Re: [SLUG] Firefox and Chrome problems
Heracles wrote: Hi All, I have been having a problem with Firefox. It keeps stopping on me. I don't think it locks up as sometimes it continues on after a while but mostly this is between 20 minutes and an hour. I have removed and reinstalled it several times but still have the problem. I became frustrated and installed Chrome which works well for everything except embedded videos and youtube. When I ask it to play either it usually starts the audio three (3) times with about a second delay between them. It is as though it is starting up several occasions of a player with only one visible. Has anyone else had this problem and, perhaps, solved it? Any ideas would be appreciated. This is a long shot, but I'll throw in my experience with similar behaviour years ago. My display would freeze once in a while running Linux and X. Drove me batty. I searched the web for a solution and found that the video driver for my specific display did have a timing loop bug in a race condition that could cause a random freeze. I suggest you search the web for problems associated with the specific display (by model number) that you are using to see if there are similar complaints. And perhaps a driver update or configuration change to your X Window may solve the problem. cheers rickw -- ---- Rick Welykochy || Vitendo Consulting We're just a bunch of spin networks of quantized loops of excited gravitational fields. -- from "Our Mathematical Universe" by Max Tegmark -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] ot: saving embeded video stream file ?
li...@sbt.net.au wrote: I was give an url to an overseas TV page, it has a utube-style embeded video with a 'play' button in middle (as well links to other pages) I'd like to save the actual video, not sure where to start, looking at html page, I can see several 'http' strings, none seems to open video directly; (should I expect to find a direct url...?) playing in browser I've looked in (XP) temp directory, could see much of interest there any tips how to do that..? If you give us the URL of the video page, we can probably be of more assistance. All sorts of methods are used (some tricky) to embed a video in a web page. Have a look at the or tags in the HTML, or in Javascript code on the page. should I try to use some of the 'capture utube' web services ..? thanks for any pointers, just at loss where to start.. The following plug-in captures many different types of embedded video streams, but not all: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-downloadhelper/ also, it also has some geoip restrictions: plays OK in Aus, but, a friend in US got a 'not authorized in your area' Perhaps a VPN or Aus-based proxy would solve that problem. good luck, rickw -- ---- Rick Welykochy || Vitendo Consulting We're just a bunch of spin networks of quantized loops of excited gravitational fields. -- from "Our Mathematical Universe" by Max Tegmark -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Slug Archives
Quick question to the SLUG list management. Are the archives being maintained? I had a quick squizz on the slug website and found archives to 2013-01. thanks, rickw -- Rick Welykochy || Vitendo Consulting Advice is free. It's the clean up and recovery after that costs. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Internet at 500m
Hey Penguinistas, Thanks to all for loads of useful info on extending my friend Andy's digital reach in the Philipine jungle. I will pass on all replies to him. He is a Linux developer. I've worked with him on a Python + Qt project. So you are helping one of the converted. cheers rickw Rick Welykochy wrote: Hi Sluggers, I have a friend living in near jungle conditions in a small town in the Philipines that wishes to span about 400m - 500m from an Internet connection to his house in the bush. Ethernet seems limited to 100m. Wifi seems limited to about 100m - 200m. Any suggestions for bridging this gap? thanks, rickw -- ---- Rick Welykochy || Vitendo Consulting If consumers even know there's a DRM, what it is, and how it works, we've already failed. -- Peter Lee, Disney Executive -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Internet at 500m
Hi Sluggers, I have a friend living in near jungle conditions in a small town in the Philipines that wishes to span about 400m - 500m from an Internet connection to his house in the bush. Ethernet seems limited to 100m. Wifi seems limited to about 100m - 200m. Any suggestions for bridging this gap? thanks, rickw -- Rick Welykochy || Vitendo Consulting If consumers even know there's a DRM, what it is, and how it works, we've already failed. -- Peter Lee, Disney Executive -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Download speed
David wrote: On 22/05/14 08:38, Rick Welykochy wrote: Edwin Humphries (text) wrote: Can anyone suggest a way of testing the download speed of my NBN fibre connection every hour and logging it? I have an ostensibly 100Mbps connection, but the speed seems to vary enormously, so an automated process would be good. Download a file of known length, say 1000 MB, from a server whose speed you can trust every hour. Time and log each download. Also verify the contents of the downloaded file with an md5 or sha digest. This can be automated with an scp inside a simple (shell) script. Westnet used to have a file available for exactly this purpose - I dare say other ISP's do too. Perhaps you could ask your own ISP. This looks promising: http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/test/ I found this via a web search for "test download file residing on an isp australia". cheers rickw -- ---- Rick Welykochy || Vitendo Consulting If consumers even know there's a DRM, what it is, and how it works, we've already failed. -- Peter Lee, Disney Executive -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Download speed
Edwin Humphries (text) wrote: Can anyone suggest a way of testing the download speed of my NBN fibre connection every hour and logging it? I have an ostensibly 100Mbps connection, but the speed seems to vary enormously, so an automated process would be good. Download a file of known length, say 1000 MB, from a server whose speed you can trust every hour. Time and log each download. Also verify the contents of the downloaded file with an md5 or sha digest. This can be automated with an scp inside a simple (shell) script. cheers rickw -- Rick Welykochy || Vitendo Consulting If consumers even know there's a DRM, what it is, and how it works, we've already failed. -- Peter Lee, Disney Executive -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] shell script to parse html and date comp ?
li...@sbt.net.au wrote: I would like to fetch date/time from html file, and use date comparison and make an ics/vcal file eventually I found a few pages on the web that discuss what you are doing: "web scraping", using python as it happens. http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman/quixote_htmlscraping.html http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/ http://scrapy.org/ I little bit of python knowledge can be a not so dangerous thing :) cheers rickw -- ---- Rick Welykochy || Vitendo Consulting Gerrold's Fundamental Truth: It's a good thing money can't buy happiness. We couldn't stand the commercials. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] shell script to parse html and date comp ?
li...@sbt.net.au wrote: that works well, the other item I need to grab is 'Duration', which can be 2 or 3 digits as below; is there a way to have egrep get such 2 or 3 digits ? Duration: 60 or ...120... Use the ? operator, which means that a match is optional, i.e. egrep -i 'duration' | egrep -o '>[0-9][0-9][0-9]?<' cheers rickw -- ---- Rick Welykochy || Vitendo Consulting Gerrold's Fundamental Truth: It's a good thing money can't buy happiness. We couldn't stand the commercials. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] shell script to parse html and date comp ?
li...@sbt.net.au wrote: I would like to fetch date/time from html file, and use date comparison and make an ics/vcal file eventually the date comes as so: Start Date Time: 20/03/2014 1400 Thursday is 'grep -o' the way to go ? what regex do I need where I put ? grep -o 'Start Date Time: ' I would recommend egrep and use the following extended regular expression: egrep -o '[0-9]{2}/[0-9]{2}/[0-9]{4}[[:space:]][0-9]{4}' which gives you output like the following: 20/03/2014 1400 19/02/2014 1553 03/01/2013 0114 03/11/2012 1514 as a contrived example containing four dates as in your example. what do I need to do with date to be able to compare it to a date range? If you use the ISO 8601 format for all dates/times in your script, life will be a lot easier, e.g. convert "20/03/2014 1400" to "20130320T1400", store it in $datetime Then you can specify a date/time range on the command line as your lower and upper bounds, $datelow and $datehigh, for comparison purposes, e.g. my_date_script.bash 20100101T 20141231T2359 and inside the script only accept date/times within range: if [ "$datelow" \> "$datetime" -o "$datetime" \> "$datehigh" ]; then echo Datetime $datetime is not in range [ $datelow, $datehigh ] else echo Found datetime $datetime fi Of course, all of this would be much easier to code in python, perl or ruby. HTH! cheers rickw -- Rick Welykochy || Vitendo Consulting Gerrold's Fundamental Truth: It's a good thing money can't buy happiness. We couldn't stand the commercials. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] making fgets fail during testing
Hi Ashley, One thing you could try is putting non-ASCII characters in the file, i.e. above 0x7f. I haven't played with PHP, but in python, if you are using ASCII encoding for text strings and try to load a non-ASCII character into a string, an exception is raised. Better still, tell PHP you are using UTF-8 encoding for Unicode characters and then stuff in some badly formed UTF-8 characters. Some random bytes ought to do it, as UTF-8 is fairly strict. Let us know how you go. Text encoding and decoding has always been a PITA. cheers rickw Ashley Maher wrote: Morning, Posting here as the coders list is now dead. Using php in a web app. Reading in a large text file. Using fgets to read line by line for processing. What can I put in a test text file to get fgets to fail? Can hand indicate the condition fail but would like to trigger a "real" read failure well into the file. A lot of references about testing for failure but nothing how to trigger fgets to fail. Thanks for any hints. Regards, Ashley -- ---- Rick Welykochy || Vitendo Consulting The chief source of problems is solutions. -- Eric Sevareid -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] 20 years of using Linux at home
Nick Andrew wrote: On Fri, Apr 05, 2013 at 09:46:39PM +1100, Martin Visser wrote: Well today pretty much marks 20 years since I've used Linux at home. You're an early adopter :-) So was my business partner. I had never heard of Linux in 1993. We were starting an ISP and I said NO to anything by Mickeysoft. So the serach for am i386 Unix began. The offerings were less than sub-average. I recall some commercial Unixware (?) "thing-a-mess" was imsply horrible, bloated and crashed as soon as you touched the keyboard. Sad. Then bus partner downloaded something called Slackware. He knew naught about Unix. After the 11 disc (?) install, up came a prompt. I typed in "ls" and screamed Hallelujah! He looked at me quizzically as I raved on about how this looks like a Unix system. We built the company on Linux and open source. At the time, a mate was working at Ozemail which was using Mickeysoft "servers" and staff were hired to hit the "OK" button everytime a dialogue popped up on the desktop "servers", which was quite often. Hilarious. Whereas we installed Apache, got our web services up and running and never looked back. The only negative at that time was having to bring up a flakey NT box to support a customer who wanted Lotus Notes online. Urgh. Curse. Grimace. Wonderful memories indeed. And lest we get to enamoured with what we have wrought, have a read of the sometimes humourous and often accurate "Unix Hater's Handbook." http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf It makes you realise that we've chosen the lesser of many evils on operating systems. cheers rickw p.s. it wasn't until apple adopted the unix platform in early 2000s that i even considered using a Mac. Now I'm using heaps of open source on the Mac platform with great results. Amazingy, the Max has not prevented me from getting anything up & running (server wise) that I can do on Linux. p.p.s as far as software quality, securitym safety and reliability are concerned, we have a very long way to go, Linux included. -- Rick Welykochy || Vitendo Consulting I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me. -- Noel Coward -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Installing a library.
