My Server came in Last week and I had some time to play with it. I looked it over a bit and found a place to put it so I can boot it up. Took a few minutes to learn the multiple bios menus. It has one for the main bios, network config, raid card, iDRAC6, and even a thing to update firmware of everything on it. All before the OS even boots.

So yesterday I bought a server, like an actual server capable of being installed in a rack. A Dell Poweredge R710 with dual Intel Xeon E5640 cpus, 24GB RAM, 2x 146gb 10k HDDs. It has upgrade potentials in all those areas but that’s at a later date. The idea for this is for me to get my hands on a cheap server to get a real world sense of what’s inside, to see how it goes together, and play with random software.

A few days ago, I joined a website that teaches IT related stuff. It has videos and virtual labs for all kinds of things. I’m using it for Network+ and while some of it kinda puts me to sleep, it’s educational. They have a coupon right now for 30% off for the lifetime of your account. I picked the standard account for like $40/mo with the coupon.

I hate Web Design, it’s time consuming and exhausting trying to find what broke, where it broke, and how to fix it. I can sit here and chase a problem all day and still not accomplish anything. It’s so annoying. Is it just me or does it effect many or all new developers? If I try to study code, I fall asleep or become incredibly lost. My problem comes in when something doesn’t quite work out right and I’m left spending hours troubleshooting and trying to find what’s wrong.

If you’re like me, you’re probably running linux on a SSD and wish to reduce the amount of writes as much as possible to prolong the life of your SSD and if you regularly view image or video files in your file browser than this tip is for you. My file browser, or nemo as it’s called, saves it’s thumbnails in ~/.cache/thumbnails. This folder can get quite big if you happen to browse folders full of images every day.

If you’re in the computer repair business then good valuable tools are nice to have around. Especially if you fit them all onto one little usb flash drive. CentOS x86_64 Minimal Clonezilla (Clone Hard Drives and SSDs) Dan’s Boot ’n Nuke (Wipe out them pesky bits on the hard drive. :) ) FreeDOS Gparted Live (Standalone Partition Editor) Hiren’s Boot CD Kali Linux (For the “hacker” in you. :P) Linux Mint or your distribution of choice.