This site is intended to be a forum for my thoughts on simplicity in IT.

After 13 years in corporate IT, I have come to believe that the tail has been wagging the dog for too long. We upgrade our corporate systems because we have budgets we have to use, we upgrade our personal systems because… well, to be frank, we feel left out if we don’t. I think the time has come to take a real look at our actual requirements and adjust our IT accordingly.

“In car terms, it’s time to get rid of that expensive Jaguar or Mercedes and buy a Mini Metro/2 CV/Honda instead.”

And you know what, if we all do that, I think that we’ll find it is cheaper to run, will go wrong less often, be easier to fix when it does go wrong and more fun (and easier) to use, as well.

I am no longer involved in Corporate IT (and much happier for it – for my C.V. look at About Me) but have never forgotten some of the things that I learnt there. I hope that I can share some of my experiences and knowledge with you to help you make your IT experience easier, faster, cheaper and better.

All the best

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Following on from last week’s look at Puppy Linux, I thought that I’d go into a little more depth about this undeservedly underused operating system.

I’m grateful for all the comments on last week’s post (it seems that many other people are also passionate about Puppy Linux) and I am going to take them into account within this post.

I should start off by saying that I posted the wrong link last week…..

My link was to Puppy 5.0; there is a newer (and better) version (5.01) available at http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/puppy-5.0.1/lupu-501.iso (thanks; Joe Plaziak for that heads up!)

ICPUG suggested that I should be showing a link to….

http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/puppy-5.0.1 as this would show the distribution directory and allow you to download the MD5 file to be able to check the download.  As he said… “Nothing worse than having users say Puppy doesn’t work but in reality they got a bad download or burnt the CD incorrectly!”

Quite right too!

Read more about… 10 reasons to love Puppy Linux

In the beginning.  Part 1…

A couple of years ago, I was looking for an operating system for Chatwin and, after trying many others, came across Puppy Linux.

At first I thought that it was a joke, but then I investigated and found that that it wasn’t – far from it.

I’ll try to explain. Chatwin is a secondhand HP e-Vectra with a 600MHz processor and 256MB of RAM. She cost me all of 70 euros.

Nowadays, I wouldn’t be able to buy a machine with such a low spec but, if one did turn up in a yard sale, car boot sale or vide greniers (what we call a yard sale in France), I’d probably fork out 20 euros for one; 30 max!

In other words, she’s not a powerhouse. I bought her just so that I’d have another machine to do my writing on – a machine that didn’t have email and internet on, so I wouldn’t be distracted.

Read more about… And they call it Puppy Love…

A History Trip…. Can you remember way back in the depths of time when Firefox was version 1.5 and was really the only alternative to Internet Explorer apart from Opera (which would have been moving from the advert displaying version to the non-advert displaying version at around about that time if my memory is not misleading me) and Ubuntu hadn’t taken off and Netbooks didn’t exist unless, like me, you were sad enough to remember the Toshiba Libretto (great machine, by the way!)

I guess we’re talking about the back-end of 2005 because it was then that I was given an old laptop and my three years of not owning a PC came to an end.

Read more about… Is Chrome the new Firefox?

Back up or die!

If your business relies on your access to email and the internet, think how devastated you’d be should that access be removed.

With this article I shall attempt to identify the risks and suggest possible strategies to minimise any risk to your data or your ability to continue with your business without interruption or inconvenience to you or your clients.

What are the risks?

Hardware failure

Let me tell you a secret. Every hard disk that has ever been built is going to fail! Every single one. The hard disk in the machine that you are using now is going to fail one day (hopefully, not today!) The hard disks in the servers at your bank are going to fail (don’t worry, your bank’s IT department also knows that and they have taken precautions – I hope).

Read more about… Backup or Die!

When building a server, my preference is to install Debian Stable and leave it at that.

However, for contingency’s sake, it is sometimes nice to have a graphical environment; I’ll explain why later on.

The following article is to detail how I build the base server using Debian Linux.

I don’t intend it to be a comprehensive quide to installing a Linux server – it’s just an explanation of how I choose to do it.

If you feel that I’m doing something wrong (or missing out something that might help me), please free to let me know.

Hardware

I have tested the installation of Debian on a number of machines ranging from a 600Mhz Celeron with 256Mb of Ram and a 9Gb IDE hard drive upto a 2.8Ghz Xeon with 2Gb of Ram and a 72Gb SCSI hard drive.

The only vital component of the installation machine is that it has a working network card/interface and a CD Drive. You will need a keyboard and screen for the installation process but, once the machine is up and running, these are not required.

Read more about… A Server With X Appeal!

Although I use Mint (an Ubuntu derivative) for my main machine, for some purposes I like to roll my own distribution.

Generally I install the bare minimum (see A Server with X Appeal) and then install the Gnome Desktop on top of that.

Once debian is installed Gnome is installed as follows….

Read more about… Lightweight Debian Linux

For many of us, email has become part of our daily lives.

No matter what tools we use, though, much of the mail we receive is univited, time-wasting or spam.

With this article, I shall try to explain how to receive trusted email and divert spam to a sacrificial email account.

What, I believe, we need is some way of receiving email so that we know it is relevant, trustworthy (where appropriate), and discardable, where not.

There are many free email providers and we should feel free to take advantage of their services.

Also, many of us have an email system provided by our ISP – we are, in effect paying for this so why not use it?

I do have to say that I choose to download all of my mail to a local email client (I use Thunderbird but many people will be using Outlook as it comes free with Windows.)

This is what I do with my system…

Read more about… Why you need 3 email accounts

Gmail is, by its self, a great free email system but, with a bit of trouble, you can use it for purposes other than what it was originally designed for.

Although I have a Gmail mail account, I also use Gmail as a way of backing up my vital files. I do back up, on a daily basis, my entire /home/keckstein directory to an external hard drive but some of my files are so important to me that I can’t afford to lose them should I get visited by Billy The Burglar or, should the house burn down.

These are the files that I back up to a Gmail account and this is how I do it…..

I have explained (on my professional IT Site www.KeithEckstein.com), how I believe that we need to “Backup or Die” and here I shall show that it needn’t cost a penny as all the tools required are free.

Read more about… Backing up to Gmail