wbenn...@turing.une.edu.au wrote: libdvdcss.so.2 libdvdcss.so.2 No---I don't know why I was told twice, either. However, could someone tell me what this library is, please? Going by the name of the library, it would be used to decrypt an encoded DVD. For a humourous discussion on how flawed DVD encryption is by its bad design, you could do worse that read this: http://decss.zoy.org/ sudo apt-get install libdvd.css.so.2 should install same, shouldn't it? I haven't tried installing this lib. But usually, one does not specify the version of the library or software component, e.g. sudo apt-get install libdvdcss To see what the name really is: sudo apt-cache search dvdcss and take a squizz at the results. HTH cheer rickw -- ---- Rick Welykochy || Vitendo Consulting Politicians and diapers have one thing in common. They should both be changed regularly, and for the same reason. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] (OT) Document and Content Management System
Richard Hayes - Nada Marketing wrote: I need to buy / create a document management system that would create government reports for energy usage. All the reports use the same format and at least 75% of the content is 'boiler plate', the text does not change. What is required is a 'super mail merge' where the I can enter the contact, location and usage data etc into a form and then the document is merged to create a 'pretty' new document. I just discovered a simple, fast and easy templating tool for python, called invoque. It is designed for HTML/XML templating, but will generate any kind of text by substitution, e.g. ${title} <http://evoque.gizmojo.org/> If you aren't using it for HTML, you do not need to install the qpy package that the author recommends for safe quoting. A python script to mail-merge from a database or CSV file into templates would be very easy to write if you have python skilz. cheers rickw -- _____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Help with files that have "identical" filenames
Scott Finneran wrote: The files have different inodes and the filesystem is ext3. From what I know, this shouldn't be possible, so I'm assumed that there are some non-printable characters in the filename. ls -d doesn't show any however. Anyone hits with he clue-bat would be appreciated Perhaps try this: ls -1 | hexdump -C and you can see the filename chars in hex and ascii. If you have UTF-8 as your charset, similar looking characters could be different unicodes. cheers rickw -- _____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services Border relations between Canada and Mexico have never been better. -- George W Bush -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Starting Apache on Ubuntu 10.10
Chris Allen wrote: I'm pretty sure I remember seeing Services as a menu option in earlier versions of Ubuntu There is more than one way to do it. Open up a shell and type: sudo /etc/init.d/apache start Familiarise yourself with shell operations and things become ... easier. cheers rickw -- Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. -- George Orwell -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] dos2unix
Steven Tucker wrote: Homepage: http://www.thefreecountry.com/tofrodos/index.shtml So perhaps tofrodos is the ticket for you. This tweaked my interest since I often type in a well remembered incantation in the shell to this purpose, e.g. $ cat filename.msdos.txt | tr \\r \\n > filename.txt as but one example. I had a smile reading all the fru-fru that comes with the tofrodos (cute name, BTW). Hrmmm ... ain't it easier to just use tr? cheers rickw -- Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. -- George Orwell -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] So slow...
Kevin Shackleton wrote: Doesn't it actually get colder for a while after winter solstice? Yup. Jan/Feb is an absolute killer on the Great Plains of North America. Esp. if you are an Aussie. cheers rickw -- _ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services aibohphobia - the fear of palindromes -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Long lines in /var/log/httpd/access_log
Jim Donovan wrote: GET /documents/url(data:image At a glance, this is a request for a data: URI <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_URI_scheme> There are exploits involving this rarely used URI scheme. <http://www.google.com.au/search?q=data+uri+exploit> Do you recognise the requesting IP address? cheers rickw -- Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services No position is so absurd that a philosopher cannot be found to argue for it. -- Michael Lockwood -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Banning non Australian IP's from Aussie ecommerce site
Ben Donohue wrote: I'm seeing mostly brute force password attacks on ssh. We were getting hammered with same. Once we reconfiged openssh to use a different (non standard) port instead of 22, all activity ceased. You can make the change transparently by including the following in your ~/.ssh/config file: Host whatever.com.au Port 12345 Host * Port 22 Then both ssh and scp will pick up the different port for whatever.com.au. cheers rickw -- Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit. -- PJ O'Rourke -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Skype Upgrade Notification - Talk More For Free
Jake Anderson wrote: something new going on? I'm seeing alot of skype type hoax spam coming through spam filters at the moment. On 27/09/10 08:25, Skype Support wrote: at http://www.skype-technologies.com/ Do a whois on the domain. It ain't Skype. And the website takes you to this: https://secureonline.ru/ Running scared yet? cheers rickw -- Hardware [n], "The parts of a computer system that can be kicked." -Henri Karrenbeld -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] NASA’s own Nebula cloud re leased under an Apache 2
Marghanita da Cruz wrote: Any comments? The new OpenStack project will power NASA’s own Nebula cloud and puts new pressure on Eucalyptus, as well as Amazon’s EC2 and the whole Hadoop ecosystem. The system is being released under an Apache 2 license. <http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/nasa-gives-openstack-instant-credibility/6878> Yes. There is a very high ratio of buzz words to nonbuzz in the above declaration. Will have to check it out to find out what it all means. cheers rickw -- _ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services The farther you go, the less you know. -- Lao Tsu, "Tao Te Ching" -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] web dav setup
Ben Donohue wrote: DAV On Order allow,deny Allow from All Deny from none<--- do you need this? Also check your Apache error log. It will indicate denials. cheers rickw -- _____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. -- Bertrand Russell -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] master password
Heracles wrote: Hi Marghanita, On 05/05/10 19:23, Marghanita da Cruz wrote: Did you try clearing the passwod under "set masterpassword"? Yes, but when I do this it asks for the Master Password before it will clear it. Sort of a Catch 22 situation! There seems to bee some master password fu here: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Master_password and here: http://www.velocityreviews.com/forums/t10416-forgotten-masterpassword.html involving either: 1. type in location: "chrome://pippki/content/resetpassword.xul" or more desperately 2. remove the files that store the encryption key (key3.db) With either method, you lose all stored passwords. Another option of course is to create a new profile. cheers rickw -- _____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. -- Arthur C. Clarke -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Re: Time Pedantry
Jake Anderson wrote: We should all just use unix timestamp for all date/time communications and be done with it. There I fixed it, http://thereifixedit.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/129138460976317329.jpg Hail me as leader Hey Leader, Are the horses drawing a UTC cart clock or sumthink? Happy Yeaster on 1270187886. Is the next SLUG meeting at 1273927886? CYA on 1271187886. cheers rickw -- _ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services Hofstadter's Law. "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law." -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: Why so snooty? Re: [SLUG] Which bank doesn't use Linux servers?
Jake Anderson wrote: The bank may well be pretty sure that nothing will go wrong but given the cost/benefit ratio its prudent not to take the chance that there is one line of code somewhere or another in the many tens of millions they have that will freak out when the clock goes backwards. What about ATMs? Will they be down for the count? If not, and the main systems are down, they must queue up transactions. The timestamps on those transactions will have to be handled correctly when the queue is processed. Including transactions during the hour the leaps back. The same can be said about bank-to-bank and bank-to-international transactions. It seems like a problem they must already have to deal with. Transactions world wide into and out of Australia do not stop for an hour at 2:00 AM Easter Sunday, do they? Anyone working in the banking sector out there? cheers rickw -- _ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services Hofstadter's Law. "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law." -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Re: Time Pedantry
Nick Andrew wrote: Indeed. The Earth's rotational period does vary slightly (effect of earthquakes notwithstanding). One reason time is hard to deal with sensibly is our insistence on synchronising it to the mean solar day. // off topic Easter Time time ramblings Isaac Asimov figured it out years ago. From memory ... Create a new calendar with 52 weeks of 7 days = 364 days. Add one extra day, called World Day, at the end - 365 days. World Day does not have a day of the week. In this way, every date falls on the same day of the week in every year. For leaps years, add an extra Leap day after World Day. It too has no day of the week. To make things precise, every 100 years, there is no Leap Day, but every 400 years there is. That pretty well matches up the solar year to the earth's rotation. Easter Sunday would still be a lunar-based nightmare. Either that or redefine it to fall on the same date always, or perhaps just fall away completely. I don't recall Asimov dealing with the tetchy problem of daylight time. As for rejigging the months? I leave that as as exercise. cheers rickw -- _____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services Hofstadter's Law. "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law." -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Which bank doesn't use Linux servers?
