[SLUG] Re: SLUG August Monthly Meeting (with new venue)
On Wed, Aug 23, 2006 at 09:38:40AM +1000, Michael Kedzierski wrote: On 8/22/06, Beach_Wins [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, I am planning to go for the 1st time. So glad to read this message as I was planning to go to Central station. 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 . Hi, You'll need to get off the train at Central, and get on another train heading to hornsby via chatswood (the North Shore line). Coming by train from the Central coast, it is likely to be quicker to get off the intercity at Hornsby and switch to a suburban on the North Shore line from there, instead of going all the way to Central and then back up again. On the other hand, Hornsby - St. Leonards is a long way, and the train times might not sync real well. Check on 131500.com or the train timetables directly to see which is actually quicker. - Matt -- You have a 16-bit quantity, but 5 bits of it are here and 2 bits of it are there... and 2 bits of it are back here and 3 bits of it are up there. The C code to extract useful data had so many and operators in it that it looked like the C++ version of hello world. -- Matt Roberds, ASR -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: linux assignment
On Wed, Aug 16, 2006 at 09:58:07AM +1000, David Herd wrote: I'm a computing student who is having troubles with part of my assignment. Can I have any help out there in Linux land. You could save yourself even more time if you just gave us the address of your lecturer, that way we could e-mail the answers direct to them, saving yourself the trouble of even having to submit the answers yourself. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: linux assignment
On Wed, Aug 16, 2006 at 12:10:57PM +1000, Martin Pool wrote: On 16 Aug 2006, Matthew Palmer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, Aug 16, 2006 at 09:58:07AM +1000, David Herd wrote: I'm a computing student who is having troubles with part of my assignment. Can I have any help out there in Linux land. You could save yourself even more time if you just gave us the address of your lecturer, that way we could e-mail the answers direct to them, saving yourself the trouble of even having to submit the answers yourself. I think he just wanted to make sure this comes up when a future potential employer searches for his name. Then they'll know he can get lots of work done by asking random people on the net to do it for him. ;-) Resume: Strengths: utilising the collective knowledge of the internet to complete tasks. Weaknesses: personal knowledge. I suppose it could be worse. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Paging IMAP gurus
[Not that this is an IMAP issue, but rather a Maildir one] On Sat, Aug 05, 2006 at 10:44:45AM +1000, James Gray wrote: Basically I'd like to run a script once a day that churns through my personal IMAP folders and removes messages older than X days. Some folders I want to expire after 7 days, others 3 weeks, others 3 months. I've already written the script to identify the messages but currently just lists them. Given that my IMAP store is maildir, is there any problem with simply deleting the messages straight from the maildir? Or is there some sort of referential integrity checking that I need to maintain within maildir? There is nothing you need to do to delete a message in a standard Maildir beyond unlink(). Many IMAP servers maintain some sort of cache or index, but AFAIK they all know to go back to the authoritative source (the actual files) for any actual data. If they don't, of course, then it's a bug in their implementation -- not that that would necessarily help you. Courier, incidentally, doesn't maintain an index. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: [chat] Howdy all
On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 02:25:38PM +1000, Christopher Martin wrote: Thanks, iSCSI may be a solution. While we're suggesting myriad ways to present block devices over the network, take a quick squiz at ATA over Ethernet -- I was pleasantly amazed at how trivial it was to get working with the aoe kernel module and aoe-tools (on the client) and vblade (on the server). Quite scary, actually, and you can do regular files as block devices too, if you want. - Matt -- I'm tempted to try Gentoo, but... I have better things to do with my CPU cycles than to compile Python so that it can compile the compiler so that it can compile the kernel. -- Dave Brown, ASR -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Changes urged after research into work visa
[Completely off-topic for SLUG; please respect MFT and followup to slug-chat] On Sun, Jul 23, 2006 at 10:26:20AM +1000, Howard Lowndes wrote: A new study has found the skilled temporary work visa system has reduced career opportunities for Australian information technology graduates. And buying all of our software overseas has been a great boon for local graduates, I'm sure. The study, by Victoria's Monash University's Centre for Population and Urban Research, says there are around 5,000 skilled temporary work visa holders working in information technology. It has found, on the available evidence, some visa holders have replaced qualified Australians. Author Bob Kinnaird says the influx has greatly contributed to reduced demand and poor job prospects for local IT graduates. Numbers of Australian students enrolling in IT has fallen from nearly 18,000 to less than 9,000 in the space of just five years. So we need to up the number of temporary work visas for IT to match the shortfall in new graduates -- there's 9,000 less suckers^Wgraduates each year now. The report has also called for the publication of the salaries of visa holders and for employers to be forced to pay market rates. Uhm, employers *are* the market. Free markets are great, as long as they don't impact me. sigh - Matt -- I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate everyone else's. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: SLUGlets this month - Web Browsers
On Thu, Jul 20, 2006 at 04:19:20PM +1000, nornagon wrote: At this month's meeting (28th July) we're looking for people to talk for 5 or so minutes about web browsers. If you're particularly passionate about your dear Konqueror, Opera, Mozilla or Firefox, this is your chance to spout it about to SLUG. Can I talk about nc host 80? - Jeremy Apthorp. You know, that weirdo with the hair. Does that make Erik that weirdo without the hair? - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Scalix email server
On Wed, Jul 19, 2006 at 08:19:08PM +1000, Kenneth Armstrong, White Property Group P/L wrote: Thanks for the helpful comparison. Have you seen or used a product called Insightserver .. its by Bynari? That?s what we use currently My deep and abiding condolances to you. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Cross Platform FOSS Project Management Software
On Thu, Jul 20, 2006 at 02:36:46PM +1000, Matthew Hannigan wrote: trac (http://trac.edgewall.org/) includes svn integration, (other scm support to come) a wiki and and an issues (bugs) list. And it has a half-million or so plugins to enhance it in various ways at trac-hacks.org. There might even be document management and forums in there somewhere. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: TPA and open source licence
On Mon, Jul 17, 2006 at 05:48:52PM +1000, Michael Lake wrote: Ricky wrote: what do you think of an Australian version of the open source licence ? Note that this isn't GPL http://nicta.com.au/director/commercialisation/open_source_licence.cfm good ? bad ? sensible ? necessary ? Not good. I do understand that something that comes with no warrrant, not even an implied one might be against some juristrictions laws but to have acountry specific licence I think is a bad move. A country-specific licence isn't the best, but I'll give them points for trying -- it's a lot better than the last draft they put around. Specifically, they've allowed a fall-back to the stock UoI/NCSA licence if the copyright holder isn't in Australia, and they've qualified the warranty bit down the bottom to limit it to only situations where there's legislation which says you can't disclaim all warranties. This might seem trivial, but the last version of this licence that went around didn't have that last bit, so as an OSS hacker releasing under this licence, you were effectively agreeing to rewrite the software if someone who downloaded it didn't like it. At least this time you have to be engaging in trade before the Trade Practices Act kicks in and requires you to not disclaim all warranties. Specifically against this licence you have to enter things like Name of Institution, Insert applicable jurisdiction, eg: New South Wales, Australia etc throughout the document. It's not like the GPL which you just insert in there. This has to be hand crafted for each institution - dumb. The Insert Jurisdiction bit is kinda necessary in any choice-of-law clause -- you can't practically make that a runtime variable (as it were). It wouldn't make much sense to have a country-specific licence without a choice-of-law clause, though. The Name of $foo bits could be abstracted out to things like Copyright Holder, but that probably requires a fair chunk of legalese in the licence to define all the terms used. What I'd really like to see is licences which try really hard to ignore the vagaries of particular jurisdictions' laws and just get down to the specifics of what you're really after in a licence -- the four freedoms would be a great licence, if it weren't for lawyers who spend all their time looking for loopholes to sneak through. If only everyone played fair, by the spirit of the rules rather than the exact letter, the world would be such a happy place... (cue Lionel Hutz' vision about a world without lawyers). - Matt -- All I care about [a linux distro] is it detect my hardware (non-Debian strengths), and teach me to fish instead of just giving me a smelly old fish (most people 'xcept Debian), and I guess don't just give me a fish biology textbook (gentoo). -- Tom (in d-devel) -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: DebSIG: Wednesday 19/07 - Matt Palmer on automated debian/ubuntu installation
On Tue, Jul 18, 2006 at 01:43:46PM +1000, Matt Moor wrote: Tonight's talk will be on automated installation and will be given by our own Matt Palmer (really this time). I promise, really I do. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Ubuntu startup
On Wed, Jul 12, 2006 at 09:45:09AM +1000, Alan L Tyree wrote: What is the recommended way to stop a particular service from starting at boot in Ubuntu? In particular, the pcmcia services are not needed on my desktop. For PCMCIA in particular, I'd be inclined to just remove the packages entirely -- you're not ever going to need them. For other packages, like (eg) database servers and webservers that you might just need every now and then for a bit of development testing, I use the sysv-rc-conf tool (from the sysv-rc-conf package) to give me a long list of all the init scripts on my system and checkboxes to fiddle the symlinks in /etc/rcN.d appropriately. Things you should *not* do: * Use update-rc.d to mangle the symlinks (not a user-friendly interface, and it probably won't do what you expect anyway); * Use /etc/default/initscript and set a variable to prevent the service from starting at boot (because then you can't use the init script to start the service later without editing the default again); * Edit the initscript and add exit 0 at the top (see above); * Pretty much anything else that gets commonly recommended. If you're feeling adventurous, you can just go all-out and fiddle the symlinks by hand, but that's all sysv-rc-conf does, and it does it a lot quicker than I can do the renames by hand. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Linux compatible Sydney 3G for notebooks
On Sat, Jul 08, 2006 at 02:51:00PM +1000, Ben Alex wrote: Matthew Palmer wrote: I've got a Vodafone 3G (Merlin) card through work and it works nicely -- a bit fiddly to setup, perhaps, but doable. A client I've been at has the other model of Vodafone 3G card and it works in Ubuntu Dapper, but not earlier versions -- so you'll need a pretty new kernel if you get lumped with that card. Thanks to everyone for their suggestions. Because I actually live in Newcastle - but travel to the capitals enough of the time to warrant mobile coverage - probably the Vodafone service makes most sense as I can fallback to GPRS when at home. I also didn't realise the iBurst coverage was sketchy - does anyone else have experiences with that, particularly in the CBD areas of Sydney and Brisbane? My experience is a year old, but it was patchy even in the city (Sydney). I got fantastic reception at the Sol1 office in Hornsby, but elsewhere it was really hit-n-miss. I'd assume they've done a lot more build-out since then, though. As for Vodafone, is there any chance of posting some notes on installing it From memory, it was plug in the card, watch dmesg to ensure it actually registered, and then put the following wvdial snippet in the config file and run wvdial vodafone to start it up. [Dialer vodafone] Modem = /dev/ttyS1 Baud = 460800 Init1 = ATZ Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 C1 D2 Init3 = AT+CGDCONT=1,IP,vfinternet.au Area Code = Stupid Mode = 1 Phone = *99***1# Username = dummy Password = dummy Ask Password = 0 Dial Command = ATD Idle Seconds = 3000 DialMessage1 = DialMessage2 = ISDN = 0 Auto DNS = 1 Check DNS = 0 and was the card detailed at http://store.vodafone.com.au/mobile_detail.cfm?mobID=18 the one that worked with Dapper? That page doesn't give exact model numbers, so it's hard to tell. It certainly looks more like the one I didn't get (Huawei brand, I think?); the Merlin I got has the SIM slot toward the back of the card. Both of them work fine with Dapper, though -- they appear to the kernel as being little more than an ACM modem. - Matt -- Non-PHB basically told $MANAGER to go check his drive integrity. -- steve, ASR -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: ubuntu routing
