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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.

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 »

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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...

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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 »

Privacy Issues, Concerns, and just what is Personification?

Posted 16 December, 2012 - 05:22 by tallship

Have you ever wondered whether, or how well, those browser plugins you installed are protecting your privacy?

In this article we will examine some of the assumptions that people make when going online, just how much personal information you're actually giving away when you surf, and available options for limiting the amount of data you deliver to the "Social Concsiousness" on the World Wide Web.

People often ask, "So what is the product that Facebook delivers, as a for profit enterprise?

Why, it is you, young Grasshoppa - You are the actual product that is being delivered... Read more »

How to replace MySQL with MariaDB - easy and in less than five minutes!

Posted 2 March, 2012 - 09:31 by tallship

Here's a quick, easy, and seamless procedure to replace MySQL with MariaDB on a freshly installed system.

Are you ready to finally leave MySQL behind and move on to its next generation replacement, MariaDB?

This tutorial assumes that you haven't initialized any databases in MySQL and therefore have nothing to backup or migrate.

What is MariaDB? Read more »

Easy LVM - Installing Linux Entirely on LVM Partitions

Posted 13 February, 2012 - 14:33 by tallship

In this article we examine just how simple and quick it can be to install Linux entirely within logical volumes using LVM.

This includes swap and boot partitions, the latter of which will be required since everything else, including your root and home partitions we will be formatted with the high performance XFS filesystem.

The entire process shouldn't take more than 5 minutes using this cookbook, dedicating about two minutes of that time prior to the OS install and about three minutes of post install configuration prior to rebooting a live Linux system... Read more »

Of Course! NetBSD 5.1.2 Released Today

Posted 11 February, 2012 - 04:38 by tallship

NetBSD 5.1.2 was released today.

Supporting an overwhelmingly impressive plethora of architectures, NetBSD continues its legacy in remaining the UNIX Operating system that is supported on more hardware platforms than any other Operating system - bar none... Read more »

Throwing Away Your Password to Enable Secure Logins on Remote Hosts.

Posted 6 June, 2011 - 05:52 by tallship

We thought we would clarify the process by which someone creates a SSH key pair in order to securely connect to one or more remote hosts.

This method alleviates and obviates the need for you to login using your password in combination with your username on a remote host, but more importantly, it secures that connection because afterward, you should disable the ability to login with a password for the given account... Read more »