Re: Can't find ip addresses of devices on LAN

[Steve Witt]

On Fri, Sep 01, 2017 at 12:28:05PM -0400, Thomas George wrote:
> I have tried ping 192.168.1.225 followed by arp -a
> 
> and I have tried netstat -r
> 
> Neither report ip addresses of attached devices.
> 
> I know there are two devices besides this pc and I know the address of one
> of these devices. I can ping it and it responds.
> 
> How to find the address of the second device other than ping each address
> from 192.168.1.2 to 192.168.1.255?
> 

What sort of network are you on? Are the IP addresses of the devices
assigned via DHCP from a router? Can you query the router to find the
DHCP leases that it has assigned (through a web interface perhaps)?
Otherwise, pinging every address in the subnet is one of the only
surefire ways to do this, depending upon what you want to
accomplish. My rule of thumb is, that if I need to perform some task
more than a couple of times, then write a script/program to do it. I'd
much rather code something up than issue 254 ping commands.

In a little more of a big picture view, if you need to communicate
between devices on your network and you want to have IP addresses
dynamically assigned through DHCP, then your DHCP server (probably a
router) should accept hostname from the device and then incorporate
that into a local DNS service so you can communicate to other devices
via their hostnames and the underlying IP address is somewhat
irrelevant. Or assign fixed IP addresses (which can be a
pain). 'dnsmasq' is a package that does this kind of thing. But it
depends upon your use case and the details of your network (mostly who
controls it).

Re: Bug with lib ssl

[Steve Witt]

On Sat, 18 Jun 2016, Fabrice Vaillant wrote:


Hey

I'm running debian testing and I have encountered a weird bug. Wanted to 
check if that was a real bug or an issue on my end.


The site https://www.w3.org/2010/05/video/mediaevents.html fails on my 
computer with both iceweasel on chromium whereas it succeds on other computer 
(not debian) I have tried it with. The reason is that media content 
downloaded  from media.w3.org over https fail due too :


```
An error occurred during a connection to media.w3.org.

SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length.

(Error code: ssl_error_rx_record_too_long)
```
Similar error message show up when I try to directly download the content 
from the site using curl. I suspect an issue in the ssl implementation but I 
have not been able to reporduce on other site.


Does anybody have a similar problem?


Works for me using Firefox and Google Chrome on unstable. Also works using 
Firefox on Jessie.  I don't have a testing system to try.

Re: home directory fail-over using automount ?

[Steve Witt]

On Fri, 17 Jun 2016, bri...@aracnet.com wrote:


I have my nfs shares set-up to automount to

/home/nfs4/

and then that directory name is used in the /etc/passwd file.

What i'd like to do is have it use /home/ in the event it 
can't see the nfs server.


it seems like some automount trickery might be possible if, for example, 
nfs mount didn't work it would actually mount /home/ on 
/home/nfs4/.


Haven't found a way to do this, probably because it's a horrible hack, 
or not possible and I should probably be trying to do this some other 
way.


Any suggestions ?


I'm not an NFS expert, but I've been using/sys admin'g NIS/NFS on various 
Sun and Linux systems at home and at work since the late '90s. I have 
never heard of what you're trying to do, but can't categorically say that 
it isn't possible (if the double negative isn't too confusing). I don't 
think the result would be very satisfactory as it seems you'd end up with 
a split home directory with files in both the local and server home 
directories. I think it would be pretty chaotic.


My experience over the years is the NFS automouting is very reliable and 
fairly easy to administer. If your network is stable, then you shouldn't 
have a problem with it at all. If your network isn't stable, then that 
problem should be fixed. I've had software development systems consisting 
of approx. 100 client workstations automouting user home directories from 
a couple of Linux servers (almost always Debian, but some Redhat and SUSE 
- doesn't really matter) with 30 - 40 heavy users. It was very reliable 
and there were almost never any problems.

Re: I need help

[Steve Witt]

On Thu, 11 Feb 2016, Ghaith Etaiwi wrote:


Hello, I'm starting in linux I used Ubuntu and didn't like it and I have
read that many people that used Debian had a better experience, I have a
MacBook Pro 4GB ram/ 500HDD/Intel HD 3000/ i5 2nd generation, can it run
Debian?. Also, I want to know what version of Debian to download, I saw
something about DVD1, DVD2...etc which one should I get and whats the
difference between them?



I have no direct experience with this but there is information on the 
Debian wiki about installing Debian on a Macbook Pro. It is at 



I've used Linux for many years now both at home and at work. I very much 
prefer Debian, use it at home and on any computers at work that I control. 
But I've had to use Ubuntu, Red Hat, and SUSE at work also. Although I 
don't perfer Ubuntu, I have to say that for inexperienced users, it can be 
a little more friendly than Debian. For example, if you try to run an 
application that isn't installed, Debian gives you a 'file not found' 
error. Ubuntu will advise you to install the package that provides that 
application with the package manager. And in the end, all of these are 
Linux distributions, the applications available are basically the same and 
the user experience is pretty similar. There are differences in system 
administration, where config files are kept, etc. Ubuntu does have their 
rather different desktop manager, Unity, which I don't like, but that is 
a very subjective opinion.


I wonder what it was about Ubuntu that you didn't like? Did you actually 
install it on your Macbook?

Re: Live network monitor

[Steve Witt]

On Fri, 3 Jan 2014, Harry Putnam wrote:


Bob Proulx b...@proulx.com writes:


  tcptrack -i eth2

There is also 'iftop'.

  iftop -i eth2


OK, checking them out... thanks


'iptraf' is also nice, it has a nice curses interface and is fairly 
configurable.




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Re: need help on install android development environment

[Steve Witt]

On Thu, 15 Aug 2013, Long Wind wrote:


Thanks for your detailed help!
I will try it without Eclipse.


I hope I didn't sound like I was recommending that you try to do Android 
software development without using eclipse. What I intended to say was 
that you could get eclipse either by installing the wheezy eclipse package 
or by installing eclipse from http://www.eclipse.org, which will be a 
little more up to date. While it is possible to do software development of 
Android applications without eclipse, it is not where I would recommend 
that you start. It would be much easier to get started doing it within 
eclipse.




PS: Your email address looks pretty distinguished to me.



Well thanks, but don't be too impressed. It is just a mail reflector 
service that the IEEE provides to members. Most people think it is some 
sort of scream or something.



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Re: need help on install android development environment

[Steve Witt]

On Thu, 15 Aug 2013, Long Wind wrote:


does wheezy meet requirement below?

GNU C Library (glibc) 2.7 or later is required.

does wheezy have Eclipse?



You can install the Android development environment on wheezy. Debian is a 
fine development environment for Android (among other things).


The version GNU C Library (package libc6) is 2.13-38

The version of Eclipse that is 'packaged' for wheezy is a little old 
(version 3.8). It would probably work fine and is the easiest install. You 
can get the latest version (4.3) from the Eclipse web site 
http://www.eclipse.org/downloads. Installing eclipse downloaded 
from the eclipse site is also pretty easy.


Then you would install the Android Developer Tools plugin for eclipse 
according to its instructions.



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Re: wheezy how-to

[Steve Witt]

On Mon, 17 Dec 2012, Bob Proulx wrote:


Russell L. Harris wrote:

Can you recommend a good Wheezy HOWTO for users forcibly being
migrated from the Gnome environment of Etch, Lenny, or Squeeze?




-- snip --


You could try MATE or another of the GNOME 2 fork projects that will
be around keeping GNOME 2 alive.  I haven't tried these but many
people have reported good results using them.  I expect GNOME 2 to be
alive for some time as a fork.


I have been using MATE for a few months now on a Wheezy system and on some 
Ubuntu 12.04 machines at work. I and my co-workers like it very much and I 
recommend it as a viable option for GNOME 2 compatibility. The switch to 
GNOME 3 (or Unity in the case of Ubuntu) was just too 
painful/disorienting.


Bob's recommendation of XFCE or LXDE are also great, I use them on some 
systems or for vnc sessions. Desktop environments are very subjective so 
you might want to give them a test drive.



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Re: etch-to-lenny upgrade problem...

[Steve Witt]

On Mon, 29 Jun 2009, Adriano Trentini wrote:


Hi.
I'm not professional. I have Lenny installed in a AMD Duron.
Why to upgrade etch if you can simply install Lenny?



Because it is easier to upgrade than to reinstall in most cases. Usually 
the machine's configuration is not affected during the upgrade and usually 
upgrades go pretty smoothly. Usually one can upgrade them remotely, if one 
has a lot of machines that they control. This can save a ton of time. 
Sometimes there are some hiccups with upgrades, but my experience (going 
back to about 1997) is really good. This was a feature of Debian that was 
ahead of nearly all other Linux distributions for a long time. It was 
common for people using other distributions to put off upgrading simply 
because it was a reinstall (which wasn't as easy as it is now). Debian 
people would just laugh at that.


I remember when Debian was a little more work to install than some other 
distributions and my colleagues at work kept wondering why I insisted on 
using Debian. I would always say because I only had to install Debian once 
and not every time a new version was released (although there where a lot 
of other reasons too). Installs now days are pretty easy, but it wasn't 
always that way.





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Re: Ticketing system

[Steve Witt]

On Sat, 24 Jan 2009, Umarzuki Mochlis wrote:


Recommend me a nice, easy to use free and open source software for support
ticketing system on linux adn please tell me why do you like it :)



We use gnats and gnatsweb at my work. It is easy to administer, which was 
a prime consideration in its selection, but also does the basic 
ticket/problem report tracking function.




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Re: Recommend a mua please

[Steve Witt]

On Wed, 3 Sep 2008, Bret Busby wrote:


On Wed, 3 Sep 2008, Péter András Felvégi wrote:

I have a few requirements for a mua, and have not yet found the ideal 
program:



-- snip --

I trust that you are aware that, apparently, the Washington University has 
abandoned PINE and ALPINE, and so both are now, apparently, unsupported.


It is an unfortunate decision by the Washington University, but, it is 
something of which you should be aware, if you are considering using either, 
and if you have expectations of your MUA.


Are you sure that the University of Washington has abandoned alpine? pine 
has been superceded by alpine, this is true, but there is no indication on 
the alpine website that alpine is not being developed any more.


I know that I, as a long-term pine and starting to be an alpine user, will 
be VERY upset if this is true. I am personally related to two UDub grads, 
who I will urge to throw their weight as alumni at the U. to reverse this 
decision!! :).

Re: what's the best IDE for C programming in Debian?