On Sat, Jul 08, 2006 at 08:42:45AM +1000, O Plameras wrote: David Kempe wrote: If you want a good firewall, use shorewall. and have it do it for you How will shorewall solved this particular problem when he is missing this functionality ? echo 1 /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward One of the things shorewall does is to enable ip forwarding ? Yes. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: ubuntu routing
On Fri, Jul 07, 2006 at 09:57:18PM +0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I cant find anything that does the equivalent of echo 1 /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward on my newly installed ubuntu box. Before I invent a way, does anybody know if I'm missing something. sed -i s/ip_forward=no/ip_forward=yes/ /etc/network/options - Matt -- I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate everyone else's. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Linux compatible Sydney 3G for notebooks
On Sat, Jul 08, 2006 at 10:14:15AM +1000, Ben Alex wrote: Does anyone know of a wireless (preferably 3G) Internet service which is compatible with Linux-based notebooks (Ubuntu)? Most of the service providers like iBurst etc seem to specify the use of Windows. I've got a Vodafone 3G (Merlin) card through work and it works nicely -- a bit fiddly to setup, perhaps, but doable. A client I've been at has the other model of Vodafone 3G card and it works in Ubuntu Dapper, but not earlier versions -- so you'll need a pretty new kernel if you get lumped with that card. - Matt -- For instance Mine eyes haves seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, the anthem of the abolitionists (and the Union forces in the civil war) doesn't actually refer to theology but the superiority of Arch over CVS. -- Jaldhar H. Vyas, debian-devel -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Linux compatible Sydney 3G for notebooks
On Sat, Jul 08, 2006 at 01:23:45PM +1000, mark wrote: Ben Alex wrote: Hi everybody Does anyone know of a wireless (preferably 3G) Internet service which is compatible with Linux-based notebooks (Ubuntu)? Most of the service providers like iBurst etc seem to specify the use of Windows. Cheers Ben The linux drivers for iburst can be found at this link http://sourceforge.net/projects/ibdriver/ I hope those drivers have gotten a *lot* better since I used them about a year ago -- they were horrendous back then. If you're considering getting iBurst, get a trial period first. Between the shithouse drivers and woeful coverage (I rarely got a useable signal) it wasn't worth it for me to get it. YMMV, of course. - Matt -- Sure, it's possible to write C in an object-oriented way. But, in practice, getting an entire team to do that is like telling them to walk along a straight line painted on the floor, with the lights off. -- Tess Snider, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Looking for some Raw DV footage to practice on
On Fri, Jul 07, 2006 at 09:00:29AM +1000, elliott-brennan wrote: I realise this is an odd request. I'm looking for some raw dv footage so that I can practice editing etc in Kino. Something like a conference or other innocuous event/footage - natch :) I'd like to get some practice with editing, exporting etc before we get our new vid cam, which sadly won't be for some months. I'm sure that our illustrious A/V team would be more than happy to ship you a couple of SLUG talks to practice on. Then you can get lots of practice before you volunteer to be a part of the A/V team for LCA 2007. grin - Matt -- And Jesus said unto them, And whom do you say that I am? They replied, You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the ontological foundation of the context of our very selfhood revealed. And Jesus replied, What? -- Seen on the 'net -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Dynamic routing - RIP or BGP or what?
On Fri, Jul 07, 2006 at 03:04:01PM +1000, Howard Lowndes wrote: I want to do some dynamic routing in a network and I don't know whether I should be using RIP or BGP. } quagga } 1.2.3.4 ||192.168.1.1192.168.1.0/24 I'net }|eth1eth0|-| } ||default gw | } | |192.168.1.2 || | eth1 | | quagga| | eth0 | || |192.168.2.1 | V V 192.168.2.0/24 When I bring the 192.168.2.0/24 network up I want to be able to broadcast that 192.168.1.0/24 network so that the 192.169.1.0/24 network and anything coming in via 1.2.3.4 knows that it is accessible via the 192.168.1.2 interface, but when I don't have the 192.168.2.0/24 network up I don't want to broadcast it, or let the 192.168.1.0/24 or the public world know anything about it. I have installed quagga where shown but I don't know whether I should be using RIP or BGP and I don't know wheta the config files should look like. You don't want to use BGP, it's not the right solution. Frankly, for this situation, quagga probably isn't what you want either. I'd just have the gateway (.1.1) route 192.168.2.0/24 via .1.2 always and let that machine drop the packet on the floor or send back a rack off message if .2.0/24 isn't available. If you use dynamic routing in this situation, unless you blackhole .2.0/24 when it's not available, it'll be pushed out via the internet connection (assuming that's the default route for the gateway box) which is Bad Stuff. - Matt -- I have a cat, so I know that when she digs her very sharp claws into my chest or stomach it's really a sign of affection, but I don't see any reason for programming languages to show affection with pain. -- Erik Naggum, comp.lang.lisp -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Financial Review crashes Firefox
On Thu, Jul 06, 2006 at 11:58:05AM +1000, Leslie Katz wrote: Firefox 1.08 Perhaps using the current version (1.5.0.4) would solve the problem? Have you tested this and determined that it worked, or are you just being versionist? There's many reasons why someone might not be willing or able to upgrade, and if it turns out not to solve the problem, then that's a bit of a bust. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Recommendations for a Document Management System?
On Wed, Jun 14, 2006 at 03:42:08PM +1000, Jamie Wilkinson wrote: Does anyone have any experience with, and can recommend, document management systems? I've heard lots of people raving (ranting?) about Alfresco. From memory, it has a similar development model to SugarCRM. Dave My Lord And Master knows all about it. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Is there a truly upgradable Linux distro?
On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 03:17:28PM +1000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 13 Jun, Matthew Palmer wrote: I wouldn't say that it can't fail, but I can't think of too many upgrades of Debian or Ubuntu boxes where it's completely done itself in, and I've done some pretty crazy stuff over the years -- custom packages, mixing releases, that sort of thing. On the other hand, I have seen some people who've managed to make a complete dog's breakfast of their systems such that the system won't upgrade, but I think that's more PEBKAC than PEID. That seems to be the consensus. (No one has volunteered any serious problems in upgrading a Debian system.) Though Billy Kwong noted that it depended a bit on how many packages you have installed: Not how many, just which ones. Sometimes you'll get cruft that'll hang around, but if it's likely to cause serious problems the system is fairly good at figuring it out (through the definition of some pretty serious chunks of package metadata -- what depends, conflicts, etc with what). That's a worry, actually. I seem to have a knack for finding good, usable software that then gets abandoned. Because I like the usability of the older package I don't want to remove it; but it stands in the way of newer versions needed by other software. I suspect this problem will continue to exist as long as we continue to use shared objects instead of static linking. Pretty much. You can't completely get around it with static linking, though -- programs evolve over time, and as their interfaces change, anything that needs that program needs to evolve too (I'm thinking programs that call some other command line program to do some work, for example). Consensus on RH seems to be that the upgrade problem strongly exists for that. So I think I'll try Ubuntu - last time I tried to install a plain Debian (nine months ago), I gave up after I realised I still had another 200 hundred questions to answer about configuring the kernel, and if I changed my mind about an earlier question I'd suffer. Hahahaha. The newer installer is a lot better there, but for minimal-grilling installation, Ubuntu is pretty darn good. BTW, what approach do these upgradable distros take to installing new kernels? I.e. keeping the right modules available and matched to the kernel that's booting, and allowing older kernels to stay in the boot config? On Ubuntu, at least, the default install will install a dummy package called (for example) linux-686, which depends on the current version of the kernel suitable for use by a 686-class machine (currently something like linux-2.6.15-37-686). Each new release of Ubuntu will install a newer version of linux-686, which will, in turn, install a new real kernel package. I don't think there's any automatic cleanup of old kernel packages in an Ubuntu system, but it's not a major hassle as the new ones get booted by default, and if you need the old one because (for example) the new one locks up, you'll really love having a bunch of old kernels to flip through. Does Ubuntu allow the use of Lilo instead of Grub? Yes, but it's not the default option (and so you won't see it in the normal install process). You can certainly install it afterwards though if you want to, and I'm fairly certain that new kernels will get automatically detected and lilo rerun. Don't quote me on that, though -- it's been a while since I ran lilo (seriously, get used to grub, and you'll learn to really love it). - Matt -- For once, Microsoft wasn't exaggerating when they named it the 'Jet Engine' -- your data's the seagull. -- Chris Adams -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Is there a truly upgradable Linux distro?
[Anyone who plans on crying about my recommendation of a specific distro can feel free to provide an alternative -- a question was asked, I'm giving an answer] On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 01:33:47PM +1000, Luke Kendall wrote: AFAIK, no Linux distro is considered quite safe to upgrade from one release to the next (e.g. from SuSE 9.2 to SuSE 10.0, or FC 4 to FC 5). Wise people still routinely advise Install the new system on a spare partition, and switch over when it's properly installed and configured. I've never had to do that with my Debian/Ubuntu boxes -- I've upgraded one machine from Woody (Debian 3.0), to Sarge (Debian 3.1), to Hoary (Ubuntu 5.04), and I'm about to upgrade it to Dapper (Ubuntu 6.06 LTS) via Breezy (Ubuntu 5.10) sometime. I've already done one workstation (with some fairly customised GNOME config) from Sarge to Dapper via Hoary and Breezy, so I know it can be done. There was effectively zero breakage on that whole upgrade path (I had to tweak the Eclipse config to use Real Java, and readjust the sound volume to a reasonable default -- about 5 minutes work all told). The problem with this is that if you've tweaked things so that sendmail is running nicely, and you have all the RealPlayer and Flash 7 and innumerable video codecs installed, and your soundcard working well and the DVD burner (and TV card?) etc. etc. all working well - then you have to do all this work afresh on the new system, and that can take days. Which is why you use a distro which actually respects your configuration files, or else use a configuration management system to apply all of your settings whenever they go away (which, for a single home workstation, is what we call Massive Overkill). So: does anyone know of a Linux distro that is so easily managed and so well structured, that not only can you easily update all your packages (via apt or yum or whatever), but you can even upgrade the whole distro, 99.99% reliably? Debian and Ubuntu both have this capability. I know people who have gone through 3 or 4 releases of Debian without a reinstall. I've got one machine under my nominal control which is now 3 releases behind the latest Ubuntu, and I have no intention of reinstalling it from scratch when I get around to upgrading it -- I intend to simply upgrade to each successive release to bring it up to date. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Is there a truly upgradable Linux distro?
