ef : EHA/End User Self Help/Common IT Services setup

Ref: Setting up POP email in various email clients

Many of our office computers are now moving over to Ubuntu Linux. Here is a tutorial with screenshots to setup your POP email in Evolution. Evolution is also the closest free alternative to Microsoft Outlook with its own version of Tasks & Calendars.

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Popularity: 2% [?]

A lot of people use more than one computing device, working on a document when at work and on the same thing at home entails either carrying it  around in a pen drive or a USB disk or emailing it to yourself. Many times you end up with multiple  copies of the same file saved here and there and it leaves you unsure about which one is current, or your mailbox full of attachments. A pen drive can be lost or misplaced and a USB hard drive can in addition be dropped and be damaged. Some drives might come with vault programs, but in these times of multiple operating systems, you cannot be  sure if it will run on the Mac and on Linux . A cure to all these ailments is of course to use a Notebook/Laptop and lug it between your home and office. It has its advantages, built in battery backup etc.. but heavy users will also know of the down side… Continue Reading >>

Popularity: 4% [?]

Not so long ago, I had to switch from Reliance’s faster and unreliable ZTE USB modem to Airtel’s  slower but more reliable EDGE card (Both USB). The reason for this switch ? -My house being on the Delhi-Faridabad border, keeps switching between states when I had my Reliance data card. Of late ,I’ve  also noticed that my Reliance phone goes off the network at night . I hope this was not part of Dhirubhai’s dream… To give them the benefit of doubt,..Maybe their tower does not have sufficient power backup. Nevertheless, when I wake up in the morning, I find my phone “searching for network” with its battery almost flat! I don’t seem to have these problems with the Airtel card as the signal seems to be stronger and more “fade resistant” compared to CDMA. Its not pretty fast, but its faster than those idiotic over heating PCMCIA cards that Airtel pimped a while back  -which needed to be pulled out of the slot and reinserted ever so often in the summers as it was very susceptible to heat stroke… but it served its purpose  during its reign though, as it was still  faster than the GPRS data connection that you you were stuck with when you were out of town and using your mobile phone as  a modem. Continue Reading >>

Popularity: 9% [?]

Last week I sent an email from  my Gmail account which I had setup in Evolution on my home computer.  Two days later I was surprised to find it still in the Outbox. I deleted the email as it was of no use now and made a mental To do to fix the problem as I was busy with other  important things  to be done -besides it still did work from my notebook -or I thought it did. A few days later I replied to a personal email from my notebook via my Gmail account and it is still lying in my outbox. This confirmed the fact that some settings had changed an Gmail’s end.

I was surprised at not receiving an email from Google to this effect, but gave them the benefit of doubt as I receive vast amounts of email and I could have easily  have missed something from Gmail thinking it was some uninteresting email message like the various automated mails I receive from numerous bots whose websites I have subscribed to. Continue Reading >>

Popularity: 4% [?]

We are in the process of moving our HIS servers from Windows 2000/2003 to Ubuntu Linux 9.10 (Karmic Koala). We are using IBM servers of the xSeries (with a little bit of variation here and there) -probably about 8-10 servers in all. Only two of them are rack mount and one of them Running RAID5. The others are all running RAID1 (hardware) on the Adaptec AIC-7982 Dual RAID controller with the suppplied 73 + 73 Gb   hot swappable SCSI drives. Continue Reading >>

Popularity: 30% [?]

This is with reference to my previous post here where I had to use a workaround to deploy a .war file for our Hospital Management Software. However as our date to go live approached, I was forced to do additional reading and experiment on the same and here are my conclusions. For your information, we are using Ubuntu Server 9.1 (Selecting LAMP + Tomcat Java Server from tasksel after the base install). the problem is still not sorted out but hopefully will soon be.  The war file was deployed in /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps/. The logs are found at /var/log/tomcat6/

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Popularity: 9% [?]

I’ve become a bit skeptical about online shopping in India. It started out on Bazee (now ebay.in)…. a few more shopping experiences with others and I finally gave up, refusing to be cheated anymore and switched from swadeshi to videshi. I do regret paying all those steep overseas shipping charges and currency conversion fees (and sometimes ridiculous customs duties) but the products have usually been of superior quality and built to last. My experiences with online service providers were no better either (unless they were Banking/Internet or Mobile phone service providers) and you can read my review on seventy mm video rental services here. I’ve even had issues with Geo/Outlook money (Magazines from the Outlook group). I actually had to remind them that I had made an online payment for a subscription to Geo and later remind them of the free Outlook money guides they were supposed to send me on a 3 year subscription to Outlook Money. (Both of which were promptly attended to) I expected something similar with Friends of Books, but was in for a pleasant surprise!

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Popularity: 11% [?]