[Steve Witt]

On Thu, 31 Jul 2008, Star Liu wrote:


When I develop in windows, I use visual studio.net 2008 as my IDE, if
I want to develop in Debian, what's the best the IDE for C
programming?
thanks!



emacs



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Re: what's the best IDE for C programming in Debian?

[Steve Witt]

On Thu, 31 Jul 2008, Thomas Preud'homme wrote:


Le jeudi 31 juillet 2008, Steve Witt a écrit :

On Thu, 31 Jul 2008, Star Liu wrote:

When I develop in windows, I use visual studio.net 2008 as my IDE,
if I want to develop in Debian, what's the best the IDE for C
programming?
thanks!


emacs


The troll begins


Excuse me while I run off to pop some popcorn...








Seriously, if you like an big IDE then I'd recommend eclipse. I've been 
forced to use it on a project for the last year and I really dislike it. 
It is too heavyweight and gets in my way. To me, a decent editor that does 
syntax high-lighting (vim or emacs and others are very capable in this 
regard), a couple of xterms, make and gdb (or ddd), are all the IDE one 
needs. Probably the older people (of which I am becoming) will say this, 
and the younger people, who grew up with IDEs will be horrified. I see 
this a lot where I work. There is a longer learning curve I think with the 
method I recommend, but I also think that knowledge gained is well 
worth the effort.

Re: Preferred applications: IDE, text-editor, music player.

[Steve Witt]

On Wed, 18 Jun 2008, Nuno Magalhães wrote:


I know, it's a religious question and i'm bound to get replies of
different people telling me their choice is the best, but, why not...

The thing is i have a few requirements: i want applications that are
not desktop-dependant (i.e. Gnome or KDE) and do not rely upon Java.
This rules out a lot of text editors. For console, i use nano, for GUI
i'm using leafpad, any other suggestions?


emacs



The IDE part is a bit more tricky. Excluding Java kicks out NetBeans
and Eclipse. The basic fuctionality i search in an IDE is
syntax-highlight, code-completion, project-management and preferably
cross-platform and i18n support. Eclipse's C++ relied on make which
may be useful for linux but not as much for windows. Any IDE
supporting a GUI would be welcome; CodeDragon is at its early stage
and this poses the question: which toolkit to use?


emacs



At the most basic level i could use a regular graphical text-editor
with syntax-highlighting and search for the rest in the languages'
reference. Speaking of which, i intend to program mainly in C++ or
derivates. Code Crusader seemed cool except for the fact you have to
buy it...


emacs

Re: 97% use of / system

[Steve Witt]

On Thu, 22 May 2008, andy wrote:


Hello

My / partition is some 12GB and I see that it is currently 97% full. How can 
I clean this out without trashing important files? What should I be looking 
for in terms of likely culprits that can be deep-sixed safely?




We'll need to know a little more about you machine's total partitioning 
scheme. Where is /home and /var? These are the partitions that tend to 
have storage of variable files in them and may need to have their own 
paritition (depending upon the machine's use).







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Re: External IP

[Steve Witt]

On Tue, 22 Apr 2008, Daniel Ngu wrote:


Hi,

How do I find out what's the dynamic IP I get when connected
to my ISP? I'm not broadband BTW.



How do you connect? Is your computer connected directly to your ISP 
connection? Assuming it is Linux box then:


  /sbin/ifconfig

will show the IP addresses assigned to your network interfaces.

If you are connecting through a router of some sort (like the Linksys, 
Netgear, etc) routers, then you'll have to connect to it and see what 
address it got.




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Re: Which backup package?

[Steve Witt]

On Mon, 21 Apr 2008, Dennis G. Wicks wrote:


Greetings;

It is time that I started getting serious about backing up my systems. I have 
nine systems on my network, one will be used just for backup  restore 
(Debian/lenny)


Do you intend to backup to tape? Unless amanda has improved a lot in the 
last few years, I'd recommend bacula. I switched from amanda to bacula and 
have been much happier. My complaint with amanda was that it didn't 
support our tape library at all (a 22 tape library) and we had to 
configure the library so it used a new tape every day. bacula does support 
tape libraries well and uses the tapes much more efficiently. It stores 
the backed up files in a database and so during a restore will be able to 
find the correct tape(s) in a multi-tape backup set to load to get the 
files you request. The cool thing about this is that it doesn't associate 
a tape with a particular backup job, and so is able to fill up the tape as 
backups are done over time. I don't know the status of development on 
amanda any more, but bacula is being actively maintained.








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Re: Adding a ttyS

[Steve Witt]

On Mon, 24 Mar 2008, Jean Létourneau wrote:



Goo day,

How do I add a /dev/rrtS?  I have 6 physical com port on my machine, but
Debian only see 4 of them. I use the command MAKEDEV but they do not
appear in the /dev, only in the /dev/.static/dev, I tryed to copy them
from /dev.static/dev to the /dev, but still, my setserial keep saying my
ttySx do not exist.



'mknod' is the command you are looking for. I believe you'd want to issue 
the following commands (as root, of course) to create the additional 
/dev/ttyS4 and /dev/ttyS5 device files you desire.


# mknod /dev/ttyS4 -m 660 c 4 68
# mknod /dev/ttyS5 -m 660 c 4 69

Then I'd change the group to dialout to be consistant with the other 
ttyS* file configuration.

Re: Install windows with debian problem

[Steve Witt]

On Thu, 7 Jun 2007, Thiago Santos Faria Xavier Teixeira wrote:


i already tried to use a live cd (ubuntu) and acess my data to move them to
the
another media, but the NTFS partition cannot be mounted e exhibit a lot of
erros...
so i don´t know what to do...


Well, I think that this means that Partition Magic hosed up the NTFS 
filesystem so that it is unusable. Did you try to use the repair option of 
a WinXP CD to fix it? It was suggested previously by someone as perhaps 
the only way to possibly fix the WinXP partition. If that doesn't work, 
then I think you are at the point of reinstalling Windows.


For your information, with the new Debian installer for etch, one can 
resize an NTFS partition during the Debian install. I believe that this is 
a new feature for the etch installer, I don't think it was true 
for previous versions. I was a little skeptical about it working 
correctly, but I've installed 3 or 4 newer laptops recently with etch and 
used it to resize the WinXP partition rather than use Partition Magic.

Re: Newbie Questions - Program dir?

[Steve Witt]

On Fri, 6 Apr 2007, Gilles Mocellin wrote:


Le jeudi 05 avril 2007 23:15, Randy Patterson a ?crit?:

I am in the process of RTFM, I'm in chapter 4 :-) and have googled without
really finding an answer. When installing non-Debian packages (EsayEclipse
for PHP) from tar.gz files, where is the best place to put them in the dir
structure so that all users will have access to them? Is there a 'right'
place or does it matter as long as they are outside a users home dir?

Thanks in Advance!
Randy


You have the choice, but there's two principal ways :
- /usr/local (default for many make install targets, I prefer that)
- /opt (suse, HP-UX)


I would suggest looking at the 'stow' package also. It allows one to keep 
track of these additional programs installed manually and install or 
deinstall them. Depending upon how much you install in /usr/local or /opt, 
it can be difficult to figure out what package each file corresponds to if 
you ever want to get rid of it.

Re: LTO-2 Tape Drive Recommendations

[Steve Witt]

On Wed, 18 Oct 2006, Tim Boring wrote:


I'm looking to get an LTO-2 tape drive/autoloader for doing server
backups.  I've tried a Dell PV-122 autoloader (8 cartridges) but had
issues with it, so I'm thinking about trying something different.
(Tried calling Dell tech support but they weren't very helpful; they
seemed to only understand RedHat Linux.)  Anyone have any
recommendations of a drive or autoloader that they have had good
experiences with on Debian Sarge?



I've used a couple of tape libraries (autoloaders) from 'adic' that work 
very well. Ours have a DLT tape drive and interface through SCSI to the 
computer (they are getting a little old now). I'm using 'bacula' as the 
backup software. We had used 'amanda' for years and years, but bacula 
works far better IMHO. I had to do a little scripting to get bacula to 
control the autoloader, but this is described pretty well in the bacula 
docs. I think when you decide on a backup application, its documentation 
should give an idea as to what tape devices it supports.





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Re: Change fqdn

[Steve Witt]

On Tue, 24 Jan 2006, [utf-8] José Pablo Ezequiel Fernández wrote:


Hello.
How do I change the fqdn of a computer ?
No matter what I do, hostname -f keeps telling localhost.localdomain, other
computers with the same configuration give the right hostname.
Thank you.
--


The hostname of the computer is contained in '/etc/hosts'. You can change 
it there.

Re: ddclient at startup

[Steve Witt]

On Thu, 11 Aug 2005, Daniel McBrearty wrote:


Anyone using ddclient that knows how to configure it to run after reboot?

At the moment I start it manually. I looked atthe deb policy manual
about scripts to be added to /etc/init.d and the scripts that come
with ddclient don't seem to fit (ddclient doesn't accept the start,
stop and so on args).

If I just have some arbitrary commands to be executed at
startup/shutdown, where should I put them? is that the good way?



ddclient isn't really a daemon so I don't think it is appropriate to run 
it from /etc/init.d/...  What you really want to do is trigger ddclient to 
run when the IP address that you are assigned via DHCP from your ISP 
changes. This could happen at reboot but also when the DHCP server's lease 
expires if you don't reboot your machine a lot.


I don't run ddclient, but do run something very similar, ipcheck, that 
does basically the same thing. The machine I run this on is a server that 
is up basically 24/7, it never is rebooted (unless something bad happens). 
What I do is run ipcheck from a cron job once an hour. It checks the IP 
address, determines if it changes and updates DynDNS if necessary. I think 
ddclient does about the same thing.


To run it at reboot, I would try to tie it in with the configuration of 
the network interface. '/etc/network/interfaces' is where you have 
configured your network interface to run DHCP and you can run arbitrary 
scripts/programs when the interface goes up or down. You should be able to 
run ddclient when the interface come up. See the man page on interfaces 
for the details. There are various 'up' commands that allow you to run 
commands before or after the network interface is brought up.




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Re: Personal Debian mirror

[Steve Witt]

On Fri, 5 Aug 2005, Doofus wrote:


Adam Mercer wrote:


On 04/08/05, Preston Boyington [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

I have come to the point of needing / wanting my own partial Debian mirror 
(amd64 and i386).  I've been reading about debmirror but when I tried it 
my mirror didn't look quite like what I thought it should.  All the 
packages were dumped into folders under pool/ and folders it created 
such as stable, unstable, and woody were essentially empty.  (Now I 
am trying an rsync string to see what the difference will be.)


