It's been an uphill battle this week with our internet service provider, who has been doing maintenance in this area resulting in major outages for Acorn's Chambana.net datacenter, along with all of the other network services in the building. Between me and my supervisor we've probably spent about 4-5 hours on hold with tech support over the last couple days.

Comment from Rob Heck on July 15, 2007 - 2:17pm

The city of Portland recently paid a private corporation millions of dollars to do something a community wireless project had already been doing for a few years. What a waste of money.. That's great that Urbana is not following along these things of supporting business over grassroots community.

Imagine if you could run Windows XP, Mac OS X, and multiple versions of Linux on the same computer.  That's already a reality--you just have to reboot to switch between them.  Now imagine that you could run all these operating systems at the same time on the same computer.  You could run MS Word 2003 at the same time you're running Safari, all while programming in Eclipse.  It's possible.  The technology that makes it possible: Xen.

Comment from cheryl jerozal on January 31, 2007 - 8:37pm

but eclipse is available for many platforms

Comment from John Miller on February 1, 2007 - 3:14pm

My goof! My intent was to pick something that's somewhat well-known and associated with Linux. Perhaps the GIMP would have been better, but it seems like most of the best F/OSS programs these days are cross-platform.

Over the past two weeks, I've been putting together a server so that people across the street from us at UMass Lowell (we're on-campus also) can mount their website files, hosted with us, as a network drive under Windows. This can be done with FTP, but it's still a bit messy. Fortunately, there's software out there, called Samba, that lets you make a Linux/Unix computer act as a Windows server. Here's how we've used it.

The first step is to set up a computer running Linux/Mac OSX/FreeBSD/NetBSD/Solaris... (any Unix flavor). This is a whole blog entry unto itself, but these days, it's not too hard, and it's getting easier and easier every day. Here at the CSL, we have a fairly well-established checklist for doing this, but there are always minor kinks in the process. Since our income is fairly small at this point (getting larger, thanks to some new grants and kind donors), our equipment is mostly hand-me-down. In this case, it meant learning about a new server we'd never spent much time on (memory on it must be installed in pairs!).