h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Just thought I'd add my name to your growing list! I've had a few years' experience on various UNIX-style platforms, writing C and shell scripts. I'm currently wrestling with some multi-threaded systems programming on IBM AS/400 in C, trying to get it to behave like UNIX (It does extremely well, BTW, though the user interface is like kicking a dead whale up a beach).

I'm also pretty well-versed with the vi editor, so if anyone has any questions about it, I may be able to help.

Just thought I'd add my name to your growing list! I've had a few years' experience on various UNIX-style platforms, writing C and shell scripts. I'm currently wrestling with some multi-threaded systems programming on IBM AS/400 in C, trying to get it to behave like UNIX (It does extremely well, BTW, though the user interface is like kicking a dead whale up a beach).

I'm also pretty well-versed with the vi editor, so if anyone has any questions about it, I may be able to help.

My idea of a unix users club here on H2G2 is to bring together those Linux users and the general unix users. Linux is a unix varient. the developers say so, so there is no distinction here in my mind (I run Linux at home and FreeBSD at work).

I've finally managed to get Redhat 6.1 to work along with win2k. There was a worrying point when I thought I'd lost both, but I fixed it with a Micro$odt utility called fixmbr (otherwise known as fdisk /mbr!)

That's because MS assume you'll only have one OS on your machine (OK when they started you did, but to continue to do so now?)

Actually it seemed to be because of Micro$pft's "let's write a new industry standard and call it NTFS" which I had converted my Win2K drives to. Lilo didn't recognise them as being bootable so it didn't include them on the boot list, leaving me with no way of accesing Win2K. I re-installed Linux and chose for it to not instal Lilo but instead to make a boot floppy. However it did not re-write the MBR to remove the previous copy of Lilo which meant that I still could not gain access. That's why I took the risk of running fixmbr even though theoretically it could have buggered up all my partitions leaving me with a completely corrupt drive. Or something like that, but hey what do I know, I'm only 15.

Who uses Win2K on it's own? I'm running Win98, virtualy unused, Linux Mandrake 7.0 and Win2k Linux read/writes FAT32 and reads NTFS so there's no big problems there.

This may be outdated information, but what the hey, I find just about all the old DOS tricks still work. (I even used SUBST the other day!)

If your run FDSIK with the /MBR switch, it re-builds the Master Boot Record. This is an old undocumented feature which I used for years and years.

This may be outdated information, but what the hey, I find just about all the old DOS tricks still work. (I even used SUBST the other day!)

If your run FDISK with the /MBR switch, it re-builds the Master Boot Record. This is an old undocumented feature which I used for years and years.

So undocumented in fact that everyone knows about it. like format /autotest

so mr patron saint of tea, which flavour of linux are you running, and why do you expect it to help you out when you smeg up?

NTFS was designed to be secure and to handle partitions in excess of 2GB it's highly unlikely that it will replace FAT although it is more efficient.

actualy a good way of exploring a win2k partiton is to mount it from BEOS, you'll see a number of directories and system files that were not visable before.

I use Redhat 6.1 Although I'm thinking of changing to OpenBSD because apparentyl it's a lot more secure.

You can make RedHat (or any other linux) more secure than the default settings. The OpenBSD projects goal is to build the most secure unix possible. You can also put it on a machine and then end up undoing all the default security measures. How about moving this question to a general discussion on securing unix (as most of the tips will work on Linux, Solaris, SCO, HP U/X, *BSD) to http://www.h2g2.com/F45713?thread=67107 come over and join in.

Hi! I just want to register an interest for future reference...

I've used Yggdrasil, Red Hat 5.0 and 5.1, and played with Corel. I'm not actively using Linux at the moment (NT4 SP6a on my 1.044GHz dual Celeron), but I have 12 old Pentiums in the kitchen which I plan to convert into a Beowulf cluster to run the multiprocessor build of POV Raytrace v3...

The current plan is to set them up running Mandrake, which I'm assured will directly read and install my Beowulf RPMs, and has good support as standard for most older network cards. (I have two carrier-bagfulls of assorted network cards collected for the project! All I need to find now is a cheap source of 50R BNC terminators. )

Make your own! A bunch of 50R resistors and some old unused network cable is all you need. Fit the resistor between the centre and shield (having cut the cable to a short length from the connector of course) and look at what you've got, a 50R termination

1.044GHz Mendocino ? what, how, where ?

It's a "Hot Celery Sandwich" - An ABIT BP6 m/board, with two Celeron 400's overclocked to 522MHz each...

Ha! On my two running machines combined I can boot Win 95, Win 98, NT 4.0, Win 3.11, Linux Mandrake 7.0, and NT 5.0 a.k.a. Win 2k. I could also install OS/2 and/or Solaris for Intel.