Totally unsupported Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) installer for ServerBeach RapidRescue
The aging Red Hat Enterprise ES4 server I have colocated at ServerBeach was starting to get a bit crufty and I felt kind of dirty running RHEL instead of Ubuntu now that I’m working for Canonical. It was finally time to bring up a shiny new Dell PowerEdge 440 running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy Heron however ServerBeach does not yet officially support Ubuntu and will not do custom OS loads.
No problem. ServerBeach provides a brilliant tool called RapidRescue that allows you to reboot your server into a Linux recovery session and gives remote console access to the disks and hardware. I whipped together an awful hack to take advantage of this tool and automate the process of formatting the hard drives and debootstrapping an Ubuntu install. Not exactly elegant, but it gets the job done. :D
Creating DOS floppies and USB thumbdrives for BIOS flashing
MS-DOS or another DOS derivative is still required for flashing the BIOS on some desktops, servers, notebooks, and mobile devices. These tools automate the creation of boot floppies and USB thumbdrives instead of fighting with tools like MKBT (Make Bootable).
Required Tools
Elementary school seeks Digg’s help to collect postcards from around the US
It appears that Mrs. Martin’s Class needs your help! They’re doing a project to collect postcards from all 50 states but, as it gets closer to the end of the school year, they’ve only received 3 postcards. I figured that if Digg came to the rescue they’d get more postcards than they know what to do with!
