Debian

Operating Systems are tools in a toolbox in my view and over the years I have been reaching for Debian because it is a quick way to get things done. I especially love the Network Installation, mostly because I hate burning CDs :-). Net install ISO are under 300 Megs and coupled with PXE boot, this is a quick way to get a desktop up and running. Download your netinstall image Boot-Up and Install the base system Select Additional packages Configure system as required Once the base system has been installed, all additional packages are download from the repositories and install. If you have a slower connection NetInstall would be very painful (slow). ...

My iPXE setup is coming along just lovely, and it is working out just fine. My goal is to avoid scurrying around like a headless chicken looking for USB flash drives and optical media whenever I have to work on someone’s system. This part usually takes the most out of me when I am fixing a system as I can never seem to find install media, usb drives and my tools. I sure wish I could network boot my tools! I’m trying to become more organized in that regard :-). ...

Network Booting my WinPe image with pxelinux has been an illusive goal of mine. I got it working :-). Get iPXE I downloaded iPXE into my home folder: git clone git://git.ipxe.org/ipxe.git cd ipxe/src make cp bin/undionly.kpxe /tftproot/ PXE Chainloading I have configured my network to chainload iPXE using the “undionly.kpxe” image. I configured my dhcp server (dd-wrt) to point to my tftp server which runs on my NAS. I placed “undionly.kpxe” in the tftp root folder. ...

I grabbed this card from my local computer shop without doing any research. I was very excited and eager to get my home NAS up and running. I was soon disappointed after installing and configuring one hard drive. I was using freeNas then and the write speeds where terribly slow. This was one of the main reasons why I started looking for another NAS solution other than freeNAS. When I migrated to OpenMediaVault this card seemed to have much better Linux support. The I/O speeds were very decent and in spite of this this card always seemed unstable and even though I kept having unstable behavior with hard drives I never made the connection that this card was the root cause. If I had any clue that this was the case I perhaps would not have been so eager with my move to RAID and would have delayed my migration until after I had found a reliable replacement. Alas, you lose data to learn and I lost over 500GB worth of movies and tv shows. ...