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Playing around with Hyper-V is fun. It’s one of the core components of Microsoft Azure. This Cloud computing thing is (of course) nothing magical. Microsoft has described their cloud in technical detail in one of their free ebooks. The main components are Win Server 2012 R2, System Center, Hyper-V and RDP. Microsofts power lies in the scalability (virtual server, virtual network) and management (System Center 2012). Microsoft provides full featured time limited evaluation versions of Win 8.1 Enterprise and Win Server 2012 R2 for free on their Software Evaluation site. Win 8.1 Enterprise can be used for 90 days and Win Server 2012 R2 forRead More →

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X11 is the mother of many things, one being remote computing. Since X11 is still the graphical engine on most modern Linux distributions these now old-school X11 functionalities are still usable. Just for fun, I set things up on Ubuntu and OS X Mavericks, without using SSH. This is important since SSH has the -X option for tunneling X11, which makes a X11 client server configuration very simple. And thus you can find guides to do this all over the internet. X11 works best on a LAN and SSH tunneling is not needed when connecting over a LAN. Also SSH tunneling kills your performance due to encryptionRead More →

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One lesser known method of adding Ubuntu to a Windows PC is Wubi. This type of install uses a single big file within your Windows file system as the Ubuntu root disk and another one for swap. “Wubi.exe” is the installer that creates these files and configures the Windows boot manager for dual-boot. Since the installer is a Windows application, the file creation and boot manager configuration are done using native Microsoft code. One advantage of this type of install is that there’s no need to re-partition. Also Windows is booted without using a Linux boot manager like GRUB. So the impact on the Windows environmentRead More →

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From 1993 till 1996 I worked for Control Data Systems (CDS) in the Netherlands. CDS was the systems integrator spin-off of mainframe manufacturer Control Data Corporation, once one of the largest computer companies in the world, behind IBM of course. An often used line was: “IBM and the BUNCH”, bunch being Burrows, Unisys, NCR, Control Data and Honeywell. I visited their HQ in Minneapolis-Saint Paul (the Twin Cities) once and had a good time there. Back in 1993 we had a 9k6 leased-line from Holland to the corporate network, and a public IP on the desktop (cdh.cdc.com sub-domain). You could download a new linux kernel (sourceRead More →