If you use your physical disk with vmware and see this message while booting: NTLDR is compressed There is an incompatibility between vmware's detection of your hard disk and your real bios's detection. A hack to get past this is to make an NT Boot floppy and tell the floppy to boot Windows from the Hard Disk.

NT Boot Disk

Follow the instructions from Microsoft (KB305595), or the following.

The synaptics touchpad can be used as a scroll wheel mouse. This is well documented in the man page, but I thought I'd post the relevant section from my xorg.conf just incase anyone is having trouble configuring theirs.

I finally got compiz to work on my box, in the end going with the method for FC5 seems like the best route. I replaced the compiz in FC6 with the one from fedoraxgl.tuxfamily, this made the biggest difference. I'm using version 30.3 of the ATI driver, for now I'm using the installer instead of the rpm.

The Intel driver uses the bios to determine resolutions, you need to use an app to change the bios resolution if you want 1920x1200. The default is 1920x1400, which won't display properly. You'll also need a 1920x1200 modeline, I've included it at the bottom of the post.

We use syslog-ng with remote logging to keep track of our logs. The targeted policy doesn't allow syslog-ng to operate by default. The following lines added to local.te in /etc/selinux/targeted/src/policy/domains/misc will allow syslog-ng to bind to port 514 and access proc kmsg for kernel messages (such as avc messages!)

We have a few RHEL4 servers, logs fail to rotate on the production machines, but not unmodified machines. We discovered that this is a known bug with using noexec on /tmp https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=156594 If you change your /tmp mount to noexec, logrotate cannot work because it tries to execute a script in /tmp to do the rotation. The hack to get it working is to add a TMPDIR in the cron job that runs logrotate (and create a directory that it can execute a script in, mkdir /root/tmp; chmod 177

I prefer a high speed serial connection to the normal 9600, we use 115200 of 57600.

Console Redirection in Bios

To see the post messages and access your bios setup screens, enable console redirection in the bios if available

Grub

Modify /boot/grub/grub.conf to enable serial console Add: serial --unit=0 --speed=115200 terminal Add to kernel line: console=tty0 console=ttyS0,115200n8 Remove: splashimage hiddenmenu

Booted System

Start a getty process on ttyS0 at the same speed specified in grub.conf Add this to /etc/in

We have a few machines with console redirection in the bios. We access these with minicom. To enter the bios, we've found that the VT100 escape sequences work. To send F1, enter ESC O P, the capitalization on the O and P are essential. Other codes that are known to work:

F1	^[OP
F2	^[OQ
F3	^[OR
F4	^[OS

F12 comes through unharmed, so to get the boot menu on most machines, we just type F12 directly.

We have a few departments on campus and each user has a username in at least one department plus the top level domain. This means that if an email is sent to username@dept.company.net and there is a cc to username@company.net Then username will get the email twice. After playing around I found that procmail can track the messageid's of emails in a file, so i have this simple rule to filter out. PMDIR=$HOME/.procmail :0 Whc: msgid.lock | formail -D 4096 $PMDIR/idcache :0 a: Mail/duplicates

After installing the cluster stuff (GFS), lvscan and lvdisplay stopped working with the following error: [uphill@zürich]: lvscan connect() failed on local socket: Connection refused Locking type 2 initialisation failed.