machus » Computers

webOS now open source

machus — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 21:33:01 +0000

It appears the new ceo for HP Meg Whitman has her head on a little bit straighter than the previous one. In this press release from HP they state they are going to contribute webOS to Open Source.

It seems to be standard tech spin expect for one line that caught my eye at the bottom.

Good, transparent and inclusive governance to avoid fragmentation

I wonder how much of this is a dig at the current state of android OS another open source operating system that has suffered from massive fragmentation.

Nginx reverse proxy for Exchange

machus — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 21:32:31 +0000

If you find yourself setup up a reverse proxy for Microsoft Exchange 2007 using Nginx you may be using this article for your conf http://planetit.ws/linux/debian/configuring-nginx-based-reverse-proxy-for-owa.html

While that article is good it is missing one line from the conf that will allow all mobilbe devices but iPhones/iPads to verify account information using the Microsoft Activesync protocol.
proxy_set_header Accept-Encoding "";

Box.net 50gig why?

machus — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 21:39:08 +0000

I saw another press release via engadget that box.net was offering 50gigs of online storage to anybody that signed up with a certain handheld. I keep getting perplexed why users should be suckered into box.net without a free desktop client to keep files synced. How they expect to compete with dropbox which offers a client is beyond me.

[Source]

New Server up and Going

machus — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 22:25:27 +0000

Isn’t that just the coolest looking server you ever did see? This thing was about 12 years old and in serious need of replacement. Of course it was fully capable of multi-year uptimes and handled email, http, dns, routing, and file serving with no maintance.

This is the new server that replaced the old one. Cleaned up the corner that the computer was sitting in making cleaning much easier. Also allowed me to upgrade the network to gigabit internally as well as increase the hard drive size. This is the computer that has the custom made molex to sata power cable as I described here.

Making a power sata cable

machus — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 22:16:37 +0000

So as I was building a new server for my apartment out of an old surplus dell that I had gotten from an auction I realized that in my haste I had forgotten about power to my new sata drive. I had purchased a new pci sata card as the motherboard only had ide connections. So with a search of the apartment discovered that I did not have an existing molex to sata power cable. I did find I had a sata power cable but the molex end was all wrong it being a female end and not a male end.

It was now time to either purchase a pre-made molex to power sata cable or see if around the apartment I could construct something. I found an old dell whose power supply had gone bad but low and behold it had power sata cables, but no male molex connectors. A little more digging and in a disused 486 box I found a cpu fan connector that had a male molex connector on it. I now had all the parts, time to break out the solder iron.

I first tried to solder out the old wires from the power supply and this worked for a couple of the wires, but with the larger groupings of wires my solder iron simply wasn’t powerful enough so out came the wire cutters and I soon had a bunch of wires freed from a PSU. I decided to remove all the wires since the wires seemed to be long enough that I might want to use them in another project.

I cut off the female portion of the cpu fan power cable as well as the two wires leading to the fan it self. After untangling the PSU wires I was left with five wires on the sata cable and 4 wires on the molex cable. Well ain’t this a problem I had an unequal number of wires to try and match up. Now I knew that the black wires were grounds and was safe there and had two of each. One red and one yellow wire matched up just fine but what was I to do with this extra orange wire. A few minutes searching the web I found that the extra orange wire is a 3.3v rail and isn’t actually needed so I was safe.

A few minutes with the solder iron and I had connected the parts together and I now had a molex to sata power cable. Due to cheapness I used black electrical tape to cover my solder joints and not shrink tubing. I also wrapped the wires in tape in a few places to help reduce the clutter. Another item of mention is that I left the unused 3.3v line attached to the sata end and just tapped it up with the other wires, just in case I might ever need this wire.

Plugged my new cable in, closed the case up and the computer powered right up detecting my hard drive so my power cable was working.

And yes I know the photo quality leaves a lot to be desired.

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