Re: [gentoo-user] Port Tracer Program Needed

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Tue, 14 Mar 2006 10:03:24 -0500 "Timothy A. Holmes"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I am getting ready to start a project here in the building to map the
> physical infrastructure of our network (its been assembled kinda willy
> nilly over the last 8 years or so).  I am looking for a program to run
> on my laptop that I can plug into a wall plate and it will cause the
> port activity lights on the switch to blink distinctly so that I can
> begin tracing plugs to ports.  Due to budgetary constraints, open
> source / freeware is very very preferable.

Not sure about "distinctly" (that will certainly depend on the switch's
electronic and programmatic design), but - tada - you can usually cause
the traffic light on the switch to blink with network traffic ;-)

So broadcasting some UDP packages out into the wild should be
sufficient. Use e.g. netcat. OTOH, you might want to play with ethtool
and switch connection rates for short intervals. Usually switches have
a light indicator for the speed, too, so that should be easier to
distinct on a busy switch. Toggle this in a shell loop with a few
"sleep"s inserted...

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Passing env variable to ssh?

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Mon, 13 Mar 2006 20:14:33 + (WET)
Jorge Almeida <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I want something like this:
> myvar="whatever" ssh [EMAIL PROTECTED] ./bin/mycommand $myvar
> [...]
> This does not work, because remotebox doesn't know about $myvar. Of
> course, if I could pass a variable to remotebox, the line might be just
> command="~/bin/mycommand" 
> and the ssh command would be
> myvar="whatever" ssh [EMAIL PROTECTED] ./bin/mycommand
> (the program itself would use the value of $myvar)

Hm, I think you're making it unnecessary complex. What's wrong with
just piping it on stdin? I.e.:

local$ echo "whatever" | ssh [EMAIL PROTECTED] ./bin/mycommand
and in ./bin/mycommand:
---
#!/bin/sh
read myvar
# do whatever
---

Or do you in fact use a pseudo tty on remote side for interactive mode
(which would make this a little more difficult)?

If you want to keep your way of doing it, I just have a few hints, but
didn't test anything, just looked them up out of curiosity:
- read "man sshd_config", item AcceptEnv, PermitUserEnvironment
- read "man sshd", section LOGIN PROCESS

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] wget won't concatenate(?)

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Mon, 13 Mar 2006 09:38:06 -0800 (PST) maxim wexler
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I tried wget'ing this on dialup: 
> ftp://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/gentoo/releases/x86/2006.0/livecd/livecd-i686-installer-2006.0.iso
> 
> Then, because I needed to use the phone, after
> downloading 150Megs or so, I ctrl-C'd outta there
> thinking I could pick up where I left off. Wrong!
> 
> wget wants to start from the beginning. I gave it the
> -nc option and it reports 'already there, not
> retrieving'. 

Did you actually bother to read what "-nc" does? In fact I think you
were searching "-c" option...

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Apache (paths not showing in url)

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Sun, 12 Mar 2006 07:20:38 -0500
Tito Valentin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Does anyone know why when I go to my website and click on the links 
> within my site the url still stays the same?  For example:  if I go to 
> www.my_web_site.com and click on the link "messages" within my site, the 
> url is still www.my_web_site.com rather than 
> www.my_web_site.com/phpbb/messages

that happens if frames are being used. Do you use frames? It's most
probably NOT due to apache. I've seen this with some free domain
providers, they only open your page in a static frameset (that cares
for displaying some ads, too).

What's showing if you chose "show page source" in your browser? A
frameset or your page?

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: how to track this down (emerge of amaya)

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Fri, 10 Mar 2006 12:01:04 -0600
Harry Putnam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> What did you do about Mesa? Just leave it out.  I see the Mesa libs
> are masked even though I'm running ~x86 enabled in /etc/make.conf

Oooh, yeah, i actually left out that part. First, I emerged "wxGTK" with
opengl USE-flag set (among "X" and "unicode").

I think compiling amaya went fine then until the final linking run. It
even compiled wxGTK and I had some strong feeling that there was an
error. I "fixed" the gcc linking run by removing references to the
amaya-wxGTK and substituted dynamic linking to the wxGTK installed via
portage. Too bad I didn't remember to turn screen's logging on when I
did that...

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] how to track this down (emerge of amaya)

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Thu, 09 Mar 2006 17:49:28 -0600 Harry Putnam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:

> Attempting to emerge www-client/amaya
> The tail end of emerge shows:
> 
> i686-pc-linux-gnu-g++: ../redland/raptor/.libs/libraptor.a: No such
> file or directory make[1]: *** [../bin/amaya] Error 1
> make[1]: Leaving directory
> `/var/tmp/portage/amaya-8.7/work/Amaya/LINUX-ELF/amaya' make: ***
> [amaya_prog] Error 2
> 
> !!! ERROR: www-client/amaya-8.7 failed.
> 
> media-libs/raptor is installed.
> 
> How to track this down?

The ebuild needs a fix, or even better: upstream needs to be fixed.
It's mentioned in bugzilla already (gentoo bugzilla, that is).

I helped myself by compiling manually. The same problem occurs, but you
can simply change the directory to Amaya/WX/redland/raptor, type
"make", return to "Amaya/WX/amaya" and continue building with another
"make". This would also give you a more current version of amaya, the
one in portage is a little bit older.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Help with backup script

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Thu, 2 Mar 2006 14:58:33 + Paul <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On Thursday 02 Mar 2006 14:37, John Jolet wrote:
> > On Mar 2, 2006, at 8:23 AM, Paul wrote:
> > > On Thursday 02 Mar 2006 12:49, John Jolet wrote:
> > > snip
> > >
> > >
> Thanks for all your help  --  I now have it working, it appears that
> the line didn't like the space between DISK and 2. I created another
> share (with no spaces and it worked)

I didn't notice this thread and the last answers earlier, therefore I
didn't react, but of course, spaces on command line must be escaped if
not meant to separate arguments. i.e., both of the following should
have worked, too:

> mount -t smbfs //lkg5f.homenet.com/DISK\ 2 /mnt/someplace
> mount -t smbfs "//lkg5f.homenet.com/DISK 2" /mnt/someplace

(of course, you can use ' - single apostrophe - instead of " here.)


-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Terminal formatting and colors escape sequences

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Thu, 2 Mar 2006 14:49:49 +0100 Bo Andresen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:

> I wish to be able to run a program (eix-sync/diff-eix) in cron that
> prints colors (with use of --force-color) and then send that colored
> output as a mail. In order to get colors in a mail a have to use
> html. If there exist a program that is capable of converting escape
> sequences used for formatting and coloring an xterm to html I would
> love to know about it. 

I'd say, the Perl module HTML::FromANSI should do what you want
(available from cpan). It brings a script, ansi2html, that provides
access from the command line. Note that you might have to play with the
TERM environment variable.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Writing to a 256MB Rom

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Wed, 1 Mar 2006 16:16:33 -0500
"Ryan Holt" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Is there any difference between ROM and NVRam?

Yes, of course. RAM is random-access-memory and in the case of DRAMs
pretty volatile when not powered :-)

If you have 256MB of NVRam to install an OS on it, the relevant
question is: Is this accessible via some controller or emulation as a
block device? That question can only be answered if you get more
specific regarding that NVRAM...

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] XFig Export

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Tue, 28 Feb 2006 00:25:25 -0500 "Justin Hart" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:

> I'm using xfig for figures for a paper that I am writing.  When I hit
> the export menu option, it crashes.  Inconvenient, since I need to get
> this into a format acceptable to latex (is there a package for .fig
> files?)

AFAIK, Xfig calls "transfig" for this. Maybe you could try to run it
manually?

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] accelerate emerge

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Mon, 27 Feb 2006 17:05:39 +0100 Alexander Skwar
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Why should "prozilla or some other tool" make the
> download be faster? When I download something with
> wget, or watch emerge invoking wget, it's always
> maxing out the saturation of the line.

On my 1Gig line on my workstation at work it's usually _not_ saturizing
the line. But I decided that it's not very polite to use a parallel
fetching tool under these circumstances...

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] traffic shaping

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Wed, 22 Feb 2006 19:16:35 +0200
Uwe Thiem <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> It happens as soon as I enter any one of the following lines:
> 
> tc filter add dev eth2 parent 1: prio 2 handle 1 fw flowid 1:20
> [...]
> I then get the error message:
> RTNETLINK answers: Invalid argument
> We have an error talking to the kernel
> 
> Prior experience suggests that a module is missing or not loaded. The 
> question 
> is: Which one? Or am I completely wrong in my assumption?

Did you compile "QoS and/or fair queuing" support into the kernel
(i.e., not the "traffic shaping device" which is in the device
section)? It should then load modules automatically (well, if
configured in the kernel, that is).

Hm, and you _did_ set up the qdiscs and classes first? OTOH, and I
don't know for sure if that's needed before configuring the filters.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] /usr as noexec? (was GB for / partition flamewar)

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Sat, 18 Feb 2006 18:51:21 +0100
Maarten <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Back to the thread... I started wondering about something. I thought a
> 100% full root filesystem was deadly, but never thought about /tmp.
> So I'd like to ask, what is more deadly for a system, a full root FS, a
> full /tmp or a full /var ?  Why ?
> And as a bonus question: which one is worse during boot, and which one
> is worse on a fully booted and running system ?

/tmp shouldn't matter. full/read-only /var will disturb the gentoo rc
scripts. When running, programs/daemons may act funny when they can't
cope with the situation of full disks (e.g., PHP can't create session
files anymore). You can't expect logging to work, too.

Full/unwritable /etc may disturb some maintenance scripts, mount can't
update /etc/mtab.

Generally, nothing will prevent the kernel from booting and running any
exec that's still readable. So even with full disks, e.g.
init=/bin/bash in kernel command line will give a root shell and let
you fix things (after remounting the relevant partitions read-write).

So on a running system, /var and /tmp are the important trees that are
expected to be writable. This should be the same for the gentoo rc
scripts, but not the kernel bootup.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: X without console log window?

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Wed, 15 Feb 2006 20:20:49 +
Mick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> > I don't have currently syslog-ng running, but I think I remember that
> > similar configuration was in /etc/syslog-ng/syslog-ng.conf (maybe
> > commented out?)
> 
> Yes, it was commented out as the default setting is to send everything to
> tty12:
> 
> # By default messages are logged to tty12...
> #destination console_all { file("/dev/tty12"); };
> # ...if you intend to use /dev/console for programs like xconsole
> # you can comment out the destination line above that references /dev/tty12
> # and uncomment the line below.
> destination console_all { file("/dev/console"); };
> 
> So, now I've uncommented it but every single message is shown not only in
> xconsole (which is fine), but in tty1 as well.  The latter makes the boot
> up messages look very messy indeed.

What a confusion. I use debian here which seems to be configured
differently. But read below...

> I don't know if I am asking too much here, but is there a way to:
> 1. Continue with all messages shown in tty12 as per default syslog-ng
> configuration.
> 2. Also show all/some messages to xconsole.
> 3. Do not pipe everything to console during/after boot - the default
> messages there are adequate for my liking.
> 
> Perhaps I am a bit confused: what is the relationship between /dev/console
> and xconsole?

Ah, the xconsole program man page explains it: By default, xconsole
reads from /dev/console. I didn't knew that.

What you want to archieve is more like the solution debian uses. I'll
post it here but I haven't tried it out so I cannot promise that it
works:

syslog-ng.conf:
---snip---
destination xconsole { pipe("/dev/xconsole"); };
destination terminal { file("/dev/tty12"); };
log { source(src); destination(xconsole); }
log { source(src); destination(terminal); }
---snip---

/etc/X11/xdm/Xsetup_0:
---snip---
xconsole -geometry 480x130-0-0 -daemon -notify -verbose -fn fixed -exitOnFail 
-file /dev/xconsole
---snip---

That should do what you want to archieve.
Nice alternative to xconsole is root-tail...

-hwh

-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] is iptables needed on a Bridge

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Tue, 14 Feb 2006 05:43:33 -0600
"Boyd Stephen Smith Jr." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On Tuesday 14 February 2006 03:31, Ow Mun Heng <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote 
> about 'Re: [gentoo-user] is iptables needed on a Bridge':
> > [...]
>
> If you /do/ want to do packet filtering on br0, I belive you can with 
> iptables.  A rule with in the filter table on the FORWARDING chain with -i 
> br0 -o br0 should match.  You could also do some logging this way.

