[SLUG] Email delays [ was Re: Website ]

[John Clarke]

On Sat, Sep 19, 2015 at 10:36:20AM +1000, David wrote:

> Received: from slug-vm.linux.org.au (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by
>  lists.slug.org.au (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2E5A6C51C1; Fri,  2 Oct 2015
>  16:52:07 +1000 (AEST)
> X-Original-To: slug@slug.org.au
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> Received: from fast.kenpro.com.au (fast.kenpro.com.au [203.23.36.9]) by
>  lists.slug.org.au (Postfix) with ESMTP id C5BA5B376B for
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Are there any list admins watching? Two weeks for email to get through
the SLUG mail servers is maybe just a little too long ... :-p


- John

-- 
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An ice-cream soda topped with fizz, Boy, how sick our Mary is.
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Re: [SLUG] Free computer/network/VoIP gear

[John Clarke]

On Tue, Jun 03, 2014 at 07:35:46PM +1000, John Clarke wrote:

 I'm doing a clean out and have a few items that might still be useful to
 someone else.

It's all gone.  That didn't take long ;-)


- John
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[SLUG] Free computer/network/VoIP gear

[John Clarke]

Hi Sluggers,

I'm doing a clean out and have a few items that might still be useful to
someone else.  Everything is free (pick up from Lindfield or the city) and
is fully functional unless otherwise noted:

1 x Linksys SR2024 24-port rackmount 10/100/1000 switch
1 x HP 2510-24 J9019B 24-port rackmount 10/100 switch
2 x Alloy POEFEM24T2SFP 24-port rackmount 10/100 PoE switches
1 x Linksys SRW208MP 8-port 10/100 PoE switch - no power supply, needs 48VDC
(max 150W if supplying full power to all ports)
2 x Skymaster 8-port 10/100 switches
4 x Grandstream GXP2000 IP phones with PoE, one with faulty PoE circuit (but
works fine with 5VDC input)
1 x 400mm deep rack shelf
1 x Philips 17 1280 x 1024 LCD monitor with speakers, two port USB hub, DVI
and VGA inputs
1 x 56k modem
a few USB keyboards and mice

The HP and Alloy 10/100 switches also have two gigabit uplink ports.

Let me know if you want any of these items.  Anything not claimed by the end
of next week goes to the e-waste recyclers.


- John 
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Re: [SLUG] Bar Code scanners

[John Clarke]

On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 01:45:59PM +1200, Patrick Elliott-Brennan wrote:

 I've got to scan a whole collection of books (a couple of hundred at least)
 and was wondering if anyone has any experience with those that do/don't
 work with Linux or know of another way I can scan the books?

I have a CueCat scanner which I picked up via librarything.com a few years
ago.  From memory it cost something like $15 including shipping.  By default
it prodces an encrypted bar code but it's pretty easy to disable this  get
clear text bar codes out of it.  You can use it, and probably any other bar
code scanner, with a GNOME application called Alexandria to catalogue your
books.

 A loan of one would be good, if possible.

I only use mine intermittently so I'd be happy to lend it to you for a
week or two.  Contact me via email if you want it.


Cheers,

John

-- 
Just because I'm at work, doesn't mean I'm awake.
-- James Bialas
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Re: [SLUG] Analog clock with transparent background and timezone support

[John Clarke]

On Thu, Dec 08, 2011 at 05:06:23AM +, Peter Rundle wrote:

 I'm looking for a Linux XWindows clock display that will allow me to have
 three instances of the clock displayed on my desktop as part of the

Have you tried the screenlets clock (screenlets package on Ubuntu, not sure
about other distros)?  Lets you run multiple clocks, each with a different
timezone  label on the clock face.


John

-- 
I used to gripe about how C should have provided this feature of PL/I,
back when I was a newbie Berkeley student. Thank you ever so much for
being smarter than that.
-- Peter da Silva praises Dennis Ritchie
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Re: [SLUG] Mounting a shared folder from one Mint PC on another Mint PC

[John Clarke]

On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 03:07:56PM +1000, Jon Jermey wrote:

 The operative word seems to be 'should'. Not only does the driver fail  
 to install, but the installation process crashes the system -- quite an  
 achievement on a Linux box.

Ah yes, the broken Samsung installers.  I've tried to use them and then
had to clean up the mess they left behind because the uninstaller
refuses to run.

Fortunately there's a .deb repo with the drivers, so you don't need to
use Samsung's installers.  Here's how I got my two Samsung printers
(CLP-550N and CLX-6210FX) working:

http://kirriwa.net/john/doc/samsung-printers.html


John

-- 
I remember fondly the days of dumb terminals and smart users, but now
it's the other way around.
-- Anthony de Boer
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Re: [SLUG] clone non-LVM system onto new LVM drive

[John Clarke]

On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 02:30:41PM +1000, John Clarke wrote:
 On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 02:15:18PM +1000, david wrote:
 
  Next, how do I persuade the new partition to boot? Do I have to do some  
  magic with grub? If so, what? Do I cpio the old /boot onto the new,  
  non-LVM boot partition? or can I use /boot within the new LV?
 
  Everything I read says to put /boot into a non-lvm partition. Does  
  grub-install  from a live CD give me the opportunity to spell out the  
  right parameters?
 
 I'm trying to so the same thing right now, and I've got *almost*
 everything working.  

Well it's now up and running with LVM and RAID1.  I've posted a complete
guide to converting a non-LVM system to LVM + RAID1 here:

http://kirriwa.net/john/doc/lvm+raid1.html

This includes everything you need to do to get GRUB to boot too :-)
I hope it's useful to someone, somewhere.


John

-- 
Knuth is right: computer programming is not a science, but an art.  System
administration is an art too, and a black one at that.
-- Adam J. Thornton
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Re: [SLUG] HDMI output Video Card recommendation

[John Clarke]

On Fri, Jul 01, 2011 at 07:42:27PM +1000, Jake Anderson wrote:

 I'm in the same boat wrt audio only with a zotac ion mini-itx board.
 Apparently people have done audio over hdmi with it but i didn't have  
 much luck, wound up using spdif.

I've not yet been able to get spdif audio to work, although I didn't
spend a lot of time on it.  Too many other things needed doing.  I'll
get back to it sometime, once I figure out why mythfrontend segfaults
every time I try to watch live tv or a recording.  I should probably
upgrade from mythbuntu 9.10 first though.


-- 
If you take something apart and put it back together enough times,
eventually you will have two of them.
-- Matt Roberds
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Re: [SLUG] HDMI output Video Card recommendation

[John Clarke]

On Fri, Jul 01, 2011 at 02:32:19PM +1000, elliott-brennan wrote:

 Is anyone on the list using a video card with HDMI output?

Yes, but video only, because it's running an old version of Mythbuntu
and the driver  also versions installed don't support HDMI audio on the
card.  Apparently the latest driver and alsa do support HDMI audio, so
when I get around to upgrading, it should just work.

 If so, can you let me know the specs and how it performs for you?

It's an nVidia GeForce GT240, nothing special, but it works.


John

-- 
Never mind the wire brush of enlightment. I say it's time to use
the belt sander of attention-getting.
-- Mike Andrews
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Re: [SLUG] clone non-LVM system onto new LVM drive

[John Clarke]

On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 02:30:41PM +1000, John Clarke wrote:

 I'm trying to so the same thing right now, and I've got *almost*
 everything working.  Now when I try to boot from the new drive, I see
 some error messages flash by during boot (they're not logged to syslog
 and don't appear when I run dmesg) saying that it can't write to
 /lib/modules/`uname -r`/volatile because it's a read-only filesystem. 
 
 This is happening because the tmpfs that's normally mounted there isn't
 being mounted, and I have no idea why.  I don't know where this mount is
 supposed to be done and I'm not having any success finding anything
 useful via Google, and without knowing where it's done I have no idea
 how to fix it.

I've found it.  It's mounted by /sbin/lrm-manager (called from
/etc/rcS.d/S07linux-restricted-modules-common), but only if
/lib/modules/`uname -r`/volatile/.mounted doesn't exist.  The file does
exist because I copied it from the running system.  I did look through
this script earlier but missed it.  I can't do any more testing tonight
though, so it'll have to wait until the morning.


John

-- 
This is yet another mission for ed.  Its simplicity and elegance is well
suited to the needs of the novice, and when he's ready for vi he will see
it as a feature-rich upgrade.
-- Patrick R. Wade
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Re: [SLUG] clone non-LVM system onto new LVM drive

[John Clarke]

On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 02:15:18PM +1000, david wrote:

 Next, how do I persuade the new partition to boot? Do I have to do some  
 magic with grub? If so, what? Do I cpio the old /boot onto the new,  
 non-LVM boot partition? or can I use /boot within the new LV?

 Everything I read says to put /boot into a non-lvm partition. Does  
 grub-install  from a live CD give me the opportunity to spell out the  
 right parameters?

I'm trying to so the same thing right now, and I've got *almost*
everything working.  Now when I try to boot from the new drive, I see
some error messages flash by during boot (they're not logged to syslog
and don't appear when I run dmesg) saying that it can't write to
/lib/modules/`uname -r`/volatile because it's a read-only filesystem. 

This is happening because the tmpfs that's normally mounted there isn't
being mounted, and I have no idea why.  I don't know where this mount is
supposed to be done and I'm not having any success finding anything
useful via Google, and without knowing where it's done I have no idea
how to fix it.

Is there anyone out there who knows how to fix this, or who can give me
a clue or two to help me figure it out?


This is what I've done so far:

I split the new drive (/dev/sdb) into three partitions and started a
degraded RAID 1 array on each of them.  I formatted the first with ext3
(for /boot) the second as swap, and the third is my LVM volume with
separate partitions for /, /home, /tmp, /usr and /var.  I mounted all of
the new filesystems under /media/lvm and copied the files from the
existing drives, then created a new initramfs and installed grub, like
this:

# these two files are used bu update-initramfs to build the
# initrd
cp /proc/cmdline /media/lvm/proc/
cp /proc/modules /media/lvm/proc/

# create an mdadm.conf on the new drive
mdadm -E -s  /media/lvm/etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf

# chroot into the new drive
chroot /media/lvm/

# change the root device in the copy of /proc/cmdline, mine
# now contains root=/dev/mapper/vg0-root ro
vi /proc/cmdline

# update the mounts in the new fstab to use the new RAID/LVM
# partitions
vi /etc/fstab

# edit the new grub memu so that the kernel's root device is
# the new LVM root device (e.g. /dev/mapper/vg0-root), the
# grub root device is the new /boot partition or RAID array,
# and the kernel and initrd pathnames are relative to /boot
vi /boot/grub/menu.lst

# create a new initrd that includes LVM and RAID support
# do this once for each kernel version you want to be able
# to boot (replace `uname -r` with the kernel version)
update-initramfs -c -k `uname -r`

# install grub on the new drive
grub-install /dev/sdb


Any suggestions on how to fix my mount problem are welcome.


Thanks,

John

-- 
I don't know what Connect[.com.au] were thinking when they put sprinklers 
in their data centre. I wonder what they'd do if you asked for a quote for 
enough rack space to hold 3 servers, a router, a switch and an umbrella?
-- Richard Archer
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Re: [SLUG] MythTv Setup

[John Clarke]

On Sun, May 01, 2011 at 09:47:27PM +1000, Jon and Hannah wrote:

 I've tried google, and it just says import channels.conf -  well how?

I did this when I setup my MythTV box 18 months ago but couldn't
remember exactly how.  Google gave me this (search for mythtv import
channels.conf and it's the last link on the first page):


http://www.havetheknowhow.com/Install-the-software/MythTV-no-channels-found.html

Look for the section titled Pull the channel information into MythTV. 
I don't remember having to delete all the channels and rescan, but I'm
using Jean-Yves Avenard's MythTV packages (from avenard.org) which may
not have this bug.


John

-- 
There's something fundamentally sad about not being able to mention
the S word in the potential presence of children, but being permitted
to casually discuss violence at a level which I find shocking (if
really cool!:-).-- Michael T. Richter
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Re: [SLUG] perl modules ubuntu probs

[John Clarke]

On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 11:55:59PM +1000, Voytek Eymont wrote:

 amavis says error with MIME Decoder BinHex but perl says it's installed,

Read the error message more closely:

 # amavisd debug
 fetch_modules: error loading optional module MIME/Decoder/BinHex.pm:
   Can't locate Convert/BinHex.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /etc/perl

MIME/Decoder/BinHex.pm won't start because it needs to load
Convert/BinHex.pm, and perl can't find it.  You need to install
Convert::BinHex.


