Re: [PLUG] Schools using macbook air computers
many people said: > I would love to use a 2020 Macbook Air. Before this goes too far ... the macbook was found by the widow of a friend who died two weeks ago. It is HER goal to find a school for it, or a low-income child for whom it could make a big difference in life. Helping a child would entail other obligations, hence a school is better for *ME*, or a school with volunteers who can help a low-income child with maintenance and sysadmin. We have time to make arrangements; another urgent task just got pushed on the stack, long story to tell later. I may be offline for a day or ten. Keith L. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
[PLUG] 2K characters per bookmark ... a snide note (was: a side note ...)
On Sat, Jun 01, 2024 at 06:52:36PM -0700, American Citizen wrote: > Why is Firefox storing almost 2K hex characters per bookmark? My snarky anti-explanation: Each 16 bit digraph references a national security organization or Fortune 500 sales department that is notified when you type anything into Firefox. All those thousands of notifications use a hell of a lot of bandwidth and processing; if you purchase 10 Gbps outbound bandwidth and a 256 core CPU, perhaps your web experience will improve to "mediocre". :-) :-) :-) Just kidding. I hope. :-( :-( :-( Keith L. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
[PLUG] Schools using macbook air computers
A friend died a month ago; his heir is finding many things in odd places, yesterday an ~2020 MacBook Air. Do any local grade schools use these for instruction, and have a good use for one more? Keith L. ( apologies those abjuring MacOS, "UNIX in chains", but I vaguely recall much "Apple-sauce" in schools, years ago. I'm more "pro-school" than "anti-proprietary". ) -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
[PLUG] Network test distro, Real-Time Linux?
"Regular" Linux is designed for a useful user experience. There are two (or more?) "Real Time Linux" distros that are designed to control hardware: RTLinux, and Real-Time Linux with PREEMPT_RT patches added to the kernel. I have not found details of benchmarks for these. How "real" is real? Millisecond response? Microsecond? Less? I can imagine designing a PCIe card for network test; full throttle rapid packet speed test, but also (with some "simple" analog circuitry controlled by "real time" software, cable testing with nanosecond TDR (time delay reflectometry), using a technique resembling "count the falling dominos by the loudness of the clatter they make". That would require microsecond response in a tight realtime loop, controlling analog circuitry that converts microsecond intervals into brief nanosecond intervals. ( Also using an analog circuit technique called "dual slope", which we need not dwell on here ) A Cat 6 cable is 5 nanoseconds per meter, 10 ns down and back. Some degradations (such as RJ45 connectors) are smaller, but can add up and limit bandwidth. The right hardware and software might help network engineers observe and understand these fast phenomena, and cure some rather subtle gigabit-rate signalling and cabling problems. Keith L. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
[PLUG] Voyager 1 ... END of Radio silence (was: Radio silence since Apr 16)
> Subject: Re: [PLUG] Radio silence since Apr 16 > On 4/23/24 10:02, Paul Heinlein wrote: > >Is this list dead? Neither my inbox nor the online archives show > >any traffic since April 16. On the subject of "no traffic": This isn't PLUG or Linux, and it might belong in plug-talk, but it IS the most audacious, humongous, glorious, ULTRA-long distance debug session and clever code hack: Restoring NASA's Voyager 1 to operability. https://blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024/04/22/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth/ Voyager 1 is 24 billion kilometers from Earth, 160 times farther from the Sun than Earth is, three times farther than Pluto. Voyager 2 is still doing well, but Voyager 1 went radio silent on November 14, 2023. "No Traffic". Using early 1970s technology, custom CMOS chips and 7400 series Texas Instruments TTL, the three Voyager 1 computers and their 32K bytes of shared memory are a space-grade distant cousin to the first computer I wired for myself with equally primitive chips. JPL did a much better job, of course. The Problem: a memory interface chip in Voyager 1's Flight Data Subsystem failed, so some code and data memory became unavailable. The remaining memory kept Voyager 1 oriented and taking data and listening to Earth, but aphasic, unable to format and transmit data to distant receivers on Earth. The JPL team fault-treed their way to the defect, designed new software with workarounds, and uploaded it. The team is still tweaking and upgrading the code, but Voyager 1 is talking to Earth again. Therapy continues. NASA announced their success on Monday April 22; I just heard about it. Keith L. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
Re: [PLUG] Comcast to Ziply ... --> cabling speed
On Tue, Apr 16, 2024 at 10:46:57AM -0700, Johnathan Mantey wrote: > I agree with Russell. I agree with Russell as well, which is why I tried my 8 pin low speed scan-the-LEDs cable tester /first/, end to end, from the cable end near the ONT, through perhaps-too-many 8 pin plugs and sockets and cable segments, to the switch. All the half-second pulses match in sequence and polarity. I do the wiring, not the installers. That said, the Ziply installers seem to be capable and informed professionals, unlike other klutzy cable crews I could name. What I don't have (yet) is a way to test signal propagation IMPEDANCE continuity. If some of the twisted pair segments in my house cabling behave like 75 ohm impedance, and others like 50 ohm impedance (for example), then a 10 meter run will behave like a 30 MHz resonator, and eat multilevel or 20 nanosecond pulses. So, I get 90 Mbps rather than the 330 Mbps the Ziply tech measured direct from the ONT. With HIS two meter cable, which performed better than my cables (Happy Family Mixed Vegetable brand, from darkest China, via Pat Heiden). Time to kludge up a TDR (time domain reflectometer). As is, 90/90 is far better than the 40/6 I pay ComCANT for. When I replace the Comcast POTS phone line with an OOMA, I will cancel Comcast service and use the cable modems as flamethrower targets. That phone line is used for a fax; it works inbound but not outbound (yet). And yes, there are internet fax services, but not many affordable and medical-practice-privacy-approved services. OOMA is free forever, after purchasing the interface box. I will get around to improving house-internal signal rates while dealing with many other urgent concerns - such as upgrading too many ancient Red Hat machines to Debian, learning why Debian Bookworm displays screen tears on my ancient but superbly ergonomic T60 Thinkpads, clear the backyard of log rounds from six fallen trees, then fixing the fence they crushed with boards cut from those logs (arboreal justice!). Plus dozens more tasks plaguing my placid passivity. Life is one damned thing after another, followed by zero things forever. And now, if you all will excuse me, I have things to do. Keith L. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
Re: [PLUG] Comcast to Ziply --> battery farm
keithl wrote: ... > to the new optical network terminal ... about the size > of a large paperback book, and powered by a 12V/2A > wallwart (wallwart wire down the preexisting cable > tray, cat5e cable using the same armored tray). ... Good news! The Ziply optical network terminal is actually a smaller device, 5.5x5.3x1 inch, snapped to the front of a 1 inch deep tray. The tray behind holds a few loops of fiber optic cable ... taking up slack in the feed from the street. Note that in my case, I have a crapton of fiber slack, left over from the prior Verizon ONT install. So there is a large separate box to the side, with about 20 more big loops of fiber optic. ( Perhaps they were thinking (?!) we would build a new house someday, farther back on our 300 foot deep lot. ) Below the ONT is a cover for cabling and connectors which SNAPS DOWNWARDS to reveal, among other things, a standard connector to the generic 12V wall wart. THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING. The devices that will be associated with the Ziply ONT: 1) A PC Engines APU firewall computer 2) An access point for PersonalTelco public wifi 3) A 5 port gigabit switch 4) The Ziply optical network terminal itself ALL run on some approximation of 12V DC. Yay! For testing purposes, I can power each device with a lab bench power supply, and measure its "amps versus voltage", estimating the range of voltages near 12V DC that each device can safely endure, Just In Case. Then choose a regulated voltage range that all devices can work with, all devices fed nominal 12V in parallel. A charged LiFePO4 battery is 12.8V; a group of /charging/ batteries will likely need more, especially at end-of-life. I can power all four devices with regulated 12V±0.2V from a 12.8V bus, using low-dropout voltage regulator components. I can build an array of 12.8V LiFePO4 batteries, connected to an array power FET switches that connect one of those batteries to the group of computer devices (through a low-drop regulator), and the rest of the batteries to float charging circuits. If I was Arduino adept, I could use that to manage all the batteries, perhaps performing "impedance tests" on the batteries and sending emails to me if one of the LiFePO4 batteries is wearing out and needs replacing. I can imagine scaling this to shared power and control buses attached to WEEKS worth of LiFePO4 batteries, a scalable solution that ubergeek hobbyists would enjoy building and deploying. I am not an Arduino adept, but someone reading this might be. I can design the power electronics and describe the controller behavior. Perhaps someone reading this can program an Arduino controller for it, then build a business supplying expandable 12V UPS systems. At age 70, I don't need another hobby, nor another startup, but one of you might enjoy the challenge. A rich showoff might enjoy owning an array of 50,000 long-life LiFePO4 batteries, powering their 12V devices for decades, until THEY are 70yo. MANY competitive rich showoffs (100,000 batteries! 1,000,000!) could make the geek supplying them a rich showoff as well. Greener than private jets and giant yachts and bitcoin mining farms. Just sayin' ... :-) ---- Keith L. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
Re: [PLUG] Comcast to Ziply ... --> cabling speed
On 4/12/24 01:17, Keith Lofstrom wrote: >The technician tested the service with his laptop; he got >330/330 mbps test results. I'm only getting 95/95 mbps >after my 24 port gigabit switch, but there may be some >slow cat5 somewhere on the path. I'll debug that soon. On Fri, Apr 12, 2024 at 01:33:39AM -0700, Russell Senior wrote: > Cat5 can handle gigabit just fine over house-scale runs, in my > experience. You might have a piece that only has two pairs > connected, which would knock you down to 100Mbps. The switch usually > will give some indication of the speed it trains at, a different > colored LED or one that just isn't lit. Check your switch's user > manual. I temporarily repurposed an older Chromebook with a USB3- to-CAT5 dongle to test Ziply. The signal went through a D-Link DGS-2205 5 port gigabit switch, (which feeds the link to the main gigabit switch downstairs) and two 6 foot lengths of CAT6 cable. Ziply Cat6 #1 DGS-2205 Cat6 #2A or #2B (two different 6 foot cables tried) USB3-to-CAT5 (years old) Chromebook (years old) Using "Internet Speed Test" and Cat6 cable #2A: 190/200 Mbps. Using "Internet Speed Test" and Cat6 cable #2B: 266/292 Mbps. Using the house network (4 cables, two gigabit switches, and a patch panel) 90/95 Mbps, as reported earlier. Cabling DOES matter. A newer laptop with gigabit ethernet and Cat6E cabling might achieve 330/330 Mbps, like the Ziply technician test. I don't need that much speed (yet). Eventually I may move my offsite rimuhosting websites to my own server near the Ziply (with Cat7? cabling?), along with a big battery backup, and a gasoline standby generator outside. Better PROVEN ways to provide green power and big battery backup would also make an interesting discussion ... but please change the subject line first. Keith L. P.S. The Chromebook is our expendable "look at internet media content, get Powned" machine, never connected to the rest of the house network inside our firewall. When we aren't teleconferencing, we flip a penny-weighted flap over the camera. Microphone still active, but we take care to not to discuss our family's ICBMs in the same room as the Chromebook. :-) "Daughter, you are sixteen now, and mature for your age. Here's a set of car keys, and the launch codes." -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
Re: [PLUG] Want Low power long duration UPS ENOLINK
On 4/12/24 08:48, Aaron Burt wrote: >We bought a shoebox-sized "portable power station" a couple years >ago that is stuffed with ~300Wh of Li-ion batteries and has a On Fri, Apr 12, 2024 at 10:53:27AM -0700, Russell Senior wrote: > -ENOLINK Ditto what Russell write ... hopefully a link to a webpage with technical details. I prefer a "power station" that can be opened and user-serviced after the warranty expires. Bonus points if extra LiFePO4 batteries (specifically that, not other generic Li-ion chemistries) can be offboarded outside the case. I won't take my ONT and power station to picnics, unless the picnic tables are provisioned for fast optical fiber. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
Re: [PLUG] Comcast to Ziply fiber migration, plus Ooma phone
On 4/12/24 01:17, Keith Lofstrom wrote: > Ziply offers 100/100 consumer grade service for $45 > per month (first year is $20 per month), with support > from an Asian call center. On Fri, Apr 12, 2024 at 01:27:51AM -0700, Russell Senior wrote: > Fwiw, every time I've called Zipy support (for my mom's residential > account), I've talked to someone with a southeastern USian accent. I was told about the Asian call center by a Crufty Old Install Tech (white beard, belt and suspenders) servicing a neighbor. My guess is that Ziply uses a 40h/week domestic support team, and sometimes a foreign team when they are overloaded or outside of normal business hours. The business support team is available fewer hours. I was told this last summer, and have been tardy about de-Comcast-ing, so Ziply consumer tech support may have gone "all domestic" since then. With passive glass fiber all the way from the Tualatin switch fortress to my house, I expect very few problems and service calls, presuming Ziply isn't bought by monopolistic corporate pirates, like Comcast was. When the last Comcast Pirate is hung from a yardarm, the "rope" will be frayed, oxidized Comcast coax. Anyway, it is WONDERFUL that SeniorMom is getting great service, from ZiplySouth and from her helpful offspring. And now, back to debugging the last 20 meters of metal from the ONT to my test computer. Which I should probably move 19 meters and two switches closer to the ONT, for test purposes. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
Re: [PLUG] Want Low power long duration UPS
On Fri, Apr 12, 2024 at 06:21:56AM -0700, jim karlock wrote: > How about the lowest power UPS you can find and replace the little battery > with car battery? > (car battery should be the kind that doesn't require periodic watering.) Tried that before - car batteries eventually "sulfate", and won't have full capacity years later, when they are unpredictably needed. The LiFePO4 sealed batteries last decades, and are a heck of a lot lighter. Data centers use them, but the technology hasn't trickled down to smaller SOHO users ... or not yet, AFAIK. Hence my question to the list. An array of smaller "lantern format" batteries can be charged one at a time, perhaps at a bicycle-accessible location that still has power when my home doesn't. BTW, I also considered replacing the 12V wall warts on both devices with a direct feed from the 12.8V batteries. However, the electronics in the Optical Network Terminal may be finicky about voltage levels, and I would need to pry open the ONT case to access the internal plug and jack. Thanks for the suggestion; if you've had better long-term success with car battery UPS, tell me more. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
[PLUG] Comcast to Ziply fiber migration, plus Ooma phone
Decades ago, I connected to the internet through a Telebit
modem and GTE pone lines. GTE became Verizon, which offered
offered fiber. Verizon became Frontier, and service went to
hell. So, I transitioned to Comcast cable - which went to
deeper hell a few years later, bad mistake. Currently, I pay
$170 per month for 40/6 (40 mbps download, 6 mbps upload),
plus one telephone "landline" (used for a fax machine).
Except ... the upload/download includes wifi ... which
Comcast sells separately ... to other customers ... out of
the 40/6 bandwidth I've paid for. Ditto for the bits that
are converted to our faux "landline" phone service.
Worse yet, the Comcast coax cable feed is shared with
television and movie channels, so the entire kludge is
underprovisioned and overstressed. On a good day with
a tailwind, a coax feed /might/ carry a few hundred
megabits of information/signal, and uses grid power for
the repeaters. When the power goes out, so does Comcast.
When the overstressed repeaters fail, Comcast shuts down
our neighborhood feed to tinker with them (unannounced
and without warning), typically between midnight and 3
or 4 am (prime hacker hours).
Meanwhile, Frontier was purchased by Northwest Fiber, and
rebranded as Ziply Fiber. The vast expansion caused
problems and some early bad reviews, but recent reviews
are very good; I soon expect to add another good review.
Ziply offers 100/100 consumer grade service for $45
per month (first year is $20 per month), with support
from an Asian call center. I wanted "no surprises"
pricing and local phone support, so instead I signed
up for 200/200 business service for $60 per month.
