[SLUG] Re: Paying Money for Quality (and software testing)
On Sat, Apr 29, 2006 at 01:49:43PM +1000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: With regards to last night's Slug meeting and using automated testing, I think everyone agrees that writing (and using) test cases produces higher quality code with less bugs. My point is that higher quality output doesn't come for free, it requires effort and that usually means someone has to pay for it. cost(Debugging without tests) cost(debugging with tests) + cost(tests) Why? Because your tests tell you where the problem is, usually. If your test suite isn't comprehensive enough to localise the problem sufficiently, then the first part of your debugging routine is to add tests to your test suite that localise the problem. This is time that you would spend localising the problem in an ad-hoc fashion anyway, and if you encode it in your test suite, then it's time spent only once (writing the tests) instead of spending the time localising the problem to the same unit over and over and over again. This single point is enough to win me over to test-first development. It has cut the amount of time I spend debugging any non-trivial program by a huge amount. Then there's all of the other factors, which improve my job satisfaction -- and a happy programmer is a productive programmer, which improves productivity as well. But they're far more intangible. - Matt -- Windows is too dangerous to be left to Windows admins. -- James Riden, 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: Ldap error
On Thu, Apr 20, 2006 at 10:15:32AM +1000, Selim Jahangir wrote: Hi I am having to trouble to use ldapadd command , it always asks me ldap_bind: invalid credentials [49]. Add -x to the command line. You're not running SASL, and ldapadd assumes it by default. - 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: Tandeming Linux servers with auto fall over...
On Wed, Apr 12, 2006 at 12:12:00PM +1000, Howard Lowndes wrote: Basically I'm looking at two Xen server boxes, physically wide spread, each with multiple virtual servers, that I need to keep synchronised and monitored such that when a virtual server falls over then its compatriot on the other box gets transparently brought on line, or when a box itself falls over (and hence all of its virtual servers) then all of the compatriot servers take over. DRBD of the LVs on both machines will keep the machines completely in sync, and heartbeat will provide the failover detection and execution. The geographical dispersion could cause a problem, though. How are you planning on addressing the IP redirection issue? - 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: Those who do... [Was: [SLUG] Re: 2006 President's Report]
On Wed, Apr 12, 2006 at 02:27:17PM +1000, Philip Greggs wrote: Extreme examples are codefests in Wollongong in recent times. If you remember or check the Archives, it was announced only Debian installs will be done. 1) Installfest, not codefest 2) Ubuntu, not Debian 3) It was only for UoW students, it wasn't a general-attendence event 4) It had a very specific intended outcome (which, IMO, contributed significantly to it's success), which was predicated on using the distribution that was chosen 5) It wasn't a SLUG-organised event, it was put together by the South Coast Linux User's Group, with the much-appreciated assistance of dedicated SLUGgers. 6) If you'd like to find a University local to you that uses your distro of choice and run a similar event, go nuts. I think that focused-outcome events like the SCLUG/UoW Installfests are incredibly valuable for helping to build the community in particular ways. I'll add that, right at the outset of planning the first SCLUG/UoW installfest, the decision was made to use whatever distro the UoW CS department was using -- this was *before* I found out that the department had switched from using RedHat to Debian since I had left. Hence, I was *expecting* to have a RedHat-only installfest. Would you have made the same comment as that quoted above if the event had been $YOUR_DISTRO_OF_CHOICE-only? - 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: 2006 President's Report