John

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chmod 777 - also known as asking to be mirrored at attrition.org.
-- James Riden
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Re: [SLUG] [SOLVED] DHCP - DDNS not updating

[John Clarke]

On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 09:23:07AM +1100, Kyle wrote:

  And the gold star goes to John.  Thanks John for thinking with me.

Thanks, but it was really just a lucky guess at the time ;-)


John

-- 
I'd miss the BBC, but not if I had time to reload.
-- Terry Pratchett  13/01/2001
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Re: [SLUG] DHCP - DDNS not updating

[John Clarke]

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 07:56:55PM +1100, Kyle wrote:

Sorry for the late reply; I've been busy.

 I have always used BIND with rndc.key and it used to work. What's then  
 the difference between nsupdate and rndc and using BIND?

They have two quite different functions.  nsupdate is used to modify
zone data by sending dynamic DNS updates.  rndc is used to control the
name server itself, for example, to stop or restart the server, to
reload config and/or zone files.


John

-- 
Yes, but then you'd have a computer running OS X.  There may be an upside,
but I'm not sure what it is.
-- Matt Palmer
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Re: [SLUG] DHCP - DDNS not updating

[John Clarke]

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 01:38:58PM +1100, Kyle wrote:

 I've tried lots since this thread started to the extent I installed a  
 whole fresh machine on 192 subnet only, skimmed dhcpd and named confs  
 down to a simple, by the book, 1 domain setup and I still get the same  
 problem even on the fresh host. And this is a CentOS 5.5 (final)  
 install. I.e. the latest they publish.

Are you having problems updating the A record or the PTR record, or
both?

Can you manually update either or both with nsupdate run on the DNS
server.

Can you do the same with nsupdate on the DHCP server?

Are the clocks on the DHCP server and the DNS server synchronised?  I
don't remember why this mattered (it's been years since I set this up
myself), but I do remember having updates fail when the clocks were not
synchronised.

Can you send me your DNS and DHCP config files?

 If I'm reserving an IP for a specific host in dhcpd.conf, am I  
 supposed to then be already placing a PTR record in the reverse zone  
 file for the reservation?

By reserving, do you mean that you've configured your DHCP server to
allocate fixed addresses based on the host's MAC address?  I wouldn't
have thought it would matter, that the DHCP server would update both the
A and PTR records anyway, as long as you've configured it to update both
zones in dhcpd.conf.

 If so, doesn't that simply defeat the whole purpose of dhcp?

No.  The purpose of DHCP is to allow hosts to get an IP address and
other information without having to manually configure each host.  The
DDNS update is just a bonus :-)


John

-- 
What's the use of having a cupboard full of dingy little machines,
none of which can run continuously for more than five minutes without
needing 15 minutes of cooldown?
Our NT admins have an answer to that.  -- Joe Moore
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Re: [SLUG] DHCP - DDNS not updating

[John Clarke]

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 02:48:45PM +1100, Kyle wrote:

 Can you manually update either or both with nsupdate run on the DNS
 server.

 ## No, nsupdate extract from last email was run on the dns server.

OK, so if this doesn't work, then the DHCP server won't be able to do it
either.  You need to fix this problem before you can get anything else
working.

What name did you give the key when you created it with dnssec-keygen? 
Was it domain1.com?  Is that what name you passed to nsupdate (in the
argument to -y)?

Do you still have the keyfiles generated by dnssec-keygen?  Does
nsupdate work if you use -k instead of -y to pass the key?

Does rndc status work?  rndc reload?



John

-- 
 ... I can use the cheaper frozen goat for IDE?
Though you _can_ sacrifice things to an IDE bus, there are no reports of
them ever sucking any less as a result, so it's likely a waste of a goat.
-- Anthony de Boer
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Re: [SLUG] DHCP - DDNS not updating

[John Clarke]

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 04:37:48PM +1100, Kyle wrote:

 'domain1.com' is obfuscated from the real value. But rest assured I am  
 being painstakingly anal in ensuring the values are the same including  
 the 'key name' in named and dhcpd being exactly the same as used in the  
 dnssec-keygen command.

OK, I just wanted to be sure, because the only way I've been able to
reproduce similar symptoms to yours was by using a different name.

 [root@server3 etc]# rndc reload
 server reload successful

I thought this might provide a clue, but I've tested it on my server
here and rndc seems to work even if the key it's told to use is not
authorised.  Oh well.

 Reply from update query:
 ;; -HEADER- opcode: UPDATE, status: NOTAUTH, id:   2442
 ;; flags: qr ra ; ZONE: 0, PREREQ: 0, UPDATE: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
 ;; TSIG PSEUDOSECTION:
 domain1.com.0ANYTSIGhmac-md5.sig-alg.reg.int.  
 1297920682 300 16 anotherSecretHere 2442 NOERROR 0

Now this is slightly different to anything I've been able to reproduce. 
If I give it the wrong key I see BADKEY in that last line instead of
NOERROR.

This is just a guess because I've pretty much hit the limits of my
knowledge, and I've never used BIND's views, but could it be something
to do with the different views you've configured?  You're trying to do
the update from localhost, so that matches the view
localhost_resolver, but updates aren't allowed in that view
configuration.  Updates are allowed in the view internal, which also
matches localhost, but I wonder if BIND is simply using the first match
and thus disallowing updates?


John

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Vs lbh'er ernqvat guvf, lbh ernyyl bhtug gb trg bhg zber
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Re: [SLUG] DHCP - DDNS not updating

[John Clarke]

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 05:35:10PM +1100, Kyle wrote:

  domain domain1.com
 incorrect section name: domain

I suspect you mean zone domain1.com.  domain is not a valid command.

 nsupdate -k /etc/rndc.key - The man page says that that format  
 requires a filename in the format 'K{name}.+157.+{random}.private'.  
 That's a new one on me. Where, why  how is that needed?

That's been the case for as long as I've been using nsupdate, at least
five years.  The filename format is what dnssec-keygen outputs when you
ask it to generate a key.

One other thing you need to make sure of is that the client and server
have their clocks synchronised (e.g. with ntp), otherwise the update
will fail.

There's an nsupdate HOWTO here:

http://caunter.ca/nsupdate.txt

and I have a page explaining how to get DHCP3 to do DDNS updates here:

http://kirriwa.net/john/doc/ddns.html



John

-- 
Bloody kids. If it hasn't got a front panel and you don't have to toggle in
the bootstrap by hand you haven't experienced a real installation.
-- Peter da Silva
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Re: [SLUG] DHCP - DDNS not updating

[John Clarke]

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 05:13:05PM +1100, Kyle wrote:

 All my relevant hosts and my DNS server all sit on the 192.168 subnet  
 all behind the same firewall with no reason to go near the modem? The  
 DNS server does act as a firewall, but yes, the relevant ports on the  
 eth1 side for DNS are open (namely 53  for whatever reason - can't  
 remember now - 953).

You need port 53 TCP and UDP, and port 953 TCP.  Port 953 is bind's
default control port, i.e. what rndc uses to talk to the server. 
nsupdate uses TCP port 53 IIRC.


John

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Active ECM, coming soon to a WLAN near you!
-- Chris Suslowicz
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Re: [SLUG] Disappearing Title Bar

[John Clarke]

On Fri, Oct 01, 2010 at 11:12:45AM +1000, Heracles wrote:

 The title bar on the windows that open within gnome sometimes go away.

I used to get that quite often in older Ubuntu releases on my old laptop
running compiz and emerald, and it was caused by emerald crashing.  Very
easy to fix, just run emerald --replace  and your title bars will
reappear.  If you're not running emerald, then try restarting whichever
window decorator you're using.


Cheers,

John

-- 
Gentoo.  Just because it lets me say NO to Gnome in /etc/make.conf
-- Anthony de Boer
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Re: [SLUG] fun with bash

[John Clarke]

On Sun, Dec 13, 2009 at 04:36:47PM +1100, david wrote:

 $ for i in *.tif ; convert $i $i.jpg; done
 $ for i in $i.jpg ; do mv $i `echo $i | sed s/.tif//`; done

 Apart from specific examples, where do I look in the bash book for a better
 way to remove the .tif part of the output filename, or other such
 substitutions?

See the section called EXPANSION, and in particular, Parameter
Expansion.   The one you want is:

${parameter/pattern/string}
The pattern is expanded to produce a pattern just as in pathname
expansion.  Parameter is  expanded  and  the longest match of
pattern against its value is replaced with string.  If Ipattern
begins with /, all matches of pattern are  replaced  with
string.   Normally  only the first match is replaced.  If
...

To remove .tif from $i in your second loop, use ${i/.tif/}.  To run
convert and set the correct outout filename as the same time, you can do
this:

$ for i in *.tif ; convert $i ${i/%.tif/.jpg}; done



John
-- 
We Europeans tend to prefer our cars like our women: small, curvy,
responsive and not too thirsty. If North Americans prefer Eastern Block
female shot-putters with advanced alcoholism, well, it takes all types.
-- Alan Bellingham
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Re: [SLUG] MythTV hardware advice sought

[John Clarke]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 10:41:45AM +1100, Mike Andy wrote:

 By the way what did you decide for with your IR Receiver John?

I was going to buy a Silverstone LC10-E, but I now think I'll get an
LC16M which includes an IR receiver (unless the DVD drive bay in the
LC16M interferes with the video card, in which case I'll get the LC10-E
and worry about the IR receiver later).


John
-- 
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Re: [SLUG] MythTV hardware advice sought

[John Clarke]

On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 11:34:57PM +1100, Jake Anderson wrote:

Hi Jake,

 Many audio amps that have hdmi ports don't actually decode the audio on  
 the hdmi channel, just something to be wary of.

Thanks, but the HDMI is for the TV, and it does support audio over
HDMI.  I'll be using S/PDIF for audio to the amp.

 Too much CPU is barely enough :-)
   
 heh, If your going to do transcoding that's pretty true, again quad core  
 will get you the performace for the price and thermal more than faster  
 dual cores ;-

True, but even with a dual core it's going to be the most powerful
computer in the house :-)

 BTW the shintaro can be recovered from having a bowl of stroganoff  
 dumped into it (If your interested).

Each to his own.  I'd rather each my dinner than pour it onto my
keyboard.


Cheers,

John
-- 
 Some of us only count in octal.
 So how come there was a PDP8 ?
Dunno, but it thinks it's a PDP-10.
-- Charlie Gibbs
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Re: [SLUG] Re: SLUG] MythTV hardware advice sought

[John Clarke]

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 11:29:14AM +0800, jam wrote:
 On Monday 16 November 2009 09:00:05 slug-requ...@slug.org.au wrote:
   a) I'd run back and front end of different machines
 
  I'd thought of doing that, but because the TV and aerial cable are in
  the same room, I'd still have to make this machine both fron and back
  end, so I don't see any great benefit in having a remote back end.
 
 Except that you don't want to power up your machine every time you want to 
 check ABC's Finance is set to record weekly, your daughter phones and asks 
 you 
 to record friends or you just want to check that motoGP has higher priority 
 than conflicts and IMHO the EPG is adequate and tracks their sometimes 
 quickly 
 changing schedules EG
 myth scheduled to record FavoriteProgram on 7 at 19:30. Seven reschedules for 
 19:32
 myth wakes up at 19:29 finds Not scheduled for 19:30 and goes to sleep and 
 does not record at 19:32 !! 

OK, fair point, I hadn't thought of it that way.  I think I'll still get
this going as a combined back  front end to start with, and I can
always split it apart later, or more likely, get a new low power front
end going and move this box downstairs.


Thanks,

John
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Not nearly as much as the TK50 and its spawn.
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Re: [SLUG] MythTV hardware advice sought

[John Clarke]

On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 05:45:52PM +1100, I wrote:

 Advice and suggestions will be gratefully received.  I'd like to order
 the hardware next week, and I'd appreciate knowing that I've chosen
 badly *before* I part with the money :-)

Thanks to everyone who replied.  You've given me some useful information
and a few things to think about before I order any h/w.  Exactly what I
needed :-)


Thanks,

John
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shouldn't watch any of them being made.
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Re: [SLUG] Re: SLUG] MythTV hardware advice sought

[John Clarke]

On Sat, Nov 14, 2009 at 10:19:29AM +0800, jam wrote:

James,

Thanks for your reply.  I appreciate your input.