I prepared well for the install, which only took a few
minutes ("fiber already to premises, backer board,
cable trays, UPS, test computer handy - this won't take
long at all"). Most of the minutes was spent removing
the old ONT, uncoiling the 30 feet of extra fiber,
recoiling it in a new separate box, then connecting it
to the new optical network terminal ... about the size
of a large paperback book, and powered by a 12V/2A
wallwart (wallwart wire down the preexisting cable
tray, cat5e cable using the same armored tray).
The technician tested the service with his laptop; he got
330/330 mbps test results. I'm only getting 95/95 mbps
after my 24 port gigabit switch, but there may be some
slow cat5 somewhere on the path. I'll debug that soon.
For voice telephone, we've been using Ooma VOIP for years,
and the expensive Comcast "landline" for the business fax.
Ooma is an $80 box ... subsequent voice service (including
domestic long distance) is free. I just bought a second
Ooma box for the fax.
Bottom line: after we cancel Comcast, we will pay $60 per
month for very fast internet, and $0 per month for a voice
phone and a fax phone. Much better than $170 per month
for slow and intermittent Comcast. I hope - failure is
(sadly) always an option.
Keith L.
--
Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
[PLUG] Want Low power long duration UPS
On Tuesday, Ziply fiber installed an optical network terminal (ONT) ... which I will discuss in another email. Besides being wicked fast, the wallwart that powers the ONT draws only 5 watts. If we have another ice storm and 8 day power outage like we had in January, I would like to power that O.N.T. and a 5 port gigabit switch (2 more watts) for a week or more. BTW, the neighborhood "hub" for the Ziply fiber is a "wavelength division multiplexer" - a glass marvel that splits a single bidirectional multiband fiber into separate bands for customers. The WDM uses no electrical power. A typical 200 watt UPS uses quite a lot of the battery power just to power internal circuitry, and has limited sealed-lead-acid battery capacity. I can imagine a 10 watt output "mini" UPS that uses a tray of external lithium iron phosphide batteries and runs for days, using far less power for internal operation. Do products like that exist? Where can I buy one? Keith L. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
Re: [PLUG] Thanks! Re: Ziply fiber - fixed IP address?
On Mon, Feb 5, 2024 at 10:43 PM Mark Casimer wrote: > Keith, Did you make the transition to Ziply? Keith sez: Not yet, still in the cleanup and planning phase. Decades of accumulated complexities. For example, I've "owned" keithl.com for decades, probably the early 1990s, having transitioned from keithl.uucp and bang paths. Name service currently from Gandi.net in France - a provider I will change, after their 2023 acquisition by greedy buttheads (GBs). I have hosted my .com sites many different places, most recently the Dallas data center of Rimuhosting, a very supportive New Zealand company with failover to London and Brisbane. Over the decades, the main threats to my world-facing web presence have been: (1) acquisition of providers by greedy buttheads (2) provider business failures (3) security flaws (4) seemingly gratuitous standards complexification (5) obsolescence (software and standards) ... and a new threat ... (6) personal aging beyond 70yo A 6-related threat is 54 yo Linus Torvalds not living to 60yo or 70yo; he and others have encouraged us to remain sane, effective, and butthead-resistant, and we have grown dependent on SABDFL's like him to protect us from GBs. Steve Jobs (a visionary GB) died of cancer at age 56. My planned "failover" for the half-a-dozen .coms that I maintain is (1) frequent offsite backups, and (2) moving sites to my home server if Rimuhosting fails or is bought by GBs. Hence, my question about Ziply and static IP addresses. I don't need Ziply for that now. I connect to my offsites with VPN tunnels (soon Wireguard). But fail-over relies on an "-over" prepared and tested in advance. The need is usually sudden and externally imposed, and almost always concurrent with many other unexpected crises. Keith L. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
[PLUG] SMS/Texting interface for Linux desktop/laptop
Many people use SMS messaging and handheld screen taps, but not email. Is there a good SMS-to-SMTP-email service Out There? Alternatively, is there a good Linux-compatible hardware for this task? Keith L. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
[PLUG] Password guessing with a microphone
This shades towards plug-talk, except that it specifically involves how we configure and use our Linux computers. I use keyboards with clicky keys, sometimes in the same room as devices with microphones. I read the mostly excellent "A History of Fake Things on the Internet" by Walter Scheirer, 2024 Stanford University Press, reminding me that everything we do leaks information. The book points out that every pixel on a specific digital camera imager has a different offset and gain - when you post two photos, the pixel field can be analyzed to show they come from the same imager, even if cropped or modified in GIMP. The techniques can easily detect image tinkering. I was surprised to discover that the citation trail leads to a paper I wrote for an integrated circuit conference, decades ago (with a zillion cites, I've earned tenure of I want it). All your web photos are belong to us. --- Anyway, physical keyboard keys will also have these small variances, but mostly, so does your individual typing style. A computer microphone hearing me type this would notice a lot of backspaces; I type somewhat spastically. After listening to a large enough corpus of typing, and RECORDING ALL OF IT, and ANALYZING THE HELL OUT OF IT, a smart-enough AI-like program could make some accurate guesses of what specific keys I am typing. Also what keys I ALREADY typed in past sound recordings, perhaps YEARS ago, with a long-enough audio recording file. Including the SPECIFIC key sequences that I type entering passwords. Some websites and apps require that frequently. MANY training opportunities for a clever program hooked up to a microphone, perhaps a parabolic dish microphone blocks away, pointed at the outside window of my office. I just added some sound damping to that window. Yes, I've changed my passwords, but not the brain that remembers them and the hands that type them; my mind and muscles follow patterns that can vastly narrow down the brute force search space for a password that works. The passwords may be machine-generated random strings; my small hesitancies and mistakes while typing a random string will also show up in an audio record. Bracketed by my grumbles: "type my password AGAIN???" Typical phone conversations are less than 10 kilobits per second compressed (with pauses); for a 2000 hour work-year, 10% typing time, that is less than a gigabyte per year. With SSDs costing $30 per terabyte recently, that is 3 cents a year per target. Stored forever. The surveillance microphone will cost a lot more, but mass-produced electronics can be cheap as well. If the "microphone" is a hack on your smart phone, perhaps government sponsored ... ... well, time to respond with "can't happen here" or "why would they target me" or "xkcd/538 Security pipe wrench", but then, that's what THEY want you to think. It is amusing that some prefer that we waste our paranoia on the poor and the foreign and the sexually different. Or on the agro-Americans who suffer those sad paranoias. But then, that's what THEY want you to think. Sweet dreams! Keith L. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
[PLUG] Short power glitch, partial firewall amnesia
Some emails were just sent to PLUG and PLUG-TALK three days after I wrote and hit "send" on this computer. Why? I haven't figured out the details, but finally I realized this happened after a 3 second PGE power outage. Probably a power flicker or two before permanent power. I just realized that this put my not-yet-upgraded ALIX firewall computer in a funny state - responsive, but somehow some ALIX software modules (like mail handling) went into a zombied state. After a restart, the ALIX released bolus of outbound emails, like those about searching for the Alaska MAX 9 door plug with NTSB. The firewall will be updated soon, and will be on a UPS, but before upgrades are complete, there will be funny behaviors like that, and some of you may wonder "WTF is keithl doing?" even MORE than most times. Keith L. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
[PLUG] Web animation screen tearing with Debian 12 Bookworm
Debian 12 Bookworm, plus Firefox, Chrome, or Brave browsers, works great on my desktop computers. Sadly, web animations often exhibit screen tearing (strips of animation pixels scattered vertically/randomly on the screen) on my ancient T60 Thinkpads with Bookworm. There is no screen tearing with Debian 11 Bullseye. Nor with Debian 13 Trixie (which won't be stable for a while, and is missing some apps, or I'd upgrade now). I'm keeping the Thinkpads; they have better ergonomics than any current laptop, but sadly have only 3 GB of RAM. My preferred-for-text-writing-and-coding 4W:3H screens; some have homebrew 2048W*1536H pixel screens. Perhaps Bookworm wants more RAM for animation buffering. Probably just a coding error. BTW, I'm keeping Debian - it is so much cleaner and faster than the old Redhat and newer Ubuntu crap I've endured for years. So lets not surrender to a different problem, OK? - So, the ask: What should I read or learn about so I can debug the screen tearing that Bookworm inflicts on my beloved Thinkpads? Keith L. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
Re: [PLUG] Pacific Telephone ...
On Wed, Jan 03, 2024 at 10:53:21PM -0800, Russell Senior wrote: > Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company --(1961)--> Pacific NW Bell > --(1988)--> US West --(2000)--> Qwest --(2011)--> CenturyLink (which ... Thanks, Russell. This Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Bell#Northwest_acquisitions says: "Acquisitions over the years extended Pacific Telephone's territory into Oregon, Washington, and northern Idaho" It would be interesting to learn about the Oregon companies that Pacific Telephone and Telegraph acquired. According to the Oregon History Project: "Pioneer steamboat captain George Ainsworth brought the first telephone to Oregon in 1878, just two years after Alexander Graham Bell patented the new technology. The first telephone conversation in the state took place in Portland between Ainsworth and his wife on a line that connected his office with his home." I wonder if Ainsworth paid royalties to Bell ... This paywalled Jstor article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20611147 ... points to a December 1938 Oregon Historical Quarterly article, which I don't have time to read. Perhaps not relevant to PLUG and Linux, except that I imagine the geeks who cobbled up Portland's first telephone systems were a lot like the geeks who cobbled up Portland's first hobby computer networks a century later (without involving steamboats). Perhaps Portland geeks will cobble up the first telepathy networks a few decades from now, though I fear that future spam will be canned meat composed of our brain cells. - Perhaps I have more important things to think about, like configuring SVG-image math equations in my own experimental mediawiki instances. Wikipedia uses a mathoid server, but I'm aiming for standalone content that I can also deploy on net-disconnected laptops. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
Re: [PLUG] Ziply ... and history
On Wed, Jan 03, 2024 at 02:50:19PM -0800, Russell Senior wrote: > So, to summarize: > > West Coast Telephone --(1964)--> GTE Northwest --(2000)--> Verizon > --(2010)--> Frontier --(2020)--> Ziply Having lived near Beaverton for 63 of the last 70 years, I've experienced all of those transitions, from gestation onwards. When I was small, my parents shared a party line with another family; I remember hearing the phone ring and ring, and did not understand that the different ring was the other (not answering) family on the same line. Besides that, the first three companies were pretty good. As I got older, I learned much from telco service techs. Beaverton being home to thousands of adept electronics engineers working at Tektronix and other electronics companies, we demanded a lot from local phone companies, and often got it. It may be no coincidence that the 2010 Verizon/Frontier transition occurred three years after Tektronix was sold to Danaher, which accelerated the Tek plunge into darkness and the shedding of more jobs and local geek talent. For quite a while, there were no "consumer internet providers". The geek cognoscenti connected with SLIP over Telebit modems, and we got our feed to the Real Internet (HUNDREDS of nodes!) through a leased line rented by Randy Bush. That same leased line fed all of South Africa at one point - the entire nation was blacklisted, but Randy fed the apartheid-fighting progressives. Much changed with the arrival of consumer internet. I changed from keithl.rain-net.uucp to keithl.com . The rapid growth of Intel and other Washington County high tech has restored a fast-growing community of high tech geeks with high telecom expectations. Perhaps Russell and others can tell us about the transitions to Century Link from (Pacific Bell?) in Portland and Multnomah County. Perhaps Randy Bush is reading this, and can replace my 20% memory errors with his own. Keith L. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
[PLUG] Thanks! Re: Ziply fiber - fixed IP address?
On Tue, 2 Jan 2024, Keith Lofstrom wrote: >Anybody on the list subscribed to Ziply Fiber? THANKS TO ALL for EXCELLENT and COGENT responses to my question about Ziply static IP. $10 (or even $50) extra per month for a business class connection with a static IP is well worth it - much time and confusion saved when there is no time to debug my ONLY connection (needed to look things up). I know I can simulate static behavior with DHCP and dynamic DNS and proper configuration, but I prefer simple and robust to clever. I'm old enough that "clever" is in short supply. Regards "business rates and business department" ... I learned similar good info from a Ziply install tech (crusty opinionated overall-ed bearded ex-hippie, my favorite variety of expert) who was servicing a neighbor, a few months ago. He said the best part of Ziply business class is a US call center rather than Asian, staffed with people who know the subject rather than parrot menus. We talked for a while, but I forgot to ask him about static IP. We already connect our landline personal phones via Ooma - which needs a working internet connection. With our current ComCAN'T connection, we also have a copper telephone connection for the fax machine (a regulatory requirement for my M.D. wife), but she may be "retiring" from practice (and the hardwire fax requirement) soon. We connected through Verizon for decades, which degenerated into horrible Frontier, which has improved into Ziply. We still have the ancient Verizon fiber modem on the garage wall, still connected to an overhead single-mode fiber to the street fiber bundle. It may be a simple matter of replacing that old modem with a modern device, then changing a few addresses in the PC-Engines APU that firewalls the modem to the house network. - Last comment in this tooo-lng PLUG post - the bad part of the overhead service drop was that it was attached by an eyescrew to the gutter fascia board nailed to the edge of our roof - a "woodrot-friendly" environment, with nails penetrating soft rotten ex-wood. The whole crumbly mess was gradually pulling loose. I replaced the fascia board, and re-attached it with Simpson Strongtie angle straps to multiple rafters (also reinforced in the attic). In the next 500-year Cascadia subduction zone earthquake, I expect that attachment to remain "rock"- solid (heh), though extreme-ground-movement-tension on the reinforcing wire might dislodge a street pole or two. :-( Keith L. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
[PLUG] Ziply fiber - fixed IP address?
Anybody on the list subscribed to Ziply Fiber? Does Ziply offer fixed IP addresses at the lower bandwidth tiers? Perhaps for an extra fee, or a business account? Other Ziply kudos or complaints? Keith P.S., if it matters, I am in Washington county east of Beaverton, and currently suffer from Comcast - though with a fixed 32 bit IP address for extra $$. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
Re: [PLUG] UPS shopping (pure sine ...)
Many laptops have some sort of stereo audio input jack. I can imagine a resistor+capacitor kludge that attenuates the "hot" and "neutral" legs of a power cord down to the stereo input levels. A program on the laptop captures hot and neutral voltage waveforms, differences them, and (somehow) uses the digitized audio signal to characterize the voltage waveform quality produced by the device the cord is plugged into. Perhaps logging the waveforms to disk on the laptop, for long term monitoring. Sub-sampling at 600 samples per second and 16 bit resolution, that is 40 gigabytes per year, more than enough to capture "rare but too-interesting" power glitches over time. If someone wants to write the program to do the differencing and logging, I can put together a few cord-and-resistor-and-stereo-plug kludges, and trade hardware for software. The result would be a portable setup for evaluating the waveforms produced by a UPS in service, or a candidate UPS in the store. Besides evaluating UPS waveforms and behavior, it might also be interesting to look for time correlations in power waveforms between different locations around the Portland area. An office in an industrial area might see subsecond line voltage sags when a nearby factory is arc welding. I can imagine those driving some computer power supplies and UPS units batty. Keith L. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
Re: [PLUG] UPS shopping - attention suspend?
