Niels Horn's Blog

Random thoughts, tips & tricks about Slackware-Linux, Lego and Star Wars

Archive for February, 2010

Using a Nokia CS-10 GSM modem on Slackware

Today I received my new GSM Modem, a Nokia Internet Stick CS-10. It had the size of an overweight pen-drive and can connect (depending on your service-provider) at speeds up to 7.2Mbps (my contract only goes to 2Mbps).
Here is a picture of the modem, taken from the Nokia site:

As was to be expected, it comes [...]

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Starting a text-based program on a headless box at boot time

Imagine yourself in the following situation:
You have a “headless” (this means: without a monitor attached) server that boots nicely, starts all the services you configured, like dns, ntp, nfs, samba, httpd, mysql, etc. But – since it has processing power left and stays on 24×7, you decide that it could do something extra that you [...]

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Benchmarking with nbench

Since I was doing some tests with Slackware running on different platforms (Slack/390, Slack/390x, ArmedSlack on Qemu, etc.) I wanted to compare the performance of the different setups.
I used a (quite old) utility called nbench that was originally written in 1995 but still is a simple way to compare how processors perform, emulated or real. [...]

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Emulating a mainframe on ArmedSlack

In preparation for a future project, I built Hercules on ArmedSlack, running in Qemu. The idea was to test the concept of running the mainframe emulator on the Arm processor.
The result was quite usable, at least for the older mainframe operating systems like MVS.
Here are some screenshots:
Starting Hercules on ArmedSlack:

The 3270 terminal connecting to the [...]

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Slack/390 11.0 – 64-bits: up and running!

Today Carnival started her in Brazil. Well, I’m Dutch so I don’t care too much about all the festivities (it is a nice party though).
So what better to do than finally test the 64-bits version of Slack/390?
I wrote an 11-part post about installing Slack/390 on Hercules more than a year ago, and it [...]

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inadyn, a Dynamic DNS client for Linux

Whoever has an ISP that regularly changes your IP address, knows the difficulties of accessing your computer at home from remote locations. If the IP address changes all the time, how can you access your home system through a browser, ssh, etc.
There are actually several solutions for this, like DynDNS, where you can register a [...]

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Using wireshark with remote capturing

Wireshark is a very nice network protocol analyzer / sniffer, that is very complete and totally free and open source. It is the standard for examining network packets, used by many professionals and home users. I’ve been using wireshark since the days when it was still called Ethereal, some years ago.
The last few days I [...]

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