Computer Tech Union blogs

Mckenzie Management Sucks

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 17:24:23 -0700

Hello World,

I wanted to share a little story of an unethical company who's business practices leave much to be desired. This company's name is McKenzie Management located in La Jolla, California. Their website is http://www.mckenziemgmt.com

The reason for this article is to warn any future techs who may come in contact with this company not to do business with them. This company has a history of using a tech, running up a bill and not paying them. I was a little sketch about working for them because I was taking the account over from another computer tech. I spoke with the tech and asked him the question, is this a good client to have? After a long pause, he gave me a somewhat grudging and disconcerting, "uhh ya there ok..." Not listening to my better sense, I went ahead and proceed to give my professional recommendations to them.

No Support for Beryl from ATI "Official Driver"

Sun, 27 May 2007 22:08:21 -0700

I was trying to get my $300 ATI card to work with beryl. Yes its possible to do if you want to use the open source "slower" driver but since i'm also a gamer and wanted to keep my framerate at top speed I attempted to install beryl with the fglrx driver that is supplied with ATI. After several hours of reading and trying different things I finally came across this http://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&questionID=26907

Basically it says that they don't support beryl...have a nice day.

XO FLEX PRI

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 18:37:07 -0700

XO FLEX PRI

A Few Experiences that i would like to share.

1) The Flex PRI is not a true pri its an IP/PRI. This has some limits on what your t1 can do, such as being able to set you out going caller id and some advantages that a normal T1 can not do, split your t1 channels dynamically into bandwidth or voice channels depending on what you need.

2) Out of the 3 months that the t1 has been active, i have only been able to use it for about 1/2 that time. Now this is not entirely XO's fault. Its just that they had no experience in making it work with asterisk. I think that by the time you read this, their customer service may have improved. This was due to XO blocking my calls. They changed a setting on the pri to not allow any calls to go out unless i had my caller id set as one of the numbers they assigned to me. After calling XO about a dozen times, having them send a tech out to my location (who said it was working fine) and then opening a service contract with DIGIUM to make sure that my settings were correct. No one could figure out why this was not working. In fact all the XO techs i spoke with couln't see anything wrong with their equipment. By chance one day i figured out that If i set my caller ID to be that of one assigned to me, the call WOULD work. It only took me 3 aggravating weeks of troubleshooting and hair pulling to figure out that little gem.

Debian Networking Tutorial for Beginners and advanced users

Thu, 14 Dec 2006 02:05:57 -0800

This is detailed step step debian networking tutorial for Beginners and advanced users.This includes Configuring your network using GUI,Command line,using ifconfig with examples and troubleshooting your network tips.

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Simple Package management with Synaptic Package Manager

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 06:29:03 -0800

Synaptic is a graphical user interface (GUI) for managing software packages on Debian-based distributions. If you are using Debian or Ubuntu you will easily find Synaptic in the System Tools menu or in the Administration menu. Synaptic uses the GTK graphic libraries . So, if you are using GNOME on your debian-based distro you will probably have Synaptic installed as well. Synaptic is a graphical package management program for apt. It provides the same features as the apt-get command line utility with a GUI front-end based on Gtk+.

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Recover Data From a dead hard drive using ddrescue

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 03:53:17 -0800

Like dd, dd_rescue does copy data from one file or block device to another.dd_rescue is a tool to help you to save data from crashed partition. It tries to read and if it fails, it will go on with the next sectors where tools like dd will fail. If the copying process is interrupted by the user it is possible to continue at any position later. It can copy backwards.

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Remotely Manage Machines Using VNC

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 08:03:44 -0800

VNC stands for Virtual Network Computing. It is, in essence, a remote display system which allows you to view a computing `desktop’ environment not only on the machine where it is running, but from anywhere on the Internet and from a wide variety of machine architectures.

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Install .rpm Files in Debian and Ubuntu

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 00:57:19 -0700

Some time you might find some applications are having only .rpm files but you want a .deb package for your debian,Ubuntu and other debian derived ditributions.If you can’t find .deb debian package in any of the debian,ubuntu repositories or elsewhere, you can use the alien package converter to install the .rpm file.

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Running Internet Explorer in Linux

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 00:56:42 -0700

No clicks needed. No boring setup processes. No Wine complications. Just one easy script and you’ll get three IE versions to test your Sites. And it’s free and open source.This may be very helpful for software developers and web developers to test their applications.

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Kubuntu 6.06 LTS Installation Walkthrough with Screenshots

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 02:02:54 -0700

Kubuntu is a user friendly operating system based on KDE, the K Desktop Environment. With a predictable 6 month release cycle and part of the Ubuntu project, Kubuntu is the GNU/Linux distribution for everyone.

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Debian Network Utilities and tools With Examples

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 01:01:19 -0700

This is the list of debian network utilities and tools for administrators and users to check the network related traffic, monitor network.This includes installation of each package with man pages.This full list devided in to two parts which is part1 network tools and part2 network tools

Debian etch beta 3 graphical mode installation with screenshots

Mon, 11 Sep 2006 01:19:37 -0700

Debian etch beta3 installation using graphical interface this is really nice installation walkthrough with each step
screenshots.This is new feature in debian upcoming release version called etch.This article contains nearly 50 images of this installation process.

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Opensource Bandwidth,Network and Servers Monitoring tools with Tutorials

Wed, 23 Aug 2006 09:48:40 -0700

This is very good tutorials for bandwidth monitoring,network monitoring and servers monitoring tools with clear step by step installation guides this includes Nagios,MRTG,RTG,Netmrg,Darkstat,monit,munin,mon,oreon,Saidar ,Cacti,Bigsister,ibmonitor,zabbix.This resouce is Very useful for Users and Administrators to monitor their networks,bandwidth and servers.

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ZABBIX monitoring System installation with screenshots

Fri, 18 Aug 2006 08:39:07 -0700

ZABBIX is software that monitors numerous parameters of a network and the health and integrity of servers. ZABBIX uses a flexible notification mechanism that allows users to configure e-mail based alerts for virtually any event. This allows a fast reaction to server problems. ZABBIX offers excellent reporting and data visualisation features based on the stored data. This makes ZABBIX ideal for capacity planning.

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Nagios2.5 and Oreon 1.3 (Nagios web front end)installation with screenshots

Fri, 18 Aug 2006 08:38:30 -0700

Oreon© is an Open Source monitoring solution based on Nagios. It offers to this monitoring standard a new front end and brings it a panel of new functionalities.

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