Windows 7 as a Samba File Server for Linux machines

Posted on by Peter Wong

If you get the this error message “mount error(12): Cannot allocate memory” while trying to mount a Windows SMB to a linux box.

You need to configure Windows to act as a file server and it will allocate the resources needed.

Change the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\LargeSystemCache  to ‘1′

and Change HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters\Size  to ‘3′

once you have done that do a reboot and try mounting the Samba drive again.

 

VMWare Workstation 8 Server

Posted on by Peter Wong

Recently I have started using VMWare Workstation 8, this is really cool and seem to function better than VirtualBox.
If you setup a virtual machine and set it to be shared, you can make it boot up with the Windows OS, hence this could be a headless sever hosting a Linux OS.
You will need to log in as the Administrator to set permission to allow your own user account to use the shared VMware server. Once you have done that you can make any virtual machine boot up as a shared virtual machine without having to be logged in to Windows.

Drilling holes without much mess

Posted on by Peter Wong

I learnt this from a friend.
If you fold a post it note like a V or check mark sharp and stick it below where you want to drill a hole in the wall, it will catch all or most of the drywall or wood debris of where you are drilling a hole.
This works best with the bigger PostIt Notes.

Fastest SD Card Reader

Posted on by Peter Wong

I just got the IOGEAR SuperSpeed USB 3.0 SD/Micro SD Card Reader / Writer yesterday and it’s the fastest SD card reader i have ever seen. This was very cheap too, you can get it for around $15 from amazon.

I was able to get 20MB/s write and 30MB/s read speed using a Patriot LX 16GB SD card on a USB 2.0 port on my MacBook, I properly could get a lot faster read speeds on a USB 3.0 port.

Good work IOGEAR!

You can read more about this product at http://www.iogear.com/product/GFR304SD/

 

Update:

I have tested this card reader on a windows 7 machine with a USB 3.0 port.

I got 63MB/s read and 38MB/s write speed which is really cool.

Running a Ubuntu server on VirtualBox

Posted on by Peter Wong

I created a virtual Ubuntu server on my Windows HTPC box using VirtualBox and VBoxVmService. This is a great setup as I can have a HTPC that’s always on with a Ubuntu server running on top.

The Zbox is very energy efficient, quiet and small. This uses the AMD APU chip which is a all-in-one CPU/GPU combo.

My setup is:

  • Zotac Zbox AD02
  • 8GB DDR3
  • 500GB WD HDD 7200k rpm
  • Windows 7 ultimate

Installation was easy, I just installed VirtualBox, create a VM using the ISO from Ubuntu (make sure you install/enable SSH or NoMachine for remote access to the headless server), and then setup the VM to run as a service with VBoxVmService.

 

http://vboxvmservice.sourceforge.net/

https://www.virtualbox.org/

Nagios

Posted on by Peter Wong

I Nagios is a wonderful tool to monitor your network devices.

 

Nagios is a powerful monitoring system that enables organizations to identify and resolve IT infrastructure problems before they affect critical business processes.

Designed with scalability and flexibility in mind, Nagios gives you the peace of mind that comes from knowing your organization’s business processes won’t be affected by unknown outages.

Nagios is a powerful tool that provides you with instant awareness of your organization’s mission-critical IT infrastructure. Nagios allows you to detect and repair problems and mitigate future issues before they affect end-users and customers.

Latest Toastman Tomato Firmware

Posted on by Peter Wong

The latest version of Toastman Tomato Firmware is really nice (i’m using  1.28.7495.2).

You can now monitor IP Traffic by IP, so you can find out if you have a rouge device on your network that’s sucking up all your bandwidth or data usage.

Also support for IPv6 is great.

Thank you Toastman for keeping the firmware updated!

http://www.4shared.com/dir/v1BuINP3/Toastman_Builds.html

Being a teacher for the first time

Posted on by Peter Wong

I was called to be a Primary teacher in December in my local LDS church, which was a surprise to me as I have never taught children before.

So this January 2012 was I big change for me, the first week I observed my co-teacher leading the class which seem very easy but I still felt a bit odd as I am normally in the Elders meeting and Gospel principals.

Today was my first time teaching the children, although I had prepared for the lesson on “I am a child of God” the previous day and it looked very easy.
Teaching the children was a bit different because it was new to me but the great thing was I had some help from my co-teacher and the children were helpful, so this was a lot more fun than I had imagined it to be.

Also this calling will be good for me as I will receive blessings from Heavenly Father and knowledge on raising my own Son.

So I am very grateful for thing calling, to be a member of the LDS church and to know Christ and Heavenly Father.

I am also grateful for technology as it makes life a bit easier.

kmod-Nvidia and Centos 6

Posted on by Peter Wong

Centos 6 comes with the nouveau which doesn’t work very well for my needs and the Nvidia driver works better. So heres the step to install kmod-nvidia as root.

  1. run “rpm -Uvh http://elrepo.org/elrepo-release-6-4.el6.elrepo.noarch.rpm”
  2. run “yum install kmod-nvidia nvidia-x11-drv nvidia-x11-drv-32bit”
  3. reboot the system

You may need to black list the nouveau driver if that does not work.
Edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst and append the following to the end of the kernel line:
rdblacklist=nouveau