Get Trigger-Happy
In Windows Power Tools: "Pulling the Event Trigger" (December 2004, InstantDoc ID 44431), Mark Minasi discusses how to use eventtriggers.exe to alert you when a certain event has happened on your system. I followed his example, but I couldn't get the event trigger to work. I entered

eventtriggers /create /eid 64002
  /tr sysalert /tk "net send
  \[userid\] Something's deleting
  system files!" /ru \[userid\]
  /rp \[password\]

and received this error message:

ERROR: Unable to create event trigger named "sysalert".

I tried a couple of different trigger labels (/tr information and /tr 64002), but neither of them worked. What did I do wrong? Does anyone else have this problem? I use Windows XP with SP1.

On an XP SP2 machine (which can be even pickier about what runs), I typed

eventtriggers /create /eid 64002
  /tr sysalert /tk "net send
  jack123 Something's deleting
  system files!" /ru markuserid
  /rp markpassword

as one line, and I received the message

SUCCESS: The Event Trigger "sysalert" has been created.

So, I'm wondering whether you've turned off a necessary service and that could be causing the problem. I'd love feedback from other readers who are experiencing problems or

have a suggestion for Ray.

Building Linux Skills
Dustin Puryear's "A Linux Primer for Windows Administrators" (November 2004, InstantDoc ID 44104) is wonderful. I don't use Linux at work, but I've always wanted to learn Linux. Last year, I installed Red Hat 8.0 and played around with it a little bit. Dustin's article has answered some of the questions I had. Can you suggest a way to see or access Windows file shares from a Linux workstation?

To share files between Linux and Windows, you need to learn how to use and deploy Samba. You can find out more about Samba at, or refer to my article "Learning Samba for File Sharing" (April 2001, InstantDoc ID 20053).

Death of the Floppy
In Top 10: "PC Computing Trends" (September 2004, InstantDoc ID 43570), number 10 states that the floppy disk is dead. Well, I'm all for that, but is Microsoft?

Recently, I bought a new motherboard for my home PC with a Serial ATA (SATA) controller on it. Windows XP didn't recognize the controller, so I had to hit F6 during the installation process to load the third-party driver. The Help message I received instructed me to "Please insert the driver disk into A: and press Enter." I didn't have the option to change where XP should look for the driver. It's kind of hard for companies to stop shipping servers with floppy drives until Microsoft stops hard-coding their existence into its OS!

Career Chicken-and-Egg Problem
I read Dianne Russell's column, Your Career: "Conquering Challenges, Reaping Rewards" (December 2004, InstantDoc ID 44429), and a question that I've always wanted answered came to mind: Why is it that when you try to land a job in IT, you often need some type of certification, but the recommended approach for getting a certification is to gain some experience first in the area you want to study? For example, one certification program I looked into stated that I had to have 1 year experience before signing up. I had a heck of a time getting positions as well as education because of this sit- uation. Do other IT pros find themselves caught in the same way? An article that addresses this question might be a good idea.

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