Also disables root access via SSH

My favorite point is #10.

I’m looking to take a crack at CentOS though, it seems popular, companies like it, etc. The best way to work with a new OS - run it in a virtual environment!

To turn this into a short story, I was attempting to boot the CentOS 5.3 installer using VirtualBox (2.2.4 r47978) on Windows Vista64 Ultimate. Unfortunately, the install kept hanging at the message of “NET: Registered protocol family 2″. Strange.

Next I began poking around and found that checking off “Enable IO APIC” in VBox’s advanced options proved to become a solution.

Now, my CentOS installer boots up, with no problem!

I will be switching from stock cooling to a Typhoon I picked up off of Marcus and OC’ing up to 3.1GHz. The M3A78-EM has voltage issues and supplies 1.32v to the CPU at 2.7GHz, which produces heating issues. I’ve managed to lower that voltage to 1.15 and maintain stability (I have not tried going lower yet, I will during the week). Currently I am at 42C, whereas I was at 57C at 2.7GHz. In order to lower the voltage on this board (not supported via BIOS) you must use AMD OverDrive and enable Advanced Mode in the preferences menu.

Googling this problem came up with few results, most of which talked about WsusDebugTool.exe, which unfortunately does not work with WSUS 3.0.

The solution: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922330. I found it on a random forum, the kb article title is awful, but the insides work.

From the article:

If you are using WSUS 3.0 with a Windows Internal Database that was created by a default WSUS installation, type the following command (all one line):

%programfiles%\Update
Services\Setup\ExecuteSQL.exe -S %Computername%\MICROSOFT##SSEE -d
"SUSDB" -Q "update tbConfigurationC set
BitsDownloadPriorityForeground=1"

Restart the Update Services service. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, click Run, type services.msc, and then click OK.
2. In the Services dialog box, right-click Update Services, and then click Restart.

Ubuntu, by default, does not have a password configured for the root user. That is, the user cannot logon through means authenticated via password.

Instead, ’sudo’ is advised to be used on Ubuntu systems. The first user created (when you are following the setup processes during the installer) is added to the file /etc/sudoers. This allows this user to execute commands with super-user privileges when they are prefixed with ’sudo’.

Typically, when a user wants to run many commands as root, they will issue the command

sudo su

… which will prompt them for their password (unless you have disabled that), and drop them into the root shell.

Alternatively, on my systems I like to run ’sudo passwd root’ as soon as I login, which allows me to set a password on the root account. Doing so allows me to login as root if I need to recover my system, say for instance my username has been removed from the /etc/sudoers file, and it gives me the warm and coozy feeling.