Carl Hage

• Woah #

I had recently purchased one of this MSI Wind netbooks to take with me to university instead of lugging around my huge HP notebook. I was suddenly confronted with the dilema that it comes with Windows XP, something which I was not too pleased about really. Being a Linux system admin I felt it was time to get a full linux system going as I was sick of dual-booting my HP system. Initially I tried a couple of linux distro’s and played around with them, Ubuntu, LinuxMint, and Fedora were my candidates. The debian based distros did not play very well at all with my hardware and couldn’t pick up the 1024×600 screen resolution and kept me down to 800×600, something you certainly do not appreciate on a 10″ screen. I will go into some of the steps required to get your MSI Wind running Fedora Core 10 to run perfectly.

Let’s face it being a good system administrator is no simple task, you firstly need the correct mindset, skills and knowledge to provide the best support you can to your customers within rapid time frames. The calls will not stop coming, that is guaranteed. However the way which you deal with them and the speed with which you can figure out the problem and give some insight and resolution matters. I have compiled a short list of what I deem to be essential Firefox Add-ons for the System Administrator.

Firebug

This tools is mostly used for one thing by a System Administrator who is not concerned with any design elements of a website, to see how fast the website loads on the client. Some times clients will call and say that somethign is wrong with the server because their website is taking 25 seconds to load, well this little tool will show you each element being called from the webpage and how long it is taking to load. To use it, click on the icon that looks like a bug in the lower-right hand of your browser and click on All then click on Net.

So if some images are loading in 8ms and others are missing and holding up for a few seconds, or if there is some horrible JS doing something nasty, you’ll pretty much nail it down and point out to them that the server is not slow but it is infact their poorly designed website which just has way too much client-side elements loading. I’ve used this in the past and my clients simply loved me, they saw the screenshots I sent them and passed them on to their designers!