Steffen's Tech Blog

11 days ago my boot hard disk crashed during some Norton Antivirus scanning in Windows XP. My desktop PC is a Fujitsu-Siemens Computer Scaleo T A64 XP 50 AM2 0 2,0GB bougth in 2006. I had Windows XP installed on the original Sigate 320GByte disk that contained also all my data (as I wanted to use the same files from both Windows and Ubuntu and Windows can't write on the Ubuntu file system but Ubuntu can write on the Windows NFTS format). In addition I had installed a 400 GByte harddisk with a backup partition and my Ubuntu installation. The bios couldn't find the Sigate disk any longer and as this disk contained the boot loader - neither the Windows XP nor my Ubuntu 7.10 did start. An clicking noice confirmed that there was a serios problem with the Sigate disk. What to do? As I have a three-year service contract from Fujitsu-Siemens I first contacted the Fujitsu-Siemens service via the service phone I found under http://www.fujitsu-siemens.com . They aggreed to send somebody...

Ever considered to make your Ubuntu installation even more secure? There is an excellent chapter available in the official Ubuntu documentation called "Keeping Your Computer Safe" that is worth to read. I used its sub chapter "Set up a firewall" to install the firestarter package - an Open Source visual firewall program that combines ease of use with powerful firewall features. To understand its basic features and how to use them you can read the quick tutorial from the Firestarter Online Manual . After completing the start wizard, some services that you might have on your machine such as a web server or a SSH server will not be reachable any longer from the outside because the default configuration set up provides strong protection against incoming intrusions. E.g. the connection from my Macbook via SSH to my Ubuntu machine wasn't possible any longer and therefore my rsync script described in my previous post " Synchronize files between a Macbook and an...

Have you ever considered mirroring/synchronizing your important files from your Mac to your Linux machine to decrease the risk of data loss because of a hardware crash? One very effective way to do this is using two open source tools available on your Mac and your Linux machine called rsync and ssh. This document will lead through the necessary steps. The main reason for this document was to have a reference for myself as it wasn't trivial. Maybe it can be helpful for others. As a precondition, it is assumed, that you have two computers that are connected via a network. I am using a Macbook with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and an Ubuntu PC with Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy connected via a WLAN where I have verified all the steps. Some of the steps described are Mac / Ubuntu specific. Most information should be valid for other operating systems where ssh and rsync can be installed (e.g. other Linux distributions) but you might check out the distribution specifics if something should not work. ...