 Rather than 'saying you oughta ...' this is what I'd do and why ...
 
 a) I'd run back and front end of different machines

I'd thought of doing that, but because the TV and aerial cable are in
the same room, I'd still have to make this machine both fron and back
end, so I don't see any great benefit in having a remote back end.

 I do not do commercial flagging as each of the channels does there to
 thing to break it (eg 10 turns off the logo BEFORE and on AFTER  the ad
 breaks. 7 skips blank frame pre and post amble etc).

Well, they don't want you skipping ads so they'll do whatever they can
to make it hard for you.  I'm happy just to record the programs and skip
the ads manually during playback.  That's what we do now with the
(analogue) hard disc recorder.

 Wireless networking does work, but wired is much better here.

Same here.  Wireless is OK for the laptops, but I've found it to be not
reliable enough for the Squeezebox, so now it's on the wired LAN.  The
MthTV box will be in the same cabinet, so I'll hook it up to the wired
LAN too (I already have a second ethernet cable back to the switch).


Thanks,

John
-- 
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conventional tank. Instead, the fuel is confined to the porous marrow of the
hamster's skeleton, made from our uniquely designed reticulated foam.
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Re: [SLUG] MythTV hardware advice sought

[John Clarke]

On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 02:05:37AM +1100, Jake Anderson wrote:

Jake,

Thanks for your input, much appreciated.

 you probably want a silverstone case. They have some nice ones.

They have some ugly ones too :-)  I was thinking of buying an LC10-E.

 I want HDMI video to the TV (LCD, 1080p), either with audio or with a
 separate analogue audio cable.  I also want digital audio (S/PDIF,
 preferrably coax) to the amp for better quality stereo or 5.1 audio.
   
 I haven't played with the audio side much yet so I cant help you too  
 much there.

I'm pretty sure I can do what I want, but I don't know whether I'll be
able to do audio over HDMI or whether I'll need to use analogue audio
for the TV.  It doesn't matter; if I want good quality sound I'm not
going to use the speakers in the TV.

 I'd also like the option of watching either live TV, recorded programs
 or ripped DVDs on any other PC on the LAN, at the same time as a
 different program is being watched on the TV and maybe another is being
 recorded.
   
 Myth will do that provided your not on a wireless network.

I have GigE.

 ripped dvd's etc will need to be shared over NFS or something as  

I can do that.  I already have both NFS and Samba running on other
machines.

 you can run mythfrontend on the remote sites and it'll pick up the  
 recorded tv though.

That's what I'd figured, but it's nice to have it confirmed.

 Suggestions specifically.
 If you want quiet, ditch the mbo, cpu and separate video card.
 the new myth out uses vdpau to accelerate video on anything that  
 supports it ( nvidia 9300 or so)

The card I'd picked, the GT220, supports VDPAU (VP4 including MPEG-4
decoding), but I'll have another look at motherboards and see if I can
find one with suitable graphics on-board.

 I have a quad core q6600 in it but I'd put one of the newer quad cores  
 in it now but its also my everything server (it has 6gb of ram and is  

This is going to be running MythTV only, so I figured a dual core would
be enough.

 Although if you want to run commercial flagging while recording you
 will probably want one cpu per channel.

We can live without that.  We're used to skipping ads manually, so as
long as I can configure a 30-sec skip button on the remote, it'll be
fine.

 CPU load watching HDTV is ~5% or so with VDPAU doing all the work. It  

That should keep the noise down :-)

 cant *quite* manage advanced 2x deinterlacing for HD footage, I  
 overclocked it to 9400 speed as well with no change. So if you really  

Wikipedia says that the GT220 is more powerful than the 9400, so it
might be able to handle it.  There's also the GT240 (rumoured to be
coming soon), which has even more grunt.

 The blue-ray's I have managed to watch @#...@#%@#$%$%^%(^%^$# DRM!!! GRRR!
 have played fine on it again at 5% cpu for a 1080P movie (twilight).

OK.  I hadn't thought much about Blu-Ray yet.  I agree with you about
the DRM though.

 Hauppage 2200 MCE dual tuner (PCI-E)
   
 That's where your going to have the difficulties with drivers, I haven't  
 looked but I'm not aware as yet of any PCI-E cards that are supported as  
 yet out of the box.

Not out of the box, but there is a driver for the 2200:

http://www.kernellabs.com/blog/?page_id=17
http://www.mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/2009-October/266154.html

 There was a twin digital PCI-E tuner floating about with drivers real  
 soon now as I recall.

That might have been the 2200/2250.

 I'm thinking of getting some cheap USB tuners from deal extreme or  
 similar, the people over on the shepherd list (the TV guide you will  
 use) have had some good and some bad experiences with them.

I have an AverMedia USB tuner, which does have Linux drivers, but
they're not very good.  The tuner works the first time I plug it into my
laptop, but if I remove it I have to reboot to use it again.  It also
occasionally causes the laptop to hang (needing a power reset) when it's
plugged in.

 Is this hardware powerful enough to do all that I want?  Do I need more
 CPU grunt?  More RAM?  More hard drives?  Bigger PSU?  Anything else?
   
 Way too much CPU ;-

Too much CPU is barely enough :-)

 Add another hdd or 2 because myth can use storage pools to reduce the  
 seek load when recording and playing multiple streams and drives are so  
 cheap these days.

More drives == more noise though, so if I do add more drives, maybe I
should configure a remote back-end?  The machine I'd do that on would
then need some drives replacing because all of its SATA ports are in
use, and there's not enough free space to store much TV.

 I'd investigate the possibility of sticking / on a USB stick perhaps so  
 that the spinning disks can shut down.

I'd thought of that too, but I'll get it up and running on a hard drive
first and see how much noise it makes.  Our analogue hard drive recorder
is barely audible with the cabinet door closed.  We can hear the drive
heads moving sometimes, but only when editing or deleting 

[SLUG] MythTV hardware advice sought

[John Clarke]

Greetings Sluggers,

I'm planning to build a MythTV box  have come up with what I think is
suitable hardware to run it on, but I'm hoping that those of you with
MythTV experience will point out anything I've got wrong.

The box will be both back and front end and will be in the lounge room
in the cabinet with the amps, dvd player, etc, so it'll need to be
fairly quiet, especially when idle, but I don't want to hear much when
it's running either.  It's going to be inside a cabinet so doesn't have
to be stunningly beautiful, but I don't want it to look spectacularly
ugly either.  My budget is $2000.

I want HDMI video to the TV (LCD, 1080p), either with audio or with a
separate analogue audio cable.  I also want digital audio (S/PDIF,
preferrably coax) to the amp for better quality stereo or 5.1 audio.

I'd also like the option of watching either live TV, recorded programs
or ripped DVDs on any other PC on the LAN, at the same time as a
different program is being watched on the TV and maybe another is being
recorded.

I believe that all of the hardware I'm thinking of is supported by Linux
and MythTV, and although I don't think the necessary drivers are
packaged in any distro yet (I'm thinking of using the latest Mythbuntu,
only because everything else is running Ubuntu), I do know where to get
them.  This is my list of hardware:

Asus P5Q SE2 motherboard
Intel Core2Duo E7600 3.06GHz 1066MHz FSB
2GB PC6400 DDR2 RAM
Asus GeForce GT220 1GB DDR3 video card
1.5GB Seagate 7200 RPM SATA HDD (ST31500341AS)
Lite-On SATA 240x8 DVD-RW drive
Silverstone LC10-E case
500W power supply
Logitech diNovo Mini bluetooth keyboard

and either of:

Hauppage Nova-T-500 MCE dual tuner (PCI)
Hauppage 2200 MCE dual tuner (PCI-E)

I'll probably add a second tuner card once I've got it all up and
running.  We have occasionally wished for a third tuner in the past (not
often, there's not that much worth watching on TV), so I may as well
have four, just in case :-)

Is this hardware powerful enough to do all that I want?  Do I need more
CPU grunt?  More RAM?  More hard drives?  Bigger PSU?  Anything else?


The only other thing I can think of is remote control.  I'd like to be
able to control it from my Logitech Harmnony One remote, at least for
the most common tasks, so obviously I'll need some sort of IR receiver. 
From what I've read, the USB IrDA dongle I have is unlikely to work, so
I'll need something else.  All I've been able to find are receivers
bundled with remote handsets, but I already have half a dozen or so of
those gathering dust and don't need to add another one to the
collection.


Advice and suggestions will be gratefully received.  I'd like to order
the hardware next week, and I'd appreciate knowing that I've chosen
badly *before* I part with the money :-)


Thanks,

John
-- 
I recommend having an accounts option. The term is vague enough that
almost everything falls under it, and of course the caller can then be
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Re: [SLUG] VPS hosting

[John Clarke]

On Thu, Oct 01, 2009 at 09:49:33PM +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:
 quote who=Ashley Glenday
 
  Can anyone recommend a good, cost effective, virtual hosting provider?
 
 Linode is WONDERFUL, and I recommend it wholeheartedly. Fantastic staff,

I'll second that.  I've been using them for about 18 months now and
they've been great.


John
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networking.
-- Anthony de Boer
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Re: [SLUG] XBitHack

[John Clarke]

On Fri, May 08, 2009 at 11:46:57AM +1000, david wrote:

 I've got this snippet in apache config:

 Directory /var/www/test/
 Options +Includes XBitHack full  IncludesNOEXEC
 /Directory

[snip]

 can anyone give me a clue about why XBitHack doesn't work?

I think your apache config is wrong.  This works for me (with
mod_include enabled):

Directory /var/www/html
Options Indexes IncludesNoExec FollowSymLinks ExecCGI
XBitHack full
AllowOverride None
/Directory


John
-- 
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make sendmail.cf editable by humans, thanks so much.
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Re: [SLUG] parts search

[John Clarke]

On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 02:16:08PM +1000, Bruce wrote:

 I'm looking for a power supply for a Compaq Deskpro P400/6 (the slimline one 
 with the triangular P/S).

I have a P300/3 here which is destined to be put out in the next council
cleanup in a couple of weeks.  I don't know whether the PSU fits the
P400/6, but it's yours if you want it.


John
-- 
[Terminator 6] ... a robot is sent back in time to kill James Cameron and 
Celine Dion.  The world becomes a much better place.
-- Joe Creighton
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Re: [SLUG] sluggish (no pun) cursor

[John Clarke]

On Tue, Apr 07, 2009 at 12:07:46AM +1000, david wrote:

David,

 I've noticed that the cursor response is getting sluggish - for instance 
 when holding down an arrow key in a text document, the cursor used to fly 
 across the screen, but now it seems to have got elderly and reluctant. 
 Half it's old speed.

I've had the same problem since upgrading to Intrepid.  I searched
Launchpad after upgrading (a few months ago) and found it was a known
bug.  I can't point you to the bug though because I've just had a look
again and now can't find it. I'm hoping it'll be fixed in Jaunty.


John
-- 
Every time I have to pipe something into awk I get this mental picture of a 
big fat seagull with stdin connected at the wrong end.
-- Arthur van der Harg
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Re: [SLUG] Anyone else having problems with Ubuntu's latest openvpn?

[John Clarke]

On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 07:39:01 +1000, Mary Gardiner wrote:

 I haven't tried OpenVPN yet, but a new security advisory came out this
 morning saying A regression was introduced in OpenVPN when using TLS
 and multi-client/server which caused OpenVPN to not start when using
 valid SSL certificates... It was also found that openssl-vulnkey from

That was it.  I've applied the latest update and my vpn now works 
again :-)

Now, does anyone know why, if the problem is that only the 15-bit PID
was used for entropy when these vulnerable keys were generated, the
blacklists contain more than 2^15 keys?  The 2048-bit RSA and 1024-bit
DSA blacklists each have 98307 entries, and the openvpn blacklist has
98304.  H.D. Moore's lists of ssh keys contain only 32K keys each, as
I'd expect (http://metasploit.com/users/hdm/tools/debian-openssl/).

The reason I ask is that I've generated 32K limited-entropy 1024-bit
RSA keys for a blacklist to check some keys we use internally (although
it's extremely unlikely any of them were generated on a vulnerable
system), and I was wondering if I should be generating more somehow.
And if anyone wants my blacklist, let me know  I'll make it available.


Thanks,

John
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[SLUG] Anyone else having problems with Ubuntu's latest openvpn?

[John Clarke]

G'day sluggers,

I updated openvpn on a Ubuntu Feisty server today and discovered that
the openvpn server wouldn't allow incoming connections (tried with two
different clients).  This message appears in syslog when a client
tries to connect.