On Wed, Apr 05, 2006 at 12:55:19PM +1000, Philip Greggs wrote: SLUG server being offline for a few extended outages due to hardware issues which thankfully have now been sorted recently by removing hardware from the equation - ie it's now on a virtual server. I check SLUG web site daily. Now appears reliable. Keep it that way. That's certainly the plan. neutral. It is perceived SLUG is driven by self-interest. There are Self-interest (enlightened, if possible) is the best driver there is. Pure selflessness isn't really in vogue any more, and I don't think it works really well without an external influence to keep your focused anyway. many Suse, Gentoo, RH, FC, etc, users than Debian/Ubuntu. Assuming you meant s/many/many more/ I'd say that your statement is only true if you take the aggregate of those distributions you mentioned. Not that might makes right, but Debian people tend to be more participative (how's that for a euphemism!) in online fora, so you're naturally going to get more noise about that distro. As well there's these perceptions of too much influence by few individuals that alienates many would be members, newbies and professionals alike. You does the work, you gets the influence. - 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: 2006-2006 President's Report
On Tue, Apr 04, 2006 at 08:22:52PM +1000, Grant Parnell wrote: Ashley Maher organised a CodeFest and had an installfest. Unfortunately the Installfest didn't get the numbers for success at UOW but the point is he tried! Just to clarify here -- there have been three installfests at UoW that Ashley has organised. The first was incredibly successful, and got a lot of people up and running with Linux. The second installfest was effectively stillborn -- a total of one attendee (due to various unfortunate circumstances). The third, which was run just a few weeks ago, was apparently a raging success as well (I wasn't able to attend and help out at that event). - 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: Heads Up - troubles with time zones
On Sun, Mar 26, 2006 at 08:39:38PM +1100, David Kempe wrote: Scott Sinclair wrote: I believe in Ubuntu, that /etc/localtime is a symlink, and thus why it probably didn't have this problem. So, would there be any problem not recopying the file and mv /etc/localtime /etc/localtime.old and resymlinking the file: ln -s (timezone) /etc/localtime ? It should work perfectly fine -- nobody should actually be writing to that file or anything. As you've seen before though, some extremely braindead systems clear the file and recopy the timezone file at bootup based on it's own strange ideas (Knoppix, I'm glaring at 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: mp3/ogg players recommended
On Mon, Mar 27, 2006 at 01:04:08AM +1000, David Ward wrote: I am looking for a new mp3/ogg player and was wondering what everyone is using. I can add to the commendation of the Samsung Yepp players -- although I'm not sure why people think they're ugly (in fact, my wife saw the 1GB version I bought myself, said that looks cute, and suddenly I was in the market for an MP3 player again). My second purchase was an iRiver T30 1GB model. It was about $10 cheaper, but didn't come with the FM radio. Not a huge loss for me. It, too, is a good player. 1. Ogg playback without too much messing around, that is, no need to re-sample to 44100hz or change to a specific bit-rate just to get the track to play on the device. Ogg support on both is perfect. 2. Plug and play in Linux. Thus needs to comply to the USB mass storage standard. Both are just USB HDDs as far as Linux is concerned. Battery life is important 2, but meeting the first 2 points are my main concern. I get about 3-4 days out of a single AAA cell (3 hours commuting plus a few hours at work each day). Both take AAA batteries instead of some USB-charged custom monstrosity, which I think is vitally important -- it might cost a bit more if you keep buying batteries (yay for rechargables) but they're standard and, if you suddenly have a need for music a long distance from your charging unit, you only need to find a store that sells AAA batteries. - Matt -- I am cow, hear me moo, I weigh twice as much as you. I'm a cow, eating grass, methane gas comes out my ass. I'm a cow, you are too; join us all! Type apt-get moo. -- 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: mp3/ogg players recommended
On Mon, Mar 27, 2006 at 07:24:23AM +1000, David Ward wrote: Where would one find these Samsung Yep players on sale ?? I got both of mine from Tandy. I was looking at the iRivers T30 and T10 versions, from my searching i found that they could only be accessed using gphoto2 and its lib; they couldnt be simply accessed through Konqueror for example. Here's an example of what i have read http://www.misticriver.net/showthread.php?t=35102highlight=t30+linux shrug Mine works fine as a USB mass-storage device -- I even relabeled the filesystem so it comes up as 'MUSIC' on my desktop. If it helps, the exact model on the player is 'T30MX' -- perhaps the suffix means something. - 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: Virtual machine recommendations?
