JDPFu.com 2010

How do you deal with abusive web aggregators?

You know, those automatic programs that search out and grab web content so that others can see it? Usually, this is a good thing for a web site, since it makes your content visible to others that wouldn’t normally see it. That is, until it becomes abusive.

I’ve been interested in saving some money on home phone service since around 2001 when I dropped the babybell service for a VoIP solution. Over the years, I’ve switched providers and ended up with the cable company phone service to get the best quality for the buck. Now they’ve raised the prices and I’m looking again. I’m not interested in Vonage at $25/month when a $3/month plan will cover me. Further, I already own the necessary equipment to get this all working. You may already own the equipment too.

It always seemed that a $3/month SkypeOut account could be linked to a PBX (Asterisk/FOSS) to make this happen. A few months ago, I asked about this on Lifehacker, but didn’t get any acceptable answers.

How to Ask a Smart Question.

After reading a 2 pg rant from a new Linux user complaining that his questions were not being answered, I did a little googling and found a post on how to ask a smart question. I added a link here mainly so I could review it later, when I needed to ask a smart question.

As some of you may know, I am a consultant, primarily with UNIX, virtualization and systems architecture. The last few days, I’ve been setting up a fairly low cost backup solution for a 100% MS-Windows shop running VMWare ESX 3.×. They have 15+ VMs and the old backup system had been shutdown and wiped more than a few months ago. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the prior backup solution except that the day-to-day system users didn’t know much about the setup. My task was to get that system working again.

The Tools

1. Trilead VM Explorer – the VMware compatible VMDK backup software. Not the free version.
2. Fire Daemon Pro – to run the backup task on a schedule.
3. MS-Batch – .CMD files – to selectively control which VMs are backed up on specific days without point-and-click requirements.
4. Service Accounts – this is very important in the MS-Windows world.

If you are looking for the smallest Linux possible and want to add just a few applications, then you really need to look at TinyCore.

11MB of disk, 64MB of RAM (perhaps less), 2.6.xx kernel, X11 or not, your choice. What more do you need to know?

Small Footprint in Disk AND Memory – 11MB

Do you have 11MB of Disk and 64MB of RAM? TinyCore Linux will work for you.