Nah, bridging is ethernet layer, not IP layer. So it will work using
ebtables, not iptables.

OTOH, when building a bridge, it usually doesn't make much sense to set
up lots of rules for security's sake, but rather in order to reduce
chattiness between the bridged networks (one may want to filter
broadcasts and other noisy stuff).

> > I also wanted to know if there's a need for iptables, mainly for
> > security. But since there isnt' an ip addressed to br0, I would presume
> > that it is safe, but I thought I'll check here 1st.
> 
> I really can't answer the safety issue.  From my understanding packets 
> coming in br0 and be delivered locally, even when br0 doesn't have an IP 
> address (and similarly with sending packets out br0) so I don't think not 
> having an IP address really buys you any safety.

It certainly does, but OTOH, the OP wrote he'll set up a third ethernet
adapter for connecting to the bridging machine, so iptables may make
sense on that interface.

The FORWARD chain of iptables is only for forwarding IP packets (heh,
it's obvious, isn't it? :-), i.e. when building a router. Well, I think
it should be possible to redirect bridged packets to the local host in
order to let them go through routing, but this seems to be a little
cludgy, because the same thing probably can be archieved by using
proxy_arp in the first place, which would save us from using
promiscuous mode...

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] X without console log window?

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Mon, 13 Feb 2006 14:23:20 -
"Michael Kintzios" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> > That depends. It usually just outputs what is piped into 
> > /dev/xconsole.
> > [...]
> 
> Would you mind showing a default/typical/custom (whatever) config file
> so that I can compare with mine?

No problem. But it's from a debian system... From /etc/syslog.conf:
---snip---
# The named pipe /dev/xconsole is for the `xconsole' utility.  To use it,
# you must invoke `xconsole' with the `-file' option:
# 
#$ xconsole -file /dev/xconsole [...]
#
# NOTE: adjust the list below, or you'll go crazy if you have a reasonably
#  busy site..
#
daemon.*;mail.*;\
news.crit;news.err;news.notice;\
*.=debug;*.=info;\
*.=notice;*.=warn   |/dev/xconsole
---snip---

I don't have currently syslog-ng running, but I think I remember that
similar configuration was in /etc/syslog-ng/syslog-ng.conf (maybe
commented out?)

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] X without console log window?

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Mon, 13 Feb 2006 11:24:25 -
"Michael Kintzios" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> > > On Fri, 10 Feb 2006 19:08:25 -0200
> > > Urs Schuetz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > > 
> > > > Everytime when I startup my computer, in X apears a minimized
> > > > "Console Log" window icon.
> > > > [...]
> 
> What's the purpose of this window?  What is it meant to log - as far as
> I can tell it just stays empty . . .

That depends. It usually just outputs what is piped into /dev/xconsole.
If nothing is piped in there, it won't display anything. But in most
cases the syslog daemon is configured to output some message classes,
if not all, to this device as well (additional to outputting to the log
file and /dev/console). So it depends on syslog configuration whether
syslog messages show up here. Other programs w/ the corresponding
rights on /dev/xconsole can pipe their stuff there, too, of course.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] X without console log window?

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Fri, 10 Feb 2006 19:08:25 -0200
Urs Schuetz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Everytime when I startup my computer, in X apears a minimized
> "Console Log" window icon.
> [...]
> I could not find the script ou option which starts this window.
> Where can I disable it? I don't even know what's the name of the
> executable for this window.

it's "xconsole", AFAIK usually started by the default Xsession script
coming with "xdm". configuration is in /etc/X11/xdm.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting udev to create tun devices

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Tue, 7 Feb 2006 19:48:49 +0700
Robin Atwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I need a device /dev/net/tun to use with hercules. tun is defined in the 
> kernel and the traditional mknode method works fine but I loose it after a 
> reboot.

That's pretty normal. I think the application using the tun device is
supposed to create them by issueing a few (?) syscalls. FYI, openvpn
can do this and can create persistent tun-Sockets. you may want to
emerge openvpn and enter the following in /etc/conf.d/local.start:
---snip
openvpn --mktun --dev tun0
---snip
Udev should then take care of creating the device.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] USE flags - Why use ntpl/ntplonly in make.conf?

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Thu, 02 Feb 2006 15:40:39 -0500
fire-eyes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Myself I tried ntpl (and also ntplonly at someones suggestion). It is
> supposed to offer better thread support, especially if you have an SMP
> or dual core system. I have an SMP system.

It's just more lightweight by using (more) kernel mechanisms. It
leverages the binding between threads and processes. This of course
means that one can only profit if one uses multithreading apps.

> Maybe it was just for me, but this turned into a total disaster. I later
> found that it was due to setting ntplonly, which apparently disables
> old, non-ntpl support entirely. Which is very very bad for apps that
> don't yet support ntpl, or something like that.

Well, it's bad for apps that weren't compiled with nptl support.
Usually, there's not much that keeps an app utilizing the old
linuxthreads from using NPTL instead. But due to this being part of
glibc, it obviously doesn't work for programs linked statically or
against an older glibc.

> My suggestion is to talk to gentoo devs, and decide for yourself if you
> think it's worth it. And by all means stay away from ntplonly.

I'm doing fine with nptlonly for some years now. (not *that* many
years, of course :-)

> Today my system is ntpl (without ntplonly), on an SMP system, and I
> don't notice any improvement at ALL. Which is VERY annoying considering
> the complete insanity I went through for about a week.

Well, maybe you aren't using multithreaded apps? Or the threading
overhead is neglegible? For me it makes a huge difference on my
pentium-200mmx (yes...) running VDR (my mediacenter-box), which is
heavily threaded. All other apps I'm using don't use threads (in fact,
some do but arre using more high-level threading implementations aside
from linuxthreads and NPTL). Lots of apps I'm using are still just
forking processes and talking via IPC.

> Yes, I know only some apps support ntpl, but the impression given to me
> was that it would speed up the whole system. Which is certainly not true.

OK, but that was a too high expectation. It's never been advertised as
high-performance general tool. And since you knew there are only some
apps making profit of threads, you should have known that the effect
was likely to be small.

I can recommend NPTL for situations where threading really matters. And
it only speeds threading, so whether using it or not is a matter of
analyzing your application landscape...

BTW, I don't suggest switching to NPTL either. If one starts a new
Gentoo installation, I think it would be a good idea to use NPTL right
from the start (and even try nptlonly). Switching from linuxthreads to
nptlonly brings some risks mentioned above. So a "emerge -e world" may
be a good idea in the case one goes down that road.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Can not emerge net-misc/openssh-4.2_p1-r1

[Hans-Gunther Borrmann]

On Friday 03 February 2006 11:11, Jules Colding wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Todays sync brought me a new openssh but a required library is missing.
> My emerge gives this:
>
> ###
> 
> checking whether system supports SO_PEERCRED getsockopt... yes
> checking if openpty correctly handles controlling tty... no
> checking whether getpgrp requires zero arguments... yes
> checking for dlopen in -ldl... no
> checking for pam_set_item in -lpam... no
> configure: error: *** libpam missing
>
> !!! Please attach the config.log to your bug report:
> !!! /var/tmp/portage/openssh-4.2_p1-r1/work/openssh-4.2p1/config.log
>
> !!! ERROR: net-misc/openssh-4.2_p1-r1 failed.
> !!! Function econf, Line 495, Exitcode 0
> !!! econf failed
> !!! If you need support, post the topmost build error, NOT this status
> message. ###

I have  the same problem in the same environment.  The emerge of 
openssh-4.2_p1 fails with the same error message and yes,libpam is installed. 
If I emerge with "-pam" the installation fails with some other library 
missing, which is installed too.
-- 

Hans-Gunther Borrmann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Rechenzentrum der Universitaet Freiburg
Hermann-Herder-Str. 10, D79104 FREIBURG
Tel.: +49 761/203-4652
Fax:  +49 761/203-4643
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Improving SpamAssassin's accuracy...

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Sun, 15 Jan 2006 14:07:51 +
Stroller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On 15 Jan 2006, at 12:56, Hans-Werner Hilse wrote:
> >
> > I'd strongly suggest using the Bayesian filters, per-user, that is...
> > [...]
> 
> What improvement rate are you seeing for this, please?

About 99% of _Spam_ mails are positively recognized. Up to now I've
never encountered a false positive.

> My concern with these particular users, who are not particularly  
> email-savvy, is that they ain't going to train the filters. I just  
> don't see it happening. And if I teach them to train the filters by  
> dragging & dropping into the "learn" folder then I anticipate perhaps  
> just one of them complaining "but why can't I just right-click it and  
> `mark as junk' in Outlook?".

True. My answer is: "because then you'll get all the spam in your
webmail when being on business trip" :-) Basically, I teach them to use
server-side mail filtering with the same reasoning.

But it makes me think: Does Outlook set some kind of flag to the mail?
Does it note anything in the headers?

> I'd really prefer all spam-filtering to be invisible to the user. I  
> don't demand a high success rate: Bayesian filtering should get 99.5%  
> or above, I think, but I'd be happy with 95%.

In fact, lots of my users are happy with about that rate and without
learning of Spam. Bayesian filters are activated for all of them, but
they are only trained by autolearning.

> SpamAssassin is currently getting about 33%, which is next to useless.

agreed, and I bet you can improve that. You can also decide to have all
users share your Bayesian database. So you don't have to teach them to
learn Spam.

> IMAP server is Dovecot storing messages in maildirs in users' home  
> directories - this makes it convenient for your suggestion, but I  
> just don't really want to go there.

You can, as described, reduce the concept at many points...

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Improving SpamAssassin's accuracy...

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Sun, 15 Jan 2006 03:08:38 +
Stroller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I emerged SpamAssasin on a mailserver the other day, added the  
> appropriate line to /etc/postfix/master.cf  and it all seems to be  
> working ok. But it doesn't seem to be very accurate in the default  
> configuration - I have a mailbox with about 4,000 messages,  
> approximately 98% of which are spam and it gets only about 1/3 of  
> them. The statement in `perldoc Mail::SpamAssassin::Conf`that "5.0 is  
> the default setting, is quite aggressive" does not seem true here.

I'd strongly suggest using the Bayesian filters, per-user, that is. For
a mail setup at my company for about 20 people with high mail traffic
I'm running a nightly cron job to archieve that.

Basically it works like this:
- All incoming mail is scanned by Spamassassin, Bayes enabled
- Users have "virtual homedirs" for Spamassassin
- A nightly cron job learns all mail in users' INBOX.Spam.LearnSpam and
  INBOX.Spam.LearnHam folders (it's a simple shell script)

That way all users can put mails they'd like to be learned as being
spam in the respective IMAP folder and have them automatically learned
overnight. Simple setup, highly effective, simple for my users.

In order to give more hints to setup this, it would be helpful to know
which mail storage is being used (IMAP? What server? What storage?).

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] SIOCADDRT: No such device

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Wed, 21 Dec 2005 21:50:05 +0200
Ryan Viljoen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> -  *   Adding routes
> -  * default ...
> -  * via ...
> - gw: Unknown host
> -  * 192.168.4.1 ...

Your /etc/conf.d/net is broken in this regard. Read the example
(net.example) for correct syntax. It's probably using /sbin/ip, thus
different syntax from /sbin/route.

> Okay I tried the following:
> 
> - ziig conf.d # route add 192.168.4.1
> - SIOCADDRT: No such device

Well, you should tell where you want your route going to...

> This however did not give an error:
> 
> - ziig conf.d # route add 192.168.4.1 gw 192.168.4.1

But should not be needed as 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0 should
automatically route through dev eth0 after ifconfig.

Hint: What you maybe want to issue is "route add default gw
192.168.4.1" or "ip route add default via 192.168.4.1"? This should
route all non-local traffic through that machine.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] data base program

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Tue, 20 Dec 2005 13:45:19 +0100
capsel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> OpenBase is part of OpenOffice... and is really slow on my laptop.

OK, please don't try to enforce your own name... it's OpenOffice Base,
not OpenBase, as you've been told...