On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 01:45:42PM +1000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 13 Jun, luke wrote: AFAIK, no Linux distro is considered quite safe to upgrade from one release to the next (e.g. from SuSE 9.2 to SuSE 10.0, or FC 4 to FC 5). I turned up this discussion about this very topic: http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/12/14/152237 in which numerous respondents say that Debian and Gentoo and Mandrake (and Arch Linux) can all have the distro itself upgraded. So, a question for the Debian, Gentoo etc. users: have any of you have had a problem when you tried to get the system to upgrade itself from an older release (e.g. Debian 3.0 to 3.1)? Or does it always work perfectly smoothly? I wouldn't say that it can't fail, but I can't think of too many upgrades of Debian or Ubuntu boxes where it's completely done itself in, and I've done some pretty crazy stuff over the years -- custom packages, mixing releases, that sort of thing. On the other hand, I have seen some people who've managed to make a complete dog's breakfast of their systems such that the system won't upgrade, but I think that's more PEBKAC than PEID. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Is there a truly upgradable Linux distro?
On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 02:24:17PM +1000, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote: Debian is similarly easily upgradable, but all my machines run testing and therefore never need anything like a full upgrade. Instead you just get to dist-upgrade every couple of weeks. What fun! I have a cat, so I know that when she digs her very sharp claws into my chest or stomach it's really a sign of affection, but I don't see any reason for programming languages to show affection with pain. -- Erik Naggum, comp.lang.lisp Hahahaha -- That's going straight to the pool room! - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: server stopped
On Sat, Jun 10, 2006 at 04:13:31PM +1000, ashley maher wrote: I was happily working (using ssh) on a server and it stopped. Going through dmesg, syslog, and messages shows something very concerning. Nothing. I do mean everything is fine. Cron is running logging. The last entry is a restart of cron. The next entries are the system rebooting. The logs indicate inodes being cleaned up on the reboot (as I'd expect with a stop this quick). Anybody mind guessing where I should look next to find why this thing stopped (Or even suggesting if I'm looking in the correct places) Power, most likely. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Ubuntu : bypassing fsck when booting on battery
On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 09:32:07AM +1000, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote: Mary Gardiner wrote: EXIT STATUS 0 (true) System is on mains power 1 (false) System is not on mains power 255 (false)Power status could not be determined boggle In what universe is 0 true and 1 false? /boogle That would be the Shell universe. Like most things in shell, it's bass ackwards. You get used to it after a while. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Re: ubuntu
On Sun, Jun 04, 2006 at 01:49:56PM +1000, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: On Sunday 04 June 2006 13:13, James Purser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: * This message has been copyrighted by me and is released under CC license in keeping with the philosophy behind the Free and Open Source Software community. I realise that this is a PUBLIC list and as such liable to be read by anyone who strolls along. I hate to burst your bubble, but CC does not meet the free software guidelines: http://people.debian.org/~evan/ccsummary.html That would be Debian's Free Software guidelines, this isn't Debian, and not all of the CC licences have Attribution clauses anyway. - Matt -- English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary. -- James D. Nicoll, resident of rec.arts.sf.written -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: ubuntu
On Sun, Jun 04, 2006 at 10:57:08AM +0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I downloaded 6.06 server and installed. Downloading the desktop CD would have been much more efficient. Would have gotten you past the first few steps. Jim Mcquellen of http://www.ltsp.org (Mr LTSP) suggested that that was the optimal route. Me, who knows nothing of ubuntu, will ignore his expert advice ?? I'm not seeing Mr Ubuntu there -- would you trust my advice on how to perform brain surgery based on my qualifications as a software developer? apt-get qt3*, discard, app-get the relevant qt3 stuff, by cut and paste Run synaptic, point-n-click your way through it all. There is this wonderful tool called apt-get. Ignore it. Comeon ... Yes, it's a great tool, but it's not for everyone and everything. - Matt -- liw hut.fi has or used to have two nfs servers not-responding and still-trying... don't know if their dns server was not-found... 4o4 would be then a good name for the web server... endless hours of fun aj did you get a response from 4o4? nah, it just 404ed -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Ubuntu verses Debian (pure)
On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 06:57:59AM +1000, James Gray wrote: On Sat, 3 Jun 2006 01:04 pm, david wrote: On my pure server boxes, I've activated the root account because it's the only account that I use. Why use sudo when every time I log in and everything I do on the box is done as root, and only I do it. I ssh into my own account, then su - sudo -H -s == Start a root shell and set the $HOME env to /root There's also sudo -i for much the same purpose. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: escaping a ' in php
On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 08:42:18AM +1000, Voytek Eymont wrote: I'm trying to insert some text into a php file, the text is enclosed in ' ' I'd like to include a word with an 's like individual's permission what the proper way to do this ? (change the outer ' ' to ?) I'd definitely consider changing the quotes, but you can escape a quote with a backslash, so 'individual\'s permission' will work. But it's better to go double quotes, because otherwise (especially in a long string like that) you'll edit the text, add another apostrophe, forget to quote it, and everything will explode again. A separate but related issue is that of the wisdom of defining long chunks of HTML inside of PHP, when there's a perfectly valid method of escaping from PHP and going back to good ol' dump-out-the-text mode, but I've given up even trying to win that war with PHP programmers. BTW, we have a coders list now if you want to help to populate it's archives: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/coders - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Ubuntu verses Debian (pure)
On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 09:25:57AM +1000, James Gray wrote: On Mon, 5 Jun 2006 09:01 am, Matthew Palmer wrote: On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 06:57:59AM +1000, James Gray wrote: On Sat, 3 Jun 2006 01:04 pm, david wrote: On my pure server boxes, I've activated the root account because it's the only account that I use. Why use sudo when every time I log in and everything I do on the box is done as root, and only I do it. I ssh into my own account, then su - sudo -H -s == Start a root shell and set the $HOME env to /root There's also sudo -i for much the same purpose. Yeh, I've had mixed success with that switch. Seems every sudo I use supports -H -s but only the Linux variants support -i...which sux when you divide For values of Linux that don't include RedHat. Feh. More motivation for me to keep the workplace pure. grin your time between Solaris, the BSD's and Linux, then rsync the same .bashrc between all of them :P Eeeew. I'll have a crab juice. Meanwhile, I've got mumble-odd machines, which don't warrant the distribution of a custom .bashrc, but which are all running Ubuntu -- I'm slowly rewiring the muscle memory to sudo -i from sudo -s. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Ubuntu verses Debian (pure)
On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 09:44:41AM +1000, david wrote: On Mon, 2006-06-05 at 09:25 +1000, James Gray wrote: On Mon, 5 Jun 2006 09:01 am, Matthew Palmer wrote: On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 06:57:59AM +1000, James Gray wrote: On Sat, 3 Jun 2006 01:04 pm, david wrote: On my pure server boxes, I've activated the root account because it's the only account that I use. Why use sudo when every time I log in and everything I do on the box is done as root, and only I do it. I ssh into my own account, then su - sudo -H -s == Start a root shell and set the $HOME env to /root There's also sudo -i for much the same purpose. Yeh, I've had mixed success with that switch. Seems every sudo I use supports -H -s but only the Linux variants support -i...which sux when you divide your time between Solaris, the BSD's and Linux, then rsync the same .bashrc between all of them :P All of which doesn't quite answer my original question, which was (restating it slightly): This is a server, only I access it, and everything I do on it is done as root. I ssh [EMAIL PROTECTED], then su - So what is the advantage of su -i over simply activating the root account? All the cool kids are doing it? grin Practically, not *everything* that you do on the machine is root-worthy -- some things you might *like* to do as root, but probably could get away without it. By the principle of least-privilege, if you can do it as an ordinary user, you should do it as an ordinary user. Otherwise one day you'll be muttering around, mistype rm -rf a/* as rm -rf a /* and we'll hear the swearing from four suburbs away. Computers do the wrong thing much faster than they do the right thing... - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: ubuntu
On Sat, Jun 03, 2006 at 09:45:16PM +0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hi
based on many favourable comments about ubuntu I decided to try it, ummm
quite
painfull:
Primarily because you chose the painful way to do it. To prove a point,
perhaps?
I downloaded 6.06 server and installed.
Downloading the desktop CD would have been much more efficient. Would have
gotten you past the first few steps.
apt-get (can't remember name) install development-package
build-essential?
apt-get qt3*, discard, app-get the relevant qt3 stuff, by cut and paste
Run synaptic, point-n-click your way through it all.
apt-get install subversion
apt-get install lame*, discard, apt-get the lame libs
svn co mythtv modules
make
fails needing Xv libs (no lXv)
You want the system to automatically know what you're going to do
beforehand?
For building a newer version of something that's already packaged, the
chances are that running apt-get build-dep package will get you
everything you need in one easy hit. The only exception to this is when the
newer version has added some new stuff it needs to build -- but at least
build-dep will get you most of the way there.
OK clearly this is painfull:
Not painful (note spelling), just different.
How do you get a list of packages and meta-packages that you can apt-get?
1) apt-cache search .
2) cat /var/lib/apt/lists/*_Packages |grep '^Package: '
3) Peer into synaptic
How do you find out WHAT is in a package. EG I got various lame bits before I
got the development libraries needed to build mythtv? (rpm -ql)
dpkg -L === rpm -ql
How do I find (in rpm speak) whatprovides -lXv ?
I just hit http://packages.{ubuntu.com,debian.org}/ and then type in the
filename I want in the bottom-most (or thereabouts) search box. If you're
on limited connectivity, you can also keep a copy of Contents-$arch around
for looking in.
The .deb format doesn't have a concept of providing individual files,
though. I think it's better for it, as it's meant that you get really
strict and well-adhered-to policies for naming library packages --
basically, you'll find the library you need in a package called
libnamesover at least 99.9% of the time, and the development headers in
libname-dev about the same amount of the time. On the odd occasion you'll
need to apt-cache search name dev because the library you need is a
sub-library of another one that it's been bundled into, but that's pretty
uncommon.
All of the apt-get info that I found, I googled for, or apt-get a wildcard,
then decline the update, but scan the output for hints on names. Surely
there's a better way.
Absolutely there is a better way. You're learning the system, it's new and
different, so things aren't going to be obvious to you. Doesn't make it
painfull -- just unfamiliar.
Oh by the way, I'm trying to build mythtv from svn.
That was kinda obvious. I figured it wasn't worth asking why you're not
just using the pre-built packages.
- Matt
--
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[SLUG] Re: Ruby Sunday.
On Sat, May 27, 2006 at 01:39:14PM +1000, O Plameras wrote: markt wrote: There are many issues regarding Ruby to be discussed. Has Rails done real good things to the progression of the language or more for the techniques of new-language promotion? Can one or several sluggers tell us the big picture of ruby-on-rails instead of just saying it is the hottest topic in WEB-development ? It's an MVC-based domain-specific language which makes building a certain (rather common) class of web applications quite simple, fast, and maintainable. What is ruby ? It's a programming language. What is rails ? See above. Why do people talk about both together instead of ruby or rails only. Since Rails is written in Ruby, it'd be pretty damn hard to talk about Rails for long without it. Conversely, Rails is quickly becoming a very popular system, so a lot of people are identifying the language primarily with the framework. Do I still need python, smalltalk, and perl when ruby-on-rails make these tools seem like Monte Carlo equations in web development ? You don't *need* anything. You may, however, choose to reduce your reliance on one or more of those technologies as a result of your use of Ruby and/or Rails. Why do I need YET-ANOTHER-DEVELOPMENT-FRAMEWORK when there are dozens already ? Because this one does things differently, and may suit your needs better. Thanks for your efforts ? In what way, exactly, it that a question? - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Setting the time
On Fri, May 26, 2006 at 01:19:39PM +1000, Howard Lowndes wrote: I should point out, though I don't see it as relevant, that this is a Xen guest server and one of the reference clocks is the Xen host but the other is independent. It's 100% relevant. By default, the domU kernel clocks are locked to the dom0 clock, and you can't change it in the domU. There is a proc flag in /proc in (I think) the dom0 which makes them independent, but I can't remember what it is (although I have a note of it here somewhere). - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Snakes and Rubies?
