It has an option for dealing with bad sectors... but refuses to run if there's corruption... which is caused by bad sectors...

me@VBox-Kubuntu:~/linux-ntfs-2.0.0/ntfsprogs$ diff ntfsclone.c~ ntfsclone.c
401,403c401,403
< if (opt.ignore_fs_check && !opt.metadata)
< err_exit("Filesystem check can be ignored only for metadata "
< "cloning!\n");
---
> // if (opt.ignore_fs_check && !opt.metadata)
> //err_exit("Filesystem check can be ignored only for metadata "
> // "cloning!\n");

I gave Nexentia a whirl on a server I'm building at home. It's a Debian/ubuntu based system on top of the OpenSolaris Kernel and core utilities. It looks like it'll be fairly useful. Perplexingly, the default behaviour of shutdown is to put the system into single user mode... which means you have to log in on the console to run poweroff... which means you have to have a console, or learn to use "shutdown -i 5" instead. My plan is to not have a console on this machine as it'll be somewhere other than my office.

My plans for the server are:

• Play with it a few weeks first so I don't make any rookie mistakes, then Re-install it for
• A large iSCSI share for my aperture vault and time machine
• A zone to run a bittorrent client and Samba share
• A zone to run Cyrus IMAP & MTA and fetchmail as a SOHO mailserver so I can use my email on any of my computers, home or otherwise
• A zone to run Apache for my own website
• Multiple zones to run Postgres for various projects and experiments.
• Multiple zones for various Apache/PHP or Tomcat web projects
• A zone with a KDE desktop installed to play with XDMCP and to have a KDE system I can access from my Mac Mini.

Upgraded to Karmic, but did it as a bacup home/clean install/barfup home so I could re-arrange the partitions, clear out some cruft, and enable home dir encryption. The barfup took a long time because of all my manuals.

I was having trouble with my Kubuntu netbook... I use it at work as a portable network tester/console router/manual viewer, etc and frequently have to move from place to place while useing it, but closing it put it to hibernate (slow to suspend and wake up) and changes in "system settings" had no effect.

This line did the magic:

sudo mv /etc/acpi/lid.sh /etc/acpi/lid.sh.notrun

Also, I changed the power button to suspend to RAM.

It's also handy for use at home with an external K/V/M as I can clamshell it and work on the big monitor. With these changes, I'll likely start using it a lot more as I really prefer Konqueror/Kate for web development (due to kioslaves), and it's even quieter than my mac mini.

1) I've been running proper offline backups on my home computer (not just other people's computers) for several months.

2) In future I need to remember to check part numbers BEFORE driving 250Km to the customers' site.... ooo... was that ever a long day.

DiskWarrior did the trick! I got my Aperture Library back, along with the master vault. Lots of other stuff was lost though.

Had two power surges last night, so I went down to shut down the computers and unplug them. This morning my Drobo won't mount; disk utility and fdisk both fail. Argh.

I went to get my taxes done at a franchise of a big financial services chain. They asked me to sign their privacy policy. When I started to read it the rep said I just had to sign it. I said I was going to read it before signing. She interrupted me several times as I was reading (two pages of small type), saying that I had to sign it before they could do my takes. Meanwhile, she was already entering my information.

I finished reading and said "please stop entering immediately". It seems burried down at the end of the document were two shocking disclosures...

They share all your personal and financial information with other financial services companies for purposes such as ... marketing and debt collection.

To make matters more interesting they send all of your personal and financial information to a foreign country where it may be accessed by any government agency allowed to under the laws of that country..... Under the laws of that country, government agencies may access all information on non-citizens without either a warrant or probable cause. Also, that country has a long documented history of interfering in the internal affairs of other countries.

READ and understand the privacy policy before you hand over your tax return slips

Union leader stops police from inciting violence.

Warning!! if you run Gentoo and have not already been bitten by the expat upgrade bug, do not emerge any package that pulls in expat-2.0.1 . It will break your system. Be prepared for a multi-day revdep-rebuild during which time your system is unusable (which may not succeed), or build binary packages (of world) in a jail or on another system.

Version 2.0.1 of the XML Parsing library was recently marked stable on all architectures despite the fact that it causes a segfault in any program that is linked against expat-1 and it does not block on <expat-2.0.0 .

In the forums 1 2 and in the bug reports 1 2 the developers have made it clear that they regard this event as nescesary and desirable (to encourage people to upgrasde to the newer KDE and GNOME versions). Many have also said that this is to be expected in gentoo. Note that expat-2.0.0 did block on <expat-2.0.0, thus preventing it from being pulled in by another ebuild accidentally, and allowing anyone who needs it to go to the forums and see why it was blocked and plan their downtime.

Some users (including me) have responded by switching to other distributions; for us, continuity of service (or at least lack of unplanned downtime) is more important than slighly more flexibility than the norm.

Why was expat-2.0.1 marked stable without blocking on expat-1.x?!?!?!?!?

I have a residential ISP (the cable company) and fetch my mail via POP3. I can check my email anywhere, but I can only send email from within their network, in the same city. If I take my laptop out of town or to a hotspot that uses the other major ISP in town (the phone company), I cannot send email.

I am currently in the process of frankensteining an ancient laptop to act as a personal webserver. Does anyone know of a very small linux application that can accept SSL'd and Authenticated ESMTP connections and forward mail on to the ISP's outgoing mailhost? I'm looking for something similar to ssmtp, but able to accept SSL ESMTP AUTH connections. There will be no scripting interpreters on the laptop, so PERL, Python, Ruby, etc are out.

Two fighter jets just flew over south Nanaimo heading north at high speed and low altitude.

Phone lines are down in Cinnabar valley for some reason. And it's a valley out of town, so no cell phone either.

So today I went looking for an open-source anti-virus package. Of course, being an open-source project I expected it to be under a .org domain. You can see for yourself what I found by going to www.clamav.org . I have left this link intentionally non-clickable. Do not go to that site with internet explorer or a non-up-to-date firefox! I suggest lynx or wget.