I was wondering if other people could give me some feedback on how they 
did their mirrors.  What commands did you use and where are there some 
good howto's on doing it as efficiently as possible?


Also, since I don't want to mirror the ISO files I was wondering how 
difficult it would be to use something like jigdo to create the disks from 
my own mirror?




I've attached the debmirror script we run everyday to update the
mirror for our beowulf cluster, it maybe of some help



How much disk space is required to do this?



I'm mirroring woody and sarge for i386, including non-free and source 
files. I'm not mirroring debian-security. My mirror takes about 37 GB for 
this.



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Re: Domain question

[Steve Witt]

On Thu, 14 Jul 2005, Rob Brenart wrote:


John Hasler wrote:


I don't really care yet about any kind of centralized user management or
whatnot, what I care about is for the machines to be able to see each
other by machinename...



You can put the name and IP of every machine into /etc/host on every other
machine, or you can install a dhcp server on one of them.



right now I have to go by IP, which aren't reserved so it's kind of a
pain.



There are IP ranges reserved specifically for LANs such as yours.  Use
numbers in the 192.168.xxx.xxx or 10.xxx.xxx.xxx ranges.

To the first point, I'm already running a DHCP server with no reservations... 
so using a hosts file doesn't work out, as when the laptops come and go I 
have no promise they'll come back with the same IP. To the second point, it's 
exactly the last .xxx which is my problem, as it's not steady, I'm already 
working in just 192.168.1.x




Well you have several options. If your DHCP server is a Debian (or Linux) 
box then you can install the dnsmasq package which will act as a local DNS 
server and provide DNS services to your local machines. It will learn the 
hostname/IP address mapping of your local machines from the DHCP server. I 
used this for years when I had a Debian box as a router for my home 
network, it was easy to set up and worked very well (and I still wish I 
was doing it this way).


But if (like me now), you have one of those little turn-key routers 
(Netgear, Linksys, etc.) that is acting as your DHCP server, you can 
configure it to provide static IP addresses through DHCP to each host so 
essentially you have a fixed IP addr/hostname mapping for each machine 
that you can put into your /etc/hosts file. Or, you can just configure the 
machines that are always on your home LAN to have static addresses and not 
even do DHCP. I like the static DHCP option for things like laptops that 
travel to different networks, but the best option depends upon your usage.



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Re: Adding a hard drive with Debian.

[Steve Witt]

On Thu, 14 Jul 2005, Redefined Horizons wrote:


Debian Users,

I originally installed Debian with a hard drive that only had about 6
Gigs. I'd like to add an 80 Gig hard drive.

Debian will be the only OS on my computer. I just need the extra
memory, and I'm not worried about running a dual boot system.

How do I get Debian to recognize the second hard drive?

What would be the best partitions to move to the second hard drive?
(What are typically the biggest partitions on a Debian system?) Can I
move these paritions once the scond hard drive is partitioned and
formatted?

Thanks for any info. ( I checked to web for a howto, but the stuff I
found dealt with booting another OS on the second hard drive.)



Its pretty easy.

1. Physically install the drive in the machine, and configure it properly 
on one of the IDE channels in the computer. Ensure that the BIOS 
recognizes the drive when you reboot.


2. Boot into Linux and partition the drive. I like cfdisk but there are 
other ways to do it.


3. Create file systems on all of the partions for the new drive. I think 
the standard nowdays would be ext3 or ext2, but whichever you use. 'mkfs' 
is to operative command here.


4. Mount the filesystem(s). Use 'mount' to manually do it at first to test 
and after you have the mounts set the way you want, edit /etc/fstab to 
make it permanet.


5. Copy/move files onto the new filesystems.

Its hard to say what the biggest partitions on a drive are without knowing 
your usage of the machine. I would guess /home but it really depends.




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Re: Graphical interface problem

[Steve Witt]

On Wed, 13 Jul 2005, Carl Fink wrote:


On Wed, Jul 13, 2005 at 06:21:06PM -0700, Alaa G wrote:

Hello,
I installed the debian OS in My Dell notebook.


Which version of Debian?


Fatal server error:
no screens found


Commonly this means that the graphic display system, XFree86, is not set up
correctly.  Have you tried typing

dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86

at a command prompt, when running as the root user?  What happened?

If nothing else, try using the VESA server.
--



My advice is to search around the web for information on installing Linux 
on the specific model of laptop you have. There is a ton of info out there 
and you'll probably find several sites that specify how to get everything 
working for that laptop. The main site is 
http://www.linux-laptops.net, but a google search would probably be just 
as good.


As was previously stated, you don't mention the version of Debian or the 
specific laptop model, both of which are VERY important for someone to 
really help you. Hopefully you are installing at least sarge (Debian 3.1) 
on this laptop with the new installer.




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Re: Downloading Debian CD: stable or testing? -- follow-

[Steve Witt]

On Mon, 11 Jul 2005, Benjamin Sher wrote:


Dear friends:

A follow-up question:

If you install the current sarge stable release, can you install deb
packages from any earlier releases? That is, either earlier stable
or testing deb packages? What's the hierarchy here: sarge stable,
earlier stable, earlier testing, etc.


First, the 'stable' and 'testing' labels, are transitory things and change 
as Debian versions go through their life cycle. So it is usually better, 
IMHO, to think of the Debian versions by codename (e.g potato, woody, 
sarge, etch, etc.) or by number (e.g. 2.2, 3.0, 3.1, etc.).


So I think your question is can you install packages from woody or potato 
(for example) onto a sarge system.


You can't usually install packages from either earlier or later 
Debian releases. Debian packages consist of the compiled applications 
(with docs, configuration files, etc.) and are compiled against a specific 
set of libararies that are present (or that would be installed along 
with the new package) on the system.  This is what the 'dependency' info 
is all about in the package definition and why other applications or 
libaries will be installed with a particular application that you want to 
install.


Normally you wouldn't want or need to install packages from version of 
Debian different from that which you are running. The cases that I know of 
where you'd want to do this are usually when a old package is dropped from 
the Debian version that you are using (but you still need it) or more 
usually, when there is a new version of an application that you want to 
use that isn't in the Debian version you are using. And, of course, 
remember that you can always compile and install a package (that hasn't 
been packaged for Debian) too.


The most usual thing is installing a newer version of a package. There is 
a semi-organized way to do this, see http://www.backports.org




Quite confused.



That's quite all right. We all were (or still are) at some point in time.


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Re: ical ?

[Steve Witt]

On Tue, 7 Jun 2005, stan wrote:


ON some older Debian machines I have a neat lightweight calender
appliacation called ical. An apt-cahce search on a fairly recent install
does not seem to reaeal it's present in the current Debian world.

Am I overlooking something? If not, what hapened to it?



I used to use ical too, and liked it a lot, before woody anyway. I don't 
remember exactly, but I think the Debian package was orphaned for woody 
and I switched to 'remind' as an appointment solution. However, a couple 
of minutes of googling turned up http://www.annexia.org/freeware/ical 
and there appears to be a package for sarge (the only version I checked). 
So, check it out, maybe it still exists.




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Re: Woody to Sarge stable?

[Steve Witt]

On Thu, 2 Jun 2005, John Hasler wrote:


Rhomboid Goatcabin writes:

My sources.list files are using specifically stable and I'm wondering
what happens when the Sarge big, red, shiny, candy-like button gets
pressed. Do all my systems go and try to install Sarge?


Yes.  I suggest that you point them to Woody and then change them to Sarge
and do 'apt-get update  apt-get dist-upgrade' one at a time after Sarge
settles for a few weeks.  If the first few go well you might then consider
doing the rest in bulk.
--
John Hasler



I'm in the process right now of upgrading about 80 machines from woody to 
sarge. I prefer to specifically name the Debian version (e.g. sarge) in my 
/etc/apt/source.list file instead of saying stable or testing, etc., 
because, when sarge does go stable, the stable link will be changed to 
sarge in all the mirrors -- so one minute woody is stable and the next 
sarge is stable. There is no grace period as you suggest (at least there 
never was before).


If all your machines are very similar in terms of their hardware (harddisk 
type/size, video card, CPU), then I would suggest that you check out 
'systemimager'. This is a fabulous tool to use to image a lot of machines 
from one 'master' machine and then install all the others very quickly and 
easily.





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Re: Will Sid go nuts?

[Steve Witt]

On Wed, 1 Jun 2005, Patrick Wiseman wrote:


On 6/1/05, Joe Potter [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

Hello all,

When we get a Sarge release in a few days, we will get crazy behavior
out of Sid for a while? I seem to remember that when Woody was released,
updating in testing or Sid was a problem for a long time. Will that be
the case again?


I _had_ planned on just staying with 'testing' in my sources.list.  Is
that a bad idea?



It really depends upon you and how stable you need the machine(s) to be. 
If you need them to be pretty stable, then change that to 'sarge' (or 
stable). If you want to continue to track the newer stuff and aren't 
afraid of a breakage here or there, then keep with testing.




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Sarge gnatsweb Problem

[Steve Witt]

I've had a software development problem report system going for a few 
years now based on gnats and gnatsweb. I upgraded the server this is on 
and installed sarge on this server. I converted the gnats databases we had 
from the woody version to the sarge version of gnats/gnatsweb (which was 
pretty easy). I got it working and it had worked for a couple of months 
until just last week. Now I get an Unparseable reply from gnatsd error 
from gnatsweb. When I run this with some debugging turned on, 
(gnatsweb.pl?debug=all) then I get the following:

server_reply:
unparseable reply from gnatsd:
client_cmd:
dbls
server_reply:
unparseable reply from gnatsd:

The gnatsd daemon is getting run by inetd but it apparently isn't running 
correctly. Has there been any changes to sarge recently that would have 
broken gnatsweb? Any other ideas?

Thanks...

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Re: Sarge gnome messed up

[Steve Witt]

On Wed, 3 Nov 2004, Matt Zagrabelny wrote:

Any suggestions for how to fix this??
make sure the following packages are installed:
.  gnome-panel
.  gnome-session
.  sawfish-gnome or metacity
optional packages:
.  nautilus
.  xscreensaver
.  xscreensaver-gl
Thanks, that was it.