> Do you know any replacement of OpenOffice for my laptop ? :)

koffice, probably. Or a combination of gnumeric/abiword, possibly.

> BTW. Is there a tool to convert mysql (and possible other) databases
> to and from ms-access *.mdb's  ?

There's an ODBC connector for MySQL, yes. You can use mysql tables in
MS Access this way.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Berkeley DB patch required (I think)

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Tue, 13 Dec 2005 18:04:56 +0200
Mike Kenny <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Dec 13 15:56:00 getafix slapd[7156]: bdb(dc=inzanix,dc=com): illegal 
> flag specified to txn_begin
> Dec 13 15:56:00 getafix slapd[7156]: bdb_txn_get: BerkeleyDB 4.2.52 
> library needs TXN patch!
> Dec 13 15:56:00 getafix slapd[7156]: conn=0 op=1 RESULT tag=97 err=49 text=
> 
> I know this is not specifically a gentoo issue, more LDAP or OX, but I 
> then followed the reference to a required patch on the second last line 
> of messages. I wanted to check what versions of bdb were available, but
> [... only found one...]

As it's clearly LDAP which is complaining here, it would be interesting
- if that's actually the OpenLDAP compiled on your Gentoo, and if yes,
- what a re-emerge of OpenLDAP causes and
- what USE flags you're using for OpenLDAP

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] IMAP Server - authenticating off a Windows Domain?

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

> That's the problem I'm getting at the moment - the user authenticates
> ok (using Samba's winbind & PAM) but the IMAP server exits because it
> can't "chdir" into the user's home directory (which doesn't exist). I'm
> told I can use `pam_mkhomedir` to solve this, but I'm beginning to
> wonder if I've gone up the wrong path with winbind.

Hm, why not just use a IMAP server that doesn't depend on existing Unix
accounts for its users? Cyrus comes to my mind...

-hwh

-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Fetchmail

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

> I run fetchmail to poll 3 servers every minute... and while this has
> worked fine for weeks, last night it froze at 2am and stopped polling.
> When I killed the fetchmail process and ran fetchmail again this
> afternoon, things jumped to life again and appear back to normal... but
> I wished I didn't have to make the manual intervention.  Fetchmail is
> version "6.2.5.2+RPA+NTLM+SDPS+SSL+INET6+NLS" from portage and has the
> following in ~/.fetchmailrc
> [...]
> --
> Can anyone tell me why this happened?

Hard to say. There's no evidence in the cited log. I think you may want to
increase verbosity of the logs... Hm, and next time don't just kill the
running instance but check what it's actually doing using strace and
ltrace (or even a debugger, but this won't help much if debug symbols are
stripped...). You've compiled in a lot of auth mechs, so it may well be
due to a related library (hence I suggested ltrace, too).

-hwh

-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] lightweight webcam server for embedded gentoo?

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Wed, 7 Dec 2005 01:29:23 -0800 (PST)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> I'd like to be able to stream video from the webcam. I don't need full
> tv quality - even a jpeg every second or so will be fine. Trouble is,
> all the software I've found so far assumes X and many other heavy
> libraries. All I want is to capture jpeg images - I could write the
> TCP/IP server part myself.

try out mplayer. You'll probably want to reduce its features to a
minimum. Maybe you're better off compiling it from source yourself,
circumventing portage. You'll want support for v4l(2) and jpeg.

OTOH, there's VLC. This may be a good bet, too. It's specifically
designed to do this kind of job.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] high volume IMAP/smtp server

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Thu, 1 Dec 2005 16:13:19 +0100 (CET)
"Peter van Eck" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Need to migrate from netscape mail server  running 7000 users to a
> preferrable open source solution(ncluding failover cluster).
> 
> Anyone got recommendations/suggestions , or actually running with this
> amount of users.

I'd suggest Cyrus. Also check out their info on the Cyrus IMAP
Aggregator: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/ag.html

Using this, you can scale the IMAP server at your needs. Further,
you'll probably need one machine for SMTP and one or more for
spam/virus filtering.

Given the availability usually expected from mail infrastructure, you
should carefully think over the choice of your distribution.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Wireless Authentication Gateway??

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Thu, 24 Nov 2005 00:32:49 +0600
El Nino <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> i have to replace our existing wired network to wireless network. so
> please help me to deploy a wireless authentication gateway using linux
> based open source application which provides a total security solution
> for wireless networks. please guide me to deploy this.

You want to read about WPA. You can set up radius and use that for
authentication. If you cannot rely on WPA due to the APs currently
present, your option is probably a VPN.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] building a server cluster?

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Thu, 24 Nov 2005 00:23:28 +0600
El Nino <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> please guide me to deploy a gentoo linux server cluster. currently i
> have 7 piii 800Mhz machines & want to test a cluster server. if
> somebody can point me step by step or a good guide, it will very
> appreciable.

What kind of server? What do you want to archieve by clustering?
Redundancy? Request distribution? Depending on that, even DNS round
robin may be enough.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Dinosaur Matrox Mystique: corruption

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Fri, 18 Nov 2005 00:56:18 +1000
"Alan E. Davis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I backed down to 1024xsomething: vertical lines were scalloped/wavy. Someone
> mentioned this would be a timing issue, but I don't know what I'd do to
> microadjust timing? xvidtune? I'll try it.

That won't help. I'm currently using a mystique and am having the very
same problem. It's _very_ easy to circumvent but requires a recompile
of xorg. The fix still hasn't made it into xorg CVS. Maybe time to
write another bug report. But i think I remember having written one for
XFree86, which behaved the same way. I was told that it was merely a
timing issue but AFAIK this isn't configurable und it was fixed in 4.5.
But I never tried that out.

To "fix" the issue, I usually did the following:
1. $ emerge xorg-x11
   waited after the moment when everything is unpacked and patched and hit 
CTRL-Z
2. $ vi 
/var/tmp/portage/xorg-x11.../work/xc/programs/Xserver/hw/xfree86/drivers/mga/mga_storm.c

search for the lines:
|/* MGAISBUSY() reportedly causes a freeze for Mystique revision 2 and older */
|if (!(pMga->Chipset == PCI_CHIP_MGA1064 && (pMga->ChipRev >= 0 && 
pMga->ChipRev <= 2)))
|while(MGAISBUSY());

Reading the comment exactly, it is easy to fix it (i.e. it couldn't work for 
Rev. 2):
|if (!(pMga->Chipset == PCI_CHIP_MGA1064 && (pMga->ChipRev >= 0 && 
pMga->ChipRev < 2)))
(i.e., changing "<= 2" to "< 2")

3. $ fg
   to continue the suspended emerge job

I'd suggest making a binary package and saving it somewhere...


-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Convert windows-1250 database to UTF-8

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Mon, 07 Nov 2005 12:25:22 +0100
Khan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Bruno Lustosa wrote:
> > On 11/7/05, *Khan* <[EMAIL PROTECTED] > wrote:
> > 
> > I'm trying to convert my windows-1250 database to Unicode, UTF-8. Is
> > there any script that can do the job?
> > 
> > What kind of database is it?
> > If it's something the likes of postgresql or mysql, you could dump the 
> > database to a text file, use recode or iconv to change the file 
> > encoding, and then import it into a new unicode database.
> 
> Yes, that's just what I want to do. Database is MySQL. Can you PLS 
> explain procedure, I have never done that before.

$ mysqldump -u root -p MyDataBase | iconv -f WINDOWS-1250 -t UTF-8 > mydump.sql

But beware, this might have big influence or lead to an application not
working anymore depending on the assumptions that application makes.

E.g., for some of my PHP applications store serialized data in
dedicated fields. This depends on the binary content of those fields
not being modified due to string length information stored within those
fields. When converting to UTF-8, the multi byte sequences would
corrupt each of these serialized strings. If I were to convert this to
another charset, I had to do it programmatically by using functions of
the application, not the DB itself.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Visited web sites

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Sat, 5 Nov 2005 20:40:02 -0800
Mark Knecht <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> > yes thats the point of squid it is a proxy.
> 
> OK, but that's like using the word in the definition to a guy who's
> never used a proxy. ;-)
> 
> I'm still unclear though, and I'm sure I'll find this out either
> through reading or use. do all packets for the machine using the proxy
> go through the proxy? Or is it more like a DNS server where just the
> URL's go through the proxy to figure out what to do?

No, it forwards all traffic. And there's another thing: You'd have to
configure it at the target computer. That is, one can deconfigure it...
but read below, there's an option...

> The I created a lot of extra wireless traffic, especially since the
> machine being observed seems to like to watch a lot of gaming videos.
> If it's just addresses, then no big deal. If it's the whole data
> stream then it's not going to work well.

Well, in order to log the traffic, you'll have to intercept it.

Probably, a text filtering firewall looking for --dport 80 and
"HTTP/1." at the start of the packet would suffice. You can even use a
firewall to make your proxy into a transparent proxy - i.e., all
traffic is intercepted at network level and redirected through the
proxy. This only works if the firewalling computer is at router level.

Maybe another idea would be to just sniff the WLAN in monitor mode and
use a packet filter to match TCP:80/"HTTP" packets.


-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Begging For Help With ALSA and Lirc

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Fri, 04 Nov 2005 06:31:55 -0800
Drew Tomlinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> >>And lirc won't load.  I get these errors when inserting the module:
> >>[...]
> >
> >well, and what does dmesg say? Do you have i2c support in the kernel?
> >What kind of IR receiver are you using? Do you need certain kernel
> >drivers for the TV card?
> >
> Thank you for your reply.  Here is the relevant part of dmesg:
> 
> lirc_dev: Unknown symbol class_simple_device_add
> lirc_dev: Unknown symbol class_simple_destroy
> [...]

While just checking google to make sure that I'm not gonna talk
nonsense here, I found a lot of similar trouble descriptions. It seems
that there's some incompatibility between newer kernel versions and
some lirc versions. Are you running lirc w/ ~x86 or just x86? If the
latter is the case (lirc < 0.7.2), I'd recommend

$ ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge lirc


-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Begging For Help With ALSA and Lirc

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Thu, 03 Nov 2005 11:11:41 -0800
Drew Tomlinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> And lirc won't load.  I get these errors when inserting the module:
> 
> tv mythtv # modprobe lirc_dev
> FATAL: Error inserting lirc_dev 
> (/lib/modules/2.6.13-gentoo-r5/misc/lirc_dev.ko): Unknown symbol in 
> module, or unknown parameter (see dmesg)
> tv mythtv # modprobe lirc_i2c
> WARNING: Error inserting lirc_dev 
> (/lib/modules/2.6.13-gentoo-r5/misc/lirc_dev.ko): Unknown symbol in 
> module, or unknown parameter (see dmesg)
> FATAL: Error inserting lirc_i2c 
> (/lib/modules/2.6.13-gentoo-r5/misc/lirc_i2c.ko): Unknown symbol in 
> module, or unknown parameter (see dmesg)

well, and what does dmesg say? Do you have i2c support in the kernel?
What kind of IR receiver are you using? Do you need certain kernel
drivers for the TV card?

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] file with IP?

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Wed, 2 Nov 2005 18:54:06 +
Neil Bothwick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On Wed, 2 Nov 2005 16:53:11 +0100, brullo nulla wrote:
> 
> > You can also poll the ip by doing an ifconfig and parsing its output
> > inside your application. I think the overhead on the system would be
> > barely recognizable if you do a reasonable (no more than every 5
> > seconds, let's say) poll.
> 
> Wouldn't it be easier to use the output from "hostname -i"? It needs no
> parsing.

But it depends on proper reverse-resolution of the hostname. This isn't
usually the case for dialup-connections...

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Glibc, userlocales, and ENV Variables

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Wed, 02 Nov 2005 21:16:49 +0100
Holly Bostick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> OK, I kinda get that and dmesg says during boot that the terminal
> (agetty) is being configured to use UTF-8 (which is what I told it to do
> when I built the kernel, so that's OK).

The kernel is configured by the gentoo rc system using "unicode_start".
This sets console charmap & font.

> So does that mean that when I log in to my DE/WM, and start X, the
> charmap will be automatically UTF-8, because that's what the getty was?

