unixman

You need a minimum of 4 drives for RAID 10 and there are only 3 in the quote. It appears you have been quoted for a RAID 5 machine, which is fine on a server. See [ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nested_RAID_levels]Nested RAID levels - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame] to learn a little about RAID01 and RAID10.

Once will do, but if you are really paranoid, run a mixture several times. Here is a link Dave Farquhar's Silicon Underground - Wiping a disk securely rm -rf /* is NOT good enough; anyone with half a brain knows how to get files back from an rm. Anecdote time. Back in the early days of SCO/Unix, if you ran rm -rf * from / it would continue to run right up until the /bin/rm file was removed, and then the command would crash, leaving your machine in a very strange state. Some commands would work, and some wouldn't, depending on what had been written where on system install. I tried it once just for a lark and got my botty smacked for the pleasure.

dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda If you have multiple drives, you'll need to do /dev/hdb, /dev/hdc, etc. To go a bit faster, use /dev/zero (to fill the disk with zeros) or /dev/urandom (for not quite random data)

Good article but the choice of pictures is completely wrong. While our school still uses hardware that outdated, many have moved on to much newer equipment. They should show this. I see that the first picture has that well known open source operating system Windows NT! What is that picture illustrating Unix? My guess is an old telephone switchboard.

I have the asus p5ql-e, which is similar to the above. It's a nice board but very finicky. According to the doco that came with it, RAID doesn't work with M$ operating systems out of the box. You basically have to run software RAID. If you run Fedora 9, the RAID controller will work fine, but it won't be recognised under Fedora 10, as they have removed a key kernel module. If you run Suse 11.0 or 11.1 it will recognise the RAID controller, but I could not get the LVM to work, I had to use disk partitioning to get volumes. Mandriva 2008 will recognise it on install, but kernel panic on boot. Mandriva 2009 works perfectly. The built-in ASUS Express Gate is a good feature if you want to access the internet but not boot your machine. I can see this as being very useful if, for example, the hard drive dies and you want to order another online.

Smarter browsing will save you energy. I use yahoo rather than google for the simple reason that yahoo is one character less to type in! Think of all the keystrokes I've saved over the last decade. I guess really I should use aj.com and save thousands of characters. I love it when teachers tell the students to go to the bbc website and 99.9% of them go to google and search for bbc, even though though it is available via our global bookmarks. Of course it is an intuitive URL, just like ebay, play.com, etc but students still google for these.

Nationwide use XP on their ATMs - how do I know? I've seen them crash several times and you will see the normal XP shutdown screen.

You could always try the Das Keyboard Ultimate ThinkGeek :: Das Keyboard Ultimate Mostly you just have to put up with it, although I think teachers could do more to help prevent the problem. Another option, viable now USB is standard, would be to issue a keyboard and mouse to each student at the start of the year. If they want to swap keys around or vandalise the mouse, they that's their lookout. You could charge a phone number range price for issuing a replacement.

I have dyslexia and I agree with some of what the muppet says! I was educated in the 1960's & 70's when there were no allowances for dyslexia such as longer exam times. Did it hold me back? Dunno you tell me - I graduated from university with a BSc in Computer Science and I've been working in IT for 30 years. You don't need financial help or longer times in exams. You learn to live with your condition and make the best of it. I am well known for my meticulous work; I check everything many times, a hang over from when I used to triple check my work.

Totally destroying the hard drive is the only way to be completely sure that your data isn't accessible. I think the DOD standard method is to write zeros to every sector on disk 10 times and then remove the platter and sand-blast it. One company that I worked for 10 years ago, which did work for the MOD, would remove the platter and chop it into 4 pieces with a guillotine.

start - Etherboot/gPXE Wiki should do the job

We use i/p address - we use static i/p. Details of all machines are maintained in a simple spreadsheet which is also our asset register. We have a stencil which etches the name and postcode of the school into the case and monitor. I use a permanent marker to write the i/p address on to the case, inside and out.

