Unit 6 assignment

Finishing these at the last minute seems to becoming a habit for me. It didn't help that I had a big assignment in 520 that I finished Sunday night and had four days were I was busy out of town. I am going to try to do better this week and finish early.
I was all gung-ho on creating a new vm and then realized I better follow the directions after I got to a screen where I didn't know what to do. I ended up having to delete my mis-created vm partition and start over and follow the directions. I had to go back later and install the webadmin stuff.

For the web page assignment, I just moved my 504 stuff into a subdirectory so it would be out of the way and started over. I am fairly familiar with the html language and have done a little of it. However, I do need to look up stuff and look at examples because it has been a while. Not sure how unique my digital libraries are. I put ones I thought were interesting/useful.

My webpage is: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~timv1/

Unit 5 assignment

This week was pretty straightforward as the router was already set up previously and I have had some experience doing it. Luckily, the routers pretty much set themselves up these days and have good firmware. 10 years ago when I was trying to set up one at home with help from a friend things didn't just work right away out of the box. Also, you had to update firmware in order to get VPN software to work. With this router, it took me a while to locate the page that told how many connection ips were available. Each one is set up different.

which reminds me, our first broadband was sprint broadband, which I think was microwaves to and from an antenna in the Tucson mountains. We could not get a second phone line at the time because they were out in our area. No cox or quest broadband internet was available for years. We stayed with sprint until they said they had to cease to give up the frequencies to the government.

I have been able to learn from the assignments whatever form they have been in. The videos have been very helpful. Wikipedia seems to have pretty good definitions and information.

As far as how I learn, I think I am a active learner. I learn better by doing. However, I am not that good in groups, something I need to work on. Although I do like to teach others. In contrast, my wife is not that way. So even though we both have computer engineering degrees, she knows very little about our windows computer at home. I have to show her everything. She is not willing to sit down and fiddle with things until she gets it working. So I've put in all the hours to figure things out. It should be interesting now that we are headed for divorce what she is going to do when it comes to computers. She is now determined not to ask for my help with anything.

Unit 4 assignments

Everything went pretty well. At first, I had typos in the packages names for the wget commands and got the 404 errors. I checked the discussion board for my problem but nothing for what I was doing wrong. Quadruple checking the names did the trick. Brought up the webadmin with no problem. I ran into those certificate problems at my previous job every time they upgraded the lab firewall, so I knew how to handle those.

Adding user and group using the command line went well. Never used those commands but was familiar with the concepts. Never looked in the /etc/group and /etc/passwd before. Funny story from my next to last employer: one group that contained a lot of people kept overflowing and knocking the alphabetical last person out whenever someone was added. She would have to send an email around to all the users in the group to have themselves removed if they left the team. Not sure what the limit was, but I'm guessing either 128 or 256 for binary reasons. This was on HP-UX unix.

adding a user on the sandbox went okay once I remembered where to look for the password. Using the Webmin went well also. I could not bring up the site http://www.doxfer.com/Webmin/UsersAndGroups but didn't need it. Browser says it can't find it.

ubuntu 1004 must be good

In this person's article, he says he had trouble finding things he didn't like and says it is one of the best operating system there is:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/10-things-not-to-like-about-ubuntu-1004/35713?tag=nl.e539

week 3

The hands on assignment went smooth. of course it was magic when I typed the commands to update the software. I know it goes and looks at the config file I changed and then installed the new software. but you always feel uncomfortable the first time doing that.

my favorite text editor is xemacs. I used it for about 15 years at intel and IBM. I really don't like vi but I probably did not give it a chance. It just seemed so cryptic and complicated at first. I am familiar with basic commands with vi but I am so much more productive with xemacs. I even had xemacs on my windows pc.

I have changed configurations on DOS computers, AIX, and even have messed around in the windows registry with regedit. I mistakenly used the wrong tax year with the program "Itsdeductable" and the only way I could get it to reset was to uninstall and then go searching in the registry for all instances of anything with that name and delete it and then reinstall. I also used rededit with sprint broadband service to make the tcpip packet size bigger so that the broadband was faster. You would make smaller for internet gaming.

With my mac, i have only used the "system preferences" to config it. I also have a program called "MacTuneUp" which I have also used. No editing of files so far.

accessing remote desktop

We used VNC at my last job. We would access our office PC from the testing lab mostly for email and instant messaging. This was before they gave us all laptops. It took a while for the light to go on in my head that I had used it before so it was a pseudo-new experience for me. Very straightforward to use. IBM had an internal product for this but it was complicated, buggy, and much slower than this. Hopefully it was put out of its misery.

I have used linux before. I had it installed on my laptop as part of a dual-boot machine with windows. ended up not using it much because I was just so busy at work. Also developed on it. So the tutorials went over pretty familiar stuff.

Installing ubuntu server in VMWare was pretty straightforward and uneventful on my mac. It did download some components that it said it didn't have, which I did not see happen in the youtube videos so maybe I forgot to do something earlier. It was pretty cool to be remotely accessing a virtual machine even though I've done those kind of things in the past. I got a great sense of accomplishment and relief when everything was working correctly, alot like I did when software I developed would work.

Ubantu user forum reveiw and blog post

My first thought of this post was: “you mean you didn’t make a backup copy of the file before you started messing with it? I imagine we will not have to change these kinds of files very much in our class.

I messed up my fstab! - can no longer access or have limited access to most drive

It is good to experiment with stuff on computers, but you have to be careful or what you learn may come at a large price: non-working computer and lost time.

One thing I learned is that trying to catch up on schoolwork in the middle of the night might not work. This blog was down for maintenance.

test

my start to catch up.