No, that's independent. Your X terminal program talks to X and uses its
font subsystem. That also uses charset information for finding correct
fonts. On the other hand there are other means to use fonts now and
some solutions do an intermediate mapping to unicode.

> It's not clear to me whether the Euro symbol is included in UTF-8
> encodings, or only as a special variant of ISO-8859-15 (the "@euro"
> variant), which is one of the reasons I try to encode both.

it's both in UTF-8 (which includes every sign under the sun - almost)
and ISO-8859-15 which is the same as "latin9" (hint: look for this when
searching console fonts!) which is a slightly modified ISO-8859-1
a.k.a. latin1. 

> > [EMAIL PROTECTED]/ISO-8859-1 didn't make much sense to me (and maybe causes
> >  some failures when building?), but other from that it seemed OK.
> 
> Well, of course I know less about this than you do [...

oooh, I know this what I am writing here since only a few minutes, not
longer. In fact, the whole locale setup is terribly bad documented.

> ...] , but my native Dutch boyfriend runs a English Windows machine, I 
> run Windows programs with Wine, and about the only thing I think I know 
> about the whole issue is that Windows pretty much only knows ISO-8859-1 
> (unless you had a multi-lingual version, which neither of us did). So I 
> wanted support for ISO-8859-1 to be available (with support for the Euro
> symbol for those MS fonts that support it, which I think that the core 
> MS fonts now do by default, though I'm not sure about that either).

Windows uses Unicode since 2000 (or even NT?). However, that doesn't
mean it's shipping fonts with the full Unicode charset available.

> In any case, if such an application called for ISO-8859-1 , I wanted it
> to be there, though as you can tell, I don't get how this is all
> supposed to work well enough to be sure that was the way to accomplish
> the goal.

Very interesting this whole stuff. Actually, I'm just reading my way
through the glibc sources as I'd always been interested in this. And it
is _very_ bad documented. I've mentioned this

In fact, there's no difference between the nl_NL and the [EMAIL PROTECTED]
locale. I think probably all of the @euro locales are more or less
obsolete now. I think they're a remainder from the time when the new
currency was introduced and the user had to choose. Now, the @euro
locales de facto just import there [EMAIL PROTECTED] counterparts. This is
written in the relevant changelog:

* locales/br_FR: Eliminate old national currencies of countries
  participating in Euro.  Make @euro files pure copies.
(continues for all @euro)

A .UTF-8 locale doesn't exist in glibc's locale database so it must get
stripped when the locale is generated.

To give you a hint, the default locales generated for language tag nl,
subtag NL are

nl_NL
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
nl_NL.UTF8

in your locales.build, this should read

nl_NL/ISO-8859-1
[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ISO-8859-15
nl_NL.UTF-8/UTF-8

to have the proper locale for each encoding you/your terminal may come
across. Although @euro is a copy, it is needed to identify and
distinguish each of the generated locales. After all, nl_NL... is just
a name, could have been another name, too. But the "LANG" setting is
also used by gettext (which has nothing to do with this all, but has
the same author), AFAIK, and thus shouldn't be totally arbitrary chosen.

Your LANG setting should be "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" for non-unicode environments
(given that you're using latin9/ISO-8859-15 fonts) and "nl_NL.UTF-8" in
unicode environments.

> > How does the "borkism" of your locales manifest?
> 
> Most of the time, when Dutch characters are meant to be used, they are,
> as in the following example:
> 
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] -> killall -9 conky
> conky: geen proces beëindigd
> 
> but sometimes I get this:
> 
>  killall -9 MPlayer
> MPlayer: geen proces beëindigd
> 
> . now *that's* interesting... I copied and pasted the second from a
> terminal (mrvxt, whereas the first was from multi-gnome-terminal), where
> what appeared was
> 
>  killall -9 MPlayer
> MPlayer: geen proces beA(with the ~ over it) << (but tiny ones)indigd
> 
> in place of the ë . But when I pasted it into this compose window, it
> came out right! But it isn't in the term.

This is probably due to different clipboard implementations. GTK has
its own clipboard which imports things from the X clipboard facility
that mrxvt is using. Probably GTK applies

Re: [gentoo-user] Glibc, userlocales, and ENV Variables

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Wed, 02 Nov 2005 15:53:11 +0100
Holly Bostick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> [...]
> /etc/locales.build
> 
> which says
> 
> # This file names the list of locales to be built when glibc is installed.
> # The format is /, where  is a locale from the
> # /usr/share/i18n/locales directory, and  is name of one of the files
> # in /usr/share/i18n/charmaps/. All blank lines and lines starting with # are
> # ignored. Here is an example:
> # en_US/ISO-8859-1
> [...]
> Glibc built fine (afaict), but my problem is that I now don't know what
> to export with a LANG variable.
> 
> For example, if I want [EMAIL PROTECTED]/UTF-8, how do I export that as 
> opposed
> to [EMAIL PROTECTED]/ISO-8859-15 (or worse, ISO-8859-1)?

Note the comment you've cited: The format is "locale/charmap". This
generates the locale data for a certain "language" (it's a little bit
more than just language, though) for the specified charmap.

In LANG/LC_* you only set the locale. The charmap is (semi-)
automatically chosen, which makes sense, since it's terminal dependant
which charset is used.
 
> Was I supposed to give the locales individual names as the Localization
> Guide implies? locales.build doesn't indicate that you can do that (and
> in fact, I thought perhaps the reason why language exports were mildly
> borked might be because I had done so).

[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ISO-8859-1 didn't make much sense to me (and maybe causes
some failures when building?), but other from that it seemed OK.

> Should I just get rid of the 'extra' locales (ISO-8859-15 and
> ISO-8859-1)? Since I guess I'm going to try to stick to UTF-8, maybe I
> don't really need them (I was mostly covering my butt, concerned that my
> current and future network connections might not support UTF-8, since
> they're mostly to Windows machines).

All the terminals you're using support UTF-8?

> I guess I've made a mistake, but I'm not quite sure what to do about it.
> Since fixing it will most almost certainly require a recompile of glibc,
> and since compiling glibc takes nine-tenths of forever, I'd like to get
> it on with it as soon as possible (sigh). So any hints would be appreciated.

How does the "borkism" of your locales manifest?


-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] emerge xmlto > ERROR: app-text/xmlto-0.0.18 failed.

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Wed, 02 Nov 2005 06:47:10 -0600
Dale <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Why does the kernel need xmlto?  It seems to work without it.

in order to build documentation. Remove the doc USE flag if you don't
want it to.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] realtime-preemption patch

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Tue, 1 Nov 2005 14:01:40 +
karlos <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> could you point me to a list where all the patches are listed, as I really
> don't know what patches are applied to gentoo-sources.#?

See
http://dev.gentoo.org/~dsd/genpatches

HTH,

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] realtime-preemption patch

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Tue, 1 Nov 2005 12:11:48 +
karlos <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I just wanted to ask whether someone on the List has experiences with the
> Realtime Preemption patches by Ingo Molnar
> 
> http://people.redhat.com/mingo/realtime-preempt/
> 
> applied to the gentoo-kernel. I have just tried it out but a LOT of files
> are not where patch thinks they should be, so I did not even attempt to
> build it.

Files should be there... you're using the correct -p flag for patch? I
guess you'd having problems anyway if you're using the (already heavily
patched) gentoo-kernel. Why not start with a vanilla kernel, patch it
with realtime-preempt and then apply any other patches you might want
from gentoo-sources?

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] what made portage go fast again?

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Tue, 1 Nov 2005 14:21:23 +0100
Fernando Meira <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> > You been running that du -s command to huh? It does work. I really
> > need it on my old 200MHz machine. Would you happen to know what that
> > command does? I read the man page but it didn't help much. I'm
> > learning though.
> 
> The idea is to cache all files into memory so that a re-run through those
> files goes faster. The command du takes all files of the dir you provide to
> calculate the amount of space used. Of course, you could use any other
> command that runs through the files... :)

du doesn't run through the files, just the directories. But this helps
enough with filesystems that don't use sorted/weighted trees for the
directory structure.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] How to get debug info when umount fails

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Mon, 31 Oct 2005 12:36:56 -0600
Harry Putnam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> [...]
> I want to know what is happening there.  A restart of samba has no
> noticable effect.

It can't, it only manages server side. Client side is done by the
kernel.

> What can I do to hasten the remountability of shares in that condition?

Hm, did you try "umount -f"?

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Weird pauses making me nuts

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Mon, 31 Oct 2005 17:24:26 +0100
Holly Bostick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Basically, my system is running "fine" (no overt problems), but about
> every 30 seconds or so, it 'pauses' to do something, and I have to wait
> for 5-10 seconds while it does it before I can go further. Or the
> display pauses, and I have to wait for the redraw , I can't tell which.

It all gets down to the question whether it "stays" in Userland or in
Kernel context in such a situation. If this happens in Userland, CPU
utilization will probably be high in such a situation and it must be
due to a high priority process when X is that much slowed down - which
itself is already running at high prio.

So I very much guess it's a kernel issue. Compiling a fresh new one
would be my first advice.

BTW, are you using any kernel based network filesystems (NFS, Samba,
ncpfs), FUSE, or PPP? The trick here would be to simply selectively
disable each one of these and watch if it keeps happening.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Sony Picturebook Widescreen framebuffer patch, was: Re: [gentoo-user] The Root Block Device is unspecified or not detected - PCMCIA card CD Boot on Sony Vaio

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Sun, 30 Oct 2005 17:48:24 +
Stroller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On Oct 30, 2005, at 11:18 am, Hans-Werner Hilse wrote:
> >
> > I'm running Gentoo on my picturebook happily since about 2 or 3 years
> > now. Just ask if there are more problems. I can give you a kernel patch
> > for the neomagic frame buffer driver to have it support the 480px
> > display height...
> 
> I really loved getting the widescreen framebuffer working - it was such 
> a buzz, so cool. That made for the ultimate in notebook usability and 
> portability.

I'm copying it here verbatim. It's made against a 2.6.11.n kernel and
may need a little polishing for newer versions, but it follows an easy
path, I've just extended the existing "special format" for toshiba's
libretto series:
snip---
--- neofb.c 2005-04-30 03:29:00.0 +0200
+++ neofb.c.new 2005-10-31 15:55:05.899735896 +0100
@@ -640,7 +640,7 @@
mode_ok = 1;
break;
case 1024:
-   if (var->yres == 768)
+   if (var->yres == (par->libretto ? 480 : 768))
mode_ok = 1;
break;
case 800:
@@ -1684,6 +1684,20 @@
.vmode  = FB_VMODE_NONINTERLACED
 };
 
+static struct fb_videomode __devinitdata mode1024x480 = {
+   .xres   = 1024,
+   .yres   = 480,
+   .pixclock   = 21786,
+   .left_margin= 160,
+   .right_margin   = 24,
+   .upper_margin   = 2,
+   .lower_margin   = 0,
+   .hsync_len  = 136,
+   .vsync_len  = 6,
+   .sync   = FB_SYNC_HOR_HIGH_ACT | FB_SYNC_VERT_HIGH_ACT,
+   .vmode  = FB_VMODE_NONINTERLACED
+};
+
 static int __devinit neo_map_mmio(struct fb_info *info,
  struct pci_dev *dev)
 {
@@ -1836,10 +1850,15 @@
}
break;
case 0x02:
-   // [EMAIL PROTECTED]
par->NeoPanelWidth = 1024;
-   par->NeoPanelHeight = 768;
-   memcpy(info->monspecs.modedb, &vesa_modes[13], sizeof(struct 
fb_videomode));
+   if (par->libretto) {
+   par->NeoPanelHeight = 480;
+   memcpy(info->monspecs.modedb, &mode1024x480, 
sizeof(struct fb_videomode));
+   } else {
+   // [EMAIL PROTECTED]
+   par->NeoPanelHeight = 768;
+   memcpy(info->monspecs.modedb, &vesa_modes[13], 
sizeof(struct fb_videomode));
+   }
break;
case 0x03:
/* [EMAIL PROTECTED] panel support needs to be added */

snip---
Just use the "libretto" option (set to "1") and everything will work as
expected.

