CITY LINUX ®

Root password on ESXi server recovered.

2018-03-12: When the systems administrator for a security firm based in Ilkeston, Derbyshire left unexpectedly taking the system passwords with him, the company faced a major headache.

Finding a replacement team to provided systems support, including managing the VMWares ESXi server (through the vSphere client) was not a problem, actually logging into the system to provide that support wasn't possible.

VMWare no longer provide a maintenance mode to allow systems recovery and the only approved method to recover from a lost root password is via a re-install of VMWare operating sytem.

Clifford Fulford trading as City Linux® was called in by the new support team to crack the problem.

Employing the experienced gained through 35 years of systems administration in large scale mission critical UNIX, Linux, Windows and Apple environments, Clifford was able to access the system, unpack critical files and modify secure tables to allow access to the VMWare hypervisor once more for the vSphere Client.

Redundant Server for Constructionlines Ilkeston.

2018-02-14: Constructionlines are a large independent Builders Merchants based in Ilkeston, Derbyshire. The company runs its own highly effective in house systems including a Linux based database system handling sales and stock stock control.

With security and continuity in mind, Constructionslines have opted to replicate their current systems on a faster, more powerful Linux system built by Clifford Fulford of Citylinux and Fulford Consulting.

The new system will be going live early in March and is expected to bring new levels of performance to the company's IT operations and greater peace of mind for the owners and managers. And, because the system is being built by a local Open Source Linux expert on the Open Source Linux systems and utilises powerful Open Source Database software the additional costs will be marginal.

Ashgates of Derby.

2017-05-23: Ashgates IT in Derby have taken on a new client with 5 virtual servers running on VMWare's VSphere bare bones hypervisor. Clifford Fulford and CityLinux was engaged to provide remote support and to determine the current archiving and recovery provision.

Vintage Windows Ltd. Riddings, Derbyshire.

2016-12-03: I was shopping in B&Q when I got a call from Vintage Windows. The company has an Suse 6.1 host managing a frame cutting robot in the factory in Riddings, Derbyshire. Although Suse appeared to boot correctly the software would not run and there appeared to be problems with file access permissions even when logged in as the root user. Short of taking the kit back to Germany for a fix, Vintage Windows had run out of options and production was plummeting.

The situation was clearly urgent so I rescheduled my appointments for the next day and was on site the following morning. It soon became clear that I needed to take the kit back to HQ where I would have the software tools available that I needed, but I was back the following morning with a working system, and what a joy it was to see those great machines kick into to life and start cutting and drilling once again.

Belfields Furnishings Ltd. Ilkeston, Derbyshire.

2016-05-01: Fulford Consulting Ltd. trading as City Linux is currently working with Belfields Furnishings of Ilkeston to migrate their primary systems to a new hardware platform.

"The company's bespoke application has been running without any major hiccoughs for over 12 years but Belfields know that they must soon move to a new hardware platform. Unfortunately the old Caldera Operating system is no long supported and I have been looking for a more up to date alternative which will run as a virtual machine to take advantage of modern computer technology while still supporting the legacy application", said Clifford W Fulford.

CityLinux are making good progress and hope to have the new system in place by the Summer.

Activeace Tennis and Multi-sports web upgrade.

2016-03-01: Activeace tennis and sports coaching community enterprise, based in the centre of Nottingham in the Victorian walled estate called The Park, is now being assisted by Fulford Consulting (t/a City Linux) to update their Joomla based web site.

Fulford Consulting Ltd. trading as City Linux, has been assisting Activeace to update their current Joomla 1.5 web site and will be migrating the site to Joomla 3 in the near future.

In addition to their own sports coaching facility, the Activeace Arena, Activeace also manage courts in West Bridgford for Rushcliffe Borough Council. Activeace provide coaching at West Park Bridgford Park, The Park Tennis Club, Harvey Haddon Sports Village, Bilborough, Nottingham Tennis Centre and Clifton Leisure Centre.

Activeace also specialise in inclusive sports training including wheelchair tennis.

Sheffield property professionals systems upgrade.

2015-10-28: A Sheffield based land and property auctioneers and and agents are upgrading their existing e-mail systems.

Fulford Consulting Ltd. trading as City Linux will be supplying a new Fujitsu based rack server fully installed and configured with CentOS 7 Linux.

