Re: [SLUG] Tutorial for a LaTeX package.
On Mon, 2011-09-26 at 17:24 +1000, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote: There is little change of any WYSIWYG documentation package to ever catch up. See LyX for a more-or-less functional WYSIWYG frontend to LaTeX. http://www.lyx.org/ -- Pete -- 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] Re: Virus Scanner
To answer OP's question, my Linux mail server uses spamassassin and ESET for filtering. My Linux file server also periodically performs full scans with ESET. I do not yet run any virus scanning on my desktop though. On Mon, 2011-04-04 at 11:30 +1000, Nick Andrew wrote: On Mon, Apr 04, 2011 at 06:46:36AM +1000, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote: Morgan Storey wrote: I think it is going to come back and bite the Linux community if we go via the line that we are immune to viruses, Unfortunately, the alternative, virus scanners that look for particular virus signatures is nothing more than security theatre. I agree. What would a virus scanner look for anyway, if there are no extant viruses on linux systems? The biggest market for antivirus scanners on Linux is when the system in question is acting as a server for other systems. This is evidenced by the fact that there are quite a few commercial A/V systems available for Linux, almost none of which are suitable for desktop use. And, for better or for worse, you need to demonstrate that you're performing regular virus scans on *all* of your systems on a regular basis for quite a few security-related standards. Regardless of whether you think you need it or not. Yes, I'm looking at you, Payment Card Industry. That leads to rule #2 - defense-in-depth. The only hope we have to survive this untrusted and potentially malicious code being executed by our browsers is to implement sandboxes, language-level restrictions and strict limits on authorization. I think that eliminating a reasonably large swathe of of your attack vector through a regularly-maintained virus scanner is a good contribution to solid defence-in-depth... -- Pete -- 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] Results from AGM and EGM?
On Fri, 2011-04-01 at 13:09 +1100, Martin Visser wrote: I'm only an occasional SLUGger, but am interested in the outcome of last Friday's meeting. Anyone care to post a summary? The minutes from the EGM were recorded at http://wiki.slug.org.au/2011egmminutes . Looks like minutes from the AGM weren't wiki'd, but the agenda is at http://wiki.slug.org.au/2011agm . I do know that all candidates for the 2011 ctte were elected unopposed. -- Pete -- 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] Finding modules..
And in case this hasn't been answered enough, yet, the kernel module itself should log the interfaces it's handling when it loads. That will turn up in the kernel logs (RH places kernel logs from the last boot in /var/log/dmesg , or it'll be in /var/log/messages , or just run `dmesg`); just grep for eth0. -- Pete -- 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] Converting a Hard Drive to a Virtual Machine
On Fri, 2010-11-19 at 15:25 +1100, david wrote: Is it possible to use MondoRescue or some other software to clone the server hard drive, preferably without shutting it down, and then create a virtual machine from the resulting image? If you don't mind free-as-in-beer, we've used VMWare's vCenter Converter to migrate a big chunk of our Windows and Linux machines to guests - http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/ . Before that, my quick, dirty but effective way to do it was: - create the new virtual guest - boot it using your favourite liveCD, partition drives and create filesystems - use tar and netcat to transfer the running system across the network: - on guest, mount the new root filesystem and run `nc -l -p 1717 | tar -C /mountpoint xvf - - on old server, run something like `tar cf - --one-file-system / | nc address_of_guest 1717`. You'll need to tune the tar command to make sure you include all of the server's mounted filesystems. - edit the new /etc/fstab on the guest as appropriate - install a bootloader in the guest, usually by editing grub config files in /boot/grub and running grub-install. Note that I made no attempt to keep any services running on the old server during this process. So all but the bare minimum was shut down, and there weren't any critical files being written to. On a real running system, you're more than likely going to end up with some files in an inconsistent state doing this if the old server is trying to write to them. -- Pete -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: Time Pedantry (was Re: [SLUG] Which bank doesn't use Linux servers?)
On Thu, 2010-04-01 at 16:56 +1100, Daniel Pittman wrote: ...but the real question is if we love or hate the GMT/UTC difference, and 23:59:61? Daniel Also, do we hate the earthquake that changed the length of the day for messing with our time-keeping? http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100302084522.htm (And, finally, for anyone who really wants to despair at the whole thing, I give you The Long, Painful History of Time, which is the best write-up I know of about the engineering difficulties of the topic: http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html ) None of this would be a problem if we'd just switch to decimal time in a single timezone and call it a day. -- Pete -- 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] System admin graphing tools
On Fri, 2010-02-26 at 09:55 +1100, Ken Foskey wrote: http://www.cacti.net/ (Language PHP) Cacti is a complete network graphing solution... I found cacti to have a surprisingly steep learning curve, figuring out how the data sources and input methods and queries work. But it's a very very capable tool, and the interface is getting very nice and Web 2.0 in recent versions. Extending what you're graphing with cacti requires a reasonable understanding of SNMP and how net-snmpd works. But once you've overcome that you can monitor anything you can write a script for. It's pretty neat. http://munin.projects.linpro.no/ (Language Perl) Munin is a networked resource monitoring tool that can help analyze resource trends and what just happened to kill our performance? problems. It is designed to be very plug and play. A default installation provides a lot of graphs with almost no work. The plugin architecture for munin is very flexible - spend half an hour going through the tutorial and it's very easy to start churning out graphs for anything you can think of. The fact that it relies on agent software running on the monitored device is a bit of a pain. I'm still having stability issues with the Windows agent, and pulling stats from devices that can't run an agent is a pain - munin's SNMP support is very weak. I've managed to get it to poll one of my ciscos, but it was a battle. Maybe I just haven't spent enough time working with it, but the web interface for munin is very sparse compared to the features available in cacti. http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/ The Multi Router Traffic Grapher Are people still using MRTG in new installations? I had the feeling it was kind of supplanted by other tools mentioned above. http://support.nagios.com/knowledgebase Cannot find a simple 'what is nagios' on website. 'Nagios is a host and service monitor designed to inform you of network problems.' From whitepaper. Everything else you've mentioned covers service performance. Nagios handles service availability and notifications only, and I consider it best-of-breed for this. http://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/ SmokePing keeps track of your network latency Also a big fan of this one. Does one thing only, and does it incredibly well. Based on a quick read, munin looks pretty good. I would have serious reservations about deploying munin if you have more than a couple of SNMP-only devices, or more than a couple of critical Windows boxes. -- Pete -- 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] Netbooks .... Again (7 months on) Are you still happy?
