Category: SysAdmin

From the Synergy website: “Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).”

I use my laptop as the “server” and then have a linux machine in my office that I can control with the laptop keyboard and mouse…. just by moving my mouse over to the right edge of my laptop screen until it jumps to the linux machine.
At home I use the same software to control a MacOSX machine from my Windows Server 2003 primary machine.

This product is simlar to a KVM, but allows both machines to have their own monitors and for you to see/control those machines at the same time (without switching between). One side benefit is that you can copy-n-paste between machines (simply copy some text in machine one, mouse over to the other machine and paste), show me a KVM that can do that!

You can download MacOSX, Linux and Windows binaries at:
http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/

Dell is recalling a large number of laptop batteries (primarily for the D-series laptops), but to the potential for overheating and fire.

Article at CNN:
http://money.cnn.com/2006/08/14/technology/dell.reut/index.htm?cnn=yes

Website at Dell for getting checking/ordering replacement batteries:
http://www.dellbatteryprogram.com/

I have used this a number of times, but since I needed to look up all the flags again, I thought I would post this for those interest. I occasionally use this to allow a script to push a file from one machine thru the firewall to an external machine (via SSH).

Here is how you make the key:
ssh-keygen -N “” -q -b 1024 -C “key comment” -t rsa -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa

This then allows you to use commands like:
scp file.txt user@externalhost:/put/the/file/here/