The Canon Pixma MX372 Office All-in-One multifunction printer / scanner / fax with a photocopier feature. Although the Canon is a budget printer that comes with a number of pleasantly surprising features, such as a 100-sheet paper input drawer and a single-sided 30-page automatic document feeder. It is a multifunction printer that enables users to scan multipage documents. Designed specifically for small offices, it offers more than you might expect from a budget MFP. However, its expensive black-ink makes it inappropriate for mass use. Let’s take a look at some of the major pros and cons of this multifunction printer.

Pros 

The device delivers sharp and distinct text output. It also enables users to send faxes from their PC. Here are the major benefits of using this Canon printer:

• Occupies very little space – Even if you have a very congested office, you might still be able to find space for the Canon Pixma MX372. It is compact and self-contained, and its folding paper trays enable it to become more compact when not in use.
• Contributes to the décor – This Canon printer comes in a captivating matte-black finish and looks quite striking. Chances are that it will add to the appeal of your office space.
• Easy to use – The Canon Pixma MX372 uses a new and easier method for cartridge-loading. Referred to as “FastFront,” it requires you to uncover a door behind the paper tray to replace the cartridge. It is more convenient than the previous method, where you had to pull up the entire scanner lid to load a cartridge.
• Moderately Priced –  This is perhaps the only Cannon printer that offers so many interesting features at such a low price.
• Feeds documents automatically – The 30-page automatic document feeder enables the device to scan multi-page documents without any manual supervision. Needless to say, this improves efficiency at the workplace.

Cons 

Low paper capacity is one of the major disadvantages of this Canon printer. However, if you want to use it for micro office, this may not be a big issue. Given below are some major disadvantages of using a Canon Pixma MX372

• Below standard photo output quality – Although the printer offers high quality text output, photo prints are not up to the mark. However, if you are not expecting very high quality photos, and want to use color photo prints for day-to-day office activities, you may find the output quality acceptable.
• High cost per page – The printing cost per mono page and per color page with this printer are 6.3 cents and 13.8 cents, respectively. This is around 2.5 cents more expensive than the usual per-page-printing cost.

Simply put, the Canon MX372 is a good choice for micro office where only one or two people will use it to print/scan a limited number of pages per day. However, those who are looking for an office printer for bulk use should look elsewhere.

Vi Insert Commands

There are a number of additional insert commands for inserting text in specific locations, I have listed these below:

I - Capital I will insert text at the beginning of the the next line

a - Adds text to the end, right of the cursor

A - Shift+A allows you to insert text at the end of the line

0 - Starts a new line below the current line the cursor is on and enters insert mode

O - Shift-O replaces the current line the cursor is on and enters insert mode

To explain this process further I have included a video below showing real world examples of how to use the above Vi insert commands.

Video coming soon.

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Ubuntu Restart Apache

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Which should give you the following output:

 * Restarting web server apache

Ubuntu start Apache

To start Apache on Ubuntu run:

/etc/init.d/apache2 start

Which should give you the following console output:

* Starting web server apache2

Ubuntu Stop Apache

To stop Apache on Ubuntu run:

/etc/init.d/apache2 stop

Stopping Apache should give you the following output:

* Stopping web server apache2

Check out our guide on how to install Apache on Ubuntu

Technorati Tags: Apache, Linux, Linux Commands, ubuntu, Ubuntu Commands

apt-get install apache2

Which should give you a similar output to:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  apache2-mpm-worker apache2-utils apache2.2-bin apache2.2-common libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
  ssl-cert
Suggested packages:
  apache2-doc apache2-suexec apache2-suexec-custom
The following NEW packages will be installed
  apache2 apache2-mpm-worker apache2-utils apache2.2-bin apache2.2-common libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
  libaprutil1-ldap ssl-cert
0 upgraded, 10 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 3,491kB of archives.
After this operation, 11.5MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

Ubuntu Start Apache

After install Apache on Ubuntu you can start it with the following command:

/etc/init.d/apache2 start

Which should give you the following console output:

 * Starting web server apache2

Providing you don’t have a firewall in place you should now be able to view the Apache test page by typing in your servers IP address in a web browser.

Technorati Tags: How-To, Install Apache, Linux, Linux Commands, ubuntu, Ubuntu Commands

First of all we must make sure we have the correct tool installed, this is going to vary depending on your version of Linux – I will cover the two main flavors .dpkg and .rpm (Apt / Yum).

Install unzip on Ubuntu / Debian Linux systems:

apt-get install unzip

Install unzip on CentOS / RHEL / Fedora Linux systems:

yum install unzip

Linux .zip extract

To extract .zip files use the following Linux unzip command:

unzip archive.zip

The contents of the .zip file should now be extracted, as always if you need any help you can reach us on twitter @TechSpotting or drop us a comment below.

Technorati Tags: Linux .zip, Linux Commands, Linux unzip

But fear not there is a way to rectify this without manually going into each AD service and changing the IP address by hand:

How to change IP address SBS 2008

Change the IP address in the normal way, “Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections” right click local area connection click properties, double click IPv4 enter your new IP address info and click ok & ok again.