On Mon, Mar 27, 2006 at 01:34:03PM +1100, Alan L Tyree wrote: OK, against my better judgment I just had a look at the Windows 98 EULA. The licence is to install it on one computer, but there are no stated restrictions on how that installation might be done. So, my quick opinion (with no warranties at all - see below :-)) is that it can be installed under qemu provided that the software came with, or was purchased for, the machine in question. I suspect your interpretation may be at odds with that of Microsoft -- otherwise you could run a dozen qemu- or vmware-encased images simultaneously on the same (very, very chunky) computer legally, which I doubt is their intention. On the other hand, you may have two copies, but you've only capable of using one at once (absent any crazy attempts to run XP-in-qemu-in-XP or similar), so I really can't see anyone getting amazingly upset 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: Re: Heads Up - troubles with time zones
On Sun, Mar 26, 2006 at 09:16:27AM +1000, David wrote: On Sun, Mar 26, 2006 at 09:33:40AM +1100, Alan L Tyree wrote: On Sun, 26 Mar 2006 08:26:22 +1000 Howard Lowndes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This gets weirder. My original comments were made against my production systems which are running Fedora Core 4. My test environment running Fedora Core 5 gets it right. My Ubuntu Breezy has it right. My breezy has it wrong :( I didn't alter the standard install. If I recall it points at ubuntu's own timeserver? Have you installed the libc6 update that came out very recently? It's the one with the updated tzdata. I've got a local network timeserver pointing at ntp.syd.connect.com.au which seems to be getting the wrong time. Is there a timeserver that is giving the right time? As mentioned, ntp servers run in UTC, and then the timezone is applied against that on the local system. Otherwise you'd have massive confusion if you were using an ntp server in a different timezone to your own. - 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: Dapper the Microphone
On Sun, Mar 26, 2006 at 10:18:11AM +1100, Bruce Badger wrote: ... but if I run Audacity and hit the record button, none of the sound I can hear coming to the speakers from the mic is recorded. I end up with a recording of silence. I reckon that your system has managed to find itself two microphones, and Audacity is recording off the wrong one. It's about the only thing left that's a possibility. Knoppix probably gets it right by accident, by switching the mics around in their load order or something crazy. - 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: Interesting view
On Thu, Mar 16, 2006 at 08:24:11AM +1100, ashley maher wrote: An interesting interview. http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/3629/106/ quote Windows is more reliable than Linux. /quote It's all about perspective. When it comes to relying on your OS to be full of holes and chock full of viruses, you'd have to admit that Windows *is* far more reliable than Linux. - Matt -- I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone. -- Bjarne Stroustrup -- 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 Tue, Mar 14, 2006 at 08:45:55PM +1100, cmyers wrote: Just asking some advice on what BT clients you guys use? I have tried Azuerus and found it so slow it was a joke. So I thought I would throw the question out to see what people recommend. Given your later requirement to run the session in screen, consider the standard btdownloadcurses program. Wonderfully screen-friendly, and acceptably fast. - 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: graduate programmers
On Sun, Feb 19, 2006 at 06:05:25PM +1100, O Plameras wrote: James Purser wrote: On Sun, 2006-02-19 at 17:32 +1100, O Plameras wrote: The point here is $25,000 for graduates as initial salary offer is low. A year-12 high school graduate begins at that salary level. Certainly, a Uni graduate is worth more than that. O Plameras Economics 101: A Graduate is only worth as much as someone is willing to pay them. Yes, we use economic indicators to decide on prices. We decide to buy stocks based on economic indicators. Yes, we decide to employ people and how much to pay for their salary based on some indicators, like Age, Experience, Academic Qualifications, and others. Between a year-12 and a Uni graduate you'd have to pay more for a Uni graduate. If you're talking about hiring the same individual when they've finished year 12, as opposed to when they've finished Uni, you're right. How often does that happen? To provide a wonderful counterexample to your statement, we've hired a 16 year old child prodigy at work for cutting code. He's very, very good at what we've got him doing. Worth what we pay him and more. He's certainly worth more than the average CompSci graduate. You'd be surprise to know that large IT companies go around Universities each year trying to woo new graduates. Companies try to find new employees at Universities. Film at 11! - 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: graduate programmers
On Fri, Feb 17, 2006 at 08:14:07AM +1100, ashley maher wrote: Anybody know the ball park for grad programmers these days in Sydney? For your common-or-garden-variety graduate, probably no more than $30k -- they really don't know squat, and these days you can't even bet on them being a fast learner. They'll need lots of training and adult supervision (which makes them a net *loss* for a couple of months) unless you're giving them exactly the same cookie-cutter pseudo-work they spent three years copying off their classmates. Naturally, there are quite a number of graduates who exceed this base-level expectation by quite a lot, but you assess those people based on their Real Experience, not because they have a piece of paper. - 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: Suggestions for web control panel for small hosting?
