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Oct 12 / 2:32am

Update the Search Behaviour of the Firefox Address Bar

After having used Chrome for so long on my Mac (in the dev channel via the very useful Chromium Updater), switching back to Firefox reveals an interesting habit - searching via the address bar. In Chrome, you can type your search directly in the address bar and you'll get redirected to Google for your search results, however in Firefox it reacts slightly differently - it will carry out a Google "I'm feeling lucky" search which will direct you to the first result Google returns.

You can customise this behavior in the 'about:config' page within Firefox. Type 'about:config' into the address bar, and then update the 'keyword.URL' field to your chosen search engine. For example, if you wanted to use Scroogle instead, you would type:

By the way, If you are not already using Scroogle, it's a simple way to anonymise your search requests.

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Filed under  //  linux   mac   windows  

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Jan 9 / 8:43am

Acronis True Image Echo Server on CentOS

I've used Acronis True Image on quite a large number of Windows systems over the years, as it is a very good product which has gradually expanded it's (already impressive) feature set throughout that time. Just recently, I had the requirement to image a Linux system and so decided to trial the new Acronis True Image Echo Server on Linux - from what I found, there is no 'workstation' product for Linux like the True Image Home product for Windows, and so had to go for the server version instead. Specifically, I needed to backup a 64-bit CentOS 5.1 virtual machine running inside Citrx XenServer Express.

After registering for the trial version on Acronis.com, downloading the appropriate installation file and moving it into the VM, a quick 'chmod +x TrueImageServerEcho_d_en.i686' made the file ready for installation. The binary is suitable for 32-bit and 64-bit systems - no need for seperate installation files.

After kicking off the installation ('./TrueImageServerEcho_d_en.i686'), it was pretty much a next-next-finish affair, except I soon found I needed to have the kernel source files and gcc installed, for the installation program to correctly configure the SNAPAPI Module. A quick 'yum install -y kernel-xen-devel gcc' fixed the dependancy issue, and after re-run of the True Image installation file, all required software was now installed.

By the way, there was no documentation supplied with the downloaded installation file; I found out some of the information on the Acronis website, and also by browing the setup log file (/var/log/trueimage-setup.log).

Since I don't generally use an X-Windows interface on *nix systems (much prefer the command line via SSH), I've now got to see how far I get with the console tools ('trueimagecmd' and 'trueimagemnt')...

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