On Fri, Dec 29, 2023 at 02:36:00AM -0800, Russell Senior wrote: ... UPS ... > Does anyone have recent experience, either positive or negative, and/or > any advice on replacements. I'd consider a used older model. Since computation equals dodopaddle (er "smart phone") for most of My Fellow Americans, I suspect desktops with UPS support will eventually become hard to find. I bought my most recent UPS from a Craigslist seller ... and replaced the batteries with SLAs from Interstate All Battery Center. A Craigslist purchase trip is a chance to visit neighborhoods I haven't seen before. One of my long term goals is to play with a Tesla Powerwall. I hope the batteries in those are better tended and last longer than the batteries in a UPS. Perhaps they will all fail after Musk absconds to Mars with our warranty money. A nearer term goal is to replace all the hard drives in the house with Samsung terabyte SSDs. My test machines suspend to SSD in less than two seconds, and reboot in ten. I can imagine a multicore CPU and a Linux kernel that continuously copies checkpoint RAM images to SSD, so that after power resumes, the machine "comes back" to a state resembling what I was working on when the lights went out. In a well-designed suspend environment, I can "suspend my thoughts" until the power comes back - and I am reminded by my computer of what I was doing before the power glitch. I would like a similar reminder process for other interrupts - doorbell, phone calls, potty breaks, and commands from She Who Must Be Obeyed. Indeed, I would like Linux tools that facilitate "timeouts" for exercise, meditation, ordering my desk, whatever keeps me at maximum productivity and happiness. "Human interrupt and resume" is just another neglected aspect of larger processes that are only partly addressed by a UPS. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
Re: [PLUG] HP Laserjet 4M+ ... Toner
On Tue, Dec 19, 2023 at 11:15:01AM -0800, Michael Ewan wrote: > It seems there are a lot of sources for the #48 toner, is "decent" the > problem? Many of those are "drill-and-fill", without replacing seals and gaskets and streaky drums. After a second multihour strip-and-clean of my old HLPJ 4M, I also (like Galen) gave my old machine to younger owner. Besides toner, and slow processing speed, the 4M was a great machine - we used to claim that it could print tee-shirts. I currently use two HP4100N printers with duplexers, with one spare, but face a similar "crappy toner" risk. The risk is not as bad as my hp2605dn color laser printer, which has FOUR toner cartridges that can leak, and a fan that can suck leaked toner into the optical box. That is a two hour teardown and rebuild, just to wipe a bit of toner off the mirrors. When it works, it makes BEYOOTIFUL color images, unlike the Brother MFC-9440CN that I mostly use. The Brother is easy to fix and clean, but the images look like a child's crayon drawings. Sigh. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
[PLUG] Wikipedia math markup rendering Re: ... mediawiki progress
On Thu, Dec 07, 2023 at 11:44:53PM -0800, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> It would be great to work with collaborators who can help
> me upgrade that server to Debian Bookworm and the web
> pages to mediawiki.
MediaWiki - I'm stuck. The basic wiki behavior is working,
but the next step (before wikifarm) is learning how to add
math markup, and also how to make incremental backups of
the mariadb database.
Save the backup question for a subsequent email.
-
Wikipedia's math markup resembles LaTeX at the user level;
TeX is I prefer and what I've used since the 1980s.
I want to duplicate that user interface and markup
format for my own mediawiki websites.
Wikipedia:Sandbox example LaTeX markup:
\sqrt{x^2+y^2}
That renders as an SVG in the Wikipedia Sandbox, using
Brave Browser and Firefox.
The second line of "view-source" of the SVG image is:
{\displaystyle {\sqrt {x^{2}+y^{2
---
QUESTIONS:
How does the Wikipedia server create that SVG image
"under the covers"?
How do I configure MediaWiki to use the same tool chain
on my own Debian 12 Bookworm server?
What IS that toolchain at this time, and how do I query
the Wikipedia site to learn what it is?
Which document(s) should I read? Which contradictory
documents should I ignore?
Which mailing list should I be asking instead?
Keith L.
P.S. I wouldn't mind paying a MediaWiki/Wikipedia guru
to show me how to do this, perhaps even teach a class
to show MANY of us how to do this.
--
Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
[PLUG] MATE terminal fonts, mediawiki progress
Ending a long ramble on plug-talk, I kvetched: - It would be great to work with collaborators who can help me upgrade that server to Debian Bookworm and the web pages to mediawiki. - I got MATE Terminal and mediawiki working on the new Bookworm machine. 1) MATE Terminal spaced lines too far apart vertically. I've used 11 point Monospace Regular on Redhat derivatives for years, also on Debian Bullseye. The transition from Debian 11 Bullseye to Debian 12 Bookworm changed the line pitch for Monospace Regular from 17px to 22px, way too much whitespace for me, displaying too few lines of text on my ancient 1024x1280 pixel displays. The reason for the distro font change was that it allowed more room for non-Roman characters and other languages. The fix is changing to DejaVu Sans Mono Book 11; back to 17px line space, with characters that look the same as Monospace Regular. 2) mediawiki install problems - that was caused by using a different database/install directory than standard. It works with /var/www/html/mediawiki, the html setup script failed for me (near the end of setup) when I tried using a different path to a different disk partition (mostly to simplify backups). Fortunately, I can achieve the same backup organization with symlinks. 2a) next step, wikifarm Keith L. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
[PLUG] "text2ps.c" - 34 years of recompiling
Perhaps timewasting chatter, but the subject is a Unix/Linux program. So there. I've used Unix/Linux for almost 50 years now ... my first encounter was as a grad student at UC Berkeley, through a friend with "legitimate" access to the machine, and to Berkeley's ARPANET node. As a Tektronix employee, my first "home" Unix system was a Tektronix 6130 running the UTek variant of Unix, around 1985. I organized a dozen Tek engineers to order the major assemblies for that system from engineering stock. We plugged the pieces together, wangled copies of the UTek source code, and compiled our own "distro" - years before Torvalds and Linux. Keith Packard helped us find "new" kernels. Typing madly, filling the process tables with compiles on those very limited machines, then pleasant chatter until completion and reboot. Remember when some brains were faster than many computers? Then text2ps ... The Apple Laserwriter (native language Postscript) also appeared in 1985. The only Postscript drivers I knew about were proprietary ... except for Australian Steven Frede's source code for "text2ps", which he wrote at University of New South Wales, probably around 1982. Just What I Needed to interface between the UTek Unix machine and the Apple Laserwriter. Over the many years since, I've updated and recompiled that text2ps code for various flavors of Unix and Linux. Before today the last recompile was 2006. However, the old C code was not strictly typed. Today (2023 Nov 22 Weds), I tried to recompile the old code for Debian Bookworm ... too many compiler warnings. I am NOT much of a programmer, but I did manage to add enough "int" and "char" and "void" and call prototypes to the program, so now it compiles without complaint. Not bad for a brain still suffering from a 70th birthday in September. I hope C and Debian won't evolve radically much over the next 25 years. I'm not planning on a "dirt nap" until I am older than my 105yo father-in-law, but my MD wife tells me I do not have complete choice in the matter; and even less choice if I hack until 3 in the morning. Spoilsport. The Apple Laserwriter is Long Gone. Today, my main printer is a Postscript hp4100n with multiple input trays (often configured for Letter and A4), also a Brother MFC4400 color printer (also Letter and A4), both with duplexing, and swappable trays for envelopes and legal. I fear that my next MAJOR recompiles will be for CUPS The Next Generation. If CUPSng is manufacturer-driven, HP and Brother may stop writing new drivers for very old printers (with Very Large and Very Cheap Toner Cartridges). Learning how to write laser printer drivers at age 75 will be challenging. Making replacement toner cartridges with desktop additive manufacturing might be even harder. Well, back to "Bringing Up Bookworm". I am moving Many old Linux (mostly CentOS) machines to Debian, and translating ancient MoinMoin websites to MediaWiki. Then, back to my main mission: Changing The World, or at least The World's Poopy Diapers. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
Re: [PLUG] Using wget to download all files from a web site (2)
On Fri, Nov 17, 2023 at 12:43:29PM -0800, Keith Lofstrom wrote: ... > I "wget-ed" a website, and was soon contacted by a > panicked/angry sysadmin watching their website brought > to a crawl because their 5 mbps upload bandwidth was > clobbered for hours by my scrape of their site. My bad. When you connect through the internet, packets flow both ways - ACK packets tell the sending process which packets arrived and do not need to be re-sent. If the data packets you request travel down the same asymmetric, bandwidth-limited channel as the web-surfing and email ACK packets of the employees at the Portland EPA office, they can't do their web-work, and they will designate your office network connection a "toxic internet packet super-fund site". :-) Just kidding. I hope. This is something we should all be aware of when we access the internet. Every process and system has constraints and limits. Neighborly net users should not heedlessly push too hard on those limits, because others will be impacted. - That said, in this PARTICULAR case, https://www.publicdata.com/ ... looks like a private company DESIGNED to provide bulk data like you are downloading, so I am probably wrong IN THIS PARTICULAR CASE. You are probably NOT stepping on any toes here. However, you might learn something helpful from the publicdata FAQ: https://login.publicdata.com/faq.html - With all the high bandwidth bots roaming the web and guzzling data at considerable expense to all of us, the publicdata company may have processes that limit data rates and thwart bots, so they don't need to purchase as much bulk bandwidth from THEIR network providers. If wget pushes on publicdata.com limits in a bot-like manner, publicdata server software may treat you like a bot, and behave in frustrating (and unexplained) ways. If they frustrate a bot, they need not say they are sorry. There may be ways to rate-limit your bulk data request, so it doesn't trigger their rate-limits, and looks more like an obsessed human user. I hypothesize; there are web provider process management experts reading this, who know how incoming 15 GB requests are handled, throttled, or thriftily ignored. Please educate us! Keith L. (who remembers 300 baud modems, and long distance toll rates) -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
[PLUG] Moving 15 GB ... in 1970
> On Fri, Nov 17, 2023 at 08:26:21AM -0800, Rich Shepard wrote: > > I need to download ~15G of data from a web site. Using a PLUG mail list Apropos of not much, when I first got on this crazy internet merry-go-round, the nearest host was UCBVAX in Berkeley, and we connected with modems. I connected one evening a week at Tektronix, originally using a 300 baud modem. With start and stop and parity bits for a serial line, that was 30 bytes per second. Telephone long distance rates were 50 cents (1970) per minute. Ignoring frequent outages, that pencils out to one 1970 dollar per 3.6 kilobytes. Inflation is 7.75x from 1970 to 2023, so that is $7.75 (2023) per 3.6 kB, a bit more than $2 per kilobyte, hence thirty million dollars (and 16 years) to move 15 gigabytes at 300 baud. Pro tip: if your time machine breaks and you find yourself in this situation, buy a faster modem. Or a shit-ton of the fastest Telebit modems available, and connect them with leased lines. We did that in the late 1970s as well. Then Randy Bush helped us connect to the Real Internet. Oh, the bad old days (except for Randy and friends). I will "soon" install 100/100 Mbps Ziply fiber for $20/month. I could upgrade to 2000/2000 Mbps (I don't need that much, I don't stream movies) for $70/month. That's one minute to move 15 gigabytes. But first, I upgrade all machines to Debian Bookworm, and my websites from moinmoin wiki to mediawiki, and harden my firewall and security in general. A struggle, given my 70yo-yet-still-immature brain. Fortunately, kids are too busy gaming to get on my lawn. Keith L. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
Re: [PLUG] Using wget to download all files from a web site
On Fri, Nov 17, 2023 at 08:26:21AM -0800, Rich Shepard wrote: > I need to download ~15G of data from a web site. Using a PLUG mail list > thread from 2008 I tried this syntax: > wget -r --accept *.* http://ph-public-data.com/ A related question is "how much will the Portland Harbor Superfund Site need to pay to upload 15 GB to you? How much upload bandwidth do they have? I've been in this situation before. I "wget-ed" a website, and was soon contacted by a panicked/angry sysadmin watching their website brought to a crawl because their 5 mbps upload bandwidth was clobbered for hours by my scrape of their site. My bad. Perhaps the Right Thing To Do is to contact the project manager (see site's contact page) and ask them how you can help them with their important mission. I can imagine showing up in person with a flash drive, copying the 15 GB to that drive on site, then making a few dozen copies of that flash drive to give to them, which they can mail to other researchers like you. Bonus points if you can figure out some way for them to design access for "supplemental uploads" to go with those flash drives, so that other researchers only need to upload recent data to add to older data on the drives. I can also imagine this process leading to new research and consulting contracts for the individual researcher who provides the "free" flash drives. Paraphrasing Dwight Eisenhower, "If a problem can't be solved, enlarge it." Keith L. P.S. to other pluggers reading this - what is the best source of reliable 32GB flash drives, quantity 50, with printed/embossed logos? -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
[PLUG] pleasant CUPS upgrade
No problem to report ... I was pleasantly surprised to learn that my ancient Redhat- style CUPS printer configuration files easily transferred to many new machines running Debian Bullseye and Bookworm. I print cover pages with the machine and username they came from. It took a while to realize that I did not need to use the web configuration interface for small per-machine tweaks, just vi on the "Info" lines of the /etc/cups/printers.conf file (which contains all the printer configs) for each user machine. This is ESPECIALLY important for my HP laser printers ... there may be THOUSANDS of different models in the little scroll box of the web interface. I seemingly must scroll through most of that list every time I make small tweeks to a printer configuration. Besides a few soon-to-be retired ancient Redhat/CentOS machines, and one sad experience with resource-hog Ubuntu, I am migrating all machines to Debian Bookworm, eventually. Two machines will be configured for Debian 11.7 Bullseye. I plan to upgrade those to Bookworm 12.2, and document procedures for that, in order to simulate a future upgrade to Debian 13.2 . I worry a little about future versions of CUPS that use "improved" (incompatible) printer description files, or worse, will not support my ancient built-like-tanks HP and Brother laser printers, with their huge-capacity toner cartridges (cheap per page!) and older Postscript. If that happens, a print server machine can run Bookworm forever. Perhaps a low-power Arduino will serve as a print server. Perhaps I should worry instead about lifting 50 pound printers when I am 80 years old, or finding trustworthy third party toner cartridge suppliers, if Brother and HP stop providing CUPS driver support for legacy machines. Keith L. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
Re: [PLUG] Internet services with lowest packet latency
On Mon, Aug 22, 2022 at 10:24:37PM -0700, Thomas Groman wrote:
> Here's a graph of latentcies i get to various sites of interest. the
> northwest IAX, a telephone exchange, ziply's gateway router, and some
> others.
> https://ttm.sh/qiv.png
[ ...205 2.3 ms ...18 2.9 ms ...129 3.2 ms ]
Thanks for the graph and the averages. I presume the
graph is a snapshot in time of a continuing ping process
that began long ago. One second ping rate?
For Comcast 40 Mbps service ("up to 50"), 12 one-second
pings average:
...205 21 ms...18 40 ms ...129 21 ms
Much larger ping times for ComCANT, different ratios.
- What extra services to you pay for?
- What do you pay per month?
Reply off-list if you prefer.
Keith
--
Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
[PLUG] Internet services with lowest packet latency
The comcast telemarketers are pestering my wife with offers
to "upgrade" our service from many streaming megabytes per
second to many more streaming megabytes per second. That
way, we can watch 5 internet movies at once rather than 3.
We don't watch movies on the net. We could get by with
far less bandwidth if packet performance was better.
My bandwidth use is packets to and from my external
server/firewall. My M.D. wife's use is interactive
televisits with patients. In both cases, we care about
is interactive first packet latency and packet rate,
not stream rate.
The comcast marketdweeb told her that with the twice-
as-expensive service ("new and improved fiber AND
coax!") we could have 100 megabytes per second,
and transfer 100 packets a second!" Probably idiot
noises from a marketing script, but what if that
dismal packet performance was actually true?
When I use a service like "internet speed test", I see
the "needle" hovering near zero for about three seconds,
then it gently crawls towards 101% of our contracted
bandwidth. I used to believe the slow climb was what
the app animation did for show, but now I suspect I am
actually watching streaming latency, packets bouncing
through servers in Finland and Brazil, but the bandwidth
THE WAY WE ACTUALLY USE IT is the less-than-megabyte-
per-second slow crawl at the beginning.
Decades ago, I designed and sold chips that went into
internet routers ... until our VC demanded that we move
from routers to ethernet chipsets, because the internet
wasn't real. Money doesn't talk, it babbles. So, I
understand how streaming routers can be optimized VERY
DIFFERENTLY than random packet routers.
Perhaps there are linux tools that a small group of us can
use to characterize what our internet providers actually
provide, especially first-packet latency. Suggestions?
Keith
P.S. We can also move to Bitly - the former Verizon fiber
modem is still in the garage. Is Bitly any better?
--
Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
[PLUG] Ubuntu 22.04.1, firefox snap, alternatives?
