Category Archives: General

Goodbye MediaPortal, Hello XBMC!

It’s been a few years since I first dedicated a computer to be hooked up to my TV. The ideal, a nice pretty interface to access my digital content from. I’ve used MythTV, Freevo, my XBox 360 via TVersity, and … Continue reading

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Suddenly can’t login to OpenSolaris 2009.06 CIFS share

I woke up this morning and couldn’t get onto my CIFS share. A quick look at /var/adm/messages and I saw this problem: Jun 15 23:10:10 zed idmap[346]: [ID 702911 auth.notice] GSSAPI Error: Unspecified GSS failure. Minor code may provide more … Continue reading

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Migrating to an OpenSolaris Fileserver

After getting replacements for my failed drives, I tackled migrating data off my old Windows 2003 fileserver onto my fancy OpenSolaris ZFS fileserver. My windows server decided this was the time it was going to become corrupt too.  I was … Continue reading

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OpenSolaris on Gigabyte GA-P965-S3

Now that I have a new box to run ESXi, I’ve repurposing my GA-P965-S3 based system for OpenSolaris.  I had a lot of trouble getting this to work.  I was initially using OpenSolaris 2008.11.  I could get it installed.  Reboot, … Continue reading

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VMWare ESXi: GA-P965-S3 and Supermicro AS-1021M-T2+B

I have now built a couple ESXi machines at home and it can be tough finding hardware that you know is going to work with ESXi.  I thought I would contribute a couple working configurations. Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-P965-S3 rev 1.0 … Continue reading

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Expand your virtual machine’s boot drive

A cool use of  (the free program) VMWare converter* is to increase the drive size of the windows boot drive (C:).  Increasing the size of a separate disk in vmware isn’t too hard. One simple way is to attach a … Continue reading

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Powershell: Invoke-Expression and Tee-Object

So in my previous post I wrote about how I got around a problem with some standard error from Perforce. I want to take my work around function and pipe it into Tee-object so I can simultaneously display and log … Continue reading

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Weird Powershell Standard Error Behavior

Ok I’m baffled. I am working on the previously mentioned powershell perforce backup script. I intentionally corrupted one of my database files to make sure I’m correctly catching the error. This ran me into a brick wall with trying to … Continue reading

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Robocopy hates it when you end with a slash!

Robocopy is a pretty good utility for copyin/mirroring directories in windows.  I use it a lot.  I just spent a bit of time thinking powershell hated robocopy because I was having a lot of trouble calling a robocopy against a … Continue reading

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PowerShell V1 doesn’t like to exit assignment functions

I was working on a fancy backup script for Perforce written in Powershell and I’ve definitely come across a bug in PowerShell V1.  Take a look at this: function Usage() { write-host "Hey fool, you need to pass 1 paramter … Continue reading

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