May 14 16:45:46 dropbear openvpn[17945]: 59.167.42.155:33826
ERROR: '/etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/server.key' is a known
vulnerable key. See 'man openssl-vulnkey' for details.

However, when I run openssl-vulnkey on that key file, it says that
the key is not blacklisted.  The key was not generated on a Debian
or Ubuntu system, nor was it generated with a faulty version of
openssl.

Has anyone else encountered a similar problem?  Any ideas why
openvpn doesn't like my key even though it's own vulnerability
checker says it's OK?


Thanks,

John
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-- Graham Reed
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Re: [SLUG] Anyone else having problems with Ubuntu's latest openvpn?

[John Clarke]

On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 07:39:01 +1000, Mary Gardiner wrote:

 I haven't tried OpenVPN yet, but a new security advisory came out this
 morning saying A regression was introduced in OpenVPN when using TLS

Thanks Mary, I've just seen that too.  I'll give it a go later.


Cheers,

John
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I find this highly amusing, as I am yet to find any difference
between `supported' and `unsupported' when it comes to Sybase
products.
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Re: [SLUG] Anyone else having problems with Ubuntu's latest openvpn?

[John Clarke]

On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 09:35:31 +1000, Sonia Hamilton wrote:

Hi Sonia,

 Out of interest, what source are you using for your security advisories?

I get mine from [EMAIL PROTECTED]


Cheers,

John
-- 
PdS You obviously haven't used terminfo.
All the problems of termcap, a few extras and a layer of nastinesss.
It's a wonderful tool.
-- Steve O'Hara-Smith
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Re: [SLUG] mutt Reply-To:

[John Clarke]

On Thu, May 01, 2008 at 01:07:50 +1000, david wrote:

 I'm using mutt in a script to send out emails. 
 
 $ mutt -s subject -a file [EMAIL PROTECTED]  /dev/null
 
 Is there any way to add a Reply-To: header? I can't find it in google or

This might work:

mutt -s subject -a file -e 'my_hdr Reply-To [EMAIL PROTECTED]'  
/dev/null


Cheers,

John
-- 
 Oh yes - it's the old type random commands into vi and see what
 happens problem.
At least it wasn't TECO. Vi beeps too early to do much damage.
-- Tim Connors
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Re: [SLUG] Manipulating DNS

[John Clarke]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 09:05:33 +0545, Howard Lowndes wrote:

Howard,

 I don't want to start fiddling with dhclient, nor with /etc/resolv.conf, 
 but I would like to get at least some of the internal zone presented to 

If you don't want to use resolvconf to sort it out (and I'm not
recommending you do, just noting it as an option), here are a
couple of solutions I've used with openvpn:

If you only want localhost to be able to resolve the internal zone,
do a zone transfer from the remote name server after the vpn comes up
and populate /etc/hosts.   When the vpn goes down (or the machine is
rebooted), remove the extra hostnames from /etc/hosts.

If you want other hosts on the LAN to see the internal zone, have a
second bind config file (with /etc/bind9/named.conf.local as a symlink
to the one you're actually using) with the appropriate config to use
the remote servers, then switch the symlink and reload bind when the
vpn comes up.  This requires that you either run the vpn client on
the same host as the local name server, or you have some way to signal
to the name server that the vpn is up/down.


Cheers,

John
-- 
Object-[dis]oriented INTERCAL.  I have seen the compiler, and it runs.
Why do I now feel like the hero in one of those H. P. Lovecraft stories
who has seen something no mortal man was ever meant to see, and who is
marginally less sane thereafter?  -- Charlie Stross
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Re: [SLUG] Re: [LINK] Sourcing replacement laptop batteries

[John Clarke]

On Fri, Jan 18, 2008 at 09:37:31 +1100, Daryl Thompson wrote:

 What is the Web address for Global Batteries please?

It was in Howard's original email: http://global-batteries.com.au/


Cheers,

John
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Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that's
not why we're doing it.
  -- Richard Feynman
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[SLUG] Re: [LINK] Sourcing replacement laptop batteries

[John Clarke]

On Fri, Jan 18, 2008 at 01:41:34 +1100, Howard Lowndes wrote:

Howard,

 Does anyone have any experiences they can offer about these suppliers, 
 or can anyone offer other experiences of reliable battery sources.

I've bought phone batteries and laptop power supplies from Global
Batteries  I'd buy from them again.  They responded quickly to my
emailed questions before I ordered  delivered my order promptly, and
they were heaps cheaper than genuine parts ($50 vs $200 from HP for
the laptop power supply).

The only minor quibble I have is that the phone batteries are very
slightly larger than the genuine Nokia ones so they're a snug fit into
the phone.


Cheers,

John
-- 
One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that,
lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination
of their C programs.
-- Robert Firth 
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Re: [SLUG] Formatting problem.

[John Clarke]

On Tue, Oct 23, 2007 at 11:04:08 +1000, Amos Shapira wrote:

 What about having a partition table on the disk? Would it help to have or
 not have one?

Mostly it doesn't seem to make a difference, but I do have one device
(a GPS) that doesn't handle memory cards with a partition table.  Ubuntu
doesn't properly handle the card if it doesn't have one, but it's only a
minor problem.  It mounts both the entire device and partition 1 (e.g.
/dev/sdb and /dev/sdb1), but otherwise has no problems using the card.


Cheers,

John
-- 
I have seen pr0n on an HP 48SX.  The viewing software implemented a
virtual desktop.  Right breast, scroll, scroll, scroll, left breast.
Whee.
-- Matt Roberds
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Re: [SLUG] Upgrading HP laptop BIOS without Windows, how?

[John Clarke]

On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 11:42:13AM +1000, John Clarke wrote:

 Unfortunately HP only provide updates as a package with a Windows (not
 DOS) program called WinFlash.

Thanks to all who replied with suggestions on how to do the upgrade
without reinstalling Windows.  I did finally manage to do the upgrade,
but it took a few attempts before I got it to work:

- replacing my hard disc with another containing Windows didn't
work. The only disc I could get hold of was from a Dell laptop,
and that wouldn't boot (apparently because Dell do something
weird in their boot loader).

- building the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows on a Windows PC at work
failed build because the machine I was using had a different
version of Cygwin (cygwin1.dll) installed to that used by the
tools in  the UBCD4Win package, which meant that the UBCD4Win
tools wouldn't run, and neither would any Cygwin programs on the
PC until I rebooted it.

- building the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows on a new (Dell) latop
with Vista and no Cygwin worked, but the BIOS upgrade program
wouldn't run because it's hard-coded to use C:, and only B: (RAM
disc) and X: (CD) were available.  Mounting a network drive onto
C: was my first thought for a workaround but that wasn't
possible because I couldn't get networking to start.

- unpacking the BIOS program under Wine and copying to a USB flash
drive didn't work either because it didn't accept the hotplugged
flash drive.

- rebooting from the Windows CD with the flash drive plugged in
worked, and finally something went right: the flash drive
appeared as C:.  I ran the program, upgraded the BIOS, and it
worked.  It even fixed the corrupted model and serial numbers
:-)


Cheers,

John
-- 
Ah, the advantage of M$ software. As the number of errors in the
software grows towards infinity, the probability that a specific error
is non-trivial approaches 0. Which means all M$ related problems are
trivial and easily solved by Googling.  -- Toni Lassila
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Re: [SLUG] Upgrading HP laptop BIOS without Windows, how?

[John Clarke]

On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 01:53:04PM +1000, Visser, Martin wrote:

 I'll see if I can get answer internally. 

Thanks Martin.  I'm a little annoyed that when my laptop died  the
motherboard was replaced under warranty, the replacement had a very old
BIOS, and they didn't set the model and serial numbers.

 An alternative might be to see if you can hold of one of the Windows
 PE or similar bootable CDs. 

I didn't know such a thing existed.  I gave up on Windows years ago :-)
We do use it at work though, so I'll see what I can do.


Thanks,

John
-- 
If you want to watch [a hard drive] die a slow agonizing death, whilst
incoveniencing the maximum number of your lusers, install it in the
part of your news spool that handles alt.sex.*
-- Brian Kantor
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Re: [SLUG] Upgrading HP laptop BIOS without Windows, how?

[John Clarke]

On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 06:37:00PM +1000, Visser, Martin wrote:

Martin,

 Even easier, might be get basically any Windows loaded hard drive, stick
 it in a USB hard drive case and boot from that (assuming your model

I have a selection of USB hard drive adapters (who needs a case :-) so
I'll see what I can get hold of at work tomorrow.  I'm sure I'll be able
to get hold of a drive for the few minutes it'll take to flash the BIOS.

I'll probably still have a go at building a bootable Windows CD in case
I ever need one again.

 Even if the hardware such as video is substantially different you should
 at least be able to get it to boot into safe mode. (Ugly I know).

Appearance is unimportant, I only want to do one thing then I'll go back
to Linux  :-)


Thanks,

John
-- 
In my cats case, if they're well fed, it just means they have more time to
play with the little squeaking feathery/furry things that they find and bring
home.  It's probably more humane on the wildlife to starve the buggers.
-- Iain Rae
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[SLUG] Upgrading HP laptop BIOS without Windows, how?

[John Clarke]

Hi all,

I have an HP laptop (Pavilion dv5230tx) which has a very old BIOS
installed and I want to upgrade to the latest version.  According to
HP's change log, Core 2 Duo support wasn't added to the BIOS until the
version after the one I have, even though the laptop has a Core 2 Duo
processor.

I've been trying to get suspend and hibernate working, and I suspect the
old BIOS is part of the problem.  Hibernate used to work before I had
the motherboard replaced, and I'm fairly sure that the old one had a
more recent BIOS.  I've had a couple of other weird occasional problems
which I suspect are due to the BIOS (keyboard not working after boot and
mouse behaving very strangely) too.

Unfortunately HP only provide updates as a package with a Windows (not
DOS) program called WinFlash.  I've wiped Windows off the laptop, so my
only choices are to reinstall Windows (which means wiping Linux first
because HP only provide recovery discs and I don't have a spare laptop
SATA drive), or to run WinFlash with wine. I've started the program and
it does appear to run, but I haven't been game to let it flash the BIOS
yet.  Does anyone know whether it's likely to work or if it'll turn my
laptop into a brick, or is there another way to do it?


Thanks,

John
-- 
I can check out all the porn I want to at home, but when I get to work,
that's when I'm supposed to be surfing the web and reading USENET.
-- Eric Schwartz
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Re: [SLUG] Windows Subversion client?

[John Clarke]

On Tue, Jul 10, 2007 at 05:18:52 +1000, Amos Shapira wrote:

 the best Windows GUI client I found is TortoiseSVN which the programmer
 doesn't like because it relays on Windows Exploder which can get stuck for
 minutes sometimes.

One thing we've found here is that it's the TortoiseSVN cache process
which locks up.  The Windows developers tell me that deleting the cache
binary works a treat :-)


Cheers,

John
-- 
No - we've got 4Mbps Token Ring with IBM Type-1 connectors. You don't
*need* something to blow up to take the network down - it does that all
by itself, pretty much whenever it pleases.
-- David Skinner
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Re: [SLUG] installing Debian Etch on Dell E520 (Intel Core 2 Duo)

[John Clarke]

On Thu, Jul 05, 2007 at 05:27:19 +1000, Amos Shapira wrote:

 I've finally got my Dell Dimension E520 desktop (don't trust the delivery
 company they use, stood me up three times in two days) and managed to boot
 System Rescue CD to shrink the Windows XP partition on it, but sticking the
 ia64 CD-ROM 1 or ia64 netinst of Debian Etch on memory stick causes it to
 just sit without doing anything as soon as the POST checks are over. It
 doesn't beep or print an error.

According to Dell's website, this model has an Intel 965 chipset.  I had
trouble installing Ubuntu (Edgy, the latest at the time) on a PC with a
965 chipset because the Linux PATA driver didn't like the PATA controller.
The generic ide driver would work, but only if compiled into the kernel,
because it needed a command line option which was ignored if the driver
was built as a module.

The only CD I could boot was GRML.  I tried Ubuntu (Edgy, Dapper), Knoppix,
Debian (3.1 IIRC), but none worked.  I couldn't do a netinstall either
because the e1000 driver in the kernel wouldn't work with the new version
of the e1000 on my motherboard.

I had to build a custom installation CD with the generic ide driver compiled
into the kernel, and the e1000 driver replaced with the latest from sf.net.
The first kernel update from Ubuntu included these fixes, and IIRC, Ubuntu
Feisty boots OK on that machine.