In addition to the email server City Linux will be configuring anti spam software and virus checking.

Managed root servers £49 pm.

2015-09-09: Dedicated Eco Servers. AMD Athalon X2 (Dual-Core 2 x 1.6). 4GB DDR2. 2 x 320GB SATA disks. Software RAID 1. 100Mbit/second link. Debian CentOS, Ubuntu or Windows Webserver 2008 R2.

Rubiqa migrate to CentOS 7.0.

2014-10-20: The Derby based website developer Rubiqa have moved their development server to a Fujitsu based server running CentOS 7.0.

The server built with CentOS 7 and equipped with Webmin and Virtualmin also provides file services to the Rubiqa teams development workers operating Windows machines on the desktop. using Samba SMB services.

Clifford W Fulford and Fulford Consulting Ltd provide UNIX, Linux, Apple and Windows support .

Norton Hall virtual server integration.

2014-09-20: Clifford W Fulford was wearing two hats this week as he built a new server providing network services to Norton Hall Care Home in Worcester.

The underlying platform for network services is Windows 8.1. Clifford exploited the ability of Windows 8.1 to run other virtual machines through the built in hyper-visor to have CentOS 7 running on the same box and providing file server and Active Directory services utilising Samba 4.

"This was undoubtedly the most difficult single server platform build I've undertaken in recent years" Clifford said. "It was the first time I had used Samba 4, Window 8.1, CentOS 7 and Active Directory which made it a very steep learning curve indeed. As with all these things, once you've studied the documentation 3 or 4 times and re-implemented and tested a half dozen times too, the mists clear and you suddenly start wondering why you had so much trouble.

"It is fantastic to see Windows and Linux so closely integrated" Clifford said. "We needed the Windows platform to support the specialist care software CMS but this project has already saved approaching £2,000 in licensing costs and will show even greater financial returns as it is rolled out to other homes in the group."

Clifford W Fulford and Fulford Consulting Ltd provide UNIX, Linux, Apple and Windows support .

Flare Support for Oldham Council.

2014-06-30: Fulford Consulting Ltd has agreed to provide Flare Systems Management Support for Oldham Council with Agilisys and Unity Partnership.

City Linux partners with Ashgates of Derby.

2014-03-14: Fulford Consulting Ltd is now partnered with Ashgates, based in Pride Park Derby. Ashgates provide IT support to companies in Nottingham, Derby, Burton and the East Midlands. Using the expert knowledge of Systems V, BSD and Linux distributions brought on board by City Linux, they will be able to extend their services in support of Linux and FreeBSD.

VMplayer 6.0.2 on Slackware 14.1.

2014-04-28: Some brief notes on the solution to installing VMplayer 6.0.2.

VMplayer on Slackware 14.1.

2014-04-23: Some brief notes on the solution to installing VMplayer 5.0.2.

Priorities and Firewalls.

2014-03-19: Clifford W Fulford muses on the process whereby critical firewalls are not infrequently disabled even in major financial institutions where you'd think this could not be permitted to happen.

Is it a result of relying on inadequately trained consultants and experts or because business priorities cause panic and anxiety leading to bad decision making?

Where systems security falls down.

2014-03-17: Clifford W Fulford muses on data systems security and privacy issues in IT with illustrative anecdotes from his 35 years in the IT sector.

Pine/Alpine end of the road.

2014-03-11: After 25 years using Mark Crispin's Pine/Alpine we finally part company. Meander.

City Linux - Linux IT support.

2014-01-27: If your server is down or performing poorly call me. With 30 years experience with major corporates, small start ups, local government and universities I can provide expert Linux and Unix support and get your systems backup and running, usually within 24 hours. Top class ad-hoc or contract support, on site, remotely or in the cloud.

City Linux supports Snap Edition.

2014-01-22: City Linux is now providing on site and remote desktop support to the company based in Market Harborough, that writes tenders for their clients. The company uses Apple iMac's on the desk top as does their sister company. Apples operating system is another variety of UNIX under the hood and provided no obstacle to City Linux providing desktop, network and systems integration support.

Time to switch to Linux on the desktop.