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Sarge gnome messed up

[Steve Witt]

I've installed sarge on an i386 machine and seem to have gnome all messed 
up. I'm using gdm as the login manager and select gnome as the session. 
When I log in, I get the gnome splash screen, it shows the first 2 icons 
in that screen, then shows no more, the splash screen goes away and I'm 
left with just a screen with the X background showing. Using the middle 
mouse button I can bring up a menu to run applications, but there is no 
gnome panel or anything else. The .xsession-errors file shows the 
following:

/etc/gdm/PreSession/Default: Registering your session with wtmp and utmp
/etc/gdm/PreSession/Default: running: /usr/bin/X11/sessreg -a -w 
/var/log/wtmp -u /var/run/utmp -x /var/lib/gdm/:0.Xservers -h  -l :0 
root
/etc/gdm/Xsession: Beginning session setup...
SESSION_MANAGER=local/electra:/tmp/.ICE-unix/5016
Gnome-Message: gnome_execute_async_with_env_fds: returning -1
Gnome-Message: gnome_execute_async_with_env_fds: returning -1
Gnome-Message: gnome_execute_async_with_env_fds: returning -1
Gnome-Message: gnome_execute_async_with_env_fds: returning -1
Gnome-Message: gnome_execute_async_with_env_fds: returning -1
Gnome-Message: gnome_execute_async_with_env_fds: returning -1


In the past in woody, gnome occasionally gets hosed and I've deleted all 
the .gnome* and other files and sort of started from scratch with my 
account's desktop configuration. Also on woody, when the window 
manager has gotton messed up, using the gnome control center 
to switch to another window manager and them back again has also 
restored things. I've tried deleting all the gnome and sawfish and gtk, 
etc. configuration files/directories in my user account and nothing is 
fixed.

Any suggestions for how to fix this??
Thanks...
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Re: Help: Embedded Debian

[Steve Witt]

On Thu, 23 Sep 2004, Stefan Drees wrote:
Hi,
i´m using debian for now two years and i created lots of servers for our 
customers.
I also tried to create an very small debian install with postfix, bind, dhcp, 
webmin,
squid etc. I was able to cut it down to 100 MB but i want it make smaller.
Are there any infos about creating an embedded system with debian or tips to 
make
it smaller, also to hold it small :-) (log files etc.).
I need also the possibilty (for the local admin) to administrate the server 
via web.
I installed webmin, but with only the needed modules = 20 MB, any suggestions 
to get it
also smaller?

It depends upon your definition of an embedded system, but IMHO you can't 
build a real embedded system from a Debian base. I do this for a living 
and one of our first products was based on Debian 2.2 (potato) that I was 
able to cut done to a 64 MB filesystem size, that we compressed to around 
13 MB and ran as a ramdisk using syslinux as the bootloader. But we needed 
to be much smaller than that so we created our own filesystem with only 
the applications we needed. Most embedded Linux's that I know of use 
busybox as the primary source of the normal Linux applications and then 
add whatever other applications that necessary for the functionality of 
the system. Currently our product runs on ARM and x86 processors and has a 
compressed filesystem size of around 3 MB that is mounted on a ramdisk and 
is 16 MB uncompressed.

Depending upon how serious you are, here are some resources:
A GREAT book on doing this sort of thing is Building Embedded Linux 
Systems, by Karim Yaghmour. There is a lot of stuff out on the web about 
this, but this book pulls a lot of it together, it is HIGHLY recommended.

There is the Emdebian project that aims to have a embedded Linux 
distribution with the same sort of configuration that Debian has, but I'm 
not sure its useable at the current time (check it out, its been a while 
since I have).

There is the Pengutronix distribution, which I think is pretty complete.
There is also the uClinux distribution.

Building 2.6.7 kernel on sarge

[Steve Witt]

I've just installed sarge on an x86 machine and have got it basically 
working. I selected the 2.4.25 kernel as part of the debian-installer 
installation. I'm now trying to compile a 2.6.7 kernel using the 
debian-source-2.6.7 package in sarge using kernel-package -- the normal 
Debian way of compiling the kernel. I've been compiling kernels for years 
now, but this is my first experience with 2.6.

The problem I'm having is that I'm getting a bunch of unresolved symbol 
errors when installing the kernel-image deb file. At first I had a whole 
bunch of options added to the kernel and I was getting literally hundreds 
of unresolved symbol errors. I tried compiling a bunch of times changing 
the kernel configuration, but nothing worked. Finally I ripped just about 
everything out of the configuration except just basic kernel stuff and 
almost nothing compiled as modules. This kernel finally compiled and 
installed OK (with dpkg). So then I added back in some modules that I need 
and again got a bunch of unresolved symbols when I installed the 
kernel-image deb file. A list of these is below.

I've never had this kind of problem with previous kernel versions and was 
wondering if anyone could give me an idea of what I'm doing wrong. I'd 
sure appreciate it.

Thanks.

--
electra1:/usr/src# dpkg -i kernel-image-2.6.7_verari.1.1_i386.deb
(Reading database ... 109440 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace kernel-image-2.6.7 verari.1.0 (using 
kernel-image-2.6.7_verari.1.1_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement kernel-image-2.6.7 ...
Searching for GRUB installation directory ... found: /boot/grub .
Testing for an existing GRUB menu.list file... found: /boot/grub/menu.lst 
.
Found kernel: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.7.dpkg-tmp
Found kernel: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.7
Found kernel: /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.25-1-386
Updating /boot/grub/menu.lst ... done

Setting up kernel-image-2.6.7 (verari.1.1) ...
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/acpi/thermal.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/char/agp/ati-agp.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/char/lp.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/ide/ide-cd.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/md/linear.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/md/multipath.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/md/raid0.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/md/raid1.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/md/raid5.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/md/raid6.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/net/bsd_comp.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/net/ppp_async.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/net/ppp_deflate.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/net/ppp_generic.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/net/ppp_synctty.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/net/pppoe.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/net/pppox.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/net/slip.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in 
/lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/parport/parport_pc.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/pcmcia/ds.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/pcmcia/i82092.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in 
/lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/pcmcia/yenta_socket.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in 
/lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/scsi/aic7xxx/aic7xxx.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/scsi/sd_mod.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/scsi/sg.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/scsi/sr_mod.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/scsi/st.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in 
/lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/usb/host/ehci-hcd.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in 
/lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/usb/host/ohci-hcd.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in 
/lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/usb/host/uhci-hcd.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in 
/lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/usb/storage/usb-storage.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in 
/lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/video/aty/aty128fb.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/drivers/video/vesafb.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/fs/cramfs/cramfs.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.6.7/kernel/fs/isofs/isofs.ko
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in 

Re: Building 2.6.7 kernel on sarge

[Steve Witt]

On Wed, 11 Aug 2004, Steve Witt wrote:
I've just installed sarge on an x86 machine and have got it basically 
working. I selected the 2.4.25 kernel as part of the debian-installer 
installation. I'm now trying to compile a 2.6.7 kernel using the 
debian-source-2.6.7 package in sarge using kernel-package -- the normal 
Debian way of compiling the kernel. I've been compiling kernels for years 
now, but this is my first experience with 2.6.

The problem I'm having is that I'm getting a bunch of unresolved symbol 
errors when installing the kernel-image deb file. At first I had a whole 
bunch of options added to the kernel and I was getting literally hundreds of 
unresolved symbol errors. I tried compiling a bunch of times changing the 
kernel configuration, but nothing worked. Finally I ripped just about 
everything out of the configuration except just basic kernel stuff and almost 
nothing compiled as modules. This kernel finally compiled and installed OK 
(with dpkg). So then I added back in some modules that I need and again got a 
bunch of unresolved symbols when I installed the kernel-image deb file. A 
list of these is below.

Sorry, ignore this, I found the problem. The module-init-tools package 
wasn't installed and I didn't realize this had replaced modutils for 2.6 
kernels.

I don't know what it is about finally asking a question of the world and 
then finally figuring it out about 15 minutes later, but it happens.


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Re: Thanks for Debian Installer

[Steve Witt]

On Thu, 29 Jul 2004, Harshwardhan Shashikant Nagaonkar wrote:
I just wanted to say thanks to the d-i guys, I used it today to install some 
new systems and it was just great... autodetecting everything (on a new 
hp-compaq d530 no less, with a broadcom network card etc.). I eventually did 
put woody on those machines (using systemimager) but I need something to 
quickly partition and get those machines up and running. I used beta2 and 
beta4 both and both worked great! Just thought I should publicly appreciate 
them what with all the flaming going around nowadays.

Thanks again,
Yeah, me too. I had to install one of the first real servers (from a 
hardware point of view) I've ever done. It has 6 IDE disks all on separate 
PCI IDE Controllers (none on the motherboard IDE channels), some SCSI, 
gigabit Ethernet and other fairly new hardware things (at least in my 
experience). I used beta4 and it ROCKS! I really wanted to install woody 
on this machine but the woody installation couldn't deal with the IDE 
configuration of this computer, so I tried the new installer with sarge 
and it worked great. I was totally speechless!

I've been a Unix user since 1989 with Suns and have been using Debian 
since buzz, am a software developer and run a software development lab 
with about 100 Debian PCs and a few token Suns. I've installed various 
Debian versions on a pretty wide range of desktops and laptops. This new 
installer (first time I've used it) absolutely blew me away. I'm really 
impressed, and I consider myself to be a pretty critical guy in these 
matters.

My compliments on a truly outstanding job!
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Re: Need to prevent X from restarting

[Steve Witt]

On Wed, 2 Jun 2004, Aldous Huxley wrote:

 Thanks to the advice of this group, I can now dual-boot using Lilo.
 Thanks again.  Now I need to figure out how to configure the proper
 file that controls how Debian boots up.  I like having the automatic
 X login screen, but whenever you try to logout or explicitly kill
 the process in a console, it just starts up again.  In other words,
 I can't back out of X and just work at a bash console.
 Summary: I do want an automatic X login screen when I boot up.
 I don't want it to automatically restart if I logoff or kill X.
 Any suggestions?


Not sure I understand completely what you want to do. Normally the X login
screen is provided by one of the following programs: xdm, kdm, or gdm --
depending upon what you have installed. It is supposed to go back to the
login screen after the user logs out. I know of no why to make it kill
itself after the user logs out.

But this isn't really a problem I don't think, as you can get access to a
console screen when you are in X. You press cntl - alt - F1 (or F2 or
F3) to get a console screen. To get back to X press cntl - alt - F7.





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Re: Sid and Root on Compact Flash ?

[Steve Witt]

On Mon, 5 Apr 2004, Iain Young wrote:

 Hi All,

 I've seen a number of 'HOWTO' documents on installing Debian on
 Compact Flash, but most of the ones I've seen deal with installing
 it once, and using stable.