Jim Donovan wrote: I noticed the following on the Commonwealth netbank site this morning: NetBank, Mobile Banking and Telephone Banking will be unavailable between 2am and 5am EST on Sunday 4 April 2010 to allow for the changeover from Australian Eastern Daylight Savings time to Australian Eastern Standard time. Please take this timeframe into consideration when completing your banking. For updates during this change, please visit: www.commbank.com.au/update. Please press NEXT to access NetBank. Similar for Westpac: "Online Banking will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance from 02:50 to 04:15 AEST on Sunday 4 April 2010." Another one not using Linux. cheers rickw -- _ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services Hofstadter's Law. "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law." -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Search and replace question
Amos Shapira wrote: Actually - if it's a one-off thing and the input is not large (or lots of files) then it's good enough. Otherwise if you are going to do it many times and care about performance then: 1. Do the entire read loop in perl. 2. Assign the "match" and "replace" strings into a hash. 3. Build a perl regexp: (\Qmatch1\E|\Qmatch2\E|...) 4. use it with something like s/$regexp/$hash{$1}/ge Yup. Much more efficient. Read all the search and replace strings once into a hash. Then perform a single pass through the target file. Here is a version written in ruby, which I am learning now. Like python, ruby doesn't suffer from the "line noise" problems inherent in perl :) [well, except for that ugly rexp in scan()] --- #!/usr/bin/env ruby -w # two parameters are passed in, a mapping file and the text file to replace in mappingfile, templatefile = ARGV translate = { } File.read(mappingfile).scan(/^([^,]*),(.*)$/) do | replace, search | translate[search.strip] = replace.strip end safesearch = translate.keys.collect { | search | Regexp.escape(search) } allsearch = Regexp.new(safesearch.join('|')) print File.read(templatefile).gsub(allsearch) { | match | translate[match] } --- cheers rickw -- _ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services I think there is a world market for about five computers. -- Thomas Watson, IBM, 1943 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Search and replace question
Mehmet, Be aware that there are special characters in regular expressions as used by grep and sed. $ is special: it matches the end of the line. There are others, like ^ [ ] + * etc. If any of these special chars are in your searchstring, grep will fail and sed will fail. Mehmet Yousouf wrote: I'm having trouble with the following search and replace script: #!/bin/bash # two parameters are passed in, a mapping file and the text file to replace in for fields in $(cat ./Mapping/$1-Mapping |awk 'BEGIN{FS=","}{print $2}') do searchstring= $fields replacestring="`grep -w $fields ./Mapping/$1-Mapping |awk 'BEGIN{FS=","}{print $1}'`" sed -e "s/$searchstring, / $replacestring, /g" $2>TestResult done it fails if there is a $ sign in the variable $field e.g. amount_$ . How can I get grep to "behave" the way I want? One solution: 1. read in the replace and search strings in one go, which makes the script run faster and avoids the need for grep. bash's read command is fine for this if we set the field separator (IFS) to a comma 2. use perl to perform the substitution, incorporating the special characters \Q at the beginning of the search string, which tells perl to ignore the special characters I spoke of above. 3. we use the -i switch in perl to edit the file TestResult in situ and the -p switch to wrap the perl command (after -e) in an input loop followed by a print Try this: #/bin/bash cp "$2" TestResult export IFS=',' cat Mapping/$1-Mapping | while read replace search do perl -i -p -e "s/\Q$search/$replace/g" TestResult done cheers rickw -- _ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services I think there is a world market for about five computers. -- Thomas Watson, IBM, 1943 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Re: Earliest open source?
Richard Ibbotson wrote: What's the earliest reference to open source anyone knows? I found this in a 1965 paper: The Michigan Terminal System (MTS) emerged in the early 70s, with the source code shared and maintained by a number of unis. <http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1404097&lastnode_id=0> "The Michigan Terminal System (MTS) was an IBM mainframe compatible operating system which came out of the University of Michigan in the early 1970s. MTS was developed and maintained by a consortium of universities around the world including ..." <http://www.clock.org/~jss/work/mts/timeline.html> "May 1967 MTS released to campus as operating system for IBM 360/67." "November 1968 University of British Columbia runs MTS" And elsewhere <http://www.clock.org/~jss/work/mts/overview.html>: "Whereas other systems made users feel like it was just them one-on-one with a computer, MTS was designed with many features that enabled sharing and collaboration. Users were able to collaborate with MTS developers, and vice versa. According to Bob Parnes, architect of the Confer system, 'MTS was our system; it belonged to the University, not to a corporation.'" Other refs: <http://www.cis.udel.edu/~mills/gallery/gallery8.html> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_Terminal_System> cheers rickw -- _ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services No position is so absurd that a philosopher cannot be found to argue for it. -- Michael Lockwood -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] debugging dns resolution issues with RES_OPTIONS="debug"
Ben Burke wrote: Yes, I know about dig. But the problem I'm having appears to be failure of dns server to respond, or a communications problem with dns server(s) I admittedly haven't delved deep into the dig man page, but a suggestion would be to add a suitable dig incantation to your cron job just before requiring DNS services, just to see what is happening in detail at the time. At least you'd have a log written to stdout that you can examine for anomalies when something awry happens with "that server". cheers rickw -- _____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services Hofstadter's Law. "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law." -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] fun with bash
david wrote: $ for i in *.tif ; convert $i $i.jpg; done $ for i in $i.jpg ; do mv $i `echo $i | sed s/.tif//`; done Apart from specific examples, where do I look in the bash book for a better way to remove the <.tif> part of the output filename, or other such substitutions? OTTOMH, there are some interpolation constructs in bash to help with this: ${VARIABLE#string} ${VARIABLE##string} ${VARIABLE%string} ${VARIABLE%%string} and saving "substitute" (best) for last: ${VARIABLE/from/to} in your case perhaps: mv $i ${i/.tif/} All of the above are described somewhere in the 4000+ pages of the bash manual ;) cheers rickw -- _____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services I was born in 1992. You have been negotiating all my life. You cannot tell us that you need more time. -- Christina, 17, Solomon Islands - threatened by sea level rise -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Dreamweaver clone for Linux ?
Martin Visser wrote: I'm a big Python fan, but I reckon you can code up just as many insecure sites or web frameworks in Python as you can in PHP. Often security probs are PEBKAC, be it the programmer or a hapless user. cheers rickw -- _ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services Be nice to us or we'll impose democracy on you. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] BBC News: 40 Years of Unix
meryl wrote: Yes I saw it Bill, Very informative! It made me wonder: Whilst we might have enough common sense to be relativly secure behind our *nix boxes at home & possibly even at work... but most of our private information held by various corporate utilities and services are on the databases that these crackers are targeting. How can we ensure that our personal information are not just held on a Windows machine with an improperly secured database? And what sort of "intellectual property rights" do we have on our own private information? I can't imagine that my local GP would be encrypting my medical records. It's all rather disturbing when you think about it. Speaking of data theft, Albert Gonzalez was caught stealing about 130 MILLION credit card details from Internet servers. Wonder how he got in? <http://blogs.findlaw.com/blotter/2009/08/doj-hacker-stole-130-million-credit-card-numbers.html> Too often in the past, news reports blithely gloss over *which* operating system is the target of attack. It is very discomforting to contemplate your personal data sitting on a Windows box exposed to the Interweb. I have to say that when I have worked in IT shops, it is invariably the Windows personnel that have little or no knowledge or regard for proper network security. That ineptitude coupled with the inherent insecurity in the Windows OS leads to real problems, as highlighted on "Web Warriors" last night. Crypto expert Bruce Schneier points out that until computer security becomes a liability and companies are made to pay for their mistakes, the situation will only worsen. <http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/11/computer_securi.html> "Liability law is a way to make it in those organizations' best interests. Raising the risk of liability raises the costs of doing it wrong and therefore increases the amount of money a CEO is willing to spend to do it right. Security is risk management; liability fiddles with the risk equation." and "Information security isn't a technological problem. It's an economics problem. And the way to improve information technology is to fix the economics problem. Do that, and everything else will follow." I haven't figured out how such liability would apply to open source. Nonetheless I think it a very good idea. cheers rickw -- _ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services The problem with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back. -- unknown author -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Anyone with a Beyonwiz PVR - looking for clues on how to transcode the video
elliott-brennan wrote: Just picked up a Beyonwiz DP-P2 sans Freeview (who needs less functionality advertised as more?) Freeview is a con. Checkout an FAQ on the subject. <http://www.dtvforum.info/index.php?showtopic=77923> The video on the machine is some odd format/container??? (.tvwiz) which seems specific to Beyonwiz. I have a DP-S1. A recording is stored in lots of small chunks named serially as 0001, 0002, etc. When you download all of the segments, simply do this: cat 0* > {recording-name}.ts which creates a (slackly headed) transport stream in MPEG-2 format. MPlayer and VLC can play .ts files just fine. cheers rick -- _____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services The problem with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back. -- unknown author -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Chinese intruder yesterday
Glen Turner wrote: I really wish distributors would add a "sshin" group by default, drop the first user's account in it, and let the sysadmin add any further users that might need remote access. Dare I ask why the distro should drop the first user's account in sshin? cheers rickw -- _____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services Beware of he who would deny you information, for in his mind he dreams of being your master. -- message on a computer game -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Post scanning inside NAT
