James Titcumb

What?! It seems illogical to me that Microsoft, after years of development still require you to restart your computer after installing trivial pieces of software, yet in Linux, the only time you need to restart is if you want to try out a new kernel or something… strange indeed.

Pretty much everyone knows about Cygwin, and it’s certainly useful. But there’s another option for getting a UNIX shell on Windows, and it’s much more simple and lightweight. This option is UnxUtils, and it’s incredibly easy to get running. Download the ZIP file from the website, and unzip in an appropriate folder, e.g. C:\unxutils\.

Once unzipped, add the following to the PATH environment variable (Start > Control Panel > System > Advanced system settings > Advanced > Environment Variables)

;C:\unxutils\bin\;C:\unxutils\usr\local\wbin\

Expecting more? That’s it. Open a new shell (Start > Run > cmd.exe), you can use most common UNIX tools, such as grep, date, ls, gawk and loads more.

So I started thinking a bit more last night and I’ve started various musings now about the structure of my new home server. I’ve decided it’s going to be virtual IP-based at least (although not 100% decided!), and I know that I’ll want the DNS server to be updated etc. I’m going to write the control panel in a similar fashion to ISPConfig, the util that I currently use, but I’m going to personalise it especialy for my system. Once it’s set up and running, then I can erase the old server, and set it up as a slave server. Somewhere between doing all that, I’m going to get the RAID array working with the hotswap bay I have, which hasn’t been used in yonks. I’ll also split as equally as possible the hard drives between the two, and setup some kind of rsync for the data, and also some kind of MySQL cloning. There’s a lot of prep work and planning to do to make sure I do this right, so I’m going to start planning this weekend.

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