On Tue, Jan 17, 2006 at 12:17:57AM +1100, Vini Engel wrote: I have been looking for some kind of OpenSoruce web panel for a small and simple web hosting. I am not planning on having more than 100 domains and may just have the web sites. So I am on the look out for something to add the user with quota, a domain in bind's config and the virtual sever in apache's config. Would anybody have any suggestion for that? Apart from the quota issue, SysCP (http://www.syscp.de/) will do everything you need. Other possibilities include VHCS, GNU Hosting Helper, and a bunch of other options you can find on freshmeat.net. The thing that turned me to SysCP was that it installed almost trivially on Debian/Ubuntu (they provide perfectly functional config files for *every* other service it relies on, which is a frigging brilliant idea, IMAO), and that it wasn't composed of either (a) 4 different languages, (b) utterly insane PHP code (instead, it's just mildly insane PHP code), and (c) it didn't attempt to bundle it's own version of various programs (screw *that* for a game of marbles, ISPConfig). It's also fairly non-intrusive as to what config it provides, so it's not hard to integrate it into an existing system if you need to. - Matt -- MacOS X ... [is] enough of a bother to luse it if you've progressed past the ooh, click on the shiny little picture! stage, if you try to treat it as a serious OS, then it really gets out the little tricycle wheels and the toy horn that goes onk! onk! -- 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: C Gurus
On Wed, Nov 23, 2005 at 08:55:50AM +1100, O Plameras wrote: Erik de Castro Lopo wrote: If you come to the SLUG meeting on Friday, I will bring you a copy of this book so you can see for yourself. If you then publically admit that you were wrong on this issue you can keep the book [1]. I am just wondering where I was wrong Ghods awful code, for a start. and I did not say I was wrong ? But you never do. - Matt Don't make me write another drinking game Palmer -- 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: C Gurus
On Wed, Nov 23, 2005 at 10:34:04AM +1100, ashley maher wrote: G'day, As the original poster, I did expect to eat some humble pie asking such a trivial question. Thanks to those who gave serious answers. (As most of the respondents know me I expect I'll get a hard time for a while over that one.) I've been playing with gtk and found myself getting very confused, so I decided the fastest way of re-orientating myself was to seek the assistance of the SLUG Gurus. So I've sorted my confusion, and learned a great deal. Now back to banging my head against a brick wall called gtk. Dude. Programming GUIs in C is so amazingly painful, it makes my eyes water just thinking about it. PyGTK is far less hassle, and if you want to leverage your existing knowledge, there's PerlGTK. I'd go looking for GTK bindings for Fortran before I ever use the native C GTK library again. C + GUI == Pain. - 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 friendly flash mp3 players
On Thu, Oct 20, 2005 at 11:23:06AM +1000, David Gillies wrote: Does anyone out there have any recommendations for Linux friendly flash mp3 players? I guess I'm trying to avoid players that require special software for uploading the audio files to. One that I can just plugin and the system sees it as being a standard USB mass storage device. And any that have .ogg support would be a major bonus. Aaah, a topic after my own heart. Firstly: http://www.hezmatt.org/~mpalmer/blog/general/my_new_love.html although my wife quickly purloined that particular player, and I got an iRiver T30 instead -- slightly chunkier, no FM radio, but a few bucks cheaper. Both are 1GB devices, operate as ordinary usb-storage devices, play oggs, etc etc. I'd recommend either of them as a quality music player. I've since seen something in a JB hifi catalogue which looks an awful lot like the Samsung I linked above for about $150, but I have no idea whether it's innards are the same as the Samsung (and hence whether it supports ogg). - 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 Tool to aid Virus Detection
