Remove carriage return ^M from a text file

Sometimes I have text files with a trailing carriage return character like this:

# vi file.txt
...
"foo"^M
"foo"^M
...

Creating empty files and using them as disks

If you ever needed some disks to test anything (eg. mdadm) then you can create your own harddisk in an existing filesystem. First create a 1GB file filled with zeros:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/local/disk/vda bs=1 count=0 seek=1073741824

0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes (0 B) copied, 1.3252e-05 s, 0.0 kB/s

Accessing CD-ROM with FreeDOS

Today I decided to get my CD-ROM in FreeDOS running. As I have a nice old machine this was somekind tricky again. First I tried to load the uide caching driver:

C:\>devload uide.sys /D:CDROM01

...

XMS init error; UIDE not loaded!

...

Check CPU in FreeDOS

There are a lot of tools to get information and to measure the speed of your CPU, here is one which I think is compact and useful: CHKCPU    
It can be downloaded from http://web.inter.nl.net/hcc/J.Steunebrink/chkcpu.htm. Copy it to your FreeDOS machine and start it like this: 

Basic networking with FreeDOS

Setting up a network with FreeDOS can be a little bit frustrating when you don't know how to do it (just like me). Here is a short description how I installed my network under FreeDOS. I am using my old 386 again with a 3COM EtherLink III (3C509B) ISA NIC. 

PS2/Serial mouse in FreeDOS

I have a PS/2 mouse connected to PS/2-Serial converter which is plugged in my old 386 FreeDOS machine. Using the mouse with ctmouse gave me a little trouble but here is how I did it:

First I loaded ctmouse with the /M option (Mouse System / Genius):

SoundBlaster (CT1350B and CT2960) in FreeDOS

CT1350B

The first soundcard I tested with FreeDOS was a SoundBlaster CT1350B which operates in 8Bit mode only, but it works out of the box. There is nothing more to tell, just set the correct BLASTER variable according as the jumpers on the soundcard. There is a tool called SBCHECK.EXE (which seems to be a virus too so be careful when downloading it - I don't have any link for it) which will check your hardware:

Measure network traffic in Solaris

Today I got stuck with a customer who was complaining that his local network was slow. Or as he said: "It feels slow"... What ever this means.
My task was to measure his network traffic on his Solaris 10 database machine and here is what I did. First I took a look at his network card: