Re: Is there a decent file attribute (date) conserving way to download your photos from Google?

[Dan Jenkins]

Summary: The JSON files contain ALL the metadata from EXIF info for each 
photo. You need to merge the JSON info back into the JPG files. There is 
a (purportedly) very good tool for doing that. I have not used the tool 
myself.


Hope this helps.

Here are supporting links:

 * Article on /How to Export Your Images From Google Photos Using Takeout/
   https://metadatafixer.com/learn/how-to-export-images-google-photos-takeout
 * The tool (EXIFTool) itself: https://exiftool.org/
 * Apple forum on the topic, with instructions:
   https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253234040
 * EXIFTool forum with instructions for Google Takeout json files:
   https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php?topic=11064.0


On 2022-06-21 13:41, Mark Komarinski wrote:

There should be EXIF metadata in each photo which should include the date taken.

Should.

-Mark

On Jun 21, 2022 1:27 PM, Bruce Labitt  wrote:

 Recently got a message (well really quite a few) warning me that my
 "free storage" on google is running out.  This, of course, is yet a new
 way for Google to monetize all the free stuff that they had been
 providing for a while.  I do have strong opinions on re-negging on
 promises, but lets not go there.

 Google apparently provides a way to extract your data, more or less.
 You can export your data using "Google Takeout".  So I wanted to takeout
 my photos, since it seemed they were the dominant storage hog.  I
 exported my photos, and got 8 2GB zip files.  Google touched the files
 and they all have today's date. This stinks because I usually sort on
 date.  For some of the photos, the date is embedded in the file name.
 For the earlier ones, the camera manufacturer didn't do that.  (Takeout
 only exports the data, it does not delete it.)  In the export, it seems
 there are json files for every jpg downloaded.  Seems like a lot of
 clutter, what use are these json files?  Apparently they had some value
 to Google, because they made them.

 Is there some way to extract the photos from google with the dates intact?

 If not, can the files be parsed for their date taken and the attribute
 date reset to the taken date?  Say one were to do this in python, it
 seems one could do this with PIL, and os.walk through the directories.
 Not quite as sure about resetting the date attribute, but pretty sure it
 can be done.  Seems like it could be an interesting exercise.  (Suppose
 one could also extract the GPS info if available and further categorize
 the photos.)

 Are there any pitfalls to the the paragraph above?  Can any of you
 suggest a better way to do this?

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Re: dd cloning a Win10 HDD to SSD

[Dan Jenkins]

In my experience dd works. Make sure the destination disk is larger than 
the source. I've had problems sometimes when they were the exact same 
size. Any other issue was due to issues on the source disk, in which 
case ddrescue, has worked.

On 2021-03-23 08:33, Bruce Labitt wrote:
> I'd be grateful to learn what worked.  No need to waste my time more than
> necessary.
>
> On Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 8:30 AM Greg Kettmann  wrote:
>
>> I don't know if dd works. I've done this several times using freely
>> available utilities.  In one case I tried and it failed.  I simply used a
>> different utility and it worked.  I was impressed with the results,
>> particularly with dramatically improved boot times.
>>
>> Sorry to be vague. You were asking about dd.  If you're interested in
>> which utility(s) I used just let me know.  I should have records.  The last
>> time was a year ago.
>>
>> Greg
>>
>> Get TypeApp for Android 
>> On Mar 22, 2021, at 10:19 PM, Bruce Labitt  wrote:
>>> Have this excruciatingly slow Win10 HDD I'd like to clone to SSD.
>>> Reading about how to do this leads me to dd as a way to clone the disk.
>>> The disks are close in size.  According to lsblk, the HDD sdb is 931.5GB,
>>> and the SSD sdf is 931.5GB.
>>>
>>> sdb has 5 partitions on it.
>>> 1) EFI  500MiB
>>> 2) MS reserved partition  128MiB
>>> 3) OS "basic data" partition 918.07GiB
>>> 4) WINRETOOLS 852MiB
>>> 5) Image   11.56GiB
>>>
>>> sdf has stuff on it, which I presume will be wiped out by dd.
>>>
>>> Since the sizes are "equal", can I just # dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdf
>>> bs=1M status=progress and be done with it?  Is there anything else that I'd
>>> need to do to get it to boot?
>>>
>>> --
>>>
>>> gnhlug-discuss mailing list
>>> gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org
>>> http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
>>>
>>>
>
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Re: Recommendations on cloning a bootable main disk

[Dan Jenkins]

Booting from sda should be fine. I just wanted to make sure you were not 
resizing from a live file system, which, while it can work sometimes, is 
problematic many times.


The 1MiB at the end of the drive appears to be related to GPT. If you 
aren't using GPT, shouldn't be an issue. With a 1 TB drive, you don't 
need to use GPT, in any event, though you could choose to. I have also 
seen such fragments of unallocated space. which appear to have been 
created due to partition alignment issues. I have never needed to leave 
such space available. Your partitioning tool may leave such space 
available, again, due to alignment issues.


On 12/2/2018 9:32 AM, Bruce.Labitt wrote:
I'm booting on to sda, not sdc.  sda is a 240GB SSD.  sdc is not 
active and hasn't been mounted.  sdc is a 1TB drive.  When sdc is 
finally sorted out, I will physically remove sda (240) from my laptop 
and install sdc (1T).  ( The bigger sdc drive probably will turn into 
sda! ).


Just to make this explicit, the sdc drive is connected to the laptop 
via a USB3/SATA adapter.  I haven't opened up the laptop yet.


If you think I should boot from a USB Ubuntu flash drive I can do that 
as well.


Thanks for the tips on gparted.
Do I need to allocate 1MiB at the end of the drive?  I'm reading 
conflicting requirements on this.


I will try your suggestions and will report back.

Sent from Blue <http://www.bluemail.me/r?b=14063>
On Dec 2, 2018, at 8:42 AM, Dan Jenkins <mailto:d...@rastech.com>> wrote:


First, you are running GParted from a bootable flash drive, not
from booting off the new sdc, correct?

I have had issues, in a few instances, with GParted, when taking
multiple steps at once.
Rather than do all the steps at once, I would do one step at a time.
Apply it and let it complete.
Then do the next step.
GParted often works fine with multiple steps, except when it
doesn't. :-)

Further, you don't actually need to move the swap partition, just
recreate it in its final position.
That would save time, but doesn't explain the error.

These are the steps I would use, if I was doing it:
1. Delete the swap partition (sdc5)
2. Delete the extended partition (sdc2)
3. Apply steps 1 & 2.
4. Resize the data partition (sdc1), leaving 30 GB unallocated at
the end.
5. Apply step 4.
6. Create an extended partition in that 30 GB unallocated space.
7. Create a 30 GB swap partition in that new extended partition.
8. Apply steps 6 & 7.

On 12/1/2018 9:05 PM, Bruce Labitt wrote:

Thanks for the instructions on the BIOS - umm, nothing was
wrong.  Having the USB stick prior to entering the BIOS made the
device show up.

OK, dd'd the disk.  Took a long time, 94 minutes, but everything
is transferred, except for this email.

Next is to resize in gparted - which didn't complete.
I followed a youtube video at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDgUwWkvuIY

Just to note, *sdc has never been mounted. *

The video is done in a virtual machine, but I followed the part
showing how to do the resizing.  The linux-swap was turned off. 
The error is as follows:

GParted 0.30.0 --enable-libparted-dmraid --enable-online-resize

Libparted 3.2

*Grow /dev/sdc2 from 29.99 GiB to 723.03 GiB*  00:00:00( ERROR )

calibrate /dev/sdc2  00:00:00( SUCCESS )

/path: /dev/sdc2 (partition)
start: 437226563
end: 500118191
size: 62891629 (29.99 GiB)/

grow partition from 29.99 GiB to 723.03 GiB  00:00:00( ERROR )

/old start: 437226563
old end: 500118191
old size: 62891629 (29.99 GiB)/

/requested start: 437226563
requested end: 1953523711
requested size: 1516297149 (723.03 GiB)/

libparted messages( INFO )

/Unable to satisfy all constraints on the partition./



*Move /dev/sdc5 to the right and grow it from 29.99 GiB to 29.99
GiB*



*Move /dev/sdc2 to the right and shrink it from 723.03 GiB to
29.99 GiB*



*Grow /dev/sdc1 from 208.48 GiB to 901.52 GiB*



/dev/sdc1 is ext4 and what I want extended  208.48 GiB
/dev/sdc2 is the extended partition                  29.99 GiB
/dev/sdc5 is the linux swap which was turned off 29.99 GiB and
was inside the extended partition
unallocated was 693.04 GiB

Partitions were dragged and moved per the basic instructions.

Can you give me a hint what went wrong?  I'm kind of surprised
that it failed, essentially in the first step, growing the
extended partition after turning linux-swap off.

The problem might be that gparted still has a problem with
leaving 1MiB at the end for the duplicate boot information.  I
found a comm

Re: Recommendations on cloning a bootable main disk

[Dan Jenkins]

First, you are running GParted from a bootable flash drive, not from 
booting off the new sdc, correct?


I have had issues, in a few instances, with GParted, when taking 
multiple steps at once.

Rather than do all the steps at once, I would do one step at a time.
Apply it and let it complete.
Then do the next step.
GParted often works fine with multiple steps, except when it doesn't. :-)

Further, you don't actually need to move the swap partition, just 
recreate it in its final position.

That would save time, but doesn't explain the error.

These are the steps I would use, if I was doing it:
1. Delete the swap partition (sdc5)
2. Delete the extended partition (sdc2)
3. Apply steps 1 & 2.
4. Resize the data partition (sdc1), leaving 30 GB unallocated at the end.
5. Apply step 4.
6. Create an extended partition in that 30 GB unallocated space.
7. Create a 30 GB swap partition in that new extended partition.
8. Apply steps 6 & 7.

On 12/1/2018 9:05 PM, Bruce Labitt wrote:
Thanks for the instructions on the BIOS - umm, nothing was wrong.  
Having the USB stick prior to entering the BIOS made the device show up.


OK, dd'd the disk.  Took a long time, 94 minutes, but everything is 
transferred, except for this email.


Next is to resize in gparted - which didn't complete.
I followed a youtube video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDgUwWkvuIY

Just to note,*sdc has never been mounted. *

The video is done in a virtual machine, but I followed the part 
showing how to do the resizing.  The linux-swap was turned off.  The 
error is as follows:


GParted 0.30.0 --enable-libparted-dmraid --enable-online-resize

Libparted 3.2

*Grow /dev/sdc2 from 29.99 GiB to 723.03 GiB*  00:00:00( ERROR )

calibrate /dev/sdc2  00:00:00( SUCCESS )

/path: /dev/sdc2 (partition)
start: 437226563
end: 500118191
size: 62891629 (29.99 GiB)/

grow partition from 29.99 GiB to 723.03 GiB  00:00:00( ERROR )

/old start: 437226563
old end: 500118191
old size: 62891629 (29.99 GiB)/

/requested start: 437226563
requested end: 1953523711
requested size: 1516297149 (723.03 GiB)/

libparted messages( INFO )

/Unable to satisfy all constraints on the partition./



*Move /dev/sdc5 to the right and grow it from 29.99 GiB to 29.99 GiB*



*Move /dev/sdc2 to the right and shrink it from 723.03 GiB to 29.99 GiB*



*Grow /dev/sdc1 from 208.48 GiB to 901.52 GiB*



/dev/sdc1 is ext4 and what I want extended  208.48 GiB
/dev/sdc2 is the extended partition                  29.99 GiB
/dev/sdc5 is the linux swap which was turned off 29.99 GiB and was 
inside the extended partition
unallocated was  
693.04 GiB


Partitions were dragged and moved per the basic instructions.

Can you give me a hint what went wrong?  I'm kind of surprised that it 
failed, essentially in the first step, growing the extended partition 
after turning linux-swap off.


The problem might be that gparted still has a problem with leaving 
1MiB at the end for the duplicate boot information.  I found a comment 
in 2017 for gparted: 
http://gparted-forum.surf4.info/viewtopic.php?id=17646


And: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=738144

Is there a practical work around to my reported error?

Thanks,
Bruce


On 12/1/18 4:39 PM, Dan Jenkins wrote:

On some of the BIOSes, unless you have the USB drive connected, before
you go into the BIOS, it will not appear as a boot option.

Also, depending on the USB flash drive model, it may appear:
1) as a removable device (aka a floppy drive),
2) a hard drive (appearing as second choice under hard disk drives;
     you would need to change the 1st drive to USB and the 2nd drive to
your current boot drive), or
3) as a CDROM drive.

Also, if you have a UEFI BIOS, you may need to switch it to Legacy,
instead of UEFI.

Lastly, if you have a UEFI BIOS, you need a UEFI compatible boot device.
In the case of Clonezilla, you need to download an AMD664 alternative
version (Ubuntu-based), rather than the default Debian-based. (We have
both the UEFI and Legacy versions of Clonezilla to try when we run into
such issues.)

And, rarely, I encounter computers that simply cannot boot USB flash
drives, but those tend to be much older ones.

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Re: Recommendations on cloning a bootable main disk

[Dan Jenkins]

On some of the BIOSes, unless you have the USB drive connected, before 
you go into the BIOS, it will not appear as a boot option.

Also, depending on the USB flash drive model, it may appear:
1) as a removable device (aka a floppy drive),
2) a hard drive (appearing as second choice under hard disk drives;
    you would need to change the 1st drive to USB and the 2nd drive to 
your current boot drive), or
3) as a CDROM drive.

Also, if you have a UEFI BIOS, you may need to switch it to Legacy, 
instead of UEFI.

Lastly, if you have a UEFI BIOS, you need a UEFI compatible boot device. 
In the case of Clonezilla, you need to download an AMD664 alternative 
version (Ubuntu-based), rather than the default Debian-based. (We have 
both the UEFI and Legacy versions of Clonezilla to try when we run into 
such issues.)

And, rarely, I encounter computers that simply cannot boot USB flash 
drives, but those tend to be much older ones.

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Re: Recommendations on cloning a bootable main disk

[Dan Jenkins]

Parted also works for me. Both clonezilla and parted are my recommendations. 

On December 1, 2018 12:51:34 PM EST, Bruce Labitt 
 wrote:
>It' apparent that one uses a variant of dd.  What isn't apparent is how
>
>one goes about cloning one's primary disk (active).  From searching it 
>appears it is not recommended to use dd when the disk is active, either
>
>the source or the destination.
>
>I'm trying to clone my nearly full SSD with the OS (Ubuntu 18.04) to a 
>new larger SSD.
>
>Is there a tiny linux I can boot into that I can run dd from?  Or can I
>
>make the main disk ro?  What do you suggest?
>
>I have backed up home.  I really don't want to re-install the OS, since
>
>I have had troubles with gdm3 screwing up (different topic).  (Black 
>screen, no consoles)
>
>Recommendations/recipes on the cloning process sought.
>
>I was simply going to use
>
># dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc bs=4096 conv=sync,noerror
>
>I've seen lots of comments about block size and optimal setting, but
>I'm 
>not sure what is optimal if there are unknown (but few) source drive
>errors.
>
>Thanks,
>
>Bruce
>
>
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Re: Recommendations on cloning a bootable main disk

[Dan Jenkins]

We use Clonezilla off a bootable USB flash drive. 

On December 1, 2018 12:51:34 PM EST, Bruce Labitt 
 wrote:
>It' apparent that one uses a variant of dd.  What isn't apparent is how
>
>one goes about cloning one's primary disk (active).  From searching it 
>appears it is not recommended to use dd when the disk is active, either
>
>the source or the destination.
>
>I'm trying to clone my nearly full SSD with the OS (Ubuntu 18.04) to a 
>new larger SSD.
>
>Is there a tiny linux I can boot into that I can run dd from?  Or can I
>
>make the main disk ro?  What do you suggest?
>
>I have backed up home.  I really don't want to re-install the OS, since
>
>I have had troubles with gdm3 screwing up (different topic).  (Black 
>screen, no consoles)
>
>Recommendations/recipes on the cloning process sought.
>
>I was simply going to use
>
># dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc bs=4096 conv=sync,noerror
>
>I've seen lots of comments about block size and optimal setting, but
>I'm 
>not sure what is optimal if there are unknown (but few) source drive
>errors.
>
>Thanks,
>
>Bruce
>
>
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Re: Need to copy a 200GB directory

[Dan Jenkins]

I definitely would use rsync. I regularly copy 2-3 TB from between 
filesystems, both locally and over networks, using it. cp would work, 
but rsync is better if you do need to interrupt and restart or if you 
just need to synchronize changes.

On 6/26/2017 3:11 PM, Charles Farinella wrote:
> We need to copy a large (200+GB) directory from one filesystem to 
> another, both locally mounted.
>
> I'm unsure as to what I should use to do this, cp, rsync, dd?
>
> Any suggestions appreciated.
>
> Thanks.
>
> --charlie
>
> Charlie Farinella
> Systems Administrator
> Appropriate Solutions, Inc.
> 1-603-924-6079
>
>
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Re: What Language for a kid

[Dan Jenkins]

On 12/29/2015 2:24 PM, Ted Roche wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 2:03 PM, Alan Johnson  > wrote: > >> 
> Unfortunately, I don't know of much in the way of 
practical >> application of Lisp outside AI researchers...

If the song is true, then creating the universe.

Yes, God had a deadline.
So he wrote it all in Lisp.

http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/eternal-flame.en.html

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Re: What Language for a kid

[Dan Jenkins]

On 12/29/2015 2:03 PM, Alan Johnson wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 10:40 AM, Bill Freeman  wrote:
>
>> I can't resist.  There is always lisp.  No indentation.  No semicolons.
>> Format it so that it makes sense to you.  Anyone approaching algebra will
>> get the bonus of learning that parentheses must match.
>>
> ​I will second the beauty of the simplicity of Lisp.  Unfortunately, I
> don't know of much in the way of practical application of Lisp outside AI
> researchers... back in my college days at least.  No ideal what AI folks
> use most commonly now.​

I used to write Lisp for AutoCAD purposes years ago.

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Re: time for the annual Internet Speed Quest

[Dan Jenkins]

On 7/4/2014 9:52 PM, Chris Linstid wrote:
 No problems at all. I'm all Linux and OS X at home. No special software
 required.

 They definitely don't block port 22 for ssh. I'm pretty sure they block 25
 and maybe 80.

Port 25 is usually blocked. It comes  goes. I use DynDNS to bring in 
email via an alternate port to our Linux email server.
Ports 80, 443, 143, 873 and 22 are all open. No problems with our 
servers: web, IMAP, SSH, Rsync, Vonage, etc.
(I have switched to running SSH on an alternate port just to cut down
 on the random probes, but not because of any blocking.)
I think some Windows ports are blocked, as they should be, if anyone cares.
Nothing else is blocked to my knowledge.

As much as I've heard complaints about them, Comcast has been fine for us,
and for most of our clients, for the last 15 years: reliable and fast.
Now that I finally got a DOCSIS 3 cable modem, I get 30/5 Mbps, 10 ms 
ping to Boston.
On older cable modem, which I fished out of someone's trash :-), it was 
12/3, if I recollect.
I don't use their DNS or email, however, I do send via their 
authenticated SMTP from our Linux email server.
SMTP is limited to 50 recipients per email and throttles to about 30 
emails per minute.
Emails faster than that just queue and go in a minute or so.
I only discovered the limits in testing, since they don't t affect me 
normally.

Generally, I've been quite happy with their service.

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Re: Attention, graying geeks: Send me your BASIC memories, as the language turns 50 -- David Brooks

[Dan Jenkins]

On 4/10/2014 4:42 PM, Ray Cote wrote:
 you had 0s and 1s? All we had  were ups and downs (toggle
 switches)...

I just had holes.
(paper tape and punch cards)

Yes, and up and down too.
--
Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc.

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Re: sound over VNC to osx?

[Dan Jenkins]

On 9/21/2013 9:07 PM, David Rysdam wrote:

Long story short, I'm trying to  VNC from a Linux laptop (client) to

 an OSX desktop (server). Graphically, no problem, other than the fact
 I need a bigger monitor on the client side.

 But I'm not getting any sound on the client end. I tried a couple
 different software clients and two different hardware clients. Then
 I RTFM and realized VNC itself doesn't support sound. Tried a client
 that claimed to have some kind of built-in support (via ssh?), but
 that didn't work either.

 As I'm typing this, I'm realizing that anything a smart client wants
 to do would have to be supported by the server sending it, which OSX
 probably isn't.

 Has anyone else done this?


No version of VNC supports remote audio.
RFB (the VNC protocol) is purely a pixel-based protocol
with no audio capability.

As you indicated, there may be alternative methods to transport
the audio separately, but I have never found one that works.
(Not that I've tried hard to find one.)

A number of other remote clients claim to do remote audio,
however, I have never tried audio with any of them.


VNC is the server, not OS X, as I understand the protocol.
I think of VNC as screen-scraping the pixels off whatever graphical 
display the OS provides.


This is unlike, say Remote Desktop, which generates a separate desktop 
session.


(I guess this post isn't that helpful. All I've done is confirm you 
can't do audio with VNC.

Not provided any solution.)

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Re: 911 calls from unsubscribed devices

[Dan Jenkins]

On 9/10/2013 3:09 PM, Ben Scott wrote:
 On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 1:02  PM, Michael ODonnell
  michael.odonn...@comcast.net wrote:
  I assume that, ideally, a 911 operator would like to have a
  conversation with the caller to better assess the nature/urgency of
  the emergency, but I also assume that's not strictly necessary as
  long as location info is included in the transmission, as obtained
  either via GPS or tower-triangulation.
 
  That may be illegal.
 
  I don't know one way or the other, but there are rules against abuse
  of 911, and deliberately attaching a terminal without voice
  capability might qualify as abuse.
 
  I'm not even sure auto-dialers with recorded messages are legal.
 
  Might be fine, too.  I dunno.  I'd check, if I were you.
 
  -- Ben

My knowledge is a bit dated, but I believe the general principals still 
hold.

Automated calls to 911 are generally legal, however, they are frowned 
upon. (This may vary by jurisdiction.)
You should (must, in some jurisdictions) contact the police before any 
call is placed and let them know about the device.
An automated call that is placed, without an actual police emergency, 
can incur significant fines, as it is treated as a false 911 call.
Repeated false alarms can be grounds for arrest.

A phone call without any voice on the line is considered a high priority 
by the 911 staff, and dispatched urgently.
The idea is that no voice means the person cannot talk, which could be 
either a medical emergency or a hostage situation.
You would not want cause the reasonable ire of the police for such a call.

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Re: FYI

[Dan Jenkins]

On 4/27/2013 1:36 PM, Ben Scott wrote:
   FYI, running badblocks -w on a 3 terabyte hard disk takes a long time.

LOL, who knew?

A few weeks ago, I did that with two 2 TB drives sequentially. (Why
sequentially? ... because I wasn't thinking.)
I headed out of town on a business trip for a week, and arrived back in
time to watch the job finish.
Thankfully it was an in-house project that no one was waiting for.

I remember it taking 48 hours to prep a 40 MB (not GB) MFM hard drive
for Novell Netware oh so many years ago.

We are so spoiled nowadays - generally just pop drives in and go.

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Re: FYI

[Dan Jenkins]

On 4/27/2013 5:17 PM, mad...@li.org wrote:
 I remember it taking 48 hours to prep a 40 MB (not GB) MFM hard
 drive for Novell Netware oh so many years ago.

 We are so spoiled nowadays - generally just pop drives in and
 go.

 Now we start in with YOU HAD A 40 MB drive?   Well *I* used to have
 to store my data on paper tape, and it was snowing and uphill both
 ways!!

I used 80-column punch cards (Digital TOPS-10), 96-column punch cards
(IBM System/3) and paper tape (PDP-8/E with a Teletype Model 33 paper
tape reader and punch), back in the day.

Since it only snowed 2/3 of the year and there was only a slight hill,
one-way to the IBM server, you've got me beat. :-)

--
Dan Jenkins

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Re: Printer recommendations

[Dan Jenkins]

On 3/7/2013 2:18 PM, David Rysdam wrote:
 On Thu, 7 Mar 2013 14:08:00 -0500, David  Tina Ohlemacher 
 ohlemac...@gmail.com wrote:
 - Color laser
 - Not overly expensive to operate
 - Cost under $500
 Whoa, last I checked color lasers were in the $1k and up range. I'd be
 surprised if the toner was reasonably priced, though.

Color lasers have been under $500 for some years now. In terms of Linux 
compatibility, I tend to stay with Lexmark, Konica-Minolta, and HP. Note 
all of them are Linux compatible, but they are more likely to be.

I spent a few minutes searching and found a HP Laserjet Pro 200 Color 
Laser Printer, wireless/wired/USB, Linux-compatible for $280. Toner is 
$40-$45 per color (CYMK).

I have used this vendor in the past and been happy with them. 
http://www.directron.com/cf147abgj.html?gsear=1

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Re: eWaste collection event, 21 May, Manchester, NH

[Dan Jenkins]

On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 8:14 PM, Jon maddog Hall mad...@li.org wrote:
  I still have my old SEARS portable, manual (non-electric) typewriter
  in my closet.

I learned to type on a Royal 10 (a 1919 model, I think). I kept getting 
my small fingers (I was 5 or 6 years old) stuck between the keys. The 
pain of that taught me accuracy. I used it for decades. Once I switched 
to a modern keyboard, I went up to 120 wpm. Typing was so effortless 
compared to the Royal.

--
Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc.

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Shopping carts

[Dan Jenkins]

I am looking for a shopping cart solution to add to several existing web 
sites I admin (all are LAMP, generally Perl or PHP coding). Basically, I 
want to be able to programmatically add items to the cart, preferably by 
a HTTP request (something like this: 
http://addcart.example.com?item=1234desc=Item_being_soldprice=3495.00. 
(I do not have source code for all the components of some of the sites, 
and this method will work for them.) The request can be limited to 
originating from the same server via localhost interface, if needed. A 
separate request would check-out. The order would be encrypted and 
emailed (again, to a local email server). I'm comfortable with Perl, 
PHP, Python, and can work with most others.

Any suggestions?
Thanks.

--
Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc., Bedford, NH, USA - 1-603-206-9951
+++ IT Technical Support Service for four decades

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Re: Shopping carts

[Dan Jenkins]

On 2/9/2011 8:54 PM, Benjamin Scott wrote:
  On Wed, Feb 9, 2011, Dan Jenkins d...@rastech.com wrote:
  I am looking for a shopping cart solution to add to several
  existing web sites I admin ... ... The url would be invoked solely
  via a localhost interface from one program to the receiving cart
  ... ... A separate request would check-out ... ... The actual
  order must, in most cases, be manually processed ... ... The order
  would be encrypted and emailed (again, to a local email server ...
  You might want to clarify what you're looking for here. Most
  commerce systems I've used assume a human being using a web browser
  at the other end of an HTTP transaction. They present the catalog,
  allow the human to pick products from that catalog and put them in
  the cart, and then checkout -- enter payment and shipping info. The
  UI is done via HTTP and HTML and a web browser. HTTP cookies track
  cart state (or at least, a session ID).

  You're saying you want to submit items via local channels (thereby
  implying you'll do the catalog, too), checkout via local channels,
  submit order info via local channels... what exactly does that leave
  for the commerce system to *do*? :-)

  When it comes to the server side of commerce systems, I've only ever
  really dealt with Zen Cart (a fork of osCommerce). It gets the job
  done, and is a relatively simple system and thus easier to fit into
  one's head. And free. There's a strong user community web forum.
  There's a web knowledgebase, which is good because the code I had to
  deal with was not well commented. The design didn't strike me as
  overly modular. So it might be tough to adapt it to... whatever it
  is you're doing.

Yeah, my description is poor. A little background might make it clearer. 
I admin some web stores. They carry unique items. I mean unique exactly: 
there is one of each item being sold. I already have a catalog system, 
which works fine. When someone orders an item, a single order form is 
created, from which the customer checks out by completing the form 
which is encrypted and emailed internally. Customers do not have to 
login to purchase, and no customer information is retained on the server 
at all.

The immediate task I want is to create a shopping cart, which allows a 
customer to add items to the cart and continue shopping, and then check 
out, get an order form with all the items included and complete one step 
for payment (instead of one per item). Again, no customer information is 
to be stored on the server, and no login to purchase is required.

We want to retain the current ordering system indefinitely (one form per 
item and immediate payment for each purchase). We want to provide the 
optional shopping cart system for those who choose that. Additionally, 
the shopping cart would allow us to handle non-unique items (parts, 
accessories, and such), which we currently handle entirely manually.

We do not want to perform credit card approval through the shopping cart 
for several reasons. So, the goal of the shopping cart is simply to 
aggregate multiple orders into a single order settlement. It does seem 
like a fairly simple task, however, none of the carts I've examined 
appear to handle this scenario.

To add complication, we have an auction site which needs a very similar 
solution. It is a closed source solution. To compound the issue, the 
number of web stores is due to proliferate twenty-fold in the near 
future to boutiques for each class of good. Some of those boutiques 
will sell non-unique items primarily. So, a single, simple shopping cart 
(for want of a better name) should work for all of these separate needs, 
and provide a consistent interface across all the sites. The last 
complication

My hypothetical interface was just a suggestion. Other methods would be 
fine.

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Netflix and Hulu [Was Re: Computer hardware for sale, cheap]

[Dan Jenkins]

On 1/26/2011 11:07 AM, Derek Atkins wrote:
 Benjamin Scottdragonh...@gmail.com  writes:
 On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 10:30 AM, Mark E. Mallettm...@mv.mv.com  wrote:
 And interested in any other comments, of course, which is why I'm not
 replying off-list ..
I canceled cable TV and watch all my TV via Netflix and Hulu now.  I
 save $60+/month and have fewer commercials (none on Netflix).
 Is all your TV actually available on Netflix and Hulu?  A friend of mine
 was showing me HuluPlus on his home TV, but when I look online I can't
 easily see a list of shows avaiable, without signing up for a one-week
 trial account.  I kinda wish they would publish the lists of shows
 available before I subscribe to see if I want to subscribe.

 All I know is that SNL is available.

TV = http://www.hulu.com/browse/tv
Movies = http://www.hulu.com/browse/movies
choose View as List in either case

For movies, change Display to All movies
For tv, choose All shows to include clips, but Shows with full 
episides only is the more useful filter.

This doesn't distinguish between Hulu and HuluPlus content, but, it's a 
help.

There's no equivalent listing I can find in Netflix.


 From this discussion, I learned a few things I didn't know. I hadn't 
realized that Silverlight (required for Netflix) works under Linux. That 
was pleasing to find out.

--
Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc.

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Re: Netflix and Hulu [Was Re: Computer hardware for sale, cheap]

[Dan Jenkins]

On 1/26/2011 1:47 PM, Alan Johnson wrote:
 On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 12:26 PM, Dan Jenkinsd...@rastech.com  wrote
  From this discussion, I learned a few things I didn't know. I hadn't
 realized that Silverlight (required for Netflix) works under Linux. That
 was pleasing to find out.
 I looked through the previous thread you reference, but I don't
 find Silverlight in there anywhere.  Is it a hack like IEs for Linux, or
 is it straight up supported by M$?  Got a link handy?  I don't mind googling
 on my own, so if it is not handy, don't bother.

A misunderstanding on my part. I was doing some research on the side and 
found some references that it was working. Turns out it was just a 
virtual machine running Windows on a Linux host. There is no native 
Linux Silverlight, unless you count Moonlight, which, I gather, has some 
issues. My mistake.

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Re: Computer part recycling [was: New Year's Cleaning]

[Dan Jenkins]

On 1/4/2011 11:59 AM, kenta wrote:
 Along the lines getting rid of old hardware from the New Years
 Cleaning thread I've been doing some cleaning as well.

 What I'm trying to find is a recycler, preferably free of charge, that
 will take this legacy hardware (read: junk) off my hands.  ...

 Anyone know of other places to check?

We've used CRT Recycling in Brockton 
(http://www.recyclingelectronics.com/). As we used them for a school, it 
was free including pickup. The school had three trailer truck loads of 
equipment to dispose of. So that's a lot larger scale, but I think 
drop-off at Brockton used to be free too.

Freecycle has worked, but it is a fair amount of work at times.

For citizens of Bedford, NH, the town has a trailer for 
computer/electronic components.

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Re: Android printer recommendations

[Dan Jenkins]

On 12/16/2010 7:20 PM, Michael ODonnell wrote:
  (Anyone know why laser printers seem to only run at 600 DPI? Every
  one I've checked (and I've l looked at dozens of models) specifies
  600 DPI as the native resolution. I'm guessing it's something
  inherent in the technology, but don't actually have any data.

  There's nothing inherent in the xerographic process (ie, using light
  to control the amount of electrostatic charge remaining on a
  pre-charged surface such that it ultimately determines how much
  pigment/toner is delivered to the print medium) as employed in recent
  laser printers and copiers that would limit resolution to 600 DPI.
  Indeed, I've heard of some industrial quality xerographic printers
  that (IIRC) had resolutions approaching 10,000 DPI in at least one
  dimension.

  Therefore, if it seems that you're enjoying arbitrary restrictions
  that always limit you to 600 DPI I'm guessing that they're, um,
  arbitrary. Maybe some sort of CYA lowest-common-denominator
  phenomenon?

Odd. We sold 2400 dpi monochrome laser printers years ago. (They were 
very expensive then.) I have a half dozen 1200 dpi ones in-house now. To 
be honest, I usually use them at 600 dpi, because there's just not much 
point going higher on simple text output, which is what we primarily do. 
There are LED printers, which are often referred to as laser printers, 
which typically have had a 600 dpi resolution, and been cheaper than 
laser printers. I haven't really paid much attention to the market in 
recent years, as we no longer do much with the printing  publishing 
industry as we used to. (That used to be our bread and butter, but has 
largely evaporated over the years.) So, I don't really know what's 
current, but higher than 600 dpi resolutions were common back in 2000. 
They were in the business class and publishing class market.

--
Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc.

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Re: cable modem requires reboot because one site falls off DNS?

[Dan Jenkins]

  On 9/3/2010 11:19 AM, David Miller wrote:

 On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 10:37 AM, Greg Rundlett (freephile) 
 g...@freephile.com mailto:g...@freephile.com wrote:

 I have a strange problem where one (and only one as far as we
 know) particular website becomes inaccessible to our office.

 The fix for this problem is to reboot the Comcast cable modem,
 however I don't understand how the modem could be the culprit.

 The website in question is nnerenmls.com http://nnerenmls.com
  and the modem is configured to use Comcast's DNS servers
 68.87.71.226
 68.87.73.242

 One red herring:  It would seem that Comcast changed their DNS
 servers, because the ones currenty in the modem configuration do
 not appear in the list
 http://dns.comcast.net/dns-ip-addresses.php  I thought to myself,
 I just switch to Google's Public DNS servers (8.8.8.8 and
 8.8.4.4)  I'm pretty sure they are not going to change.  However,
 it doesn't make sense to me that one website would fail, while
 general DNS would still be working.  And, at the time of the
 failures, other people using Comcast can resolve that domain
 meaning it doesn't even appear to be an issue where the target
 domain is occasionally falling off the web.

 Any ideas on what could cause this and how to troubleshoot?


 We have that problem here time to time.  It doesn't appear to be a DNS 
 issue in our case it's always been a very strange routing problem that 
 happens after a bunch of correct hops.

 We are lucky enough to have a 2nd internet connection and when we have 
 this problem here I can traceroute from each connection and the 
 comcast one normally will get to the correct datacenter and then take 
 a different hop from our T1.  I've never been able to make any sense 
 out of it.  But for this reason I have a few sites setup to route out 
 our T1 so that it doesn't cause any interruptions in our business.

 Rebooting the comcast router in our case has always resolved this 
 routing problem.  I'd be interested in any theories as to what causes 
 the routing to go awry after many hops and outside of comcast's network.


We've had this strange routing problem several times over the last year. 
It makes no sense to me either, but power cycling the Comcast-provided 
SMSC cable modem/router has solved the problem in all four cases at 
three different clients. In one instance, the traceroute made it to the 
very last hop before their web server, and then died. I wondered if it 
could be some odd TTL issue. Comcast's tech support has been pleasant, 
but not very informative about the cause. Since power cycling works, and 
is quick, I haven't tried to diagnose it further though I'd like to know 
why it happens. In one of the other cases the route to a specific IP 
number immediately went along a completely different path than another 
IP that was in the same destination network. The other case appeared to 
start playing leap frog half way to the destination (hop E to hop F to 
hop E, etc.). The fourth occurrence I just had them power cycle. There 
may have been more cases, but I documented how to power cycle the cable 
modem for them (they are all small enough that it hasn't been a major 
issue) and haven't heard about recurrences.




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Re: e-mail sync options?

[Dan Jenkins]

  On 8/30/2010 2:08 PM, Bruce Dawson wrote:
   On 08/30/2010 11:14 AM, Joshua Judson Rosen wrote:
 I could just write a suite of code to implement this myself,
 but maybe someone can save me the effort by pointing me to a canned
 solution :)
 A many-to-many sync is extremely resource intensive. And the optimizations
 for doing it with fewer resources are mathematically difficult. I'd like to
 test it if you think you've come up with code to do it! (I've done this
 in the
 past with sync'ing databases, and gave up on all but the one-to-many
 scenario.)

 I'm not satisfied there are any (commercial or otherwise) products that
 do the generalized many-to-many sync correctly. (Including tracking
 deleted and attribute records.)
 It really seems like IMAP is the only thing available that's
 at all like a `portable, ubiquitous mail-handling API'..., so
 maybe what I want is to just use OfflineIMAP in IMAP-to-IMAP mode?
 If so, what sync-*topology* should I be using? Do I have to
 use a star topology, where everything syncs with each other
 through a central node? Or can should the IMAP UUID support
 be sufficient for me to do an N-way distributed sync with
 data flowing every which way?
 I would recommend using a master node that all the satellites sync to.
 I believe
 an N-Way distributed sync will eventually end up in a mess that you
 won't be able
 to unravel (other than just declaring one the winner and dup'ing that to
 all the other
 potential master nodes). I say this given the unreliability of network
 connections,
 software releases, humans, and the world in general (e.g. practical
 experience).
I've used imapsync with a master node method for something like this. 
It worked well. We did not do any expunges while using it though, so I 
don't know how well that would work. As it maintained deleted flags, I 
would think it would be fine. I did not use offlineimap, because it was 
a server-to-server project in my case.

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Re: Recommendations for/against Comcast Business as an email provider

[Dan Jenkins]

  On 8/30/2010 10:31 AM, Ted Roche wrote:
 Slightly off-topic, although I got my foot stuck in this door since I
 have installed and maintain a LAMP server and apps at this client site.
 So, there's a bit of Linux in there.

 I have a client running a small business with my LAMP server as his only
 non-desktop machine, and Comcast Business for internet provider. He's
 been using a patchwork of email services over the years (they use AOL
 and Yahoo! email addresses and a former web design firm provides their
 domain's POP server.) They are entitled to Comcast Business email as
 part of their internet package. I wondered if folks here had experience
 with setting up other clients with Comcast. In particular, my concerns
 are reliability (losing email during business hours means lost business)
 and whether they provide decent spam filtering.
I've had excellent up-time with Comcast Business Internet. Their spam 
filtering in their residential service has been adequate for those 
clients who use it. I have not yet used their business email service, 
however, I do plan to in the next few weeks. As Comcast provides an 
eXchange server for business class there are some benefits to this 
client, as they all use Outlook and want a shared calendar. And I just 
don't have the time to implement an alternative for them. I'll let you 
know the results of using Comcast Business email service after I have 
some experience with it.

I have another client who converted to Comcast Business Internet today. 
I plan to use Comcast's email server as a pre-filter for spam filtration 
and as backup email server to feed their in-house Postfix/CourierImap 
setup. I'll let you know how that works too.

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Re: Recommendations for/against Comcast Business as an email provider

[Dan Jenkins]

  On 8/30/2010 10:51 PM, Steven C. Peterson wrote:
 To the best of my knowledge both the residential and commercial email 
 is run by zimbra, with the exchange emulation turned on for the 
 commercial accounts.
 this is based on marketing by zimbra, and the look and feel of the setup page 
 we have on one of our Comcast commercial lines.
Excellent to know that. I've been meaning to learn more about Zimbra for 
awhile.

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Re: Professional GCC support?

[Dan Jenkins]

  Tyson Sawyer writes:
 Obviously there is also GCC for ARM processors. I was told IAR was
 purchased because management wanted to make sure nothing was
 holding upname  in his work with the SAM7x camera controller. I'm told
 we can get support from IAR when we pay that much, and this does not
 exist when we decide to use GCC.