On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 03:45:26PM +1000, nornagon wrote: Python and Ruby are in many ways very similar. Where does this idea come from? Perl and Ruby are much closer, in my mind -- there's a clear flow of ideas from one to the other. Yes, you can do most of the same things in both languages, but that's not a big thing -- ultimately you can make the same comparison between most pairs of languages. There's lots of things that are tricky in Python that are trivial in Ruby, and I assume there's something that's hard in Ruby that's easy in Python. bloodlust for the Other Kind. However, having a Snakes and Rubies group would bring the two groups together in a (hopefully) peaceful way, and lead to civil discussions and productive conversations. Bwahahahaha. In fact, I can think of few things *worse* than an SR meeting -- it'd either be inflammatory sniping about the percieved or actual deficiencies in each other's languages, or anaemic acknowledgement of the other's virtues. Neither sounds like a fun way to spend an evening to me. Codefests for code. SR for scripting. That's what SIGs are all about. Because Ruby and Python are the only two possible languages for scripting? Personally, I think the general OSDC-style evening would probably be best -- especially if we can get some interesting talks on niche languages (or the term I heard today -- stretch languages[1]) to get people interested in what else is out there. - Matt [1] http://osteele.com/archives/2006/02/stretch-languages -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Coding/Snakes/Rubies/Newbies
On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 05:33:15PM +1000, david wrote: Is there any interest in a group of non-coders who want to learn? I've had several false starts at learning Perl/Python/PHP/bash but I never keep it up to because: * I'm not going to school, * I don't have lots of time on my hands These two seem related somehow... grin I for one have some projects that I'd love to code, but they need some reasonably advanced skills that won't happen if I don't stick to it. That's one of the hardest things about programming -- the stuff you can do for the first month or two are completely trivial and useless (well, not always, but it often seems that way). Perhaps there is some interest in a SIG for newbie coders? So that we aren't intimidated by the bottomless talent of the sluggers? ;-) Perhaps even get some HELP ;-) This is a tricky problem. Yes, a group of new starters, with a bit of experience, working together cooperatively, could probably help each other out. There's two tricks there -- getting experienced help willing to put in a *lot* of time to help out some newbies, but more importantly, finding a group of people who can meet at a common time and place on a regular basis to code things and support each other. It's a pretty good idea, though. In fact, it's such a good idea that I'll make a commitment -- if at least 5[1] new programmers[2], who are interested in learning Ruby[3], can identify a common time (weekly)[4] and place[5] and will commit to showing up for at least 6 weeks (and putting in some time between sessions), I'll provide an evening a week of group and one-on-one help to that group for at least that 6 weeks, with the intention to keep going as long as the group does. So, find some people, and organise a time and place amongst yourselves. Send me the proposed time and place, and the list of people (including contact details, a brief description of what they might want to code, their computers background, and why they want to learn to program) and we'll kick it off. Anyone else who wants to mentor Ruby (or start up a competing scheme in a different language grin) is of course also welcome. - Matt [1] The minimum is to ensure there's a reasonable demand, and to give us a decent chance of a group over time. I'd say that I'll be able to help no more than about 10 people in a group, but if everyone's willing to accept that there might be less help, I'll give a larger group a go. Note that oh, I might be in it if it gets going doesn't count -- the 5 people need to be yes, I will definitely be there at this date and time. If somebody says 'yes' and then doesn't turn up at the first meeting, the whole thing is off. [2] New defined as being has never put together a reasonably practical software project in any language. If you know another language well enough to build an application, or contribute non-trivial patches to an OSS project, I'm sorry, this isn't going to be for you. [3] Because it's my favourite language, and because it's actually really easy to learn. [4] At least a 3 hour block of time. It needs to be at least weekly, so that there's regular feedback amongst the group. More than weekly will probably be too much for me to handle. I'd prefer a weeknight other than Friday (SLUG meetings, doncha know). [5] Needs to somewhere either pretty close to my house (Bankstown/Liverpool area) or somewhere I can get to via public transport (East Hills/Airport line or North Shore line). There'll really need to be a whiteboard and preferably a few desktops for people who don't have laptops surgically implanted like I do. A data projector would be *very* handy too, if it can be swung. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Snakes and Rubies?
On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 06:41:15PM +1000, nornagon wrote: On 5/24/06, Matthew Palmer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 03:45:26PM +1000, nornagon wrote: Python and Ruby are in many ways very similar. Where does this idea come from? Perl and Ruby are much closer, in my mind Well, yes - perl and ruby are similar. Because ruby draws on perl for many of its concepts. Note that I didn't say python and ruby are closer than perl and ruby, though. :) Point. But I can't think of too many similarities that Python and Ruby share that aren't also shared by a host of other languages, so I still don't know why everyone keeps on comparing them -- and I've asked this question before, and I've never gotten a good answer. I'm starting to suspect that people are just repeating what they've heard instead of actually sitting down and thinking about it for themselves. In fact, I can think of few things *worse* than an SR meeting -- it'd either be inflammatory sniping about the percieved or actual deficiencies in each other's languages, or anaemic acknowledgement of the other's virtues. Neither sounds like a fun way to spend an evening to me. Aw, come on, flamewars are fun g No, they're not. Productive disagreements are great, but pointless bickering just sours people to each others' viewpoints. Personally, I think the general OSDC-style evening would probably be best -- especially if we can get some interesting talks on niche languages (or the term I heard today -- stretch languages[1]) to get people interested in what else is out there. Once again, why subvert the infrastructure already in place? Codefests ftw. I do like your idea about stretch languages, though... I'd love to get someone talking about smalltalk or ocaml next codefest. :) Codefests are all day events, with a lot of different things going on. An OSDC-style SIG would be more structured, with a particular focus, and would probably be a couple of hours in an evening instead of a whole day (which is often hard for a lot of people to get to -- I know I've only been able to get to one in about the past 18 months). - Matt -- liw hut.fi has or used to have two nfs servers not-responding and still-trying... don't know if their dns server was not-found... 4o4 would be then a good name for the web server... endless hours of fun aj did you get a response from 4o4? nah, it just 404ed -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Encouraging new membership
On Sat, May 20, 2006 at 12:38:37PM +1000, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: I would imagine that there are plenty of people who attend one meeting and never participate again. Many geeks are by nature quite introverted. It can be intimidating for such people to be in a room full of other people. Imagine yourself walking into a room of 30+ people, many of whom seem to know each other and have formed little cliques. How would a shy person break into these groups? Many potential SLUG members, I believe, are discouraged, and end up never returning. One thing I first heard of in any detail was a small group of dedicated greeters -- hang around the door (or even outside) and pounce on anyone they don't recognise, introduce themselves, get a couple of relevant details, and maybe try and find a regular with similar interests. The idea isn't that the greeters are everybody's new best friend, but rather that there's going to be at least a couple of familiar faces with names attached, at least one of whom is in a similar situation/has similar interests to the new attendee, and so there's a bit of a personal bond there that might draw the new person back again next month. Of course, this pre-supposes that there's enough extraverted people who know enough existing SLUG people to be able to usefully route new attendees into the crowd -- I think there might be, but I know it can be awfully uncomfortable to pounce on complete strangers. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: CeBIT - a success!
On Sat, May 13, 2006 at 01:22:58PM +1000, Pia Waugh wrote: - Terry Dawson (penguin) - Mary Gardiner (penguin) - Tony Green (penguin) When you say (penguin) here, do you mean occupiers of a penguin suit? If so, kudos to the besuited ones. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Who looks after your stack?
