Booting the workstation over the home network

Booting and administering a computer over a network remotely isn't that big of an art form, nor is it new. From ever since I was in elementary school and even before that, there have been systems that could power on, pull the software needed from another system and boot into a working system. While it's not new, the way I had to go about booting the workstation over the network from an installation image hosted on my MacBook *was* new to me. I intended to use the Preboot Execution Environmentor PXE to boot the work station over the network. PXE is best introduced in this wiki article from this wiki . The systems that I'll be setting up for PXE booting have the following specs: Workstation: - ASUS A7V8X-X - AMD Athlon 2500+ @ 2.1 GHz - 512 MB RAM - 60 GB HDD - ATI Radeon 7000 64 MB - 500 W PSU MacBook: - Intel Core2Duo T7200 @ 2 GHz - 1.5 GB RAM - 80 GB HDD - Intel GMA950 - 60 W PSU (battery is physically dead) The first thing I did was configure the workstation's bios to boot over the network. The option to actually enable PXE in the Boot Options menu tab was hidden in the I/O Chip Configuration menu under the Advanced menu tab. After toggling that setting and setting PXE first in boot priority, I then setup the MacBook to host the installation image for the workstation. This ended up being quite a challenge, as it seemed that not many people who did computer networking used Mac OS X as their OS of choice on their Mac systems. I needed to at the time, so after looking around for a time, I found this wonderful nugget of information. While it goes over the instructions for working with Debian, I took the info I needed and combined it with the archboot imageand the info I neededfrom the wiki article for installing Arch over the network. After all that, I had to download the appropriate filesfrom here to replace the ones in the /private/tftpboot/boot directory, as the ones that came in the original image kept causing a kernel panic.

Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray: Xperia Mini replacement?

While looking into the Xperia Mini Pro (the reason why will be in another post), I came across the Xperia Ray which had already launched in the UK. With a form factor similar to the Xperia Mini that is currently available, albeit thinner at 9.4 mm thick, it seems that the Xperia Ray will replace the equally small yet bulkier phone. The most compelling reasons for this is the inclusion of the Exmor R for Mobile camera sensor, a front facing camera and the 3.3" display with a resolution of 480x854, all of which the current Xperia Mini lacks. This could also be a foretelling of a Xperia Mini Pro replacement which is merely receives the more capable Exmor R for Mobile sensor and sharper display. I will update this post once I receive further word on whether these musings are true or not.

Posting to Multiple Blogging Platforms using tarpipe

For the last few years, I've always hosted my blogs on one and only one platform at a time. The biggest problem with that is there is a single point of failure. The Gadgetic Musings blog I have hosted at http://gadgeticmusings.net currently has all of pictures broken on it and the one I have hosted by Wordpress.com risks getting comprised should Wordpress.com's server farm get comprised again. Hosting the site myself would cost me considerably more than owning the domain so I came up with a new plan to keep the blog up and running. I decided to host the blog on multiple platforms and post to then using email.

I accomplished this using a single tarpipe workflow, tumblr and blogspot (to start). In the tarpipe workflow I created, I used one MailDecoder, two TextInputs, and two Mailers to complete the project.

This will be the first of many posts posted using the workflow.