I have been slowly transitioning some systems away from increasingly-open-source-unfriendly Redhat derivatives (and RPM distros) to Ubuntu 20.04.x (and APT/DEB, or so I thought). My goal is a maximum-stable malware-free environment, not the shiniest-latest dancing-bearware. Today I migrated a test machine to Ubuntu 22.04.1. I expected all the upgrades to be DEB packages. Surprise! Canonical provides Firefox as a SNAP package, their own walled-garden flavor (like RPM). I had hoped to escape jails of that kind. There are many Debian and Ubuntu (and derivatives) adepts on this list. Is there a painless way to configure Ubuntu to use only DEB files, with alternate repositories for Firefox and similar apps? Repositories to use, or avoid? Well written tutorials? Or perhaps .DEB-flavor long-term-support alternatives to Ubuntu? I would rather become adept with a new environment before I turn 70 next year, because it may be too difficult to learn and make major transitions when/if I am 80. Note: I use some obscure command-line-only applications that are only available as DEB and RPM. I'm glad there are other distro communities out there, but many do not have the obscure stuff, and building large apps from source will soon be beyond my skill set. So, DEB distros with long term support, please. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
Re: [PLUG] UPS failure modes, not fully considered ...
On Tue, Aug 16, 2022 at 12:02:07AM -0700, wes wrote: > now that it's way too late to point this out, but maybe it'll help someone > somday: > > most UPSes can be configured to not play the sound. Good point. I configure my UPS volume with a resistor and a soldering iron. As a Stanford EE professor friend used to say: "Real Men program with solder". I am pleased that he also teaches Real Women (and other emerging gender categories) to program with solder as well. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
Re: [PLUG] Temperature recorder
On Thu, Aug 11, 2022 at 01:59:18PM -0700, Rich Shepard wrote: > There are inexpensive units that do this but the maximum temperature is > limited to about 150F, and I need a range to 500F. As a cheap wildass alternative, can you use a second controllable fan to mix room air with your roasting chamber output air, aim the output mix setpoint at 150F (or whatever) with a thermostat, then estimate temperature from the mix ratio and physical gas laws? This kludge would require calibration (use dried peas, cheaper than coffee beans?), but you could implement it with cheap hardware store tech and calibrate it with algebra and a Rubber Bible. Maybe not; I presume roasting coffee beans emit a lot of steam, with a crazy-varying specific heat compared to room air. Which implies that an electronic sensor must be steam-resistant; very hot steam is corrosive. It also suggests that your roasting set point (for whatever kind of controller) should also adjust to moisture content for different kinds of coffee bean. Roast temperature is a proxy for output product, perhaps you will discover a better proxy. But maybe, after enough cups of coffee, you can invent a cheap fix, perhaps invent a profitable product. You aren't the only customer who cares beans about coffee. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
Re: [PLUG] Anybody have a Brother HL-L3270CDW?
On Sun, Aug 07, 2022 at 03:16:09PM -0700, Russell Senior wrote: > And if so, can they comment on how it works for them? >From the replies so far, you've noticed that there are MANY different Brother models, and most models support Linux. I have a (huge) MFC 9440CN with an extra 500 sheet paper tray, which I use (rarely) for big duplex color print jobs, and for paper faxes. Large and HEAVY, but built like a tank. It uses a tray of imaging drums, separate from the high capacity toner. The Brother manual is fairly thick, and I often must refer to it, because drilling down through the numbered options to set up some of the zillion different print modes (tiled enlargement?) is NOT intuitive. It may have a Windoze control menu that is easier to use. My MFC uses a separate imaging drum from the high capacity toner cartridges. That's less expensive for high volume printing. I keep 8.5x11 office paper in the main tray, and have a spare tray compartment, which I switch between legal size and international A4. The Brother is cheaper and easier to maintain and far less finicky than my HP2605dn color printer, but it is Postscript emulation, and not as pretty as the HP ... ... when the HP is working, it tends to collect red toner in the laser compartment, which is a one hour teardown to access and clean. I print B documents and envelopes with Yet Another black-and-white printer, an HP 4100N with a duplexer. Keith P.S. I also have a working B MFC-2700DW and a for-parts B MFC-7420. Also a scratched imaging drum tray, and a scratched fuser from the 9440CN, perhaps usable for frankenstein-re-assembly repair. Free to anyone who wants to drive out to east Beaverton for them. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
[PLUG] Ubuntu with mate/gnome2 and deb, but not snap
Can I rely on Ubuntu/MATE and apt/deb into the future? Many on the plug list use Ubuntu or derivatives like Mint. I am moving to MATE Ubuntu LTS from 20+ years of Red Hat Enterprise Linux derivatives because Red Hat has moved to "stream" distros and Gnome3. Keeping my own cheezy coding hacks working in the Gnome3 environment is Too Hard. Rocky Linux isn't an option because they don't support MATE/Gnome2, while my vision and coordination does not support Gnome3. I've migrated systems towards Ubuntu-MATE 20.04 LTS and apt/deb for months. It meets my needs, but will support endure? I'm dabbling with Ubuntu 22.04.1 "beta" now; the release was scheduled for Thursday August 4, but delayed a week because of a problem with "snaps", Ubuntu's walled-garden package system. This may not bode well for the future; while I can configure gnome packages and Debian apt, Canonical may stop supporting that. I'm not looking for a fashionable distro - I'm looking for a stable and secure distro on which I can build and maintain my own content (mostly huge numerical simulation jobs written in C, with graphical output). Is it reasonable to assume Ubuntu MATE will endure for a decade or two? Or is it more reasonable to rely on Debian MATE? Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
Re: [PLUG] rent large storage space
On Fri, Jul 22, 2022 at 11:56 PM Thomas Groman wrote: > Does anybody know of anybody whom I could rent a large (15TB) SSD or > tape drive from for a few days? I have a large amount of data I need to > backup while I reconfigure the topology of a raid array, and if I used > cloud storage it'd take me over a month to upload everything and > download everything back, Which isn't doable. On Sun, Jul 24, 2022 at 12:05:24PM -0400, Daniel Ortiz wrote: > The website may contain what you are looking for, but maybe it helps you. > https://www.leaseville.com/computers-tablets/computer-components/hard-drive.html?p=1 That's a cool website, worth considering in the future. Useful for "try before you buy", though the Samsung QVO on the first page reminds me that first impressions are poor indicators of long-term reliability. Another issue is "wipe after use". Large sophisticated storage systems swap replacement sectors - the QVO does this internally and frequently. The replaced sectors may no longer be evident, but they may retain most of the data written on them. What if that data is a copy of /etc/passwd? When you return your leased drives, wiped to the best of your ability, what might a clever future user extract from one of them? However, the larger question about during-upgrade storage space is "where is the backup"? Redundant RAID protects against random hardware failure, but not "sudo rm -rf /", mistakenly typed when you had instead planned to type "sudo rm -rf /..." Before migrating stored data, I would make sure everything is backed up locally. I would test the backups, and use the migration to test the restore process. Rule #1: "If you don't have two copies, you will soon have zero copies". Given my frequent typing mistaeks, I aim for four copies, with one copy in a bank vault, miles away. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
[PLUG] xsane-gimp (?)
I had trouble connecting from xsane to a Fujitsu IX-500 scanner on my wife's SL7.2 office desktop. At Sunday's clinic (thanks folks!), she learned to install xsane on two laptops (one SL7.3, one Mint 18.2), and xsane worked fine with the scanner on both laptops. After looking for differences, I de-installed xsane-gimp on her desktop machine, and the scanner connected fine. I'm not sure why xsane-gimp was installed, or why we might want to scan directly into gimp someday, but for now we do better without it. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] Librem 5 dodopaddle
This looks intriguing: http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Features/Librem-5-and-the-Challenge-of-the-Free-Phone ... although as a "late adopter" for nonessentials, I'll wait to ask somebody else who has had one for six months, and seen a detailed engineering teardown. The most attractive aspects are the (claimed) hardware switches on the radios. I would add an additional feature - a truly independent "broadcast detect" circuit that lights up (and stays on for perhaps 30 seconds) when the device emits any form of broadcast. I would not trust a device completely unless it was open source silicon, with "hardware double entry accounting" for interface transactions between chips and subunits (counters in hardware matched to counters in the software, flags raised if extra bytes are unaccounted for), but that won't happen until a rich privacy-obsessed geek pays for a lot of chip design and manufacture. I don't have that on this desktop computer, so I'm not holding my breath. I tried using a dodopaddle (functional description of a so called "smart phone") for a month; I could not make it do what I wanted, as opposed to being seduced to do what the designers and sponsors wanted. I've watched other users lose their ability to navigate the world mentally, make independent decisions, create artwork and longform text, or respect others face to face. These devices are not "smart", they just seem smarter and smarter as their fleshy appendages ( AKA "users") become less capable and more dependent. The Current Occupant was elected for his tweets. So ... I hope a truly libre phone will create a user community that owns the environment, rather living in Apple or Google company housing. The latter might have prettier furnishings, but a jail is a jail, even if you can pick some of the locks. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] Comcast cable modem tweaks
I am retitling this for those who still care about subject lines "Paul" == Paul Heinlein <heinl...@madboa.com> writes: > I'll note that if you rent a cable modem from Comcast, but would > rather use your own routing and/or wireless gear, you can ask the > installer to disable wifi and use bridging mode. The tech may look > at you funny, but s/he'll do it for you. On Tue, Oct 03, 2017 at 03:32:49PM -0700, Russell Senior wrote: > This is based on anecdotal, third hand information, but I have heard > that those tweaks will work until they roll out new firmware, at which > point the local tweaks get paved over. I don't claim that is reliable > information, but it sounded very plausible. I hope to see some confirmation one way or the other on this. My wife has had Comcast Business in her current office building for 18 months. During installation, the tech turned off wifi and enabled the cable modem to work with the already-working ALIX. No interruptions since, besides the building remodellers slicing Comcast's cable to her office. Which the Comcast tech found and fixed quickly, then stayed to answer system questions. He spent more time than I expected playing with the cable modem; perhaps he updated it and restored the settings we wanted. Or maybe he was making sure it was going to keep working for months after he left. Comcast Business service is spendy, but the service is surprisingly good. At least in wealthy NW Portland, with multiple upstarts competing for the "50+ user in one building" market. The tech was knowledgable and proud of the job he did. We will move the Comcast Business service to our house in a funky old West Slope neighborhood. We'll see if Comcast techs are as eager out here. We'll risk a two year contract with the move; if the organization that takes over Frontier's bankrupt shell does a good job, we'll consider going forward with them instead, and get 10 Gbps or better on that fiber someday. Keith P.S. Comcast cable modem pro-tip: When it IS working, make a diagram of where the cables are hooked up (yours and theirs) and the state of the blinky lights. Knowing which blinky lights change when the cable modem STOPS working speeds diagnosis. I'm going to find the the modem service manual and figure out what all the blinky lights actually mean ... real soon now. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] ISP near Gresham
t; TEDx talk). It also will help my wife transition her business to temporary or part time office space. There's more to the provider decision than cost and speed and hardware compatibility (those are very important, of course). In the best case, look for financial strength, excellent customer and technical service, POTS telephone services (the copper still works when the lights go out), transparent billing and limited price hikes (for which Comcast Residential sucks). Supporting local business (or a nonprofit or coop or ...) would be much better, but the new providers I know about have limited and focused capabilities, and probably won't connect to you. If the houses in your area are more than 60 years old, the copper phone wires are oxidizing and the insulation is waterlogged; DSL and voice WILL SUCK in rainy season (between October and June). Whatever choice you make, private/public/whatever, realize that no organization is perfect, and incompetence can destroy anything. Don't assume that what you get now will be better (or even as good) in the future. Design for flexibility and plan fallback options. That's about 120% of what I know, and 400% of what you want to read. I'll report after our Comcast Business move, and our subsequent transition off of Frontier. Assuming I'm still connected, and the rest of you still are. Cross fingers. The "singularity" is a divide by zero, and zero is looking more likely. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] Wanted: automated incoming mail system test tool
After a mail transfer failure (stemming from a subtle DNS misconfiguration), I realized I have no automated tools to keep track of the health of the incoming mail processes. Imagine a tool that sends a short email every five minutes to an email test address on my world-facing server. If a bot on the server does not get the emails regularly, it sets an alarm level, increasing with log(2) of the dead time. An applet on my laptop queries the mail status server for the alarm level, perhaps displaying a tiny envelope with a colored status number in my desktop toolbar. 0 for ok, 1 for 10 minutes no email, 2 for 20, 3 for 40 minutes, etc., topping off at 9 for 2560 minutes or 42 hours (FIX it NOW). Click on the applet for details. For extra bonus points, initiate a debug tool. If I can imagine it, somebody else has probably already done it. Does anybody know of such a tool? My programming sucks, and you don't want me writing it ... Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] What's up (or down) with spiritone/aracnet?
On Mon, Oct 02, 2017 at 10:36:37AM -0700, Rich Shepard wrote: > I think Mike C. was correct, that it's a DNS problem. > Perhaps one or more root servers was corrupted or attacked. The bad guys may be exploiting the DNS flaw described below, recently patched in the distro I'm currently upgrading. I bet the bad guys have tools for testing and probing DNS server integrity. Why don't you and I have those tools? We build ephemeral new capabilities without diagnostic and monitoring tools for critical core capabilities. Then we replace core capabilities ( systemd ), trading a heap of old known bugs for a wilderness of new unknown bugs. I'm all for replacing rickety designs with clean ones, but based on demonstrable metrics, not aesthetics, after a shitstorm of bounty-driven white-hat attacks. Sometimes there are empirical reasons for rickety. Measure twice, cut once. When softwave becomes real engineering, perhaps we will learn how to do that. Keith --- Synopsis: Critical: dnsmasq security update Advisory ID: SLSA-2017:2838-1 Issue Date:2017-10-02 CVE Numbers: CVE-2017-14491 -- Security Fix(es): * A heap buffer overflow was found in dnsmasq in the code responsible for building DNS replies. An attacker could send crafted DNS packets to dnsmasq which would cause it to crash or, potentially, execute arbitrary code. (CVE-2017-14491) -- SL6 x86_64 dnsmasq-debuginfo-2.48-18.el6_9.x86_64.rpm dnsmasq-2.48-18.el6_9.x86_64.rpm dnsmasq-utils-2.48-18.el6_9.x86_64.rpm i386 dnsmasq-debuginfo-2.48-18.el6_9.i686.rpm dnsmasq-2.48-18.el6_9.i686.rpm dnsmasq-utils-2.48-18.el6_9.i686.rpm - Scientific Linux Development Team --- -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] Accessing individual external hard drives in the same enclosure
On Fri, Sep 29, 2017 at 03:03:52PM -0700, Tomas Kuchta wrote: > Two USB devices are twice as fast only if you can connect them to two > separate root hubs in the PC. > > I'd check this before being too optimistic: > a) do you have 2 root hubs - unlikely in a laptop without a dock or TB port. > b) Did you connect the devices to separate root hub ports physically? > > Unless you have done a) and b) it is just by chance. Good point - but you should do (a) and (b) anyway. I use docks to reduce connector wear on laptops in fixed locations, which is where the external drives are. I presume by "TB" you mean Thunderbolt, not Terabyte or Tuberculosis. Ellis Island was a TB port a century ago. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] Power converters for power outages
Three weeks ago, a suicidal squirrel (or "Rocky the Frying
Squirrel") tested his electrical "mettle" on the power feed
to our street, and lost. We were without power for a few
hours, until PGE diagnosed and fixed the blown fuse.
We were involuntarily reminded that the cordless POTS
phones in our house are powered by wall warts. We lost
landline phone service until I plugged in an ancient
princess phone from a basement junkbox, so we could call
PGE (using caller ID to verify the outage location).
The grid will become increasingly unreliable in coming
decades; it wasn't designed for intermittent "alternative
energy", electric car charging, and squirrels frightened
by climate change predictions. It could be ... but "why
not" is a whole 'nother rant.
Anywhoo, the bottom line is that we will be on battery
power and generator backup more often in the future, and
it is prudent to prepare. For example, alternative power
strategies for essential wall-wart-powered devices, like
the cordless phones, the firewall computer, and the
wireless access point.