So, try GRML (grml.org, I used v0.8) or Ubuntu Feisty, maybe that'll get you
going.


Cheers,

John
-- 
Zero Administration is analagous to Maintenance-free Battery.  When 
administration is needed, you have zero chance of being able to do it.
-- Paul Sawyer
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Re: [SLUG] What plug is that

[John Clarke]

On Wed, Jul 04, 2007 at 02:17:26 +1000, Howard Lowndes wrote:

 There used to be a web site that told you the wiring for various plug 
 and connectors.  Does anyone have it bookmarked?

Is pinouts.ru what you're thinking of?


Cheers,

John
-- 
If they're going to make up their own alphabet, play them at their own
game: g as in gnat, k as in knife, m as in mnemonic, h as in
honour, p as in pneumoconiosis...
-- Gary Wolf Barnes
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Re: [SLUG] changing motherboards

[John Clarke]

On Thu, May 31, 2007 at 11:01:16 +1000, david wrote:

 Using Ubuntu 7.04, should I be worried? 

Probably not.

 Is it just a case of 
 dpkg-reconfigure xorg-xserver 
 dpkg-reconfigure alsa-
 or is it more complicated than that.

If your motherboard has onboard networking, you may also need to change
/etc/iftab to have the new MAC address.

 I'm also a bit worried that fstab might get messed up. I've got one IDE
 and one SATA drive, and my system doesn't use the standard UUID that

I wouldn't expect the device names to change.  Sometimes the ordering of
hd* changes between releases (Breezy - Dapper did that to me), but it's
unlikely to do that if all you're doing is changing the motherboard.


Cheers,

John
-- 
I find the iron law of Oracle holds for almost all software: *Every* default
setting is wrong, often painfully so.
-- Chris Adams
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Re: [SLUG] deb caching software for use on LANs that doesn't suck?

[John Clarke]

On Wed, May 09, 2007 at 09:49:52 +1000, Billy Kwong wrote:

 So, has anyone come across something like apt-proxy or apt-cacher, but it
 doesn't suck? (Yes I know it sounds like a big ask) :)

Have you had a look at apt-mirror?  It differs from apt-proxy or
apt-cacher in that you create a mirror of a remote repository all
at once rather than caching packages you download, so it can take
a while to get setup, but then it's simple to keep up to date -
just run it from cron once or twice a day.  dapper + edgy + feisty,
main + retricted + universe + multiverse, including updates, 
backports and security is 51GB in total.

If you want a quick way to fill your mirror, I have a full mirror
of the three latest Ubuntu distros.  Bring a hard drive to either
St Leonards (work, but not this week) or Lindfield (home) and
I'll copy it over for you if you'd like.


Cheers,

John
-- 
It took people a long time to figure out which machine was doing it,
and even longer to figure out how.  But for some reason it didn't take
them any time at all to figure that I'd done it.  -- Paul Tomblin
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Re: [SLUG] Could someone please remind me...

[John Clarke]

On Mon, Apr 16, 2007 at 09:42:14 +1000, Howard Lowndes wrote:

Howard,

 ...what is the syntax to include one HTML document into another so that 
 they present as one, similar to the IMG SRC=... type of syntax.

Are you thinking of server-side includes?:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/howto/ssi.html

or iframe or object elements?:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/objects.html


Cheers,

John
-- 
Shirley any sysadmin worth his NaCl knows that the steady-state
of any real-world RAID-system includes at least one failed disk?
-- Tanuki
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Re: [SLUG] fedora 6 and epson scanner

[John Clarke]

On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 08:31:41 +1000, Craig Warner wrote:

Hi Craig,

 Can someone point out what I need to do?

I don't know how FC6 differs from Ubuntu, but in the hope that it's
similar enough that it'll just work, here's all I had to do to get an
Epson scanner working on Ubuntu (dapper):

install libsane, sane and sane-utils
edit /etc/sane.d/saned.conf to allow scanning from my subnet
edit /etc/sane.d/dll.conf to uncomment the net and epson
backends and comment out all the others
create /etc/xinetd.d/saned to run /usr/sbin/saned on port 6566
(sane-port)
restart xinetd

I then had trouble with remote hosts being able to automatically find
the scanner, so after a few hours of trying everything I could think of,
I eventually got it to work properly only in debug mode and only if not
run via xinetd.  So, I disabled service via xinetd and wrote a script
which continually ran saned in debug mode:

#/bin/sh
cd /tmp
while /bin/true
do
/usr/sbin/saned -d0 /dev/null 21
done

and I start that from /etc/rc.local with:

su saned /usr/local/sbin/saned 


Cheers,

John
-- 
'Sabotage In The American Workplace' would have a REMARKABLY short chapter
on the substance of a.s.r and a.t-s.r - a lot of one-line entries saying
I quit and let things happen as the boss said to.
-- David Gerard
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Re: [SLUG] howto remotely edit session panel? (Ubuntu Edgy)

[John Clarke]

On Thu, Jan 11, 2007 at 04:19:43 +1100, Sonia Hamilton wrote:

 vnc currently not available to that machine, due to firewall issues...

If you can ssh in to the machine, it is.  You can tunnel vnc over ssh,
e.g.:

http://www.vanemery.com/Linux/VNC/vnc-over-ssh.html


Cheers,

John
-- 
This is so sick and twisted, it *needs* to be done!
--- Rick Dickinson
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Re: [SLUG] JMicron woes....

[John Clarke]

On Mon, Dec 18, 2006 at 08:16:04 +1100, Grant Parnell wrote:

 I've got a GA-965P-S3 motherboard with on-board JMicrcon controller. I've 

Any motherboard with a 965 chipset is a bit of a bugger to get going ...

I've installed Ubuntu Edgy on a couple of different Intel 965
motherboards but I needed to build a custom installation CD to do it. 
There are two problems:

1.  The PATA controller doesn't work unless all-generic-ide is passed
on the kernel command line, but this option doesn't work if the
driver is a module.  Solved by compiling the module in to the
kernel.
2.  The e1000 network driver in the kernel doesn't support the new h/w.
Solved by replacing the e1000 driver with the latest from sf.net.

A few days ago, Ubuntu released a kernel update which apparently
includes these fixes.  I've installed it on one Intel 965 motherboard
and it appears to work.  I haven't done a huge amount of testing but
both the PATA optical drive and the network are OK.

I've only found one live CD which boots and runs on the Intel 965
motherboards: grml (http://grml.org/).

 I actually wanted to install Centos 4.4 on it but had trouble getting it 
 to find the install media - looks like the 'all-generic-ide' kernel option 
 helps there (just tested that) but the install still locks up... trying 

A few other options that I've seen suggested to deal with various
problems with 965 chipsets: pci=nommconf, acpi=off, irqpoll.  Zero or
more of those may work for you.


Cheers,

John
-- 
[Terminator 6] ... a robot is sent back in time to kill James Cameron and 
Celine Dion.  The world becomes a much better place.
-- Joe Creighton
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Re: [SLUG] Gnome WeatherApplet

[John Clarke]

On Wed, Dec 13, 2006 at 10:03:40 +1100, John wrote:

 Is there a reason why I cannot get the BoM radar map to show in the Gnome
 WeatherApplet after I input the url into :preferences:general:?

It works for me.  The URL I'm using is:

http://mirror.bom.gov.au/radar/IDR033.gif

(for Sydney).


Cheers,

John
-- 
Minis on the other hand are just the wrong size. Too small to work on 
directly and too large to put upside down on the workbench.
-- Craig 'Stevo' Stephenson
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Re: [SLUG] NAT stuff

[John Clarke]

On Thu, Nov 30, 2006 at 06:06:37 +1100, O Plameras wrote:

 Yes, it's silly to complicate when you can simplify.

I agree, all other things being equal.  However, I was trying to point
out that there might be other things to consider and there may be
reasons why it would be preferably to use NAT in this case.

I'm not going to waste any more time arguing with you; let's just agree
to differ.


Cheers,

John
-- 
Now that you mention it, bagpipes _do_ make a lot more sense if you think
of them as an enormous set of symbolic genitalia.
-- Anthony DeBoer
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Re: [SLUG] NAT stuff

[John Clarke]

On Thu, Nov 30, 2006 at 04:04:13 +1100, John Clarke wrote:

 iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.0.0/24 -o eth1 -j MASQUERADE

I should have also said that if the dual-homed host has a static address
on eth1 then you should use SNAT instead of MASQUERADE:

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.0.0/24 -o eth1 -j SNAT \
--to-source 10.0.0.1


Cheers,

John
-- 
Not all of us are willing to get the genital piercings to get the right
walk.
-- Paul Tomblin
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Re: [SLUG] NAT stuff

[John Clarke]

On Thu, Nov 30, 2006 at 03:03:13 +1100, Scott Waller (Lots of Watts) wrote:

 and I want to let all the computers on eth0 network to talk to an 
 internet connection on the 10.0.0.1 network, how would I use iptables 
 and/or NAT to make this happen?

Make sure that all the computers on eth0 have 192.168.0.1 as their
default gateway and then something list this should do the trick:

# accept all packets that are part of an existing connection
iptables -I FORWARD -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
# forward anything from eth0 to eth1
iptables -A FORWARD -s 192.168.0.0/24 -i eth0 -o eth1 -m state --state NEW 
-j ACCEPT
# masquerade anything forwarded from eth0 to eth1
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.0.0/24 -o eth1 -j MASQUERADE


Cheers,

John
-- 
Yeah, but imagine all the helpdesk calls. The term 'clitmouse' gives an
accurate indication of how to operate the control[1]. But with a 'penis
control' it'd be seconds before a luser calls in my cursor doesn't move
when I move my hand up and down the shaft.-- Arthur van der Harg
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Re: [SLUG] NAT stuff

[John Clarke]

On Thu, Nov 30, 2006 at 04:08:48 +1100, Michael Fox wrote:

 Might be a silly question, but why NAT the 192 - 10 network, as its

It's not a silly question.

 very likely a device is already doing on the 10 network to the
 internet. Basically why would you want to double NAT, maybe we should
 just setup some sort of route to get this traffic out to the net via
 the nat device on the 10 network?

You could do it with routing, but all devices on eth1 (10.x) would need
to have a route to the 192.x network.  Using NAT means that nothing on
eth1 needs to know about the 192.x network (they don't even need to know
it exists).  Of course, that may be a bad thing -- you might not want
192.x to get to any hosts on 10.x -- but it's not my network so I don't
know that :-)


Cheers,

John
-- 
 Is someone piping me through sed without my knowledge?
No, they're using your request as a command line for teco, with the
error message as the input file.
-- Joe Zeff in reply to Malcolm Ray
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Re: [SLUG] NAT stuff

[John Clarke]

On Thu, Nov 30, 2006 at 04:41:49 +1100, Peter Hardy wrote:

  You could do it with routing, but all devices on eth1 (10.x) would need
  to have a route to the 192.x network.
 
 In theory, this just means adding the static route to your DHCP server. 

Only in the theory that says every device uses DHCP ...

 But in practice, both of the dhcp clients I've tried in Linux don't ask 
 for static-routes by default, and I've only idly googled to check 
 whether Windows supports it. The answer seems to be maybe.

The dhcp-options(5) man page says ... this option  is  virtually 
useless, and is not implemented by any of the popular DHCP clients, for
example the Microsoft DHCP client.  Given that this was written by ISC,
I'd be willing to bet that it's not implemented by their DHCP client
either.

 But yeah. A simpler and more efficient solution would be to make sure 
 your multi-homed box has IP forwarding turned on ( echo 1  
 /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward ), and add a static route on the device 

Yes, very important.  I forgot to include that bit.

 terminating your internet connection, telling it to use your multi-homed 
 box as a gateway for 192.168.0.0/24. As long as there's nothing else on 
 the 10.0.0 network that you want to talk to, everything will Just Work.

s/will/should/

:-)


Cheers,

John
-- 
One distinguishing characteristic of BOFHen is attention deficit disorder.
Put me in front of something boring and I can find a near-infinite number
of really creative ways to bugger off.
-- Anthony de Boer
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Re: [SLUG] NAT stuff

[John Clarke]

On Thu, Nov 30, 2006 at 05:30:07 +1100, O Plameras wrote:

 NATting is used to route Private Network(RFC1918) - Public
 Network(Internet).

Not necessarily.  NAT is Network Address Translation.  Any network. 
There's no reason why you can't use NAT in private networks, and in some
situations it makes sense to do so.