Morgan Storey wrote: To me that looks like web traffic, first two http-gets going out then the response. Do a packet capture and we will see. Do you have any toolbars that get updates (weather plugin, time sync, rss), or some automated update tool? Thanks for your reply. As I noted in my previous response, the machine had been up for weeks, and browsers for days. Who knows what stray gremlins lay in wait. After a reboot, all is clear. cheers rickw -- _ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services Beware of he who would deny you information, for in his mind he dreams of being your master. -- message on a computer game -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Post scanning inside NAT
Zhasper wrote: Visiting http://62.67.50.112/ <http://62.67.50.112/> gives me a Rapidshare.com page. Does your modem, or the machine in question, let you run tcpdump/ngrep/some other packet inspection thingy to have a look in more detail inside the packets? Also, there's nothing in what you posted to suggest that the internal machine was responding to the external machine - the port numbers suggest that it was the internal machine that initiated the connection. If you could catch the three-way handshake at the start of the connection (syn/syn-ack/ack), we could tell for sure which was opening the connection. Further investigation proves you are correct. For some reason, this machine was initiating a connection to 62.67.50.112 on port 80 every couple of seconds. I played with tcpdump some more and found that even something as innocuous as grabbing Java docs from Sun resulted in an annoying flurry of repeated ("reload page?") activity from ad servers and the like. NAT is vindicated and I was at fault, interpreting the tcpdump as an incoming scan. I've rebooted to see what the traffic is like (the machine had been up for weeks). And now there is only local traffic for WiFi discovery and a bit of SMB crap. I think I'll leave tcpdump alone otherwise I'll go mad. It goes to show that there is a lot of traffic occurring that one is not even aware of. thanks, rickw -- _____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services Beware of he who would deny you information, for in his mind he dreams of being your master. -- message on a computer game -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Post scanning inside NAT
Hi sluggers, I thought I understood the mechanics of NAT. My modem blocks all incoming requests to my 192.168.0.* internal network, save a few port forwards, i.e. about five ports are open. During an idle period today I noticed annoying but consistent traffic of about 100 bytes/sec. Why? tcpdump reveals that my local machine on 192.168.0.27 is responding to what seems to be a port scan from Germany (62.67.50.112) ... 17:20:28.677718 IP 192.168.0.27.52262 > 62.67.50.112.80: . ack 1 win 65535 17:20:28.677842 IP 192.168.0.27.52262 > 62.67.50.112.80: P 1:607(606) ack 1 win 65535 17:20:29.045173 IP 62.67.50.112.80 > 192.168.0.27.52262: . ack 607 win 55 17:20:29.055137 IP 62.67.50.112.80 > 192.168.0.27.52262: P 1:306(305) ack 607 win 55 Their egress port is always 80 (suspicious in itself) and my ingress port is climbing through all numbers, serially. My possible misunderstanding of NAT is that my local machine on .27 should not even be seeing this traffic since it *should* be blocked at the modem/router. Is it me or is it the modem that is wrong? cheers rickw -- _____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services Beware of he who would deny you information, for in his mind he dreams of being your master. -- message on a computer game -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] firefox/embed problem
jam wrote: On Thursday 16 April 2009 10:00:06 slug-requ...@slug.org.au wrote: I'm trying to use this snippet of code to embed a sound. I can't persuade FF or Epiphany to respect the autostart attribute. I've tried variations such as autostart=["0"|0|"false"|false|etc] but to no avail. BTW, the same code works correctly for both IE and Firefox on Mac and Windows, so it really looks like a Linux problem :( Otherwise, what am I doing wrong? The world got complicated and you may not 'just do' this, also Watch your syntax! http://www.w3schools.com will take you on a journey the end of which is blurred. This DOES work on linux-firefox loop="false"> BUT the validator bitches! We discussed the task of embedding a sound cue (ding!) in HTML files here: <http://www.nabble.com/sound-cues-td20389874.html> But did not touch specifically on Linux/FF. Rather, all sorts of different ways to do it were discussed. cheers rickw -- _ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit. -- PJ O'Rourke -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Defining "Mainsteam"
Lindsay Holmwood wrote: That said, their update tool is totally broken. Case in point: you do a clean install of OS X, the software updater runs silently in the background and starts downloading the latest updates, you run the software update frontend manually, and it discards any partially completed silent downloads so far (this could be up to 1gb of updates). Getting OT ... There is a tedious way around that. Install OS X offline. Then open up the Software Update preferences, and disable "Download Import Updates Automatically", which IMHO should be the default. You then have more control over when updates are downloaded. One of my Internet peeves is software that silently gobbles bandwidth without notifying you. cheers rickw -- _ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example. --Mark Twain -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Defining "Mainsteam"
Rev Simon Rumble wrote: One of my colleagues was complaining this week that a Vista service pack is something like a gigabyte (and her ISP doesn't have free mirrors) of download in one hit. Ouch. Sounds outrageous! I had a peek on the Microsoft website for the Vista services packs. SP1 is about 440 MB and SP2 is about 350 MB. Ouch! Apple has similar offerings, perhaps 500 MB every four months. Comparatively, the debian box I am caring for needs maybe several 100 MB of updates in a year. Apples and oranges, though, since the deb box is not running X. Just plain old shells. Bliss! cheers rickw -- _ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example. --Mark Twain -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Clients accessing web server
Rick Phillips wrote: I have never allowed FTP, SFTP nor SSH access to the server for security reasons (other than myself) but this customer wants to directly edit his new web site from time to time. We had a very similar prob on a machine running many guest hosts on Linux Vserver. It was trivial to set up vsftpd to handle the odd client who required direct FTP access to their own virtual. The sandboxing capabilities and security of vsftpd are claimed to be second to none (famous last words?) cheers rickw -- _ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services aibohphobia - the fear of palindromes -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] useful bash tricks thread
Amos Shapira wrote: Yes but what if you (or someone else sharing the root account) got it into history by accident? If I realise that sensitive info made it into the history file, I remove it by editing .bash_history You may have to futz around closing that shell and opening a new one and ensure the info is really gone. cheers rickw -- _ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it's done. -- Scott Adams -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Re: useful bash tricks thread
Owen Townend wrote: 2009/2/9 Amos Shapira : [snip] And one last thing, related to security - if you type a sensitive string on the command line and get it into your history, use "history -d" to delete this line. There is an easier way around this. Most shells, bash included will exclude a line from the history if you begin it with a space. My bash doesn't do this. It includes the line in the history :( but HISTSIZE=2000 SHELLOPTS=braceexpand:emacs:hashall:histexpand:history:interactive-comments:monitor might have an effect on this behaviour. cheer rickw -- _____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it's done. -- Scott Adams -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Dedicated Server hosting in California - anyone with experience?
Stuart Guthrie wrote: We would love to find a trustworthy an reliable server builder company with access to a colo that I could work with to install a server similar to our configs in AU. We've been running a dedicated server (on which we run Linux Vserver and many guests) with the mob at iWeb. Cost is maybe $1200/year. Service is excellent, if a bit French, since they are in Montreal Canada. Lots of different plans and services are available. <http://iweb.com/> Review: <http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2007/02/04/new_york_internet_webcom_and_iweb8_most_reliable_hosting_companies_in_january_2007.html> or <http://tinyurl.com/2t4hhb> cheers rickw -- _____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services "There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed. " -- Bill Gates (1995) -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Mythbuntu set up not 'quite' right
Owen Townend wrote: I'm looking for some ideas to help me complete my installation set-up. I've just installed Myth on top of Ubuntu 8.04.1. Out of curiosity, how does the price of an SD or HD do it yourself pvr-style setup, e.g. MythTV or other, compare to paying for a pvr from Topfield or Beyonwiz? SD Topfield ... approx $700.00, with 200 GB HDD HD Beyonwiz ... approx $1200.00, with 320 GB HDD I've had an SD toppy for, oh, four years now. Only hiccup was a damaged IR pickup which was repaired under warranty. Live TV? What is that? The only downside to the two PVRs I have played with: their software is riddled with bugs. Not show stoppers, but real annoying little gnats that have insane workarounds. These machines are software heavy but ... sigh. cheers rickw -- _____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services "There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed. " -- Bill Gates (1995) -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] [OT] PowerShell slow
Erik de Castro Lopo's sig says: > Powershell is slow. Exceedingly slow. I didn't think speed would be > a factor in a shell until I used Powershell. The Unix shell tools are > literally hundreds, if not thousands of times faster than the equivalent > Powershell commands." > http://reddit.com/r/programming/info/6cgne/comments/c03h3h7 I'd ne'er heard of PowerShell so I investigated. It is Mickeysoft's latest addition to the Whacky World of Windows, yet another attempt to get it right, only they got it wrong. PowerShell is indeed really slow. But of course if you know Windows, you'd know how to speed it up: Set-Alias ngen @( dir (join-path ${env:\windir} "Microsoft.NET\Framework") ngen.exe -recurse | sort -descending lastwritetime )[0].fullName [appdomain]::currentdomain.getassemblies() | %{ngen $_.location} Obviously! Further reading indicates the many opt for Unix Tools on Windows. cheers rickw -- _ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services Some people are like slinkies - not really good for anything but they bring a smile to your face when pushed down the stairs. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] A command question.