> 
> > BTW, @Stroller: it's a 10" widescreen, 6" would be a
> > little too small...
> 
> That's really 10" not 6'??? How come I don't have a girlfriend??
> ;P

Well, size doesn't matter anyhow, does it ? ;-)

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] The Root Block Device is unspecified or not detected - PCMCIA card CD Boot on Sony Vaio

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Sun, 30 Oct 2005 15:57:28 +1000
Richard Watson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> > I installed Gentoo on a Pentium II 400 Vaio "Picturebook", the Sony 
> > with a 6" widescreen (1024 x 480??) but never had one of these CD-Roms 
> > available, only the floppy drive. In fact I cheated & resorted to 
> > removing the hard-drive & installing Gentoo on it using a desktop PC 
> > before returning the drive to the laptop. I think it might be possible 
> > to avoid this by installing from stage 3 - that mostly just needs to be 
> > unpacked onto a Linux-formatted partition, doesn't it? There are surely 
> > Linux distros that'll boot on this device so a pre-compiled kernel 
> > could be copied across from another machine and then only grub needs to 
> > be run, I think.
> >  [...]
> Hey Stroller ... You got the model in 1 ...! I think you're correct. I'm 
> going to try and 
> use partition magic under Windows 2000 which is the OS it came with to create 
> my partitions and install
> a stage 3. I'll let you know how I go. Hopefully having an EXT2
> partition will help Knoppix start properly. Thanks, Richard

I'm running Gentoo on my picturebook happily since about 2 or 3 years
now. Just ask if there are more problems. I can give you a kernel patch
for the neomagic frame buffer driver to have it support the 480px
display height... BTW, @Stroller: it's a 10" widescreen, 6" would be a
little too small...

I did use a one-floppy distro that time to do the initial fdisk and
mke2fs, copying over and unpacking the stage-File. I just forget which
floppy distro I used, but it supported my PCMCIA-CDROM (not sony, so I
hadn't even the choice to try booting from it) and my network adapter.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Mobile phone

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Tue, 25 Oct 2005 16:38:34 +0200
Keats <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> i wonder how to get the pictures from my phone ? 
> i have it to work with irda via gammu/wammu but this software seems to
> be able only to get numbers phone and sms from the phone...

What phone brand? Most phones support OBEX transfers via IrDA. You need
a running OBEX server on your PC to receive them. I think obexftp or
openobex-apps should do. Note that there are also phone dependent
utilities that may let you do more/other things. OBEX will only allow
you to send those pictures via IrDA like your phone would do for
transferring them to another mobile (for the case you already happened
to do so).

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] [ot] PDF or PS format for daily use?

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Tue, 25 Oct 2005 13:10:56 +1300
Nick Rout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I am not sure if font embedding is possible in a .ps document.

Of course it is. I think people using laser printers would have
complained a lot otherwise...

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] [ot] PDF or PS format for daily use?

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

Sorry for another tree of answers, but the others seemed a bit "fuzzy"
to me...

On Sun, 23 Oct 2005 16:08:50 +0800 (CST)
Zhang Weiwu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Because I always save two copies of every of my document, one in original
> format (eg. odt) and another in printable format for my colleagues in case
> they don't have the Linux fonts and software. Here comes the question should
> I keep a PS copy or PDF copy.

Note that PS is an interpreted language. PDF is a pure document format,
no "program flow" involved there.

You can do pretty funny things using Postscript you won't ever be able
to do with PDF. I think Postscript even has a Random Generator.

So if you do serious Postscript programming, PDF isn't an option ;-)

PDF can be thought as the final result of a computation, Postscript
describes the computation itself.
 
> I think PDF copy is absolutely the prefered format because:
> * easier to find acrobat reader;

Hm. Let's turn this into: On most computers you'll find a PDF reader today.

> * can be 'Tagged', especially used with OOo;

Hm, produced by OOo, but "used"?!? Can be something to think of when it
comes to reading on PDAs.

> * possibility to 'copy and paste', though format will be lost;

Not impossible with Postscript - doesn't have Gnome's new doc viewer
have such a feature? Or something on KDE? Not sure, though...

> * not to take other people by surprise with unfamiliar PS extension;

But you still have the PDF version that _may_ prevent you from opening
the PDFs on older Acrobat Readers when chosing a too high level.

> * different quanlity: I can save PDF in very high quanlity that I was told
> "can be taken to press house"

No difference to postscript here - besides the new layers feature

> * easy to convert to PS format when needed.

This is true the other way, too.

> Here comes the question: if the above all stands true, why do I ever need PS
> format at all? There might be some reasons to keep this format still
> existing. Perhaps in other areas, other then office work.

Because that's what your printer interpretes? Or its network server thingy?

> So the conclusion: for typical office workers, we can forget PS format.

Except for piping it to the printer, yes.

> Now welcome for suggestions.

PDF is fine. Hm, and if you want something very future-proof, keep a
plain text copy. This isn't a joke, let's discuss this in 30 years or
so...

> P.S. another quesiton I happen wish to have an answer: in one case, I have
> to keep PS format because, I can print booklet (brochure) in OOO2 right the
> way I expected, but if I carry this brochure to my colleague, and he doesn't
> have openoffice, then I try to export to PDF format, and found there is no
> 'brochure' option in exporting,[.

emerge pdftk && read about it on http://www.accesspdf.com, or check out
the Multivalent Tools (google will tell you the address).

> ...] also there is no 'brochure' option in
> Acrobat Reader printing dialogue box, so it's clear if I export to PDF
> format I will never be able to print it in brochure style on a normal PC, so
> I have to print to PS file and carry it. But so far this is the only case I
> think I need PS format. If I only exported PDF format, can I still print a
> brochure? The difficulty in printing brochure is you have to make correct
> page order.

Of course. You can create a new PDF with above mentioned tools that has
pages from the other PDF layouted in a certain way in the new PDF.

-hwh

-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] using g++ instead of gcc to build abiword

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Sat, 22 Oct 2005 18:08:47 -0700
Robert Persson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On October 22, 2005 04:38 pm Dave Nebinger was like:
> > I think at this point you'll have to post some of the output generated when
> > the ebuild fails before we'll be able to help you any further...
> 
> Well here goes...
> [...]

What you cited then looks like the final linking step. My first guess
is that the ebuild doesn't list all dependencies of abiword that it
actually has and in your case you're missing one. Check the -lx
lines (libraries) if something is obviously not yet installed. I don't
really know which library is supposed to provide those missing
functions, and searching for them doesn't make lot of sense - I guess
"new" and "delete" aren't very typical for one certain library...

Have you got some old .h header files lying around
in /usr/local/include? This might totally mess up things, as well as
duplicate libraries (of different versions) in /usr/lib
and /usr/local/lib.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Stealth Ethernet testing

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Fri, 21 Oct 2005 19:19:15 + (UTC)
James <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Well, after much ado, it seems quite easy (trivial) to hide an ethernet 
> interface, while being able to collect reems of local ethernet traffic
> based data, from both snort and ethereal.

No, it's not that easy - depending on your requirements on the "hiding".
 
> Here's the normal ethernet interace on a portable:
>  /sbin/ifconfig -a
> eth0  Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:90:F5:0D:30:0E
>   inet addr:192.168.2.15  Bcast:192.168.2.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
>   UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
> 
> 
> issued:
> 
> route delete default
> ifconfig eth0  inet 0.0.0.0
> 
> and voila:
> /sbin/infconif -a
> eth0  Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:90:F5:0D:30:0E
>   UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1

Yep, it's up and doesn't have an IP. If this is sufficient for you,
fine then.

> On any system, 'ping 0.0.0.0' receives responses from the local
> interface.

No, if you specify an interface for those packets, it most probably
won't receive anything. But that's nitpicking here...

> What I need is for folks to test and verify that an ethernet 
> interface setup this way, is indeed invisible (undetectable)
> by other systems.

It surely isn't. It's up, listening at least to broadcasts and
multicasts (well, it's written uppercase in the ipconfig output).

> If you find this is not true, please tell me what you did and 
> what tool/syntax you used to discover/detect a system with an
> ethernet interface set up this way

emerge hping2, emerge arping. And then play a little bit. Note that
ethernet frames don't rely on IPs to get to their targets. In the above
described situation, I would try to send a bunch of different ethernet
frames to that machine and see what happenes. If I were you, I would
dedicate another machine for the testing stage that sniffs if the
machine answers anything. "ping" isn't really the tool of choice here.

If you really don't want to chose a hardware based solution and go the
software way, you should carefully inspect /proc/sys/net/... and have a
read in linux docs how to chose sysctls for not letting linux itself
spit out packages.

But using this way, it is scientifically impossible (well, nearly) to
100% negate the theory that a package might get through. I really
recommend the already mentioned way, cutting the Tx wires. After all,
this is simple and you can be sure that you didn't forget anything.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] OpenOffice 2.0 has long pauses

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Fri, 21 Oct 2005 11:24:07 -0600
Dennis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I've been using OpenOffice 2.0 since the 1.9.xx beta era.  For a while,
> I've had issues with the responsiveness when I click a menu or use the
> scroll bar with my mouse.  Clicking a menu or scrolling with the mouse
> causes the program to pause for a few seconds before something happens.
>  I don't have this issue with other applications.  Is this an
> installation or configuration issue?  Or is it simply a slow OpenOffice?
>  Anyone else have similar symptoms?  Can it be fixed?

You're shure that your hardware allows a fluent work with OOo? You
might want to keep an eye on swapin/swapout measure at the time you're
experiencing this. You can monitor this easily by issuing

$ vmstat 2

in a shell window. If the si/so values are high in such a situation,
you simply lack a bit of RAM.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] firefox is very memory hungry

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Wed, 19 Oct 2005 12:57:02 -0200
Bruno Lustosa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Just had a look at 'top' here, and was astonished by its output:
> 
> PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
> 19328 isabel.s 15 0 511m 204m 16m S 0.0 27.2 0:02.47 firefox-bin
> [x4]
> 22668 lustosa 15 0 129m 97m 17m S 0.0 13.0 11:50.05 firefox-bin
> [x2]
> 
> [...]
> I can't understand how firefox evolved from small and fast phoenix to this
> memory hungry beast that has a virtual space of half a gigabyte.

Hm, on the hand: yes, it _is_ memory hungry. On the other hand: You've
already said: virtual address space. And as I interpret the above
numbers, a lot of things is most probably shared among those processes.
You can find out e.g. by comparing their /proc//maps.

> I mean... even IE doesn't seem to eat all this memory. In fact, I have seen
> very few processes eating that much memory.

You mean that tiny frontend to the OS' functionality? It certainly
doesn't need much memory, no. But remember, other Browsers have to
implement a lot of this stuff themselves and not rely on the
functionality that specific OS and its API offers.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Ejecting an IPod

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Wed, 19 Oct 2005 13:02:34 +0200
Ryan Viljoen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> The eject doenst work unfortunately, the IPod is detected as /dev/uba.

Revisit your kernel's configuration and disable the Slow USB Block
Device support (under Device Drivers/Block Devices, AFAIK). Instead,
enable usb-storage if you didn't yet (in the USB config section). This
provides a SCSI emulation for accessing USB devices and is probably
more completely implemented than with UBD's.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] porno filtering using squid?

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Mon, 17 Oct 2005 04:37:25 +0100
Stroller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> http://dansguardian.org/?page=copyright2
> 
> I read that as "your friend can download it for non-commercial use & 
> then distribute it to you for free under the GPL for you to use for 
> commercial purposes".

I don't agree. In my opinion the legal status of this document is that
it carries two licences but no option to freely chose between them if
you're using it commercially. It's GPLed only in a non-commercial
context. You'd need a lawyer (most probably this isn't enough, you'd
need a court and a judge's decision instead) to exactly analyze the
clause and it's problematic "upon downloading" clause. It says "GPL"ed
(and even has some mentioning of RMS) but it isn't clearly GPL, though.
In the mentioned way to circumvent the license, there's the question if

- redistributing to another (commercial) party is "relicencing" (only
the author - or holder of copyright in other countries' laws - can do
this)
- the "GPL" really is a GPL here.


-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Wiki Howto: Xorg and Fonts, did I fatally screw up the directions?

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Fri, 14 Oct 2005 13:54:34 -0700
Rob <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I wonder about this, because I enable the xtt module in my 
> /etc/X11/xorg.conf, but I get an error message that the xtt module 
> cannot be found.  Using slocate I confirmed that xtt is nowhere to be found.

