[Solved] PXE Boot from Windows Distribution Service (WDS) on Windows 2019

WDS is a convenient means of installing Microsoft operating systems to computers attached to your LAN. It’s particularly useful now that virtual machines are ubiquitous, so that a single physical machine can host multiple virtual machines via Hyper-V. That said, I encountered plenty of frustration as I climbed the learning curve of setting up WDS… Read More »

Quick Tip: rsync –exclude-from syntax

The rsync –exclude-from option specifies a file that contains exclude patterns (one per line). It is very picky about the way the pathname is entered. It appears to be a path relative to the current directory. The only option that worked was “–exclude-from=./filename“. A full path from the root directory didn’t work, nor did a… Read More »

Quick Tip: DNS and resolved configuration with OpenVPN

After climbing the steep learning curve to get OpenVPN to work on Ubuntu (as a client), I ended up with a VPN that worked but still had issues with DNS name resolution. What finally worked for me was to use the distribution defaults for everything, but install libnss-resolve and openvpn-systemd-resolved packages. This worked for a… Read More »

FIxing Win10 Taskbar Context for Putty

I recently upgraded Putty on my Windows 10 machine to the latest 64 bit version. After doing so, I was disconcerted to discover that I could no longer right-click its taskbar icon to  see a list of sites I had connected to previously. This was reminiscent of when I first installed Win10 and had the… Read More »

Network Booting with DNSMASQ in Proxy Mode

In this project, I will show you how to network boot an Arch Linux ISO image with DNSMASQ set up in proxy DHCP mode. The approach taken here should readily generalize to the ISO images of other distributions. If you understand what’s being done here, adapting to another distribution should not be too difficult. I’m indebted to… Read More »

Amazon Web Services S3 via Command Line

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a nice Command Line Interface, allowing script or command line access to quite a wide range of capabilities. I recently attempted to use this with the Simple Storage Service (S3), but was frustrated with a repeated error message in response to a simple directory request on a bucket. jeff@mars:~$aws s3… Read More »

Fixing VSFTPD login problem

I recently set up a new Ubuntu 12.04 server, and as part of the setup installed vsftp. I used an identical setup to a similar server, but for some reason, I kept getting an authentication error attempting to login as a local user. After a lot of troubleshooting, I finally isolated the problem to the… Read More »

Antenna Patterns at NX6T

I recently used N6BV’s HFTA antenna and terrain modeling software to analyze the antenna setup at NX6T, in particular to assess the benefit of replacing both antennas on the 40′ tower (a 2 element 40M yagi and a 3 element SteppIR) with a single KT-36XA, with 5 elements of 15 and 20, and 6 on 10. The terrain surrounding… Read More »

America’s Six Foot Tiki

Dear Selected Members of the U.S. House of Representatives, I used to think of myself as a fiscal conservative, I guess because I thought among other things I ought to pay the bills for things I’ve bought. Even stuff that I kinda wish I hadn’t, like that awesome 6 foot tall tiki statue I got… Read More »