Jeff Waugh wrote: Is there a command that finds a file containing a certain word? find and apropos don't. They work on filenames only. grep ... and you can use -r to search through files/directories recursively. You can also use -i to do a case insensitive search. And there are dozens of other flags to confuse you! man grep <=== tells all. And to add to the mix, there are variants fgrep and egrep :) cheers rickw -- _____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services Tis the dream of each programmer before his life is done, To write three lines of APL and make the damn thing run. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] ATO/wine
Dean Hamstead wrote: appdb shows a fail i spent a few hours on it, until i just drove to my inlaws and used XP. seriosly didnt seem worth the effort for a once off usage. There is another option, but it may cost you. I had a bit of whinge to the ATO just yesterday about the application running only on Windows. The clerk was sympathetic and mentioned this site: http://www.etax.com.au/ which apparently allows to submit your tax return online using the web. A tax agent then submits it to the ATO on your behalf. I still like the paper system. Takes me under an hour to fill in. If the ATO receives a paper return before mid July, they process it within a week or so. Anytime after that (I am told by the ATO) and they begin bogging down with a work overload. cheers rickw -- Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. -- H.L. Mencken -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] StephenFry wishes GNU/Linux Happy 25th
In case you missed it: Actor Stephen Fry wishes GNU/Linux happy 25th birthday. Good bit of positive promotion for the cause. s and what's so fine about free software. http://www.gnu.org/fry/ In a rush? download the OGG video here: http://ma.tt/dropbox/2008/09/gnu/ VLC plays it, but then crashes at the black area at the end of the clip. cheers rickw -- Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. -- H.L. Mencken -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] DODO
Jeff Waugh wrote: I totally recommend Internode - plans are a little more pricey but the speed is always consistent and so far I've never had to call tech support. When we connected to internode their support and sales guys have been top notch. Concur. If you care about good 'net access, there's no point going cheap and dirty (which less than adequately describes the cheapness and dirtiness of ISPs like Dodo). Concur again. I was using 's ADLS1 up in Ballina at a friend's place for a few days. Drove me insane. The DNS was less than average. Connection dropouts were common. And I had real trouble accessing some pages on Ebay and Paypal, which never occurs with the same lappy using other ISPs. Prolly the old MTU problem, but I cared not to investigate further. cheer rickw -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor The problem with adults is that they are contaminated by experience. -- Kumi Naidoo, General Secretary and CEO of CIVICUS -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Re: Kill Firefox
bill wrote: Isnt it ps ( in a terminal) to get the PID for Firefox, then kill "PID"? Bill Still a newbie killall -SIGNAL processname kill -SIGNAL pid work the same. I have tried sending various signals to firefox -TERM firefox exits "unexpectedly"; restarts with an error warning -HUPsame as -TERM -INTsame as -TERM -USR1 same as -TERM etc. -QUIT firefox crashes and burns It would be nice if there were a command-line arg that disables the annoying warning on startup after a crash. cheers rickw -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace. -- Jimi Hendrix -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Apache failed t/s
Voytek Eymont wrote: service httpd stop/start fixed it OK, BUT, what could've gone wrong to bring it down ? error log included: 'caught SIGTERM, shutting down' is this when it failed ? Yup. error log included: [Sat Jul 19 06:29:48 2008] [notice] caught SIGTERM, shutting down [Sat Jul 19 08:29:28 2008] [notice] suEXEC mechanism enabled (wrapper: /usr/sbin /suexec) Something shut down Apache at 6:29 AM .. possibly logrotate. Something else started is up again at 8:29 AM. You perhaps? Perhaps all that happened is logrotate failed to start Apache again for reasons as yet to be determined. cheers rick -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor I forget what I was taught. I only remember what I have learnt. -- Patrick White -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Re: eee pc 900 (20080709)
Richard Ibbotson wrote: It's true enough in England. For example in a country where hardly anyone is properly trained on IT Are there any countries that fit the bill of "trained in IT?" cheers rickw -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor The word "genius" isn't applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein. -- Joe Theisman, NFL football quarterback and sports analyst -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: [LINK] The Amazon Kindle e-book
Richard Chirgwin wrote: Now, apart from the "wow, this is an e-book!" factor, what's the attraction? One attraction is that the e-book is running Linux, has wireless and USB connectors. ref: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Kindle> Like all things Linux, this little beauty will be dissected and cracked in no time and boffins will install their own software on it. cheers rickw -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but can't afford an air force. -- William Blum -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Is someone is snooping my wireless?
Jonathan Lange wrote: Recent events have reminded us that randomness is just as important in SSH key generation. I'd save my dice (and my time) for things that actually guard my data. An old favourite is to pick a song you know well and grab the first letters of a line or two in the song. Apply a standard substitution rule to the letters and voila! ttl8hIwwyA This is for passphrases (usually for keys) that you have to remember and type in often. cheers rickw p.s. Twinkle twinkle little bat, how I wonder where you're at! -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. -- Mark Twain -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Is someone is snooping my wireless?
Glen Turner wrote: They avoid number at the extremes and avoid repeated digits (a 60 byte string would have a run of 6 repeated digits about one time in five). The result is very non-random. Yes indeed. I've read about complaints from consumers about seemingly non-random behaviour in the shuffle function on iPods. Apple tries to explain that yes, the iPod can easily play 3 songs in a row by the same artist when in random mode. This is the nature of randomness. Usually falls on deaf ears. cheers rickw -- Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. -- Mark Twain -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Is someone is snooping my wireless?
Tony Sceats wrote: why not have a little fun instead of locking everything down immediately :) http://ex-parrot.com/~pete/upside-down-ternet.html and anyway, setting up a proxy server, forcing them through it and logging all requests may give you an insight into what they are doing on your network, and maybe who they are.. much more interesting than securing your network Excellent! kittennet and blurnet. Ain't technology wonderful. I like the guy's domain name. Spam comes from Monty Python. So do ex-parrots. thanks rickw -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor ... wanted me to be a Win2K admin with "emphasis" on security. That's like a job as a SCUBA diver with an "emphasis" on keeping things dry. -- Anthony de Boer -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] composite multiple images command in imagemagick
Jamie Wilkinson wrote: 2008/6/12 Jeff Waugh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: I've always pondered where to draw the line between sys admin and programmer /analyst. Wherever you draw it, draw if very firmly. Sysadmins should not write code, Bollocks. I've yet to meet a sysadmin who does not write code. But I classify it as "scripting". Leave programming in the large to analysts. cheers rickw -- ________ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor ... wanted me to be a Win2K admin with "emphasis" on security. That's like a job as a SCUBA diver with an "emphasis" on keeping things dry. -- Anthony de Boer -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Is someone is snooping my wireless?
Martin Visser wrote: It isn't clear what you are seeing. Is this just an *available* adhoc network appearing in network-manager? This just means that there is someone nearby advertising their PC as an ad-hoc network. It is then up to you to decide if you want to connect to them. I strongly suspect that all it was was someone advertising their PC (not another WiFi network). There is no evidence they obtained access. I am moving to WPA as we speak. All other measures have been implemented so I feel much more secure now. Thanks to all for the great advice. -rickw -- Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor ... wanted me to be a Win2K admin with "emphasis" on security. That's like a job as a SCUBA diver with an "emphasis" on keeping things dry. -- Anthony de Boer -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Is someone is snooping my wireless?
Dean Hamstead wrote: (unless you hire some sort of sniper on top of your building). Good idea! That mob from the APEC summit must be bored these days. firstly. use MAC filtering Yup. I have an ACL for MAC addrs. Can that be cracked? i.e. keep trying the *huge* MAC address space until they get in? Must take until the heat death of the universe to do that. second. get rid of WEP and use WPA or WPA2 if someone is using your network, you should be able to see a dhcp lease from your dhcp server (which might just be an adsl/ip router). this is a good place to start! from there you can block their mac address otherwise take a look in the routers arp table and look for strange MAC addresses - then block them. Thanks for the advice. And something new to investigate. I'll try to figure out how to ssh to the WiFi (it's an airport ... might have trouble there!) and look around. Apple products are so dumbed down that the Airport Base Stn Utility doesn't give you much in that regard. cheers rickw -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor My advice to the women's clubs of America is to raise more hell and fewer dahlias. -- William Allen White -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Is someone is snooping my wireless?
DaZZa wrote: You should make sure you take the simple steps which *everyone* running wireless should do. 1) Disable SSID broadcast 2) Disable DHCP unless you absolutely *have* to use it. Already do the above two. SSID should only be used for public nets, I presume. And no DHCP. 3) Make the Wireless subnet as small as you can possibly go for the number of machines you have. The one I use at home is set to 192.168.25.0 with a 255.255.255.252 netmask - leaving room for only the router's IP address, and the one machine I have running wireless. The cable LAN segment has a completely different range. Excellent advice. Thanks. I am completely statically addressed here with a number of machines. I'll partition the address space and separate out the cabled LAN. Would this suffice: LAN: 192.168.100.0 255.255.255.whatever WiFi: 192.168.50.0 255.255.255.252 Or better: LAN: 10.1.100.0 255.255.255.whatever WiFi: 192.168.50.0 255.255.255.252 4) Use WPA or WPA2. WEP is badly broken, and was cracked years ago. Will do. It's long overdue. Laziness == !Secure. Depending on your wireless AP, you can require authentication (if supported) before allowing a wireless connection. Yes indeed. I already require authentication. I am beginning to think that this icon I saw was someone's PC trying to get on the wireless but they failed. I've turned the wireless back on and they've vanished. But I will remain vigilant and implement as much security as possible. thanks rickw -- ________ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor My advice to the women's clubs of America is to raise more hell and fewer dahlias. -- William Allen White -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Firefox 3.0 Download Day
Dean Hamstead wrote: firefox on debian? *gasp* iceweasel is the OSS browser of choice for debianites. Crikies I must keep up. I'm only using Linux in serverland, sans an X or GUI, so I am out of that loop. Why iceweasel over FF? cheers rickw -- Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor My advice to the women's clubs of America is to raise more hell and fewer dahlias. -- William Allen White -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Firefox 3.0 Download Day
Dean Hamstead wrote: there is a debian/amd64 package? *scratches head* And I am sure there are packages for FF 3.0. And many mirrors of it. I hope the Firefox team are taking this into account when they estimate the number of downloads tomorrow. Does anyone know if, in general, mirrors report back to base with stats on downloads? cheers rickw -- Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor My advice to the women's clubs of America is to raise more hell and fewer dahlias. -- William Allen White -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Is someone is snooping my wireless?