It's not compiled on gentoo, AFAIK. For that reason xorgconfig has a
dummy entry for it - it _theoretically_ can be compiled from the xorg
sources. xtt is a little bit outdated, AFAIK. I'd suggest using
freetype instead - although it doesn't do artifical weights and slants
of the fonts. If you really, really need xtt, you'd have to make an
overlay ebuild and add that relevant line to the "host.cf"-generation.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Mail systems

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Mon, 10 Oct 2005 15:54:12 +0200
Jean Magnan de Bornier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> | I've liked the fetchmail->procmail setup as I can have procmail process 
> | the mail in many ways and even though Opera can do much of that I'ld like 
> | to keep this process.
> 
> OK, sorry, I remember now why I gave up using opera!
> 
> What you can do is setting up a mail server, (postfix, exim, qmail) as an
> imap server on your machine. Fetchmail keeps its business as before, now
> feeding your mail server; you can point opera to your server.
> 
> Procmail would not be used in this case, but you can organize folders
> within opera... 

Hm, a couple of things here:

- both Opera and Pine can talk SMTP. So no need for a SMTP Server (MTA)
here (postfix, exim, qmail,...).

- fetchmail can use arbitrary MDAs, so even for delivery no need for a
mail server (the OP probably knows this as he did only mention
fetchmail and procmail).

- Pine and Opera have different backends for local mail file storage.

- Pine and Opera both support IMAP as backend (can't talk for Opera
here, but IMAP using Pine is just amazingly fast).

Consequence (same as above cited but a little bit different explained)
is: using IMAP backend would probably be the way to go. This could be
e.g. Cyrus, UW-Imapd, dovecot, Courier. I have used Cyrus and Dovecot
and can recommend both. Cyrus makes sense for multiple users and for
those who like the Sieve mailfilter (like me).

IMAP servers usually bring their own utility for dropping mails into
the mailstore. One would pipe the mail from procmail into such a
program and configure Pine/Opera/other MUA to use the IMAP backend.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] what is x11,and what is XFree86 and XORG

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Mon, 10 Oct 2005 20:40:44 +0800
libertine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> i don't know what is x11,and XFree86 and XORG's different
> who can tell me

X11 is commonly referring to the protocol suite. X11R6 is the current
version, AFAIK.

XFree86 and Xorg are Implementations of this protocol consisting of
many software items of which the most prominent one is the X server.
Xorg is forked from XFree86's codebase.

There are other X Server implementations available, e.g. the
tinyX-Server (it's integrated the XFree Codebase), which is now known
as the kdrive-Framework based XServer
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fXserver

There are X Servers for Windows as well. Most of them are commercial
but cygwin has an implementation which also started in the XFree
codebase and now changed to use the Xorg codebase.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X11
has a lot of information, too.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] /usr/X11R6/X11R6/X11R6/X11R6/....

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Wed, 05 Oct 2005 02:48:13 +0200
Matthias Langer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> By accident i recognized that the link /usr/X11R6/ conatains itself - 
> leading to an infinite recursion, as hinted in the subject of this 
> message ...

Does it really contain _itself_? I think this would be wrong. Instead,
it should point to /usr, i.e. the directory containing the sym link.
Reading the subject of your mail, I guess that's the case for you, too.
But above you said otherwise ("pointing to itself")...

It's due to the fact that X11 is distro-managed and as such there's
little reason to keep it in an extra location.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Size of portage tree

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Wed, 28 Sep 2005 15:52:17 +0200
Etaoin Shrdlu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Also, the block size of the file system in which /usr/portage lives can 
> make a big difference. 

True. See below...

> Try a clean /usr/portage on an ext2/3 filesystem vs. a /usr/portage on 
> reiserfs and you'll see what I mean.

FS type isn't about blocksize (well, maybe about blocksize
constraints). Reiserfs supports putting more than one file in a single
block, that's why using Reiser makes a difference, too.

But reg. blocksize:

$ du -sh --exclude=packages --exclude=distfiles /usr/portage/
138M/usr/portage/

Neat, eh? That's because of this:

$ xfs_info /usr/portage/
[...]
data =   bsize=512blocks=706792, imaxpct=25
 =   sunit=0  swidth=0 blks, unwritten=1
[...]

As you can see, a blocksize of 512 bytes is enough to keep portage
small. I've dedicated a small partition to the portage tree because of
this.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Bash prompt

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Wed, 14 Sep 2005 11:15:13 +0200
Charles Trois <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I am getting confused with profile, bashrc, etc.
> The prompt string I want to use is
> 
> PS1="[EMAIL PROTECTED] \W]\$ "
> 
> [...]
> I thought that /etc/profile should provide the default, but I was 
> obviously wrong. Trying to mend things, I created two files 
> /root/.bash_profile and /root/.bashrc, writing just PS1 in each. Now, 
> logging in as root, the result is
> 
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] root]$
> 
> which is wrong, since "$" appears in place of "#", as though my syntax 
> of PS1 were incorrect, but I don't see that it is.

That's probably due to multi level backslash escaping. Because you
surrounded the prompt string with "", the backslash isn't surviving the
first parser run by bash. You'd need to double it or even triple it
(because the "$" may need escaping on the first level, too).

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] set FAN speed

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Tue, 13 Sep 2005 16:14:59 +0300
Catalin Trifu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>  I am having a very nasty problem. My Dell Inspiron 5160 laptop
> (P4 3.06 GHz) runs at very high temperature (77 degrees C) and in the room are
> only 20.
> [...]

Hm. And you're sure that the fan *isn't* already at maximum speed?

>  ACPI does not work properly on this machines (it's a known problem).

You should be using APM then, right? Isn't there a fix available
(custom DSDT or a newer ACPI version)? Googling for ["inspiron 5160"
acpi] I found this:
http://www.swineworld.org/inspiron5160/
and it says that ACPI, at least throttling, is working fine.

> [...]
>  Does anyone knoe how I could get the FAN up to speed ?

When using APM, AFAIK that's the BIOS' job.

This isn't directly an answer to your question, but did you told the
kernel (in the APM config section) that it should use IDLE calls?

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Nasty bugs in portage?

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Sat, 10 Sep 2005 20:09:29 +0200
Frank Schafer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> When I returned home from work I found in the logs, that ``emerge
> --emptytree system'' failed at package 28 of 186
> 
> python-fcksum-1.7.1
> i386-pc-linux-gnu-gcc bla...bla
>  ^
>  |
>  +- !
> 
> gcc-config error:
>   could not run/locate "i386-pc-linux-gnu-gcc"
> 
> My architecture is i686 and it seems that 27 packages before
> python-fchksum found the i686(that's SIX-eight-six)-pc-linux-gnu-gcc.

Hm, when editing /etc/make.conf, did you change the CHOST setting? That
could cause such behaviour... I think that may be amongst the reasons
why /etc/make.conf.example reads like:

---snip---
# Host Setting
# 
#
# DO NOT CHANGE THIS SETTING UNLESS YOU ARE USING STAGE1!
---snip---

...I guess you aren't using a stage1?


As a side note: When building a minimal system, using
USE=-*
in /etc/make.conf should be considered. You can then fine tune each and
every package in /etc/portage/package.use. That's quite like my setup,
my global USE is set to "-* nptl ssl nls pam". All the other stuff is
set per package. I have one build host machine that distributes the
binary packages and portage tree snapshots to my other computers.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Encrypted NFS via ssh tunelling

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Fri, 9 Sep 2005 09:29:18 +0200 (CEST)
"Patrick Marquetecken" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I always get this error:
> mount: localhost:/usr/portage failed, reason given by server: Permission
> denied

> Attach NFS port of Server (2049) to local port 2818
> ssh -f -L 2818:10.32.3.172:2049 -l root 10.32.3.172 sleep 86400
> 
> Attach mountD port of Server (675) to local port 3818
> ssh -f -L 3818:10.32.3.172:675 -l root 10.32.3.172 sleep 86400

so the SSH server will make a connection to its own external IP. It
will also probably use its own external IP (not 127.0.0.1) as
originating address. What IPs are allowed access by its /etc/exports ?

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] iptables

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Tue, 30 Aug 2005 00:54:47 -0400
"John Dangler" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> yep. it's a bug.  As soon as I remove iptables from the kernel config,
> ipw2100,ieee80211_crypt_tkip, ieee80211_crypt_ccmp, ieee80211_crypt_wep,
> ieee80211 all show up fine in lsmod.  no dmesg errors, and eth1 (wireless)
> shows up fine.  Off to bugz to log this.

Nah, it isn't a bug. That incorporation of netfilter into the kernel
changes some internal structs, i guess. So you need to recompile your
other modules (ipw2100 and fellows - at least the network-dependent)
for the new kernel. That's all pretty normal.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] How can I format correctly a FAT floppy?

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Mon, 29 Aug 2005 16:51:54 + (GMT)
"Michael Kintzios" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Using fdisk to check the partition table of a FAT floppy gave me this 
> output:
> [...]

Just a side note here (mtools and mkfs.vfat would solve the actual
task): partition table of a floppy disk? well, you could create one,
but i guess _that_ would definately lead to a floppy not working with
Windows... There's usually no partition table on a floppy disc. The
whole device is used for one filesystem instead ("superdisc"?).

This is actually a little bit different with USB disks: Both variants
are common there (w/ and w/o partition table).

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Closing message of emerge sync confusing

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Sat, 27 Aug 2005, Harry Putnam wrote:


After running an emerge sync, I see a message at the conclusion that
says:

* An update to portage is available. It is _highly_ recommended
* that you update portage now, before any other packages are updated.
* Please do so and then update ALL of your configuration files.

What does this mean...  I though I had just updated portage.  Or is a
sync something different than an update?


You synced the portage _tree_. So you could say, you updated the portage 
_tree_. Portage itself is a piece of python coded software, installed and 
managed by - portage, i.e. itself. To update this software, you'd need to 
type


$ emerge -u portage

-hwh
--
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] switching from reiser4 to reiserfs

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Fri, 26 Aug 2005, Justin Patrin wrote:


 Is there an easy way switch back my reiser4 partition to reiserfs without
reinstalling everything.


I suggest booting from a Gentoo CD. Make a tarball of the entire FS
you want to convert and either pipe it across the network or onto
another HD you can put in this machine. Reformat the partition.
Untarball the backup onto the newly formatted partition. You also need
to make sure you alter your fstab to mount the partition right (and
alter your grub or other boot config files accordingly as well).


Hm, short addition here: ...and don't forget to use tar's "p" option! 
BTW, I don't really know if the Gentoo CDs support Reiser4... But any 
LiveCD will do. In fact, one could simply remount the partition read-only 
for the running system and build the tarball. Using a tmpfs root system it 
would even be possible to unpack the tarball without any reboot. But for 
doing that, one has to read at least the pivot_root manpage and a ready 
chrootable system is needed, to. Gentoo's stages will most probably do a 
good job here.


-hwh
--
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] VPN?

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Sat, 27 Aug 2005, Michael W. Holdeman wrote:


I have a dyndns account, it keeps the dns updted. I can always get to my
router/gateway which is dyndns enabled, how do I get to my ip on the server,


set up port forwarding on the router. Most router-in-a-box appliances will 
let you configure this using some kind of frontend.



I need to mount the servers nfs export throught the router. I setup the
correct ports for nfs to foreward, is that it?


Hm, yes, that's how it is supposed to work. But as you mention...


If I can do that it would be very insecure, then I would disable that and
set-up openvpn on the server to the router...


... I wouldn't offer my NFS mounts to the wild, wild world out there. 
Instead, your setup would look like this:


Router --port forwarding--> Box running OpenVPN

And with OpenVPN you could either
- bridge your office LAN to the OpenVPN virtual device (not recommended, 
traffic explosion ahead ;-) ),

- route from the OpenVPN device to the office LAN

So you'll basically get away with just one port forwarding from the router 
to the box running OpenVPN.


-hwh
--
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] VPN?

