Archive for January, 2009

Via Storage Server and MSI WindBox

Home Automation, Technology | Posted by epistasis
Jan 28 2009

Two things here really.. I’ve just seen that LinITX have started stocking the VIA NSD7800 Tower Storage Server. This amazing kit would be a great NAS device, perhaps running the open source FreeNAS software. It features an Intel Atom 1.5GHz CPU, and can support up to 1GB of RAM. If you pop on over to the Automated Home website there is a voucher code to get the full 1GB for free!

Second up, the MSI WindBox. The WindBox is an ultra-compact PC from MSI. It features a VESA mount interface allowing it to be wall mounted or simply placed on the back of your monitor. It also has the following I/O options:

  • Realtek 10/100 LAN
  • 3 USB 2.0 ports
  • a 3-in-1 card reader
  • VGA interface.

Pretty neat huh?

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FreeBSD chown and chmod

FreeBSD, Problems | Posted by epistasis
Jan 28 2009

Problem: I was recently trying to use chmod and chown in PHP on a FreeBSD system. I found out that these two commands (for obvious) reasons, can only be used by the superuser, therefore I couldn’t change the owner of an uploaded file (via a website) from the www to the user who’s website it was. In Solaris you can just change rstchown to 0 in /etc/system – unfortunately I couldn’t find a similar way to do this in FreeBSD.

Solution: The main solution I have found to this is to just use a cron job as root to chown all the files  (by using an asterisk in the file path) in a certain directory (the upload directory) to the user.. This is also a lot safer than allowing other users to use chmod/chown.

Obviously, if anyone can think of a better way of doing this, please let me know.

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Windows 7 Beta

Windows 7 | Posted by epistasis
Jan 28 2009

I am currently evaluating the Windows 7 Beta. Please watch this space for my review on it!

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Windows Server 2008 – Server Core

Windows Server 2008 | Posted by epistasis
Jan 28 2009

Ok, so I’m going to start tinkering about with server core… it looks good from what I’ve done on it so far, and I hope to post some information on how to get started with server core very soon.

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