Most of the wall warts are 12V or less; the phone base
sets are 7.5V *DC*. Chinese suppliers on ebay sell
little 3 amp LM2596S step-down ("buck") converter boards
for less than $1 ... and a longish delivery time. I
plan to put a 12V marine battery in an unused fireplace
(to vent hydrogen, if any) and distribute (fused!) 12V
power to a few places in the house.
I will replace the essential wall warts with properly
adjusted step-down converters. Then the phones and
the wireless power will keep running for a few hours
while the battery discharges. For extended outages
(and we had a two week outage a decade ago) I'll fire
up the kilowatt Honda portable generator. That won't
power motor startup on our older refrigerator and
freezer, but we will replace those soon. I presume
we can find refrigerators with "low inrush current"
soft-start electronic motor controllers; I expect those
have been developed for off-grid solar homesteading.
In any case, relevant to PLUG, I have a bag of these
buck converters to play with, which might be useful for
powering your low-power computer gizzies after Oregon
plunges into darkness. Or powering them in your gas
guzzling car(*). Let's schedule a play date here for
fooling with them; contact me via email.
Keith
(*) visions of the Personal Telco 500, a high speed
automobile race where the lead car with the access point
races around the track, while distracted drivers race
behind it with their laptops, debugging and uploading
kernel patches; Indy Indie networking! :-)
--
Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
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Re: [PLUG] Accessing individual external hard drives in the same enclosure
On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 06:23:28PM -0700, Rich Shepard wrote: > I have a HornetTek dual-bay external hard drive case (SATA II and USB 2 > which are adequate for my needs). My guess is that the dual drive enclosure requires special windoze software to switch something in the controller chip in the drive. By now, some obsessive Linux coder might have reverse engineered that and made a Linux driver for it. That driver will be alpha code, unlikely to find it's way into a distro. But there's a good reason why nobody smart enough to write a driver would bother: A question you should ask is whether you mind losing two drives rather than one if the (presumably supercheap) HornetTek power supply fails, loses regulation and zaps the 5V drives with (say) unregulated 10 volt power? That is why an impulse-buy dual bay "drive toaster" sits in an unopened box on my shelf. Partly because I was too lazy to return it, partly to remind me of unintended consequences discovered by subsequent contemplation. Running two separate enclosures costs a little more and may burn more power when both are operating, but burns less power when only one enclosure is powered at a time. If I need to make an operating-system-mediated drive-to- drive copy, two enclosures is twice as fast. With low bandwidth USB2, that matters a lot. So, the total energy per copy is less with two enclosures. Something to ponder. Small acknowledged mistakes can forestall bigger ones. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] Tweaking PDFs, font size and color
Are there useful linux tools for reformatting third party PDF documents? An example is the seemingly well written but difficult- to-read "systemd in SUSE Linux Enterprise 12": https://www.suse.com/docrep/documents/huz0a6bf9a/systemd_in_suse_linux_enterprise_12_white_paper.pdf Small gray main text font, half of each page is useless whitespace. Some text boxes are gray on light gray. I'd like to increase font size and contrast and print the result. I collect annotated paper documents as insurance, in case distro update mistakes make my systems unusable and I need to repair them. So, what can I use to tweak these PDF pages? Keith BTW, poorly tested updates and core tool frobbing seems to be more common. Perhaps that is because I am less agile now, with a lot of legacy data to maintain and no interest in change for change's sake. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] VOIP, NOMOROBO, POTS, FAX
On Wed, Sep 06, 2017 at 04:51:02PM -0700, Larry Brigman wrote: > Got to a computer so I can add the URL: http://www.jollyrogertelco.com/ > And the Ted talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXVJ4JQ3SUw That's a lot of fun! I got a telemarketer call ten minutes ago, and manually Jolly Rogered them. Ring ring, answer, ... silence ... Me, falsetto voice: Hello? Hello Hello? Pradeep in Bangalore: hello ... Me, riffing, angry voice: "Where's my cheese?" Pradeep: "Cheese?" Me: "I gave you people 1400 dollars for cheese, where is it?" Confused Pradeep: "Sir ..." Me: "I want my cheese RIGHT NOW. Did YOU eat it?" Timid Pradeep: "I don't ..." At this point, I hung up, laughing my ass off. Yes, I could have wasted another 5 minutes stringing them along, but I quit while I was laughing hardest and I had done the most ego damage in the least time. I hope Pradeep is hurt and angry for the rest of the day. He knows he is doing wrong, and he's earned those feelings. Jolly Roger wastes telemarketer time, but what if we make a science of this, learn how to drive these people into insanity, so they attack their own criminal bosses? Technically: we can probably use line echo behavior and other clues to estimate how far away the telemarketer is and what region they are in, and calibrate our responses for maximum cultural effect. Technolegally: These calls enter the US phone system at identifiable bridge points. We can equip phones with a little black box with a button. Pressing the button sends an encrypted message that is collected at the bridge point to traceroute the source of the digital call, and register the complaint. All that information is stored in a public key encrypted file, which can be opened by law enforcement after streamlined, public, and prompt legal procedures. Done properly, we can semi-automatically initiate legal proceedings against these bastards within a few minutes, just as a traffic cop (under strictly defined limits) is empowered to stop a speeder or drunk driver in seconds. Design in due process and civil rights protection. 99% of such designs will be ineffective or invasive or non-legal, but an excellent solution may lurk in the remaining 1%. Sounds like a great Linux app to me! Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] HIPAA, FAX, regulations, EPA
BTW, this aspect of the thread is drifting into plug-talk territory. I keep it here because legislation will change how we are allowed to write and use do software. Keith wrote: KHL> Complications: We've got a fax, which we use 3-5 times KHL> per month, for HIPAA-sensitive stuff. No internet fax KHL> services are truly HIPAA compliant. On Wed, Sep 06, 2017 at 05:21:38PM -0500, Chuck Hast wrote: CH> I find that so funny since fax has been breakable ever since the druggers CH> used to send "orders" over hf using fax machines and very expensive SSB CH> radios, some using pilot carrier to lock both ends. HIPAA, banks and CH> insurance companies still use fax believing it is not hackable. Keith responds: Like all government mandates, HIPAA is not about safety or robustness, it is about adherence to a bureaucratic procedure, enriching lawyers and penalizing those who don't with huge fines. The internet fax services purposely avoid HIPAA, but telcos are not allowed to. On a similar note ... My nephew arranges hazardous waste disposal for the National Institute of Health research centers in Bethesda, Maryland. The worst part of his job is that the enabling legislation for the Environmental Protection Agency specified exactly which chemicals may be properly labelled and safely disposed of using EPA mandated procedures, and FORBIDS that any nonlisted chemical is labeled or handled in the same way. The chemicals listed in the legislation (decades ago) were chosen politically, with some awful toxins forced off the list by their well-connected manufacturers and users. In the decades since the act was passed, many new chemicals are in play, and some of them are terrible. Researchers at NIH Bethesda sometimes use these toxins, and it is my nephew's task to figure out how to dispose of them, since the most responsible and safe disposal means are forbidden by law. Sometimes, he is forced to put the crap down the drain and into the Chesapeake. Sometimes, he works with the researchers to find less toxic ways to accomplish their goals. He's starting to study for a law degree, with a long term goal of repairing the legislation. I hope his integrity survives. On topic moral: Don't write bad software, or politicians will force you to write even worse software. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] VOIP, NOMOROBO, POTS, FAX
Today, 10 spam calls since 630 AM, and Frontier says (after half an hour on hold) that they can't block fake phone numbers or "Out of area". It's like the submitting a list to the police of the 10 name-badge-wearing people you don't want to kill you. Time for a change. Complications: We've got a fax, which we use 3-5 times per month, for HIPAA-sensitive stuff. No internet fax services are truly HIPAA compliant. We've got Frontier FIOS; QOS goes to hell on "Netflix Nights", but there may be a way to fix that, too. Nomorobo.com (which depends on a VOIP connection) looks interesting. That means a VOIP link to the network. Also, they are "free", which means somebody may be paying them to listen in. My vague idea, feedback and consulting help welcome: 1) We move our 503-xxx- phone number of 30 years to a VOIP service, and connect that to nomorobo.com . 2) We buy a magic box to connect the existing house phone wiring (POTS) and the FAX to the IP network. Suggestions? 2a) We have a dozen wireless phones scattered around the house, and eventually the greenhouse, connected that way. 2b) We have a Sangoma card than might work in a small format PC with Asterisk, but I would rather have a simple box with outside tech support. Asterisk; been there, done that, got the scars. Too much work! 3) PLUG puts together a SIG to think about how to do this. Perhaps a few of us put together a businss. 4) We work to change the laws to make the carriers responsible for the anonymous/fraudulent crap they insist on passing through. Their computers can (in principle) be programmed to stop this crap if the end user requests it; they steadfastly refuse. These are $300/incident torts; If every Oregonian gets 2 such calls per week, and 25% are angry enough to do something about it, that is 100 million torts or $30 billion per year. Frontier's market cap is $1.1 billion, so Oregon owns them in two weeks, other carriers with similar policies ditto. We sell the assets to new and responsible owners, and fund the schools with the proceeds. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] Linux Widows Guide
Over 25 years, my wife has grown dependent on me to maintain the computers and fix problems. I worry that if something happens to me, she will be unable to stay connected, do upgrades, keep the printers working, get stuff repaired and replaced, and resist charlatans and crooks exploiting her current lack of knowledge. We are considering a project over the next year: writing a "Linux Widow's Guide". Perhaps that title is sexist; I have met many competent women Linux adepts, but none with a non-techy husband depending on Linux systems that she exclusively maintains. "Linux Widow(er)s Guide" seems clunky and harder for a librarian to catalog, but might actually sell better. I imagine there are many "Linux Spouses" on this list with similar dependents; would anyone else like to contribute writing to this project? Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] newegg security
On Thu, Jul 06, 2017 at 07:40:35AM -0700, Galen Seitz wrote: > Could someone else please try these two addresses and report if you see > a similar problem? To the best of my knowledge, both of these are > Newegg IPs. > > https://38.95.229.188 > https://216.52.208.188 Same deal using firefox, chrome, and opera. A server configuration error. Call them and let them know, though I bet the phone pool workers are in a different Chinese province than the semi-incompetent IT wonks who misconfigured the web server and IP address assignment. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] backup drive in a NexStar dock
On Thu, Jun 22, 2017 at 12:27:02PM -0700, Denis Heidtmann wrote: > By "drive adapter" I assume you mean the NexStar model NSY-D100 hard drive > dock. What should I replace it with? I chose a HD dock because I use the > drive only once per week, so it does not make sense to have it running all > the time with such low usage. But these things are prone to issues. I > took the thing apart, and I cannot say I am impressed with the > workmanship. But I found nothing that I could pin the problems on. If I > can find a way to check the power supply voltages (5V and 12V) I will do > that. Connectors should have a thick enough gold plating to be impervious to moisture. Most have just enough gold to be shiny and impress the rubes. Plugging and unplugging the drive wears them out pretty quickly. The chemistry of connector failure is fascinating ... and frightening. I have a DST100 and a DST200 dual dock which I haven't used yet. I probably should. I keep my backup drive in a cage inside the computer, probably not a good idea. If the power supply fails the wrong way, it takes out both my main and my backup hard drive. That's a good reason for an external drive on a separate power supply. However, the backup drive could be inside the case, on a short SATA cable, and connected to a small separate power supply on a separate power switch. Extra brownie points if we can trigger something that tells Linux to mount or unmount the drive. Perhaps we should collaborate and figure out a good way to do this, without the extra external "toaster" and more cables to fail. A power brick, wires, and a switch, not an extra box. Or simply a small PCB with a front panel on/off switch and circuit breakers that trigger if the system power voltage exceeds limits. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] Aliasing? Re: Audio hum when playing Blu-ray movie
On Mon, Jun 19, 2017 at 10:33:28PM -0700, John Jason Jordan wrote: > laptop for getting VLC to play a Blu-ray movie, and it does so, but > there is a loud hum, loud enough to drown out the audio in the movie. I > would say it is a 60-Herz hum, except that it seems just a bit higher. Given the strange behavior, this could be audio software written by folks who do not understand signal theory. Digital versions of audio signals are sampled into a fast series of mumbers. The sample rate might be 32,000 samples per second or 64,000 samples per second or 65,536 samples per second or something really weird like fer instance 63,262.3 samples per second. Different devices use different sample rates; a video device might sample at a different frequency than an audio device. I don't listen to much audio or watch movies on my computer, so I don't know the current standards. Adding insult to injury, computer CPU clocks are "dithered" - the clock rate varies a bit so that the radio noise that the computer broadcasts is spread out, not a single pure tone that the FCC can point at and say "you are interfering, add more shielding!" This is a cheat permitted under current rules, shielding is more expensive but more polite, but I digress ... Lastly, your computer responds to interrupts to do stuff, a device or a service periodically (60 Hz is common, so is 100 Hz) requesting CPU time to take care of things. Now ... with all those different things happening at different times, imagine an audio source that is sampled at 64,000 samples per second (perhaps the Blue Ray sound track) feeding an audio program that wants 65,536 samples per second. Not the same rate! Where do the extra 536 samples per second come from? How do you turn samples that are 15.625000 microseconds apart into samples that are 15.2487891 microseconds apart? And what do you do if your audio output system wants more samples, and the video display is refreshing at that time? An excellent media programmer will understand all that and deal with it. A not-quite-excellent programmer will fail to provide for some combinations of software, hardware, sources and outputs. Indeed, in some cases a "quiet" channel with the wrong kind of zeros (two's compliment versus integer) mixed up will make a hell of a racket. I hope I've flummoxed you with detail, so that you understand how a less-than-perfect programmer might be flummoxed as well. There's a good chance you are listening to the result of such a flummox. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] Firefox 52 crashes on older 32 bit distro
On some of my machines, I run 32 bit Scientific Linux 6.9, a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9. RHEL6.x is supported until November 2020, perhaps to 2023 if Red Hat repeats past practices, and SL (supported by a team at Fermilabs, with extra scientific packages added), is an enhanced clone of RHEL. However Firefox 52.1esr, the supposedly stable extended release, SEGMENTATION FAULTS with the 32 bit version. Safe mode ditto. No trace files left after the segfault. Could be worse; On one of my laptops (hacked hardware), Firefox sometimes crashes Linux, causing a reboot. My favorite programming language is solder, but that doesn't leave trace files, either. So, I downrevved Firefox to 45.9esr, turned off automatic updates, and will put up with the nagging messages from websites demanding the latest and greatest. Better than crashes. Maybe the next ESR release won't segfault, and I can turn updates back on. I'm told that version 52 is a MAJOR re-redesign of Firefox, an all-singing all-dancing multithreaded media munching monster. Not competely tested, apparently. Perhaps Mozilla should work on their testing processes first. BTW, the good thing is that Firefox stores itself entirely in /usr/lib/firefox, so changing versions is as easy as moving them into directories with names like /usr/lib/firefox45, then simlinking /usr/lib/firefox to that. When the next version XXesr comes along, I will remove the symlink, install to /usr/lib/firefox, rename that to /usr/lib/firefoxXX, then symlink to that. A small hassle, but better than crashes. -- While I am slowly upgrading the machines to SL7.3 64 bit, I have a 20 year accumulation of more than 1000 binaries to recompile and verify, so this will take a while. I run long term support distros so I don't have to do this often, but our friends at Mozilla seem to prefer churn. Perhaps they should get a job at Microsoft, churning Word. I prefer the fewer failures, fewer features corner of the map. I can generate plenty of my own failures, thank you. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] Intel new memories ( was WD 4TB failure ...)
