Archive for category Computers
Hard Drive Prices
Sweet spot seems to be 1.5 TB, but there is a cheap 1 TB Hitachi with $5 rebate.
Checksum
Posted by bumscientist in Computers, Computing, Digital Rights on December 11, 2009
I started backing up all of my DVDs onto my hard drive, but how will I know when my data is corrupted?
The answer is to compute a hash with md5sum or sha1sum. Better yet, use both. md5sum is not considered secure, because hackers can insert bits while retaining the same hash. For random corruption, the md5sum should work fine. For finding out if someone has hacked your files, you should use sha1, which is still considered secure. The thing about cryptography is to not make something secure, but to make something secure for some period of time.
Microsoft has a file check integrity verifier, fciv.exe.
I guess after I compute the sums, I would need to check them every year or so just to make sure my hard drive is still okay.
Gparted
Posted by bumscientist in Computers on December 7, 2009
Gparted now does everything partition magic used to do, like resize NTFS partitions without destroying data. You can download a live CD from their site, but Ubuntu also has gparted on their live distro, so there’s really no point in using the gparted live cd, when Ubuntu and Knoppix have it. Ubuntu is more up-to-date than Knoppix since it has a 6 month release cycle, but they are both based on Debian.
SSH Host Keys
Posted by bumscientist in Computers on November 28, 2009
A machine I’ve been remotely connecting to was compromised recently forcing me to change my password into a new stronger password. I don’t pay as much attention to security as I should. I should be more careful about host keys, but I don’t think I can easily get the fingerprint until after I’ve made the first connection.
Find your fingerprint of your server with
$ ssh-keygen -l -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key.pub
This should match with the fingerprint when you try to ssh into the server. If it doesn’t match, then you have a problem.
Windows 7 Impressions
Posted by bumscientist in Computer Science, Computers, Computing on November 18, 2009
I installed the RTM version of Windows 7 Professional. The installation was smooth and fast, but after I starting installing applications, things firefox crashing and I got some file system errors from applications I downloaded. Eventually I remembered I installed some bad RAM into the computer. Thankfully, I was able to determine which of the two sticks was bad with Memtest86+. After that, I have to say that I like Windows 7, but I don’t use it in day to day operations.
Dangers of Silence
Posted by bumscientist in Computers on November 9, 2009
The last time I built a computer, I selected parts to make it quieter. I may have done too good of a job. I turned it on, but I wasn’t sure it was turned on till I looked at the keyboard and mouse indicators This reminded me a bit of blind people wanting to add noise makers to electric cars, because they are so quiet when operating. Silence can be dangerous.
Benefits of a NAS
Posted by bumscientist in Computers, Computing on October 6, 2009
I just found out I can mount a DVD ISO on my MacBook Pro over a network and then play the DVD without annoying hard drive spin. Another benefit is that I can watch my DVDs anywhere I’m connected to the network, which means anywhere on campus, even my research lab. I love networks!
Media Server and Slackware 13.0, An Update
Posted by bumscientist in Computers on September 19, 2009
So far, I have MythTV working and recording videos, but I couldn’t get MythTV plugins to work. Instead of MythTV plugins I’m using FUPPES to serve up media through uPnP, but I haven’t gotten transcoding on the fly to work yet. This is all good though. Everything I need works. There’s no point in using MythTV to record TV, because my reception sucks. There’s no point to serve up media since the wireless is too slow for me to serve up videos, but audio works. All my audio is encoded in multiple formats and in multiple places. I don’t have enough CDs to warrant a centralized server.
uPnP Media Server
Posted by bumscientist in Computers on September 18, 2009
So I finally got a media server working and serving up data to my PS3. I tired many programs, but had difficulty getting MythTV Plugins, gmediaserver, ushare and mediatomb to work. Fuppes complied easy and worked great. The only problem was that it took me a while to figure out which ports to poke a hole in my firewall.
I added this to my firewall.
iptables -A INPUT -m udp -p udp --dport 1900 -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -m tcp -p tcp --dport 5000 -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -m udp -p udp --dport 49200 -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -m tcp -p tcp --dport 49200 -j ACCEPT
Things work great now. I can watch mp4, mp3 and wma files on my PS3.
Snowy Leopard
Posted by bumscientist in Computers on September 4, 2009
Woot. Running Snow Leopard and it seems fine so far.