 Has anyone had any experience with using Sid, -and- keeping it
 up to date with apt-get update and apt-get upgrade regularly ?

 How long do the modern CF cards last before they need to be replaced ?
 Most of these machines would be router || dns || ldap type machines -
 ie small, dedicated for a particular job, rather than general purpose,
 or graphics.

 Any other tips ? I guess moving syslog to be over the network
 might help, but I'd think the apt-getting would probably be more
 costly in terms of CF life.

 I'm thinking of migrating my home machines to the Mini-ITX factor,
 and so was considering going all the way, and doing without a hard
 drive in most cases.

 (And yes, Im one of those nutters who like to have the leading
 edge software)


AFAIK, this technique is mainly used for embedded systems and I put the
quotes there because one man's embedded system is another man's Cray. The
CF disk normally would contain a kernel image, a compressed root
filesystem, and a bootloader like 'syslinux' (on a i386-based system)
that loads the kernel, then loads the filesystem image and then boots the
kernel. The kernel is configured to have its root filesystem loaded as a
ramdisk. The CF disk has a FAT 16 filesystem on it and is normally not
mounted at all during operation. It can be mounted periodically to
read/write configuration files that can be used to configure applications
in the root filesystem (in the ramdisk).

The advantages to this are that the filesystem image is virtually
incorruptible and there is no harddisk to fail. Embedded systems are
typically not shutdown nicely like a desktop or server, but are just
switched off.

This is very practical for appliances like you mention, but I would
think impractical for a general-purpose desktop or server. I do not think
that it is practical to maintain such a system as a Debian machine because
the filesystem image that I have described must be built using a bunch
of tools.

My day job is developing routers and network communications devices for
military applications and we've been using Linux in an embedded sense
since about 1999. We did release an early product that was essentially a
Debian filesystem (with a lot of stuff ripped out of it), but it was
significantly larger in size than one can do by building one's own
filesystem and is not really the way to go.

I don't know what your background or desire is in terms of doing this, but
my feeling is that one really needs to do some software development to
build something like this. There are a lot of resources on the web about
this, search for embedded linux. There is also a great book on the
subject, Building Embedded Linux Systems, by Karim Yaghmour, that I
highly recommend.

There was a very interesting and useful project called the Linux Router
Project that unfortunately is now dead, don't know about any spinoffs from
it. This provided somewhat of a turnkey system like what you are
describing.

There is something called PTXdist http://www.pengutronix.de that is a
developer's tool to provide a significant jumpstart to developing an
embedded Linux system that you might check out.

There is a Debian-related project called Emdebian
http://www.emdebian.org also.

Anyway, there is a TON of stuff on the web about embedded Linux and a lot
of embedded distributions in various states. You'll need to do a little
research and see what you can find that fits your application and interest
level.

Good luck...




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Re: Debian in Server Farm

[Steve Witt]

On Tue, 30 Mar 2004, Michael Bellears wrote:

 We are in the process of migrating an overburdened Debian
 3.0/Apache/qmail box into a webfarm setup.

 Looking at using a ServerIronXL for loadbalancing.

 Would appreciate anyone's experiences/recommendations on the following
 points:

 1. What is the recommended method to synch config files on all real
 servers (Eg. Httpd.conf, horde/imp config files etc?) - Have only one
 server that admins connect to for mods, then rsync any changes to the
 other servers?

I asked a similar question a few months ago and someone suggested
'cfengine'. I started using it and, after a bit of learning curve, I have
probably 30 machines (Debian woody) being managed automatically by it. It
works great. I think the version in woody is old, so I got it from the
upstream site. Basically you can store configuration files and other
actions on a master server. Then you can cause (through cron, for
example) each client machine to be updated with current config files and
other actions. These files can be scripts, so essentially you can do
pretty much whatever you want to do.

For example, I have a list of the Debian packages that should be present
as one of the config files that gets transferred to each machine when
cfengine runs on the master. There is another script that runs on each
machine (also controlled by cfengine)  that sets this new list of packages
(dpkg --set-selections) and then runs apt-get update/upgrade, etc. So to
add a package to my machines I just edit the one package file on the
master and then the clients get update either when cfengine runs through
cron (once a day for me) or you could run it manually at that time if you
needed the update sooner. It works really well.


 2. What about logfiles - We would have all users mail etc on an NFS
 share - Can you do the same for logfiles?(Or do you get locking issues?)
 - From a statistical aspect, it would be a pain to have to collaborate
 each real servers logfiles, then run analysis. Also from a support
 perspective - How are support personnel supposed to know which real
 server a client would actually be connecting to in order to see if they
 are entering a wrong username/pass etc?

I don't have a lot of experience with this but I would configure syslogd
to send logging info to a master log server. I think it is clear that
which host they came from in this configuration.


 3. Imaging of Servers - I have looked at SystemImager
 http://www.systemimager.org/, and it looks to do exactly what I want
 (i.e. be able to create a bootable CD from our SOE for deployment of new
 serverfarm boxes, or quick recovery from failure) - Can anyone provide
 feedback as to it's effectiveness?

I am still struggling with systemimager. The machines I want to image have
gigabit Ethernet devices that require a newer kernel than was available
when I first tried it (about 2 months ago). I didn't have the time to get
it working, but I don't think it was its fault. I had trouble getting a
new kernel compiled with the new Ethernet driver and ran out of time.
Hopefully I can get back to it, because it does seem like exactly the
right tool for the job.


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Re: debian and women? from DWN #10

[Steve Witt]

On Wed, 24 Mar 2004, Monique Y. Herman wrote:

 I just saw this in Debian Weekly News issue ten:

 http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2004/debian-vote-200403/msg00067.html

 I guess I just wonder.

-- snip --

 Any guys have opinions?

I guess I'm surprised that anyone even cares about gender anymore (as
pertains to interacting with people via email about technical matters).
I'm an electrical engineer with over 20 years experience, so I have an
excuse to be a reactionary pig.  I mostly write software these days and
work for a large defense firm in the U.S. There are a LOT of women in the
software engineering business. A LOT, at least here! So, its not really a
novelty at all. I'm a little surprised by those that think that women are
rare in the computer/software industry, because I have just the opposite
impression.

In my experience I don't see a correlation between technical knowledge and
gender. I know men and women who are mediocre and men and women that are
excellent. Two of the best software engineers I've ever met are women. On
my team I value hard work, the willingness to dig in and figure things
out, and self-motivation. There are men and women I work with that HAVE
these qualities and men and women that I try not to work with that DON'T.

I've been on many technical mailing lists since the early '90s and the
Debian lists since about '96 and I don't recall seeing much flaming due to
gender. I'm not a woman so maybe I'm completely insensitive to it when it
happens, but I don't recall seeing much at all. I was a little surprised
to see mention of it in the DWN. Anyway, its really what you know that's
important, not your physical characteristics, particularly on mailing
lists where you don't even see the people you're interacting with.


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Re: Network stopped coming up on boot

[Steve Witt]

On Mon, 22 Mar 2004, David Baron wrote:

 ppp is not starting on bootup. I can pon at will afterwards but this has
 stopped coming up on boot.

 Is there a script that might have been lost along the way?


If you're talking about having a ppp network interface started
automatically and unconditionally at boot time, then there is a file
/etc/ppp/ppp_on_boot, that, if present, causes this to happen. The logic
for this is in /etc/init.d/ppp. The default Debian action is for the
ppp_on_boot file to be named /etc/ppp/no_ppp_on_boot. There are
comments in 'no_ppp_on_boot' that discuss this and what should be done to
bring up the ppp interfaces you want at boot time.


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Re: Is sarge in a pre-release phase?

[Steve Witt]

On Wed, 18 Feb 2004, David Z Maze wrote:

 Michael Kahle [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

  I have a server that is dedicated to doing backups via Amanda.  I have
  recently purchased a Intel Pro 1000 Server adapter for this machine.

 What kind of an adaptor is it?  A network card?  More recent 2.4
 kernels should include a driver for this, as e1000.


We've just put 16 new computers into operation with Intel Pro 1000 NICs
and the 2.4.24 kernel supports these very well. I had trouble with the
e1000 driver in the 2.4.20 kernel and in looking at the driver source code
it appears to me that that driver is undergoing (or at least underwent)
some significant development in recent kernel versions. But our experience
with the e1000 driver with the 2.4.24 kernel is very good.



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Compiling pcmcia source w/ 2.4.x kernel

[Steve Witt]

I'm trying to setup a wireless LAN system on a system running Debian
testing, and am compiling the 2.4.7 kernel sources (which I can do fine).
I'm also trying to compile the pcmcia sources and am running in to a
problem. I'm using the kernel-package mechanism of compiling the kernel
and pcmcia sources and during the pcmcia source compile I get the
following compile error:

cc   -MD -O3 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -pipe -I../include
-I/usr/src/kernel-source-2.4.7/include  -D__KERNEL__ -DMODULE -c
apa1480_stub.c
apa1480_stub.c:53: ../drivers/scsi/aic7xxx.h: No such file or directory
apa1480_stub.c:79: `AIC7XXX' undeclared here (not in a function)
make[4]: *** [apa1480_stub.o] Error 1
make[4]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/modules/pcmcia-cs/clients'
make[3]: *** [all] Error 2
make[3]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/modules/pcmcia-cs'
make[2]: *** [build-modules] Error 2
make[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/modules/pcmcia-cs'
make[1]: *** [kdist_image] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/modules/pcmcia-cs'
Module /usr/src/modules/pcmcia-cs failed.


Looking at the 2.2 kernel sources, the file 'aic7xxx.h' is in the
'drivers/scsi/' directory as expected by 'apa1480_stub.c', but there is no
such file in the 2.4 kernel source. There is a aic7xxx.h in
'kernel-source-2.4.7/drivers/scsi/aic7xxx', but it looks like a very
different file than in the 2.2 source. I've also done this with the 2.4.9
kernel source that I downloaded directly.

So, anyone compiled the pcmcia sources recently with a 2.4 kernel?

Thanks...

Re: Routing

[Steve Witt]

On Tue, 10 Jul 2001, Debian GNU wrote:

 Hi all,

 I have a network with the following configuration.

 -
 192.168.1.0/24  |  |
 192.168.1.1192.168.1.2
Linux Gateway Router
/   |
inet address
 192.168.100.0/24
|
Router to internet

 The machines in 192.168.1.0/24 network has put their
 gateway as the linux machine and are accessing the
 internet using proxy/masq. The default gateway of
 Linux is set to the address of the router to internet.