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Sat, 27 Aug 2005, Bryan Whitehead wrote:


Get dyndns working on one end... and then use ppp over ssh... :)

http: //www.csh.rit.edu/~psionic/articles/ppp-over-ssh/
http: //www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/ppp-ssh.html


Nah, don't do that. It will introduce major issues reg. connection 
stability. OpenVPN is much better - as long TCP isn't used. Using SSH/ppp 
one would transfer IP over TCP. That's much worser than IP over UDP.


-hwh
--
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Mozilla & Google behind the scenes payola

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Thu, 11 Aug 2005 09:30:31 +0930
Iain Buchanan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> > I'd vote for a preference setting for prefetching:
> > - disable / enable / enable for the same host only
> > a little bit like cookie handling.
> 
> from http://www.scroogle.org/gscrape.html#ffox "Fortunately, you can
> disable this "feature" by entering about:config in the address bar and
> then scrolling down to network.prefetch-next and toggling it to false"

Yep, I knew that. But my point was that there should be a third
setting, not only enable/disable, but something like "allow prefetch
only for pages on the same host". Cookie handling already has this,
AFAIK.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: OT - How to work with USB DVD-RW/CD-RW drive

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Wed, 10 Aug 2005 09:53:13 -0700 (PDT)
Michael Sullivan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> ...
> Starting to write CD/DVD at speed 48 in dummy TAO mode
> for single session.
> ...
> Sense Code: 0x30 Qual 0x05 (cannot write medium -
> incompatible format) Fru 0x0
> Sense flags: Blk 0 (not valid)

Did there happen to be a medium in the CDRW drive? A 48x capable medium?

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: OT - How to work with USB DVD-RW/CD-RW drive

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Wed, 10 Aug 2005 06:48:06 -0700 (PDT)
Michael Sullivan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> For what it's worth the only command listed above that
> shows my external drive is this:
> 
> baby ~ # cdrecord -scanbus
> [...]
> scsibus2:
> 2,0,0   200) 'TOSHIBA ' 'CD/DVDW SD-R5372' 'TU53' Removable CD-ROM

Then you should be able to burn CDs using "cdrecord dev=2,0,0".


-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Mozilla & Google behind the scenes payola

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Wed, 10 Aug 2005 14:28:18 +0100
"Michael Kintzios" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Do the cookie settings under preferences override FF/Google's preset
> cookie flow?

Yep, the FF/Google cookie flow, yes. But I think you mean the cookie
flow from Google's search result pages' links? No, probably the cookie
settings won't allow to influence this (well, they'll do if you
construct fine-grained per-domain cookie settings). I emphasize it
again: It's NOT google-specific. Prefetching just fetches everything
linked as being "next", and Google just uses this fact.

Prefetching with a different set of general cookie acceptance
permissions than normal website visits would be kind of pointless.
You'd better disable prefetching completely, then.

I'd vote for a preference setting for prefetching:
- disable / enable / enable for the same host only
a little bit like cookie handling.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Linux comm program

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Tue, 9 Aug 2005 18:51:55 -0400
Daniel D Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>  I can't seem to find anything but stuff that was written in the 
> '90s like minicom  or programs that have limited capabilities.
> ...
> I'm looking for a GUI program with a scrollback buffer, scripting, 
> multi protocol support (ssh in all its various 
> flavors, serial port, telnet, rlogin), session logging, etc.
> ...
> This is the kind of technical itch that I would think lots of 
> programmers would scratch, but I haven't been able to find 
> anything close.

Because this isn't the Unix way of doing things. (I think you're a Cisco
tech?!?)

Instead, the approach would be to
- use a console for X11 gui (xterm, rxvt, whatever),
- use a terminal emulator for for terminal emulation (usually included
in the console applications, but I'm more thinking of "screen" here
because you mentioned scollback buffer and stuff),
- use a serial line comm prog for the serial communication (what's
wrong with minicom?)
- use a SSH shell for SSH connections, Telnet for telnet, etc. pp.
- use a program for skripting ttys for the macros - "expect" and "talk"
come to my mind.

Instead of having a huge, hard-to-maintain one-does-it-all-package,
this seems a lot more flexible to me. If you want to save keystrokes -
well, write some scripts and aliases.

-hwh

-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Mozilla & Google behind the scenes payola

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Tue, 9 Aug 2005 15:52:10 -0400
"John J. Foster" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Just wondering if anyone had heard of this. Although, if true, it
> certainly doesn't surprise me with todays corporate ethics as they are.
> Just a bad mark on Mozilla.

This is to be separated:

#1: Google is implemented as Mozilla's #1 Search Engine in the list.
#2: Google uses the Mozilla Browser's prefetching feature

ad #1: If that makes Mozilla a bad browser for you, you're free to fork
your own source tree and have whatever-you-like as #1 search engine.

ad #2: Certainly this imposes a privacy leak. But it's a feature you
can disable - as well as, e.g. including images from foreign web sites.
That cookie argument doesn't count: any image linked from other sites
can do the very same.


-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] OT: disk full but lot of space

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Mon, 8 Aug 2005 15:53:54 +0200
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> I've attached the output of e2fsck -n. Could you please tell me how bad it 
> looks? Are there questions to which answering yes is dangerous?
> 
> e2fsck 1.26 (3-Feb-2002)
> Warning!  /dev/hda2 is mounted.

That is done in a mounted situation. I guess, it is even read/write-
mounted? 

Well, I'll cite the man page:
---snip
Note that in general it is not safe to run e2fsck on mounted
filesystems.  The only exception is if the -n option is specified, and -
c, -l, or -L options are not specified. However, even if it is safe
to do so, the results printed by e2fsck are not valid if the filesystem
is mounted.
---snip

This is very harsh, I'd say, remounting it ro (read-only), sync'ing it
and then doing "e2fsck -n" will give a lot more valid information.

In mounted state, esp. read-write, it is pretty normal on a busy system
to have these inconsistencies the e2fsck dump showed...

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] recomendations for web stats in php

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Sat, 06 Aug 2005 12:34:58 -0300
Mauro Faccenda <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I have an customer that has a website hosted in a chrooted environment
> and want a stats page (hits, origin, etc...) I have access to the apache
> logs but I don't have a shell access, so I was thinking if there is any
> php script that reads the log file and plots a nice web page with those
> stats.
> 
> Or can anyone suggest another solution?

Hm, I don't think using a simple php script would work very reliably.
Parsing the log files can become a heavy task depending on the
logfile's size. So I think it's always the best solution to run the
analyzer from command line.

You could e.g. run the analyzer on a different host where you have
command line access and can run that scripted every night. The
resulting stats pages and graphs can then be synced back to the web-
only server.

Another possibility would be to use desktop programs for the logfile
analysis. I don't know of good free programs here, but at least there
are a few very professional commercial ones.

Both solutions only require access to the logfile which you told you
have.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] How does cisco vpnclient find its .pcf file?

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Sat, 06 Aug 2005 18:26:57 +0800
"W.Kenworthy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I have just installed the cisco vpn client and cant figure how it
> accesses the .pcf configs under gentoo.  Can someone in the know tell me
> how to specify a .pcf when issuing a /etc/init.d/vpnclient start ?

There wouldn't be a point doing so. This just loads the kernel module,
it doesn't setablish a connection at that point.

> Where I work has given me a couple of different configs depending where
> I access from, but the install cant seem to find them if I put them
> in /etc/CiscoSystemsVPNClient/Profiles (and how would it choose one from
> multiple profiles?).

You have to connect using vpnclient itself. You can specify the profile
then. It's "vpnclient connect profilename" if I remember correctly (for
profilename.pcf). The kernel module just cares for packet injection in
Linux's ip stack and brings a IPsec stack.

Note that there's a more elegant solution with "vpnc" (also in
portage), if it fits for you (still hasn't some functions of Cisco's
client, but it's free and you don't have to use a binary proprietary
kernel module).

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] wpc54g card as AP -- works?

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Fri, 5 Aug 2005 18:22:31 +
Fernando Meira <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> hmm...
> not nice...
> There's no other way to work with my card unless with ndiswrapper... at 
> least from what I read.

Yep, that's what I read, too.

> What about Ad-Hoc? Would it be possible to provide internet access to other 
> pcs?

>From my experience, this is possible but may get a little flaky due to
adhoc mode and interoperability, but it should work.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] wpc54g card as AP -- works?

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Thu, 4 Aug 2005 15:28:46 +
Fernando Meira <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Does that mean that it is unadvised to use a PCMCIA card for AP functions?
> I won't need a good range... something that works fine up to 8 meters 
> (between 2 rooms) is enough.
> I have to check if the driver I use allows Master mode.
> 
> # ndiswrapper -l
> Installed ndis drivers:
> lsbcmnds driver present, hardware present
> 
> Any idea?

ndiswrapper doesn't support master mode:
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/FAQ#Is_master_mode_supported.3F

There would have to be a native linux driver, supporting soft-AP
facilities...

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] [ot] An iptables like setup on windowsxp

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Thu, 4 Aug 2005 23:51:53 -0400
"Walter Dnes" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> > If it is possible to run iptable from cygwin then I'd prefer that
> > approach. Anyone have pointers/urls?
> 
>   Even if you could do it, running iptables under cygwin is *NOT* what
> you want.  Cygwin is a *PROGRAM* running under Windows.  Windows will
> get the packets before iptables-under-cygwin-under-Windows does.

Hm, Cygwin isn't a program. It's a compatibility layer that is usually
being used as a set of libraries (DLLs). This allows Unixoid programs
to use POSIX calls and have an abstraction for things Windows doesn't
offer itself.

Well, and *iptables* won't ever compile on Windows just using Cygwin.
Well, iptables doesn't compile on the BSDs either: It depends on a
*kernel* API. Cygwin is all about userland. See it as some kind of
glibc on Windows.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] wpc54g card as AP -- works?

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Thu, 04 Aug 2005 07:21:25 -0400
Craig Zeigler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> This is a pretty cool idea, but I wonder what the range on something 
> like this is. Considering that the transmitting capability of a PCMCIA 
> card isn't very high. Do you risk burning out the card or the slot by 
> forcing more power to it? will the PCMCIA bus permit diverting more 
> power to a card?

Huh? "Forcing more power to the card"?!? You mean, increase the
current? Or how else do you want to archieve that? Nah, this wouldn't
work. You'd have to set up power level by means of the pcmcia card,
that is by using "iwconfig ... power ...", in most cases.

Well, and I know a few PCMCIA cards that do 100mWatts output. In fact,
a whole bunch of APs internally use standard WLAN cards that are just
flashed with a different Firmware.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] PHP5 Quick Question

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Tue, 2 Aug 2005 10:32:21 -0400
Michael Crute <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Is there a way to build the php 5 extensions (I.E. GD, mysql, etc) as 
> external libraries instead of compiling it all into the core? I assume this 
> is the sharedext flag but I want to make sure before I go try it and muck 
> things up.

$ grep sharedext /usr/portage/profiles/use.desc   
sharedext - Adds support for building shared extensions in php

sounds good, doesn't it ;-)?

Regarding the "gd-external" A. Khattri mentioned, I think this is to
make php use a separately compiled (by emerging it as a dependency) GD
lib instead of using the sources that php has integrated.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] PS/2 mouse not working

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Sun, 24 Jul 2005 13:23:14 +0200
smoke3 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> It's OK: I had winzoz installed from the seller i bought it from and
> the mouse did function as well!

Hm, OK, it definately _is_ a driver issue then...

> > * the right PS/2 plug (not that keyboard one...)
> nice joke, but... no!

Well, seen it before, and I thought to mention it doesn't harm... :-)
 
> "dmesg | grep PS/2" --> 
>  "PNP: PS/2 Controller... irq 1,12
>   mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice
>   input ImExPS/2 Generic Explorer Mouse on isa0060/serio1"

Hm, OK. So it _is_ recognized then... Maybe the kernel choses a level
that's too high. From kernel docs (kernel-parameters.txt):

snip
psmouse.proto=  [HW,MOUSE] Highest PS2 mouse protocol extension to
probe for (bare|imps|exps).
psmouse.rate=   [HW,MOUSE] Set desired mouse report rate, in reports
per second.
psmouse.resetafter=
[HW,MOUSE] Try to reset the device after so many bad 
packets
(0 = never).
snip

So I'd try to begin with the proto setting. Note that this only applies
if the driver actually is compiled into the kernel instead of being a
module. In the latter case, you'd need to edit the module parameters.