On Fri, Oct 21, 2005 at 10:03:21AM +1000, Peter Rundle wrote: Dean Hamstead wrote: ethereal? Sure. But how do I distill the worms attacks out of the millions of other packets that are being picked up? There is constant broadcast traffic on the LAN with PC's file sharing between each other. So traffic to port 137 etc is very busy. How can I tell out of that broadcast stream which packets are the worm scanning for ports to attack on? I mean if the worm is scanning then I can just ethereal/tcpdump in the Linx box to try and capture the initial port scan for vunerable ports. I reckon that a bit of time spent with a tcpdump log and the usual suspects in the toolbox of Unix text manipulation tools would get you your answer. Consider, you're looking for a machine which is flinging a lot of SYN packets around, on port 137, to a lot of different IP addresses. So, you'd do something similar to: tcpdump -i eth0 -n port 137 /tmp/capt grep ': S ' /tmp/capt | cut -d ' ' -f 3,5 | sort | uniq And then look for addresses which happen to have a lot of connections to a lot of different destination addresses. With a bit of extra faff you could do a lot better, by stripping out the source and dest ports, then doing another sort/uniq, then stripping out the destination address, sort/uniq -c to get a count of how many times each line appeared, and you would then have a list of source IP addresses, with the number of distinct machines that each source IP has contacted over the period of the scan. - Matt (Executive Director of the 'Shell Scripts For All!' foundation) -- 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: package installation initial state
On Thu, Sep 29, 2005 at 12:01:18PM +1000, Christopher JS Vance wrote: With RH/Fedora, I can make a few empty directories, run rpm --initdb (or whatever the spelling is), and then use rpm either after chroot or with an option to change the directory it considers as root. What is the equivalent in Ubuntu/Debian? I have come to prefer apt over rpm for upgrading, but it's not obvious how to start the thing out. The man page for dpkg is up(?) to the usual GNU standards for documentation. What you want is debootstrap. Does everything you're looking for, but in a single command. I note with some interest that somebody has recently written rpmstrap (name might be slightly different) to provide an equivalent to debootstrap for RPM-based distros. - 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: LVM and software RAID
On Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 09:36:03AM +1000, Rafael Kraus wrote: 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). So... you've done this in Debian Sarge...? hrmm... and pray tell exactly how? 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. Make partitions on the rest of both HDDs and mark them as being used for RAID (can't remember the exact wording, but you get to it by selecting the option which, by default, says Ext3 filesystem). Return to the main partitioning page (it'll probably do that by itself) and select manage RAID partitions (or something similar). Go in there, mark the two large chunks as being a RAID 1 volume (can't remember exactly what you need to select to do that, I only did it once long ago). Head back out to the main partitioning screen, you'll now have a /dev/md0 to select from. Take that, select use as LVM (instead of Ext3 again). Go into manage LVM volumes from the main screen, select manage volume groups, create volume group, check the md0 partition to add to the VG, choose a name, head back to the main LVM page, select manage logical volumes, then run through the create logical volume screen as often as you need to create the LVs you want on your new system. If you know all the options to follow, it takes about 90 seconds to do in total. Some bits above might be a bit inaccurate, I'm going from memory because I don't have a spare machine to put through a boot sequence right now to get all the exact sequencing. - 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: Using a WRT54 for data capture