2014-02-20: Fed up with shelling out for new versions of Windows? With support for XP ending in April this could be a good time to think about switching to Linux on the desktop. UNIX type operating systems like Linux and Apple's iOS X dominate on mobile phones, tablets, mainframes and supercomputers so the objections to using Linux on the desktop need to be reconsidered?

If you want to be able to keep your systems up to date, with out having to pay for expensive licensing agreements, kit upgrades and retraining, get in touch with City Linux to discuss how it might be done.

City Linux also supports systems integration with Windows and Macs on the desktop, so you don't need to put all your eggs in one basket.

City Linux supports Care Home.

2013-11-19: Fulford Consulting , now additionally trading as City Windows IT , is supplying IT support to Valuecare Ltd at the Lathbury Manor Residential Care Home near Newport Pagnell, Milton Keynes. Clifford Fulford will be providing top class systems management and systems administration on the Windows based system with Leap IT managing the help desk and providing desk top support.

City Linux engaged by Colwick based software company.

2013-06-11: Profitmaster Systems Ltd. based in Colwick, Nottingham, support a number of clients across the UK running on Red Hat Linux servers. The skilled in house team at Profitmaster is able carry out most routine systems administration but every so often they run across an intractable problem that needs a higher level of technical knowledge and experience. Using City Linux makes that hands on Linux expertise available without the overheads involved in engaging a full time Linux Administrator.

1and1 web server rescued.

2013-05-16: Daniel Torridon who shoots people, including wedding guests, had a problem with a 1and1 server running CentOS Linux. The server would not run his web site. 1 and 1 technical support had been unable to help, so Daniel, who is based in Retford, Nottinghamshire, contacted Clifford to get an urgent fix. The work on the server in Germany was carried out remotely and by 10.30 that evening all was resolved and Daniel was able to get his web site back up and running.

"You.... are amazing.... !! Thank you!!" - Daniel Torridon

Virtual server disk constraint resolved.

2013-05-05: Rubiqa the web and graphic design studio in Derby, was running out of disk space on their virtual development server and came to City Linux for assistance at the end of April. It was one of those times when a company rich with IT skills never the less needed experienced systems administration support to resolve a particular issue.

Although Clifford and Jeremy Swift of Rubiqa have never met Jeremy felt confident that by granting remote access to his server he could have the issue resolved swiftly, safely and with a minimum of cost.

Linux support in the cloud.

2013-02-14: Do you have a Linux server in the cloud, perhaps with 1and1 or Rackspace? City Linux can provide expert, cost effective Linux server support and management anywhere in the world.

"I work with a very restricted client base so that I can give my personal attention to customer problems. This means that they know exactly who is accessing their servers and the level of care and expertise that can be expected." - Clifford W Fulford. MD City Linux.

City Linux training pages moved to new site.

2013-02-04: The City Linux training pages have been moved to new site.

To meet the increased demand for IT systems training the City Linux training web pages have been further developed and moved to a separate site www.training4linux.co.uk

Pork Farms choose City Linux to provide Linux training.

2012-11-21: Pork Farms is running a 6 day Linux systems administration training course on Ubuntu for the company's IT administrators at their Nottingham head quarters. Covering a wide range of topics and focusing on command line control and configuration using a Ubuntu Linux distribution the course is being delivered by Clifford W Fulford of City Linux.

City Linux & Fulford Consulting migrate to Slackware 14.0.

2012-10-15: City Linux the Linux support service and Fulford Consulting ( the systems integration, administration, security and systems support company) upgraded their systems to Slackware 14.0 today.

This was one of the simplest, most trouble free OS upgrades I've done in the last 25 years. The Slackware 14.0 packages were downloaded with "wget" and after being careful to upgrade the basic system libraries and package tools first , I then ran the command

"upgradepkg --install-new <local path>/slackware/*/*.t?z".

The whole thing was done while still in multi-user mode and only involved a few minutes downtime in the early hours to reconfigure the web servers. Another triumph for the elegance and simplicity of Patrick Volkerding's Slackware distribution.

Clifford W Fulford

Leicestershire company take out support contract on CentOS system at 1&1.

2012-03-28: After Clifford Fulford helped them to recover from a major systems failure, a new media contract advice company in Market Harborough, Leicestershire, decided to take out a support contract with City Linux for their CentOS Linux system co-hosted at 1&1 's data centre in Germany.

