Re: VT100 FreeBSD spreadsheet with data manipulation connections

2009-07-05 Thread Kelly Jones
On 7/4/09, Bill Campbell free...@celestial.com wrote: On Fri, Jul 03, 2009, Kelly Jones wrote: I'm looking for a command-line (VT100) FreeBSD spreadsheet that has data manipulation connections. One that I have used off and on for years is ``sc''. It's simple, and stores data in fairly simple

VT100 FreeBSD spreadsheet with data manipulation connections

2009-07-03 Thread Kelly Jones
I'm looking for a command-line (VT100) FreeBSD spreadsheet that has data manipulation connections. That is: other applications can edit the spreadsheet (via some API), and the spreadsheet can run commands when cells are edited. My goal: create a VT100 spreadsheet-like interface to sqlite3 (and

Re: Using ctorrent or other program to seed a torrent

2009-06-30 Thread Kelly Jones
that resistance to new ideas and technology is unwise and ultimately futile. On 6/28/09, Kelly Jones kelly.terry.jo...@gmail.com wrote: I know how to use ctorrent to create a torrent file, but how do I actually seed the resulting file so that others can get it, and how do I 'register' myself w/ a tracker

Using ctorrent or other program to seed a torrent

2009-06-28 Thread Kelly Jones
I know how to use ctorrent to create a torrent file, but how do I actually seed the resulting file so that others can get it, and how do I 'register' myself w/ a tracker so that others will know what IP address to connect to, etc? Can ctorrent seed torrents, or do I need another program for that?

Re: Need a filesystem with unlimited inodes

2009-06-10 Thread Kelly Jones
On 6/8/09, Kelly Jones kelly.terry.jo...@gmail.com wrote: What UFS-like filesystem has unlimited inodes, but is a drop-in replacement for ext3, and is fairly easy to configure? Thanks to everyone who replied. I'm using 100+ rented cloud servers to do stuff for me and rsync the results back

Need a filesystem with unlimited inodes

2009-06-08 Thread Kelly Jones
What UFS-like filesystem has unlimited inodes, but is a drop-in replacement for ext3, and is fairly easy to configure? Is UFS2 no longer considered the best general-use filesystem? Reason I ask: I'm going to create many small (~1K) files on a 100G disk and thus need at least 100M inodes. newfs

Waiting for a process to die

2009-05-31 Thread Kelly Jones
How do I wait for a specific process to die? I want to do something like: waitpid 1234(echo done! | Mail -s PROC DONE kelly.terry.jo...@gmail.com) I'm sure this is trivial, but I can't find a way to do it. I wrote a Perl script that checks every second if /proc/pid exists, but that only works

Customize .vacation.msg to include subject, sender, etc?

2009-05-29 Thread Kelly Jones
I'm using 'vacation' as an autoresponder, but can't seem to customize .vacation.msg to include the subject, sender, recipient, etc. Is there a way to do this? If not, is there a better autoresponder I can use? I realize I could write one myself, but I'd prefer to use an existing solution. --

Re: Customize .vacation.msg to include subject, sender, etc?

2009-05-29 Thread Kelly Jones
Woops, that's not quite what I meant, sorry. I meant something like: From: some...@somewhere Subject: Re: {subject of message you sent} Dear {email address of person who sent message}, You recently sent an email to {to address of messages}... and so on. I realize the to address is often fixed,

Setting up a cloud space server

2009-05-27 Thread Kelly Jones
I have a lot of disk space on one of my remote dedicated FreeBSD servers, and I'd like to resell it as cloud space. Is there a program that does something like this? Specifically: % Makes the disk space available through standard cloud protocols % Calculates how much space/bandwidth each user

Formatted text conversion

2009-05-27 Thread Kelly Jones
I have e-books in several formats (DOC, LIT, PDF, RTF, HTML, TXT, etc). Is there a Unix command-line tool that converts between these formats? If not, is there at least a tool that converts these formats to TXT? My goal is to read these books on my Kindle, even if it means losing some

VM server sharing (OT)

2009-05-27 Thread Kelly Jones
Has anyone setup a VM server sharing arrangement, whereby I run some of their vmdk files on my VM server, and they run some of my vmdk files on their VM server? VM servers are great, but if the whole server (or its network) goes down, there's no redundancy. VM server sharing would allow people to

Better version of ispell?

2009-05-26 Thread Kelly Jones
Is there a version/improvment of ispell that: % Lets you exclude certain sections of a file from spellchecking? Example: I often email sendmail logs with their random-character queue ids. I don't want ispell to check those cut/pasted logs. % Lets you declare correctly-spelled words as being

Using rsync for versioned backups without --backup

2009-05-25 Thread Kelly Jones
I want to use rsync to backup a large file (say 1G) that changes a little each day (say 1M), but I also want the ability to re-create older versions of this file. I could use --backup, but that would create a 1G file each day, even though I only really need the 1M that's changed. How do I tell

What do ASCII codes 128-159 stand for?