My keyboards have many keys that I don't use. Firstly there are the windows keys - I don't even use these on my M$ machine. Secondly, the entire numeric keypad - I can key in numbers much faster using the numbers above the letters. Finally caps lock - can't see a need for it. I do have a keyboard without windows keys and somewhere in the loft I have one without the numeric keypad. Sadly, both are dead otherwise I would use them. Does anyone use an alternative layout such as Dvorak?

Untrue! I know of several laptops which will run Vista, but Linux won't support all of the hardware, especially the camera and wireless. Yes you can get the wireless working with ndiswrapper but this is not always guaranteed. Check Linux Online - Linux-Friendly Hardware and/or Linux-drivers.org - Linux Hardware Compatibility Lists & Linux Drivers to determine if your hardware is support and even then don't assume it is. The HP MiniNote comes with Linux pre-installed but the camera and mics don't work without a lot of messing around. My experience has shown that Asus L series just work and Toshiba Satellite Pro's are a reasonably safe bet, although you will need ndiswrapper for wireless support. As to distro, I would always recommend Fedora over Ubuntu; I've been running Redhat professionally since 1997 and Ubuntu for the last 4 years and there is no contest in ease of update - rpm wins hands down over .deb files.

Ah Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride as Ma and Pa Kettle. True classics which thankfully so far, Hollywood hasn't decided to curse us with a remake.

Doh! A Windoze program to recover Linux files! I don't think so. The correct method is with debugfs. There are loads of examples on the web available if you don't know how to drive this very simple utility. Essentially you recover the inode. However, if you've shredded the file, it's gone.

When we click on the Forums link on the home page, we can see a link "Today's Posts". I reckon it would be useful to have this link on the home page. Basically I'm lazy, and the less use of the clicky clicky mousy thingy the better.

What about one of these new fangled USB enabled ciggies? https://e-cig.com/shopping/shopexd.asp?id=251&bc=no Smoke free, so you can kill yourself without affecting the fire suppression system or your colleagues lungs.

I'm posting in case it proves useful. We were quoted £35 for a genuine Dell replacement for a Latitude D520 and 7 days delivery. As usual, it was needed RFN so I dropped into PC World on the off chance and found a no brand that fitted for £27. We usually use Maplins for these but the Maplins one didn't have the correct end for the Dell.

Send them to AOL

IMO you are much better off buying something like a Netgear ReadyNAS rather than building your own. You can buy a 2TB rack mounted device for < £1000 or a desktop model (13x22x20cm) for £800. Plug them in and they work hassle free out of the box. You'll have a device used by many commercial organisations too. The school I worked at had one, on my recommendation. 20 mins after I'd unpacked it, we had full backups running. Out of the box, you can also use it to host iTunes and video media and there are lots of nice add-ons available.

On UK shelves on 10 July according to http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,39428446,00.htm

http://www.nerdtests.com/images/badge/nt2/da5c8b74ef60008a.png I've always considered myself to be reasonably non-nerdy and I guess I was correct.

Another option is virtualisation using something like bochs or xen. I've run Science Investigations from the Focus On Science Series under Win98 running via bochs on FC6. It runs just like the real thing, even down to crashing. However on a native Win98 host, the crash terminates the program, but under emulation doesn't and you can carry on with your experiment. Under wine, the option that causes the crash doesn't do anything, so it is even more stable that running under native mode. Interestingly, Win98/bochs running on an AMD Sempron 1500 MHz with 256MB ram runs at close to native speed (98%) but on a Intel Dual Core 1.83 GHz with 1GB ram it only runs at about 35% native speed. Both machines are running FC6. I do not understand why the superior machine has such inferior emulation speed. I know of sites that have had very bad experiences of Windows Terminal Services. I've seen Flash applications quickly cripple a dual Xeon 4GB server that was supporting 5 terminal service clients. Tread carefully if you go this route.

Add your command to /etc/rc.local