On 8/25/2010 12:10 PM, Joshua Judson Rosen wrote:
 I'm not sure of specific details off the top of my head, but some names
 that come to mind: Monta Vista, Wind River, Allegro Consultants,
 Red Hat (GNUPro?); there are some others listed at the FSF's
 Service Directory:

  http://www.fsf.org/resources/service


 Could also try finding out where the active GCC maintainers all work ;)
In my experience with Monta Vista and Wind River behave the same way 
regarding GCC support. Monta Vista support was effectively non-existent, 
however, I do believe a large issue was the project manager, who refused 
to allow anyone, other than him, access for support.

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Re: And we thought they were dead :-)

[Dan Jenkins]

  On 7/10/2010 9:13 AM, Jeffry Smith wrote:
  Judge Kimball rules as a matter of law the contract was clear, and
  tSCOG didn't get the copyrights.  tSCOG appealed to the 10th circuit
  that it should be a jury who decide.  10th Circuit ruled ruled that,
  even if Judge Kimball was right (they actually stated in their
  decision Novell had compelling arguments), it was for a jury to
  decide (as tSCOG asked for), and sent it back to the district court,
  where Judge Kimball recused himself (for reasons I don't recall), so
  it ended up with Judge Stewart for jury trial.  The jury (which
  tSCOG asked for) ruled tSCOG didn't get the copyrights (probably not
  helped by Darl testifying they didn't need the copyrights to conduct
  business under the APA, only for their new extortion scheme).  tSCOG
  appealed to Judge Stewart on the grounds, basically, that the jury
  they had asked for had to be wrong (to quote a movie line I object
  on the grounds its damaging to our case).  Judge Stewart denied
  their appeal.   Now they're appealing back to 10th Circuit that both
  the jury (that they asked for) and Judge Stewart must be wrong,
  because no one could possibly rule against them.  My suspicion is the
  10th will deny them this time, but IANAL, so who knows?

  I would suspect that this is only a formality, and they plan to
  appeal to SCOTUS.
 
  I suspect they'll continue to appeal as long as they can.  Of
  course, there's no requirement SCOTUS hear the appeal :)

Thank you, Mr. Smith for your clear summation. I've long since last 
track of the in  outs of all this.

Other than the FUD (or otherwise) impact on Linux, I would not be 
interested in this matter, as I neither enjoy soap operas nor reality 
TV. The fact that this travesty has ground on so long both amazes and 
appalls me (IANAL, so perhaps this is common  normal, though it boggles 
my mind).

When the dust settles, and truth  justice triumph (in other words, 
Linux, through its avatars, Novell  IBM), hopefully there are enough 
resources to reimburse those who suffered through this process. If not, 
more revenue, and emotional catharsis, could be raised to compensate, 
through A Modest Proposal of mine: Confine Darl, the various attorneys, 
Yarrow, and the other SCO miscreants to a desert island, which is 
well-equipped with hidden cameras, though with as few resources as SCO 
truly had, and see what develops. Revenue could be generated by selling 
advertising and gambling on individual participants dominance  length 
of survival. It would have much of the appeal of those game shows, soap 
operas and reality TV, which appear to captivate much of society. While 
it would be appropriate to deliver the Survivors-to-be to the island via 
a train wreck, however, a plane wreck would work (as it is the 21st 
century and our metaphors do need an update - plus I haven't figured out 
how to have a train wreck on a desert island). We could thrill to their 
emerging micro-society (ala Lord of the Flies), watch their gambols 
through the wilderness as they realize they truly are Lost and chill to 
their rising awareness that they themselves are the only protein source 
on the island. As I couldn't come up with a T-Rex to put on the island 
to eat any of the lawyers (for comic relief), this is then an 
alternative: Darl  Yarrow, after capturing the attorneys (Dewey, 
Cheatam and Howe) in a long, long chase, broil them over a fire in an 
attempt to extract their only remaining value.

Think I could get any takers to my Modest Proposal?

-- 
Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc., Bedford, NH, USA, 1-603-206-9951
*** Technical Support Excellence for four decades.

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Re: UPS electrical problem

[Dan Jenkins]

  On 6/29/2010 9:33 PM, Greg Rundlett (freephile) wrote:
 I have my Linux Media Center, a Dell Studio Hybrid PC, 2 1TB Fantom
 external drives and a 25 lcd monitor plugged into an APC Backups Pro 500
 UPS on the battery+surge protection side.

 Within the past week, when the household thermostat kicks on or off the
 central A/C system, the PC shuts off instantaneously.  Other electronics do
 not seem to be affected, although they probably are.  It's just harder to
 confirm since a flicker in the drive or monitor power would be hard to
 observe.   I assume that a sag or surge gets through the UPS and affects my
 PC, but don't understand how that can happen when I thought that's what the
 UPS was supposed to prevent.  And, short of replacing the UPS, I'm not sure
 what to do about it.  Is there something I can do to prevent this sag/surge
 event -- since it's likely to affect something else?
In my experience, that is usually a sign that the UPS battery is shot. 
On any power twitch, the UPS switches over to the battery, which has no 
capacity, and shuts everything off. How old is the UPS' battery? The 
Backups Pro 500 is a fairly old model, as in Windows 98 era, if I recollect.

-- 
Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc., Bedford, NH, USA, 1-603-206-9951
*** Technical Support Excellence for four decades.

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Re: UPS electrical problem

[Dan Jenkins]

  On 6/29/2010 10:01 PM, Ben Eisenbraun wrote:
 On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 09:54:52PM -0400, Dan Jenkins wrote:
On 6/29/2010 9:33 PM, Greg Rundlett (freephile) wrote:
 Within the past week, when the household thermostat kicks on or off the
 central A/C system, the PC shuts off instantaneously.
 In my experience, that is usually a sign that the UPS battery is shot.
 On any power twitch, the UPS switches over to the battery, which has no
 capacity, and shuts everything off. How old is the UPS' battery? The
 Backups Pro 500 is a fairly old model, as in Windows 98 era, if I recollect.
 That would be my guess as well, but the other thing to check is that most
 of the APC models have user-settable voltage cutover points for over/under
 current events.  It's possible that if the under-voltage setting is too
 low, then the UPS battery might still be good, and it's just that it's not
 cutting over soon enough and the PC power supply can't survive the dip,
 which causes the machine to reboot.

 Last I looked, APC had Windows/Mac clients for checking/changing their
 settings, and I think there are some 3rd party linux/UNIX tools that will
 allow you to do it as well.  Network UPS Tools (NUT) is one I have used in
 the past.
On some of the older UPS models, there were dip switches on the back for 
the cutover.
That is a good point, if there is enough load and the PC power supply 
can't handle any dropout.

I have an old IBM server which will survive the lights going off  on 
(it doesn't have a UPS).
Some of my newer units can't handle even a flicker of the power. Cheaper 
power supplies.

-- 
Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc., Bedford, NH, USA, 1-603-206-9951
*** Technical Support Excellence for four decades.

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Re: Spike in SSH attacks

[Dan Jenkins]

On 6/21/2010 8:42 PM, Bill Sconce wrote:
 On Mon, 21 Jun 2010 11:05:18 -0400
 Chip Marshallc...@2bithacker.net  wrote
 On 21-Jun-2010, Bill Sconcesco...@in-spec-inc.com  sent:
  
 START WITH NEVER EXPOSING SSHD ON PORT 22.

 You don't secure your house by hiding the door, you secure it by
 having good locks.
  
 I couldn't agree more.  The idea is to cut down on the scratching
 and rattling noises as every script kiddie in Romania bashes on your
 door on the chance it might be unlatched.  Noise is annoying; it's
 hard to see why anyone would recommend that you have to put up with
 it.  (Nevertheless, if you like port 22, use port 22.)

 I hope I didn't give the impression that moving off port 22 is the
 only thing I recommend, or do.

When I had 26,000 SSH door rattlings, on one server, in one day, I moved 
from port 22 on almost every device we administer. The logs were so full 
of door rattlings, real warnings could get lost. I have never had 
another SSH probe since. They really must be script kiddies - no port 
scans to identify alternate SSH ports. As I can limit most SSH 
connections to a limited pool of originating IPs, I do that too. If 
possible, we only use SSH keys, no password logins. No root logins. 
Protocol 2 only, etc. Of course, no remote access unless it is needed. 
Like any security, the more layers the better.

-- 
Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc., Bedford, NH, USA, 1-603-206-9951
*** Technical Support Excellence for four decades.

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Re: Broadcom WiFi -- for a public library -- in Fedora 13 maybe? [now OT]

[Dan Jenkins]

On 6/11/2010 4:34 PM, Joshua Judson Rosen wrote:
 It's *us*. *We're* the Software Freedom Squad.
 Since when?

 Since *now*.

We don't have to wear spandex, do we??
I, for one, definitely do not look good in spandex.
But a cape might be cool.
My business partner, Keith, actually would look good in spandex. (He can 
lift 1,000 pounds.)
:-)

--
Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc., Bedford, NH, USA, 1-603-206-9951
*** Technical Support Services for four decades.

Now featuring Keith the Incredible Hulk and Dan the Double-Brained.

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Re: Open Source Auction Web Site software on Linux

[Dan Jenkins]

Thanks for everyone's thoughts on open source auction software. 
Digesting the options. I'll share my results.

--
Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc., Bedford, NH, USA, 1-603-206-9951
*** Technical Support Excellence for four decades.

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Re: Broadcom WiFi -- for a public library -- in Fedora 13 maybe?

[Dan Jenkins]

On 6/10/2010 2:11 PM, Bill Sconce wrote:
  I got an e-mail a couple of weeks ago, from a public library in a
  small New Hampshire town, with the subject

  HELP SAVE US FROM MICROSOFT!

  (I am not making this up.)  Such a plea caused me to do some
  perhaps-foolish things.  I called the library; I volunteered to help
  them; I omitted to ask what hardware was involved.

  Does anyone have experience, either with this laptop (Dell Dimension
  E5500) or with getting a $#! Broadcom adapter to work (a 4318
  apparently) -- or experience which justifies a decision to just not
  do this?

I've had almost no trouble getting Broadcom to work with Ubuntu and 
Mandriva distros. Just get the most current versions.

I haven't had as much luck with Fedora and Centos, though I didn't 
really try to; just gave the folk network cards which did work and put 
the Broadcoms in Windows laptops. (I had a surplus of laptops to 
exchange components between, and an enormous time crunch to just get 
things working.)


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Re: Open Source Auction Web Site software on Linux

[Dan Jenkins]

Ray Cote wrote:
  Hi Dan: While I won't say it is anywhere near 'best', I did write an
  Auction package for some local organizations. Written in Django and
  thus easily customized. Is pretty straight forward to use and extend.
  You can see samples of it at:
  http://auction.peterborougchamber.com
  http://auction.monadpets.org

  We've been using it for a few years and it addresses our needs. Set
  up is: Linux Django PostgreSQL.

  I've not taken the time to package it up, but if you're interested I
  can whip up a tarball and forward it to you. --Ray

I would definitely be interested in your auction software, Ray.
Thank you.

I have not used Django, so it'll be a chance to learn something else new.


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Open Source Auction Web Site software on Linux

[Dan Jenkins]

A client of mine asked me this morning to create a new domain and web 
site for on-line auctions of their items , eventually, consignments 
(they are in the collectibles/antiques business, primarily weaponry). 
They are not trying to reinvent eBay; they only want to list their own 
items and not the general public's. Rather than write my own, I searched 
for some existing solutions, but haven't found anything which jumps out 
as good, let alone, best. Does anyone have any suggestions for 
on-line auction software, preferably open source, though commercial is 
acceptable, if source is available (Perl, PHP, or Ruby, preferable)?

Running on Linux is mandatory (the distro started out as a RedHat 
variant years ago, but has been heavily customized since). We host with 
ICDSoft. They have the usual LAMP setup, as well as PostgreSQL, or other 
options, as needed.

Any package likely will need us to customize it some, presumably nothing 
onerous, as there are a few oddities of this business (governmental 
regulations) that off-the-shelf software might not provide. Plus I 
really prefer to be able to modify anything as needed.

So far I've seen the names of phpAuction, AuctionFactory (a module for 
Joomla), iLance, E-Z Auction, and a smattering of others which appear to 
be phpAuction-forks. I have only briefly looked at any of these, as I 
hope someone in the group has some experience with something reliable 
and, preferably, easy to work with.

Any thoughts?
TIA.

--
Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc., Bedford, NH, USA - 1-603-206-9951
+++ Excellence in IT Services for four decades.

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Re: [OT] Small business/SOHO accounting

[Dan Jenkins]

Benjamin Scott wrote:
  This isn't really Linux-related, but I think there are a number of
  people on this list likely to have good answers.  So:

  Anyone care to give recommendations in the small business/SOHO
  accounting product space? 


I've used Open Systems some years ago. It worked well. Their OSAS 
product cross-platform, including Linux  Windows.
http://www.osas.com/


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Re: Souhegan High School

[Dan Jenkins]

Jon 'maddog' Hall wrote:
 Here are the slides I used that day.  I am sending them to the list in
 case anyone else would like to see them.  If not, d is an appropriate
 action.
   
Thank you. This will be very helpful for me when I need to do a 
presentation later this year.

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Re: DHCPD and Windows question

[Dan Jenkins]

On 2/14/2010 12:26 PM, Todd Littlefield wrote:
  I finally got some time to sit down with Wireshark and compare the
  bootp packets between the D-Link and the Linux box...  The first
  thing that jumped out as different was the source address on the DHCP
  Offer packets.

  D-Link:  192.168.1.1 Linux: 127.0.0.1

  So, something wasn't right.  I began mucking around with a bunch of
  different settings based on the dhcpd.conf(5) pages.  None seemed to
  work...

