Thursday tech
We left off yesterday with a recycled workstation set up for temporary purposes until I get the new $1,000 Core 2 Duo unit assembled and put into service. I installed the hard drives from the dead PC into the temp PC so I already have access to all my non-server based data exactly as it was before. More importantly, the temp PC will allow me to get off this old ThinkPad.
I quickly setup Office 2000, FireFox, and AdAware on the temp PC from an install directory accessed over the high-speed network here in TheGarage. Took about ten minutes. Now all I have to do is drag the entire “My Documents” structure from the old harddrive and drop it into the “My Documents” folder on the Temp PC’s C drive and it’s like nothing ever happened.
Here is a word of caution, or is it more of a tip. If you ever use this technique you might find that you can’t access the “My Documents” folder on the old hard drive after it is attached to a new WinXP installation. Even if the same user name is used, the actual security is based on a user object from another machine and wont work. This problem occurs on NTSF formatted drives where special permissions were applied to a folder, e.g., My Documents, by the owner.
In the case where the other machine is dead making it impossible to log in from the other computer to reset the permissions, another solution is needed. Even the administrator can’t change permissions on a folder with special permissions denying access to everyone; however, the administrator can take ownership of the folder and then reset permissions. Kinda picky, isn’t it? But there ya go. Choose Safe Mode at boot up and login as the Administrator to have complete control over the computer.
Today I am going to take a quick look at upgrading the PowerEdge 6300 to make it a bit more substantial in the processing power dept. I think the geriatric server can get me to where I want to get in the near term. Temporarily, in other words.
Then I have some report writing to do but I am also going to see about getting my Linux box on the bench. The Linux PC is operational but has been ailing a bit. I think I scavenged the RAM from it for something else. I have some extra RAM now so I’m going to pop it in and see if Suse doesn’t perk up a bit.
I’ll post the PowerEdge and Linux hardware configurations later.