SBS 2008 change IP instructions using “Fix my network”:

1. Click Start
2. Load up the “Windows SBS Console”
3. Click on the Network icon at the top
4. Select the “Connectivity” tab
5. On the right hand side under “Tasks” you should see “Fix my network”
   
6. Run through the Wizard and reboot

You’re done everything should now be working on the correct IP address, make sure you reboot Windows for good measure. If you have any problems drop us a comment below or ping us on Twitter @TechSpotting

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tar.gz files are commonly used on Linux operating systems for source packages and for grouping large amounts of small files, tar.gz is by far the most common compressed archive software used on Linux, if you are from a Windows background you will be familiar with .zip this is a similar propitiatory equivalent.

How to untar tar.gz archive

tar -xvzf archive.tar.gz

You should be left with your extracted files in a directory or in the directory where you extracted your tar.gz file.

I will explain the Linux untar options I used above:

x = Extract
v = Verbose (it shows you what files are extracted from the archive on the console)
z = Filter through gzip – allows us to extract gzip compression using the Linux tar command.
f = File, this tells the command we which to use a file

Technorati Tags: How to untar tar.gz, How-To, Linux, Linux Commands, Linux untar command

Using the popular Ubuntu command “apt-get” to resync the apt sources and upgrade Ubuntu, other commands such as aptitude or GUI tools could be used as an alternative.

To resync the apt sources:

sudo apt-get update

To upgrade all packages on Ubuntu to the latest version run:

sudo apt-get upgrade

This will update the package if it’s installed or install it from the apt repository if not:

sudo apt-get install PACKAGENAME

Note than an alternative to using apt-get would be aptitude or a GUI tool if you are on a desktop.

Technorati Tags: Command Line, Guides, How-To, Linux, Linux Commands, Ubuntu Commands, Update Ubuntu

To display the Linux memory usage type:

free -m

(the -m is optional, it displays the data in Mb’s instead of Kb’s – I personally find this easier when checking Linux memory usage).

Linux Memory Usage Command Explained

Linux memory info output from free should look similar to this:

root@asterisk:/# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           995        956         39          0         65        734
-/+ buffers/cache:        156        838
Swap:          475          0        475

Below is an overview of what each memory value means:

Mem
This is real memory (RAM).

Swap
This is memory that the Linux Kernel has swapped out to disk to free up RAM (faster memory), if you are a Windows Admin you would call this “Virtual Memory”.

Total
This show the total memory for Linux Swap and RAM.

Used
Shows the total Linux memory usage for the system, this is often confused and many admins often think there system is out of memory.

Free
Displays the free memory Linux has.

Buffers
Buffers are needed for inter-process communication, such as accessing disks etc a certain amount of memory has to be left in buffers.

Cached
Cached memory is basically a buffer used in RAM for applications to use, it is perfectly normal for free to display Linux memory usage very low and a high cache value.

Technorati Tags: Linux Commands, Linux Memory Info, Linux Memory Usage

Asterisk is an Enterprise level VoIP PBX telephone system that has many configuration options and can use a wide range of hardware, this guide will walk you through the process of installing Asterisk on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, which is often a daunting task for Linux Admins.

Specifically this guide will show you how to install Asterisk 10 on Ubuntu LTS 10.04, this guide is a copy and paste tutorial.

Asterisk 10 Ubuntu LTS Install Guide

To start off with make sure that Ubuntu is up to date.

aptitude update && aptitude dist-upgrade

Install deps and build tools so that we can compile Asterisk 10 on Ubuntu

sudo aptitude install -y build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r` libxml2-dev ncurses-dev libsqlite3-dev sqlite3

Create a directory to build Asterisk and change directory

mkdir /usr/src/asterisk && cd /usr/src/asterisk

Download Asterisk 10 and DAHDI tools

wget http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/releases/asterisk-10.0.0.tar.gz &&
wget http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/dahdi-linux-complete/releases/dahdi-linux-complete-2.6.0+2.6.0.tar.gz

Extract the tar archives for Asterisk 10 and DAHDI Tools

tar -xvzf asterisk-10.0.0.tar.gz && tar -xvzf dahdi-linux-complete-2.6.0+2.6.0.tar.gz

Build DAHDI Tools on Ubuntu LTS

It is important to build DAHDI tools before we build Asterisk 10

First we must enter the DAHDI directory:

cd dahdi-linux-complete-2.6.0+2.6.0/

Build DAHDI Tools with the following commands:

make all
make install
make config

Start the DAHDI Tools service with:

/etc/init.d/dahdi start

Build / Compile Asterisk 10 on Ubuntu LTS

Next it’s time to build Asterisk 10, change to your Asterisk 10 directory:

cd asterisk-10.0.0/

Build Asterisk 10 with:

make clean
./configure

Configure your Asterisk options and build with:

make menuselect
make
make install

Make Asterisk samples:

make samples
make config

Start Asterisk with:

asterisk -vvvvvvc

That’s it you should now have a working Asterisk 10 install running on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, now it’s time to setup your phones and outbound SIP trunks.

Technorati Tags: Asterisk on Ubuntu, HowTo, Install Asterisk 10, Linux, Ubuntu 10.04, Ubuntu LTS