 How can I access the machines in 192.168.100.0/24
 network ?

I think the diagram got a little garbled in my mail reader, but if the
192.168.100.0 network is on the other network interface of 'Router'
(192.168.1.2) then the following applies.

The default route in a machine is the route that is used after all other
routes have been checked. For machines in the 192.168.1.0 network to have
connectivity to the 192.168.100.0 network, add a network route to
192.168.100.0 with the next hop gateway as 192.168.1.2.  For machines on
the 192.168.100.0 network, because (if I understand your network's
topology correctly) connectivity to all other networks is through
'Router', a default route with the next hop gateway being the
192.168.100.x network interface on 'Router' will suffice for them.

Hope this helps...

Re: 3com NIC question

[Steve Witt]

On Wed, 11 Jul 2001, Sunny Dubey wrote:

 hey,

 I have a 3c509 NIC.

 I tried getting an IP for this NIC by using DHCP.  (I used dhcpcd)  But for
 some odd reason, it wouldn't work, and so I stfw'ed. (searched the fucking
 web).  looking at various mailing lists, i found that I wasn't the only one
 with the same problem, the common solution was to disable PNP, and try again.
  I followed the steps as show, with no luck in the end.

 I tried both linux-2.4.6, linux-2.2.19pre17 (The one with potatoe) and
 various dhcp clients (dhcpcd, pump, etc) and none have worked.

 But today, on the same box I tried installing openbsd, and I found that DHCP
 worked right out of the install.  This made me wonder once again why it
 doesn't work under linux.

 Does anyone have any insight on why this happens only in linux?  (I tried
 under windows, and it works there too)


I'm not sure if your problem is with the NIC or with DHCP. Can you assign
a fixed address to the NIC (in /etc/network/interfaces) and get it to
work? If so then I don't think there is anything wrong with the card or
driver.

I've used a lot of these NICs and the only problem I had was with Plug and
Play. The solution was to get a drivers disk from 3Com and run the
configuration utility (boot with a DOS floppy), turn off plug and play in
the card and set the IRQ and address range you want for the card. If the
IRQ/address are one of the common ones (like IRQ 10, address 0x300), the
driver will find it and go from there.  There may even be a linux version
of this 3Com configuration utility, though I've never used it.

Re: Is Woody installable at this time????

[Steve Witt]

On Mon, 4 Jun 2001, Chris Hoover wrote:

 Is woody/unstable currently in a state to do a apt-get dist-upgrade to?  If 
 not, is there a eta on that time frame?

 Thanks,


I've been running it for months too, and it has, for the most part been
pretty good. In fact I really like this new 'testing' version, it doesn't
have the major breaks that 'unstable' can have but it still has pretty
up-to-date stuff. If you're running it on a machine(s) that are
important or production (whatever that means to you), then I think you
need to have a good reason to upgrade. At work I have a machine that is a
mail/nfs server that I only run 'stable' on. We also have a bunch of
machines in our lab still running stable that are used to assist in
software development. But I have another desktop machine that is pretty
much my machine that I'm running 'testing' on, mostly because I wanted
newer gnome stuff.  I'm willing to take the risk for myself, but wouldn't
for most of the others that I work with, because any instability in Linux
causes them to lose confidence too quickly. Likewise at home I have some
machines that are running 'testing' because I needed to run XFree86 4.x
due to newer video cards, etc., trying to get the latest kids software to
create another generation of Linux zealots, etc. :).

Re: gnome cal? Doesn't seem to process alarms

[Steve Witt]

On Tue, 24 Apr 2001, Rick Macdonald wrote:


 Is anybody using gnome calendar (gnome-pim package)? I've tried many times
 over the last 6 months and I've never been able to get it to do anything.
 The specified times pass with no notification.

 I'm currently using woody.

 ...RickM...


Yeah, I'm on woody also and am using it. The alarms work for me. Are you
keeping it running? As far as I can tell, the alarms don't schedule a
background process or anything, if the program is running it will generate
the alarm. I usually keep it minimized to keep it out of the way and still
allow it to generate alarms.

Re: ipmasq

[Steve Witt]

On Mon, 23 Apr 2001, Robert Voigt wrote:

 I compiled a 2.2.19 kernel because I want to use ipchains and do IP
 masquerading.
 The ipmasq package description on the debian website says one should enalbe
  CONFIG_FIREWALL, CONFIG_IP_FIREWALL, CONFIG_IP_FORWARD, and
 CONFIG_IP_MASQUERADE.

 I couldn't find CONFIG_IP_FORWARD in the kernel compile options. I assumed it
 was obsolete and went on.

 After installing the kernel and rebooting I installed the ipmasq package from
 potato. It printed the following error several times:

 Should I start IP Masquerading? [Y/n] y
 Initializing IP Masquerading.../sbin/ipchains: invalid mask `' specified
 Try `/sbin/ipchains -h' or '/sbin/ipchains --help' for more information.

 In between these errors it said IP forwarding is not enabled and I should do
 echo 1 /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

 The file /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward already contains a 1.

 Now I don't know what to do.

 I cannot connect to the internet from the other box. It says unknown host.
 The internal network runs fine otherwise, and /etc/network/interfaces looks
 good. The internet connection on this box that I want to use as gatewaw also
 works.

 Help would be great.


Have you read the IP Masquerade HOWTO? I've set up IP Masquerade several
times and each time I followed this HOWTO pretty much to the letter and
got it working without much trouble. The biggest problem that I had was to
figure out what initialization script to use to load the IP Masquerade
modules, set up IP Chains, and IP Forwarding. If I remember correctly
there has been no standard Debian way of doing this in past releases, so
one had to write an init script (not that it was a big deal). I try to
stay with the Debian spirit of these things, if I can figure out what that
is. Anyway, I'm at work right now, and unfortunately don't remember
exactly how I have it set up at home.

From what you say, it sounds as though Debian has an init script for IP
Masq in /etc/init.d and there are errors in the firewall rules you have
set up. Look in the HOWTO and see if your rules are correct. There are
just a couple of rules necessary to get Masquerade working. Then, if you
want, you can beef up the firewall rules to provide protection to your
masquerading machine and internal network -- but this is another subject.

Hope this helps a little.

Funny Story

[Steve Witt]

I don't know if this story is true or not, but I hope it is. A guy who is
our sys admin said he read on a sys admin type mailing list that the crew
of the International Space Station are having some computer problems just
like a lot us down here on earth. It seems that the U.S. provided
computers running AIX and Win NT. A Win NT computer is being used as an
SMTP server. Apparently the crew are becoming experienced Win NT sys
admins because they are having all kinds of problems with the SMTP server.

The Russians brought computers running Linux. They seem not to be having
SMTP server problems.

As I said, I heard this third hand and have no idea if its true or not.
It was probably started by a bunch of Linux college geeks, I don't know.
Someone from NASA will probably roast me alive...

Re: IP masq, forward ?

[Steve Witt]

On Fri, 23 Mar 2001, Szfelix wrote:

 I change the WIN2000 server.
 The local terminals can ping the output eth card but I can't go out on the
 internet.
 From gateway  I can go out.
 So simply what and where I must write to resolve this problem.

 and, where i can find a documentation, step by step to understand the linux
 platform.
 I pograming in DOS,WINDOWS since 1990 , so imagine what is in my mind...  :)

 I try MAN but I want to understand, to feel the LINUX system.

 Thanx
Felix


It looks like you've got both of your Ethernet interfaces up and working
and IP forwarding working in the kernel. Did you compile in the IP
Masquerade modules into the kernel? That or the configuration of ip_chains
might be in error. In any case there is a great HOWTO on this, the 'Linux
IP Masquerade HOWTO', which can be gotten from several HOWTO locations, I
use http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/IP-Masquerade-HOWTO.html. I've been
able to install several IP Masquerading routers based on this.

Re: debian hardware

[Steve Witt]

On Mon, 5 Mar 2001, Mike Egglestone wrote:

 Hi...
 Is there a web site or somewhere where I can
 find which hardware is compatible with debian 2.2 r2
 I want to buy new servers and new network cards
 and I don't want to find out that the card isn't supported
 say... and brand new 3com 905 or something...
 thanks for your help...

 Mike


Debian is a Linux distribution using the standard Linux kernels and
XFree86 implementations which contain most of the hardware dependencies
that I can think of. So, if some component works with Linux, then it works
with Debian.

I think your best bet is to search the web concerning the specific
hardware you are concerned about. There is a Hardware HOWTO at
www.linuxdoc.org but it seems to have been last updated in 1999, so that
might not be that useful. In a quick web search on 'Linux hardware' I
found a site 'www.linux.com/hardware' that I hadn't run into before that
seems to have a pretty large list of hardware status, and I'm sure there
are a lot of others. As far video boards are concerned, www.xfree86.org
has a list of the video boards that are supported by XFree86.

Re: Configuring NTP

[Steve Witt]

On Mon, 5 Mar 2001, Benjamin Pharr wrote:

 I'm trying to set up NTP on my Debina server.  I installed NTP using
 apt-get and then added several:

 server servername.com

 lines to the /etc/ntp.conf file.  It's been over a month, and my time
 continues to wander and /var/log/ntpstats is empty.  I can't find any
 errors in any of my log files.  Can anyone tell me what I might be doing
 wrong.  Thanks!

 Ben Pharr


It sounds like NTP isn't really running. Something that I've noticed is
that there seems to be a maximum time that your computer's clock can be
off from what NTP thinks is the real time or else NTP just gives up. I
can't remember what the error message is, or even where it is written to,
but I have seen it enough times. I would suggest looking into ntpdate,
which will let you set the time from your NTP servers and then restarting
ntp which hopefully will pick up from there. I suppose that you've checked
that you have connectivity to your time servers.

It's probably something simple, I've got NTP running on about 30
computers, both Sun and Linux, at work and at home and its never been too
much trouble.

Re: upgrading a built-in video card

[Steve Witt]

On Sun, 21 Jan 2001, Joseph Anthony De Los Santos wrote:

 Hello,

 Right now, I am  currently using  a pathetically underpowered built-in video 
 card (s3 virge) for my debian pc. I would to upgrade it to a much better one. 
 My question is would my built-in card cause me any trouble? I  think that it 
 won't since xf86config asks me what kind to use but I am not really sure.

 Thanks for any info.


No, you won't have any problem. I've had a computer at work for several
years now that was a Dell Optiplex that has some sort of video on the
motherboard. I've never used it and bought a better PCI video card. Just
specify the card in your XF86Config file. I've always used XF86Setup to
configure XF86Config, but that's really another story, how you get the
file is another thing.

