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Business Internet and Telephony, since 1985

NorthTech Computer is a full service VAR/ISP specializing in Enterprise and Small Business Voice, Data, and Software solutions.

With offices and network centers located in Europe, Australia, and the United States, our staff is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week to ensure the availability and integrity of your operating environment and mission critical data.

From the SOHO to the Enterprise. NorthTech.

An Atom is One Bit of Memory

Posted 18 November, 2013 - 09:28 by tallship

An atom, what used to be touted as, "The smallest whole particle of matter", is now one bit of memory. A bit, a nibble, a byte, and soon we have the latticework needed to produce meaningful data, manipulate it, perform calculations, and retrieve results. Read more »

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How To Convert a GPT Disk Back to an MS DOS type MBR Label

Posted 30 July, 2013 - 11:34 by tallship

Here's a real quick HowTo showing how to manage that pesky conversion when you want to convert a GPT disk to an MS DOS label.

I wrote this up real quick for my good friend arrozcaldo, and thought that I would just go ahead and share it with everyone else too cool

I'll leave this on the front page for a few days, and then move it to the blogs section, where you can find lots of other little tidbits of quick info for common tasks that I keep on hand for easy access in the form of an online cheatsheet... Read more »

NorthTech Computer Joins the OIN

Posted 25 July, 2013 - 04:52 by tallship

Today, NorthTech Computer became the latest organization to join the Open Invention Network (OIN).

NorthTech, along with IBM, Slackware Linux, Novell, Google, Gentoo, Phillips, Sony, NEC, Texas Instruments, and over 500 others, as fellow members of the OIN are pledging non-aggression agreements between themselves and other member organizations concerning Linux patents.

Have you ever wondered about that little link on a web page in your browser, that changes color, indicating that you have previously visited the URL it links to? Guess what? There's a patent for that ;)

And what do you think would happen if that patent suddenly fell into the hands of the wrong people? That's right. The people who develop browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Internet Exploder would be at the mercy of that patent holder, subject to penalties and/or royalties... Read more »

Oh, the Horror!

Posted 19 July, 2013 - 07:18 by tallship

There really isn't much that one can add to this video that says so much already. Those of us who have been in the IT industry for more than a couple of decades have simply come to accept this paradigm with a grin and a chuckle, because it is immutable and not worth stroking out over.

You just gotta be able to give a good laugh at yourself sometimes, so here's one for those precious moments cool

 

How To Backup and Restore MySQL and MariaDB Databases the Easy Way!

Posted 19 June, 2013 - 13:31 by tallship

Today is my daugter's birthday. She turned 17 years old. Man how time flies. I've been using Slackware Linux longer than she's even been a glimmer in my eye, and Slackware will soon be twenty years old. I'm going to whip this out real quick for all of you so please be a little forgiving for the brevity of this tutorial, because we've got birthday stuff planned for The Jennifer.

So let's knock this puppy out so you can feel secure in knowing that your data has been safeguarded...

Read more »

How to break the 256GB disk barrier on ESXi 4.1

Posted 4 May, 2013 - 07:06 by tallship

How to create disks larger than 256GB on ESXi 4.1

Not so long ago, storage wasn't so cheap. I remember when we used to talk about how cheap storage had become when you could buy a Connor 80MByte IDE HDD for about $80 - a buck a meg...

We may laugh at those prices now, but storage demands in the data center and home alike are increasing, and so are the options for implementing stable, and inexpensive solutions. In this article we discuss using OpenMediaVault to get the most out of a fully warranted and redundant, reliable, refurbished server you should be able to pick up for under $400 that will far exceed the combined computing power of any laptop and USB NAS device you can pick up at your local Best Buy store - Carrier grade equipment that only 5 years ago might cost as much as the car your driving now... Read more »

Slackware to include MariaDB instead of MySQL from now on...

Posted 23 March, 2013 - 15:53 by tallship

One of the nicest things about Slackware is that you can decide between its -current, and stable branch releases. In fact, most longtime slackers just follow the -current branch and maintain mirrors from which they deploy Slackware in the Enterprise. this means that you effectively have a rolling release instead of a static, although well maintained, version release.

There's a couple of really big news items reverberating and propagating throughout the Slackware community today. One of those items is the announcement, just about an hour ago via the Slackware changelog, that from this moment forward, MariaDB will be included as part of the Slackware base; while the Evil EllisonCo's MySQL has not just been handed its hat, but shown the door...

Read more »

DistroRank is a Fresh, Honest New Survey Seeking to Track Linux and BSD Popularity

Posted 16 February, 2013 - 05:11 by tallship

After the fall of Microsoft, and the overwhelming adoption of Linux as a personal computing platform, a group calling themselves the American Laboratory Scientists has launched a project called DistroRank, which seeks to introduce a fresh, new, and purportedly honest methodology for ranking the 20 most popular Linux distributions and the four most prominent BSDs.

In a world where Android commands over 52% of the mobile market in smart phones, Apple controls less than 18% with their iPhone, and Samsung alone sells more Androids than Apple sells iPhones; the debut of the first new Microsoft UI for smartphones since those based on the familiar Windows 95 has enjoyed a respectable showing of sales, even though it doesn't appear to be doing much to affect the existing sales rankings of the market... 

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The End of an Era: R.I.P. FAFNER

Posted 23 January, 2013 - 10:56 by tallship

Decades of impeccable service and significance to the computer science community have sailed off into the sunset. After more than a decade of faithful and continuous service in her most recent role, FAFNER passed on 15 January to greener pastures in the great beyond, and will be fondly remembered in the hearts and minds of all who were touched by her...

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Installing The Sublime Text Editor With Vim Style Behavior

Posted 29 December, 2012 - 18:36 by tallship

Sublime Text is a relativley recent addition to the family of available text editors, having been introduced first in January of 2011. it is truly lightning fast, supports syntax highlighting for most common languages as well as code execution facilities so as to enable the user to run code snippets without having to exit to a shell.

Some of the major features that make this editor so attractive are the "goto anything" feature, the ability to select columns for editing, and a feature called "multi-select", which permits the editing of several cursor positions simultaneously, enabling the user to globally change entire variable names, or complete regions of repetitive text at the same time, for example.

Written in Python, Sublime runs on Linux, OS X, and Windows. In this tutorial, we're going to cover the installation of Sublime Text on your system and configure it to act like Vim... Read more »