On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 10:14:32AM +1000, Richard Hayes wrote: I am thinking about using a Linksys WRT54 running OpenWRT to capture data from a serial device and then I would like to passer to another server in as a structured message ie XML (Dublin Core / HL7 etc) Is there a very small XML passer? I can find libace5.4 in Ubuntu hoary. There are other small XML parser libraries as well. Could you use a small web such as AppWeb? That appears to be a HTTP daemon. OpenWRT comes with some other one. I'm not sure why you need a web server on the WRT if it's just pushing messages off at another server. A bit of script and something like neon or curl should suffice for pushing XML fragments to some other server. - 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: USB device mappings
On Wed, Jul 27, 2005 at 01:04:06PM +0200, Ben Buxton wrote: How can one go about ensuring that certain USB mass-storage devices always get linked to the right /dev node, irregardless of the order that they're plugged into? I'd like to have things where by for example, my camera always appears ad /dev/sda, my USB key as /dev/sdb, etc. It seems that they are allocated in the order they're attached, but this makes things rather complicated as I have to keep hunting for which device something's attacehd to. I don't think you can have the same device mapped to the same /dev node. What you can do is have custom hotplug scripts mount whatever device nodes come up when you plug the device in. It's slightly tricky to start with (hotplug is the quintessential maze-of-twisty-passages shell script) but duplicating it for lots o' devices isn't hard. Unfortunately, I don't have any of my hotplug magic with me, so I can't attach scripts for your perusal. That's because... I've recently switched to a new Ubuntu laptop, where all of the hotplug stuff has been completely changed in some way, related to GNOME's HAL/dbus/udev/whatever system, so I don't need to dicker around with my hotplug stuff. Now, usb-storage devices get mounted to /media/name, where name is either the FS volume label, if it has one, or usbdisk-n otherwise. That's quite cool, and I imagine you can either set the FS volume label on everything you usually plug in (and hence always access it through /media/volumelabel), or hack the underlying technology to match a GUID to a name, and mount to that (which would be tres cool for stuff you can't set the volume label on for whatever reason). - 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: Mysql won't start
On Thu, Jun 23, 2005 at 05:50:16PM +1000, Michael Lake wrote:
I have a severe problem:
It started with mysqdump not working:
$ mysqldump --add-drop-table kiddev sys_fid
mysqldump: unrecognized option `--max_allowed_packet=16M'
I've hit this problem recently, too. Check /etc/{,mysql/}my.cnf for
max_allowed_packet -- most likely you've got it defined in there. I can't
work out why it stopped working sometime recently, either -- I'm thinking
that a Debian woody security update lunched it somehow. It's about the only
distro which still ships MySQL 3.23... grin
Is there a more verbose option to start to tell me more info maybe?
I hunted the problems down just by running 'mysqld' at the command line.
It'll spew about 400 lines of crap when it dies -- it's the first line or
two which are interesting. Edit my.cnf to remove that option, run again.
There'll be about 4 directives that will screw it up. When it's running
right, it won't spew at you, it'll just sit there and not drop you back to a
prompt. Run /etc/init.d/mysql restart in another xterm, and it'll all just
work again.
- Matt
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Re: [SLUG] debian disks at fri syd meet?
On Thu, Jun 23, 2005 at 02:30:03PM +1000, josh wrote: i've been bad and lost touch with linux a bit.. my last install was fedora2 (yuck). i'm thinking of coming along to the sydney meet tomorrow night and am hoping someone might have the latest debian release.. dvd or cd. i can pay (cash preferred over services rendered.. my back is killing me:) I'll have a few Ubuntu hoary CDs (as, I'm sure, will many many other people). No Sarge CDs yet -- just a *few* too many of them to download and cook. Everything Linux (http://www.elx.com.au) are going to be selling the complete pressed set fairly shortly, though. - 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: Bigpong blocking port 25?
