When the stuff arrives, I will try to finally assemble my C64Mac. Also I will make some pictures. Won´t take long… hopefully…

The very (!!!) first thing one should do is making a backup. Skipping this step is a bad idea, except there´s nothing important on your machine. I was using Acronis True Image Home 2010, but any other backup tool you´re familiar with is fine. Closing all applications and stopping all unneeded services (e.g. local instances of mySQL and sort of) is also mandatory.

1. I started Microsoft´s Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor and removed everything it told me (especially Toshibas Bluetooth Stack. It was causing problems with Windows Vista, so I assume it wouldn´t work better in Windows 7).
2. Reboot!
3. I removed crap files and cleaned the registry with Piriform´s CCleaner.
4. Reboot!
5. I created a full backup and had a beer in the meanwhile.
6. Reboot!
7. I used Partition Wizard Business Edition, which is free of charge. It did a great job and resized my partitions without a glitch. However, it needed two reboots (without user interactions). Afterwards I checked my filesystems with the chkdsk command (without /f). See the screenshots below to see how the summary should look like.
8. The last and longest step was the updates. I started it at 11pm, and it finished somewhen at 1.30am. FYI, I´m writing this post on my new Windows!

Summary:
This task was rather time-consuming, but It worked without any problems. Also, my installation is noticeable faster than before. Thanks to Software Assurance I am up2date

However, to make long things short, I´ll set up all systems with out-of-the-box configuration and let them share myRAID1. Afterwards I´ll compare the speed, as good as possible, to see which platform acts best in it´s defaults.

I cannot describe how annoying this error was. After having a chat with the developer, I assume I can solve the problem tomorrow. Hopefully.

Assertion ((C * heads + H) * sectors + S == A) at
disk_dos.c:586 in function probe_partition_for_geom() failed.

They can be ignored. After this part of the installation everything went fine. After the first reboot I started “conary update conary” and “conary updateall” to apply the newest patches. It took rather long, but I´m not shure if it´s te processing power of the board or the architecture of Openfiles itself. I will compare it to another installation, when I find some time.

Stay tuned!

One of my friends, who works at a well known firewall company in Innsbruck, pointed me to WPAD and PAC. After studying the very good articles on Wikipedia (WPAD and PAC) I started to reflect the mentioned changes to my network. Everything went fine, until I got to the point where I had to add a host called “wpad” to my Windows 2003 DNS. It just didn´t resolve! Testing some other hostnames I added afterwards, everything went fine. Just my wpad-host wouldn´t resolve.

Doing some research I stumbled across this article on Technet. The described method is to be used on Windows 2008, but also works on 2003. Strange enough I couldn´t find any articles about 2003, but enough on 2008. Go figure.

After applying the changes and starting a new instance of my Firefox (and, meanwhile, examining the live logs of SCM) I figured out it works.

So I could configure all my clients without going too many ways. Read ahead on my followup (which will be released soon) on how to achive this.

Für genau diesen Zweck gibt es verschiedenste Produkte, kommerziell, gratis, oder Opensource. Zu letzteren gehört DBAN – Darik´s Boot and Nuke. Dabei handelt es sich um eine Mini-Distribution, die eigentlich nur eines macht: Festplatten zu überschreiben. Dazu kann man aus folgenden Möglichkeiten auswählen, wobei die vermeintlich sichereren natürlich um einiges länger dauern, da verschiedene Datenmuster in mehreren Durchgängen geschrieben werden:

Bild1

Allerdings soll das alles, lt. dem Forensikexperten Craig Wrigh, unnötig sein.

http://www.heise.de/security/Sicheres-Loeschen-Einmal-ueberschreiben-genuegt–/news/meldung/121855

I´m still not exactly shure about the purpose of this device, but for now I´m ripping my favourite Radiostation (FM4) with it. When I visit my friends, FM4 is often running in the background. More and more I realised it would be a great idea to save show like “Digital Confusion” for later listening – my Ubuntubox will do this for me.

This can be achieved easily by wgetting one of the Streams from the net (bash-scripting & cron are your friends). When I´ve developed a fully functional system, I will post more information here, as well as pictures (as soon as I´m back@office).

…to be continued…