Do you have a wireless AP on a private network?  If so, you're probably
doing exactly what you've just said is silly.

 And so,  it's silly to use NATting in this situation.

No it's not.  You can solve the original problem with or without NAT,
but without knowing more about the original poster's requirements, you
can't say whether it's better to use NAT or not in this case.


Cheers,

John
-- 
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to
build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying
to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
-- Rich Cook 
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Re: [SLUG] Re: UPS and monitoring software

[John Clarke]

On Thu, Oct 26, 2006 at 02:36:06 +1000, Michael Fox wrote:
  On 10/26/06, Ben [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  
   I think the Nova is an older model and possibly wrong socket type (ie,
   needs international adaptors).
 
 I've asked the supplier to find out the plugs on it. Everywhere says
 NEMA type, which is indeed not IEC or the standard.

I've found two different answers.  This document:

   
http://www.nps.com.au/solutions-for-power-problems-product-details/nova-ups-brochure.pdf

says it has IEC connectors (and the photos show them), but this one:

http://www.mgeups.com.au/nova_au.pdf

says it has standard Aussie 3-pin mains sockets.


Cheers,

John
-- 
The Mid-winter solstice is a good time for enterprising priests to go
into a ritual to supposedly bring back the sun, and justify lazing
around all the rest of the year doing bugger-all.
-- Dan Holdsworth
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Re: [SLUG] Re: UPS and monitoring software

[John Clarke]

On Thu, Oct 26, 2006 at 05:55:59 +0100, Rev Simon Rumble wrote:
 Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 05:55:59 +0100
 From: Rev Simon Rumble [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 To: SLUG slug@slug.org.au
 Subject: Re: [SLUG] Re: UPS and monitoring software
 Mail-Followup-To: Rev Simon Rumble [EMAIL PROTECTED],
   SLUG slug@slug.org.au
 X-URL: http://www.rumble.net/
 User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.9i
 
 This one time, at band camp, John Clarke wrote:
 
  says it has IEC connectors (and the photos show them), but this one:
 [snip]
  says it has standard Aussie 3-pin mains sockets.
 
 IEC connector = kettle cord, so both are probably right and you'll have 

I know what an IEC connector is, and they can't both be right.  IEC
socket != Aussie mains socket.

 no problem plugging it in.

That's something we can both agree on :-)


Cheers,

John
-- 
Having sat on the ground an watched people trying to land off the IGS, I'd
suggest that most airlines should be doing 20 mile finals, and no less.
-- JB
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Re: [SLUG] New St George HTML based online banking interface

[John Clarke]

On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 09:49:42 +1000, Luke Yelavich wrote:

 Now if I could just try and work out the damn URL used to load the 
 sign-in screen, I just might be able to use the damn thing in elinks. :)

This one?:


https://ibank.stgeorge.com.au/html/index.asp?redirected=TrueJavaVendor=SUNClientPlatform=UNIXJVMVersion=document=/xml/bank.xmlbrowser=FirefoxApplType=jdk11cookies=Truesize=demo=route=IBSVersion=1IDMError=card=


Cheers,

John
-- 
Putting Telstra and ADSL2+ in the same sentence isn't currently
sensible. Telstra haven't invented ADSL2+ yet.
-- Simon Hackett
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Re: [SLUG] New St George HTML based online banking interface

[John Clarke]

On Mon, Oct 16, 2006 at 05:10:01 +0100, Rev Simon Rumble wrote:

 Still, I'm a bit disappointed that they still don't support Firefox but 

That's not what they told me when I first started using the new HTML
interface a few months ago, and on this page:

https://www.stgeorge.com.au/int_bank/support/technical.asp

they state that Firefox *is* supported, although only on Windows and
Mac.

 Regardless, it works fine in Firefox.

It does.  It doesn't work in Mozilla though.


Cheers,

John
-- 
Just pause and think for a moment; someone must have been paid real
money to re-implement _drive letters_.
-- James Riden
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Re: [SLUG] Re: [SLUG-ANNOUNCE] SLUG August Monthly Meeting (with new venue)

[John Clarke]

On Tue, Aug 22, 2006 at 01:12:29 +1000, Beach_Wins wrote:

 I'm from Central Coast , Can you tell me if I should go to ST.Leonards 
 railway station and do I need to catch a bus .

Get off the train at St Leonards, walk through the ticket barriers and
walk straight ahead until you reach the highway.  Turn left (toward the
city).  The IBM building, 601 Pacific Hwy, is a couple of hundred metres
away on the left (i.e. the north side of the highway), near Westpac
Bank.

If you reach Albany St, you've gone too far.  If you go past RNS
hospital, turn around and go back the other way :-)


Cheers,

John
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In My Experience, which includes 25 years with WeBuildHighways, a
traffic engineer's point of view involves trying to see out through
intestine and abdominal wall.
-- Mike Andrews
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Re: [SLUG] Re: [SLUG-ANNOUNCE] SLUG August Monthly Meeting (with new venue)

[John Clarke]

On Wed, Aug 23, 2006 at 09:56:28 +1000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 How would the parking be there at this time of day [if any exists at all
 close by] ?

Lots of meter parking, most of which becomes free at 6:00pm (or maybe
6:30pm).  Most areas have a two hour limit, and I think it's about
$2/hr.  Closer to Crows Nest some areas are metered until 10:00pm.  I
don't often park in the streets around there, but I'd expect you'd be
able to find a spot not too far away (within 10 minutes walk).


Cheers,

John
-- 
OK, so it's not really thermite. It uses Mg++ instead of Al+++. I
suppose they figured that having the entire box disappear in a lake of
molten iron wouldn't make it easy to eat.
-- Shalom Septimus
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Re: [SLUG] Seeking iptables interface-specific script

[John Clarke]

On Wed, Aug 23, 2006 at 11:51:23 +1000, Mary Gardiner wrote:

 deleted with -D, but only if you know the rule number which, as far as I
 can tell, you work out by running 'iptables -L' and counting the rules
 from the top of the chain.

With '--line-numbers' you don't have to count :-)

 So are people doing this kind of interface specific iptables rules, and
 if so, how are you doing it? Is there a blessed way, or just a bunch of
 ways?

I list the rules  look for the one I want, then delete it by number,
but I've only (so far) needed to do it in one script on one host.  You
may be able put the rule into a separate user-defined chain, then simply
flush the chain to delete it (iptables -F chain).


Cheers,

John
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... every credible survey which has ever been conducted has concluded 
that filtering software is to Internet users what meat-mincers are to 
cows ...
-- Mark Newton
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Re: [SLUG] How do I automount CF card when PCMCIA adapter inserted?

[John Clarke]

On Mon, Aug 07, 2006 at 08:37:50 +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:

 It totally depends on your PCMCIA adapter. Some do everything fine, even if

Thanks Jeff.  The card is recognised, it's just not mounted
automatically:

kernel: [17180389.364000] pccard: PCMCIA card inserted into slot 0
kernel: [17180389.364000] pcmcia: registering new device pcmcia0.0
kernel: [17180389.404000] Probing IDE interface ide1...
kernel: [17180389.692000] hdc: SanDisk SDCFB-16, CFA DISK drive
kernel: [17180390.364000] ide1 at 0x2040-0x2047,0x204e on irq 3
kernel: [17180390.364000] hdc: max request size: 128KiB
kernel: [17180390.364000] hdc: 31360 sectors (16 MB) w/1KiB Cache, 
CHS=490/2/32
kernel: [17180390.364000] hdc: cache flushes not supported
kernel: [17180390.364000]  hdc: hdc1
kernel: [17180390.368000] ide-cs: hdc: Vcc = 3.3, Vpp = 0.0

 I'd recommend filing a bug with as much information you can glean about the
 PCMCIA/CF adaper as possible.

I want to be sure it's not something that I'm doing (or not doing)
first.  Is there a config file somewhere I have to edit to make it
automount?

 Quick thing you can try - boot with it unplugged, run hal-device-manager,
 plug it in and see what happens.

It sees the adapter when it's plugged in.  lshw tells me this:

*-pcmcia
 description: CardBus bridge
 product: Texas Instruments
 vendor: Texas Instruments
 physical id: 6
 bus info: [EMAIL PROTECTED]:06.0
 version: 00
 width: 32 bits
 clock: 33MHz
 capabilities: pcmcia bus_master cap_list
 configuration: driver=yenta_cardbus
 resources: iomemory:d2004000-d2004fff irq:185
   *-storage
description: SDP
vendor: SunDisk
physical id: 0
version: 5/3 0.6
slot: Socket 0
resources: irq:3
   *-ide
description: IDE Channel 0
physical id: 1
bus info: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
logical name: ide1
clock: 33MHz
  *-disk
   product: SanDisk SDCFB-16
   physical id: 0
   bus info: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
   logical name: /dev/hdc
   capabilities: packet


Cheers,

John
-- 
... every credible survey which has ever been conducted has concluded 
that filtering software is to Internet users what meat-mincers are to 
cows ...
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Re: [SLUG] How do I automount CF card when PCMCIA adapter inserted?

[John Clarke]

On Mon, Aug 07, 2006 at 08:51:16 +1000, Martin Pool wrote:

  I'd recommend filing a bug with as much information you can glean about the
  PCMCIA/CF adaper as possible.
 
 What Jeff says is the right thing to do.

Thanks, I will, when I'm sure it is a bug.

 I bought a Belkin USB 2.0 reader for about $30 and it's *much* faster

I have a USB 2.0 reader too, so if I can't get the PCMCIA adapter to
work it doesn't matter.

 desktops if need be.  Money well spent in my case.  Maybe John's is
 better.

It's as slow as a wet week, but it doesn't make the machine crash, so
it's slightly better than yours :-)


Cheers,

John
-- 
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Re: [SLUG] Re: How do I automount CF card when PCMCIA adapter inserted?

[John Clarke]

On Mon, Aug 07, 2006 at 11:39:49 +0200, Ben Buxton wrote:
 John Clarke [EMAIL PROTECTED] uttered the following thing:
  
  Would someone please point me in the right direction?
 
 If you're fairly desktop-agnostic, you can try reverting to Kubuntu. I

Last time I used KDE I wasn't too keen on it, but it was a long time
ago.

 find KDE does a marvellous job at auto-mounting removable media. When I
 stick a removable disk in (either usb or pcmcia), it pops up asking me
 what to do (and i can set it to remember my choice).

GNOME does the right thing with USB drives, CDs and DVDs.  It's only
PCMCIA that's not working.

 Also on an HP laptop.

This is a new Pavillion dv5230tx.  I also have access to a couple of
Dells so I might try it on those too.


Thanks,

John
-- 
[unistd.h] is in /usr/include; or if it isn't, you don't have a
compiler, you have an implement designed for the regenerating of
kernels.  Any resemblance that may have to a compiler is purely
coincidental.   -- Eric The Read
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Re: [SLUG] How do I automount CF card when PCMCIA adapter inserted?

[John Clarke]

On Tue, Aug 08, 2006 at 03:03:04 +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:

  Is there a config file somewhere I have to edit to make it automount?
 
 No. I mean, you can look at the Removable storage preferences dialogue,
 but I can't imagine you've changed it in any way that would effect this. If

I haven't changed it at all.  That's the first place I looked and it
seemed OK to me.

 You can see it in hal-device-manager? If so, definitely file a bug. It may
 just need a bit of hardware ID / capabilities tweaking.

OK, thanks Jeff, I'll do that.


Now to try to get suspend  hibernate working properly ...


Cheers,

John
-- 
And as was widely anticipated, the Canadian election was brought to a
conclusion long before the US one.  The only surprise, really, was that
the CBC still had a heterosexual employee on the payroll.
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[SLUG] How do I automount CF card when PCMCIA adapter inserted?

[John Clarke]

Hi all,

I have a new (HP) laptop with Ubuntu 6.06.  Most things just work :-)

I also have a PCMCIA compact flash adapter which works, except that I
have to mount the drive manually after inserting it.  I'd like to have
it automount but having never played with PCMCIA on Linux I don't know
what to do to make it happen.

Would someone please point me in the right direction?


Thanks,

John
-- 
I've said it before and I'll say it again.  Server rooms should be
unfriendly!  They should look dangerous, they should be uncomfortably cold,
they should be inexplicably noisy.  If you can arrange for the smell of
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[SLUG] Postfix configuration help needed

[John Clarke]

Hi all,

I'm trying to configure postfix on a new machine at home to replace an
old installation of sendmail on another machine.  I want the new machine
to be the outgoing mail server for the LAN and to masquerade addresses
in my domain, exactly as sendmail is already doing.  The mail server for
my domain is elsewhere, so this new server should forward all mail for
the domain (except those directly addressed to LAN hosts) to the
external mail server.