2009-05-25 Thread Kelly Jones
man ascii defines the ASCII codes from 0-127, and the various ISO-8859-x tables define the ASCII codes from 160-255 (depending on your character set), but are there standard representations for the ASCII codes between 128 and 159 inclusive? -- We're just a Bunch Of Regular Guys, a collective

Secure unsalted or fixed salt symmetric encryption?

2009-05-24 Thread Kelly Jones
Are there any secure openssl symmetric encryption routines that *don't* use a salt? Is it secure to use a random-but-fixed salt (openssl enc -S salt)? man enc says This option [-salt] should ALWAYS be used [...] Reason I ask: I was using this command to backup files using

ps says process has been running for 49710 days

2009-05-24 Thread Kelly Jones
I use /bin/ps -www -ax -eo 'pid etime args' to see how long a process has been running. This usually works fine, but I sometimes see things like: 17469 49710-06:28:15 /usr/bin/fly -q -i [...] indicating a process has been running for 49710+ days. I originally thought that was the time from the

Blowfish encryption key length

2009-05-19 Thread Kelly Jones
I want to use a random Blowfish key to encrypt files, so I did this: dd if=/dev/random of=mykey.bf count=100 bs=100 to create a 10K byte mykey.bf file. I can now encrypt foo.txt by doing: openssl enc -bf -pass file:mykey.bf -in foo.txt foo.txt.encrypted However, man enc says Blowfish and RC5

Backing up FreeBSD and other Unix systems securely

2009-05-17 Thread Kelly Jones
I tried using Mozy for backups because they offer unlimited space, but 1) they don't support FreeBSD, 2) they encrypt file contents, but NOT file names, and 3) they don't do true versioned backups. Easy workaround for 1): rsync to a Mac/Windows and backup from there, but 2) and 3) are more

Windows mailing lists?

2009-05-17 Thread Kelly Jones
This question is OT by definition: are there any Windows mailing lists similar to this one? Ideally one for people who hate Windows, but have to deal w/ it (eg, Windows command-line and Cygwin users, not people who use it by choice). I know Cygwin has mailing lists, but it's not quite the same

Better version of diff?

2009-05-17 Thread Kelly Jones
I often need to compare two Perl files sans comments. This mostly works: egrep -v '^#' file1.pl file1.tmp egrep -v '^#' file2.pl file2.tmp diff -B file1.tmp file2.tmp (yes, it breaks for perldoc style comments, comments on lines w/ code, # characters inside HERE docs, and probably other

qmail.sh is broken symlink

2009-05-15 Thread Kelly Jones
I just installed qmail on my FreeBSD box out of /usr/ports/mail/qmail, and noticed this: # ls -l /usr/local/etc/rc.d/qmail.sh lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 13 May 15 18:43 /usr/local/etc/rc.d/qmail.sh@ - /va\ r/qmail/rc # ls -l /var/mail/rc ls: /var/mail/rc: No such file or directory I read

Emailing 100+ PDFs, one at a time, to a given address

2009-05-14 Thread Kelly Jones
I need to email 100s of PDFs, 1 per email, to a given address. What's the easiest way to do this? /usr/bin/Mail won't work, since PDFs are binary, so I must first BASE64 encode them. I could write a Perl script to BASE64 encode them and MIME-wrap them, but is there an existing tool for this?

Reading warnings when installing multiple ports

2009-05-10 Thread Kelly Jones
I often use make -DBATCH install to install ports. Problem: many ports spew out a warning/todo message after you install them (eg, you must manually create an x user or something). Since ports install recursively, I miss most of these messages. Can I tell ports to store these messages for me

bzip2split

2008-12-21 Thread Kelly Jones
Can I split a large (4G+) bzip2 file into smaller bzip2 files? Notes: % Obviously, 'split' won't work for 2 reasons: % Each chunk won't have the BZIP2 header % 'split' will cut the file inside a bzip2 block, rendering the first/last blocks of each file unreadable. -- We're just a Bunch

Publishing information via DNS

2008-12-17 Thread Kelly Jones
Has anyone tried publishing non-DNS information via DNS? Advantages: % Automatic distributed caching on various nameservers. % UDP, so no TCP overhead I know SPF uses this, and clamav publishes their current version number this way, but has anyone done this on a large scale basis? -- We're

Re: Publishing information via DNS

2008-12-17 Thread Kelly Jones
On 12/17/08, Matthew Seaman m.sea...@infracaninophile.co.uk wrote: Kelly Jones wrote: Has anyone tried publishing non-DNS information via DNS? Advantages: % Automatic distributed caching on various nameservers. % UDP, so no TCP overhead I know SPF uses this, and clamav publishes

Basic Tulip questions

2008-12-03 Thread Kelly Jones
I just installed Tulip on my FreeBSD server. The server has X11 installed, but isn't running it. I asked the questions below to the Tulip list ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) earlier, but got no reply, so I was hoping someone here was familiar w/ it and could help me. Does Tulip have a command-line mode?

sniffit requires config file?