  After looking a little closer at the server-identifier tag, it was
  misconfigured...  I was using the name instead of IP address.  The
  man pages are a bit confusing though...  It states:

  Theserver-identifier  statement

  *server-identifier*  hostname*;*

  The  server-identifier statement can be used to define the value
  that is sent in the DHCP Server Identifier option for a given scope.
  The value  specified*must*  be an IP address for the DHCP server, and
  must be reachable by all clients served by a particular scope.



  So, it needs to be set to the --hostname-- but they really mean
  --IP--  Why they didn't just specify it as:


  Theserver-identifier  statement

  *server-identifier*  *address;*


  I guess we will never know...  Right below that is the server-name
  tag, which really is the name.  So, if anyone else runs into this
  problem, the answer is RTFM --Carefully-- before adding things to the
  config.

In the man page for dhcpd.conf, after the paragraph above, it says:
  The use of the server-identifier statement is  not  recommended  -
  the  only  reason  to  use  it  is to force a value other than the
  default value to be sent on  occasions  where  the  default  value
  would  be  incorrect.The default value is the first IP address
  associated with  the  physical  network  interface  on  which  the
  request arrived.

  The  usual  case where the server-identifier statement needs to be
  sent is when a physical interface has more than  one  IP  address,
  and  the  one  being sent by default isn't appropriate for some or
  all clients served by that interface.  Another common case is when an
  alias  is  defined  for  the purpose of having a consistent IP
  address for the DHCP server, and it is desired  that  the  clients
  use this IP address when contacting the server.

So, you would not normally use it at all. I've never had a reason to use 
it myself.

I suspect, if you had an entry in /etc/hosts mapping your desired IP to 
that hostname,
and used that hostname in server-identifier, it would work. An IP 
derived from a DNS
lookup wouldn't, however.

--
Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc.

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[OT] Bonded web site developer?

[Dan Jenkins]

I was talking to a client the other day, who needs a web site developer 
for a non-profit of his. He was told to make sure he only used bonded 
web site developers. I have never heard, nor been able to find, any 
reference to bonded web site developers. Does anyone know about this?

I do know about EO insurance, bonding, and such, but not the relevance 
specifically to web site development.

Thanks.
--
Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc., 1-603-206-9951

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Re: [OT] Generator testing

[Dan Jenkins]

Ben Scott wrote:
 I know many UPSes don't like the output from some generators, for
 example -- they stay on battery (which runs down and then drops the
 load).  So I know just going to Home Depot and buying something off
 the shelf is probabbly a bad idea.  But I wouldn't know what to look
 for if I was asked to review a proposal.
   
I had not thought of that. Even though the UPSes are keeping the servers 
up, I don't know if the UPSes consider the generator power good. I'll 
have to check next week. We had proposed putting tiny UPSes on the 
network switches and access points so as to keep that stuff working, but 
a tiny UPS might not keep up devices for the 10 to 15 minute outage.

Thanks everyone for the interesting discussion I've seen so far.

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Re: Can't eject CD/DVD after warm reboot?

[Dan Jenkins]

Michael ODonnell wrote:
  Most of our HP systems (all recent models like xw8600 and z800)
  refuse to eject their optical media when the drive button is pushed
  after a warm reboot following a rescue/install session booted from
  that drive. Other systems (eg.  Dells) behave as we'd like when
  booted from those same discs so this seems clearly to be something
  related to HP hardware design or BIOS code.  This behavior is seen
  after using DVDs created using the old Timo's Rescue CD
  (Debian-based w/2.4 kernel) as well as a fairly current SysRescueCD
  (Gentoo-based w/2.6 kernel) configs.

  Is there some trick (maybe some kernel commandline option or some
  program executed during shutdown) that will leave the drive willing
  to eject the media (unlock it?)  without us having to power-cycle
  these machines?

  The Dell drives are IDE and the HPs are SATA - might that be
  relevant?

  Is it the case that the HPs are working correctly according to some
  spec and that the other systems that allow it are in fact the ones
  whose behavior is b0rken?

With SysRescueCD you can specify a parameter (docache) at boot to load 
the CD into a RAM drive, so that the CD can be ejected. Elsewise, the 
drive is locked while it is operating. It does unlock when we reboot on 
most systems, but we have found a few that actually require a power 
cycle to unlock the drive. That would be broken behavior.

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Re: URL syntax

[Dan Jenkins]

Ben Scott wrote:
  On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 7:48 PM, Dan Jenkinsd...@rastech.com wrote:
  Does the URL show properly in Thunderbird but then get messed up
  when Firefox gets it?
  Yes. If I recollect, it looked right in Thunderbird, but opening it
   caused a failure in Firefox.

  Curiouser and curiouser.  If I copy-and-paste the URL to a text
  editor, confirm the ampersand, then CP back to Firefox, it works
  properly.  If I manually type an ampersand as a Wikipedia URL, I get
  the appropriate redirect.  So Firefox does the right thing for me.
  Maybe it's the interaction between FF and TB?

  I've deleted the email, so I cannot do any further testing.

  If you want to do more testing, the URL was:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Search__Transfer

  If you don't want to do more testing, that's okay, too.  =-)

This URL worked fine for me. No idea why it came through broke the first 
time. If I recollect it was not the  encoding which was broke, but that 
there was a break in the URL. When I searched for the partial URL on 
Wikipedia, I found the right URL, which, when I posted it in my email, 
encoded the  as %26. This is purely from memory, during a very busy 
day, whilst concentrating on something else, so my memory may have no 
resemblance to reality. :-D

--
Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc., 1-603-206-9951





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Re: comcast dhcp leases

[Dan Jenkins]

On 08/25/2009 09:23 AM, jk...@kinz.org wrote:
  Hi all - I notice that  comcast has dropped its dhcp lease times down
  to about 15 minutes, it used to be a number of hours, which is rather
  longer.   I wonder if its possible to somehow have the dhcp requests
  ask for a longer lease period?  Anyone know, how If its possible?


You can request a longer lease time, but not compel it. That is up to 
Comcast's DHCP server configuration.
If you use dhclient, it is the dhcp-lease-time option, which is sent as 
part of the send request if I recollect.
I've never used it.

I just checked my last few Comcast leases have been about 220,000 
seconds each (60 hours). I've had the same IP number for a couple of years.


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Re: URL syntax

[Dan Jenkins]

Ben Scott wrote:
  On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 7:13 PM, Dan Jenkinsd...@rastech.com wrote:
  So I guess the failure is in software at Dan's end.
  Which is Thunderbird 2.0.0.22 and Firefox 3.5.2. Odd behavior, as
  I've never seen it before. But then, I've never seen an ampersand
  in a URL that wasn't encoded.

  Does the URL show properly in Thunderbird but then get messed up when
  Firefox gets it? 

Yes. If I recollect, it looked right in Thunderbird, but opening it 
caused a failure in Firefox.
I've deleted the email, so I cannot do any further testing.

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[OT] - Recovery of data from DVD-R

[Dan Jenkins]

May be Linux related, if anyone can suggest Linux tools to use. :-)

A friend has a DVD-R which contains sentimental documents from her 
mother  father who passed away recently. The DVD is unreadable. The 
DVD-R was burned April 2008 and was stored since then in a bubble-wrap 
envelope and, by the appearance, squeezed under a pile or between books. 
The surface of the DVD has an imprint of the bubble wrap on the surface, 
which several cleaning passes (DVD cleaner  alcohol with a microfiber 
cloth from a DVD cleaning kit) did not completely remove. The disk 
simply fails to read anything.

Any suggestions? Including data recovery services who might be able to help.
Thanks.

--
Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc.

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Re: Cookout? CORRECTION!

[Dan Jenkins]

Bill McGonigle wrote:
 On 07/22/2009 09:18 AM, Ted Roche wrote:
   
 So sorry. Shouldn't type before the second cup of coffee. The cookout 
 would be off Exit 23 of I-93, not I-89.
 
 At least it's non-routable (89 leaves NH just after x20 in W. Leb).

 -Bill
   
Non-routable in Vermont too. When 89 leaves Vermont for Canada, it is 
after x22.

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Re: OpenSSH vulnerability?

[Dan Jenkins]

 From http://isc.sans.org today:
  For the last couple of days we've been all witnesses of FUD
  surrounding a supposed 0-day exploit for OpenSSH skyrocketing.

  At this moment, it definitely looks like we're dealing with a hoax –
  even more, it's not the first time someone said they have a 0-day
  exploit for SSH.

OpenSSH 0day FUD http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=6760

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Re: OpenSSH vulnerability?

[Dan Jenkins]

Neil Joseph Schelly wrote:
 On Thursday 09 July 2009 02:38:18 pm Ben Scott wrote:
   
   Someone perpetrated a successful DDoS attack against OpenSSH
 servers.  Of course, the attack vector was human fears, and the
 technique social engineering.  It's hard to patch OpenSSH against
 that.
 

 I'm not sure how widespread it is, but I know that ANHosting (MidPhase) is 
 blocking it entirely.  And they've got no ETA for when they'll put it back so 
 far.  I guess they're waiting for details and patches about the exploit to be 
 released... ugh.
   
HostGator has disabled OpenSSH support for now. No ETA for restoration 
either.

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Re: [OT] DTV switch-over

[Dan Jenkins]

Joshua Judson Rosen wrote:
  Greg Rundlett (freephile) g...@freephile.com writes:
  btw, at least in Newburyport, Comcast has been advertising this
  heavily with automated calls, mailings, newspaper ads.  Today they
  even called me live.  In the process, they are also shifting some
  of the lineup (emphasizing the new channels you get, not the ones
  they're removing).
  Yeesh. Hearing things like this makes me glad that I don't have to
  deal with them anymore.

  How? I just gave up television. ;)

  And it's been really interesting--I've occasionally found myself
  going through this routine where I sit wander into the living-room,
  sit down on the couch, spend a minute trying to remember why I'm
  there..., and then I remember that I have something else that I want
  to be doing--and I go do it :)

I stopped watching over ten years ago. I had a similar habit until I 
moved to a new house.
I did gain a lot more time, which I now waste frivolously in other 
areas. :-)

--
Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc.


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[OT] Experience with getting participation in school web site by teachers

[Dan Jenkins]

This is totally off-topic (except that we use Linux for all of the 
server infrastructure there), but I figured some of you may have some 
insight on this issue.

We have an elementary school as a client. They want to have a more 
dynamic web site with teachers / classrooms having more up-to-date web 
presence. Web presence defined as any of web page(s), blogs, wiki, etc. 
Each classroom sub-site could be different. They just want to have 
something which teachers would update with minimal effort for those who 
won't/can't expend more effort. As most places, there are a few zealous 
ones, a bulk of if-it's-not-too-much-trouble (or, to be honest, 
I-don't-have-enough-time-as-it-is) ones and a few no-way-no-how ones.

They do not have a clear idea of what they want to present, nor to whom. 
(I know that ought to be the first thing, but they simply don't know 
yet.) This is brain-storming phase.

They tried a website some years ago, with each classroom having a web 
page, but it bogged down. They were using various web editors (Publisher 
mostly), and most people got tied up in the effort of creating web pages 
that looked good to them, versus content that was useful to others.

I am not looking for ways to inspire them (though I will be happy to 
listen to any).

I am looking for tools to make it easy for them to update content 
(broadly defining content) and provide an overarching structure to make 
it easy-to-find.

They have four Linux servers (Mandriva), with the usual LAMP. We are 
planning on overhaul of their Linux servers this summer to address 
performance (on their email server/web filter) and storage issues (they 
are doing much more video editing and space has gotten tight). This 
summer would be a good time to put any new infrastructure for this in place.

Does anyone have any suggestions?
--
Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc., Bedford, NH, - 603-206-9951
*** IT support excellence for thirty years

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Re: searching/grepping for words near each other

[Dan Jenkins]

virgins...@vfemail.net wrote:
  From: kevin_d_cl...@comcast.net (Kevin D. Clark) Date: 30 Apr 2009
  12:02:19 -0400
  I want to search a text file for a few (alphabetic) words which
  must be near each other, but not necessarily on the same line.
  Near could be defined however you like... within a certain
  number of words from each other, a certain number of charecters
  from each other, or some similar constraint.

I believe this is often called a proximity search. I did write some 
code to do it three decades ago in Lisp. I don't recollect where I 
gleaned the algorithm though.

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[OT] Opinion of Systems Plus Computers in Lebanon

[Dan Jenkins]

Does anyone know these folk?
I have a client who wants to buy about 25 laptops  accessories from 
them and wants any opinions of them.
Mainly in regards to reliability, not service. Their pricing is 
disturbingly good and she is not sure whether to be happy or wary.
Any thoughts?
Thanks.
--
Dan Jenkins, 1-603-206-9951, Rastech Inc.

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Re: Meaning of GNU find options: -mtime, -ctime, -atime

[Dan Jenkins]

virgins...@vfemail.net wrote:
  A question was raised recently on the list about the exact meaning of
  arguments to GNU find's -mtime test.  While I've been able to get by
  for years without understanding the exact semantics, I decided was
  for me to dig in and learn how exactly this works.

  Here's what I found (no pun intended).  If anyone finds any mistakes
  in this description, please holler... loudly. :)

Just what I've needed for years and never took the time to understand fully.
Thank you.

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Re: Question about the ADF of a scanner.

[Dan Jenkins]

Tom Buskey wrote:

  I ran tests for a company developing a color printer ink jet in 1988.  They
had an issue with jams when wear started.  We tried alcohol  increasing the
force onto the rollers, It required a redesign of the paper path.

With the new path you could crumple the paper, flatten it, then feed it at
300 dpi.  You could feed a piece of cloth through and get a decent print
onto it.
  