On Wed, May 10, 2017 at 08:54:41PM -0700, Michael Christopher Robinson wrote: > A google article suggests that data corruption and not drive > failure is the greatest issue with SSDs. If the data corrupts, > that is equally as bad as a drive failure. Intel is working on > a new technology using Ferro Something for a semiconductor, it > is ultra low power and more reliable potentially than current > solid state flash memory technologies. Perhaps someone else > can fill in the gaps with what Intel is working on. Intel "announced" 3D Xpoint solid state memory last year; much fanfare, no details. Their first Optane products are scheduled for 2018. Those will start out far more expensive than flash or DRAM, with performance somewhere in between. "3D Xpoint" is probably chalcogenide phase change glass, which Intel published a lot of journal papers about, and filed a lot of patents ... then stopped about a year before the big press conference announcing 3D Xpoint. This is Intel's usual behavior. Phase change glass is sometimes called "ferroelectric". http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/memory/has-intel-invented-a-universal-memory-tech The pretty picture is a computer rendering, not an actual physical device. In semiconductors, a scheduled release of a new chip technology more tham one year out means there are serious problems, and no clue when or even if those problems will be solved. Remember bubble memory? Nantero has a competing technology involving carbon nanotubes (gee whiz gosh wow!). They've been working on it for more than a decade, and are trickling out samples now. Starved for cash, like most startups. I've talked with their CEO, who claims that Xpoint won't work. Maybe nothing in the pipeline will work. This is a struggle for investment dollars. Those dollars are migrating towards molecular biology, and Intel and Nantero and others are fighting over crumbs. My guess is that all of this is at the bleeding edge of the possible, and when the fog clears, there will be one player with enough customers and resources to go into production with one more big change. The semiconductor industry is maturing; dense solid state memory may be like Boeing's supersonic transport. Much is made of Moore's law, doubling capability every two years. What is neglected is Moore's SECOND Law: the cost of a chip-making FACTORY doubles every FOUR years. When the cost of a higher-capability factory exceeds a company's slowing annual revenue growth (Intel is at 5% now), the rate at which new factories are built slows down, which slows down the rate of process improvement, whcih slows down new applications. Intel has already announced that the cadence of new processes will slow. We may be nearing the end of the fast exponential, as we did with automobiles, aircraft, electricity, telegraph, telephone, television, rocketry, ... Sorry, no singularity, just a cascading series of S curves. It was fun while it lasted. Further discussion belongs on plug-talk, but the overall problem frames future Linux development, and software in general. I hope that, facing resource limits, new software startups will focus on reliability and stability and efficiency rather than exponential accumulation of buggy complexity. Perhaps we will have time for regression testing ... Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] WD 4TB Red drive failure...
On Wed, May 10, 2017 at 12:16:28AM -0700, Michael Christopher Robinson wrote: > I suspect that my two Western Digital 4TB Red drives are only 3-4 > years old. I'm running FreeNAS 9.10 U3. I'm getting an error > finding the ZFS filesystem that is striped across the two drives. > Thought maybe I had done a mirror, no such luck. I suppose I can > take these drives to someone who can do some tests to find out if > one or both of them have gone bad. Can they be repaired? How > about the data on them? Any data that you do not have two copies of, you have zero copies of. Backups. http://dirvish.org Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] Examples of customized grub2 configuration files?
On Mon, Apr 3, 2017, Keith Lofstrom <kei...@kl-ic.com> wrote: > I'm looking for examples (with explanatory comments) of > customized configuration files to use in the /etc/grub.d > directory, somewhere out there on the intertubes. Tom H on the Scientific Linux mailing list offered a helpful response. I wrote up what I did here: http://wiki.keithl.com/grub2single Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] Examples of customized grub2 configuration files?
I'm looking for examples (with explanatory comments) of customized configuration files to use in the /etc/grub.d directory, somewhere out there on the intertubes. Specifically, what I hope to add is a "11_single" file to /etc/grub.d that adds a boot menu option for booting the most recent kernel in single user mode. Yes, I know I can select a menu entry with "e", and then edit "SINGLE" onto the end of the kernel line. However, I will typically only do this when something is wrong, I am in a hurry to fix it, and prone to mistakes. I prefer to prepare for emergencies in advance, when I am calm and have time to think things through, so I will have more brain cells to focus on on the specifics of an unplanned emergency. I do best by copying and understanding examples. The example "41_custom" file has almost no useful comments; they are there to remind the grub2 maintainer, not teach a newbie to make safe tweaks. Ditto the documentation. Completely implemented and explained, the new grub2 setup could be a lot safer and easier to use than the old grub setup. But old grub was simple vi tweaks of a single grub.conf file, and the new setup requires far more knowledge to operate properly. I prefer to learn from multiple tested examples. I'd rather spend an hour than a week learning to do this. Any suggestions? I did find an almost-germane explanation of a particular grub2 customization at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/CustomMenus but my brain is too small to translate that into the solution that I am hoping for. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] Which version of MATE are folks using?
On Mon, Apr 03, 2017 at 07:58:00AM -0700, Dick Steffens wrote: > So, to get to the question, which version of MATE are folks using? I use Mate version 1.16 from the EPEL repository. Mate is NOT officially supplied with Red Hat Enterprise Linux or the clone that I use, Scientific Linux. Red Hat pushes Gnome 3 pretty strongly, which is more like a video game than a work environment, IMHO. Mate seems incomplete, but is a better approximation of the Gnome 2 work environment than anything else. Gnome 2 is no longer supportable, since the underlying GTK libraries and distros have evolved without backwards compatibility. No clue about which (if any?) distros feature Mate as their primary desktop environment. I worry about Mate's long term support; if the principal contributors find "real jobs" someday, I may be S.O.L. I imagine that's how Gnome 3 wandered off into the weeds. I send money to the Mate project sometimes. I hope that encourages persistence. If I had ten million dollars, I would hire Miguel de Icaza to lead a Gnome palace revolution. Then he would hire a team to make Mate into a bulletproof Gnome 4, while making Gnome 3 into the new Microsoft desktop, sinking both. Keith P.S. If I had ten million dollars, I would need a hundred million dollars to do all the great projects I can imagine doing with ten million dollars. Sigh. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] Netgear GS716T $25 at Goodwill
As of noon on Wednesday 2017/03/29, there were six used Netgear GS716T 16 port gigabit "smart" switches at the Goodwill store on SE Grand near Mill (a few blocks SW of Free Geek) $25. Today is 10% off "senior" day for 55 yo and older (does that include decrepit and dishonest 40 year olds?). Don't know if they work. Don't know which firmware version. Don't know if the GS716T sucks. They have standard IEC power cord sockets, but no power cords; bring one with you for testing. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] Surplus shop -- with equipment racks?
On Sun, Mar 26, 2017 at 06:54:25PM -0700, nat...@sandver.net wrote: > Hello, > > For any of you familiar with the Seattle area, is there any place in > Portland like Re-PC? I'm particularly looking to get my hands on an > inexpensive full-size, four-post equipment rack, but if there's anywhere > that also carries a weird and wonderful assortment of random old Unix > workstations, network gear, etc., that's always fun to browse and pick up > odd toys from, too. Nothing quite like Re-PC, but then, Re-PC is not what it was two decades ago. Surplus Gizmos in Hillsboro, about 15 miles west Green Century Recycling on MacAdam, near SW Free Geek Thrift Store, near SE EcoBinary on Beaverton Hillsdale Highway All these recycling places put their most-likely-to-sell stuff in the store, but have a lot more passing through on the way to material separation recycling. For example, ecoBinary retails perhaps 10% of what they get for recycling, mostly from businesses. Ask the person at the counter (usually Mickie) to watch for what you want. I asked for three IBM X61 thinkpads, and they found them for me in a week. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] CentOS 6.x to CentOS 7.x
On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 06:09:21PM -0700, Thomas Groman wrote: > ... just start a new CentOS 7 box and migrate your stuff over. Agreed. Machines are cheap, especially used (motherboard from Free Geek?), and bringing up a new distro on the new machine while leaving the old one running is slightly less painful. Get a KVM switch and use both. I use Scientific Linux, a clone of RHEL like CentOS, with many scientific, engineering, and math packages added. The SL online community is not nearly as big as CentOS, and I rely on the CentOS community and FAQs as well, but the SL folks solve the same kinds of computing problems that I do, calculation rather than web-service oriented. The transition from RHEL6 to RHEL7 (the upstream version that CentOS and Scientific Linux are copied from) is especially jarring, much more fraught than RHEL5 to RHEL6 was. I am going through the process now because my mind is aging. I must upgrade eventually, when RHEL6 reaches end-of-life perhaps 6 years from now. The init change is more painful if you wrote your own init scripts (I haven't). A more painful change for me is the change of firewall control to a GUI. I am setting the new SL7 machines up with the older iptables instead, because 90% of my work is through xterm. The most painful change is gnome3, which is an abomination unto Cthulu. Mate is functionally only 90% of gnome 2, but getting better, while gnome3 is 30% of gnome 2 and getting worse, more like a video game than a work environment. Setting up Mate can be a pain in the ass, but there are many in the CentOS community helping to make that easier. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] monitoring MAGNITUDE of internet activity - how?
On Wed, Mar 01, 2017 at 04:33:57PM -0600, Richard Owlett wrote:
> Is there a tool which can be
> "turned on" at time t0
> "turned off" at time t1
> which will report the number of
> "uploaded" bytes
> "downloaded" bytes
> in that interval?
For your purposes, perhaps you pipe a standard interface
reporting tool into a text file that you can edit into
.cvs format for a spreadsheet.
However, sometimes the easiest way to do stuff is to learn
a scripting language and automate a task. The good thing
about scripting languages is that you can always look at
the program to remind yourself how it works.
A decade ago, I wrote a cheesy perl hack to wrap around
"ifconfig" to look at total bandwidth used, then modified
it a year ago to look at specific interface usage. It is
very dependent on the behavior of /sbin/ifconfig for an
old distro, but it is easy to modify. It would be even
easier if "standard" tool maintainers were more
intelligent and responsible and less "creative".
Keith
--
#!/usr/bin/perl
# ifbr60 - average traffic rate for 60 seconds
# depends on specific behavior of /sbin/ifconfig
# V0.1.1 Keith Lofstrom KLIC 2016 Jan 30
my $delay = 60 ;
use bigint ; # the byte counts can be very large
my $ifc; # interface name
my $encap ; # type of encapsulation
my $mac; # mac (hardware) address
my $updn ; # interface up or down?
my $inet ; # ipv4 internet address
my $txrx ; # sum of transmit and receive bytes
my $err; # sum of transmit and receive errors
my $ifcNum = scalar(@ARGV);
my @r, @t;
for my $pass (0..1) {
my $ifcnt = -1 ;
foreach my $port (@ARGV) {
$ifcnt += 1 ; # start at 0
open (IFOUT, "/sbin/ifconfig |" );
while () {
if( /(\w+)\s+Link encap:(\w+)/ ) {
$ifc = $1 ;
} elsif( /inet addr:([\d\.]+)/ ) {
$inet = $1 ;
} elsif( /RX bytes:(\d+).+TX bytes:(\d+)/ ) {
if( $port eq $ifc ) {
printf "%4s%14s%16s.r%16s.t\n", $ifc,$inet,$1,$2 ;
if( $pass == 0 ) {
$r[$ifcnt] = $1 ;
$t[$ifcnt] = $2 ;
} else {
my $rd = ( $1 - $r[$ifcnt] ) / $delay ;
my $td = ( $2 - $t[$ifcnt] ) / $delay ;
printf "%4s%14s%15.3f/s %15.3f/s\n\n", $ifc,$inet,$rd,$td ;
}
}
}
}
}
if( $pass == 0 ) {
printf("\n");
sleep $delay;
}
}
close IFOUT;
--
Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
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[PLUG] Manuals for HP Laserjet 4
Regards and HP4+ On Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 09:37:25AM -0800, John Jason Jordan wrote: > >If someone else hasn't already spoken for it, I'll take it. > It's been spoken for. :) I have six manuals for the Laserjet 4 and 4M from a recent cleanup (the last LJ4 left a decade ago). A mechanical parts level service manual, users manual, networking, PCL5 manuals. About 8 inches of shelf space. I don't know how applicable these are to the LJ4+, or whether anyone still cares about HP's PCL printer control language, but my guess is that they still apply, and should be useful for maintaining open-source printer drivers for these venerable, built-like-a-tank machines. I expect that currently deployed LJ4s will remain working long after all the current crop of cheap new printers wear out, and after the Chinese stop selling us new ones because you-know-who pissed them off. So, these manuals may be vital to those trying to keep the remaining fraction of our economy functioning. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] Comcast speed upgrade
On Fri, Jan 06, 2017 at 08:51:35PM -0800, Dick Steffens wrote: > An email arrived this afternoon from xfinity (Comcast) telling me > that they are upping my speed from 75 Mbps to "up to 100 Mbps" after > I reboot. These are download speeds. They provided directions: ... > My Ubuntu 14.04 20 ms119.02 Mbps6.18 Mbps ... > Is there likely to be any change if I shut down my router, their > cable modem, and start them back up? Just for grins, try a speed test TO SOMEPLACE BESIDES THE USUAL SPEED TEST SITES (say an ubuntu DVD image from a known fast server, but find a download source that you usually download from anyway) and see how fast that moves, BEFORE "netflix-pig primetime". Then try again DURING primetime, then reboot/replug and try again after that. I presume they treat speed tests to known test sites as higher priority than other traffic. Makes their service look better. So try moving stuff that matters to you. I presume the upgrade moves you to a different switch at their end, that they actually are trying to deliver more bandwidth to you when the network is saturated, and that new the switch connects better to the sites you want, not just the sites that Joe Q. Couchpotato wants. There is a small but nonzero chance that they are evil bastards, and are moving you to a slower switch with more NSA spy hardware attached. Unlikely, I hope ... In any case, get some data that matters to you. Then try again in a few months. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] RIP Paul Nelson, wiki obituary?
On Wed, 4 Jan 2017, Russell Senior wrote: > Is there an obit anywhere? I looked at the O, didn't find it. On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 10:05:48AM -0500, Paul Heinlein wrote: > Obituaries at The Oregonian are very expensive. I did not know Paul, but I have set up obituary wiki websites. When my mother passed away 12 years ago, I set up a wiki for her: http://wiki.keithl.com/CathyLofstrom About 40 family and friends contributed pages or info. All I paid the Oregonian for was a picture and a url. Some of the contributors were 80 year old grannies; wiki ain't rocket science. Her pastor used a large trove of information and anecdotes to write the memorial service. Paul deserves this much. If anyone here volunteers to manage the wiki, I can provide space on one of my servers. There are more wikispammers now, so the management task is more involved, and I don't have time for that. If nobody else does so, I will purchase paulnelson.org from godaddy and add an instance to my moinmoin wikifarm. Others must take it from there. Ask yourself whether watching TV tonight means more to you than Paul did. Contact me off the list. Somebody send me a picture, and I can seed the start page. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] Scripts vs GUI
On 12/10/2016 10:15 PM, Keith Lofstrom wrote: > ... > The power of Unix/Linux is that shell scripts can automate > what you do frequently. > ... On Sun, Dec 11, 2016 at 01:21:21AM -0800, King Beowulf wrote: > ... > Often a properly designed GUI is quicker and more intuitive that trying > to remember and track obscure CLI options stuffed into a script > somewhere. > ... If you reread what I wrote, it is about making your own SHELL SCRIPTS for frequently used tasks. You can connect to your scripts with the command line, or you can add a desktop icon, or add an icon to the Gnome/KDE menu. CREATE and AUTOMATE. There are tools for capturing and automating mouse clicks. But your desktop icons can move around, so that is very fragile. Rich mentions LyX for working with LaTeX, which I have tried using. Too inflexible, too much work to iterate towards what I want, too subject to the changing whims of GUI re-designers. My documents are built out of segments of other documents, dozens of interations, often with other tools (like povray) making some of the elements of the complete document. Concatenating documents with shell scripts is easier after iteration two, and vital on a tight deadline. My dear wife uses the desktop and GUI far more than I do; the icons and documents are piled on top of each other on her desktop, and she cannot find anything. Her desktop has meeting minutes from two years ago, but she can't use grep to locate what she worked on last month. With grep and text sources, I can find meeting minutes from 20 years ago; more specifically, a document in a specific two week time window 20 years ago - on half a dozen machines, with different distro versions. If I put that search in a script, with a few comments, I can use it again in the future. I can rewrite it to look for another time window, without needing to remember how to use rarely used grep options. When I have many such scripts, I can use grep to find them. Simple shell programming (with comments!) is an investment in the future. Some people "organize" their information and tasks like they have no future. They work like blue collar assembly line workers, repeating the same manual operations over and over until they get old and they can't hold their hands steady any more. Or programmers replace them with a robot. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] Scripts vs GUI
On another Linux list, someone asked fpr a GUI to simplify
using scp ("too easy to make a mistake on the command
line"), and someone else suggested "fileroller".
