Ubuntu

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January 6, 2010 by Sciri

HP Mini 1000 and 110 batteries on sale

For you mobile geeks out there HP Home currently has 3-cell batteries for the HP Mini 1000 and 110 on sale for 60% off as well as a $15-off coupon you can use (ACY93421). No idea how long this is going to last.

The 6-cell batteries are regular price but the coupon should also work.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/minami/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Archive

September 8, 2009 by Sciri

Upgrading Polycom firmware

If you have a mixed bag of Polycom kit in your office, be sure to check out the VoIP SIP Software Release Matrix to check on compatible versions. In our case, I chose SIP version 3.1.3RevC since it’s compatible with both the IP 430 and the IP 4000. I’ll probably bump up to SIP version 3.2.0 for the IP 430; just not today.

Also pay special attention to the release notes. Just because a Firmware version is on the download page for a particular model doesn’t mean it will work. We had to mix and match with Firmware version 4.1.3 for the IP 4000 and 4.2.0 for the IP 430. This is difficult (but not impossible) since pre-4.0 Firmware versions look for bootrom.ld instead of modelnumber.bootrom.ld in 4.0 and higher versions.
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Archive

July 21, 2008 by Sciri

Totally unsupported Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) installer for ServerBeach RapidRescue

The aging Red Hat Enterprise ES4 server I have colocated at ServerBeach was starting to get a bit crufty and I felt kind of dirty running RHEL instead of Ubuntu now that I’m working for Canonical. It was finally time to bring up a shiny new Dell PowerEdge 440 running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy Heron however ServerBeach does not yet officially support Ubuntu and will not do custom OS loads.

No problem. ServerBeach provides a brilliant tool called RapidRescue that allows you to reboot your server into a Linux recovery session and gives remote console access to the disks and hardware. I whipped together an awful hack to take advantage of this tool and automate the process of formatting the hard drives and debootstrapping an Ubuntu install. Not exactly elegant, but it gets the job done. :D

Archive

July 21, 2008 by Sciri

Creating DOS floppies and USB thumbdrives for BIOS flashing

MS-DOS or another DOS derivative is still required for flashing the BIOS on some desktops, servers, notebooks, and mobile devices. These tools automate the creation of boot floppies and USB thumbdrives instead of fighting with tools like MKBT (Make Bootable).

Required Tools

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