On Fri, 2010-02-19 at 09:47 +1100, Peter Chubb wrote: I bought an Acer Aspire One a year ago, and am still happy. +1 on the Aspire One. I have one that I picked up, oh, maybe 18 months ago and it's been my main PC since. Unlike Peter I bought a model with a hard drive, which is no worse than any other laptop hard drive I've used. I'd agree with everything else he's said. The hardware support is nice. Initially had some minor problems with the wifi radio not coming back after resume, but under the most recent Ubuntu everything works perfectly. Any other current Linux should be fine. -- Pete -- 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] fstab and simultaneous mount points
On Tue, 2010-02-02 at 22:07 +1100, david wrote: Does fstab allow for two UUID's having the same mount point thus: UUID=2e7c5578-933a-4b09-a89d-14b6be718fe5 /mnt/BACKUP ext4 defaults 0 0 UUID=b007bc41-0280-48d5-b958-9160092e3d44 /mnt/BACKUP ext4 defaults 0 0 Yes. Have you tried it yet? :-) Especially given that this machine has three caddies on board, so it's theoretically possible for me to accidentally mount both backup drives simultaneously! Would I be so silly? it's at least possible. Does anyone know what happens if they both successfully mount? Anecdote time! One of the sites I look after runs a large proprietary application server, and the customer's installed SOE uses a /tmp partition far too small for the installation / upgrade process utilised by said application server. The installer also has this wonderful bug wherein it ignores all attempts to define a new temporary file location. My process for applying hotfixes to the app server includes: Create a large empty file under /var/tmp . Create a filesystem in this file. Mount it over the existing /tmp using the loopback driver. Run the upgrade. Unmount the temporary /tmp . Say you have the first filesystem mounted on /mnt/BACKUP , and some processes have open file handles on that first filesystem. Mounting a second filesystem over /mnt/BACKUP will not interrupt those open file handles - all reading and writing using those handles will still use the first filesystem. I *think* that new file handles opened by those old processes will use the second filesystem (including readdir() calls and the like), but I haven't tested this too thoroughly. New processes attempting to read from /mnt/BACKUP will only see the second filesystem mounted there. Listing the mounted filesystems with the mount command will show two filesystems mounted on /mnt/BACKUP . I have no idea what will happen when you just run umount /mnt/BACKUP, and would suggest being more explicit about which filesystem you want to unmount. Bottom line, though, is that you won't break anything by experimenting with this. If you're nervous, make sure you have a backup of the filesystems you're playing with, or create a couple of loopback ones to test with. Also, I can't wait until the end of this month, when those app servers are retired... -- Pete -- 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] Thumbdrive with a problem.
FAT32 is easily usable by both Windows and Linux. But it suffers from the same shortcomings Peter mentioned. It has no concept at all of file permissions, so copying anything to it is going to result in the destination having permissions set to whatever the default is for that mount point. On Thu, 2010-01-28 at 15:29 +1100, wbenn...@turing.une.edu.au wrote: Hum! Isn't there a common file system (FAT32, has been suggested to me) whereby I can use Windows and Linux? Before I lost it, I had an antiquated MP3 player that I'd cleaned out and used as a thumb drive and it handled both OSs without complaint. Bill Bennett. Peter Chubb wrote: Sounds like you have a DOS file system on there -- it doesn't \ obey UNIX file permissions. You can reformat the drive as, say, ext2, but this will make the resulting filesystem unusable on any platform other than linux. To try this, do mkfs -t ext2 /dev/sdb1 (or whatever the name of the drive is). Not while the drive is mounted! -- 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] Further to the USB Modem installation.
On Thu, 2010-01-28 at 15:22 +1100, wbenn...@turing.une.edu.au wrote: ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1147685 which is headed How to install modem ZTE MF626 HSDPA in Jaunty. It involves getting the latest modeswitch, installing same and then editing it to recognise a modem. This is exactly the process I followed to get one of these dongles working in 9.04. No problems at all. -- Pete -- 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] Wireless Broadband?
Hey hey. On Wed, 2010-01-20 at 20:44 -0800, j blrown wrote: I've been looking at getting a wireless Broadband Prepaid kit from either Vodaphone,Optus or Bigpond. I have experience with Vodafone and Bigpond post-paid wireless broadband on Ubuntu 9.04. The Vodafone dongle works fine. Plugged it in, it was properly detected, I was able to set up a new wireless broadband connection using the Network Manager applet. Using it is simple, just plug it in, and connect using Network Manager. My mother regularly uses a Bigpond dongle on her Eee running the 9.04 netbook remix. I think it's one of the newer style dongles Telstra are using. Setting it up was a little bit more complicated - I had to install and configure the usb_modeswitch tool ( http://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/ ), and then wvdial to dial out and set up a PPP session through it. Now that's done, though, actually using it is as simple as the Vodafone dongle. Plug in, wait until the light turns blue, double click the wvdial icon. Hope that helps, -- Pete -- 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: syncml server?
Ken Foskey wrote: Looking at installable packages we have: multisync0.90 - PIM Synchronization Tool opensync-plugin-syncml - Opensync SyncML plugin opensync-plugin-evolution - Evolution plugin for opensync There is a requirement for a syncml server in order to synchronise. Is there an installable version rather than using something like scheduleworld. The one that I've used in the past (and will probably go back to soon) is Funambol - https://www.forge.funambol.org/ . It's released under an open source licence, but doesn't seem to be packaged in the ubuntu repositories yet. gmail may at sometime support syncml, but there is no official mention of it now. The scheduleworld guys sync with gmail contacts and google calendars, presumably using their own mechanisms. -- Pete -- 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] individual sender email verification on inbound
On Mon, 2008-08-04 at 14:10 +1000, Mary Gardiner wrote: On Tue, Jul 29, 2008, Voytek Eymont wrote: is there any req on me having an 'apache@' address if I'm sending emails as such ? (i.e., who misconfigured their server ?) Sender address verification is a fairly common anti-spam technique. RFC 2821 allows for mail to be rejected based on local policy, and the remote end has chosen to implement a policy whereby the return address must verifiably exist (in the sense of being able to receive the first part of an SMTP transaction) before accepting mail. So it's not a configuration that violates the protocol, that I can see. Whether it's a totally sensible configuration is another question: it tends to interact badly if the sender address in turn greylists incoming mail, for example. But it's unlikely to be accidental on their part. I for one think it's perfectly cromulent. If the sender MX utilises greylisting then it'll send back a transient failure message as distinct from a permanent 550 failure. At that point, the receiving MX can either assume a transient failure means it's normally a valid address and accept the mail, or give back its own transient failure - an eye for an eye if you like. If that's a problem, I'm more inclined to blame it on greylisting. Introducing needless artificial delays strikes me as an incredibly ugly solution for dealing with spam. -- Pete -- 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] Debian: How do I remove a package and all it's dependencies?