I suggested figuring out how to use scp once (examples on
the web, man pages for more information), then putting an
example in a shell script. Want a different file? Copy
the shell script and modify it.
The power of Unix/Linux is that shell scripts can automate
what you do frequently. You can store your shell scripts
in your own ~/bin, or share them in /usr/local/bin. Put
comments in the scripts so you can figure them out the
next time, or find them with grep if you forgot what you
named them.
Some tasks, like looking at web pages, are better done
with a web browser, but for repeated web accesses, even
that can be automated with wget in a shell script.
GUIs are manual labor. If you want arm exercise, grow a
garden and get sunshine and vegetables for your efforts.
Keith
--
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Re: [PLUG] Linux job hunting...
On Mon, Nov 14, 2016 at 06:10:45AM -0800, Michael C. Robinson wrote: > I have a major problem, I'm a college grad in > computer science with 0 years of experience. Portland (and software hubs in general) may be the wrong place to look, since so many young people come here looking for software and Linux work. Given the values you've expressed in the past, you might be happier somewhere in the Midwest, at a non-software- focused company (where YOU would be the expert!). Look where others fear to go. An example that comes to mind is Rockwell-Collins Radio in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. A friend grew up there, moved to the Bay area and married a New-York-born physicist, who has predictable political views. Her husband and her family do NOT agree politically. He would die before living in Iowa. That may also hold for most Linux professionals, so there is likely to be a shortage "out there". I don't know whether Rockwell-Collins in particular has openings, but there must be hundreds of companies like them who cannot attract enough Linux programmers. Learn something about embedded systems; most hardware (such as manufacturing machinery) is computerized now. Buy an Arduino and attend a dorkbots meeting or two. If you interview at a hardware company, something hand- sized that does something interesting (preferably a sensor of some sort) could move you to the top of the candidate list. Hardware engineers love to handle objects. Post-911, food processing plants have become highly secure facilities, with lots of software surveillance and process monitoring. More software jobs enabling blue-collar jobs. While there may be fewer total software jobs in "fly-over country", what matters to you is the ratio of jobs to willing and qualified job seekers. You can still connect to the global open source community from software-light areas. In a few years, you may be teaching and mentoring other young Linux hopefuls in your chosen new community. I look forward to that. Given my differing personal values, it is politically disadvantageous to suggest this to you. The exodus of liberal professionals from borderline red states to already-blue states is partly responsible for recent election results; fewer blue votes "out there" means red wins more of those states, whereas a few extra blue (or red!) votes in the Portland area changes nothing. OTOH, I also believe unemployment and desperation contributed to the inferior choice of candidates on the ballot in 2016. We are all scared for the future. If you as a software engineer can help create jobs in a midwestern community, that helps us all, and we may make less fearful and more rational choices in 2020. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] Mint 18.0 Cinnamon 64-bit: Message 'Boot is Full'
On Sun, Nov 13, 2016 at 04:39:22PM -0800, Vedanta Teacher wrote: > Everyone, > >I'm running a relatively new HP Pavilion desktop with: > Mint 18.0 Cinnamon 64-bit > Version 3.0.7 > Linux Kernel 4.4.0-47-generic > RAM 14.6 > HD 945.9GB > > Yesterday it threw a message at my of: Boot is Full > > I've used the default installation settings for Boot & Grub. Presumably, you have both a boot and a main partition. Most distros are set up this way. Mint is probably set up to run automated updates, which means it adds new kernels with security fixes from time to time, and does not delete the old ones. If you installed Mint with a "just big enough" boot partition, a few updates will add enough kernels to fill it. Your boot partition is too small. The easiest way to fix this is with a "live flash drive" (like a live CD), using gparted with a GUI. A live CD will work just as well (but slower). I'm pretty sure Mint has a live flash drive version. If not, you can do this with an Ubuntu live (CD/flash). With gparted, you can make the main partition smaller, and then the boot partition bigger. With a one terabyte hard drive, I would make the boot partition at least 10 GB, or more than 5 times as much space as it uses now. That is way more than you will probably ever need, but you won't ever have to deal with this error again. You can also use text editors and command line tools from the install (CD/flash) in repair mode, and remove the older kernels. This is not a difficult fix, but it is easy to screw up, so I do not recommend it for the not-yet-adept who have monster hard drives like yours. There's a small chance that your boot partition is fine, but you are intentionally storing stuff in boot that doesn't belong there. Don't do that, move those unholy files to your main partition, and sin no more. You can do that with a live CD, or in repair mode, too. But if the distro put those files in boot, let not man split asunder. :-) Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] The plague of cloud devices
On Tue, Oct 25, 2016 at 10:40:40PM -0700, Chuck Hast wrote: > I have a "Wifi thermostat" from Honeywell, the drawback > is you have to connect the thing to the cloud, for some > reason the thermostat can reach the server ... Your satellite connection is, in effect, up to a million miles long. Signals to the Honeywell server and back travel through the satellite twice, up and down, and that is half a second right there. Then there is queueing time. You share the limited satellite channel with thousands of others simultaneously, and you wait your turn. That can add many seconds to the delays if the channel is congested. I doubt that Honeywell's subcontracted Chinese engineers even thought about delays through satellites when they designed the timeout and retry response on your thermostat. Even if the timeout was programmable, you probably need to use the remotely managed GUI to change it. I'd take it back, and avoid net-connected controllers until you get optical fiber. But then, I would never expose a life-and-death appliance (which furnaces can be) to the internet. A malicious cracker could dial up the furnace to maximum temperature on a hot summer day, or permanently disable it during freezing temperatures. If the thermostat was more intimately involved in furnace operation (like direct control of gas feed and ignition), it could turn your house into a fuel-air bomb, like the one that took down the Murrah building in OKC in 1995. Someday, state-sponsored cyberterrorists may firebomb whole cities with a few well-hidden exploits like that. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com - Don't waste your vote in 2016! Give it to the Republicans and Democrats, and they will gladly waste it for you! ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] Email reply robot for PSU wifi access?
PSU fixed the guest wifi, and I appreciate that. Perhaps Mordac took a vacation this summer. A minor annoyance remains. To get access, PSU's access bot either texts your slave-phone (which I do not have) or sends an html email to the address you provide (my sole use of gmail). The email has a weblink that, when clicked, completes the handshake, after which 24 hours of access is provided. Cumbersome. I run postfix on my own mail server. How easy would it be to set up a special email address that drives a script that extracts the web address and "clicks it" for me? For example, imagine the special email address is p...@keithl.com . Postfix redirects the email body to a script which extracts the PSU URL: > ... > To activate your PSU Guest Wi-Fi access for 24 hours, > please click on the following link: > https://sentinel.net.pdx.edu/activate/email/800fa36407c214d1cd56d7fb1302adae > ... ... then sends a wget to that address, discarding the result. This all happens in the background, I don't need to jump through the extra hoops. Of course, I will use a more obscure email address on my server, and change it from time to time. Besides bureaucratic obstinacy, I don't see much potential for problems. Am I missing something important? Can a clever programmer suggest an even easier way to do it, perhaps even automagically filling out the guest wifi "signin and agree" form as soon as I connect to PSUguest? I can even imagine a command line script that enables my wifi (I leave that turned off by default), connects to PSUguest, fills out the script, then activates the openvpn link to my home network. Seems like someone with better programming skills and a similar network setup could figure this out in 30 minutes. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] HP fine for me ... Re: Another reason ...
On Sat, Sep 24, 2016 at 02:44:13PM -0700, Rich Shepard wrote: > FWIW, I buy refilled HP laser cartridges for both the LJ-5 > monochome and 2550L color at Cartridge World and they've > all worked great for me. I've settled on an ancient HP4050n for cheap black-and-white (sadly, it won't do postscript 3, default for some apps), and the venerable duplexing HP2605dn for color. I have 3 HP2605dn's deployed and one nearly-brand-new spare (plucked out of a scrap heap with 40 prints on it). I have good luck with Brand X toner cartridges from Cartridge Network in Raleigh Hills, and enjoy verbal sparring with the owner, who reminds me of Rich. I have 6 HP260x printers in storage as a source of spare parts (fusers and belts) that I will probably never use. One was ruined by a very leaky Cartridge World cartridge, so my mileage, as they say, differs from Rich Shepard's. If toner gets into the laser and rotating mirror assembly, it is fiendishly difficult to get inside there and clean it out, hours of tricky disassembly and reassembly. That is my major complaint about the HP260x design. If anyone is feeling ambitious about fixing HP printers, or wants some lasers and rotating mirrors and gears and motors, the printers in storage (sans toner) are available to anyone willing to drive me from East Beaverton to Tigard (217 and Greenberg) to pick them up. Otherwise, they get recycled Real Soon Now. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] Keeping laptop connected to a specific WiFi hotspot
On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 11:42:09PM -0700, Russell Senior wrote: > NetworkManager has a way of "forgetting" a wireless network you have > connected to before. According to my brief research, try looking in: > > /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/ > > and look for a file that matches the network you don't want to connect > to. Either delete or move it from that directory. You can also click a > bunch of clicks to do the same thing, but I don't remember all the > clicks or know how to describe them adequately. On my ancient gnome2 system, the directories and files are in: ~/.gconf/system/networking/connections/ cd to that directory, and (to find xfinity, for example): grep xfinity */*/* I do this fairly often, to delete xfinity hotspots, which open-hotspot-hunting network manager latches onto like a heroin addict looking for a fix. I wish there was a way to force it to always ignore "open" xfinity hotspots, besides burning down the houses containing the WAPs that broadcast it. :-( To avoid further arson prosecutions, I suppose I must set up a shell script in cron.daily to seek out the xfinity entries and delete them. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] GMANE at risk
https://lwn.net/Articles/695695/ GMANE, the open source mailing list archive, is down due to DDOS attacks, and the fellow running it is too stressed to continue. PLUG uses GMANE in addition to Mailman. Private discussions among the leaders of the open source community are tending towards rebuilding the GMANE interface at the Internet Archive. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] Creating a home network
On Wed, May 11, 2016 at 07:51:45AM -0700, Larry Brigman wrote: > All of 1) can be handled by a network switch. Network switches can be > chained together to allow more connections. Surplus stores. Plenty of perfectly good 10/100 8 port (even 24 and 32 ports) switches out there, replaced by gigabit switches. There's a whole shelf of them at ecoBinary in Beaverton. For my own office, I scored a 32 port gigabit switch with a broken power supply that I knew how to fix. I use the huge bandwidth for backups every night, but normal users less obsessive about backup can easily get by with 100 mbps. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] Enabling USB backup of Android Moto G
I am experimenting with two Android phones (setting them up for my wife). I've got adb ( adb = Android Debug Bridge version 1.0.3) running on a 64 bit 3.10 kernel Linux laptop, which I connect to the microUSB port on the phones. Both phones are updated to 5.1 Lollipop. adb backup doesn't work on the older Motorola moto G. I haven't figured out why. It does connect to Linux and show the contents of the picture folder on the Mate desktop, acting like a camera. Suggestions? HELP??? The new and acceptably brickable phone, a Motorola Moto E model XT1527, does an "adb backup" just fine. I will attempt a wipe and "adb restore" Real Soon Now. I prefer to rely on Google as little as possible, and to slim down the bloatware. Both phones will have some of my wife's patient information on them, much more on the E. While I would prefer to keep /everything/ medical on the E, my wife is has less IT discipline (hence my involvement and concern for the G). If she loses a phone, I want to be able to remotely wipe it without worrying about data recovery. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] documented sudo?