On Mon, Jun 20, 2005 at 09:14:15AM +1000, Peter Rundle wrote: Rev Simon Rumble wrote: I thought Bigpong were blocking outbound port 25 now? Jun 17 11:54:43 localhost postfix/smtpd[6052]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from CPE-60-226-209-90.sa.bigpond.net.au[60.226.209.90] 550 [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in local recipient table; from=[EMAIL PROTECTED] to=[EMAIL PROTECTED] proto=ES MTP helo=cascade.taz.net.au Hmmm interesting, I have just had a problem were a remote site couldn't send us e-mail using big-pond adsl, no port 25 connection to our server here. So are they or aren't they? They are for dynamic addresses, and aren't for static IPs. - 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: script assistance please
On Mon, Jun 20, 2005 at 09:36:59AM +1000, David wrote: I need to go through an entire directory replacing foo.bar with bar.foo within each file and at the same time I also need to replace macintosh line breaks with unix ones. for file in $(ls /dir); do # String translation sed 's/foo\.bar/bar.foo/' $file | tr '\r' '\n' $file.replaced mv $file.replaced $file done Test it in a sample directory first, I'm not 100% sure that tr will work as I expect... - 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: Seeking User Group Management Advice
On Tue, Jun 14, 2005 at 10:12:20AM +1000, Alan L Tyree wrote: On Tue, 14 Jun 2005 09:39:16 +1000 Peter Rundle [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: SNIP Does anyone know of an open source matlab alternate? The GNU Octave language for numerical computations (2.1 branch) Octave is a (mostly Matlab (R) compatible) high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides a convenient command-line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically. I have not used it and have no idea of its value. It's pretty good for the basics. Last I used it (~18 months ago) it wasn't quite totally Matlab compatible, but there were a surprising number of Matlab libraries that were drop-in compatible, which was nice. Gd sigmonster. Here, have a cookie. - 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: Geographic Information Systems and PostgreSQL
On Fri, Jun 03, 2005 at 02:45:13PM +1000, Matt Moor wrote: I've run a few more tests... I remember someone saying that they had the loan of a kick-arse server as a test bench (was it Matt? can't remember) Funny story, that. We sent it back, but not before it (helped) take out a power circuits in the office where it was located. :( It's actually still (at least as of yesterday afternoon) still sitting in the same office, although the power problems remain. It's still there because nobody has yet plucked up the strength to heft the damn thing back into it's packaging to send it back (it is an absolute fscking tank of a machine). - 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: Debian /etc/apt/sources.list
On Wed, Jun 01, 2005 at 08:35:01PM +1000, Terry Collins wrote: Looking for a listing of Debian Wooody(stable) /etc/apt/sources.list ftp.au.debian.org ftp.wa.au.debian.org mirror.pacific.net.au mirror.internode.on.net (Internode customers only, I believe) mirror.aarnet.edu.au (.au IPs only, I've been told) Etc etc. Prepend deb http:// and append /debian woody main contrib non-free to each. Particularly australian source for security. A lot of mirrors don't carry security updates, because you typically don't want any delay in getting your security updates, as you would get from a 2nd or 3rd tier mirror. I've just done a base installation of cdroms and apt-get update spews over the default security setting. ? As in it throws an error from http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free? That's just *weird*. - 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: [SLUG] Video card info
On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 09:54:34AM +1100, Alan L Tyree wrote: I have a box with a video card that claims to have 32mb memory. Running at 1028x768, the best I can get is 8 colour depth. Is this about right? The maths on this is pretty simple - the number of bits you need to store your image is with * height * bpp. Divide by 8 for bytes. So, 1024x768 = 786432 pixels, at 8bpp is 1MB. Even at 32bpp, you're still running at 4MB. Something's rooted somewhere. Of course, modern video cards use their memory for a lot more than storing the current image, but I've never seen a card modern enough to have 32MB of video memory that can't push itself to 1600x1200 or so. Either your card is lying, or you've got something squirrelly going on in your X config. Does /var/log/XFree86.0.log tell you *why* it's not giving you any sensible modes? - 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: [SLUG] Video card info