I've almost got it, but there's one thing I can't get to work and that's
correct handling of mail addressed to root.  I want mail to root,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] and [EMAIL PROTECTED] to be delivered locally, but
[EMAIL PROTECTED] needs to be forwarded to the external mail server.  I've
only been able to make it forward all variations of root to the external
server, or deliver them all locally.

I'm using postfix 2.2.4-1ubuntu2.1 on breezy.  Here are the relevant
bits of my main.cf:

append_dot_mydomain = no
alias_maps = hash:/etc/aliases
alias_database = hash:/etc/aliases
myorigin = /etc/mailname
mydestination = dropbear.kirriwa.net, localhost.localdomain, localhost, 
localhost.kirriwa.net
relay_domains = kirriwa.net
relayhost = mail.internode.on.net
mynetworks = 127.0.0.0/8, 192.168.42.0/24
virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual
masquerade_domains = kirrwa.net
masquerade_exceptions = root

/etc/mailname contains:

kirriwa.net

/etc/aliases contains:

root:   [EMAIL PROTECTED]
clamav: root

/etc/postfix/virtual contains:

root[EMAIL PROTECTED]

I've tried with  without masquerade_exceptions, with  without
virtual_alias_maps, but I can't make it do what I want.  I either get
mail to root delivered externally, or mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
delivered locally.


Is there a postfix guru out there who can whack me with the appropriate
cluestick?


Thanks,

John
-- 
 Wow. They've got you both coming *and* going, eh mate?
Yep. That's why semen is white and urine is yellow. That way, the
soccer/football fans can tell whether they're coming or going.
-- Mike Andrews
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Re: [SLUG] squid experts - ports 81,8000

[John Clarke]

On Tue, Jul 25, 2006 at 01:18:48 +1000, Grant Parnell - EverythingLinux wrote:

 lynx http://www.some.site:81/ it returns a 503 and I can see NO PACKETS 
 going to the site with tcpdump. Exactly the same with port 8000. The error 

Is your access blocked by an acl, e.g. Safe_ports?:

[EMAIL PROTECTED] /etc/squid]$ grep Safe_ports /etc/squid/squid.conf 
acl Safe_ports port 80  # http
acl Safe_ports port 21  # ftp
acl Safe_ports port 443 563 # https, snews
acl Safe_ports port 70  # gopher
acl Safe_ports port 210 # wais
acl Safe_ports port 1025-65535  # unregistered ports
acl Safe_ports port 280 # http-mgmt
acl Safe_ports port 488 # gss-http
acl Safe_ports port 591 # filemaker
acl Safe_ports port 777 # multiling http
acl Safe_ports port 631 # cups
acl Safe_ports port 873 # rsync
acl Safe_ports port 901 # SWAT
http_access deny !Safe_ports


Cheers,

John
-- 
Oh, the memories. They just won't stay repressed.
-- Phil Edwards
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Re: [SLUG] Firewall Device Opinions

[John Clarke]

On Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 09:21:36 +0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 A lot of work.

Not really.  Modifying the case to allow for the extra NIC took the 
most time, the rest was just Linux installation  configuration
which is quick  easy.

 Satisfying.

Yes.

 About 200M last time I counted, although I used a 30M version in my 

285MB, but I'm sure I could reduce that if I really cared :-)


Cheers,

John
-- 
I wonder why, when I just did kind of normal things-- some good
engineering and just what I wanted to do in life-- why everywhere I go,
some people think that I'm some kind of hero or a special person. 
-- Steve Wozniak 
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Re: [SLUG] Firewall Device Opinions

[John Clarke]

On Mon, Jul 10, 2006 at 05:45:51 +1000, Phil Scarratt wrote:

 2. Small form factor pc with some sort of solid state memory running linux.

I'm doing this at home.  I'm running a cut-down ubuntu dapper
installation, initially installed as a breezy server then any packages I
didn't need removed, followed by a dist-upgrade to dapper when it was
released.  It has about 200 packages and uses less than 300MB of flash.

The h/w is one of those VIA PCs that Vini Engel was selling a month or
two ago.  I've added a PCI NIC (an SMC card which was small enough to
fit in the case) and a PCMCIA NIC to give me LAN, WAN and DMZ.  It took
some work to install the PCI NIC -- there were no holes in the back of
the case for it and the power connector was a bit too close to the PCI
slot, but it wasn't hard, just fiddly.

It runs off a 512MB CF card via a CF-IDE adapter, because although the
board has a CF slot the BIOS can't boot from it.  Apparently there is a
BIOS upgrade available but I couldn't find it easily, and the CF-IDE
adapter wasn't expensive enough for me to care.

The box has a fan, but it's very quiet.  I could probably disconnect it
without anything overheating, but the noise is insignificant -- there
are other much more noisy things in the room :-)

I did make a few changes to reduce the number of writes to the CF card
to extend its life: 

- mount / noatime
- use tmpfs for /tmp (with a max size limit so it can't take all
the RAM)
- no swap
- syslog to a LAN host and stop syslog being restarted each day if
there are no local log files (causes a write to /dev)
- change ntp.conf so that the drift file is in /tmp and copy it to
/var once a week if it's changed (and on boot/shutdown).

I think that was all.

 The only caveat is that it (the fw) has to allow for a DMZ, and may have 
 to run multiple internet (WAN) connections (I am currently 

I don't know whether any of the VIA motherboards have more than one PCI
slot.  If not, you'd need to use a case with enough room for a larger
PCI card with more than one network port, or use a USB ethernet adaptor.


Cheers,

John
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Re: [SLUG] CRAMFS little vs big endian...

[John Clarke]

On Wed, Jun 14, 2006 at 03:29:30 +1000, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:

 so simply byteswapping the whole thing is not going to work.

Yes, you're right.  I didn't realise that the various parts were
compressed independently, nor that some parts weren't compressed
at all.


Cheers,

John
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Spamming because of serious financial problems is like 
yodeling because your cat destroys your furniture.
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Re: [SLUG] Google Earth available for Linux

[John Clarke]

On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 01:02:22 +1000, Peter Miller wrote:
 On Tue, 2006-06-13 at 12:36 +1000, Graham Smith wrote:
  You can download it from here
  http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html
 
 Totally borked.  Segfaults immediately for me on Dapper.  Only the

Works fine here.  Ubuntu Breezy, ATI Radeon X300, fglrx driver.


Cheers,

John
-- 
MS may think they have the Buddha nature, but one way to tell that
there's more to it than just sitting there being happy and bloated
is that such attributes also belong to the Homer Simpson nature.
-- Anthony DeBoer
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Re: [SLUG] CRAMFS little vs big endian...

[John Clarke]

On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 09:01:17 +1000, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:

 This is almost *certainly* *not* what you want. My guess is that
 while this filesystem has *some* 16 byte integers, it also has 32
 bit integers and probably also 64 bit integers. Swapping pairs of
 bytes will do the right thing for 16 bit integers, but not for
 any of the others.

I'd treat the data as 32-bit words and swap the bytes within those
words.  That's how the arm v5 cores (xscale is a v5 core)  handle it.
The h/w doesn't do actual byte swapping, but it's easier to think of
it in those terms, if you have to think about it at all.


Cheers,

John
-- 
I find Rational much the same way.  The satisfaction of getting one of
their products to work hides the fact that it didn't do anything
useful.
-- Graham Reed
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Re: [SLUG] CRAMFS little vs big endian...

[John Clarke]

On Wed, Jun 14, 2006 at 01:25:22 +1000, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:

 The binary in question is a complete file system. As such it is 

Didn't James say it was a compressed file system?  If so, it's
simply a stream of bytes, not a mixture of different data types.
The compression algorithm doesn't know the meaning or size of each
bit of data in the filesystem, it just treats it as a stream of
bytes.  It might read those bytes as 32-bit words, or it might
read them as individual bytes, but it doesn't matter.  It just
processes what it sees as a chunk of random unstructured data.

Once it's uncompressed, nothing changes.  The kernel, when reading
a file system, doesn't read individual 8, 16 and 32 bit fields off
the disc, it reads a chunk of data (probably some number of sectors)
then tries to make sense of it.  By then, it's been copied at least
once (maybe via dma) by code which has no knowledge of the underlying
structure of the data it's processing.

The different fields don't have meaning until they're interpretted
by the application using them.

Now, I don't know whether byte swapping is needed before or after
uncompressing, both, or neither, but I don't believe any knowledge
of the underlying structure of the data is necessary to do that
byte swapping.

Let me give you an example which may help you understand why I think
this.

I write processor models (x86 little endian host) for a living, and
have worked on both big and little endian cores, including some that
can switch endianness at run time.  When we load a target binary, all
we know is that it's an ELF (or S record, or whatever) image and that
it's big or little endian, but not the meaning of each part of the
image.  For our ARM models, and most other big-endian cores, we simply
byte swap big-endian data as aligned 32-bit words, and store it in
little endian format in host memory.  We store the data in host endian
format and do the conversion when it's read depending upon the current
processor mode.  Unaligned accesses complicate the process[0], but are
irrelevant for the purpose of this example.

When we do the initial byte swapping, we neither know nor care what
the meaning or size of each individual location in the binary is, we
simply treat it as a collection of 32-bit numbers and everything just
works.

I think this file system image can be treated the same way,  at least
until you actually want to mount it and interpret the contents.  Then,
and only then, do you need to know how big each field is.


Cheers,

John

[0] Some cores raise an exception, some do an aligned access and rotate
the data, some ignore the least signifcant address bits to force
alignment and some do multiple bus cyles to handle the unaligned 
access.

-- 
 Hmph, whatever happened to *ethics*? - That's what I'd like to know!
It's still there, just to the north of Kent.  Nasty elisp you've
got there
-- Sean Purdy
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Re: [SLUG] GPL discovery on Netgear FVS338

[John Clarke]

On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 10:16:02 +1000, James Gray wrote:

 So I might be in luck - anyone know if I need a cross-compiler or SDK for the 
 XScale CPU?  Or is it IA32 compatible??  What the hell is this Cavium 

xscale is an arm core, so you need an arm cross compiler.


Cheers,

John
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Fanta _looks_ orange, but tastes of the bastard child of a sugar cane
plantation and a Dow plant.
-- Richard Bos
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Re: [SLUG] Fwd: Club history

[John Clarke]

On Mon, May 29, 2006 at 10:24:02 +1000, Terry Collins wrote:

 I had the impression that it had been going for a year or so beforehand.

The first meeting I attended was, IIRC, in 1994, and it had been going
for some time before that.  The meeting was in a small upstairs room at
UTS and there were maybe ten of us there.  Those I remember are Jamie
Honan, Grahame Kelly, Del, Charlie Brady, Ken Yap, Leonard Chan.  Del
talked about setting up mail and news over UUCP.

I think I'd been on the mailing list for a month or two before then.  I
only went to two or three meetings over the next year or so, and it was
many years before I got to another.  By then, SLUG had outgrown the
original room and there were about 150 people there.  That was around
the time that SLUG became an incorporated association.


Cheers,

John
-- 
 You sleep late. But mornings are nice, aren't they?
No. Mornings are horrible, and you are weird.
-- Jenny Holmberg
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Re: [SLUG] Fwd: Club history

[John Clarke]

On Tue, May 30, 2006 at 11:15:35 +1000, Terry Collins wrote:

 When did RH4.0  RH4.1 come out?[1]

According to http://www.owlriver.com/redhat_versions.html, 3rd October
1996 and 3rd February 1997 respectively.


Cheers,

John
-- 
The object-oriented model makes it easy to build up programs by
accretion. What this often means, in practice, is that it provides
a structured way to write spaghetti code.
-- Paul Graham
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Re: [SLUG] Fwd: Club history

[John Clarke]

On Tue, May 30, 2006 at 12:45:14 +1000, Terry Collins wrote:

 Hmm,it seems that according to google, there is only two pages on the
 internet that list this information. Sadly I didn't think of searching
 for redhat_versions.

I searched for redhat release dates and it was the first result.