On Tue, May 09, 2006 at 06:03:28PM +1000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Who looks after your stack of software - such as in a typical LAMP environment? It depends. If you've a jack-of-all-trades, or aren't big enough to hire separate people, then your one person is it, they do the installs, the upgrades, the DBA, and they write the apps. I've been there. If you're a bit bigger, the chances are you've got someone who herds all of your machines (desktops mostly, probably) and they'll probably install, tweak, and patch the stack, and there'll be a web monkey who puts the software together. Either of one of them might do the DB stuff, depending on who has the skills. As you get bigger, you'll probably keep much the same structure. At one place I know, there's a team of two or three admins who keep all of the machines together and do the underlying DB work (create DBs and users), and then the dozen or so developers put the apps on top and maintain the DB schemas. At some point, you'll probably have enough databases to justify having someone specialise (even if it isn't their entire job) in wrangling the DBs. This is especially true if you've got Enterprisey DBs like Oracle or DB2, because they need a lot more care and feeding than PgSQL or MySQL. If you're a government department, then you'll probably have totally different contracting organisations handling the server maintenance and application management, and to get an admin change done, the developers will need to lodge a ticket in the other company's ticket tracking system and wait a week for it to be actioned[1]. You think I'm joking, but I'm not -- buy me a beer and I'll tell you stories that'll make your hair fall out (or grow back, if you're didymo). So, to reiterate my original comment, It Depends -- on how many people you've got, what their skills are, what you're actually trying to accomplish, and whether you're a byzantine bureaucratic organisation who exists primarily for the purpose of sending normal people insane. How are you all doing this? With the power of packaging and Puppet. - Matt [1] This is apparently corp-speak for ignored, then misinterpreted, then misimplemented, then closed without reason. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Permission problems on linode (Ubuntu 5.10)
On Sun, Apr 30, 2006 at 08:22:57PM +1000, dave kempe wrote: Robert Collins wrote: for future reference: 'dpkg --force-depends -P udev' will remove it and leave ubuntu-minimal and initramfs-tools in place. hrmm I thought it was a cardinal debian sin to use --force? Yes, but ultimately we're all sinners, so we shouldn't let that get in the way of getting the job done. The danger is when people start thinking hey, this is a good feature, I'll use it all the time without *knowing* what's going on and how it'll affect things. It's like goto -- every programming student knows that it's a heinous crime to use goto in your code, because it turns your code into a hideous mess that's unmaintainable. Then the Linux kernel is full of them, because once you know what you're doing, they're a powerful tool in the right hands. - Matt -- I was punching a text message into my phone yesterday and thought, they need to make a phone that you can just talk into. -- Major Thomb -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Postfix query
On Fri, Apr 21, 2006 at 08:01:42PM +1000, Howard Lowndes wrote: If I have a virtual mail domain of, say, example.com.au, then how do I get emails addressed to, say, [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED] to be directed into the virtual mailbox .../example.com.au/fred Specify the mailbox for [EMAIL PROTECTED] and [EMAIL PROTECTED] to be example.com.au/fred, or alias [EMAIL PROTECTED] to [EMAIL PROTECTED] If you throw your actual config here we can help out a lot more -- what is best depends on how you're doing the vhosting. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: A Sys Admin's worst nightmare
On Fri, Apr 21, 2006 at 01:31:14PM +1000, Simon Bowden wrote: cleartext). Unless someone is regularly keying in the root password and they're capturing that somehow, then they'll need to break they crypt to get it... (right?). Which seems a little unfair. They can pwn all of the machines in the shop and use them as a distributed cluster to brute-force the root password. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Dual Screen woes.. ;)
On Thu, Apr 20, 2006 at 08:52:14PM +1000, Charles Myers wrote: Ok yet another possible silly question, I have googled but everything that isnt related comes up (as you will see my problem maybe very specific?) I have Ubuntu running dual screen, but when I play a game the game centres in between the two monitors. Is this usual? Or would anyone know a workaround I could use to direct it to one monitor? It's usual for applications that aren't Xinerama-aware to end up doing things like this. I'm not sure of a workaround; perhaps there's a setting in the game, but I'd doubt it. It might be worth keeping a separate X instance (running on a single monitor) around for gaming. - Matt -- Igloo I remember going to my first tutorial in room 404. I was most upset when I found it. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: A Sys Admin's worst nightmare
On Fri, Apr 21, 2006 at 11:51:42AM +1000, Simon Wong wrote: I'd love some feedback from people on what further preps I should undertake. SELinux. Muahahahaha. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: I can't get apache-dev installed; some problem with its dependencies on libdb4.2-dev
[First off, let me say that you should switch to Gentoo; these sorts of things don't happen there. grin] On Mon, Apr 10, 2006 at 01:28:50PM +1000, Michael Lake wrote: $ sudo apt-get --no-act install apache-dev The following packages have unmet dependencies: apache-dev: Depends: libdb4.2-dev (= 4.2.52) but it is not going to be installed E: Broken packages Bugger. You made the right next move: $ sudo apt-get --no-act install libdb4.2-dev But your problem is here: The following packages have unmet dependencies: libdb4.2-dev: Depends: libdb4.2 (= 4.2.52-18) but 4.2.52-19 is to be installed For some reason (repository skew, most likely) libdb4.2-dev still needs 4.2.52-18 of libdb4.2, while that package has already been upgraded to 4.2.52-19. Solution is *probably* to apt-get update (clearing any intermediate apt-proxys you may have lying in the way) and cross your fingers it's fixed. Other solutions include a downgrade of libdb4.2 to -18 (but if the binary package has gone bye-byes, you're stuffed) or hunting down libdb4.2-dev 4.2.52-19 by hand from a mirror and dpkg -i'ing it into oblivion. Then apache-dev will have all it's deps already installed, and everything will be happy. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: I can't get apache-dev installed; some problem with its dependencies on libdb4.2-dev
On Tue, Apr 11, 2006 at 01:32:11PM +1000, Michael Lake wrote: Matthew Palmer wrote: For some reason (repository skew, most likely) libdb4.2-dev still needs 4.2.52-18 of libdb4.2, while that package has already been upgraded to 4.2.52-19. Solution is *probably* to apt-get update (clearing any intermediate apt-proxys you may have lying in the way) and cross your fingers it's fixed. Other solutions include a downgrade of libdb4.2 to -18 (but if the binary package has gone bye-byes, you're stuffed) or hunting down libdb4.2-dev 4.2.52-19 by hand from a mirror and dpkg -i'ing it into oblivion. I found a libdb4.2.52-18 on a pool directory on one of the debian mirrors and did a dpkg -i and it installed fine. Just a warning that I was downgrading. That's how you do downgrades. grin In theory, you've got to be a bit careful -- the maintainer scripts in the package aren't typically written to handle downgrades, so there might have been things in the upgrade that won't get reverted in the downgrade, but that's rarely a problem for most packages (and library packages, especially). Then an apt-get install apache-dev worked perfectly and pulled in the libdb4.2-dev Yay! - Matt -- After years of studying math and encountering surprising and counterintuitive results, I came to accept that math is always reasonable, by my intuition of what is reasonably is not always reasonable. -- Steve VanDevender, ASR -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: Those who do... [Was: [SLUG] Re: 2006 President's Report]
On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 05:53:30PM +1000, Craige McWhirter wrote: Many great ideas, projects and partnerships have spawned from those meetings. Within a few meetings it had gone from being Debian only talk topics to more like SLUG-Social - with the name never being changed because no one could think of a more suitable one. BeerSIG? - Matt -- I invented the term object-oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind. -- Alan Kay -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: 2006-2006 President's Report
On Wed, Apr 05, 2006 at 07:58:00PM +1000, Craige McWhirter wrote: On Wed, 2006-04-05 at 17:06 +1000, Matt Palmer wrote: The first was incredibly successful The third, which was run just a few weeks ago, was apparently a raging success as well I was at one and three. Both were great. The third one, held a few weekends ago, was the best install fest I've ever been part of. Ashley and SCLUG [1] are doing great things down there. NULL pointer dereferencing footnote. Core dumped. While many SCLUG members are involved in SLUG, unfortunately it's a been a while (years?) since SLUG has run an install fest. Something to think about. The thing about the SCLUG installfests is that they are very, very targeted -- everybody gets the same installation (no hey, what random distribution do you want on your machine?) for a specific purpose (providing a lab-equivalent install). Quite interesting to examine the different purpose and hence the different outcomes that seem to result. -- We won't just automatically click our heels and follow the Americans -- John Howard, telling fibs on September 27th, 2002 He wasn't telling fibs -- he doesn't click his heels. - Matt -- All I care about [a linux distro] is it detect my hardware (non-Debian strengths), and teach me to fish instead of just giving me a smelly old fish (most people 'xcept Debian), and I guess don't just give me a fish biology textbook (gentoo). -- Tom (in d-devel) -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Web Server Watchdog
On Mon, Apr 03, 2006 at 01:41:00PM +1000, Rob Sharp wrote: I'm needing to monitor the server logs of a machine that I don't have shell access to, but can have software installed onto if necessary. I'm looking to be able to monitor web server logs for specific errors and be notified by email if (when!) they happen. I'd probably use logwatch (or equivalent) for that simple task. Nagios is definitely overkill for just grepping logs. - Matt -- [the average computer user] has been served so poorly that he expects his system to crash all the time, and we witness a massive worldwide distribution of bug-ridden software for which we should be deeply ashamed. -- Edsger Dijkstra -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Congratulations to the new committee!
For those of you unable to make it to the meeting, the following people were elected to the committee last night at the AGM: President:Lindsay Holmwood Vice President: Silvia Pfeiffer Secretary:Matt Moor Treasurer:Ken Wilson Oridnary Members: Jeremy Althorp Chris Deigan James Dumay - Matt -- I invented the term object-oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind. -- Alan Kay signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [Fwd: Re: [SLUG] WebDAV]
On Thu, Mar 30, 2006 at 09:26:38AM +1100, Phill O'Flynn wrote: However if i try to use windows explorer to open a web folder, in http mode i get as far as putting in the username and password which is repeatedly not accepted regardless of the different combinations ie user, username\server, etc... Known problem with WinXP and WebDAV -- it just doesn't work. It used to, but then a hotfix or something broke it and it hasn't worked since. There's probably a registry entry you can change -- like HKEY\something\stupid\i\am\billg's\bitch\webdav\makeitworkright -- that'll bring it back to life, but I've not done the necessary futzing to discover the source of the problem. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Appointment of proxies for AGM tonight
I've heard tell that people are appointing proxies on IRC and so forth. This just won't do -- I can't authenticate the validity of the proxy. The rules for appointing a proxy are set out in the SLUG constitution, section 33, as follows: 33. APPOINTMENT OF PROXIES 1. Each member is to be entitled to appoint another member as proxy by notice given to the secretary. 2. The notice appointing the proxy is to be in the form set out in Appendix 2 to these rules. Digitally signed email shall suffice for the appointment of a proxy. So you have to give proper notice, and send it to the secretary ([EMAIL PROTECTED] if I'm not mistaken -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] will certainly suffice). I'll be forwarding all proxies received by me to the secretary. I'll be checking my mail immediately before the meeting, for any late entries. Appendix 2 is: FORM OF APPOINTMENT OF PROXY I, ___ (full name) of _ (email address) being a member of ___ (name of incorporated association) hereby appoint __ (full name of proxy) of _ (email address) being a member of that incorporated association, as my proxy to vote for me on my behalf at the general meeting of the association (annual general meeting or special general meeting, as the case may be) to be held on the day of 20 and at any adjournment of that meeting. * My proxy is authorised to vote in favour of/against (delete as appropriate) the resolution (insert details). * To be inserted if desired. Signature of member appointing proxy Date NOTE: A proxy vote may not be given to a person who is not a member of the association. Additionally, no person may hold more than 5 proxies. Your proxy needs to be digitally (or physically) signed. Unsigned proxies, again, cannot be verified and must be discarded. - Matt signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] ctte nomination
I'm going to have to decline the nomination as an ordinary committee member of the SLUG committee for the coming year. I'm flattered that anyone thought of me for the committee, and in other circumstances I'd gladly accept, but my time is stretched quite thin at present, and I see plenty of very talented people already nominated who will have no trouble keeping SLUG on the straight and narrow. Try me again next year, though, if anyone still thinks I'm worthy. - Matt -- Talk about unlucky. D'you know, if I fell in a barrel of tits I'd come out sucking me thumb. -- Seen on the 'net: http://thelawwestofealingbroadway.blogspot.com/2006/01/bang-to-rights.html -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: ubuntu/debian
On Sun, Mar 19, 2006 at 01:03:26PM +0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I downloaded skype: dpkg: error processing Desktop/skype_1.2.0.18-1_i386.deb (--install): package architecture (i386) does not match system (amd64) Errors were encountered while processing: Desktop/skype_1.2.0.18-1_i386.deb resolvable? Convince Skype to go OSS, or at least to provide a .deb file for amd64? Not being free software, you're always going to be playing catch up with it. I tried to get xine to play a wmv file. I enabled every repositry and every option. I get (sic): The stream ShazBaz.wmv use an unsupported codec: Video Codec: Windows Media Video 9(WMV3) Start Playing anyway ? Easy with SuSE: install the w32codec-all-20050412-0.pm.0.i586.rpm Nothing like a bit of illegal redistribution to keep a distro on it's toes. There is an equivalent package available for Debian/Ubuntu called win32codecs. Google will reveal all, no doubt. Also, my SuSE amd64 has 32 libs, so it can run 32 apps. Skype don't give any other options. The package you want is ia32-libs, I'd say. - Matt -- A friend is someone you can call to help you move. A best friend is someone you can call to help you move a body. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Re: Interesting view
On Thu, Mar 16, 2006 at 04:42:04PM +1100, Howard Lowndes wrote: just as MS has worked for the last twenty odd years to make Windows mean something other than Hole in the Wall (hmmm, but that is another discussion). ...but everyone know what a window is, very few know what a ubuntu is... What does it matter if people know what a window is, when it comes to branding an OS? Do you honestly believe people looked at a boxed set of Windows 3.1 on the shelf of 1990 Harvey Norman and said to themselves That's what I need on my computer. Now, where's the curtains to match? and then proceeded to purchase and be happy with their product? The simple fact is, people associate the word Windows with the fisher price widgets because Microsoft has spent a metric arse-load of money making it so. You could argue, I suppose, that in the absence of a massive marketing budget, Linux distros should keep to the names that don't need explanation, but I don't think that's going to work -- namespace exhaustion problems come to mind immediately, not to mention the size of a name you'd need to properly describe your differentiation in the marketplace. Quite frankly, in the world of blogs and Internet-scale marketing, you don't need Microsoft's ad budget to get your name known. I doubt that Canonical has spent much in marketing, comparatively (although the CD shipments must cost a bit) and yet a *lot* of people know their name -- I have had people who are very not into computers find out I'm into Linux, and specifically ask me about Ubuntu. - Matt -- A byte walks into a bar and orders a pint. Bartender asks him What's wrong? The byte says Parity error. Bartender nods and says Yeah, I thought you looked a bit off. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: converting *nix users to email users in Postfix
On Wed, Mar 15, 2006 at 01:33:08PM +1100, Voytek Eymont wrote: any Postfix experts here ? *cough*jdub*cough* I'd like to 'convert' local users to be email users in similar fasion, through MySQL lookup Uhm... WTF? Do you want them to be local, or virtual? Are you storing your /etc/passwd in MySQL, or do you want to remove users who only use your system for e-mail from your local /etc/passwd and only have them in MySQL? . virtual_mailbox_maps = mysql:/etc/postfix/mysql_virtual_mailbox_maps.cf # local_transport = local # local_recipient_maps = unix:passwd.byname $alias_maps # local_transport = virtual local_recipient_maps = $virtual_mailbox_maps but,. I'm missing aliases... virtual_alias_maps = mysql:/etc/postfix/mysql-virtual_alias_maps.cf mysql-virtual_alias_maps.cf: user = SQL_UNPRIVILEGED_USER password = SQL_UNPRIVILEGED_PASSWORD dbname = SQL_DB table = mail_virtual select_field = destination where_field = email additional_conditions = and destination '' and destination ' ' hosts = SQL_HOST (According to SysCP, which does all this sort of thing for me automatically normally). - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: bittorrent clients
On Wed, Mar 15, 2006 at 11:48:35AM +1100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If I could ask a question about that, when I create the .torrent file how do I seed it? As my impression from the man 'btdownloadcurses' is only for downloading? Is this correct? No. A seed is nothing more than a client which already has all of the data file, and hence can provide any part of it to other clients. You just need to have the data file somewhere handy, and then point the program at the .torrent (which will refer to the tracker). The program will look at the torrent, verify the local file, then tell the tracker I'm open and ready for business. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: email self test tool ?