On the grub kernel line (or LILO's parameter line, respectively),
append something like:

psmouse.proto=imps

And see what happens. Try with the other values (exps, bare), too. Of
course, this will need a reboot after modifiing the kernel command line.

As a side note, my dmesg reads:
Jul  2 12:59:52 sub00421 input: ImPS/2 Generic Wheel Mouse on isa0060/serio1


Last question: Does this mouse work for any (other) linux box? What
does the dmesg read there?


-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] PS/2 mouse not working

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Sun, 24 Jul 2005 12:52:11 +0200
smoke3 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On 7/24/05, Michal Pronay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>  
> > Looks like your mouse is broken, try booting some livecd like knoppix
> > for example.
> 
> Easy way, but not the right one: my mouse is new and does function on
> other computers running M$...

Hm, OK, other computers... What about the computer you want to use it
with? What does it do if you try another OS? When the mouse is
considered OK, then there's the computer left...

I'd also check
* BIOS settings regarding the mouse
* the right PS/2 plug (not that keyboard one...)
* dmesg output regarding the psaux driver
* another PS/2 mouse (this isn't clear from your postings if there was
  one before you bought the new one)

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] aterm do crash displaying long files, konsole don't: swappiness problem?

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Sun, 24 Jul 2005 10:52:06 +0200
Fabrizio Prosperi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Doing a long emerge -up world aterm kept crashing and I thought it was
> an emerge problem, but then I focused on a particular emerge
> (mozilla-firefox) and I realised it was it. 
> 
> Just doing cat /var/log/portage/.log
> is making aterm crash again, but not konsole.
> 
> I guess I something with swappiness settings, but how to fix it? 

Hm, don't know about aterm and its memory management, but that's for
sure: _swappiness_ should have absolutely nothing to do with this. The
swap management isn't up to userspace applications, that's kernel's
matter. Well, there might be some small probability left that your swap
management is somewhat hosed due to bugs in the kernel but that is very
unlikely and wouldn't explain why these conditions only occur with
aterm and only affect aterm.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Daily dumb question... chron.

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Mon, 18 Jul 2005 13:06:29 +0100
"Steve [Gentoo]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I've noticed the directories /etc/cron.daily; /etc/cron.hourly; 
> /etc/cron.monthly etc. and therein a bunch of non-user-specific 
> administration tasks... For example, in ./etc/cron.daily I've 
> logrotate.cron and rulesdujour - but none of these appear to have run in 
> the last month.  Are thse system tasks supposed to be fired 
> automatically by fcron?  What would be the easiest way to get all my 
> periodic system administration tasks defined in these directories to be 
> fired automatically?  Did I make a sensible choice with fcron?

Can't tell much about fcron (esp. if its config syntax is similar to my
vixie-cron), but for me, vixie-cron installed a /etc/crontab that
contains the following lines:

0  *  * * * rootrm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.hourly
1  3  * * * rootrm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.daily
15 4  * * 6 rootrm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.weekly
30 5  1 * * rootrm -f /var/spool/cron/lastrun/cron.monthly
*/10  *  * * *  roottest -x /usr/sbin/run-crons && /usr/sbin/run-crons

this does the job.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Interesting install experience

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Thu, 14 Jul 2005 16:27:49 +0100
Jim Hatfield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> So I just installed another machine, using the 2005.0 CD and using
> the new instructions. It has a Matrox G400 so I added support for
> that in the kernel. This may have been a mistake.
> 
> Everything is fine until I reboot, when after the GRUB screen and
> kernel selection, the screen goes black with lots of pretty blue
> squares all over it.

This may be due to the framebuffer chosing a wrong mode for the kind of
monitor you have. You can set the resolution and frame rate on the
kernel command line. This should be documented in /usr/src/linux/
Documentation/fb/... (don't have it here atm)

> I guess I will rebuild the kernel with Matrox support removed and
> see if that fixes.

This will probably work, too :-)

> BTW, what is the received wistom wrt building things into the
> kernel or building them as modules? As well as the G400 I have
> an Intel NIC and a VIA sound card, and this time round chose to
> build them in, though before I built them as modules. I'm not 
> clear as to the pros and cons.

If the hardware is builtin, and you don't have problems with somewhat
random hardware enumeration (i.e., multiple NICs getting different
devices on each boot), there's little reason to build the drivers as
modules. OTOH, probing a module triggers (if it loads successfully) a
hotplug event, which is not the case during bootup (AFAIK, at least
there are no hotplug scripts available at that moment). So if you chose
to compile them into the kernel, you need to e.g. have "net.eth0" in
the runlevel configuration for "boot" or "default". If you're probing
them as modules, that will trigger hotplug and this should take care of
running the respective start script. If you intend to run a common
kernel on multiple machines, it may be wiser to compile some drivers to
modules, but for e.g. PCI devices this shouldn't matter a lot, you only
will save some RAM on machines that don't need the driver (compiled
into the kernel).

Sound is another matter: The kernel ALSA isn't always the latest
version. So it's best to only configure sound support but no ALSA or
OSS and then later "emerge alsa-driver".

Then there are drivers that have their own code base only. In most
cases it's much more complicated to integrate them into the kernel
sources than to compile them as external modules.


-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Apache Sub directorys

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Thu, 14 Jul 2005 14:12:56 +0100
Michael Thompson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Even the drwxr-xr-x will not run at all. These have not changed since they 
> were working previously. 

Hm. Isn't anything written to the apache error log that could give a hint?

Did you restart apache after installing the new php module? It may even
help to stop and then start it as a "restart" won't kill the apache
master process.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] /usr/bin/man SGID ?

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Thu, 14 Jul 2005 15:28:57 +0200
Jarry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Does /usr/bin/man really have to have SGID-bit on? Why?

For caching the rendered man pages for all users, IMHO.

> I just checked one debian-box, where /usr/bin/man is without SGID...

On debian, if configured to be chatty when installing packages, one is
asked upon installation of the "man" package if it should be set SGID.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Apache Sub directorys

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Thu, 14 Jul 2005 13:40:42 +0100
Michael Thompson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On Thursday 14 July 2005 15:23, Emanuele Morozzi wrote:
> > Try giving access to anyone to tost if it's a permissions related
> > problem. (Perhaps using php files need also execution rights).
> 
> The permissions have not changed. They are all apache:apache with a mask of:
> 
> drwxrwxr--  20 apache apache 4096 Jul 14 10:34 htdocs

What about its subdirectories? They need to be executable to allow
access to paths below themselves and need to be readable to allow
directory listing (which also needs to be allowed as per httpd.conf).

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] 161 UDP Constant Connections

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Fri, 8 Jul 2005 16:42:43 +0100
Michael Thompson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Umm, quite possible. How about they have set their SNMP broadcast to a too 
> wide range, which includes the whole subnet? 

Yes, of course, I've mixed up two items you told, my fault. They're
sending SNMP, and yes, a too big broadcast would explain this. I've
mixed this with the other thing, the telnet access. What's displayed
there looks like a OTP (one time password) login to me :-) I've no clue
whoever CMN might be...

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] error loading several modules (at boot)

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Fri, 8 Jul 2005 16:30:22 +0200 (MEST)
"dini mamma" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I got the problem, that several modules couldnt be loaded at boot. some of
> them are filesystems (xfs,jfs,ntfs). and some device drivers (aic7xxx,
> 3c59x).. But why?
> At least the device drivers should work. I compiled these ones, that have
> been loaded with the livecd.
> I cant imagine, what happens. This error occurs too, when i only load the
> modules as modules [M].

Don't know exactly what you are speaking of, esp. last sentence.
possible explanations:
- you've compiled the drivers statically into the kernel rather than
modules (that's how I interpret that talking about "[M]"...), then
there's no module to load,
- you haven't installed modules (did you compile manually? did you run
"make modules_install"?)
- the modules don't load because hardware cannot be found

What happens if you manually modprobe those modules? What's the error
being shown then?


-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] 161 UDP Constant Connections

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Fri, 8 Jul 2005 15:46:42 +0100
Michael Thompson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> > > Any one got any ideas?
> >
> > you could just try blackholing the IP at your firewall, or as i've
> > already mentioned - try and contact your ISP with all you know and see
> > if htey can shed any light on it - its possible a comprimised box.
> 
> It is firewalled, and blacklisted. Has been for months. I am just curious as 
> to why it is coming back to me.

Well, two possibilities.
1.) the packets are already mirrored at your own box
2.) the packets are mirrored at the target box

I guess it's #2, you can find out by tcptracing the wire.

If I were to reproduce this behaviour of the remote box I'd set up an
iptables rule with the "MIRROR" target. See "man iptables" for an
explanation.

This may be some scary tactics to irritate the support persons in
charge of managing the network - and has, according to you notes,
proven to work for that :-)

My interpretion is:
hacked box, shell services running on UDP 161, mirroring everything
else to scare people :-) I think they've chosen SNMP port to hide their
traffic, maybe to get through some firewalls.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] bash_history missing

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Thu, 7 Jul 2005 21:14:44 -0700 (PDT)
maxim wexler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> all academic now -- the pc just died :( Not a beep, no
> screen o/p. The green light on front of the box comes
> on for about 1/10 sec, fan turns a few degrees and
> thats IT! Tried another power supply -- no dice. Tried
> bypassing the on switch -- nope. Moved RAM to another
> slot -- nada. re&re'd the 3V battery -- negative. I've
> never seen the like before. 

Sounds like the onboard DC current stabilizers are gone... In my
experiences, it's not unusual that one of the electrolytic capacitors
is burst. Resoldering a new one is not an easy task but possible.

-hwh
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] IPtables statefull connection capable

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Tue, 5 Jul 2005 15:52:20 +0200 (CEST)
"Patrick Marquetecken" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> If I’m correct then iptables is statefull connection capable, this means I
> should not use rules like:
> If state of connection is ESTABLISHED ...
> If state of connection is RELATED ...
> 
> and i my use only:
> If protocol is TCP and source is bla bla and destination port is bla bla
> and state of connection is NEW

All of the mentioned rules are related to stateful connection matching.
You probably want all ESTABLISHED and RELATED traffic in both the
incoming and outgoing direction, and NEW connections only outgoing.
Additional you'll probably want NEW connections also in the incoming
direction for the services you want to offer - that's how I interpret
your last sentence. But you'll definately want ESTABLISHED and RELATED,
too.

Concept usually is:
INPUT:
- allow ESTABLISHED,RELATED
- allow NEW for selected services
FORWARD:
- allow NEW,ESTABLISHED,RELATED from LAN to WAN
- allow ESTABLISHED,RELATED from WAN to LAN
OUTPUT:
- allow NEW,ESTABLISHED,RELATED

where OUTPUT rules are optional if OUTPUT's policy is set to ACCEPT.

Current connections being monitored are listed and accessible in procfs.
When playing with Linux as a router for UDP traffic, you may want to
play with the state matching related sysctl's (also accessible via
procfs) to adjust the timespan that the information is held. My VPN
connections from LAN to WAN tend to time out otherwise. But that's just
a side note.

-hwh

-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

[gentoo-user] Re: KDE font size

[Hans Hvelplund Odborg]

Zac Medico skrev:

> Martins Steinbergs wrote:
>> hi
>> 
>> i'm curious, every other time i boot, GDM and KDE are with bigger fonts.
what 
>> part is responsible for it? Xorg.0.log has only this:
>> Could not init font path element /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/local/,
removing 
>> from list!
>> SetClientVersion: 0 8
>> 
>> 
>> Martins
> 
> Maybe it's your dpi setting?  You can use "xdpyinfo | grep resolution" to
see what dpi X is using.  You can control dpi with the X -dpi option or
the DisplaySize in xorg.conf.
> 
> Zac
I once had this exact problem. (although it was only every 20th time fonts
were different).

I found that switching off my monitor, turning it back on, and restarting X
(ctrl-alt-backspace) often would solve the problem. 

It turned out to be a problem of DCC (detecting screen size or something).
Back then I had a creative geforce2 gts and a sony 19" crt
I used drivers from nvidia and found there was an option to disable DCC
(NoDCC i think). It solved my problems.

Dont know what drivers/graphicscard you are using but perhaps you could do
something similiar?



-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list