On Thu, 2008-07-24 at 11:07 +1000, Michael Lake wrote: Peter Hardy wrote: Hey hey. On Wed, Michael Lake wrote: apt-get remove $PACKAGENAME doesn't work for you? The above won't remove a package if there are dependencies. It should. What version of debian / apt do you have? To pick an example at random: [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~% sudo apt-get remove compiz-core Ah, maybe the difference is that in my case its an upsteam dependency (something depends on what I want to remove) whereas in the example above its a downsteam dependency (what I want to remove depends on something). `apt-get remove` will *only* handle upstream dependencies. The autoremove command that etch doesn't seem to support can do both upstream and downstream. This is what I get: # cat installed.packages | grep evol | cut -f1 evolution-common evolution-data-server evolution-data-server-common evolution-webcal # # cat installed.packages | grep evol | cut -f1 | xargs dpkg -P (Reading database ... 79929 files and directories currently installed.) Would remove or purge evolution-common ... dpkg: dependency problems prevent removal of evolution-data-server: ekiga depends on evolution-data-server. dpkg: error processing evolution-data-server (--purge): dependency problems - not removing dpkg: dependency problems prevent removal of evolution-data-server-common: evolution-data-server depends on evolution-data-server-common (= 1.6.3-5etch1). dpkg: error processing evolution-data-server-common (--purge): dependency problems - not removing Would remove or purge evolution-webcal ... Errors were encountered while processing: evolution-data-server evolution-data-server-common # $ sudo dpkg -r evolution-common dpkg: dependency problems prevent removal of evolution-common: evolution depends on evolution-common (= 2.22.3.1-0ubuntu1). dpkg: error processing evolution-common (--remove): dependency problems - not removing Errors were encountered while processing: evolution-common $ sudo apt-get remove evolution-common [sudo] password for phardy: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages will be REMOVED: evolution evolution-common evolution-exchange evolution-plugins 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 4 to remove and 0 not upgraded. After this operation, 106MB disk space will be freed. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? apt marks evolution-common, and everything that depends on it, and any/all downstream packages for removal. For giggles, `try apt-get remove libc6` and see what it tells you. -- Pete -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] USB to serial redux: four port devices
Can anybody recommend a USB adaptor that provides four serial ports and works well in Linux? I used to have one of these beasts driving four GSM modems, with kannel used to send and receive SMS. It's recently died, though, and finding a replacement is problematic. I've been toying with a Quatech QSU2-100, which ships with source for a driver that claims to be compatible with kernels up to and including 2.6.18. Experiments with CentOS 5.0 show that I'm able to talk to an attached modem in minicom and issue AT commands just fine, but kannel reports an incorrect response when it tries to communicate with a modem. So it closes and re-opens the device, at which point the kernel promptly panics. So, does anybody have any positive experiences with multi-port USB adaptors? Or am I going to be adding four separate adaptors and a hub to my mess of cabling? -- Pete -- 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] script help
On Wed, 2008-07-16 at 09:39 +1000, Voytek Eymont wrote: I'm trying to put together a basic script to get 'on demand' traffic info to my handheld, all commands more or less work as desired, but, I would like to make a 'proper script' out of it: I guess I should put the 'temp' files in /var/tmp ? and, send screen output to /dev/null ? any help or suggestions appreciated: Rather than just redirecting all output to /dev/null , it's worth checking if the commands you're using have a quiet option. As previous posters have already pointed out, wget's -q option is one. Also, look in to using the mktemp command to create temporary filenames. -- Pete -- 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] upgrading complicated installs
I've managed to avoid taking part in this thread to date, mostly because enough people have been beating the FOR THE LOVE OF GOD USE YOUR DISTRIBUTION'S PACKAGES drum. And I'm not entirely sure this even dignifies a response but hey, why not. On Mon, 2008-06-02 at 10:06 +0800, jam wrote: Clarke 1 notwithstanding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws and as an elderly (damn not distinguished) I proclaim your concern/rant unadulterated balderdash The one about: if you build your own packages and don't pay attention then your linux box will contract plague etc. Frankly, no one I know, has ever had, or knows someone who has ever had a compromised linux box. Frankly I doubt if all of SLUG ever has ... Here compromised means: someone has taken control of the machine and is using it for some nepharious purpose eg spam DoS etc Hi. Six. The majority handed to me by potential/new customers or friends with servers that have started acting funny, the others resulting from exploits in both inhouse and third party software. Oh, and one very memorable case of an extremely weak user password. All used for assorted nefarious purposes ranging from hosting IRC servers/bots through to FTP drop boxes and DDoS zombies. Quite a few of those were the direct result of software installed outside of the distribution's package management system, and then never updated, documented, or in some cases even used, again. I don't have any significant issues with choosing to use software that isn't provided by your distribution vendor. But packaging it up properly means you've got an easily reproducible version that you can reinstall when (*not* if) you want to expand or rebuild a dead box. And tracking announce/security lists for said software is now completely mandatory, no matter how much you might cry that these things never happen to you. -- Pete -- 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] [OT] fileserver suggestions
Hey hey. Alex Samad wrote: I am looking at putting together a file server for the house. looking for a case that would support 4 (or 6) drives, the motherboard needs to have 4-6 sata connectors (and maybe 2 esata connectors on the outside and a gig eth (2 would be good), I am presuming a 400-500w power supply Have you considered picking up a NAS appliance instead of trying to build up a PC? I've just added a D-Link DNS-323 to my network, which apart from only housing two drives meets most of your requirements. It's much smaller and more attractive than a PC case, and the only time I hear it is when it spins up the drives from idle. There are four drive boxes around, and the vast majority of them run Linux under the hood and are moderately easy to hack around with. The other requirement is has to be very quiet ( and no lights on the case). If you do end up building your own, who says you need to connect any of the LEDs? :-P -- Pete -- 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] Minimum username length?
On Fri, 2008-05-16 at 14:35 +1000, DaZZa wrote: Anyone know if there is a default minimum username length for some (or all) current Linux distros? I have a vague recall from somewhere it's 4 characters minimum - but can't find any documentation to back this up. My copy of O'Reilly's Practical UNIX and Internet Security (3rd edition) says that standard passwords are 1-8 characters, although modern systems will allow longer. Most of my work involves debian, and RHEL of varying ages. They all have system users with short names (bin, sys, lp and the like). The only time I've seen a single-character username was one added by a dodgy rootkit. -- Pete -- 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] Debian SSH vulnerability: act now!
On Fri, 2008-05-16 at 09:24 +1000, Peter Chubb wrote: Just in case anyone missed it, there's been a major vulnerability for any SSH keys generated on a debian system over the last two years or so ... apparently the random number generator wasn't being seeded right, so only a few distinct keys were actually generated. Today's XKCD sums up my feelings on the matter quite nicely. http://xkcd.com/424/ -- Pete -- 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] Fedora netinst?
Hey hey. On Thu, 2008-05-08 at 21:48 +1000, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote: I want to install Fedora in a qemu VM for testing purposes. Since I'm after a pretty mininal install I'm looking for something like the 150Meg Debian netinst images, but all I can seem to find is 3+ Gig ISOs and rescue images. Is there such a thing as a small Fedora ISO image? What you want is the minimal boot media. The installation guide tells you where to get it; http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f8/en_US/sn-which-files.html -- Pete -- 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] SIM cards as cheap data storage?