On Wed, Mar 15, 2006 at 12:12:09PM +1100, Voytek Eymont wrote: I used to know of one, but, can not find it anymore, does anyone knows of an email self test system, where one can send an email and get a reply ? [EMAIL PROTECTED] perhaps? (slug@slug.org.au ?) - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Latex, layout of maths answer
On Tue, Mar 14, 2006 at 01:43:58PM +1100, Terry Collins wrote:
Okay, how do you layout an answer for something as simple as
sqrt(175)-17**2 in latex?
$\sqrt{175}-17^2$
(From memory, anyway)
Looking for a/the method of doing the multiple lines showing your
working with equal signs all lined up.
\begin{tabular}{rcl}
x = 1
y = 2 - x
= 2 - 1
= 1
\end{tabular}
(Again, from memory)
The LaTeX docs are usually pretty good at describing math stuff, BTW. I
recommend the essential guide for starting out.
- Matt
--
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[SLUG] Re: internet access via mobile phone
On Tue, Feb 28, 2006 at 04:43:50PM +1300, Bret Comstock Waldow wrote: Is anyone using a mobile phone for internet access? Is there a provider that is Linux-friendly? (or OS agnostic, anyway) I'm moving to Oz soon, and considering this approach. I'd be interested in any experiences, resources, etc. Costs a fortune. Coverage isn't bad, but don't expect stellar performance if you're moving around. I've got a Vodafone 3G PCMCIA card through work and it's Linux support is adequate (although documentation is a smidge scarce). If you really need mobile internet access, it's not a bad option, but it doesn't hold a candle to an open access point. grin - Matt -- liw hut.fi has or used to have two nfs servers not-responding and still-trying... don't know if their dns server was not-found... 4o4 would be then a good name for the web server... endless hours of fun aj did you get a response from 4o4? nah, it just 404ed -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: graduate programmers
On Fri, Feb 24, 2006 at 02:48:02PM +0100, Glen Turner wrote: James Purser wrote: Economics 101: A Graduate is only worth as much as someone is willing to pay them. Yep, and a quick look at the stats from the Graduate Careers Council of Australia shows that recent median first year salaries for IT graduates under 25 years of age (ie, no work history) in Sydney is $40,000. under 25 years of age doesn't mean no work history. It means under 25. Also, that $40k is for your 50th percentile employed candidate, so half of the graduates who found work are getting less than $40k. Do the statistics indicate what the unemployment rate is for new IT grads? - Matt -- A polar bear is a rectangular bear after a coordinate transform. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: graduate programmers
On Sun, Feb 19, 2006 at 02:38:05PM +1100, O Plameras wrote: Terry Collins wrote: O Plameras wrote: This is the base salary graduates start with 15 years ago, in at least two Companies I know. So, graduates base salary now should be higher than this. 15 years is a lot of years in the IT industry. NOPE. Supply and demand. There is an enormous number of IT graduates these days, so IMO advertised starting salaries are generally down to what they were 15 years ago. I posted the $15-20K one as it was offered each year for a few years. What hasn't been mentioned yet is industry If you are in the pure IT side, then the best can get some spectacular salaries, but other industries tend not to have salaries too much above industry norm, so the $25-20K was a dogsbody in finance as a start, but some of those companies can reward well. This is less than a student rate, and much less than a graduate rate. For $25,000 stipend (or salary) per year one could continue University and earn a Ph.D. Because that'll get our clever country moniker back -- people who aren't worth $25,000 a year doing advanced research. There aren't anywhere near enough Ph.D scholarships to cover the number of IT graduates who aren't worth any more than that on the open market. On the upside, though, at least if they're kept in a postgrad lab, they'll do less damage there than out in the real world exercising their skills. - Matt -- Some people are like slinkies. They are fun and don't actually serve any real purpose, but they still make you smile when you push them down the stairs. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: DNS - Xen - Virtual server hosting
On Tue, Feb 14, 2006 at 09:12:14PM +1100, Ben Donohue wrote: A little off the original question here but on the subject of virtual hosting did you know that VMware are giving away GSX server now for free? It used to be over AUD$2000 but they are feeling the heat from Xen and MS virtual software as well as others in the market. So their Linux version you can freely download and it works very well. Oh my god, Ben's a corporate shill! http://www.consumerist.com/consumer/evil/did-nvidia-hire-online-actors-to-promote-their-products-152874.php grin - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: DNS - Xen - Virtual server hosting
On Wed, Feb 15, 2006 at 10:21:58AM +1100, Howard Lowndes wrote: Ben Donohue wrote: A little off the original question here but on the subject of virtual hosting did you know that VMware are giving away GSX server now for free? It used to be over AUD$2000 but they are feeling the heat from Xen and MS virtual software as well as others in the market. They shouldn't be feeling the heat from Xen yet because Xen will not run Windows until the new Intel chips ship. You've got your tenses wrong. The first VT-enabled chips shipped about a month ago, and it's now available in a number of laptop, desktop, and rack-mount server units. AMD's Pacifica, on the other hand, doesn't look to be out and about for a few months yet. I have a problem with VMware after 2.6.13 kernel - it won't compile on 2.6.24 and later, which is why I am looking at Xen. Not surprising it doesn't compile -- guessing kernel ABIs 9 versions in advance would be a neat trick. grin - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Apache2 php mysql, CMS?