That's impressive. 

When I ponder the number of printers we've seen that jam when facing a
1/16" skew in the paper hopper...



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[OT] Inadvertent HTML post to [Re: Question about the ADF of a scanner.]

[Dan Jenkins]

I apologize for inadvertently sending a post in HTML. Not quite sure
how that happened as all posts to gnhlug.org are sent as text, as are
most of my emails to anyone, unless I explicitly override it. Sorry for
any inconvenience.



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[OT] Text vs HTML

[Dan Jenkins]

Yet another apology, I found why I was posting in HTML, even though I 
intended to explicitly send in text to gnhlug.org.

I am truly sorry for that, as I am aware both of the technical and the 
personal reasons not to do so as some members have a strong objection to 
HTML email.

I use Thunderbird. It works well for me and does IMAP fairly well as 
well as being cross-platform, so I can use it from Linux, OS X and 
Windows, all of which I must use constantly. I explicitly configured 
sending to the group to be a text-only domain. Somehow I had an entry in 
one of my address books which indicated gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org 
preferred HTML. As I also had a separate entry in the same address book 
saying it preferred text, I am not sure how that happened. Even if 
Thunderbird is told the domain prefers text, it will override that if 
the address book says otherwise. As to which entry wins when there are 
duplicates in the address book, I guess the most embarrassing one must, 
by Murphy's Law.

In any event, I have corrected the issue here, and will check the other 
computers I work from elsewhere to ensure this does not recur.

(I shall now slink away in embarrassment.)

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Re: Question about the ADF of a scanner.

[Dan Jenkins]

Steven W. Orr wrote:
 I just scored a free HP C6270A scanner with an automatic document feeder. 
 Sane seems to talk to it just fine. I'm *almost* happy. The ADF seems to 
 jam up. Is there something that I personally can do that's cost effective 
 to fix the ADF or am I SOOL?
   
I have had this sort of problem with feed rollers on some scanners and 
printers. Basically, they get glazed and cannot pull the paper. Cleaning 
the feed rollers helps sometimes. Typically I use alcohol to clean them 
and then, if I'm still having a problem, a very, very mild abrasive 
(emery cloth, for example) to slightly roughen the roller surface. They 
are other cleaning supplies which used to help, but I don't know whether 
they still exist; they were used to clean typewriter rollers.

Of course, there could be another cause, but this might help.

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Re: OT? Shipping issues?

[Dan Jenkins]

Ben Scott wrote:
 On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 2:59 PM, Hewitt_Tech hewitt_t...@comcast.net wrote:
   
 Recently I've noticed that both major overnight package delivery
 companies have been damaging packages.
 

   Other than the Recently part, your experience matches mine.
 Shipping eats boxes, but this isn't news.

   My favorite was a story told to me at UNH, where a rather expensive
 new computer arrived with holes in the box and BB shot rolling around
 inside.  Apparently, someone had used it for target practice.  This
 was no more recently than 1996.
   

To be honest we've had largely good luck in shipping, except for a few 
instances.

My favorite story was when our regular man-in-brown sheepishly brought 
in what appeared to be an accordion made of metal - the sole surviving 
piece of the server that had fallen out of the back of his truck and was 
slammed by a tractor trailer into oncoming traffic where it was hit by a 
dump truck and knocked into a swamp where it sank. They did not dispute 
the claim.

Nothing in the last twenty years has equaled that, so I consider the 
other incidents minor annoyances.

--
Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc.

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Re: Question about the ADF of a scanner.

[Dan Jenkins]

Michael ODonnell wrote:
 feed rollers on some scanners and printers.  Basically, they
 get glazed and cannot pull the paper.  Cleaning the feed rollers
 helps sometimes.  Typically I use alcohol to clean them and then,
 if I'm still having a problem, a very, very mild abrasive
 
 I'll second that and as an aside I'll comment (having
 run printing presses and mail processing equipment in a
 previous life) that automated paper handling is a problem
 that gets %0.01 of the respect it deserves.  Considering the
 essentially infinite combination of infuriatingly subtle
 variables (static electricity, fiber quality, temperature,
 moisture [ambient as well as absorbed], friction coefficients,
 roller degradation, fouling by dust/grease/fibers, etc, etc)
 it's a fscking miracle printers work at all, never mind that
 most of the time you don't even have to think about them.
   
Amen. I've worked in  out of the printing  publishing industry for 
about thirty years. Good pressmen have amazed me getting good print out 
of poor ink and lousy paper and quirky presses.

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Re: Disk imaging for XP system

[Dan Jenkins]

Chris wrote:

  I have an XP system which I want to migrate from a 250GB IDE drive to a
500GB SATA drive, is there a live CD and package that would allow me to do
that, I have tried Norton Ghost (2003) but that can't see the SATA drive,
and I have also tried Powerquest partition magic image center with no luck
because that barfs on some directory entry.

WIll dd or some other program do the job or will I have to try to find some
other package?
  

We use Acronis, a worthy replacement for our beloved, lamented
PartitionMagic. 
Acronis does support SATA, IDE, USB, etc. A very nice tool. 
Acronis TrueImage Workstation sounds like the specific product you want.

If you want to stick to Linux tools, I have used GPartEd with good
results.
I use it from SystemRescue CD.




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Re: How many laptops to a wireless AP?

[Dan Jenkins]

Ted Roche wrote:

  I'm looking at setting up a caf//-style space where somewhere between 
10 and 25 people will be working on their laptop. I'd be bringing in an 
internet connection, likely a Comcast 16/2, and I anticipate most folks 
will be surfing with 802-11g or n (draft). Mostly surfing, with 
occasional file uploads, YouTube viral videos. Twittering, or debugging 
a misbehaving Drupal app.

Can 25 people share a single wireless access point, or will more than 
one be needed? Would a consumer-grade WRT54G or equivalent be suitable? 
For simplification, let's assume an open 40' x 50' space with fairly 
clear line-of-sight and no major physical obstacles. I recognize if 
there's a second space behind a brick wall they'll likely need their own 
WAP or a switched connection. I'm more concerned with the load on a 
single WAP. I've done mostly wired deployments or single AP layouts with 
a couple people, so I'm not sure where the loading will drag it down.

Any insights on things to set up (DDWRT, traffic shaping) or avoid would 
be appreciated.
  

I have successfully used Linksys WRT54GL with DDWRT or HyperWRT Thibor
(the latter is deprecated I gather) firmware for about 40 concurrent
users in three different settings: teachers in a training session, kids
in a mobile lab setting, and a small cube farm with mixed engineers
 biz folk. I had no problems with simultaneous connections. The
teachers and kids all were making Internet connections simultaneously
for their training and testing (25-35 of them).

I have also used Belkin (don't recollect the model) with stock firmware
for a school with about 200 users. I have eight scattered around, plus
two with stock WRT54G firmware. We used to have a lot of problems when
we had older Linksys units, but most of the problem likely came from
them moving the access points around, rather than from the equipment
itself. They didn't have enough APs for the physical space and did not
understand how to deal with wireless. (Several times we found three or
four access points stacked on top of each other to, in the words of
someone, "boost the signal.") Once we got the units evenly distributed
and secured and configured the laptops properly, things have been
running well. We did do some basic testing to ensure reasonable signal
strength throughout the space when we positioned the units.

Based on your physical dimensions, I would go with two, on
non-overlapping channels, one at each end of the space.



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Re: How many laptops to a wireless AP?

[Dan Jenkins]

Alan Johnson wrote:

  On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 3:29 PM, Dan Jenkins d...@rastech.com wrote:
  
  
 I have successfully used Linksys WRT54GL with DDWRT or HyperWRT Thibor
(the latter is deprecated I gather) firmware for about 40 concurrent users
in three different settings: teachers in a training session, kids in a
mobile lab setting, and a small cube farm with mixed engineers  biz folk. I
had no problems with simultaneous connections. The teachers and kids all
were making Internet connections simultaneously for their training and
testing (25-35 of them).

I have also used Belkin (don't recollect the model) with stock firmware for
a school with about 200 users. I have eight scattered around, plus two with
stock WRT54G firmware. We used to have a lot of problems when we had older
Linksys units, but most of the problem likely came from them moving the
access points around, rather than from the equipment itself. They didn't
have enough APs for the physical space and did not understand how to deal
with wireless. (Several times we found three or four access points stacked
on top of each other to, in the words of someone, "boost the signal.") Once
we got the units evenly distributed and secured and configured the laptops
properly, things have been running well. We did do some basic testing to
ensure reasonable signal strength throughout the space when we positioned
the units.

Based on your physical dimensions, I would go with two, on non-overlapping
channels, one at each end of the space
  
  
Looking only at the wireless network layer, 802.11b is bad at handling
multiple active clients and will only get you 5Mbps of application
throughput when you have an 11Mbps connection over the air.  It should
handle 10-20 active clients on a ~1Mbps back haul fairly nicely since that
leaves 4Mbps to be wasted on collisions and retransmits.

  

I had forgotten to mention that we had eliminated all the 11b we could
in that 200 users network. That definitely helped a lot.

  11a/g starts with a bigger pipe of ~14Mbps of application throughput on a
36Mbps+ connection over the air and is better at sharing it.  If every one
has full signal and with 54Mbps of on-the-air speed, that gives you 18Mbps
to waste on collisions.  You should easily be able to serve 40 clients (as
mentioned by Dan) sharing a 12Mbps connection.  You might not want to play
Doom on it, but if you are mostly talking about web browsing and email, that
kind of bursty, not-so-latency-sensitivity traffic should be fine.  In fact,
I would think you could get 100 or more users sharing such a connection.  If
you are limited to 6Mbps back-haul, and disable 11b, then I'd bet on a
pretty smooth ride all 100+.

11n varies widely in application throughput by device (did that ever come
out of draft?), but I have not heard anything less than 100Mbps.  I don't
know for sure, but I am pretty sure it uses the same sharing as 11a/g.  I
would be shocked if it is worse.  At a max of 200 simultaneous routed
connections (a la Bruce Dawson's link) you are going to hit that before you
max out 11n clients.

So, my suggestion is that 1 11g router on a clean channel should more than
meet your needs if the guts behind the radio can handle the connections.  Go
for 11n if you expect that kind of client, but remember that 2.4Ghz 11n
traffic will crush any 11b/g traffic competing for the same bandwidth on a
nearby access point.  Same goes for 5Ghz 11n vs 11a.  Not really your
problem, but we Linux geeks are all about play-nice, right?

Also, 11n uses twice the bandwidth per channel, so you need 2 of the 3
non-overlapping channels of 11b/g to run 11n at 2.4Ghz.  This means you will
aways be using some of channel 6, the middle of which is the resonant
frequency of H2O used by microwave ovens.  (This is why the 2.4Ghz band is
unlicensed.)  I have not heard of microwave ovens causing noticeable
problems with 11n at 2.4Ghz, but they sure can screw up 11g and they crush
any 11b within range.

  

I've definitely seen problems with 2.4GHz cordless phones taking out
11g. Never noticed microwaves doing it though.

  As for picking a clean channel and playing nice, run net stumbler before you
buy anything just to see the situation, unless you are sure you are clean in
this location.  It is free, so it does not hurt to check anyway.  Kind of a
fun tool to play with.  It even cracks WEP keys for you!  Or is that Air
Snort...  It has been a while since I played with either.

In a perfect world, everyone runs 5Ghz 11n and leaves 2.4 for other
technologies, but unless you are in a corporate setup with bucks to blow on
new client WNICs, then I'm guessing that won't happen. =)

  

My experience with 11n at 2.4 GHz is limited. It works nicely at 5 GHz.

I was (operative word, "was") in a situation where we could have
switched everyone at our client to 11n, but then the economy happened
and that
project is shelved now.

  Oh, and it is worth mentioning that Linksys hardware runs 

Re: linux accounting software or cheap winxp

[Dan Jenkins]

Derek Atkins wrote:
 Lloyd Kvam pyt...@venix.com writes:
   
 NOTE-- The payroll documentation says:

 GnuCash does not have an integrated payroll system.  While you can track
 payroll expenses in GnuCash, the calculation of taxes and deductions has
 to be done outside of GnuCash.

 That's the last piece a small business would seem to need.
 
 Doing payroll is harder than it seems.  There are pretax and posttax
 deductions, and then there are all the various taxes that need to be
 taken out, some from the employee, and some employer-paid.  Then of
 course there's the fact that each locale has its own tax rate, and those
 change year to year...  I think the best we could do in GnuCash is come
 up with a good payroll framework and then let the actual tax rates and
 local rules get plugged into the framework.

 This has been discussed on the gnucash-devel mailing list, and I
 encourage anyone interested in this topic (or better yet, interested in
 implementing it!) to join that list and bring it up there.
   
I wrote a payroll system a few decades ago. As I started from a far too 
simplistic framework, I created something too baroque to be maintainable 
in the long run. Coming from New Hampshire's fairly simply P/R taxes, I 
had no idea how complicated taxation could be elsewhere. Being a green 
software engineer didn't help, of course. I used to be amazed that 
no-one had developed a common framework that everyone could simply 
incorporate in their products. I still think it could be done. Now I 
would envision it as a separate service independent of GnuCash (or 
whatever application), so those applications would not need to embed the 
varying rates  logic within themselves, just pass some information to 
the payroll service, which would internally track the pay information, 
and the application would get back the results. Not that I have any 
desire to tackle that project ever again.

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Re: linux accounting software or cheap winxp

[Dan Jenkins]

Lloyd Kvam wrote:
 I could not find any adequate business accounting packages for Linux.
   
It's been a couple of years since I evaluated them, but here's a few 
packages I checked out back then which looked reasonable.
Without knowing what depth  purpose of accounting software you need, it 
is hard to advise which is best.