The company will receive hands on remote systems administration and security advice for their CentOS Linux systems without incurring the expense of employing a full-time systems administrator.

"To say we had a server crisis would be an understatement. But Clifford Fulford restored not only all of our data but our sanity too! Outstanding personal service. "

Company Director

2011-11-05: Fulford Consulting Ltd. is now offering support and consultancy services on the sophisticated and powerful integrated office application LibreOffice .

LibreOffice which is available for Windows, Macintosh, UNIX and Linux platforms, is a the successor to StarOffice and OpenOffice productivity suites. LibreOffice provides six integrated applications which are able to use the fully open internationally agreed file formats.

Clifford Fulford , systems consultant with Fulford Consulting , (trading as CityLinux) can help you install LibreOffice from downloads or CD and provide ongoing configuration and support.

" I can help you migrate from your current office applications to LibreOffice to reduce your IT costs now and give you a solid base from which to expand without the burden of additional licensing costs when the economy picks up. "

Clifford Fulford
IT Consultant

Standout - RedHat 5.5 development server.

2010-12-09: The creative communications agency Standout a fast growing marketing agency in Desford, Leicestershire, went with RedHat 5.5 on Dell kit to build a development server at their Leicestershire head quarters this December.

Clifford Fulford , systems consultant with Fulford Consulting , (trading as CityLinux) was brought in by Somerbys IT to configure a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) development server under RedHat 5.5. Webmin was installed to assist in the management of the system. Apache Subversion (SVN) was also included to provide development version control.

"Its been a while since I've had a request for RedHat in a fully open source environment, but apart from some hiccoughs with the Dell default disk partitioning schema, the installation went very well
RedHat gives clients the confidence of having a professional support contract with large international vendor"

Clifford Fulford
IT Consultant

AH Allen move to Slackware 13.

2010-07-28: A H Allen Health & safety consultants and experts in asbestos sampling and surveys migrated from Fedora Core Linux to Slackware.

A H Allen decided to opt for the the simplicity and elegance of Slackware over the bells and whistles of Fedora for their latest upgrade. Slackware's longevity, stability and ease of server administration provided a good fit with the need to accommodate Windows 7 PCs authentication and file sharing with Samba.

"I think Slackware was a good choice. The transition was was very smooth.
Slackware provides a very simple and elegant software tools that are familiar to UNIX administrators around the world.

Clifford Fulford
IT Consultant

TANC move to Slackware 12.

2008-07-28: TANC the voluntary sector technical advice consultants in Nottingham have upgraded their Dell Linux server to Slackware.

City Linux were called in when the SATA disks on the server failed and TANC were facing the prospect of needing to pay for a new server and a fresh operating system installation.

"I was able to reconfigure another machine with an external disk as a temporary server. This gave us a breathing space to find out just what was wrong.
Replacing the disks with a higher capacity Samsung devices and installing Slackware as the operating system gave the server a new lease of life and got TANC back up and running for a fraction of the price other companies had quoted."

Clifford Fulford
IT Consultant

AH Allen migrate to Linux.

2006-03-28: A H Allen Health & safety consultants and experts in asbestos sampling and surveys migrated to Fedora Core Linux today.

Moving to Linux at their head office in Hessle, East Yorkshire is allowing them to substantially reduce the costs of licensing and support on their file server.

"For a small company, the cost of replacing our ageing Windows NT4 server was so high, it was out of our reach. City Linux's suggestion of a free Linux distribution saved us so much in license fees that it made the project feasible again."

James Corner
Asbestos Survey Team Manager

Nottingham City migrate to Linux.

2006-01-01: Nottingham City Council's Environment & Public Protection Services migrate from SCO UNIX to a Red Hat Linux high availability cluster. The system is used to provide a stable, robust platform on which to run the Civica APP / Flare data base system which is used for Trading Standards, Public Health, Pest Control, Pollution, Dog Warden, and Anti-Social Behaviour services.

Moving to Linux has given Nottingham immediate savings in licensing and support costs.

Fulford Consulting server migration.

2006-08-06: Fulford Consulting's new Linux server went live today.

The low spec server (1.4MHz Celeron processor, 256MB RAM) provides Fulford Consulting Ltd. with network and file services for the office network and supports 4 active web sites including the West Bridgford Community Network site which receives 5,000 visits (16,000 hits) per month.