Wierd ISP Email Processing

[Steve Witt]

I just changed ISPs, to Flashcom, and have noticed that they seem to have
a strange email processing system. I have a potato box using exim as my
email MTA. The email arrangement is pretty standard for ISP email, I get
mail via POP3 using fetchmail from a Flashcom POP3 server and send mail
using SMTP to a different (at least hostname) Flashcom SMTP server.

I have been able to send some email successfully through their
outgoing SMTP server. But last night I received 3 rejected messages from
their mail server. The text of one of the messages follows:

-

Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 21:51:43 -0800
From: Mail Delivery System [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. The following address(es) failed:

  [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
SMTP error from remote mailer after RCPT TO:[EMAIL PROTECTED]:
host smtp.flashcom.net.criticalpath.net [209.228.150.115]:
553 To send mail, first check your mail with a valid POP account; this 
prevents unauthorized SPAM relaying. (#5.7.1)

-- This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. --

Return-path: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Received: from sawitt by electra.flashcom.net with local-esmtp (Exim 3.12 #1 
(Debian))
id 141Mcw-00011z-00; Wed, 29 Nov 2000 21:51:26 -0800
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 21:51:26 -0800 (PST)
From: Steve Witt [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To:  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Address verification request
In-Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Form-Type: [List-Manager-Commands]
Command: [auth 421fae58]
Command: [subscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Command: [end]

-

It appears that they are doing some processing to relate checking mail
with sending mail. I believe there is some time interval, on the order of
minutes, that one must check their POP mail account before sending SMTP
mail or else they reject the sending email message. I've called their
customer service and have gotten absolutely nowhere with them. I can't get
them to address the error message that is shown above, they only want to
talk about how Outlook is configured. I'm afraid this is going to be a
long drawn-out battle with them.

Anyway, I've never run across anything like this before, and was wondering
if anyone had, and whether there was a solution for it or not. I looked
through the exim docs and didn't see any configuration that would seem to
accomplish this.

Thanks...

Re: ps vs free again

[Steve Witt]

On Tue, 30 Mar 1999, Shao Zhang wrote:

 Hi,
 I saw earlier disscussions about ps and free.
 So what command can I use to actually display the total memory that
 is occupied by my system?
 
 Thanks.
 
 Shao
 

'top' gives a lot of very nice information in this regard.

Problems with java

[Steve Witt]

I'm trying to learn a little about java, so I installed jdk1.1 from hamm.
The rest of my system is Debian 1.3 (or stable).

I'm testing the installation using the 'hello world' app below:

class HelloWorldApp {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println(Hello World!); //Display the string.
}
}  


Compiling the app seems to work fine:

[/usr/home/witt/devel/java] $ javac -verbose HelloWorldApp.java
[parsed HelloWorldApp.java in 451 ms]
[loaded /usr/lib/jdk1.1/bin/../lib/classes.zip(java/lang/Object.class) in
96 ms]
[checking class HelloWorldApp]
[loaded /usr/lib/jdk1.1/bin/../lib/classes.zip(java/lang/String.class) in
242 ms]
[loaded /usr/lib/jdk1.1/bin/../lib/classes.zip(java/lang/System.class) in
172 ms]
[loaded /usr/lib/jdk1.1/bin/../lib/classes.zip(java/io/PrintStream.class)
in 29 ms]
[loaded /usr/lib/jdk1.1/bin/../lib/classes.zip(java/io/Serializable.class)
in 16 ms]
[loaded
/usr/lib/jdk1.1/bin/../lib/classes.zip(java/io/FilterOutputStream.class)
in 21 ms]
[loaded /usr/lib/jdk1.1/bin/../lib/classes.zip(java/io/OutputStream.class)
in 10 ms]
[wrote HelloWorldApp.class]
[done in 2423 ms] 


My problem is when I try to run the app:

[/usr/home/witt/devel/java] $ java HelloWorldApp.class
Can't find class HelloWorldApp.class


I've checked the environment variables CLASSPATH (I don't have it set, so
it should be set by the java scripts) and can't think of anything else.
Anyone have any ideas??

Thanks...

Steve


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Re: Problems with java

[Steve Witt]

On Thu, 29 Jan 1998, Alex Yukhimets wrote:

 Sure, lots of ideas :)
 
 just run it as java HelloWorldApp
 (without .class) and everything will be fine.
 
 Alex Y.
 

ARG!!  I knew it was some boneheaded thing!  Thanks a lot!

Steve



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Re: Whereis libXpm

[Steve Witt]

On Wed, 14 Jan 1998, Mario Filipe wrote:

 On Wed, 14 Jan 1998, Remco van de Meent wrote:
 
   In that case i need another type of assistance. When i do 
 ldconfig -p | grep libXpm i get this :
 
  126 - ELF libXpm.so.4 = /usr/X11R6/lib/libXpm.so.4
  127 - ELF libXpm.so = /usr/X11R6/lib/libXpm.so
 
 So this would mean that i do have libXpm installed. THe problem is that
 when i try compile something (gnome in this case) it tell's me that it
 cannot find it ! I would appreciate any help here if that would be
 possible.
 

This sounds like a Makefile configuration problem.  It would help if
you showed us the make error that you got when you compiled it.  make has
a -L switch that allows one to indicate the directory(ies) that libraries
can be found in.  So to solve this, you would add the following to the
line in the Makefile that builds the executable target:

 -L /usr/X11R6/lib  

I'm not familiar with the gnome software or its build process but I think
/usr/X11R6 is a pretty standard path for X so I'm a little surprised that
this wouldn't already be in the Makefile.  Anyway, I hope this helps.

Steve



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Re: Whereis libXpm

[Steve Witt]

Sorry about this but it should be 

-L/usr/X11R6/lib

without the space I added in my first message.

Steve



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Re: Fetchmail and Procmail. (Fixed pine)

[Steve Witt]

On Thu, 8 Jan 1998, Ender Wigin wrote:

 Hi,
 
 BTW I fixed Pine to all those who might have the Mailbox Lock problem the
 solution is to su -c chmod 1777 /tmp
 
 Now for the problem ... I have procmail installed and I configured it with
 the .forward file as the mail-filtering FAQ sugjested ... to no avail ...
 I was wondering if some nice person who has Fetchmail getting the mail and
 Procmail sorting it could please explain how they did it ... and share
 what is in there .forward file ...(It seems to me that procmail never runs
  IE: I never see it in a top srceen ...) ...
 
 TIA
 -Kevin.
 

Here's my .forward file...

|IFS=' '  exec /usr/bin/procmail -f- || exit 75 #witt


If you've specified a LOGFILE in your .procmailrc, then you might be able
to examine that to pick any errors that are occuring.  You might also
write a very simple filter rule at first to ensure that procmail isn't
ditching your mail somewhere unknown.

Steve



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diald problems

[Steve Witt]

I'm trying to get diald working and am having some problems.  I have a
working ppp connection using the pon, poff scripts.  I installed diald and
configured the /etd/diald/diald.options file and rebooted to test.  It
wouldn't dial my modem.  Turned on the debug options in diald to try to
get a hint at the problem.  What happens is an IP datagram triggers diald,
which then runs its connect script.  I have diald connect set to
/usr/bin/pon.  At this point there is an error, 'modprobe can't find
module ppp0', and the connect script fails.  

I have ppp compiled into the kernel, not as a module so I really don't
understand this error.  I carefully recompiled my kernel a couple of times
to verify that ppp is compiled into the kernel and I'm sure that it is.
Looking at dmesg output, I see the following:

 PPP: version 2.2.0 (dynamic channel allocation)
 TCP compression code copyright 1989 Regents of the University of
 California
 PPP Dynamic channel allocation code copyright 1995 Caldera, Inc.
 PPP line discipline registered.
 SLIP: version 0.8.4-NET3.019-NEWTTY (dynamic channels, max=256).
 CSLIP: code copyright 1989 Regents of the University of California.
 SLIP linefill/keepalive option.

This should indicate ppp support in the kernel, right?  But I still get
this error.  Any ideas?

Thanks...
Steve



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Re: Sparcs

[Steve Witt]

On Tue, 30 Dec 1997, Ian Keith Setford wrote:

 
 Hi-
 
 I am looking to buy a used Sparc and I know that there are important
 differences between older models.  What are the models to stay away from
 and which ones are ideal?  How do I tell them apart?
 
 Appreciate any information or direction!
 
 Thanks in advance,
 
 Ian
 

I've used just about all of the SPARCs at one time or another and know of
none that one should stay away from.  This includes a 1+, 2, 4, 5, 10,
20, and Ultra 1.  These were all used with some version of Sun's OS, SunOS
4.1, 4.1.1, 4.1.3, 4.1.4, and Solaris 2.4 and 2.5.  I have no experience
with Linux on a SPARC.  From a hardware point of view, all of the Sun's
I've used (starting in 1989) were very reliable and gave very good
service.  All of the SPARCs I've used were bought new.

Having said all of that, I'm wondering why you want to buy a SPARC?  Since
I've been using Debian (about a year and a half), I've come to the
conclusion that the most cost effective machine is a fast PC running
Linux.  My 200 MHz Pentium Pro at home runs rings around my current Sun's
(SPARC 4, 5, 10 - running 4.1.4) at work.  I was, in fact, a little
shocked by this as I've been a Sun guy for some time now and perhaps a
little snobbish in my attitudes towards PC platforms [with a real OS :)
]. Perhaps there is a software package that you need that is only
available on a name-brand workstation, such as a SPARC.  Assuming you're
using Linux, do commercial SPARC software packages work with Linux?  

Steve



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Re: How are .Xdefaults files handled under Debian?

[Steve Witt]

On Fri, 5 Dec 1997, Mark Phillips wrote:

 
 Hi,
 
 I added the line:
 
 xterm.scrollBar:  true
 
 In a .Xdefaults file to turn on scrollbars automatically on xterms, but X
 seemed to ignore this.  How does Debian deal with Xdefaults?  And where
 can I read about these things?
 

You've gotten a lot of good info about .Xdefaults or .Xresources but the
answer to your question about how to enable the scroll bar in an xterm is:


XTerm*scrollBar:on


This info is contained in the xterm man page as is nearly all information
about application specific X resources.  Note the capitalization of the
class name 'XTerm', it is case sensitive.  The man page on 'X' has a lot
of general information about X windows including a section on Resources.
The man page on xrdb would also be pertinent to this.