In alphabetical order:
Appgen
AccPac - pricey if I recollect, I think it is Sage now
American Business Systems (ABS)
GnuCash - Very Basic
Open Systems Inc. (OSAS) - this looked best for my application at the 
time; seemed pretty well-rounded
SBT - I believe this is long gone, but I did use an older version under 
Linux once; it was quite good and source code open years ago
SQL Ledger - looked good, but required a lot of work to configure, if I 
recollect
Vigilant for Linux

There's a listing of about 300 Linux accounting packages here:
http://www.findaccountingsoftware.com/software/browse/serveros/17

The same site lists other operating systems too.
http://www.findaccountingsoftware.com

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Re: Blackduck Software and IP

[Dan Jenkins]

Paul Lussier wrote:
 BlackDuck (i.e. specifically my friend) has spent months painstakingly
 researching each and every package for Debian (and probably RH,
 others) and created a database correlating versions with packages with
 licenses, etc.  Additionally, they've created checksums of everything
 such that they can scan large repositories and detect these signatures
 to help you determine if what your shipping falls under certain
 licenses.

 They are in fact a legit company, consisting of people who hold FOSS
 very near and dear.  They have just found a way to monetize a service
 around FOSS as well.
   
Oh, I wish I had known about them a year ago when I had to manually do 
much the same at a client.
(As well as trying to explain fourth hand to a lawyer what a compiler 
was and why we needed to use one - and, no, we couldn't write our own.)
They could have saved us several man months of effort, which was 
critically needed on actual development then.

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Re: Bots don't honor 301 :(

[Dan Jenkins]

virgins...@vfemail.net wrote:

  
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2009 19:46:26 -0500
From: "Ben Scott" dragonh...@gmail.com

  
  
not to.  There are orders of magnitude more bots then web servers.

  
  
That's quite a claim.  Do you have evidence for this?
  

I can't say for the types of payload, which would affect your
remediation efforts, carried on the various botnets (which, of course,
varies depending on how the authors and their sublettors use the
botnets), but the Storm botnet was enormous by most estimates. Kraken
the current (known) king is supposed to be(come) bigger. There are
about 186,727,854 web sites currently, though, obviously, far fewer web
servers to host them. To, if the estimate of 50,000,000 in the Storm
botnet (using the higher numbers) was accurate and, for sake of
argument, 10 web sites are hosted on a server on average (purely out of
thin air number I made up), there are 19,000,000 web servers. So, for
sake of argument (do we need a sake for argument?), there are more
botnets than web servers. :-)

References:
Botnet sizes:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/16/AR2006021601388.html

Storm:
http://www.neoseeker.com/news/7103-worm-storm-gathers-strength/

Kraken:
http://www.darkreading.com/security/perimeter/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=211201307

Websites:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2008/12/24/december_2008_web_server_survey.html



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Re: Bots don't honor 301 :(

[Dan Jenkins]

virgins...@vfemail.net wrote:

  Yes, but the number of compromised hosts isn't critical - it's the
number of unique scan queues which is important to evading tarpits.
If a botnet has 50,000,000 nodes, is vulnerable to tarpitting, and
scans every IP address on the Internet in exactly the same order, then
a single tarpit would still save 1/2 the hosts on the Internet from
ever being probed.

The crucial element is the *order* in which prospective hosts are
scanned.  Assuming the bot is deterministic, hosts are likely to be
scanned in the same order by every copy of the bot.
  

>From http://www.honeynet.org/node/54:

Most botnets use a topic command like:
  
 1. ".advscan lsass 200 5 0 -r -s"
  
The first topic tells the bot to spread further with the help of the
LSASS vulnerability. 200 concurrent threads should scan with a delay of
5 seconds for an unlimited time (parameter 0). The scans should be
random (parameter -r) and silent (parameter -s), thus avoiding too much
traffic due to status reports. 


Scans are almost always random nowadays. The bots download their
commands from an IRC channel or some other command-and-control channel,
so they don't have the same list of addresses to scan as the others.
The CC spreads the address ranges for scans around to reduce
visibility to behavioral analysis tools.

There are a number of articles, white papers, research topics available
on distributed scanning, address partitioning and management at the
CC end. 

Bots are not deterministic. They get new addresses often. They are
updated with new payloads and new behaviors. Portions of them are
rented out to others who have differing needs (DDOS, spamming, etc.).
Their updates often come from varied sources as those channels are fast
fluxed and thus change constantly  continually. No two bots are
likely to be completely the same. Why would they have them all scan the
same addresses or behave in a strictly predictable fashion? Brownian
motion provides adequate coverage. Spread the address ranges around to
gain greater coverage. Adjust behavior based on success or failure.

Delaying a single mind-controlled foot soldier, or even destroying such
a soldier, does not prevent, or even slow, the battle from continuing
as the swarm is chaotic. It does not need to be lock-step to accomplish
its goals.



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Re: Inspiron Mini 9?

[Dan Jenkins]

We have about 40 HP 2133 subnotebooks. The keyboard is almost normal
sized. No special keystrokes needed to reach common keys, at least none
I've noticed. The Lenovo Thinkpad X series is very small, though
arguably not a subnotebook. Close to normal sized and laid out keyboard
as well.

Linux (System Rescue, which is Gentoo based) seemed to recognize all
the hardware on the HP. We've had Mandriva on the Lenovo.




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Re: buying a laptop either bare or with Ubuntu

[Dan Jenkins]

Greg Rundlett wrote:

  On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 12:02 PM, Lloyd Kvam [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  
  
On Fri, 2008-11-14 at 10:53 -0500, Ben Scott wrote:


  The question is, did you avoid paying for it anyway?

  

Vista Home Premium appears to add $30 to the cost.


  
  
I've noticed many vendors offering a Windows XP "downgrade" for an
additional fee.  I just ordered a Lenovo notebook, and they do that.
I don't know what to say about paying not to get something other than
it sounds like a mafia racket.  /me shakes head.  If I were going to
actually run Windows, then I'd probably pay extra for the XP option

  

Microsoft's licensing for Vista Business allows you to downgrade it to
Windows XP.
In fact, it is the only way to officially buy Windows XP on most
computers.
You can't buy XP from Microsoft (they sell you a Vista Business license
instead) or from most (all?) retail channels.
So, you have to pay a premium to upgrade to Vista Business, so you can
downgrade to Windows XP.
I recently bought some Windows XP laptops which came with Vista
Business stickers.
Presumably all this downgrading counts as a Vista sale to Microsoft,
even though it is not being used as Vista.



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Adding custom tags to RPMs

[Dan Jenkins]

Does anyone know if it is possible to add user-created custom tags to 
RPMs when creating them?
Thanks.

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Re: Adding custom tags to RPMs

[Dan Jenkins]

Michael ODonnell wrote:
 Dan Jenkins wrote:
   
 Does anyone know if it is possible to add user-created
 custom tags to RPMs when creating them?
 

 I don't quite understand what you're asking for but you
 can cause rpm to generate a list of all possible tags thus:

rpm --querytags

 ...some of which can (I believe) be specified in .spec
 file directives.
  
I didn't make it clear. I was asked whether it was possible to extend 
the list of standard tags in RPM packages someone is building. I don't 
know exactly what issue they are trying to solve, but a custom tag would 
help them somehow. I forwarded the question to the folk who would know 
what was possible best. :-)


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Re: Adding custom tags to RPMs

[Dan Jenkins]

Jarod Wilson wrote:
 Ah. So ignore my prior post. There was some discussion along these lines
 on the fedora devel mailing list a little while back, and iirc, the
 answer was that you could really only do this by code changes to rpm
 itself. Otherwise, rpm won't know to store the info in that tag in the
 rpm database, apps won't know to look for that tag, etc.
   

That is just what I needed to know. I'll pass it on.
Thank you.

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Re: Server issues baffling me...

[Dan Jenkins]

Neil Joseph Schelly wrote:
 I have a server that I can turn on in our office, plugged into the 
 wall, and it will work fine for days, weeks, whatever.  I have never 
 had a problem there.  When I bring it to the datacenter, it won't 
 finish booting before it starts to get hda DMA timeouts.  It's the 
 errors I typically associate with a failed drive.  Without fail, the 
 machine does it every time it's booted up in the datacenter.  And 
 without exception again, it works fine in the office.

Is the visiting server connected to the exact same power source as the
datacenter equipment? Is the monitor/serial console plugged into the
same power as the computer?

Years ago, we had a client with an odd problem, where the system became
intermittently unstable, and the hard drive sometimes failed, when the
equipment was moved into another room. We discovered there was a 400
volt difference in ground between the outlet into which the computer was
sometimes plugged and another outlet used by a peripheral, which was
occasionally connected to the computer, when the computer was in that
room. When the peripheral was connected and turned on and the computer
was plugged into the other outlet, the computer became unstable and
ate hard drives. It took a lot of visits for our tech to find that one.

We had a vaguely similar problem once with network cables with differing 
ground voltages.


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Re: Search-and-replace text in Firefox

[Dan Jenkins]

Ben Scott wrote:
   Anyone know of a Firefox extension or Greasemonkey userscript which
 provides an ad hoc search-and-replace text feature?  I frequently
 find myself wanting to do this within an HTML form's TEXTAREA box, or
 even across multiple text fields.

Xinha WISIWIG Editor
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1449

Right click in a TextArea and choose Open Xinha Here (probably has a 
shortcut key too). Just found it. I guess my Google-Fu was stronger today.

Works fairly well in my admittedly short testing. Does a lot more than 
just find and replace.

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[OT] Offer Gateway Connected Media Player

[Dan Jenkins]

Does anyone have any interest in a Gateway Connected Media Player 
(CMP1)? It is a web-based, SMB-based music player. No storage itself; it 
uses a SMB share. A friend gave it to me. I think the Analog Audio Out 
might not work, but the Digital Out has never been used. The web server, 
etc., still works. He was replacing his equipment, so he didn't try to 
debug it at all.


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Re: [OT] Offer Gateway Connected Media Player

[Dan Jenkins]

This is pending pickup already.

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Re: KVM question

[Dan Jenkins]

Jerry Feldman wrote:
  I've got excellent feedback on Avocent, Raritan Dominion, and Rose
  electronics, but not on Aten. Our company uses Rose Electronics
  equipment in their Toronto and other data centers, but the Aten
  KH1516I seems to have the equivalent functionality for a lot less.

  snip

  I've already got feedback from Avocent users, but I am looking for
  feedback primarily on Aten as that is the  most cost effective
  solution.

We are expecting that Aten model this coming week and plan to install it 
immediately.
I shall provide any feedback we have once it is in use.

--
Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc., Bedford, NH
Excellence in IT Services for over three decades.

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Re: New distro question

[Dan Jenkins]

Labitt, Bruce wrote:
 I realize this is / was / will be a religious argument, but I'm having
 trouble with this distribution of Centos on my computer.  I was
 wondering if there was a distro more up to date and was suited for
 scientific calculations.
   
Personally, we use Mandriva. It generally just works. It was derived 
from a RedHat ancestor, so it is ought to be familiar to RedHat folk. 
They have a new release every year typically. The updates are fairly 
quick in between.

I am not familiar with their scientific packages. I know there are some 
in the repositories, especially the contrib repository. Anything in 
particular you are looking for.

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Re: Cheap Gigabit switch will allow DHCP thru it?

[Dan Jenkins]

Ben Scott wrote:

  On Dec 30, 2007 1:16 PM, Bruce Labitt [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  
  
Is there a simple way to swap eth0 and eth1?

  
  
  You're running Fedora, right?  If so, get to a root shell prompt,
and do the following:

service network stop
cd /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts
mv ifcfg-eth0 ifcfg-tmp
mv ifcfg-eth1 ifcfg-eth0
mv ifcfg-tmp ifcfg-eth1
# now swap the actual network cables (don't type this line :)  )
service network start

  Unless you've got something referencing the actual network
interfaces -- which is unusual, most things use IP addresses -- this
should work fine.  The one question mark might be the firewall.  If
needed, you can reconfigure it using the command:

system-config-securitylevel
  

You will also need to edit the ifcfg-eth0 and ifcfg-eth1 files to
actually say DEVICE=eth0 and DEVICE=eth1 respectively.
Since udev is on by default (at least in FC8), you will need to edit
/etc/udev/... (Mike ODonnell mentioned this in another post).
You may also find /etc/modules.conf needs editing.
I do a grep -r eth0 /etc/* to find all the relevant places when I need
to do this sort of thing.



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Re: Cheap Gigabit switch will allow DHCP thru it?

[Dan Jenkins]

Ben Scott wrote:

  On Dec 30, 2007 2:24 PM, Dan Jenkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  
  
 You will also need to edit the ifcfg-eth0 and ifcfg-eth1 files to actually
say DEVICE=eth0 and DEVICE=eth1 respectively.

  
D'oh!  You're right.  I always forget that.
  

As have I, which is why I remember it now.

  
Since udev is on by default (at least in FC8), you will need to edit
/etc/udev/...

  
Not if if you're swapping the IP configurations, as described above.
 In that case, the device names should stay the same.  Alternatively,
you can swap the device names, and keep the IP configuration
untouched.  Swapping both will end up doing nothing
  
 You may also find /etc/modules.conf needs editing.

  
Only if changing device names, and not the assigned IP configurations.
  

Good point. I had forgotten the original reason. (Not good when
answering questions.) I'm usually swapping them from another reason.



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Re: Phone Hands free

[Dan Jenkins]

Tom Buskey wrote:

I use a wired earpiece in the car so I can keep my hands on the wheel when I
drive.  I've used it while running out of the car to get something  keep my
hands free.  It's nice to be able to do something  not have to wait for the
call to finish.