I'm transitioning machines to a RHEL 7.x derived distro from prehistoric RHEL 5.x. I am encountering selinux, firewalld, systemd, and other command-line configured tools, which produce many little disconnected XML files, rather than the /etc configuration files I am used to. I put lots of comments with observations, intent, hints, helpful webpages, and other useful information in my config files, and use those comments to get up to speed years later, when I repair or upgrade those files. This is difficult to do with the *d command-line tools. I would expect there would be something like a "dodo" command, pronounced "dew-dew" (*) and is short for "documented do". This gives the user an opportunity to add documentation to every sudo, timed and in context with every other dodo, per subsystem and in sequence. Syntax errors would be treated separately, corrections aided. This seems like an obvious help tool for sysadmin using the new config-file-free tools, so it probably exists. What is it called? If it does not, would someone please earn fame and fortune by writing it? Keith (*) dodo pronounced "dew-dew" indicates cognoscenti who've got their s**t together. Pronounced "doe-doe", like the extinct flightless bird, indicates a clueless newbie. I hope this is an additional incentive to snarky tool writers to write this for me. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] Removing Network Manager Wifi Connections
I still use Network Manager on some ancient (5 years old!) laptop distros, but have not found useful documentation. I learned how to delete unwanted wifi connections, in particular xfinity. They are stored in: .gconf/system/networking/connections ... which is lots of numbered directories, not so useful. However, going to that directory and doing this: grep -r Auto * > names Gave me a list of the network names (I've accumulated 340) embedded in xml fluff. After making a backup copy of the "connections" directory, I used vi to edit the list down to number/name pairs with a tab in between. Then I removed the lines of access points that I wanted to keep. Then I removed everything after the tab, and put an "rm -r " in front of the spaces. Then I ran the file as a script with "sh names" Perhaps there is a GUI command to do similar editing, but I make too many mistakes with GUIs. Making backup directories, then making scripts that I can review obsessively, is a much safer way to do a cleanup. One surprise was that there was nothing like "Jack's Porn Shop" in the hundreds of names. I would have guessed I was more curious about such things. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] LIGO and Linux
Last week, the LIGO Consortium announced the detection of gravitational waves from the merger of a pair of black holes an estimated 400 megaparsecs away. The mc² energy of the gravitational waves was 3 times the sun's mass, converted entirely to energy. The Hanford, WA and Livingston, Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatories ( Advanced LIGO ) use their own customized "GPL Linux" kernel. Not all F/OSS, they use MATLAB Simulink for some of the data analysis, but all of it was constructed with F/OSS tools on Linux systems. Another win for the penguin and the gnu! They spent 5 months ruling out other local massive events, like deep seismic movements or Bill Gates using an ATM. The announcement paper in Physical Review Letters had 1140 authors from 133 institutions worldwide. Surprisingly readable, and Creative Commons 3.0 . Announcement: https://dcc.ligo.org/public/0122/P150914/014/LIGO-P150914:Detection_of_GW150914.pdf http://tiny.cc/dligo Design description, Linux mentioned on page 37 third paragraph: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0264-9381/32/7/074001/pdf http://tiny.cc/aligo Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] Tool to test internet speed
On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 11:01:23AM -0800, John Jason Jordan wrote: > My computers are both Xubuntu 14.04.3, up to date. There may be > something built in that would tell me what I want to know, but I could > use a clue what to look for. > > Suggestions? When do you test? Netflix uses, on average, 40% of US internet bandwidth. Usage is never "average" - at peak TV times, and in some places, Netflix hogs almost all capacity. They demand video quality low-latency service, through many choke points and congested fibers, so the rest of us must wait behind their supposedly more-important traffic. The internet is indeed a "net", many segments and switches between you and the server you are talking to. Any one of those segments and switches can be slow or choked up. The internet is not optimized for video delivery, just as a bike lane is not optimized for 18-wheel freight trucks. Try running the test on a weekday morning, early, and see if the results vary. Also, the best way to estimate what you are actually using is "ifconfig". You may have bandwidth hogs you've underestimated or don't know about. I wrapped ifconfig in a little perl script running on my firewall machine. The script asks ifconfig for send and receive byte counts, waits 50 seconds, then collects them again and does the math. You can do the same with: ifconfig ; sleep 100 ; ifconfig "sleep 100" takes longer but makes the math easier. Look at the numbers for "RX bytes" and "TX bytes." I see the Netflix Effect with my 15/5 Frontier FIOS; on Friday and Saturday nights, I read books instead of using the net. If my wife must answer the internet phone from her office (doctor on call), she reroutes it to her cell phone. TV seems to be more important than life-saving phone calls. Various websites like "internet speed test" are usually too optimistic; they connect to test servers with good bandwidth and low congestion. But most let you choose the test server. I often select a test server in Boston or Atlanta or Miami to test the whole internet, not just my last mile of it. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] Connecting to PSU wifi with linux
I was surprised to learn last night that most Linux users have problems connecting to PSU wifi, not just me. I figured out a procedure to connect: 1) Connect your laptop to the SSID "PSU Guest" 2) Fill out the form with your gmail address, connect by email 3) Turn OFF wifi on your laptop 4) as root, run "dhclient -r" 5) Turn ON wifi again 6) Connect to the SSID "PSU" (/not/ "PSU Guest") 7) Surf to gmail, open the message from PSU, click the link 8) You are in, for 24 hours! For more details, see http://wiki.keithl.com/Mordac I will update that with the improvements of others, but please make the effort to read that page first. And if any TENURED PSU FACULTY are reading this, please create the website mordac.pdx.edu and populate it with solutions to PSU IT problems. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] Gmail: Re: Connecting to PSU wifi with linux
On Fri, Feb 05, 2016 at 02:34:56PM -0800, Rich Shepard wrote: > What about those without a gmail account? Try something else. But things will go much faster if you can get at that particular email and click the link in a browser. Since PSU also uses gmail for their campus mail provider, my suggested method is not likely to break. Having a gmail account that you use only for this one task will not violate privacy. This is indeed the only use I make of the gmail account, besides preventing someone else from claiming keith.lofst...@gmail.com and using it to damage my reputation. I will gladly surrender it to the only other Keith Lofstrom on the planet. > Assuming that _everyone_ has one Assuming that I "assume that _everyone_" does anything is also invalid. If you want to use some other webmail account that works the same way, be my guest. I was illustrating how to to something, not the way it must be done - indeed, adding five more steps, I can establish a VPN link to my internal network, ssh to my own mail server, and use mutt to get the 20+ hex digit access code, then type it into my browser. That, plus mistakes, plus greylisting delays, can use up most or all of the 15 minute activation window. Gmail is the most widely used email provider on the planet. It is a safe bet that people like me who prefer to use email elsewhere are still able to extrapolate from "gmail instructions", just as people like me must (much more often) extrapolate from "outlook" instructions. If you understood my page well enough to accomplish the task with your preferred tools, mission accomplished. If you don't use the PSU network and are just trying to needle me, mission accomplished. If you want me to be upset with you, fail, I would rather be friends. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] Connecting to PSU wifi with linux
> PSU Guest wifi access: http://wiki.keithl.com/Mordac On Fri, Feb 05, 2016 at 01:38:46PM -0800, Russell Senior wrote: > FWIW, PSU Guest also doesn't work on OSX, so it is not just a Linux thing. The hurtdesk folk told me they did support Mac. Perhaps I should find someone with a windoze laptop, and see whether PSU actually supports guest access for anyone. I edited the webpage, and Mac users join the loathsome untouchables. Bouzouki music, and a long list of operating systems not supported would be amusing ( Venezuelan Beaver Standard Distribution? ), but I take no responsibility for the senseless waste of human life that might result. > Your workaround worked great for me last night. I'm curious how you > stumbled on this somewhat obscure solution. How did I figure this out? The "dhclient -r" was a frob attempted by the Smith Center helpdesk. The rest of it was trial and error, hours of trying different things, including different laptops, different linux versions, different wifi cards, different places at PSU, power cycling, battery removal. Some steps may be unnecessary. Please experiment further. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] lm_sensors and sensors3.conf
lm_sensors collects and formats system hardware measurements (voltages, temperatures, etc.) for other applications, such as the mate-sensors applet I have in my MATE panel (which I rebuilt from sources and patched for RHEL7.1 and clones). The lm_sensors project may be in trouble: http://www.lm-sensors.org/ ... is pointer a copy of website stored at the Internet Archive, dated 2015 September 5, with this message: Unfortunately, the previous hosting for lm-sensors.org has been discontinued and the former website maintainers can't be reached. For now, please refer to the Internet Archive of the old site until a replacement is created: Hardware monitoring is important - where do we go from here? Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] Failure Mode in 20 volt Power Adapters
On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 06:38:51PM -0800, wes wrote: > well your power brick is more like a small nuclear reactor so who knows > what sort of crazy magic tricks it can do? What a frightening idea! It was made in China, and is almost big enough to contain a small fission weapon. WHAT IF IT DOES? John, do us a favor and do NOT surf Chinese websites during times of heightened international tension! Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] Failure Mode in 20 volt Power Adapters
On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 01:59:55AM -0800, Keith Lofstrom wrote: > John, do us a favor and do NOT surf Chinese websites during > times of heightened international tension! Forgive me - this is plug, not plug-talk, and I should say something marginally germane to the original question. Even if the question is not about Linux, it is about laptops that support Linux very well. The yellow power sockets on Thinkpads have a tendency to crack if the adapter plug is stressed sideways. The short, large diameter socket is less prone to this than the tiny diameter connectors on many other laptop types, but there is always a breaking point, and it always happens to the socket before the power cord pulls apart. That leads to poor compression and contact. Fortunately, the 20V power sockets are typically on a pluggable wire harness. Aftermarket replacements are ≈$5. Unfortunately, on many thinkpads, you must remove close to 100 screws to get at the socket to replace it. Fortunately, there are PDF hardware maintenance manuals (HMM) for most of the earlier thinkpads. If you are careful about organizing the parts and the screws when the machine is stripped to tiny little bits, you can reassemble it correctly. You will need some fine-tipped jewelers sized pliers and #0 and #00 philips screwdrivers for most of this, and you Will Void The Warranty. With a couple of well-anchored egg cartons (or a compartmented plastic box for you vegans) you can keep all the little metric screws separated, step by step. Make lots of notes - the manual does not indicate which sized screws fit which hole. I like to number the subassemblies with post-its. The adapters themselves are cheap, not too much new from Lenovo. I find them at Goodwill from time to time and add them to my hoard. If you follow me around, I may forget one and you can grab that (hence the hoard). There are also ≈$10 aftermarket AC adapters on eBay. I have a few. Someday I will take one apart to see if it has the smart control circuit. It may be frying my cheap aftermarket batteries, which may also lack smart control circuits. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] Ignoring xfinity wifi
Network manager automagically finds the first open wifi hotspot, and attempts to connect. Here in Oregeon, about half the time, that is an xfinity network hotspot, usable only by Comcast xfinity customers. Is there some way to configure Network Manager to always ignore particular SSIDs (in this case xfinity), avoiding the frequent hassle of bypassing it so I can access a new and different hotspot? Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] I'm going to build a laptop..
On Thu, Dec 31, 2015 at 07:38:05PM -0800, Vedanta Teacher wrote: > Everyone, > > After some deliberation I've decided to build my own *laptop* in the new > year and install Linux on a virgin HD. I did have some questions: Laptops can be modified, but building a laptop from scratch is not practical. I deeply modify my own, starting with used laptops. For example, 15 inch diagonal 4x3 form factor IBM T60 laptops, with the screen replaced with 2048x1536 glass. I have enough spares of both to last as long as I do, though the 2048 glass is no longer in production, and the surplus market prices are skyrocketing. Someday, I hope other business users will realize that taller high rez screens are better for A and A4 size page composition, and create demand for the production of new tall screen laptops, Security, CPU, etc? I don't know of any CPU that is "better" for security, and if one had special features for that, the kernel would need to support those features. I would love a CPU with byte-counting interfaces, and large integer modulo arithmetic, and a kernel that exploited these to cryptographically checksum modules and programs as they come off the disk. But most people believe that sofware-only security is sufficient, so I don't expect to see such hardware soon. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] Turning off Firefox "your Adobe Flash player is insecure" nag
On Wed, Dec 30, 2015 at 09:48:04PM -0800, Randy Stapilus wrote: > Not a solution exactly, but I've largely switched over to Chrome for > exactly that reason. No more nags. Thanks, Randy. Though Google does not support Chrome on my main distro (Scientific Linux 6.6), I was able to get it running with this hack: wget http://chrome.richardlloyd.org.uk/install_chrome.sh sudo sh install_chrome.sh Chrome runs flash a bit faster than firefox, though the looping control seems different. Chrome also does not crash with Google maps like Firefox sometimes does. However, I am concerned about security; Google's real customers could be using data that Chrome gathers. As I am not a paying customer, I shy away from Google products, though I do use maps, books, and scholar. Otherwise, protopage and duckduckgo are my main search and browsing tools. There may be a similar SL6 porting hack for Chromium. Is the open source version of Chromium Adobe flash compatible? Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] Turning off Firefox "your Adobe Flash player is insecure" nag
About 4 times a year, a new insecurity is discovered in Adobe Flash player, and Firefox demands an update. Until that happens, every flash video requires a click to enable it. The big problem is, even if the flash player is automatically updated by the distro, ~/.mozilla/pluginreg.dat doesn't get rebuilt by Firefox, so it keeps complaining even after the update. Is there any way to turn off the nag? I make presentations with embedded flash, and it really sucks to have the nags show up in front of an audience. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] systemd
Like many recent linux changes, systemd solves a lot of problems compared to the kluges that it replaces, but it was not deployed with other people and existing infrastructure in mind. So, the burden of adapting to such changes is foisted on the rest of us. While glittery shiny first impressions are nice, pain rules our long term reaction to new things. A distro that is easy 90% of the time and ridiculously difficult 10% of the time is less likely to endure than something that is 30% easy and 1% difficult. Change is never easy, and migration is difficult. For me, a computer is a structure that I embellish with my own data, procedures, adaptions, and improvements. Changing the structure means I must translate all of that, without help. It's like replacing the wooden beams of my house with carbon fiber. That might help in an earthquake, but the cost of the transition would be more devastating than an earthquake. Instead, I added kludges and retrofits to achieve the same earthquake protection. Build new houses with carbon fiber if you wish, but don't abandon the installed base that is better improved than replaced. If you must change house structure, make your carbon fiber install cheap and painless. We invest in our computers, and change invalidates many of our investments. If those who wish to impose these changes had to pay the full cost of their decisions, and help us recoup our lost investments, they would make different decisions, and provide tools that facilitate change and adaption. This is an opportunity hiding in a problem, for sane profit- seeking entrepreneurs (if there are any left in our community). Focusing on the needs of humans, rather than the needs of the machines. Modelling change against the entire installed base, instead of a couple dozen configurations favored by developers. At a guess, linux designed for low cost mass deployment and long term stability might make new development five times harder for developers, almost cost-free for customers, and thus 100x cheaper overall, assuming millions of customers willing to pay a little something to avoid pain. For those of us ready to graduate from "gratis" Linux to "least total cost" Linux, a new distro to fill the role that Redhat used to fill (stodgy but predictable) would be welcomed, and could be very profitable. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
[PLUG] Replating gold contacts (was "boot failure")
On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 02:17:59PM -0800, Keith Lofstrom wrote: > It would be nice to find a more expensive drive dock with > thicker gold plating. It would also be nice if test labs > would measure this stuff and publish results in something > like what Consumer Reports used to be, before they devolved > into knob counting and political opinions. That was way too passive-consumer-wussy. I found this on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYza_M8WVf0 We can actually replate the gold connectors ourselves, if we can locate the no-doubt-toxic chemicals. And perhap we can find a grad student at PSU who can assay connector surfaces (x ray scattering?). It would be interesting to post the numbers for connectors from various manufacturers on the web, and watch the accusations fly. What does this have to do with Linux? Every copy of Linux ever distributed has passed through gold contacts, somewhere along the data transmission chain. So there. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] boot failure
On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 09:41:58AM -0800, Denis Heidtmann wrote: > This a SATA hard drive dock which mounts in an ATX case. It is a Kingwin > KF-1000 BK. When I get a blank panel to fill the hole I will take it out > and look it over. I am surprised that there is anything to go wrong inside > except connectors. I use a lot of those, but they are cheaply made. Connectors have limited lifetimes, because the copper diffuses into the thin gold plating on it. Then the copper oxidizes, making insulating spots, and making the surface much less compliant, with less contact area. You can clean the contact a couple of times with a pencil eraser, but if the gold is thin (on the Kingwin docks, it may be just a few atoms thick), and it will get worn away. It would be nice to find a more expensive drive dock with thicker gold plating. It would also be nice if test labs would measure this stuff and publish results in something like what Consumer Reports used to be, before they devolved into knob counting and political opinions. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] Linus and the 'Net
On Sat, Nov 07, 2015 at 08:53:29AM -0700, Mark Phillips wrote: > I liked the article a lot! It prompted me to buy "How Linux Works: What > Every Superuser Should Know" by > Brian Ward and it is a great read. I recommend it. > > My point is I disagree a little with Linus' goal of rejecting all security > patches if they slow down user space. Moore's Law is still in effect ( > http://www.techradar.com/us/news/computing/moore-s-law-how-long-will-it-last--1226772), > so the speed of computer hardware is still increasing faster than the drag > produced by software. I agree ... but ... the real issue is that the hardware itself is insecure, and does not speed up security procedures as much as it should. Indeed, transistors are cheap and getting cheaper, and CPUs are now made with "dark silicon", functional modules that are only powered up as needed (like video rendering, or multiband radios). Frantically pursuing perfection in software without addressing the hardware weaknesses is like a vault door on a tent. So - who knows what is on your CPU chip? Or in the hard drive or flash drive controller, or the video chip, or ... Three modest proposals: 1) I would like to buy CPUs with netlists and corresponding maps of transistor layouts. I don't have time to scrutinize every chip I buy, but students being trained to design the next generation of chips do. I would love to donate to a fund that provides full ride scholarships to any student who finds an important functional difference between an actual chip, the netlist, and the functional description. 2) I would provide all data interfaces on a chip with unalterable counter registers that count every byte that passes through that interface since chip reset. Then I would put double entry bookkeeping in software and the kernel. It is not difficult to keep track of every byte that goes in and out the ethernet port, for example. Discrepancies between what programs are supposed to produce and what they actually produce indicate hanky panky. 3) CPU chips should have specialized dark silicon math units which perform large integer modulo arithmetic - a common component in most encryption algorithms. These math units need not be fast - just faster than bigint math in software. This saves power, and RAM space, and mistakes, and can run in parallel with other operations, so it would not slow the kernel, except for the instructions to load and unload it. (2) and (3) would require attention from the kernel, but it would be new standardizable hardware that Linus might find amusing to write code for. (1) would also lead to time-saving standardization - more good ideas get copied, and Linus's job gets easier. We do not need to do this on all CPUs - but most data center CPUs run Linux, and we can encourage Intel to differentiate those products with Linux friendliness and built-in security. BTW, I am a chip designer. Though I do not design CPUs, I have some idea of what is possible. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com ___ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
Re: [PLUG] VGA still useful?
On Tue, Nov 03, 2015 at 03:41:45PM -0800, Michael Rasmussen wrote:
> I'm (again) toying with the idea of a new laptop. As I look at models I see
> ... VGA?
> Is VGA still needed for projectors? If not I see no need for it.
I give lots of presentations, using a smaller, older laptop
with HD15 ("VGA" and other resolutions) video. The docking
cradle has DVI, but I prefer not to lug along the extra weight,
so I have a HD15 to DVI and HDMI adapter.
About 10% of venue projectors are old and HD15 only, about 10%
are HDMI only screens, most have more than one interface, some
have all three, and even have ethernet. Most problems stem
from projector and screen aspect ratio, with older systems
using 4:3 and newer systems using 16:10 or 16:9 or some
other media-focused aspect ratio.
Keith
--
Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
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