This may be off topic, but there is a lot of networking talent on SLUG. And the answers to this query will be very useful in general. A new icon I have never seen before for a PC connection to my wireless LAN has alerted me that someone the area is attempting to connect. The icon only indicates that it is a PC. No IP or any info like that. What I am after is intrusion detection software for a wireless LAN. * how can I get the IPs of the connected or trying to connect? * can I "snort out" those trying to break in with WEP cracks? That kind of stuff. I feel like I'm running blind right now, and disconnecting the wireless is the only option until I know what is going on. FWIW I've run this wireless for about five years now and this is the first time I've seen anything like this. I am in inner Sydney and there are heaps of wireless LANs around, and an office block full of PCs 10m across the alley from me. One idea comes to mind: tcpdump, which has been an excellent tool in the past, esp. to point the finger at a stray device that is flooding the LAN. cheers rickw -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor My advice to the women's clubs of America is to raise more hell and fewer dahlias. -- William Allen White -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Firefox 3.0 Download Day
Robert Collins wrote: Isn't this a _linux_ users group? I would have assumed using linux -> not using internet explorer. Bien sure! You can't even get IE for the Mac anymore. Aw shucks. The email sent to SLUG was BCC'd to lots of Winders addicts out there in an attempt to wean them off the evilware on their machine. They were the target audience for my IE remark. I hope some take the advice. I've seen people using buggy and insecure IE 6.0 lately. When I tell them all about it, and the zombies and the spam and the p0rn etc.etc. they usually glaze over and start surfing again. Sigh. I think one of the real serious aspects of lax internet security is that most consumers simply do not see the dangers and could care less. Their puter is little more than a toaster with a pretty browser and email interface on it. cheers rick -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor My advice to the women's clubs of America is to raise more hell and fewer dahlias. -- William Allen White -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Firefox 3.0 Download Day
Hi Guys, Firefox 3.0 is coming out tomorrow. The 18th here is the 17th in the USA, which is global download day for the Firefox 3.0 launch. Mozilla is attempting to win a Guiness Book of World Records entry for the most downloads in one day. So far, 1.4 million have pledged. More here: <http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/> Ditch Internet Explorer and get Firefox :) cheers rick -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor My advice to the women's clubs of America is to raise more hell and fewer dahlias. -- William Allen White -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] LaCie 2TB 2Big Dual + debian (LaCie SATA II PCI-Express eSATA cards)
david wrote: Every external firewire/usb drive i've used has ended up giving me hard drive failure, and in some cases heart failure. Other people whose opinion I respect have come to the same conclusion. I get the impression that the problem has to do with power supply on the external device, but I haven't figured that out for certain. I haven't used Lacies. Are they better? I've been using a LaCie 500 GB external for a few years now without a single hitch on Mac OS X. Firewire connection. I am impressed with LaCia products. Seem pretty solid. Since I am also backing up the files from the LaCie using a LaCie DVD burner, and then verifying all originals and backups using MD5 sums, both the HDD and burner/reader are getting a good workout. Both work flawlessly. Aside: I cannot say the same about the Mac internal superdrive, a MATSHITADVD-R UJ-835F. A google will show why it is crap. Utter crap. That is why the LaCia external DVD burner. cheers rickw -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." -- Henry Spencer -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] composite multiple images command in imagemagick
Daniel Pittman wrote: That said, don't discount the risk that a programmer might wander in here as well. :) You're talking (?) to one. I enjoy the SLUG list since I have programmed some largish systems on Linux for the enterprise and when I'm at the coal face I need sys admin skills, as rudimentary as they are. SLUG is a great resource for all, not just sys admins. Witness the requests we get from overseas for help! It would be interesting to see a breakdown of SLUG membership by area of IT expertise. My guess is 70% admins and 30% the rest. There are a lot of Linux users on here, no? cheers rickw -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." -- Henry Spencer -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] composite multiple images command in imagemagick
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What you are after is actually a programmer... who can write that sort of thing.. Ya think? I've always pondered where to draw the line between sys admin and programmer /analyst. Many sys admins I work with can whip up shell scripts and are whizzes at handling utilities and such in the shell. But often they are not adept at designing software systems and implementing them. No offense, admins, but it is a different discipline. Which raises the question: does it require a programmer to handle and correctly execute complex command-line programs like convert, etc. as found in Imagemagick? As an aside, my brain begins weeping when I have to do something novel with iptables (another command-line monster) but I don't consider that a programming job. I get the impression many Linux admins can configure iptables in the dark without a keyboard and both hands preoccupied with beer and pizza. cheers rickw -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." -- Henry Spencer -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: Compromised Linux box stories (Re: [SLUG] upgrading complicated installs
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Depends how you set it up. Mine has a `three tries and you're out' policy. And as I use an ssh-agent on my (carry around) laptop, there's no chance of being locked out accidentally. I assume three times password fails and you're out, right? That's interesting. Can one configure ssh so that the password attempts are TCP wrapped, but the cert-based (ssh-agent) logins are always allowed, no matter where you are? cheers rick -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out? --Will Rogers -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: Compromised Linux box stories (Re: [SLUG] upgrading complicated installs
Dean Hamstead wrote: Denyhosts is a great daemon/cronscript that will manage hosts.allow for your ssh server. you can set thresholds and instant triggers etc which will result in that ip being blocked. Also, can't one use a TCP wrapper with ssh? Either way, it does compromise one of the beauties of working on the Internet. When I head up north for a break, for example, and need to access the server, heaven knows what my IP will be when away from home. There is a "door knocking" technique that was discussed a couple of years ago on this list to allow you to "tap tap tap" the server ask it to let you in temporarily. More work of course. Also, you could turn off password auth and just use keys. Yup. Great idea. cheers rickw -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor The user's going to pick dancing pigs over security every time. -- Bruce Schneier -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: Compromised Linux box stories (Re: [SLUG] upgrading complicated installs
jam wrote: Daniel talks about 'brute forcing' a password: say [EMAIL PROTECTED]&*()_/?] and 6 chars passwords 6**70 umm 70 * log (2) and 10**8 brute forces / sec thats 10 to the power 60 secs! Sorry the universe went flat. Or collapsed to a singularity. As Bruce Schneier points out here: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/01/choosing_secure.html most passwords are much more limited in variety than the 6**70 in your estimate. That article discusses offline password cracking, but many of the points he raises apply to online password cracking. * a surpiring number of admins leave the password unchanged as installed out of the box * there are passwords out there that are simply 'password' And, "When attacking programs with deliberately slow ramp-ups, it's important to make every guess count. A simple six-character lowercase exhaustive character attack, "aa" through "zz," has more than 308 million combinations. And it's generally unproductive, because the program spends most of its time testing improbable passwords like "pqzrwj." According to Eric Thompson of AccessData, a typical password consists of a root plus an appendage. A root isn't necessarily a dictionary word, but it's something pronounceable. An appendage is either a suffix (90 percent of the time) or a prefix (10 percent of the time). So the first attack PRTK performs is to test a dictionary of about 1,000 common passwords, things like "letmein," "password," "123456" and so on. Then it tests them each with about 100 common suffix appendages: "1," "4u," "69," "abc," "!" and so on. Believe it or not, it recovers about 24 percent of all passwords with these 100,000 combinations." I am running a server that was getting heaps of password cracking attempts on SSH port 22. Since changing the port, the attempts have stopped. cheers rickw -- Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor The user's going to pick dancing pigs over security every time. -- Bruce Schneier -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: Compromised Linux box stories (Re: [SLUG] upgrading complicated installs)
Martin Visser wrote: I have often found that feeding the output of the toaster, back into the toaster demonstrates an overflow bug, requiring opening all of the windows and doors. Funny that. And I have found that feeding the output of Windows back into Windows often results in toast! cheers rickw -- Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor The user's going to pick dancing pigs over security every time. -- Bruce Schneier -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: Compromised Linux box stories (Re: [SLUG] upgrading complicated installs)
Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: On Mon, 2 Jun 2008 at 14:59, Jason Ball <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Not wishing to start an OS war, but I rarely if ever have seen a BSD or Sun box compromised. Is this due to sheer numbers of Linux and Doze? More than likely. I've seen a range of plausible reasons and hard statistics to back up Linux supporters' assertions that the frequency of compromises on Windows systems is due to far more than just its sheer install base. I'd hate to see Linux users start to solely use the 'market share' argument against other, less used, operating systems. As pointed out previously, one contributing factor to x86 Windows and Linux architectures being popular targets is that there is significant payback in writing attack software for platforms that are ubiquitous. The rarer the system, the less likely there is blackhat experience to crack it. Market share is a factor. But as we all know, a house of cards built of shakey foundations is another factor. BSD and Sun zealots do claim that their software systems are much more robust/stable than Linux and Windows. I cannot respond to that claim. Regarding your sig: Your toaster doesn't crash. Your television doesn't crash. Why should your computer? http://www.linux.org.au/linux The answer should be obvious. A dedicated computer running an appliance runs heavily tested software dedicated to one purpose and a well-known hardware set. A general purpose computer running any variety of software you install along with a conglomerate of possibly never before tried hardware suffers the combinatorial explosion of interactions and complexity that a toaster never experiences. The devil is in the detail of general-purpose vs purpose-built. cheers rick -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor The user's going to pick dancing pigs over security every time. -- Bruce Schneier -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: Compromised Linux box stories (Re: [SLUG] upgrading complicated installs)