BT would mean I don't have that pesky wire hanging around.  I could see BT
headphones being useful instead of wired when I'm doing yardwork, mountain
biking and motorcycling.

I could see it in a remote data center.  The tech in the center has the
BT/phone while using tools as someone else is talking them though it.

Of course, it can get out of hand.
  


For safety when driving, a hands-free kit is very important. Only not 
talking on the phone could be safer. (Or not driving at all, of course.)


We used wired headsets for a couple of years. We both kept catching the 
wires and tearing off the headset or phone. We purchased at least three 
wired headsets during that time, as we kept destroying them. One phone 
was held together by duct tape by the end. We only converted to BT 
headsets this last year when we got BT-capable phones. We would never 
switch back - dorky as the blinking blue headset looks. I'm geek, so 
that doesn't matter to me, but my business partner is definitely not 
geek. The benefits outweigh the appearance aspect for him.


I've had my business partner talk me to a destination, giving me street 
by street directions from Google Maps when I would otherwise have needed 
to either stop and view a map or, much worse, try to read a map while 
driving (haven't we all done that). He has also rerouted me around 
traffic/construction/weather blockages.


We have both used headsets when acting as remote techs. Making the 
phones hands-free made collaborative work possible that was inconvenient 
or impossible before. Making them wireless perfected it. As we have 
unlimited minutes between our phones, we can effectively work together 
while physically separate. We rarely are sitting at computers where IM 
would be feasible, and voice is more effective for us, so BT headsets 
have allowed us to greatly increase the amount of work we can get done 
without detriment to the immediate tasks at hand.


They are not status symbols whatsoever, but cost effective tools with 
safety benefits.


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Re: Phone Hands free

[Dan Jenkins]

Bill McGonigle wrote:

  On Dec 20, 2007, at 14:24, Ben Scott wrote:

  
  
On Dec 20, 2007 1:50 PM, Dan Jenkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


  I've had my business partner talk me to a destination ...
  

  Is his name "Tom"?  ;-)

  
  
First and last?
  

Which would make him a GPS.

However, his name is not Tom, neither Tom Tom nor Tom Bombadil.



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[OT] VOIP provider recommendations

[Dan Jenkins]

A client of mine is looking into VOIP and has a proposal recommending 
IPTelesis, who I have never heard of.
They need 40 telephones and 9 voice paths according to the proposal, 
which is estimated to cost $850,

including 500 minutes domestic long distance.

I am not that familiar with VOIP pricing (though I do use Vonage and the 
like). Just wanted to get

anyone's take of this vendor and if the pricing seems reasonable.

Thanks.

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Re: [OT] VOIP provider recommendations

[Dan Jenkins]

Bill McGonigle wrote:

On Dec 17, 2007, at 18:01, Dan Jenkins wrote:
A client of mine is looking into VOIP and has a proposal recommending 
IPTelesis, who I have never heard of.
They need 40 telephones and 9 voice paths according to the proposal, 
which is estimated to cost $850,

including 500 minutes domestic long distance.

I am not that familiar with VOIP pricing (though I do use Vonage and 
the like). Just wanted to get

anyone's take of this vendor and if the pricing seems reasonable.
What else does that include?  Are they running their own PBX or does 
that include PBX hosting or an onsite PBX?  Is that a monthly or 
yearly cost?  Does it include the telephone rental (what kinds)?  How 
many phone numbers?  A separate switch and cable plant for VOIP?

Thanks for the information.

Sorry for the incompleteness. This is a first draft proposal with lots 
of gaps which I barely skimmed before asking my question.


The $850 is a monthly cost. The proposal mentions auto-attendant, 
unified messaging, unlimited local calling and the above 500 Long 
Distance monthly minutes in the $850 price. They have no existing VoIP 
equipment at all. The proposal mentions Polycom IP phones and an 
Edgemarc router. They also mention integrated VoIP/cellular at $40 per 
call path using Meru access points. PBX systems are mentioned as 
ranging from $7,000 to $25,000. No more details provided.
Lacking data, here's a scenario:  if instance they own their own 
phones and asterisk box, and want 9 phone numbers the provider I'm 
using (Junction Networks) would charge $31/mo (.029*450+9*2=31.05) 
plus some setup costs.  I paid, I think $72 for my Grandstream phone, 
the drone-worker models are like $40.   My Asterisk box is an $800 
machine.  If you got all of the phones I got, over 3 years that's 
worth $80/mo.

The Polycom phones are range from $170 to $380 each.
Assuming everything's provided running on your existing cable plant, 
it sounds like a it should be a $400/mo package with a 2-year contract.
New building - new cable plant will be needed - not included in this 
proposal. An existing building may need some phones until they move out 
of it. Some phones in Western site to be integrated into new phone system.
Note, I've seen $10,000 Panasonic VOIP PBX's which don't do everything 
Asterisk does, so this may be a proprietary model vs. open source 
issue re: cost.
PBX model not even specified in the proposal. No existing equipment. 
(Well nothing usable. The old PBX is being retired.)


I just want to be able to suggest another alternative. Or at least to 
give a broader perspective than a captive proposal. Preferably open 
source. I have not used Asterisk, but one of my associates has and said 
good things about it.


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Re: Recommendations wanted - best/simplest distro for civilians

[Dan Jenkins]

Michael ODonnell wrote:

  I'm doing some housecleaning and I plan to cobble
together one or more machines from random parts I
have lying around and then offer them up on FreeCycle,
so I wonder which Linux distro I should load on them
so they'll be most familiar / least threatening to J.
Random Recipient.

Ubuntu
Mandriva

If these are just random parts, do they have enough horsepower for 
"modern" distros?

If they are going to be low-end random parts, other distros might be 
better, but I don't have any current recommendations. 



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Re: Power supply monitoring in Linux?

[Dan Jenkins]

Ben Scott wrote:
 On Nov 9, 2007 10:08 AM, Paul Lussier [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
   
 We need to monitor it in the OS to detect the failure on one of the redundant
 power supplies (it would be tough to detect the failure the second :)
 
   Nonsense, that's *easy* to detect.  Kind of impacts availability, though.  
 ;-)
   
Oddly enough I'm involved with a Linux-based project which needs to 
detect that the power has gone out, and, during the run-down of the 
capacitors, save the state of the system and then automatically resume 
when the power returns. Or just resume if the power is back before the 
caps run out. No batteries allowed. Typically power will be off for a 
few seconds to half a minute. So, while the actual power off does impact 
availability, not as much as you'd think. Though this is different than 
the power supply itself failing. That would crimp things a bit. :-)

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*** Technical Support Excellence for over a Quarter Century


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Re: [OT] Understatement

[Dan Jenkins]

Jeff Macdonald wrote:

On 10/31/07, Dan Jenkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  

 From a BBC article on IPv6 vs. IPv6 (Vint Cerf is pushing for the
transition as he anticipates address exhaustion in 2010/2011):


IPv6 will create 340 trillion trillion trillion separate addresses,
enough to satisfy demand for decades to come.
  

Umm, 340 undecillion (3.4 × 10^38 ) allows for 700 billion addressable
IPs per square micron of the Earth's surface or, as I believe Vint Cerf
is thinking, 1 IP address per every 9 cubic feet of the entire solar
system (out to Pluto's orbit). That definitely would qualify as enough
for decades to come.


what, nanites can't have IP addresses?
  

A very good point I didn't think of, especially in regards to this:
World's First Nanoradio Could Lead to Subcellular Remote-Control 
Interfaces http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/11/nanoradio


With about 10^14 cells in a human body, we would have enough addresses 
for every cell in the bodies of  3.4x10^24 humans. However, each human 
presumably has stuff to address, so assuming a billion addressable 
devices per human, we would run out of addresses when our population hit 
3.4 quadrillion.


Alternatively, assigning ranges to every star in every galaxy allows 3.4 
quintillion IPs per star.


That should be enough for decades to come. :-)

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Re: MonadLUG Notes, 12-Oct-1007: Ben Scott presents DNS and BIND

[Dan Jenkins]

Kent Johnson wrote:
 I have been uniformly un-Impressed with OO on Mac OSX. Writer is clunky, 
 I have had problems interoperating with MS Word (and whatever you think 
 of MS Word, sometimes that is a real requirement) and Calc is unusably 
 slow even on a reasonably fast machine. Oh, and X11 doesn't integrate 
 very well either. This is one reason I bought MS Office in the first 
 place, it wasn't without some consideration of the alternatives. So I'm 
 not that excited about trying Impress.
   
I use NeoOffice for OpenOffice on Mac OSX. It looks native and works 
well, in my experience.
My experience with Impress vs. PowerPoint is limited as I don't 
personally use that class of tools
at all. Some of my clients find Impress acceptable, but more than half 
do prefer PowerPoint.

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[OT] Old Roomba for anyone to play with

[Dan Jenkins]

A friend of mine has an old Roomba to give away to anyone who wants to 
play with it. The battery is old, but the rest works, as far as he can 
tell. He was hoping there was some one with a tech bent who might like 
it, before he trashes it.

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Re: [OT] Old Roomba for anyone to play with

[Dan Jenkins]

On 10/16/07, Dan Jenkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 A friend of mine has an old Roomba to give away to anyone who wants to
 play with it. The battery is old, but the rest works, as far as he can
 tell. He was hoping there was some one with a tech bent who might like
 it, before he trashes it.
   
Man, that was fast!
It was gone within minutes.
Two people responded within the same minute.
I flipped a coin and gave it to one of them.
Sorry to everyone else.

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Re: OLPC: Buy one, send one to the third-world

[Dan Jenkins]

Bruce Dawson wrote:
 Ted Roche wrote:
   
 OLPC is trying a new tactic: buy one to keep, send one to the third
 world: $399 gets you a *really* cute, *really* innovative OLPC, and in
 time for Christmas.

 http://www.xogiving.org/  
 
 Or, you can get a Koolu for $300. It has both Ubuntu and OLPC on it.

 see http://www.koolu.com/
But then you are getting *one* versus one for you and you for someone else.
Though the KoolU does look interesting in its own right.

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Motherboard capable of supporting over 32 GB RAM

[Dan Jenkins]

Does anyone have any recommendations? Preferably with DDR-800 support.
It'll run both Linux and Windows XP 64 and is used for simulations.
Thanks.

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Re: [OT] Charging UPS batteries outside the UPS

[Dan Jenkins]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 IIRC, APC UPSs (how's that for an acronym?) generally ship with the
 batteries DISCONNECTED.  When you get it and first open the box, the
 instructions tell you how to hook them up.
   
U.S. FAA  DOT requests that batteries are disconnected. during shipment.
It is a voluntary program, as far as I know, but all the UPSes I've seen 
in the last
few years, no matter who made them, come disconnected. So, it isn't just 
APC.
In one brand, they had a locking slide switch which made the connection 
rather
than having to open the unit to connect the battery wire, like APC does.

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Re: A question about rsync

[Dan Jenkins]

Cole Tuininga wrote:
 On Sun, 2007-07-22 at 21:59 -0400, Dan Jenkins wrote:
   
 Depends on the (numerous) options to rsync. Typically (someone correct 
 me if I'm wrong), rsync uses the size and date/time on the file and a 
 checksum. This can be modified to ignore times and force all files to be 
 checksummed.
 

 I believe (again, someone correct me if *I'm* wrong) that it only uses a
 checksum if -c is specified.
   
That's what I wasn't sure of. I know rsync uses the checksum in the 
algorithm to identify differing chunks of the file when transferring it, 
but wasn't sure about whether it did the whole file. Thanks for the 
clarification.
 On another note, if you're using rsync to make backups, cannot more
 highly recommend using rsnapshot (http://www.rsnapshot.org/)
   
Oh, thanks for that information. I've been writing scripts to do that. 
That's a much simpler solution.

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Re: A question about rsync

[Dan Jenkins]

brk wrote:
 I have a question for people who might be more intimately familiar  
 with rsync than I am...

 How does rsync know what files have been touched?

 What would happen if by some twist of fate a handful of files were  
 cleanly corrupted such that they would for all purposes appear to be  
 deleted or non-existent on a machine that had an rsync process  
 running to a remote backup machine?  Would those files be removed on  
 the remote machine, or would they likely remain in place there?
   
Depends on the (numerous) options to rsync. Typically (someone correct 
me if I'm wrong), rsync uses the size and date/time on the file and a 
checksum. This can be modified to ignore times and force all files to be 
checksummed.

If rsync does not specify the --delete or --delete-excluded, then no 
files will be deleted. If one of the --delete options is in use, then 
files will be deleted on the destination.

I ALWAYS test rsync with the -v (--verbose) and -n (--dry-run) options 
to see what it is going to do, before I do it.

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Re: Stupid UDP NAT argument

[Dan Jenkins]

brk wrote:
 On Jul 13, 2007, at 8:59 AM, Dan Jenkins wrote:
 Travis Roy wrote:
 Don't be a troll. ;-)
  Uhh, have you ever met Ben in person?

  (sorry, I couldn't help it
 So...
 Come to the BBQ.
 Bring Food.
 Feed the Troll.
 :-D
 Just for clarification, do you mean feed as in beer, or feed as in 
 debian is teh sux?
Hmm, well I was thinking the former might inhibit the latter, but I was 
not thinking beer, which might well disinhibit the latter instead.

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Re: Stupid UDP NAT argument

[Dan Jenkins]

Travis Roy wrote:
  Don't be a troll. ;-)
  Uhh, have you ever met Ben in person?

  (sorry, I couldn't help it

So...
Come to the BBQ.
Bring Food.
Feed the Troll.
:-D

(sorry, I neither could I help it.
And I haven't even physically met him yet.
Apologies to Ben, but the setup seemed too good to pass up.)

BBQ -  http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/SummerBBQ2007

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