to install additional software to bridge the compatibility divide?
Indeed there is…
HowTo: Migrate an Apt-Mirror-generated Ubuntu archive to another mirror source or merge a foreign Apt-Mirror archive into yours
So, you’ve gone and created your very own local Ubuntu mirror using Apt-Mirror, and you’ve come across a situation similar to:
- You’ve decided to change where you update your Apt-Mirror archive from (eg: you’ve changed ISP’s or feel that another source is more reliable than your current one to update from)
- You’re adding another large repository to your Apt-Mirror archive (such as the next version of Ubuntu) and don’t have the quota to download it, so you’re getting a friend to download it for you from their free server using Apt-Mirror (eg: iiNet and Internode customers can access their respective Ubuntu mirrors for free), so you need to be able to merge it with your own Apt-Mirror archive and have it update from your preferred source afterwards.
So how do you do this? Read on.
HowTo: Pair your Bluetooth mobile phone with Ubuntu Jaunty for file transfers etc.
Following up my previous article of how to pair your Bluetooth mobile phone with Ubuntu Intrepid, I present this updated article for pairing your mobile phone using the updated version of the Bluez Bluetooth stack and the newer and better Blueman applet for Jaunty which greatly simplifies the process of pairing Bluetooth devices and transferring files to your mobile phone.
HowTo: Reclaim reserved disk space on non-system drives taken by the Ext3 filesystem.
I made a rather alarming discovery today, quite by accident.
Like most people, I use an external hard-drive to backup data to, or to shift things around if I’m low on space on my PC’s internal drive. Well, today that external drive reported that it was full. Damn.
So I fire up Ubuntu’s Disk Usage Analyser, aka Boabab, to find out what’s consuming the most space. I use a 1TB external drive and it’s formatted total is about 916GB, which is about right, however Boabab reported that the total consumption of data on the drive only added up to about 860GB – wtf? Even Nautilus’s Volume Properties window was reporting that the drive still had 50GB-odd free, so why is the system telling me it’s full?
I use Ext3 on my drives and, being a journalled filesystem, some space on the drive is reserved to record these journals among other functions which is expected, but 50GB worth? I did some research and found out that the Ext3 filesystem reserves 5% of disk space by default for itself! In this day and age of large drives, that’s a huge chunk of lost space!!
Thankfully there is a way to tell Linux not to reserve so much space. Read on…
Mini-Review: Transcend JF V60 32GB USB Flash Drive on Ubuntu
It was only just 10 years ago that some of the first USB Flash Drive storage solutions became available in the form of highly expensive sticks that only had a capacity of upwards to 32MB (yes, Megabytes) and had transfer speeds that were slower than molasses on sandpaper.
Today, we now have 32GB USB Flash Drives that go for a paltry AUD$95, and this is a review of Transcend’s offering.
HowTo: Pair your Bluetooth mobile phone with Ubuntu Intrepid for file transfers etc.
While connecting a Bluetooth mobile phone to Ubuntu was not terribly difficult, Ubuntu Intrepid brings with it a new Wizard for connecting all manner of Bluetooth devices without the user having to touch the command line at all.
So, to that end, here is an update to my previous HowTo for connecting a Bluetooth mobile phone to Ubuntu Gusty or Ubuntu Hardy.
Mini-Review: The Fujitsu Dynadisq III 320GB USB Portable External HDD
Actually, I tell a lie – the full title for this product is the “Dynadisq III High Speed USB 2.0 Portable Storage & Backup Solution for Fujitsu 2.5″ SATA Disk Drives” (say that in one breath 5 times)!
Title aside, this is one of yet another series of pre-packaged drive & enclosure solutions being bandied about the market today. These solutions are gaining interest with a lot of consumers because they generally manage to undercut the combined cost of buying the same hard-drive and enclosure separately, so much in fact that many users who only need the drive, buy the solution package, rip out the drive and discard the case because in some cases (pun not intended), it can be cheaper this way.
Cost aside, what if you simply need to have a cost-effective external portable backup solution with minimal hassles? That immediately calls for a notebook hard-drive that can be powered by the USB data cable.