After you've finished this assignment ... :)

==
Steve Witt  (714) 730-3245
PairGain Technologies, Inc.


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Re: How are .Xdefaults files handled under Debian?

[Steve Witt]

On Fri, 5 Dec 1997, Steve Witt wrote:

 This info is contained in the xterm man page as is nearly all information
 about application specific X resources.  Note the capitalization of the
 class name 'XTerm', it is case sensitive.  The man page on 'X' has a lot
 of general information about X windows including a section on Resources.
 The man page on xrdb would also be pertinent to this.
 

If I may be permitted a quick retraction, 'xterm' works as the class name
also.  

xterm*scrollBar:on

is a valid .Xresources line (I checked it).

Perhaps 'xterm' isn't valid under SunOS (which I use mostly at work). 
Sorry about the mis-information. 

==
Steve Witt  (714) 730-3245
PairGain Technologies, Inc.


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Re: Philosophical question

[Steve Witt]

On 4 Dec 1997, Larry G. Gariepy Jr. wrote:

 I hope I don't sound heretical:  I imagine that a lot of people like Linux for
 the fact that there is something new to try every week or two. :) (or more
 often?)  But practically, how often do people think it is worth the trouble to
 upgrade major software components?  Every six months?  Every year?
 

I've been using Debian a little over a year now and I've pretty much just
followed the software versions in the stable, non-free, and contrib
directory trees.  My upgrade policy is to run dselect every two or three
months or whenever I want something new.  I run dselect connecting via FTP
so I don't worry about the age of packages on a CD-ROM.  By the way -- I
REALLY like the FTP connect option, it is very convienient and a nice
addition to the normal download from some type of media options.  If there
are new versions of some of the packages I have installed, dselect will
want to upgrade them and I usually let it. It seems that this has happened
a two or three times in the last year. I've never had any problem with the
upgrades and one of them was pretty major (Debian 1.2 - 1.3). 

I bet that there are many different types of users out there with respect
to their desire for a stable vs. bleeding edge system.  There are a lot
of people who really need a stable system and are careful to keep theirs
that way.  I think you should upgrade when you feel like it or whenever
new version are released into the stable tree.  If a update package 
does contain bugs, there is usually pretty quick action from what I've
seen.  Anyway just my opinion...

- Steve



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Re: MAJOR PROBLEM!

[Steve Witt]

 
 I follow the Red Hat list on Usenet ... it is a ZOO compared to this list.
 Thinking about it, it makes sense.  What market is Red Hat aiming at?
 People who can't install Linux! 
 
 
 
  We have a very active mailing list and that somehow reduces Debian posts
  in the general linux groups. I think Debian is gatting bigger all the time
  
  - Daniel
  

I used to try and follow the usenet Linux groups but as soon as I
discovered Debian and this list I unsubscribed from those groups in a
hurry.  The SNR on this list is so much higher and the level of
discussions so much more civilized [well, at least most of the time :)].

I can't remember why I switched to Debian about a year ago, but I sure am
glad I did.

- Steve



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Installation Problem

[Steve Witt]

I'm installing the current Debian onto a 486 machine at work and am having
some problems.  I'm pretty much following the installation steps exactly
as the installation script tells me.  The problem occurs when I get to the
'Net Configuration' portion of the setup. I enter the machine name, IP
address, etc. and it asks me the default network device (eth0, etc.) and I
select 'eth0'.  When I press 'return' the machine just freezes.  

Previously in the installation I had installed the driver for an Intel
EtherExpress Ethernet card.

I tried it twice, with exactly the same results.  The third time I didn't
install the driver for the Ethernet card and didn't configure the network
and the install finished fine.

The puzzling thing about this is that I had previously install Debian on
this machine about a month ago without any problem.  The Ethernet hardware
is exactly the same, in fact all of the hardware in the machine is exactly
the same.  I'm re-installing it because at that time I had scrounged a
small, second hard disk to put in the machine and installed Debian on
that, leaving Win95 on the first hard drive.  Well, I've decided that
Win95 does me no good on this machine and so I'm going to eradicate it and
just have a Debian machine.  So now I am trying to install on the first
drive '/dev/hda'.

Any thoughts as to what might be causing the freeze when selecting the
default network device?

Thanks...

==
Steve Witt  (714) 730-3245
PairGain Technologies, Inc.


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Re: TkSTEP...anyone done it?

[Steve Witt]

On Wed, 19 Nov 1997, Andrew Akins wrote:

 Now that my system is up and running stable, I thought I'd mess around
 with it :)
 
 I'm interested in installing TkSTEP. I've got Tk4.1 and Tk4.2 installed
 using the standard debian packages. I was wondering if anyone out there
 in debian-land has installed TkSTEP. And if so, what steps are involved?
 There doesn't seem to be a TkSTEP package, so I'm assuming I gotta do
 this by hand. 
 
 Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Yes, I'm running it at home on a Linux system and was running it at work
on my Sun.  Although its been a while and I don't remember the
installation process intimately, I don't think I had any problems at all. 
Just download the gzip'd tar file, uncompress/untar, and follow the
installation instructions.  If anything it seems that these days its
easier to build things on a Linux system than on a Sun!  Don't worry about
things if you have some trouble.  This is one of those applications that
won't mess up anything else on you system if you build/install it and have
problems.  TkStep just won't work, but nothing else should be affected. 
But, as I said, it should build just fine 'out of the box' so to speak.

I'm using fvwm2 as my window manager so I believe I start TkStep from the
initialization clause in the .fvwm2rc file.


==
Steve Witt  (714) 730-3245
PairGain Technologies, Inc.


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Re: Which news reader to use?

[Steve Witt]

On Wed, 24 Sep 1997, Richard Heestand wrote:

 I have installed nn and receive my news via NNTP.  However, it takes about 5 
 minutes to get my first page of news (slower than ms windows trumpet by 
 about 4 minutes!).  Is this a function of nn.  Should I be using another 
 newsreader?
 

What kind of network connection do you have?  PPP/modem through an ISP?
How many groups do you subscribe too?  Your newsreader must check each
newsgroup for new messages, etc. so subscribing to a lot of groups will
slow it down considerably.  

I have been using 'slrn' for some time now and really like it.  It has a
few settings that increase its performance over slower links, though I
haven't used nn in a very long time so I can't judge if this is
significant or not. I probably subscribe to 20 - 25 newsgroups and I 
think slrn takes a little less than a minute to load and become functional 
over a 28.8 kb/s link.  I used to subscribe to a large number of groups 
(between 100 - 200) and the startup time of slrn was pretty slow.

==
Steve Wittmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
PairGain Technologies, Inc.  (714) 730-3245


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Re: reading mail with gnus

[Steve Witt]

On Wed, 17 Sep 1997, Mario Olimpio de Menezes wrote:

 
 Hi,
 
   I'm trying to set gnus to manage email with split methods. 
   Using XEmacs I was able to configure the methods but I
 couldn't find how to have the e-mails shown in the screen. 
   Is there some tutorial/howto to do this? Can someone help me
 with a step-by-step guide? 
   Thanks,
 

There are a couple of sources of info about Gnus.  First, there should be
an info file in your emacs info system.  So Help, Browse Manuals
Gnus (from emacs -- you'll have to translate into Xemacs) would get you
to the Gnus manual.  Second, there is a web site http://www.gnus.org
that is the home page for Gnus in which there is an html manual, FAQ,
mailing list info, etc., etc.

==
Steve Wittmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
PairGain Technologies, Inc.  (714) 730-3245


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Re: lftp

[Steve Witt]

On Mon, 8 Sep 1997, Ralph Winslow wrote:

 I've been trying to download a large file (~32Mb) without sucess using
 ftp and ncftp, 
  ^

ncftp will automatically resume the download of a file that failed in a
previous session.  I've seen this happen to me MANY times.  But it seems
that it didn't work this way for you.  

==
Steve Wittmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
PairGain Technologies, Inc.  (714) 730-3245


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Re: Prompt in Bash

[Steve Witt]

On Sat, 6 Sep 1997, Lawrence wrote:

 Is it possible to do it in tcsh?
 

Yes, this is from the O'Reilly book Using csh  tcsh.  I use this at
work on SunOS 4.1.4 running tcsh.  There are two files involved, your
.cshrc (or .tchsrc) and another little file ~/.settitle.

= .cshrc ==

#-
#
# Set prompt display
#
#-

if (xterm =~ $TERM) then
source ~/.settitle
set prompt = %~ % 
else
alias setprompt 'set prompt = %~ % '
setprompt
alias cd 'cd \!*;setprompt'
alias pushd 'pushd \!*;setprompt'
alias popd  'popd \!*; setprompt'
endif


 ~/.settitle  ==

#
# .settitle - display path location in xterm title bar
#

alias settitle 'echo -n 2;$cwdttitle
alias cd 'cd \!*;settitle'
alias pushd 'pushd \!*;settitle'
alias popd 'popd \!*;settitle'



==
Steve Wittmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
PairGain Technologies, Inc.  (714) 730-3245


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SCSI Host Adapter

[Steve Witt]

I'm hoping that someone with some SCSI experience can give me some
advice here.  I'm contemplating buying a SyJet 1.5 GB drive and need to
get a SCSI host adapter as this will be the first SCSI peripheral I have
installed on this machine (Dell 200 MHz PPro).  Basically, I'm having
some trouble choosing a SCSI host adapter.  This machine is my home PC
and I dual boot this machine with Win95 and Linux.  I'm in Linux probably
80% of the time and wish to use the SyJet with both Win95 and Linux.

I've read the SCSI HOW-TO and it seems to highly recommend the Buslogic
series of boards.  All of my Windows friends tell me that the Adaptec
boards are the only way to go.  In looking at my normal stores, both local
and mailorder, the Adaptec boards are sold by everybody, the Buslogic by
almost no one.  I searched for some suppliers of the Buslogic boards and
most don't seem to keep much stock and would have to order board from the
manufacturer.  The two boards I'm considering are the Buslogic BT-948 and
Adaptec AHA-2940, which seem to be similar in performance and price.

My questions are:  Is the Buslogic board really better than the Adaptec?
Is the Buslogic better supported in Linux than the Adaptec?  Is the
difference worth it?

I'm famous for buying the best technical solution.  I bought a Heath
(Zenith) H-100 instead of the original IBM PC, and I've got two older
Macintosh's at home (though the jury's still out on Apple).  I finally
bought a PC because of Linux, the Mac Unix options weren't coming along
fast enough for me.

Thanks...


==
Steve Wittmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
PairGain Technologies, Inc.  (714) 730-3245


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