On Tue, 2008-04-15 at 13:40 +1000, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: I am looking for a cheap data storage solution for many people. The requirements are as follows: * CHEAP (very important) * storage space isn't important - maybe a couple of hundred kilobytes max. * media can be lost and replaced without much trouble/cost * media can be easily read/written by an ordinary Linux computer * media and media reader must be reasonably durable * scalable: the media should be distributable to millions of people ...paper? Satisfies all requirements except possibly machine reading. And surely you've got reasons not to use CDRW. -- Pete -- 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] bash challenge
On Fri, 2008-04-11 at 15:06 +1000, david wrote: while inotifywait -e close somefile ; do lots of stuff rm foo/*.tif done The problem is that i need to make sure that foo/*.tif have closed before I remove them, or strange things happen. I don't know what the names of the tif files are going to be, although I know they will in directory foo/ Is there a way of waiting until all files in foo/ are closed? lsof will work as long as foo/*.tif doesn't overflow your command line length. while inotifywait -e close somefile ; do stuff while lsof foo/*.tif /dev/null 21 ; do sleep 1 done done (usual disclaimer about actually testing this first applies) -- Pete -- 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] ssh - localhost, mysql
On Sun, 2008-03-30 at 16:49 +1100, Sonia Hamilton wrote: On Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:46:12 +0900, jam [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: Using a fresh install of Gutsy, and having apt-get install openssh-server he tunnels to me ssh -R 1200:localhost:22 [EMAIL PROTECTED] I then go back the tunnel to his machine ssh -p 1200 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Slightly OT question related to this. How would I prevent ssh complaining about changed ssh keys for localhost? (Because I regularly tunnel via localhost, but to different ips). Easiest way is to turn off StrictHostKeyChecking for localhost. Add this to the end of your ~/ssh/config Host localhost StrictHostKeyChecking no You can also tool around with adding distinct HostKeyAlias names on the ssh command line for each separate machine you want to log in to if verifying host keys on the destination machine is important to you. (the relevant man page for reading about these things is ssh_config(5)) -- Pete -- 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] ssh - localhost, mysql
On Sun, 2008-03-30 at 18:48 +1000, Peter Hardy wrote: Easiest way is to turn off StrictHostKeyChecking for localhost. Add this to the end of your ~/ssh/config Host localhost StrictHostKeyChecking no Erm, that should be in ~/.ssh/config , natch. -- Pete -- 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] Connecting bluetooth under Ubuntu
On Mon, 2008-03-24 at 19:02 +1100, Richard Hayes wrote: I am trying to connect a phone to my box. I can scan and identify both the phone and computer but it looks like I need to create a 'shared secret' for the wireless connection similar to a wifi link. *snip* The answers you seek lie in /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf . 1. How do either enable 'promiscuous' mode so I do not have any passcodes? I *think* you can do this by setting security to none. But I've never tried it and it comes along with all the obvious potential security gaffes if you do. 2. How do I configure the passcode? I set security to auto, and set a PIN for it in the passkey option. In theory, the default setting of user for the security means ubuntu will pop up a dialog whenever anything tries to pair with it, but I don't think I've ever had that working. Once that's done, restart hcid with /etc/init.d/bluetooth restart , and initiate the pairing from your mobile device, entering the appropriate pin when it asks. http://www.thejoe.com/2007/05/17/bluetooth-pairing-and-tethering-in-ubuntu-feisty/ is very helpful when you're doing all this. -- Pete -- 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] which process holding port
On Mon, 2008-03-17 at 17:58 +0900, Hasnain wrote: Is there anyway how to find which process is holding a tcp port in linux? Say for instance, i checked netstat -a |grep ###. but i dont know which process has opened or hold that port currently. Is there anyway to find out this? Nobody has yet mentioned lsof or fuser. This makes me sad. [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~% ps ax | grep light 14230 ?SN 0:01 /usr/sbin/lighttpd -f /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~% sudo fuser -n tcp 80 80/tcp: 14230 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~% sudo lsof -i :80 COMMANDPID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE NODE NAME lighttpd 14230 www-data5u IPv4 64209 TCP *:www (LISTEN) [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~% Hooray for everything being a file! -- Pete -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Surround sound cards?
So, I have a sound card with a CM8738 chipset, that I picked up from Dick Smith fairly cheaply. I'm using it with a set of Logitech 5.1 surround speakers, with plain old analogue connections (three 3.5mm stereo connections). This all sounds great, and the driver works reasonably well. But the driver on my ubuntu hardy machine (kernel version 2.6.24-12-generic) has one glaring problem - it's only able to control the volume for the front-left and front-right channels. In stereo mode this is fine, but in 5.1 mode the other three channels are pegged at max volume. So, can anybody recommend a sound card? I'm looking for: - 5.1 surround support, with analogue output - reasonably cheap, and reasonably good quality - good linux driver support Thanks, -- Pete -- 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] Ugly fonts in Hardy
Erik de Castro Lopo wrote: Hi all, I'm on Hardy Heron and like Jeremy, I have been suffering from ugly fonts: http://jeremy.visser.name/2008/03/ugly-fonts-in-hardy In the comments to Jeremy's blog post Lindsay said: System - Preferences - Appearance, click on the Fonts tab. You’ll probably see “Rendering” set to “Best shapes”, and you’ll want to set it to “Subpixel smoothing (LCDs)”. If you click on the “Details” button at the bottom, you’ll get another screen with a bunch more options. Try setting “Hinting” to “None”, and “Smoothing” to “Subpixel (LCDs). Problem is, I'm not running Gnome (i prefer E17). I've run gconf-editor and I can find the Hinting setting, but not any of the others. The easiest way, if you're not averse to it, is to install the gnome-contorol-center package, and run gnome-appearance-properties. That'll give you the appearance applet that Lindsay described. Failing that, the gconf keys you want are: /desktop/gnome/font_rendering/hinting - I assume this is the hinting one you've already found. /desktop/gnome/font_rendering/antialiasing - The smoothing section Lindsay described. My version of hardy provides more than enough documentation in gconf-editor about possible values. But if you're not seeing them, you need rgba for subpixel smoothing. Hope that helps. -- Pete -- 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] ADSL modem recommendations (with bridging)
I call shenanigans! On Thu, 2008-03-06 at 16:22 +1100, Matthew Hannigan wrote: Don't stop there! You probably mean bits not b(ytes) and mebi not mega, so it's 108 Mibit/s 1) It's mibi not mebi. 2) The same standard that defines mibi- as a prefix (IEEE 1541 [1]) specifies that b is the symbol for bits, and B should be used for bytes. In practical use, though, I tend to see either bits or B. -- Pete, who measures his traffic in gross nybbles to reduce confusion. [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1541 -- 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] ADSL modem recommendations (with bridging)
