I had a major problem with the LCD display in my Dell Inspiron 600m laptop this past weekend. Everything was working fine all day Saturday. That night however, I went to use my laptop and the screen started acting weird. It looked fuzzy and things were flashing around. So I restarted the it to see if things would clear up. They only got worse. I shut down the laptop and decided to give it a day of rest. Sunday night I booted it back up. The screen was really bad now. The dell logo was all over the place on the boot screen. And when it got to Windows all that showed up were some vertical bars. I decided to take the lcd display apart and see if anything was loose, or if I could spot any other problems. I never figured out what was wrong, but I figured I would take some pictures and write an article about how to disassemble a Dell laptop lcd display.
Continue reading ‘Disassembling a Dell Laptop display’
Monthly Archive for March, 2006
I like to monitor the stats for my website very closely, to see how visitors find the articles on my site. I have noticed that the majority of visitors come from google or some other search engine. I am a big fan of google and use it all the time. In wordpress, I use the google sitemap plugin to generate a sitemap and automatically submit it to google. But through keeping an eye on my mint stats (mint is the best stat program for a website ever), I have noticed that when I write a new article, there are no hits to that article from google for at least two weeks. For example, exactly two weeks ago, I wrote an article about memory dumps. The last two weeks, I have not received a single hit on that article from any searches on google. Tonight I suddenly received several hits on that article. I have also noticed this same thing with other articles that I have written. It doesn’t bother me that it takes two weeks for search results to find my articles, I just found it interesting. So if you are running a website just know that it will take two weeks for search results to return your site.
I bought a new domain name the other day. frank.vg I wanted to get a simpler domain to use for email. I currently use gmail for most of my mail, but I would like to start hosting my own email. frankdzedzy.com is too long and hard to spell to be an email address. Of course frank.com, and all the other top level domains are already taken. So I registered frank.vg, with Network Solutions. .vg is the tld for the British Virgin Islands. While I have no connection with the British Virgin Island (wish I was there though:) it is a nice simple domain name. Right now I pointed it to my website here. Eventually, I will probably use it for email, and maybe my home webserver. It would definitly be cool to get frank.com or frank.net though.
I have been having a problem with a Windows 2000 server consistently rebooting itself from a bugcheck. It is pretty annoying, since it always seems to happen between 12am and 2am, so my monitoring software wakes me up with a phone call. After the bugcheck Windows dumps all the memory into a 1gb file in the c:\windows directory. I usually just delete the file and restart the applications. But today, after a 12:30am wakeup, I decided to find out what that memory.dmp file is about.
Continue reading ‘Viewing a memory.dmp file after a bugcheck’
There have been many times, while I was at work, when I wanted to access my computer at home. There are many different ways to do this. GoToMyPC LogMeIn and
You could just setup Vnc and use that by itself for remote access. But vnc is not encrypted, so it send everything you do across the internet, including your password in plain text. While the odds of getting your password sniffed out by a hacker are probably slim, you don’t want to take that chance. So SSH tunneling is neccessary.
SSH tunneling involves establishing an ssh connection, and forwarding the port you need over this connection. This allows SSH to encrypt all the info you send. It does add some overhead, but the securiy and privacy is worth it. This guide focuses on Windows. If you use another os you probably already know how to do all this.
One of my first computers that I had was a Dell 486 DX2. I experimented with Win3.1, Win95, OS/2, and Linux with it. I eventually settled on Win95, because I wanted to play dos games and access the internet with it. I always wanted to get Linux working on it. Well this weekend I finally did get around to getting Linux on an old 486. I have worked with Linux before, playing around with it on my own, doing some software testing for a company, and in a C/C++ programming for a class in school. But I have never done any extensive server administration, espessially from the command line. I am eager to learn, and this is turning into a very fun project.
My goal is to build a fully functioning webserver(http, ftp, smtp), with Apache, PHP, MySql on a 486 box. Along the way, I want to learn about configuring these components as well as become proficient with the Linux command line. Eventually when it is configured to my satisfaction, I am going to try to do some performance testing, to see how good a server a 486 is.
The first step was to get a working 486 computer. This proved to be harder than I originally thought it would be. Continue reading ‘Building a 486 Linux Webserver’