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"Personal thoughts, ramblings, and nonsense from Drew, himself."

Stepping Into Samba

A few friends of mine stare at me blankly when I mention Samba and SMB. In fact, sometimes they think it’s the same thing, when in fact, it’s not. I’ll talk about the differences between the two and walk you through setting up Samba networked shares. This will give you a nice introduction to Samba and also Linux, if you are not familiar with that, also.

The real question here isn’t why SMB, or why Samba for that matter? Well, first off, after I explain to you what SMB is and then explain what Samba is, you’ll see that this question I just asked was mildly stupid. The actual question here is “Why create network shares in the first place?”. This is a very basic, honest question, but it tends to turn a few heads. I’ll give you a scenario. You have 5 computers in the house; your laptop, your desktop, the kids have two computers, and your wife has her school laptop. So, your wife has school work and her latest favorite songs on her laptop, the kids have theirs, and you have all your applications and whatnot all on your laptop and desktop. What might seem like not that much data, turns into gigs of data. You have tons of music, school reports and research, ISOs and applications, Development related stuff, pictures from the past four years. You notice you are running out of space on your kid’s computers and you wife’s laptop is running a little sluggish. Now, this is probably highly due to the games and occasional pop ups that are clicked, but hey, why take up space on the systems, when everything can be centralized? Yes, that’s the word - Centralized. Continue reading Stepping Into Samba

Configuring a VPN w/ PPTP using VPC (Part 1)

A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, allows users to create a private network between two or more computers on the internet (or through your own network without being on the same workgroup or domain). For this lab, I will show you how to set up a basic VPN using PPTP for file sharing (mapping in our case) using MS’ Virtual PC (”VPC”). Continue reading Configuring a VPN w/ PPTP using VPC (Part 1)

The Notebook

Windows Fix: "Insufficient system resources exist to complete the API"
Ugh. Another Windows error. Another Windows error that really doesn’t tell you what is really wrong; some (most) people aren’t nerds. Don’t worry, I’ve got your fix right here. This has to do with memory on your Windows XP system. Have you tried Hibernating or putting your system into standby after upgrading your RAM? If you have, keep on reading. More...

Curing 'Symbolic link not allowed' (Apache 2.0)
Awhile back when trying to add a directory to Apache on my Ubuntu 6.06 LTS server, I ran into some issues. These issues, of course were the infamous 403 “Forbidden” error that your web barfs up when you try to access a server that is not publicly viewable, because of permission issues. I’m going to give you my scenario and explain how you can fix this issue, so that you don’t have to go through an hour of throwing your hands up in disgust. More...

VMWare: "Failed to create named-pipe directory" error
Have you ever received the Failed to create named-pipe directory error message via the vmware-mui error log files, and not able to access the VMWare Management Interface? If so, here’s the fix. More...

/bin/rm: Argument list too long
Removing gigs and gigs, or just alot, of unwanted “opened” email that often clutters the system. More...