Hey hey. On Thu, 2008-02-28 at 23:11 +1100, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote: Can anybody recommend an ADSL modem that does up to an including ADSL2+, is Linux friendly and easy to set up in bridging or half bridging mode? It would also be nice if the adminstrative functions were still accessible when it is in bridging mode. I have a D-Link DSL-502T, which is a couple of years old by now. It had a lot of problems with Linux clients when it was running as a gateway - the Linux resolver just didn't play nicely with its name service. But I'm using it in full bridge mode now in front of a WRT-54G and have no complaints. Don't think they do half-bridging. But flipping it into full bridging mode is a snap, and the internal interface keeps the address that was assigned to it, so the admin interface is still accessible. -- Pete -- 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] Asus Eee 4G 7 Micro Laptop
On Sat, 2008-02-23 at 00:52 +1100, aggeyl wrote: 3. Find a way to be able to reinstall Xandros so I can try other operating systems. Well, not try them so much as install Fluxbuntu or Xubuntu. But I want to have Xandros on hand in case it doesn't work. BTW, Xandros is not a bad OS. I'm not sure what I was expecting after their bed games with Microsoft, but the OS is pretty good. I don't usually like KDE, but I really suits the Eee PC. If you happen to have a USB CD-ROM, you can use that to boot off the disc that comes with the Eee. I think the manual talks about doing a restore. I didn't have one, so I booted eeexubuntu from a USB stick, which was able to bring up a network connection. Then, before reinstalling, used dd to grab an image of the internal SSD and transfer that across to a box with storage space. Comes the time I want to restore it, just boot from the USB again, blat the image back across the network and write it to the SSD with dd. -- Pete -- 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] Asus Eee 4G 7 Micro Laptop
On Fri, 2008-02-22 at 16:52 +1100, Rick Welykochy wrote: Anyone had a play with the Asus micro laptop? Described here: http://tinyurl.com/ynnn9c It runs some form of Linux, has no HDD, just 4 GB of flash. Sounds ideal for travel ... but perhaps the 7 screen is a bit too small. Going for about $450 at JB Hifi and less on eBay. I picked one up about a month ago, while they were still pretty much exclusive to Myer. The installed operating system is Xandros with icewm and a custom desktop interface. I can't comment on it too much because getting what I wanted out of it seemed too much effort so I installed xubuntu over the top of it in short order. But my one other (non-technical) friend who has one absolutely loves the OS. It's small and light and fairly awesome. The keyboard feels slightly cramped (the right shift key irritates me no end). The screen resolution is 1024x600. Again, a little getting used to (the wiki over at eeeuser.com has a lot of tips for small themes and trimming a lot of vertical space from firefox and the like), but I personally think it's pretty good for things like web browsing. For the price, I think it's a great machine. If anybody wants to have a poke at it, I'm planning on turning up at the next SLUG meeting. -- Pete -- 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] Asus Eee 4G 7 Micro Laptop
On Fri, 2008-02-22 at 18:14 +1100, Martin Visser wrote: On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 5:55 PM, Peter Hardy [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The screen resolution is 1024x600. All the doco says 800×480?? Sorry, brain fart. It is indeed 800x480. -- Pete -- 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] headless servers
On Wed, 2008-02-06 at 23:54 +1100, Bruce Bruen wrote: On an entirely differnet theme. Some time ago, it used to be possible to convince certain BIOS versions that they had a keyboard attached by shorting the PS/2 pins 3 4 with a 100K resistor. Trying it today with a certain (Compaq Presario desktop P3) box, it doesn't seem to work. This is a typical Compaq ATX board (and by that I dont mean typical). Anyone got any good ideas? Many many years ago, Jamie Honan gave a talk at SLUG about a little microcontroller kit he hacked up to emulate a PS/2 keyboard, to solve precisely this problem. http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~jhonan/havr-go/havr-go.html -- Pete -- 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] New in australia
On Mon, 2008-01-21 at 16:17 -0600, Sonia Hamilton wrote: On Mon, 2008-01-21 at 22:10 +1100, Rodolphe wrote: Sonia Hamilton wrote: Hi Rodolphe, welcome to Australia! By gnu/linux compliant internet cafe, what do you mean? That they use Linux on their desktops (I don't know of any), you can use your Linux laptop to connect via ethernet cable or wireless (some in George St near Chinatown), or ...? Yes, you're right, i need to precise my need. I look for an internet cafe where the computers run under linux (idealy with gnome :P), but all those i have seen run under xp :( So, if anybody know where i can found the holy graal ... Hi Rodolphe, You posted to me but I presume to meant to post to the list :-) I don't know of any Internet cafes in Sydney that run Linux on their desktops - as you suggest it's the holy grail - maybe others on the list would know? The closest I've seen recently was a number of Optus kiosks scattered around the international terminal offering free Internet access. They all seem to be powered by Ubuntu, but I only figured that out because of the one that'd crashed on a boot screen. :-/ I would suggest that if you get desperate for a Linux desktop you could by a cheap second hand laptop and install a light version of Linux like Xubuntu http://www.xubuntu.org/ Incidentally, Xubuntu on the Eee is a winning combination. -- Pete -- 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] Apache - allow from certain IP Addresses
Hey hey. On Fri, 2008-01-18 at 09:59 +1030, Roger Symonds wrote: I currently looking into Apache and am wondering if it can restrict the IP Addresses it accepts incoming requests on, for a particular virtual host. Apache has an absolutely mind-boggling array of ways to filter requests. On the machine are 3 web applications running behind Apache, all using a seperate virtual hosts. Two of the virtual hosts need to remain open to the public on their domains. The third application is an application that should only be available to specific IP Addresses. Is it possible to get a virtual host to only accept requests from a range of specified IP Addresses? That's covered in the auth howto; http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/howto/auth.html#whatotherneatstuffcanido The last example there is pretty much exactly what you want. In addition, the Allow and Deny directives will take basically any address specification you can think of - http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_access.html#allow You can't put allow and deny directives straight into the VirtualHost stanza. I usually wrap them in Location tags like: VirtualHost foo DocumentRoot /path/to/docroot/ Location / Order deny,allow Deny from all Allow from dev.example.com /Location Other stuff /VirtualHost Hope that helps, -- Pete -- 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] Tuesday afternoon shell command optimisation party!
On Tue, 2007-12-18 at 16:09 +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote: Here's a starting point. What's a more optimal way to perform this task? :-) sed 's#[^,]*##g' input.txt | tr -d '\n' | wc -m Tuesday afternoon shell optimisation party! How do you want it optimised? grep -o is the most readable. But the fastest I've found so far is cat input.txt | tr -d '\n' | tr ',' '\n' | wc -l -- Pete -- 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] Tuesday afternoon shell command optimisation party!