2008-12-03 Thread Kelly Jones
Whenever I use sniffit on a new machine, I have to create this conf file: select both mhosts 0 select both mhosts 1 select both mhosts 2 select both mhosts 3 select both mhosts 4 select both mhosts 5 select both mhosts 6 select both mhosts 7 select both mhosts 8 select both mhosts 9 Not a huge

Unix domain socket tunnel to TCP on other machine

2008-12-03 Thread Kelly Jones
For mimedefang/clamav purposes, I'm trying to setup a Unix domain socket that tunnels to a TCP port on another machine. For example, if I telnet -u /var/spool/mysock on machine X, I want it to be just like doing telnet Y 25. I've poked around with stunnel and ssh's port forwarding/ControlMaster

Unix program that sends email directly using MX record

2008-11-22 Thread Kelly Jones
What Unix program sends email directly, using the MX record of the recipient, instead of using sendmail or an installed MTA? I realize I could tweak sendmail.cf/etc to do this, but that's not working in my (fairly unusual) special situation. I also realize that sending email directly is normally

sudo multiple commands at once without shell script

2008-10-25 Thread Kelly Jones
How do I run multiple sudo commands at once? This fails because the semicolon ends the whole sudo command: sudo whoami; whoami root user This confuses tcsh: monica:~ sudo ( whoami ; whoami ) Badly placed ()'s. I could obviously write a shell script or something or do: sudo whoami; sudo

Can tcsh report 'command had no output'?

2008-10-12 Thread Kelly Jones
Can I force tcsh to say previous command returned empty stdout or something? I often cut and paste shell output for my cow-orkers, and it's crucial to note when a command returns nothing. Currently, I insert the information manually: ls | fgrep 'phrase' [no results] but it'd be nice if tcsh

newsyslog naming scheme could be improved?

2008-10-11 Thread Kelly Jones
newsyslog rotates logfiles so that messages.0.gz is yesterday's file, messages.1.gz is the day before's, etc. This is ugly. If I tell my fellow sysadmins that I ran this command: zfgrep 'bad thing' /var/log/messages.4.gz and found stuff, they may run it the next day and get different results

Installing multiple ports quietly and efficiently

2008-10-06 Thread Kelly Jones
Here's one way to install multiple FreeBSD ports unattended on a machine: cd /usr/port/foo/prog1; make install; cd/usr/ports/foo/prog2; make install and so on (perhaps even in a shell script). Two problems: % It's ugly. I'd prefer cd /usr/ports; make foo/prog1 foo/prog2 ... % make install

[EMAIL PROTECTED] - does free distributed computing exist?

2008-05-24 Thread Kelly Jones
There are several projects (like [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], etc) that let you donate spare CPU power to a specific cause. Is there a project that lets you donate spare CPU power to anyone who needs it? That is, a pool of CPU power that anyone can tap into for free to

Unix command-line tools to edit SharePoint site?

2008-05-24 Thread Kelly Jones
I begrudgingly use a Windows SharePoint server at a customer's request. I'd like to automate (command-line) updating and creating documents, lists, etc. Is there a Unix tool that does this? I know SharePoint has an API, which basically spoofs the GET/POST calls that your browser would make(?).

Line-by-line mode for ssh?

2008-04-06 Thread Kelly Jones
Telnet has a line-by-line mode that's really useful on a slow connection: you can type in an entire line of text and hit return instead of having to type one character at a time. Is there anything similar for ssh? I tried tunelling port 23 on my machine to port 22 on the remote machine and then

Snapshotting a system before fixing it

2008-04-06 Thread Kelly Jones
When a critical service on a system goes down, fixing it is top priority. Unfortunately, this makes doing a post-mortem analysis more difficult-- after you've fixed the problem, doing ps, mailq, or whatever isn't that helpful. Question: has anyone written a script that quickly snapshots (saves

Recovering data from a newfs filesystem

2008-01-19 Thread Kelly Jones
Months ago, I got a new USB drive for my Mac OS X, did newfs /dev/disk1 on it, and it's been working fine. I then foolishly did disklabel -create /dev/disk1, which broke it. How can I recover my data? I've tried fsck w/ alternate superblocks to no avail. less -f /dev/disk1 shows me the disk

Allowing noschg in multi-user mode on Mac OS X

2007-07-04 Thread Kelly Jones
Most FreeBSD kernels let you set a flag(?) to decide whether chflags noschg will work in multi-user mode. How do I do this w/ Mac OS X? Here's what happens when I do chflags noschg in multi-user mode: # chflags noschg test.txt chflags: test.txt: Operation not permitted The opposite, chflags

Using LD_PRELOAD to make date return a specific date

2007-04-24 Thread Kelly Jones
I recently discovered LD_PRELOAD, a cool environment variable that lets a library intercept system calls. For example, setting LD_PRELOAD to /usr/lib/libtsocks.so lets tsocks intercept socket connections and redirect them to a SOCKS proxy. My question: how can I write a library that intercepts

Loop/wildcard-like syntax for GNU make?