On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 10:03:14AM +1100, Peter Hardy wrote: On Tue, 2004-01-06 at 09:54, Alan L Tyree wrote: I have a box with a video card that claims to have 32mb memory. Running at 1028x768, the best I can get is 8 colour depth. Is this about right? Not really: 1024 pixels * 768 pixels * 8 bits per pixel = 6291456 bits = 6MB for one Eh? 1B = 8 bits. Or have video card makers now started screwing the public over by counting thei video memory in bits? I hope HDD manufacturers never catch on to this trick (like redefining a gig as 1 billion bytes, so their hard drives look bigger). - 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: [SLUG] Video card info
On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 10:13:59AM +1100, Alan L Tyree wrote: (it's my wife's machine). I'm running RH8 and it picked the vesa driver - I've tried a few others without success. Doing an lspci -vv on it gives: VGA Compatible Controller: SiS: unknown device 6325 There's an SiS driver, which you might luck out on. But the VESA driver should give reasonable performance anyway - there's nothing special about 1024x768 at 16bpp - the dodgy old on-board on an IBM I was using recently did that using the vesa driver, and it was a pretty crap card. Best of luck, - 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: [SLUG] Video card info
On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 10:10:11AM +1100, Jason Ball wrote: Eh? 1B = 8 bits. Or have video card makers now started screwing the public over by counting thei video memory in bits? I hope HDD manufacturers never catch on to this trick (like redefining a gig as 1 billion bytes, so their hard drives look bigger). That has been the case for a number of HDD manufacturers for a while. http://www.eweek.com/print_article/0,3048,a=107838,00.asp I know that, it's why I said it. What I was referring to was the possible attempt by the HDD manufacturers to list drive capacities in bits, so they're numbers are 8 times as big. Sigh. - 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: [SLUG] fdisk not recognising new disk.
On Fri, Jan 02, 2004 at 07:19:58PM +1100, David Fisher wrote: On boot up the kernel appears to recognize the new disk but when I try to use fdisk I get: fdisk: unable to open /dev/sdb Fdisk has no trouble with /dev/hda and /dev/sda. Long shot, but have you had a look at the permissions on /dev/sdb*? Not *likely* to be the problem, but if sdb is listed in dmesg correctly, then it's about the only thing left, barring hardware failure - I've had that problem with a very old and crusty IDE drive - BIOS finds it, kernel says hmm, disk there (probably foolishly trusting the BIOS, methinks) but fdisk says no cookie for you!. Might be a similar thing happening for your SCSI disk. - 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: [SLUG] fdisk not recognising new disk.
On Fri, Jan 02, 2004 at 07:50:59PM +1100, David Fisher wrote: On Fri, 2 Jan 2004 19:46, Matt Palmer wrote: Long shot, but have you had a look at the permissions on /dev/sdb*? Not *likely* to be the problem, but if sdb is listed in dmesg correctly, then it's about the only thing left, barring hardware failure - I've had that problem with a very old and crusty IDE drive - BIOS finds it, kernel says hmm, disk there (probably foolishly trusting the BIOS, methinks) but fdisk says no cookie for you!. Might be a similar thing happening for your SCSI disk. Thanks, Matt, will check for that, as unlikely as it seems. What perplexes me is that tomsrootbt fdisk recognizes it but the fdisk on the actual machine in single user mode doesn't. That's what triggered me to a likely permissions problem - tomsrtbt will be 0660 /dev/sd*, while your running system is possibly 0440. - Matt -- Note for spammers: These are your balls. (show two grains of rice) These are your balls after SPEWS. (smash rice with a hammer) Any questions? -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