On Tue, 2007-12-18 at 17:05 +1100, Lindsay Holmwood wrote:
On Dec 18, 2007 4:35 PM, Martin Visser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
perl -e 'while(){$a+=s/[,]//g};print $a\n' input.txt
Ruby version:
I've got a sixpack of beer for a working PostScript variant. :-)
--
Pete
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Re: [SLUG] Favourite Linux distro in Australia
Hey hey. On Tue, 2007-11-27 at 13:28 +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am not looking to create a flame war or anything like that. Yeah, this seems very much at odds with the rest of your message. ;-) The favourite distribution at the moment in South Africa is Ubuntu. I would like to know what is the most common distro being used in Australia. My opinion: Most of the more vocal SLUG participants seem to be using Debian or Ubuntu. I'm not too sure these days which is winning. Fedora is only slightly less popular. I see lots of news on Mandriva in Australia. I don't recall a great deal of traffic with people asking specifically about Mandriva on the SLUG mailing lists. There was a Mandriva-sponsored installfest in Sydney recently, but I haven't found any reports about it. -- Pete -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Sharing files between guests and hosts (Was: Re: [SLUG] virtualisation and wine on ubuntu gutsey for adobe photoshop flash premier etc)
On Wed, 2007-11-28 at 12:03 +1100, David Peterson wrote: Hi David I also run vmware Win XP on linux and do the scp trick. I am wondering whether there is an easier way to move files between my host FS and the vmware instance, as it's a bit of a hassle using scp all the time. Has anyone else got an answer? Maybe sharing within the XP instance and mounting it on the host node using smbfs, or some other option? The user manual for the beta of VMWare Server 2.0 talks about an integrated Samba file sharing solution. But I've had some problems actually getting the beta to run on my machine, so couldn't give you any more detail than that. Apart from that, installing and configuring samba on the host is a fairly simple exercise. -- Pete -- 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] Suspending the screen-saver by command line
Hey hey. On Mon, 2007-11-26 at 00:36 +1100, Daryl Thompson wrote: I have fedora install and wanting to Suspend the screen-saver from starting when watching videos automatically when i start mplayer. is it posable and if so what is the command or command base I'm not 100% sure if Fedora is using gnome-screensaver or not. If so, you want to use the gnome-screensaver-command utility. The -i option will prevent the screensaver from activating. If it's using xscreensaver, then you want xscreensaver-command. -- Pete -- 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] bounce in evolution
On Tue, 2007-11-06 at 14:13 +0900, jam wrote: On Tue, 2007-11-06 at 12:00 +1100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I want to bounce mail with evolution (gutsy) as per http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/ResendingMailWithHeaders Anybody able to offer any help? Please I do NOT want to resend, see the link for all the reasons. I fear that I'll just have to revert to kmail complete with crashes! Yes I googled for a couple of hours :-) James That link also tells you how to do it; from the Message menu, Forward As... - Redirect. No, how evolution once-upon-a-time could do it. Select actions ... ooops None of the current redirect options 'bounce' The redirect option from the Forward As submenu sends to new recipient(s) leaving all headers intact. If that's not the bounce you're looking for, what is? OK I take a mail to me and 'redirect' to [EMAIL PROTECTED] As Mary, I open the mail which says: From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (resent as [EMAIL PROTECTED]) To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... Wow! bizare! Now the same mail form maxine to jam bounced to mary (in kmail, done properley) From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... THAT's a bounce. jam is not mentioned in mary's mail I wouldn't call it a bounce if it's rewriting the From: header (although evolution does add a new Envelope-From: header that things like Outlook can pick up on). I just tried the same procedure the guys at http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/ResendingMailWithHeaders recommend for kmail; copy the message to a Sent folder, then select it, go to the Message menu and Edit as New Message. That seems to preserve all but the Received (and From) headers from the original message. -- Pete -- 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] bounce in evolution
On Sun, 2007-11-04 at 10:15 +0900, jam wrote: Hi rant I find kmail to be the best featured mailer, I just crashes, usually when searching :-( /rant I want to bounce mail with evolution (gutsy) as per http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/ResendingMailWithHeaders Anybody able to offer any help? Please I do NOT want to resend, see the link for all the reasons. I fear that I'll just have to revert to kmail complete with crashes! Yes I googled for a couple of hours :-) James That link also tells you how to do it; from the Message menu, Forward As... - Redirect. -- Pete -- 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] bounce in evolution
On Mon, 2007-11-05 at 10:21 +0900, jam wrote: On Mon, 2007-11-05 at 12:00 +1100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I want to bounce mail with evolution (gutsy) as per http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/ResendingMailWithHeaders Anybody able to offer any help? Please I do NOT want to resend, see the link for all the reasons. I fear that I'll just have to revert to kmail complete with crashes! Yes I googled for a couple of hours :-) James That link also tells you how to do it; from the Message menu, Forward As... - Redirect. No, how evolution once-upon-a-time could do it. Select actions ... ooops None of the current redirect options 'bounce' The redirect option from the Forward As submenu sends to new recipient(s) leaving all headers intact. If that's not the bounce you're looking for, what is? -- Pete -- 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] Crossword compiler on Ubuntu, the errorfile.
On Wed, 2007-10-03 at 17:05 +1000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
configure
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking whether make sets ${MAKE}... yes
checking for working aclocal... missing
checking for working autoconf... missing
checking for working automake... missing
checking for working autoheader... missing
checking for working makeinfo... missing
checking for gcc... gcc
checking for C compiler default output... configure error: C compiler
cannot create executables
You've got a C compiler, but no libc6-dev package. If you install the
build-essential package, it'll install that, plus a few other packages
that will be needed.
You'll probably also need other -dev packages for assorted libraries
that your program uses. Hopefully it comes with a README or other file
telling you what it depends on.
--
Pete
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Re: [SLUG] treating \n like any other character
On Wed, 2007-10-03 at 18:52 +1000, david wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~/test/testdir $ cat test 1 2 3 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~/test/testdir $ sed s/1\n/1/g test 1 2 3 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~/test/testdir $ The output I would have liked would be: 12 3 but sed doesn't seem to work like that. Pity. I'm pretty sure you can't get vim to do it either. I'm assuming vim just uses sed anyway? vim will do that just fine, and is pretty much my go-to when I find myself needing to do it. I did find a way to search/replace across newlines with sed, too, but it made my head hurt. -- Pete -- 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] expect - more modern tool available?
On Sat, 2007-09-29 at 16:04 +1000, Matthew Hannigan wrote: http://code.google.com/p/enchanter/ This is a java app. Enchanter is a small library that helps you script SSH sessions in a manner similar to Expect. It comes in multiple flavors that support different scripting languages including Python, Ruby and BeanShell. This tool requires Java 5 or greater. Its special feature is a learning mode. So I get that might make it modern :-) autoexpect ( http://expect.nist.gov/example/autoexpect.man.html ) has been in the expect distribution since 1995. :-) -- Pete -- 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] Wireless router with Optus broadband cable
What James said, with the addendum that my venerable old WRT54G also runs OpenWRT quite nicely. But it's gone through a few hardware revisions since I bought mine, and from memory the newer ones might have issues. It's probably worth checking the website before putting money in to it. -- Pete On Thu, 2007-09-27 at 13:21 +1000, James Polley wrote: The WRT54G does support WPA. The WRT54GL (http://www.ht.com.au/N/0/keyword/wrt54gl/part/T6018/detail.hts) will do everything you want, and also runs linux. If you feel like getting your (virtual) hands dirty, there's a slew of distros for it - http://openwrt.org, http://www.dd-wrt.com/, http://www.thibor.co.uk/, etc. These can give you fantastic features, like being able to set up a WDS, configuring multiple SSIDs, assigning all switch ports on different vlans, etc. Also, because it's running nice stock linux things, you can do stuff you'd do on any other linux firewall, like ssh in and twiddle iptables rules. Of course, you've only got 16Mb ram to play with, and the CPU is only 200Mhz... On 27/09/2007, Jesus Jr M Salvo [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, I have Optus cable at home, and have been simply plugging my laptop ( a Compaq Presario V6107AU ) running Fedora7 to the cable modem ( Motorola, forgot the exact model ) to get Internet access. Can anyone recommend a wireless router that I can use instead so that : 1) The wireless router connects to the cable modem. 2) The wireless router serves DHCP to wireless laptops. 3) Supports VPN passthrough 4) WEP / WPA-PSK / AES encyption 5) Allows a USB 2.0 printer to be connected so that it is shared among laptops ( optional ) ... and of course ... works with linux ? I have been looking at these: LinkSys WRT54GX: http://www.ht.com.au/N/-20+-43+-535/part/R8671/detail.hts LinkSys WRT54G: http://www.ht.com.au/N/-20+-43+-535/part/H9739/detail.hts The second one is cheaper, although it does not have WPA or AES. What do people here with Optus cable use ... and what's your feedback ? -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- There is nothing more worthy of contempt than a man who quotes himself - Zhasper, 2004 -- 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] expect - more modern tool available?
