MS Access: checking network paths without freezing your application

Access programming is inherently single-threaded. That’s usually OK as most operations are sequential anyway and it keeps things simple at the programming level. There are times though where the lack of ability to run code on another thread is sorely missing: anything that takes a long time to run will just freeze the application, making... » read more

Linux sysadmin: a short RAID trouble-shooting story

I recently had an issue at a remote location (12000km away) where the old multi-purpose Linux server that had been working for the past 5 years wouldn’t boot again after a nasty power failure. The server was used as a firewall, a local email store, a file server and a backup server, so its failure... » read more