On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 01:10:22PM +1100, Steven Heimann wrote: One new database that I thought I would try my first experiment with is a simple document store. It seems to work nicely with mysql. This database only needs fairly simple add, edit search function and I thought there are probably some automated system to take an existing mysql structure and create some PHP web forms to allow these functions. Despite a fair bit of time with Google I haven't found what I am looking for. It's not PHP, but Ruby on Rails has a simple scaffolding generator for tables. It's pretty (read: amazingly) neat stuff. Although they seem aimed at a slightly different and much larger and more complex problem there seems to be about a million competing Content Management Systems that may or may not do what I need. However, the learning curve for these might be larger than just learning more PHP and writing the system from scratch. Not a hope in hell. I could learn Plone in less time than it'd take to write a fairly simple CMS, and Plone is a huge, ugly beast of a system. If someone could recommend a system that could help me I would appreciate it. If one of these CMS is the way to go recommendations from a happy user of one or other of these would be great. I can see at the moment I could spend weeks just trying to decide how best to approach the problem. Perhaps there are some templates of existing systems out there but I haven't been able to find them. The problem with recommendations is that different CMSes suit different situations -- do you need management of rich multimedia, or just HTML/images/PDFs? Do you need strong content approval processes? How technically inclined are your users? What performance/scalability needs do you have? There was a roundup of member-recommended CMSes on the OSIA discuss mailing list in the last week or two which would probably be useful to you. http://www.osia.net.au/ and follow the links to the list archives. - Matt -- I'm seriously considering getting one of those bright-orange prison overalls and stencilling PASSENGER on the back. Along with the paper slippers, I ought to be able to walk right through security. Not. -- Brian Kantor, in the Monastery -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Install application
On Tue, Dec 27, 2005 at 08:10:26PM +1100, john gibbons wrote: I am running Ubuntu 10 and have just downloaded CorelPHOTOPAINT9Lnx.tar.gz which is sitting in the archive window. Would appreciate advice on what to type into the command line to get it running. What instructions were available when you downloaded it? - Matt -- Non-PHB basically told $MANAGER to go check his drive integrity. -- steve, ASR -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: [ot] Asterisk suppliers / consultants
On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 08:11:28AM +1100, Richard Hayes wrote: Is there any companies in Sydney specialising in Asterisk? Define specialising. It's unlikely there's too many reasonable size companies out there who do nothing but Asterisk -- the market for Asterisk (as rapidly expanding as it is) just isn't big enough to support many people. We've got a couple of guys on staff who do Asterisk stuff for clients, and they'd love to do it full-time, but we jut don't have the business volume for it. What has been the expreince with them? Clients love the near-infinite flexibility of Asterisk PABXes. Nobody's told us to go away yet. Beyond that, I'm at the wrong end of the supply chain to give you a customer's eye view of the process. grin - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Osirix software port required MacOS-X to Linux
On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 09:51:10AM +1100, Grant Parnell - EverythingLinux wrote: I couldn't find anything resembling ./configure or a Makefile and the dev page isn't very helpful unless you're using xcode. http://homepage.mac.com/rossetantoine/osirix/Index2.html My Gut feeling... probably cheaper to buy a Mac - except he wants to deploy many times over, thus if it costs a few grand it's OK. The Redoing the build system wouldn't be hard -- worst case, if it has to be autoconfiscated, might be a day or so's work. The *hard* bit is redoing all of the GUI code to work under Windows instead of the Mac. It's a non-trivial operation. Tack an extra couple of zeros onto your few grand and you'd probably be in the right ballpark. - Matt -- A byte walks into a bar and orders a pint. Bartender asks him What's wrong? The byte says Parity error. Bartender nods and says Yeah, I thought you looked a bit off. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Osirix software port required MacOS-X to Linux
On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 11:22:47AM +1100, Grant Parnell - EverythingLinux wrote: Took me a while but I'm downloading an x86 zip file... no idea what's in it, the sourceforge site Oscar pointed out is a bit light on for documentation. [time passes] Hmm.. looks like some sort of Mac binary with no source - does have header files though still not much idea of what platform it's supposed to be for - x86 doesen't really narrow it down. Is it Windows, MacOSX-X86 or Linux or something else. MacOSX-x86 -- the index2.html page you listed earlier had a minimal amount of information in it. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: pentium M series
On Mon, Dec 19, 2005 at 10:14:15AM +1100, ashley maher wrote: On Sat, 2005-12-17 at 12:54 +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote: quote who=ashley maher TO my surprise Ubuntu chose to install the 386 series kernel. Can't fit a lot of kernels on the CD, as well as a complete desktop. :-) is this an example of gnome bloat??? More kernel bloat. Debian woody had most of the 4th CD taken up with various kernels. You can have a *lot* of variations in your kernel config, it seems... - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: mysql issue
On Sun, Dec 11, 2005 at 08:26:09PM +1100, ashley maher wrote: G'day, I have an ubuntu hoary install. I have just used apt-get to install mysql-server. (Which I have done countless times with no problems) However this time I get: [long and interesting log message] Anybody with any hints where to look great fully received. Of the several suggestions provided in the log output, which (if any) have you already tried? Also, try running the mysqld binary by itself on the command line. Oftentimes, it'll give you more info on what went wrong. - Matt signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: linux sms gateway server
On Wed, Dec 07, 2005 at 03:27:22PM +1100, Kasim, Yosep wrote: Just asking is there anyone has ever setup a linux sms gateway server Yes. An Intercel SAM-10 and smstools. Works beautifully. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: xserver
On Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 10:46:14AM +1100, ashley maher wrote: G'day, Distro: Ubuntu Breezy amd64 I made the mistake of upgrading my kernel and the nvidia package a couple of days ago using ubuntu packages. From the logs: Script started on Tue 29 Nov 2005 10:23:49 EST [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ more /var/log/gdb[Km/\:0.log snip Error: API mismatch: the NVIDIA kernel module is version 1.0.7174, but this X module is version 1.0.7667. Please be sure that your kernel module and all NVIDIA driver files have the same driver version. Smells like you upgraded the X driver without bumping the kernel module at the same time. - Matt -- I'm tempted to try Gentoo, but... I have better things to do with my CPU cycles than to compile Python so that it can compile the compiler so that it can compile the kernel. -- Dave Brown, ASR signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: debian developers perth
On Thu, Nov 24, 2005 at 02:16:29AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote: To all the Debian Developers on the list: Please consider sunny Perth for a holiday destination this Christmas! Visit the coral reefs, the surf, the forests and the forest dunes! That way you could sign my GPG key while you are over here :) Consider holidaying in Dunedin this January. Possibly not quite so sunny, but you could probably rack up close to 50 DD sigs if you worked at it. grin I take it that you had no luck contacting Perth-local DDs for a signature? That surprises me, as I know at least one of them (go Jeremy!) is alive and active. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: ocaml vs python/ruby/perl etc. was [SLUG] Why not C
On Wed, Nov 23, 2005 at 07:46:36PM +1100, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote: Steve Lindsay wrote: While I would agree that catching any bugs asap is a good thing, I find that typos and the like are not the problems that are causing me most grief (crappy logic, crappy requirements, not enough time, other developers writing crappy code, etc are more likely to cause me problems). I recently worked on a quite large piece of Python code which I inherited without any tests. The only way to test it was to run it which took 10-15 minutes. While I was working on this I was constantly finding that little bugs that an Ocaml/Haskell/Ada/Pascal etc compiler would have found were killing me at run time. It was a royal PITA. Any codebase without a comprehensive testsuite is going to be painful to work on. The bugs that a compiled language picks up just get replaced in the royal PITA list by ones that the compiler doesn't pick up. Lather, rinse, repeat. So, you add a testsuite, and then there's a whole new set of bugs that crop up that can't be effectively tested for in the royal PITA list. LRR. Let's just give up this programming thing and go back to farming. def CowTest(unittest.TestCase): [...] - Matt signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: ocaml vs python/ruby/perl etc. was [SLUG] Why not C
On Thu, Nov 24, 2005 at 11:11:42AM +1100, Robert Collins wrote: On Thu, 2005-11-24 at 11:01 +1100, Matthew Palmer wrote: So, you add a testsuite, and then there's a whole new set of bugs that crop up that can't be effectively tested for in the royal PITA list. LRR. Well, the only bugs I've found to date that cannot be effectively tested for are concurrent operation bugs - threads and co-processes specifically. State machine based pseduo concurrency however, gives extremely easy reproduction of a bug, once you identify it ;). What sorts of bugs are your PITA list ? GUIs, concurrency, and graceful handling of major system faults (like database goes away in the middle of a transaction) are my three biggies. I avoid them by not doing GUIs or major concurrency unless I can avoid them, and just crossing my fingers that I'll never get an inconvenient database crash. Luckily, I don't do work in environments where such things are critical, otherwise I'd be very much unhappier. - Matt signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: ip addresses
On Thu, Nov 17, 2005 at 12:46:03PM +1100, Phill wrote: Is there any way of finding out the range of ip addresses used in Australia. My web server is frequently being attacked by [EMAIL PROTECTED]@ in other countries. I want to configure my hosts.allow to accept australian ip addresses only The best way to secure your machine is to restrict connections to only accept from 127.0.0.0/8. I did that and it restricted the number of attacks I received by heaps. Seriously though, how do you define Australian IP addresses? Addresses assigned to physical hosts currently located in Australia? Machines administered by Australian citizens? Addresses assigned, in the first (or final) instance, to Australian legal entities? The problem is that addresses move around, and can be sub-delegated and redelegated all around the place. There are databases that try to keep a track of some sense of where an IP address exists in meatspace, but they're limited (at best). My suggestion: don't bother trying to limit to some arbitrary ideal of where an IP address is. Block selectively based on actual activity. Make sure your machines are secure. And don't stress about it. - Matt -- Windows is too dangerous to be left to Windows admins. -- James Riden, ASR signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Linux or BSD for Webhosting?
On Sun, Oct 16, 2005 at 04:05:18PM -0700, pesoy misak wrote: I just got a request from my friend to build a web hosting system for his business but i don't know what is the best distro for it. I presume you're talking about hosting multiple sites and such, rather than a webserver. I've recently deployed SysCP (http://www.syscp.de/) to a client, and so far I've found it to be quite nice. Looks decent (although there are a few little grammatical problems due to the main authors being German), provides all the basic functionality you might need (multiple domains including aliases, mail domains, full quotas on everything) and doesn't require diving into the base system much-if-at-all. Installs natively on top of Debian Sarge, but I've installed it quite easily on Ubuntu Hoary. I agree with Jeff's sentiment overall, though -- use what you're familiar with already unless you're keen on making this a learning experience. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: local Ubuntu apt server
On Tue, Sep 27, 2005 at 11:16:24AM +1000, Carlo Sogono wrote: I need to setup a local Ubuntu apt server but don't know where to start. I need something that syncs with official Ubuntu servers but I only want it to sync packages I define. Is this possible? You want apt-proxy. - Matt signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: LVM and software RAID
On Thu, Sep 22, 2005 at 09:08:52PM +1000, Raphael Kraus wrote: We're trying to set-up a host with software RAID (mirroring) and LVM at work (for a backup server). Just trying to install Debian with RAID partitions is proving painful. Anyone done this before? Any recommendations, tips, suggested methods? I'm thinking I should install to one drive putting a plain boot partition and then a LVM on it, leaving the second alone. Once install is complete create the RAID with the second drive marked as failed. (I can remember doing this a while back, but I think RAID has changed on Linux now.) Eh? You just create a RAID partition, and then lay LVM on the md device.[1] The kernel/initrd just works it all out and you've got /dev/mapper/vg-lv to play with once the system's booted. You can even put your root partition on it (although you do need to have a non-LVM /boot partition, but that's easy enough to manage with a separate little partition at the front of the disk). The partitioner in d-i is da bomb for this sort of thing; it supports all these sorts of shenanigans right out of the box (although unfortunately not in an automatable fashion yet). - Matt [1] Doing it the other way around (RAID on top of LVs) makes no sense; you'd have to have duplicate VGs on both disks, make duplicate LVs on each physical disk and then tell the RAID code to mirror each one. signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: LVM and software RAID
On Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 10:27:57AM +1000, Ricky wrote: don't think you need LVM for your /boot partition (in fact, it may not even be possible), if you want to be super safe just partition it with 100MB or something You can't have your kernels/initrds stored in an LVM if you want to use GRUB. It's not capable of reading the necessary files off an LVM. LILO can, but it's not suitable for some things (like running Xen, for instance). never did try mixing RAID with LVM, can anyone comment on their experience.. Works quite fine. The output of a RAID volume is a block device, and the input to an LVM volume group is a block device, so things Just Work. - Matt signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Re: LVM and software RAID
On Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 12:31:02PM +1000, Terry Collins wrote: Matt Palmer wrote: Off the top of my head: Create a partition on the first HDD of about 100MB in size, select /boot as the mount point. Make a partition on the first HDD of the same size, leave it unused. Err, that second first HDD should be second HDD no? Yes, indeed it should. Yay for proofreading! If you are using lilo, does this mean your lilo.conf should reference /boot/vmlinuz /boot/initrd.img in the lilo.conf rather than a link from /vmlinuz /initrd.img ? I don't think LILO cares -- it does a fairly good job of dereferencing symlinks to their actual location on disk, from memory. Or doesn't lilo boot raid? I think it will. It boots LVM, so I'd be a bit surprised if it didn't also do RAID. - Matt -- A polar bear is a rectangular bear after a coordinate transform. signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: wifi router
On Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 12:44:24PM +0200, Gottfried Szing wrote: Hi again The good thing about OpenWRT is that you can install it and use the hardware for something else than the factory programmed functionalities. I recently installed Asterisk PBX on it. It's a quite sweet device. For good or bad, it could run Apache as well (lacks persistant memory space though). i forgot to ask in the last mail: have you used the packages that are availble via ipkg or a different piece of software? is this software stable enough for home-usage? Rock solid for me. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: network restart drops eth0 connection :(
On Sat, Sep 17, 2005 at 12:21:50AM +1000, David wrote: I'm just building a brand new Ubuntu server box. Unfortunately I put in the wrong address for the nameserver so I changed it manually (edited /etc/resolv.conf and /etc/network/interfaces) and now if I restart networking I lose the eth0 connection completely! ie, ifconfig only shows loopback. If I completely reboot the machine, eth0 comes back and works fine until the next time I restart networking :( Can anyone suggest what I'm doing wrong? Check that /etc/network/interfaces contains the line auto eth0 I've had some problems with machines not having that line in there, and having exactly the problems you're reporting. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Code Management Database
On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 04:05:33PM +1000, Edwin Humphries wrote: We have several Linux software products, and have recently had enquiries about customised versions for specific customers. We're happy to do it, but I'm looking for a way to manage the codebase so that when we do an upgrade, we can upgrade the customised versions without overwriting the customised code. The code is delicious mix of C, PERL, PHP and bash scripts (don't ask). My understanding is that CVS is not the tool for this job, but does anybody know of a tool that is good for this? Any of the distributed revision control systems are quite good for this -- the model of many disparate versions with a common core is quite similar to the archetypical distributed RCS use case of many disparate hackers producing different changes against a common core. CVS can, in theory, support this, but you will go bald, crazy, or (most likely) both trying to do it. Subversion is a bit better, but it's still limiting for practical purposes, primarily because it's merging support is pretty primitive. To give you an idea of the dancing you have to go through: http://plone.org/development/info/merging A distributed RCS will take a little getting used to, if you're used to the crippled way that CVS does branching, you won't be used to the cool stuff which you can do with powerful branches. But with a bit of practice, you will learn to love it, and you'll never go back. - Matt A CVS refugee signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: sl-modem on Ubuntu Hoary...grrr
On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 12:43:13PM +1000, James Gray wrote: I've been bashing my head on this one for a few days. I have a HP NC6230 lappy with a built-in modem: $lspci | grep -i modem :00:1e.3 Modem: Intel Corp. 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 03) Apparently that requires the sl-modem stuff. No problem. $apt-cache search sl-modem sl-modem-daemon - SmartLink software modem daemon sl-modem-source - SmartLink software modem driver - module building source Hmm - so far so good. Do an apt-get update then: $sudo apt-get install sl-modem-daemon Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done Some packages could not be installed. *snip* The following packages have unmet dependencies: sl-modem-daemon: Depends: sl-modem-modules-new but it is not installable E: Broken packages It's all fun and games until somebody doesn't properly QA their packages. Hmm, I wonder if piuparts[1] is being run on Breezy? I solved this particular minor problem by gutting sl-modem-daemon a bit and removing the dependency on the modules package. Not so good. So I try the source and install sl-modem-source. But that package appears to be a branch that should be inserted into a full kernel source. Bah! How do I compile this?? No frigging idea. I ended up downloading slmodem-2.9.9e-pre1a and running 'make' in the drivers directlry, then copying slamr.ko into the kernel's modules directory. So as a last resort, I get the source file from smartlink and compile that. Only two warnings during the make install stage: /home/myuid/src/slmodem-2.9.10/drivers/st7554.c:1112: \ warning: implicit declaration of function `usb_endpoint_halted' ... *** Warning: usb_endpoint_halted [/home/myuid/src/slmodem-2.9.10/drivers/slusb.ko] undefined! Unless you've got a slightly freaky laptop, you don't need this module. It's for USB-connected softmodems. First one isn't a big deal, but the second one looks ominous. When it comes around to inserting the module: $sudo modprobe slamr FATAL: Error inserting slamr (/lib/modules/2.6.10-5-686/extra/slamr.ko): Unknown symbol in module, or unknown parameter (see dmesg) And here's dmesg: slamr: Unknown symbol get_device slamr: Unknown symbol put_device slamr: Unknown symbol device_release_driver You built the module without versioned symbols, while the kernel has it's symbols versioned. Run 'make oldconfig make dep' in the kernel source tree for the running kernel (I think that the make oldconfig is enough, but I'm quite certain that running both will definitely sort it out). Once that's done, it's back into drivers for a 'make clean make'. Anyone solved this one before? Not entirely -- once I'd got it all built and installed, the driver would load and go hey, that's a modem! but I couldn't actually get it to make dialling-type actions. Hopefully you'll have more luck. - Matt [1] http://packages.debian.org/testing/devel/piuparts -- New Yankee Workshop isn't a how to for home hobbyists, it's Baywatch for powertool fetishists. -- Geoff Kinnel, ASR signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Partitioning software
On Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 07:26:09PM +1000, Howard Lowndes wrote: I am probably going to buy a lappy in the next few weeks and it will inevitably come with that toy OS on it. Having paid good money for it I am disinclined to blow it away totally so I want to be able to cram it into a corner of the disk and give the rest over to a real OS. What are ppls recommendations for partitioning software - preferably FOSS that will handle XP with either NTFS or VFAT? I just used the Debian installer in Ubuntu Hoary, and was able to say resize this partition down to this size, and the NTFS partition on which resided my (as yet unactivated) XP Pro install was suddenly a lot less greedy. - Matt signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: domain name registration
On Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 04:34:18PM +0930, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I've registered a '.info' domain name with registerfly.com for about $AUD5.00. It all works but it takes about 5 seconds to do a lookup. Can anyone recommend a domain registration service that has fast response times and does cheap '.info' domains? Your choice of registrar can have nothing whatsoever to do with the actual process of performing a DNS lookup. Just find a 3rd party DNS server and delegate the domain to them. Hell, if you've got a static IP, you can run the master yourself and ask for a slave (or 12) here... - Matt signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Asterisk Open Source PABX software
On Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 03:16:04PM +1000, Michael Kraus wrote: Has anyone had any experience with Asterisk (or any other) open source PABX software, and wouldn't mind commenting? Played with Asterisk. The possibilities are endless. It's relatively straightforward to play with if you don't mind muddling around in lots of text config files, or there's the quite delightful [EMAIL PROTECTED] custom distro (http://asteriskathome.sf.net/). It's just Asterisk and a pile of custom web-based admin/config loveliness built on top of CentOS. I highly recommend it, at least until you really know your Asterisk stuff (at which point you'll know plenty enough to select your own environment based on your needs and desires). - Matt signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Setting up email domain on boxen
On Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 10:23:55AM +1000, Michael S. E. Kraus wrote: G'day... I've a couple of boxen that contain perl programs and cron processes which send out email . The problem is that they are machines which exist on an internal subnet and are named as such (e.g. my home machine is simply called mnementh). Now, when sending email via smtp I get a lot of delivery failures because of this (invalid domain). How can I fix this for the Perl programs and the cron processes? Install nullmailer or ssmtp. Both have the ability to rewrite sender domains. - Matt signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Re: Setting up email domain on boxen
On Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 02:57:24PM +1000, James Polley wrote: On 8/22/05, Matthew Palmer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Install nullmailer or ssmtp. Both have the ability to rewrite sender domains. As does sendmail (and, I imagine, any other real MTA) The difference between the ones I mentioned and a real MTA is that they're both small, lightweight, don't listen on a port, and are far simpler to configure. - Matt signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: RedHat at UOW
On Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 07:20:37PM +1000, Simon Males wrote: I'm guessing that he wishes to install Fedora on an UOW supplied machine? If he brought his own hardware he could connect wirelessly assuming he doesn't need any specific networked resources (though printing could be a difficultly). I believe academics are (maybe were) allowed to connect there laptops via ethernet. Postgrads normally get to do whatever inhuman things they like to the machines they get given, primarily on a just don't expect us to help you fix it basis. When I was in CompEng, most of the postgrads in TITR were running Linux on their desktops, and nobody seemed to care. Further, the 3rd year Computer Science project lab use to have Fedora 2 or 3. They'll probably be Debian Sarge now, like most of the rest of the CompSci machines now. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: RedHat at UOW
On Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 09:51:29AM +1000, Robert Barnett wrote: I have a colleague from Uppsala University, Sweden. He uses ITK/VTK for data processing and manipulation of Medical Images. He currently has a post-doc position which is shared between UOW and a Sydney hospital. He's informed me that UOW would not let him use his RedHat (Fedora Core 3) machine on the campus network because they only allow for approved OSes to connect to the network. By UOW, do you mean University of Wollongong? (I'm having trouble expanding UOW into anything related to Uppsala, but that could be a lack of imagination on my part). My personal policy at Wollongong Uni was forgiveness, not permission. Worked like a charm. Does anyone have any ideas about how to appeal this decision/policy? I All that should be necessary is a letter from their supervisor saying that the machine is needed for their studies. I've never really noticed any huge hatred towards Linux boxen in general (hell, most of the CompSci/CompEng labs are at least dual-boot boxen). completed a postgrad course at UOW. In all my time there I never managed to get any response from the IT department with regards to policy. You're talking about ITS? The techos there are reasonable enough to talk to, but when the hair is pointy, it's *very* pointy. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: sending email from a laptop
On Thu, Aug 18, 2005 at 11:48:19AM +1000, Sonia Hamilton wrote: What I'd like to do is have some sort of mail server running on my laptop, and then have it try different SMTP servers until sending mail succeeds on one of them ie from my mail client send to 127.0.0.1:25 and have the listening program just work it out. At the moment I'm using Postfix - can I do this in Postfix? What about another mail transport program? You should be able to do that, just list multiple hosts in the relayhost config parameter. I'm not sure if 5xx errors will make it drop the e-mail, though, so try the config out on some test e-mails before you go the whole hog. An alternative which I use is to have a VPN connection back to my home base SMTP server, and I relay everything through that. It's much easier to debug problems that way. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Clusters and parallel programming group
On Mon, Aug 15, 2005 at 09:31:30PM +1000, Carlo Sogono wrote: Suddenly I've had this urge to do some parallel programming using MPI on Linux (either using the MPICH or LAM implementations) 'for fun'. Problem is I don't have access to multiple systems to act as clusters or nor the money to buy some. I was wondering if there were any SLUG'ers here with the same interests or who may want to form a small informal 'for fun' interest group in Sydney. I have a P3 computer to spare so maybe some of you can volunteer a place or a few computers. I do not intend to run high Here's a sick and perverse thought, if you're *really* not interested in high-performance, but just the whole clustering thing -- run a few UML instances and Beowulf between those. Performance will be significantly worse than running the same program in a single-machine mode, but it'll at least give you an opportunity to get a taste for the pain and suffering that is parallel programming. Be warned: some consider running a UML Beowulf to be a crime against nature. grin - Matt -- For once, Microsoft wasn't exaggerating when they named it the 'Jet Engine' -- your data's the seagull. -- Chris Adams signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Telstra ADSL bridge mode on Linux
On Mon, Jul 11, 2005 at 02:01:23PM +1000, Peter Rundle wrote: I am trying to get the same setup out of Telstra (don't ask why) at a third site. Their Account rep assured me that the modem could work in bridge mode (as per the other vendors) but it turns out that doesn't appear to be true. The *complete* sentence they meant to say was the modem could work in bridge mode as long as the PPPoE software is running on the host. Is there any point in persuing this or should I try and work on ditching Telstra for one of the other vendors? Run, don't walk, away from Telstra. - Matt signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Apache probs - Invalid command 'Alias', perhaps mis-spelled
On Sun, Jul 03, 2005 at 10:51:37PM +1000, Michael Lake wrote: and my modules.conf is this: I'm not seeing a mod_alias line in that config file. Methinks it's gone on a holiday. As per the comments in the config file: # To update it, run the command: #/usr/sbin/apache-modconf apache-perl And select the alias module. That (and an apache restart, which apache-modconf should probably do for you) should set you straight. - Matt signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