On Tue, 2007-09-25 at 12:56 +1000, Sonia Hamilton wrote: I want to (as a simple example) update my password on n *nix machines using the passwd command, which prompts me to enter my old password then new password twice. With expect I can automatically feed in the old and new passwords when prompted as passwd is run via ssh on each of the n machines. I could also (for example) use awk/perl/tool-du-jour on /etc/shadow on each machine, but that's nasty, especially across different Linuxes/SunOSs/versions. expect is still a good, reliable tool that gets a lot of use. My only issue is that it's written in Tcl. But most of the current crop of scripting languages have a module to emulate expect behaviour. Depending on your needs, using one of these might be a more pleasant option. For python, I quite like pexpect. And in great SLUG tradition, I'm going to offer a suggestion that you definitely didn't ask for; something else to consider, especially for jobs like the one you describe, is using a tool like multixterm which uses expect to launch a number of terminals and control them all together. -- Pete -- 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] SCO delisted from NASDAQ
On Fri, 2007-09-21 at 12:36 +1000, Del wrote: James Dumay wrote: It has not been delisted yet and the decision is subject to appeal. So they have not been delisted from NASDAQ - apparently there is a certain amount of time between filing chapter 11 and NASAQ delisting your company - and this reporter is just passing this fact off as news. So there's still time to rush out and buy me a whole stack of SCO shares! Yay! I was thinking about putting a pool together to buy UNIX from them. I'm in for $20. -- Pete -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] GanttPV?
Just wondering if anybody's got any opinions about GanttPV ( http://www.pureviolet.net/ganttpv/ )? I'm particularly interested in how well this integrates with MS Project, as well as how easy it is for Project users to switch. The article I found GanttPV through ( http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2006/12/01/30-essential-pieces-of-free-and-open-software-for-windows ) seems adamant that it's a Project killer. But I'd like to hear some other opinions. -- Pete -- 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] Can't access web through Broadband
On Mon, 2007-09-10 at 20:53 +0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm a complete novice when it comes to setting up networks, and I'm running an ADSL router (D-Link 504T) on Ubuntu 6.06LTS (Drapper?). Turning of my firewall, through Firestarte, doesn't help. I wouldn't have a glue how to setup the network settings. When I was using a 504T as a router, the Linux clients on my network had a lot of problems with the modem's built-in nameserver. Windows clients would work just fine, OSX would work, but I seem to recall it logging errors with name resolution, and 9 times out of 10 Linux just wouldn't work with it at all. Somewhere else in the thread, Heracles talked about changing your Linux machine's DNS server. If that didn't help, I'd suggest checking your ISP's support pages for their name server address, and use that instead. Cheers, -- Pete -- 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] Suspenseful laptops
On Fri, 2007-09-14 at 10:09 +1000, Michael Lake wrote: 'Description: The stone put, or clachneart, involves putting the stone as far as possible. The stone must be put; i.e. like in the shot put; the stone may not be thrown from behind like a baseball, underarm like a softball, or overhead with two hands.' (where clachneart = laptop) I have at least one Thinkpad that people can try putting if they really want. And I'm fairly sure they'll just bounce. -- Pete -- 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] Problems with linux firewall, PPTP, opening ports
Hey hey. On Fri, 2007-08-17 at 11:58 +1000, Scott Waller wrote: *snip* The Acacia program uses iptables as it's back bone I guess, it also uses ULOGD to log the traffic. EG log file fw acacia E violation: IN=ppp0 OUT= MAC=(null) SRC=66.124.120.195 DST=220.245.83.141 LEN=163 TOS=00 PREC=0x00 TTL=119 ID=23307 DF PROTO=TCP SPT=443 DPT=1369 SEQ=1872663048 ACK=2546150166 WINDOW=65463 ACK PSH FIN URGP=0 This is an example of an External violation, ie someone scanning my firewall. acacia IE violation: IN=eth0 OUT=ppp0 MAC=00:a0:cc:3e:22:44:00:16:6f:6c:3d:48:08:00 SRC=10.0.0.52 DST=203.63.234.178 LEN=52 TOS=00 PREC=0x00 TTL=127 ID=9213 This is an example of the log when I try and connect to my work VPN When I try to connect (laptop) it seems to talk to work but once it comes to the user name and password to times out. If I have the wrong password it will tell me, as I said before, I can connect through a Telstra Hot Spot of McDonalds for example, I can use the hotel internet when I am away to connect.. I have added in these lines into my acacia.conf file iptables -A INPUT -p 47 -j ACCEPT iptables -A OUTPUT -p 47 -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -p TCP -s 0.0.0.0/0 --source-port 1723 -j ACCEPT iptables -A OUTPUT -p TCP -d 0.0.0.0/0 --destination-port 1723 -j ACCEPT The important thing to remember about iptables' built-in chains: The INPUT chain only applies to packets coming in an interface destined for the local machine. The OUTPUT chain only applies to packets leaving an interface that are originating from the local machine. For packets that are originating from your laptop that are going through the firewall, the FORWARD chain is the only one that's checked. So I'd start by adding rules like these: iptables -A FORWARD -p 47 -j ACCEPT iptables -A FORWARD -p TCP -d 0.0.0.0/0 --destination-port 1723 -j ACCEPT If you'd like to do some more reading on how iptables works, you'll find some great documentation included under /usr/share/doc/iptables (at least it is in debian, redhat may use a different location). Hope that helps. -- Pete -- 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] how do I log startup or where do I find the log?
On Fri, 2007-08-17 at 10:17 +1000, Marghanita da Cruz wrote: My knoppix/grup startup reports a couple of errors, which I have been happy to live with until now... however, I would like to look into them but am not sure how to capture the error messages before they fly by and KDE starts up. It varies by distribution, but /var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog are likely candidates. Quite a few services also log to their own files under /var/log/ . Just generally poking around in there should prove enlightening. -- Pete -- 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] MythTV - almost there
On Tue, 2007-06-19 at 17:35 +1000, Howard Lowndes wrote: However, I've got no sound, and this might be about the dumbest question to ask, but do I have to connect the sound output on the capture card to the sound on the mobo somewhere (it has integrated sound). The capture card is a plain analogue card (Phillips saa7134). I was expecting the sound to be picked up over the PCI bus. I've never used the Philips card before, but every analogue card I've come across came with a short patch cable to link the audio out from the card to the line in on your sound card. I'm fairly sure the answer you're looking for is yes, but if your card does indeed deliver sound direct, then the driver would have set up new devices. Might be worth checking syslog and/or dmesg to see what the driver is doing before getting hold of a cable. -- Pete -- 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] fspot mailer
On Wed, 2007-05-30 at 10:02 +0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I've looked in the obvious places, without joy. How would I make f-spot's mailer thunderbird, not evolution Looked in GNOME's Preferred Applications app? It's in the System - Preferences menu, and apparently called gnome-default-applications-properties (or at least it is in Ubuntu). -- Pete -- 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] SLUG Bootcamp, this Saturday!