Cheers,

John
-- 
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Re: [SLUG] Occassional freeze-up in Ubuntu 5.10

[John Clarke]

On Fri, May 26, 2006 at 02:37:52 +1000, Simon Wong wrote:
 On Fri, 2006-05-19 at 18:39 +1000, John Clarke wrote:
  And if anyone can tell me how to downgrade my kernel package
  I'd be grateful.  I'd also like to know how to find the source
  difference between any two arbitrary package versions.
 
 To install a specific version of a package do something like:
 
 $ sudo apt-get --reinstall install linux-686=2.6.12.16.1

Thanks Simon.

Do you have an answer for my second question: How can I find the source
difference between two versions of a package?


Cheers,

John
-- 
Sigh... What the fsck it is about GUI stuff that makes its authors to produce 
mind-boggling amount of excrements and attempt to pass them for programs?
-- Alexander Viro
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Re: [SLUG] Occassional freeze-up in Ubuntu 5.10

[John Clarke]

On Fri, May 19, 2006 at 06:14:43 +1000, elliott-brennan wrote:

 Until recently I was running FC4 on the same 
 machine. I installed Ubuntu 5.10 (with KDE) approx 
 three weeks ago. Over the last three days, the 
 machine has started to freeze. Running at the time 

I've had a similar problem since the last Ubuntu kernel update.
I was running Hoary and it had been stable for months, then
after installing the new kernel and rebooting the machine began
randomly freezing solid.  It doesn't seem to be particularly
dependent upon what's running -- I've had it lock up overnight
when I've been logged out. 

At the same time I started seeing messages like these in the logs:

hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
ide: failed opcode was: unknown

Thinking it was a failing hard drive, I replaced the drive with a
new one, and at the same time installed Breezy.  The dma errors
continued to happen and the machine continues to randomly freeze
solid, more frequently than on Hoary.  I'd get two or three days
with Hoary, but I'm lucky to get 24 hours running on Breezy.

I'm sure it *could* be two faulty drives, but it's unlikely, and
especially starting at exactly the time the new kernel was
installed.  I can't prove it's the kernel, but given the timing,
I do suspect it.  If I knew how to downgrade the kernel package
I'd do it to see if the problems go away.

The 686-smp kernel is much more prone to freezing than the non-smp
386 kernel.

I've found that turning off dma seems to fix the problem
(hdparm -d0 /dev/hda), but it also makes the machine noticeably
slower.  Still, a reduction in performance beats random freezing.

One interesting point: ide=nodma on the kernel command line
is supposed to turn off dma at boot time.  I've checked the
source and code to detect that command is there.  It doesn't
work though: I don't see the Prevented DMA message that it's
supposed to print and I get some dma errors before hdparm is
run to turn it off.  Sometimes the machine even freezes early
in the boot process (after Creating initial device nodes but 
before Setting disc parameters).

 Are there any logs I can check to see what was 
 happening at the time?

Have a look in /var/log/syslog for dma errors.


And if anyone can tell me how to downgrade my kernel package
I'd be grateful.  I'd also like to know how to find the source
difference between any two arbitrary package versions.


Cheers,

John
-- 
I wish I could find a one-armed economist, so he couldn't say, 'on the
other hand...'
-- Harry Truman.
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Re: [SLUG] Occassional freeze-up in Ubuntu 5.10

[John Clarke]

On Fri, May 19, 2006 at 07:44:13 +1000, Howard Lowndes wrote:
 John Clarke wrote:
  
  hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
  hda: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
  ide: failed opcode was: unknown
 
 I've seen that many times with non-smp kernels but never to the extent 
 of causing a lockup.

The non-smp kernel seems far less prone to lockup than the smp kernel.

 Are you able to disable DMA in the BIOS?

No, unfortunately.  Any other suggestions?


Thanks,

John
-- 
I wonder what Indians *deliberately* trying to do a Welsh accent would
sound like. Would their heads explode?
-- Paul Martin
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Re: [SLUG] arrayprobe

[John Clarke]

On Fri, May 12, 2006 at 09:08:22 +1000, Del wrote:
 
 There appears to be a debian package floating around, so if anyone
 has a 2.6 kernel Debian or Ubuntu system that they can install this
 on and send me the binary (it should just be a single self contained

I tried building from the Debian source package on my Ubuntu system 
and it failed too.  Some horrible autoconf error that I couldn't
quickly figure out.  So I've extracted the binary from the Debian
package and attached it to this email (it's very small).

For future reference, here's how to pull apart a .deb:

[EMAIL PROTECTED] ~/tmp]$ file arrayprobe_2.0-2_i386.deb
arrayprobe_2.0-2_i386.deb: Debian binary package (format 2.0), uses gzip 
compression
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ~/tmp]$ ar vx arrayprobe_2.0-2_i386.deb
x - debian-binary
x - control.tar.gz
x - data.tar.gz
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ~/tmp]$ tar -xvzf data.tar.gz
./
./usr/
./usr/bin/
./usr/bin/arrayprobe
./usr/share/
./usr/share/doc/
./usr/share/doc/arrayprobe/
./usr/share/doc/arrayprobe/changelog.gz
./usr/share/doc/arrayprobe/README
./usr/share/doc/arrayprobe/copyright
./usr/share/doc/arrayprobe/changelog.Debian.gz
./usr/share/man/
./usr/share/man/man1/
./usr/share/man/man1/arrayprobe.1.gz
./etc/
./etc/cron.daily/
./etc/cron.daily/arrayprobe


Cheers,

John
-- 
In my cats case, if they're well fed, it just means they have more time to
play with the little squeaking feathery/furry things that they find and bring
home.  It's probably more humane on the wildlife to starve the buggers.
-- Iain Rae


arrayprobe
Description: Binary data
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Re: [SLUG] debian vs FC threads

[John Clarke]

On Wed, Apr 05, 2006 at 06:25:58 +1000, Jamie Wilkinson wrote:
 This one time, at band camp, Del wrote:
 
 re-inventing the wheel. further, one asks another flame-bait question - 
 are there actually really savy redhat users? on this list?
 
 Yes.  Me.  (I think I'm the last one who hasn't been scared off -- I
 certainly know other experienced Red Hat users and systems admins who
 won't have anything to do with SLUG).
 
 You're not the last RH user nor sysadmin on the list :)

Neither are you :-)

-- 
So you make it so that it takes serious and unmistakable action to
get around the access restrictions, so that when the little darlings
do whatever they have to do to get root you can nail their arses
to the wall.  Preferably with rail spikes.   -- Matt McLeod
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Re: [SLUG] old mac with scsi anyone? (Re: [SLUG-ANNOUNCE] ComputerBank Sydney Giveaway)

[John Clarke]

On Fri, Mar 03, 2006 at 12:07:48 +1100, Matthew Hannigan wrote:

 It wouldn't matter except I promised to get some old file of an old
 external SCSI hard disk for a friend.  I now have old external scsi
 disk but no mac.  It's got one of those giant old SCSI conectors
 (amphenol?)

If the drive's readable in Linux, and you can get it to me (work: Crows
Nest, home: Lindfield) I have a couple of machines with SCSI and a bunch
of different SCSI cables, and I could try to do it for you.


Cheers,

John
-- 
 ... what _does_ PC LOAD LETTER mean?
OUT OF AMMO
-- Anthony de Boer
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Re: [SLUG] Bash scripting problem....

[John Clarke]

On Thu, Dec 08, 2005 at 12:46:16 +1100, James Gray wrote:

 I've been fiddling with a script and can't quite get it to work.  The problem 
 is premature wild-card expansion.

Have you tried disabling filename globbing? (set -f)


Cheers,

John
-- 
A good way to clean up /opt is to umount it and use the slice elsewhere.
Nothing good ever goes in /opt.
-- Andrew J. Caines
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Re: [SLUG] MTU size

[John Clarke]

On Fri, Dec 02, 2005 at 12:43:35 +1100, Jobst Schmalenbach wrote:

 Now I have been talking to one of the techies @ my ISP (internode)
 and he suggested to drop the MTU size down to 1000.

If this works, then I'd guess that something between you and the remote
site is blocking icmp fragmentation needed packets, thereby breaking
path mtu discovery.


Cheers,

John
-- 
Unlike other cuisines, the Finnish one is most distinguishable by the
fact that none of the major traditional dishes have anything you could
remotely call flavo(u)r, and pretty much the only spice is salt.
-- Toni Lassila
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Re: [SLUG] Mail filtering with .forward, procmail and perl.

[John Clarke]

On Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 11:23:32 +1000, l cheung wrote:

 Is there a way to pipe my mail through a filter before/after procmail

There's no need to do it before or after procmail, you can pipe a
message through and filter at any point in your .procmailrc, like this:

:0 fW
| filter_program

See the procmailrc and procmailex man pages for more detail.

 or to rewrite the From header inside procmail?

Use formail as a filter.  For example, this will add a From header, but
only if there isn't one:

:0 fW
|  /usr/bin/formail -a 'From: '

You can also use formail to extract headers and put them into
environment variables for use with later procmail rules.  The procmailex
man page has an example of how to do this.


Cheers,

John
-- 
 Their license key generating software runs off FluxLM, and you caught 
 them with the license server was up.  W00t!
nah.  They must have looked it up in a book, FlexLM servers are *never*
up.-- Zebee Johnstone
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Re: [SLUG] mutt displaying base64 encoded emails

[John Clarke]

On Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 09:07:21 +1000, Benno wrote:

 does any one know how to get mutt to play nicely?

mutt *is* playing nicely; it's the sender's MUA that isn't.  What
I do is edit the content-type in mutt -- 'v' to view the message 
structure, move to the attachment, 'control-e' to edit the
content-type.


Cheers,

John
-- 
Failure is not an option; it comes bundled with your Microsoft product
   -- Ferenc Mantfeld
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Re: [SLUG] Mail forwarding with a twist...

[John Clarke]

On Thu, Aug 11, 2005 at 04:34:02 +1000, Alastair Steel wrote:

 For example we like to divert all incoming port 25 traffic from a particular 
 address say 111.111.111.111 http://111.111.111.111 to port 25 on a 
 particular internal mail server say 192.168.1.5 http://192.168.1.5 but the 

/sbin/iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp -s 111.111.111.111 --dport 25 \
-j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.1.5 


Cheers,

John
-- 
I always envisioned Bill [Gates] as the first guest star on the hot new 
series, Who Wants to Sodomize a Billionaire?  The contestants could vie 
to invent creative methods for Doing What Need Be Done.
-- Patrick R. Wade
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Re: [SLUG] creating new users with no shell as a default

[John Clarke]

On Fri, Jul 29, 2005 at 09:42:50 +1000, Voytek wrote:

 all the users on my RH server (apart from me) are web/mail users, that is,
 they only need ftp access, no ssh, no shell
 
 is this the correct way to create them (the /bin/false part):
 
 adduser domain.com.au -s /bin/false -p passwd

I'd use /sbin/nologin instead, but whatever you use, make sure it's
listed in /etc/shells.

 how do I set the 'no shell' part as a defualt for future users ?

Edit /etc/default/useradd.

 how can I verify the 'no shell' is set (apart from trying to ssh login (as

Look in /etc/passwd.  The last field on each line is the shell, e.g.:

johnc:x:500:500:John Clarke:/home/johnc:/bin/bash


Cheers,

John
-- 
snort's flexresp seems a tool worthy of the BOFH himself. And of
course, with a few misplaced keystrokes you can take the entire network
down, or at least stop anyone using it - that's always a bonus.
-- James Riden
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Re: [SLUG] creating new users with no shell as a default

[John Clarke]

On Fri, Jul 29, 2005 at 10:53:34 +1000, Voytek wrote:

 SHELL=/bin/bash

That's what you want to change.

 can I edit /etc/passwd directly ? to alter home path ? shell ?

Yes (with vipw), but don't.  Use usermod instead.


Cheers,

John
-- 
This  is a.s.r; you  want n.a.n.a.e.,  where there  is a  _LONG_ queue
waiting to do Something Horrible to Telstra. It's slightly longer than
the  number of  people who  have ever  participated in  [EMAIL PROTECTED], and
growing at about the same rate. -- Mike Andrews
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Re: [SLUG] Problems with SCSI tape drive

[John Clarke]

On Thu, Jul 14, 2005 at 09:19:39 +1000, Mike wrote:

 It's the only device on the SCSI bus. Thanks for the help. If you have
 any more, feel free. :)

Is the bus properly terminated?


Cheers,

John
-- 
 Ah, back when I'd sooner pee on a keyboard than type on it.
After spending enough time as a sysadmin, one reverts to this stage.
-- Niklas Karlsson
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