Adrian Chadd wrote: The trouble is that the entry barrier for coding is so low, you can "code" without any "clue". This very issue gave rise to some heated debate over on the LINK mailing list, which some of you attend. Many of us computer "professionals" were peeved by this low barrier to entry into the software industry. Computer software creation is not a certified profession like engineering. There are far toomany shiesters out there peddling crap software because they can. This gives rise to many many problems in IT. But, enough said. Yup, you can code up crap in any language. Especially INTERCAL! cheers rickw -- ________ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor The user's going to pick dancing pigs over security every time. -- Bruce Schneier -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: Compromised Linux box stories (Re: [SLUG] upgrading complicated installs)
Daniel Pittman wrote: [2] formmail. I say no more. The perl language has been pretty bullet proof. I do recall one string-based exploit in the many many years I have been using it. That said, yup, scripts like formmail are written by monkeys in the 11th level hell and sent to torment sys admins. I was running an ISP and in my early days I stupidly allowed some customers to upload their own perl CGI scripts to our (only) main web server. After watching the machine being brought down to its knees due to inexperienced coding (don't ask) I learnt my lesson very quickly. They only way to allow user-supplied scripts nowadays is via some sort of virtualisation scheme with solid sandboxing. Even then, poor coding can gobble up heaps of resources needlessly. cheers rickw -- Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor The user's going to pick dancing pigs over security every time. -- Bruce Schneier -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: Compromised Linux box stories (Re: [SLUG] upgrading complicated installs)
Mary Gardiner wrote: I suspect attacks through web apps like WordPress are pretty common causes of comprise of machines run by essentially knowledgable people at the moment, because there doesn't seem yet to be a good set of best practices for packaging and updating them (upstream tends to aims their instructions at people who might not even have shell access, let alone root access, and there's the whole plugin universe too). Out of curiosity, I often query the server used in the links provided in phishing scam emails. More often than not, the phishing box is a compromised Linux server running Apache and PHP. Rarely do I see a Windows server :( I would tend to blame an out-of-date PHP install rather than Apache as being the attack vector. If you are on AusCert or DebSec, you will know how many exploits are disovered in PHP 4 and 5. And they keep finding more. I did do a PHP install and was amazed at the server info p[ag. There are a myriad of hacks and "fixes" in PHP, as reflected in the PHP system variables, to turn off all sorts of insecure features. I got the feeling that out of the box and with little technical knowledge, PHP is not a healthy addition to any Linux server. Not wishing to start an OS war, but I rarely if ever have seen a BSD or Sun box compromised. Is this due to sheer numbers of Linux and Doze? cheers rickw -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor The user's going to pick dancing pigs over security every time. -- Bruce Schneier -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] upgrading complicated installs
Daniel Pittman wrote: Without that commitment you well, eventually, get to join the legions of poorly maintained, compromised Linux boxes out there. This hurts everyone, but especially you -- potentially legally, certainly in terms of a lot of work when your ISP (or the police) call up about all that SPAM you have been sending out or those warez you are distributing... Are you implying that a zombied box can be a legal liability for the hapless owner? If that is the case, a heck of a lot of Winders lusers should face the courts. But I doubt this is the case. cheers rickw -- Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor The user's going to pick dancing pigs over security every time. -- Bruce Schneier -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Telephone Call Logger?
Nigel Allen wrote: I'm looking for a simple telephone cal logging system (or anything that can be simply modded to suit). Google found this PABX call logger, which might be adaptable. http://www.treshna.com/phone-look/ Sounds like one could easily whip up a one pager in python + some DB with apache to do the job. Of course, the devil is in the detail. Contact mgmt database, report generation. cheers rickw -- Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor Tis the dream of each programmer before his life is done, To write three lines of APL and make the damn thing run. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] perl equivalent for cd $(dirname $0)?
Sonia Hamilton wrote: The difficulty in solving problems in any new topic is often knowing what question to ask :-) I searched and searched (got the perl doco locally), but didn't know what to look for... Even if you know what you are looking for, things can be difficult. Ever try to find out how the 'read' command works in bash? Searching for the word 'read' in the doco leaves me breathless. cheers rickw -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor We like to think of ourselves as the Microsoft of the energy world. -- Kenneth Lay, former CEO of Enron -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] PostgreSQL slowing down on INSERT
Rick Welykochy wrote this and replies to hisself: Howard Lowndes wrote: I have a PHP script that inserts around 100K of records into a table on each time that it runs. It starts off at a good pace but gets progressively slower until it falls over complaining that it cannot allocate sufficient memory. When I need to do this in MySQL, I used a LOADDATA INFILE sql command that loads the data from a CSV or TSV file. Completes very quickly, with only one round trip to the server. Is there a similar command in PostgresSQL? Found it. It is called COPY in PostgreSQL. <http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/static/populate.html> They recommend to turn AUTOCOMMIT off. Then take Sonia's recommendation of enforcing a unique index so the dupes are chucked out. Fire off one single COPY command from PHP and see how that works. cheers rickw -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor Tis the dream of each programmer before his life is done, To write three lines of APL and make the damn thing run. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] PostgreSQL slowing down on INSERT
Howard Lowndes wrote: I have a PHP script that inserts around 100K of records into a table on each time that it runs. It starts off at a good pace but gets progressively slower until it falls over complaining that it cannot allocate sufficient memory. When I need to do this in MySQL, I used a LOADDATA INFILE sql command that loads the data from a CSV or TSV file. Completes very quickly, with only one round trip to the server. Is there a similar command in PostgresSQL? cheers rickw -- Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor Tis the dream of each programmer before his life is done, To write three lines of APL and make the damn thing run. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Can I be comfortable with this log message
jam wrote: In all the years noone has ever tried my non standard ssh port! Ditto. I use non-standard ssh/scp ports on all machines I maintain. Works a treat. The reason: I was getting hammered on port 22 and snort told me all about it. cheers rickw -- Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor We like to think of ourselves as the Microsoft of the energy world. -- Kenneth Lay, former CEO of Enron -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Perl Question
Rick Welykochy wrote: Peter Abbott wrote: if ( $_ =~ m/^Box(\d) ([A-Z]+(\. | ?)[A-Z]* ?[A-Z]*).*?(\d).*?(\d\d\.\d \d).*?(\d*\.\d\d)L/) { $box, = $1; $name = $2; $place = $4; $time = $5; $margin = $6; $name =~ s/\.//; } Please write maintainable code that is easy to understand. I'll put my money where my mouth is ... $match = qr/^Box(\d) ([A-Z]+(\. | ?)[A-Z]* ?[A-Z]*). ... etc/; if (m/$match/) { ($box,$name,$place,$time,$margin) = ($1,$2,$4,$5,$6); $name =~ s/\.//; } i.e. my rule of matching: grab the $placement variables in the statement, to be sure, to be sure :) The qr/.../ creates a pattern match, precompiled. And it can be used multiple times in your code. Easier to maintain. It's the one thing missing from python: ease of handling regexs. Yes, yes, there is the 're' package, but that is an O-O implementation. ot part of the language. It is for that reason alone that my GLPs (grungy little programs) are still whipped up in perl instead of python. cheers rickw -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor The best way to accelerate a PC is 9.8 m/s2 -- anon -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Perl Question
Peter Abbott wrote: if ( $_ =~ m/^Box(\d) ([A-Z]+(\. | ?)[A-Z]* ?[A-Z]*).*?(\d).*?(\d\d\.\d \d).*?(\d*\.\d\d)L/) { $box = $1; $name = $2; $place = $4; $time = $5; $margin = $6; $name =~ s/\.//; } correcto However if the $name substitution is inserted above $place like so it fails to allocate values to $place, $time and $margin. if ( $_ =~ m/^Box(\d) ([A-Z]+(\. | ?)[A-Z]* ?[A-Z]*).*?(\d).*?(\d\d\.\d \d).*?(\d*\.\d\d)L/) { $box = $1; $name = $2; $name =~ s/\.//; $place = $4; $time = $5; $margin = $6; } incorrecto and hard to maintain You've also introduced a very subtle bug that I could not, at first glance, see. The $name substitution resets $1 ... $6. Please write maintainable code that is easy to understand. I wouldn't want to be given the second code example buried amongst 1000+ lines of perl and then asked to fix "the obscure bug". cheers rickw -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor The best way to accelerate a PC is 9.8 m/s2 -- anon -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] ssh - localhost, mysql
Sonia Hamilton wrote: Slightly OT question related to this. How would I prevent ssh complaining about changed ssh keys for localhost? (Because I regularly tunnel via localhost, but to different ips). Just a guess you could assign one loopback addr to each distinct host and add to your /etc/hosts file: 127.0.0.101 tunhost1 127.0.0.102 tunhost2 127.0.0.103 tunhost3 127.0.0.104 tunhost4 127.0.0.105 tunhost5 : and arrange a separate and uniquely identifiable tunnel for each host. cheers rickw -- Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor The best way to accelerate a PC is 9.8 m/s2 -- anon -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] how to verify time zones are corrected for new DST ?
