Author Archives: Donncha

Data Recovery from a Hard Disk

Some of you may remember my bad luck with hard disks during the summer. One was a Fujitsu drive that died hours after I plugged it in when I got home. I lost a month’s worth of photographs from Chicago and that was obviously upsetting. Of course, after the rest of what’s happened it’s small change in terms of the bad year that 2003 was for me!
Anyway, it’s 2004 and there’s a possible solution to the drive problem!
Here at work another Fujitsu HD died yesterday morning but this time I had more success recovering data from it. I asked on , the ILUG IRC channel, and Christian suggested Parted, while Liam suggested using Gpart. Gpart is on the ILUG BBC and a quick search found this description of how to use it!
I can happily say that gpart worked perfectly! It detected the partition table and I was able to write it to the drive again. A quick reboot and I was able to copy off the important data! Other stuff can wait but gpart turned out to be a life saver here. 🙂
Of course, this is only usefui if your BIOS and Linux/*BSD can see your HD.
I have my fingers crossed that I can do the same on the HD at home. There’s a lot of photos I want to recover!

Morning Ireland piece on MyDoom virus

In a radio interview (realaudio link) this morning an “expert” told the nation that the DDOS attack on SCO was orchestrated by “people who are promoting a thing called open system software where by you can have competitors for the Microsoft products which are essentially free.” Peter Aherne provided a brief transcript of the interview and it looks shocking in it’s ignorance of the facts!
There’s a lengthy thread on the ILUG about it including links to articles debunking the interview.
The serious accusations in this interview need an answer and sooner rather than later!
Update! Nils posted a cleaned up transcript of the interview, and Gavin McCullagh posted one too.

Netcraft: www.sco.com is a weapon of mass destruction

This is so funny! 🙂 Go read it and wait and see if SCO slashdots Slashdot!

Much of the commentary on the SCO distributed denial of service scenario, including our own, has been based on the premise that SCO badly wants to keep their web site running. This may not be the case: unlike Microsoft, which has a real business to run and a real need to keep its web site operational, SCO Executives may not strongly care about the availability of www.sco.com. After all, Michael Doyle’s half a billion dollar patent win against Microsoft scarcely hinged on the response times of the Eolas web site.

In fact, the author of the MyDoom virus has delegated control of the most enormous volume of http traffic that the Internet has yet seen to hostmaster@sco.com. On a whim, SCO can direct that Tsunami at an object of their choosing, simply by changing an A record in named.conf in time for the change to propagate by Sunday.

Cube – Open Source FPS for Windows and Linux

Cube – This looks like an interesting game. It’s got some pretty screenshots and the blurb makes it look appealing.

Cube is an open source multiplayer and singleplayer first person shooter game built on an entirely new and very unconventional engine. Cube is a landscape-style engine that pretends to be an indoor FPS engine, which combines very high precision dynamic occlusion culling with a form of geometric mipmapping on the whole world for dynamic LOD for configurable fps & graphic detail on most machines.

I won’t pretend to know what all that means but I’ll give it a whirl over the weekend!
Here’s the linuxgames.com review that pointed me towards this game.

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