Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar
Thursday, 6/15/00
Power supplies and Linux installs… I swapped out a power supply last night for Steve DeLassus (there’s something mildly amusing about an electrical engineer asking a journalist for help with a power supply issue), and I installed Mandrake 7 on one of my PCs so I could get ready to mess with Apache. It kept dying during install, so I reset the BIOS defaults, after which it worked fine. Probably it was memory timing sensitivity but I didn’t feel like messing with it. Linux is much more sensitive to such things than Windows, which may explain some people’s installation difficulties (I think nothing of messing with my BIOS settings until I get it right, but some people understandably never think to check those). Loading BIOS defaults, or, better yet, safe defaults if available, may tame the beast.
Apache… I’m not going to say I can change the world, but some of the things you can do with Apache are totally out of sight. I can’t wait until I can type well enough again to really start experimenting. I’m no pioneer in doing these things, but if I start explaining how to do them, then I will be. If you think I’m looking at this to be one of the big selling points of the next book, you’re dead on.
Until next week…
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.