Voytek Eymont wrote: %subject%? zdump -v Australia/Sydney and look at the entries for 2008, i.e. the following should be correct: Australia/Sydney Sat Apr 5 15:59:59 2008 UTC = Sun Apr 6 02:59:59 2008 EST isdst=1 gmtoff=39600 Australia/Sydney Sat Apr 5 16:00:00 2008 UTC = Sun Apr 6 02:00:00 2008 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=36000 Australia/Sydney Sat Oct 4 15:59:59 2008 UTC = Sun Oct 5 01:59:59 2008 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=36000 Australia/Sydney Sat Oct 4 16:00:00 2008 UTC = Sun Oct 5 03:00:00 2008 EST isdst=1 gmtoff=39600 This was found as follows: google for "linux %subject%" and click I'm Feeling Lucky. cheers rickw -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor Filling the tank of an SUV with ethanol requires enough corn to feed a person for a year. -- The Economist: "The end of cheap food" -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] What is suspicous?
I just posted a reply to the list and received a soft bounce saying the following: Your mail to 'slug' with the subject Re: [SLUG] how to verify time zones are corrected for new DST ? Is being held until the list moderator can review it for approval. The reason it is being held: Message has a suspicious header Either the message will get posted to the list, or you will receive notification of the moderator's decision. If you would like to cancel this posting, please visit the following URL: http://lists.slug.org.au/confirm/slug/096e10eb98e8041c037087e39b483a79482e0103 I have little or no preternatural ability to divine which header this message is referring to. Would it be possible to modify the message to indicate which header is suspect? cheers rickw -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor Filling the tank of an SUV with ethanol requires enough corn to feed a person for a year. -- The Economist: "The end of cheap food" -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] file list for owner/group
Alex Samad wrote: find /path/to/directory -user xxx -group xxx does that show files that are user xxx AND group is it different from find /path/to/directory -user xxx -o -group xxx Yup. From the man page: The -and operator is the logical AND operator. As it is implied by the juxtaposition of two expressions it does not have to be specified. ^^ The -or operator is the logical OR operator. HTH HAND rick -- Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor Anyone who says he won't resign four times, will. -- John Kenneth Galbraith -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] looking for a command to automatically create sequentially numbered files
elliott-brennan wrote: Now, I know I've asked a similar questions, but I thought that I'd ask again with what may be a clearer request :) For example: I have a collection of images labelled - a_0001.jpeg through to A0999.jpeg b_0001.jpeg through to A0999.jpeg c_0001.jpeg through to A0999.jpeg d_0001.jpeg through to A0999.jpeg I want to merge them as follows: montage -geometry +4+4 a_0001.jpeg b_0001.jpeg c_0001.jpeg d_0001.jpeg montage1.jpeg the output file is montage.jpeg and needs to be a sequentially increasing number. Is there a command that will allow me to do this automatically without having to individually enter each file name and output name? I realise this is a little weird and no doubt unusual, but, as usual, any assistance or direction would be most appreciated. Not weird at all. Well organised file systems often use sequential or semi-sequential numbering to keep things logical and consistent. (Who said consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative?) The GNU seq command is useful for sequential numbering. $ seq 1 5 1 2 3 4 5 As well, you can use printf to format the numbers as you wish, e.g. $ for i in `seq 1 5`; do echo `printf a_%04d.jpeg $i`; done a_0001.jpeg a_0002.jpeg a_0003.jpeg a_0004.jpeg a_0005.jpeg Putting it all together: $ for i in `seq 1 5`; do j=`printf %04d $i`; echo montage -geometry +4+4 a_$j.jpeg b_$j.jpeg c_$j.jpeg d_$j.jpeg montage$j.jpeg; done montage -geometry +4+4 a_0001.jpeg b_0001.jpeg c_0001.jpeg d_0001.jpeg montage0001.jpeg montage -geometry +4+4 a_0002.jpeg b_0002.jpeg c_0002.jpeg d_0002.jpeg montage0002.jpeg montage -geometry +4+4 a_0003.jpeg b_0003.jpeg c_0003.jpeg d_0003.jpeg montage0003.jpeg montage -geometry +4+4 a_0004.jpeg b_0004.jpeg c_0004.jpeg d_0004.jpeg montage0004.jpeg montage -geometry +4+4 a_0005.jpeg b_0005.jpeg c_0005.jpeg d_0005.jpeg montage0005.jpeg Get rid of the "echo" command, change 5 to 999 and Bob's your aunty. cheers rickw -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized that the Lord doesn't work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me. -- Emo Phillips -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] ADSL modem recommendations (with bridging)
Glen Turner wrote: On Thu, 2008-03-06 at 17:43 +1100, Peter Hardy wrote: Pete, who measures his traffic in gross nybbles to reduce confusion. Is that 4-bit IBM nybbles or 6-bit DEC nybbles? 6-bit DEC nybbles? never. cheers rickw -- Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but can't afford an air force. -- William Blum -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] support enquiry
Bruce Bruen wrote: On Tue, 4 Mar 2008 03:59:53 pm Rick Welykochy wrote: Nigel Allen wrote: "young" IT person? That smacks of ageism and discrimination. Smacks of "we will only pay peanuts" :) Oh for Snoopy's sake. The guy is a small business operator. He needs someone to run, maintain and hopefully improve his business, not a druid to read his goat's entrails. Get a grip folks. This isn't the attitude that is going to get any us any further. Go for it! cheers rickw -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but can't afford an air force. -- William Blum -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] support enquiry
Nigel Allen wrote: "young" IT person? That smacks of ageism and discrimination. Smacks of "we will only pay peanuts" :) Which raises a rather serious issue. The more experience and quality service one can bring to a project, the harder it is to get the job. Or so I am finding. Often companies opt for the "young" IT person, in an effort to save bucks. With all due respect to young geeks entering the workforce, there is a place for experience and wisdom in creating, implementing and deploying software projects (my specialty). The catch-22 is I don't work for peanuts. Anymore. The often touted response to this observation is that I should get into management. As if that is natural career growth path for someone talented in software design and development. Nothing of course could be further from reality. A good geek != a good manager. Heck, I even eschew project mgmt if I can avoid it. I find myself losing out out more and more jobs as I get older due to the almighty dollar and saving thereof. I've even chatted to some recruiters about this and they agree. No-one will admit it up front, but that is the reality of the job marketplace. I'm sure this also applies to many other sectors. The upside is that I can get by on doing less work for more pay. cheers rickw -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor The purpose of censorware is not to Protect The Children, but to get some people elected and keep other people employed. -- Daniel Rutter -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] support enquiry
Bruce Fenwick Adscreen wrote: I came across your website and need some help. We are a small Digital Signage company located in the Hills District of Sydney and require the services of a young IT person to help service our existing infrastructure that is totally Linux driven. "young" IT person? That smacks of ageism and discrimination. BTW: you may be looking for the Slug jobs list: <http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/jobs> cheers rickw -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor The purpose of censorware is not to Protect The Children, but to get some people elected and keep other people employed. -- Daniel Rutter -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Seeing 2020
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Under the Federal Government and State Government, there has been millions of dollars "promised" but then leak away. This will keep on continuing... [off topic] It is worthwhile to note that when many of the promised funding plans (in all sectors, but esp. social welfare) were followed up over the past ten years, no funds were actually dispersed. It is one thing to promise to fund. It is quite another to actually see the funding occur. cheers rickw -- ____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor The purpose of censorware is not to Protect The Children, but to get some people elected and keep other people employed. -- Daniel Rutter -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Asus Eee 4G 7" Micro Laptop
So many great and informative responses :D Thanks, Sluggers. Amos Shapira wrote: to fill. I'd be pretty confident that they other main vendors will be quickly trying to come up with competition. (And no, even though I And here they come marching: http://www.everex.com/ The big difference being HDD vs. solid state storage. I am really interested in a "backpackable" lappy so that I can travel light without worrying about dropping my bag en route. Also thinking about one for a 14-yr old net addict ... she is none to kind to hardware (which teenager is?) who likes nothing better that balancing a notebook on her knees while yacking on the phone, watching TV, eating toast and drinking milo at the same time. That said, I have a Mac powerbook circa 2001 still running fine. It has been dropped from table height to a hardwood floor and carpet about four times now and still shines. Takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin' as they say. (The only damage: the optical drive only reads DVDs now ... it rejects CDs!) cheers rickw -- _____ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services The manufacture and transport of a 1L bottle of Fiji water consumes 26kg of water, 0.9kg of fossil fuel and emits 0.5kg of greenhouse gas. -- Pablo Paster, Sustainability Engineer at Triple Pundit -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Asus Eee 4G 7" Micro Laptop
Anyone had a play with the Asus micro laptop? Described here: http://tinyurl.com/ynnn9c It runs some form of Linux, has no HDD, just 4 GB of flash. Sounds ideal for travel ... but perhaps the 7" screen is a bit too small. Going for about $450 at JB Hifi and less on eBay. cheers rickw -- _ Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services A polar bear is a rectangular bear after a coordinate transform. -- Anon. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html