2007-04-17 Thread Kelly Jones
Here's a Makefile that converts 3 GIFs to JPGs in a given directory: 1.jpg: 1.gif /usr/local/bin/convert 1.gif 1.jpg 2.jpg: 2.gif /usr/local/bin/convert 2.gif 2.jpg 3.jpg: 3.gif /usr/local/bin/convert 3.gif 3.jpg How do I generalize this to apply to ALL the GIFs in a given

Using weekly backup disk to store partial full backup as well?

2007-03-31 Thread Kelly Jones
I currently backup important files to DVD weekly. These files are 2G in size total, so I waste ~2.7G on each DVD (these are DVD-Rs, so I can't wipe/re-use them). How can I use this wasted space to do a complete backup? Example: first week, backup the first 2.7G of my HD; second week, backup the

FreeBSD equivalents of hwclock and adjtimex?

2007-03-10 Thread Kelly Jones
What are the FreeBSD equivalents of hwclock (view/set the BIOS hardware clock) and adjtimex (adjust clock speed)? I couldn't find these two well-known Linux commands in ports? -- We're just a Bunch Of Regular Guys, a collective group that's trying to understand and assimilate technology. We feel

Tool for validating sender address as spam-fighting technique?

2007-03-10 Thread Kelly Jones
To fight spam, I want to validate the address (not necessarily in real-time) of the a given email sender. Is there a Unix tool that does this? The basics are simple: to validate [EMAIL PROTECTED], I connect to the MX record of wnonline.net and go as far as RCPT TO as follows: host -t mx

Effectively detaching 'less' from a pipe

2007-02-26 Thread Kelly Jones
I often run commands piped to 'less', to make sure the command is working OK by looking at the first few lines of output. Once I'm convinced, though, I'd like to get rid of less, and just have the rest of stdout spewed to the terminal (and/or /dev/null and/or to a file I specify). In other

Low-cost dedicated FreeBSD server or non-jail VPS?

2007-02-07 Thread Kelly Jones
I'm looking to rent a low-cost FreeBSD dedicated server or VPS with root access. For a VPS, I realize this is really psuedo-root access. I once rented a VPS on a FreeBSD box that was split into virtual boxes using jail, but wasn't happy with it. So, if it's not a dedicated box, I'm looking for

Re: Low-cost dedicated FreeBSD server or non-jail VPS?

2007-02-07 Thread Kelly Jones
Thanks, Derek. I'm not looking to run this machine from home or to co-locate an existing box (though I suppose I could do that). As Jay mentions, I'm looking for something like: http://tektonic.net/unmanaged.html http://www.leeware.com/vps100.html http://rosehosting.com/virtserv.html (all bad

Single command that outputs system status?

2007-01-21 Thread Kelly Jones
It's easy to write a shell script that dumps/mails the output of several status commands (eg, df -k, crontab -l, ps -aux -www, top -n -d 1 infinity, w -d, mailq -v, netstat -a, vmstat, etc) every hour, but I'm wondering if I'm re-inventing the wheel. Is there a FreeBSD command that reports

Signing a document with my SSH key, not a PGP key?

2006-12-29 Thread Kelly Jones
I want to sign a document with ~/.ssh/id_dsa so that people who have my public SSH key (~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub) can confirm that it's from me. I don't want to encrypt the document, just sign it. How can I do this? Is it a good idea? Does ssh-keysign (which is disabled by default) play into it? I

Unix/sh/bash/tcsh command to limit clock time for program?

2006-12-26 Thread Kelly Jones
Is there a Unix or shell command that runs a given program for n seconds and then terminates it (unless the program takes less than n seconds to run, obviously)? I know ulimit can limit a program's CPU time and sh's TIMEOUT variable can limit idle time at the shell prompt, but how to limit a

Command-line iridium flare prediction software for Unix/Mac OS X?

2006-12-23 Thread Kelly Jones
I've seen lots of iridium flare prediction software that's graphics-based, but is there any that can be run from the command line? I want to run the predictor as a cron job and pipe the output to a Perl script, for example. I'm running Mac OS X, but if I can get the source of anything that runs