I am all too familiar with the Capacitor Plague of the early 2000’s, having had three motherboards and a DSL modem/router fail because of it. Well, I can add my VIA EPIA CL to that list now too.
You know, I’ve had this same idea for a few years now, and now that I know what it looks like, I’m thinking about doing it again. Over the last couple years, I’ve gotten rid of most of my extra computer junk and downsized to a laptop, but when I look at my current “rack,” there are a few essentials that won’t go away for the foreseeable future:
I’ve also been thinking that the money I spent on this laptop might have been better invested in a new chair. I thought it would be nice to sit on my couch with a laptop, but my legs just get hot and sweaty. Laptop keyboards and touchpads suck when trying to get any actual work done, and when I come home, I miss the dual monitor setup I have at work. So if I do decide to invest in a new desktop machine, I think I’d have enough computer junk to justify a little 12U server enclosure, and I’m sure it would look a lot better than the shelf I have now.
Since I don’t have a wiki set up here, I guess I’ll use this page to keep track of my potential shopping list:
OK, I’ll write more later.
I don’t know why Ubuntu server doesn’t have this enabled by default, but you should add the following to /etc/sysctrl.conf:
kernel.panic=60
This will automatically reboot your server 60 seconds after a kernel panic.
I remember spotting this Google car on the way to work last fall. Too bad you can’t see my face through the windshield. I’m in the black Honda Civic.
With the net user command, it’s possible to modify active directory user accounts on the command line.
net user myuser mypassword
Similarly, it’s possible to modify group membership with the net group command.
net group mygroup myuser /add
This is all well and good, but Microsoft in all its infinite stupidity did not include a way to set account passwords as non-expiring (and you might want to do this when creating active directory accounts with a script). That’s where the dsquery and dsmod commands come in. The following code will use dsquery to locate all the users with names like “myuser” and use dsmod to set the passwords as non-expiring.
for /f "delims=" %D in ('dsquery user -name myuser*') do dsmod user %D -pwdneverexpires yes
Ignore the part of Microsoft’s documentation that says the ds* commands ship in Windows 2008 Server. They also ship in Windows 2003 Server.