On Fri, 2007-05-18 at 15:45 +1000, Del wrote: I thought about participating with some hands-on fedora directory server stuff but since the aim was mostly to play with desktop apps and not server ones I decided against it. I may drop by during the day, though, and perhaps I'll save the FDS/Samba talk for another time. Would it be something you'd care to give at a SLUG meeting some time? I for one would be interested to see a demonstration of FDS. -- Pete -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Open source groupware solutions
Hey hey. Because it's been about a year since this last came up on the SLUG list, and because I have a need for something like this soon, I'd be interested to hear what people are using for groupware these days. I'd like something that can share contacts / calendars / tasks across a fairly mixed environment - evolution, thunderbird and sunbird/lightning on Windows and Linux, and Outlook 2k3. We initially considered just exporting calendars to a WebDAV share. This seems to be a workable solution, but I have my doubts about how well a .htaccess scheme to allow access would scale to an office of around 40 users. On a similar note, CalDAV or GroupDAV look like attractive solutions to drop in to an existing environment as well. But from some brief googling, it seems that Outlook support for either of these protocols are limited at best. Has anybody had any success syncing Outlook with one of these servers? I've also looked at Scalix in the best, and like what I see. My only issue with it so far is that I'd prefer to keep my existing mail infrastructure. Is it possible for it to co-exist with an existing IMAP service? -- Pete -- 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] Open source groupware solutions
On Tue, 2007-05-08 at 17:36 +1000, Craige McWhirter wrote: On Tue, 2007-05-08 at 16:24 +1000, Peter Hardy wrote: I've also looked at Scalix in the best, and like what I see. My only issue with it so far is that I'd prefer to keep my existing mail infrastructure. Is it possible for it to co-exist with an existing IMAP service? Is this for you personally or for a professional office deployment? The answer for IMAP co-existence will be markedly different depending on how the deployment is going to be used. Professional office deployment. -- Pete -- 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] Open source groupware solutions
On Tue, 2007-05-08 at 21:21 +1000, Steven Tucker wrote: On Tue, 2007-05-08 at 16:24 +1000, Peter Hardy wrote: I'd like something that can share contacts / calendars / tasks across a fairly mixed environment - evolution, thunderbird and sunbird/lightning on Windows and Linux, and Outlook 2k3. -- Pete I ve used and loved Zimbra, I often try out Scalix when I see some propaganda, but keep going back to Zimbra. From what you have said, I think it would be a good fit Thanks, Zimbra hasn't really been on my radar at all. I'll check it out. -- Pete -- 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] Linux users in Canberra and photography
On Wed, 2007-04-18 at 13:58 +1000, Peter Hardy wrote: For full colour profiling, you should start by checking out little cms[2]. It provides utilities to help generate ICC colour profiles, which individual image editors are expected to know how to read (more often than not, they also use lcms to do so). The documentation for the DTP package Scribus has a very good overview of colour management in Linux, including some pointers to further reading. http://docs.scribus.net/index.php?lang=enpage=cms -- Pete -- 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] Running Google Earth in Ubuntu
On Wed, 2007-04-18 at 16:14 +1000, Ken Caldwell wrote: I have investigated this a bit further and extracted more information using glxinfo. *snip* The problem seems to be:- libGL: OpenDriver: trying /usr/lib/dri/r200_dri.so libGL error: dlopen /usr/lib/dri/r200_dri.so failed (/usr/lib/dri/r200_dri.so: undefined symbol: _glapi_add_dispatch) libGL error: unable to find driver: r200_dri.so As /usr/lib/dri/r200_dri.so exists on this system do these messages indicate a bug in the package libgl1-mesa-dri which provided it? Earlier in this thread you mentioned you're using the ati driver. Do you have the fglrx driver package (xorg-driver-fglrx) installed as well? It installs its own libGL library, which is incompatible with the x.org one. And a quick test on my Ubuntu machine (with a Radeon 9250) gives the same error. So, uninstall xorg-driver-fglrx and try it again. :-) -- Pete -- 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] Linux users in Canberra and photography
I shoot with analogue gear, and very rarely do any post-processing. But hopefully I can throw a few useful pointers out there. On Tue, 2007-04-17 at 23:29 +1000, Sharon Doig wrote: I am a photography student at ANU. Issues with colour management has come up recently in my work flow. I want to have some recommendations on a) how to calibrate my Flat Screen NVidia Monitor? b) what kind of screen monitor calibration tools should I use and what software? I use a manual method for gamma correction[1] using the xgamma utility that should be included with your distribution already. To the best of my knowledge, hardware devices like Spyders aren't supported under Linux at all. For full colour profiling, you should start by checking out little cms[2]. It provides utilities to help generate ICC colour profiles, which individual image editors are expected to know how to read (more often than not, they also use lcms to do so). As far as applications go, while GIMP is the posterchild for Linux image editing, I wouldn't recommend it for truly serious work. Mostly because it doesn't handle 16-bit channels. If that matters to you, then the best option at the moment seems to be CinePaint[3], which started life as a fork of GIMP aimed at motion picture editing. Browsing through Wikipedia's entry on linux colour management[4] can also be pretty constructive. c) how do I calibrate my HP Photosmart 7760 Printer to give a very close print to what I see on my screen? If you're not using the HPLIP[5] package for your printer, then you should be. It has full support for your model printer, including utilities for colour calibration. Browsing their documentation should set you on the right track. Are there anyone who can give advice or have set up colour management for photography using a linux set up? Incidentally, if there is, then I for one would love to see a SLUG talk about end-to-end digital photography workflow in Linux. Even something about managing large image libraries would be neat. [1] - http://applications.linux.com/article.pl?sid=05/02/07/2244242 is one reasonably good description. [2] - http://www.littlecms.com/ [3] - http://www.cinepaint.org/ [4] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_color_management [5] - http://hplip.sourceforge.net/ Hope that helps, -- Pete -- 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] using apt-pkg data to build backup candidate list
On Mon, 2007-04-02 at 13:05 +1000, Peter Miller wrote: Does anyone know of a tool which walks all the files on your system, and ((any files which are not part of any package) or (files which are part of a package and which have been changed, thinking here of config files)) print the file name? This would be great for generating a list of file backup candidates. debsums(1) comes close, but only for installed files, and I'd like all of the files which *aren't* package files as well. cruft(8) will tell you about files that don't belong to any installed packages. Hopefully that should cover everything you need? -- Pete -- 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] Swap = 2xRAM
On Wed, 2007-02-28 at 10:06 +1100, Howard Lowndes wrote: http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/05/24/1716222 If you select Swap Writer, suspend2 will write all data to the swap space, so make sure your swap is at least twice the amount of your RAM in size. You can also select File Writer and save the suspend data on a file on the hard disk instead, but I prefer the swap method since it's easier to set up. Compile, install your kernel, and reboot to it. In earlier versions, swsusp required swap to be physical RAM + video RAM. And the recommendation was to make it a bit bigger, er, Just In Case. The suspend2 HOWTO[1] says requirements for using the swapwriter are spare swap = physical RAM. That's spare swap. The kernel will do its best to free up buffers and swap pages back in to make room for the swapwriter if it needs to. But yeah, sure, double your RAM to be on the safe side. I didn't know swsusp had a filewriter method these days. If I were setting it up right now I'd probably prefer going that way - relying on having enough free swap to suspend sounds kind of fragile. [1] - http://www.suspend2.net/HOWTO-2.html#ss2.2 Cheers, -- Pete -- 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] Query re Firefox
On Wed, 2007-02-28 at 16:54 +1100, Leslie Katz wrote: On that tab, I'm able to select my default web browser. I've got the Custom Web Browser button highlighted and a box into which I'm to put a command. The command which appears is the full path to the Firefox executable. I've tested that command from the command line and it does open Firefox. Unlike what I understand to be your situation, however, there is no option available on that tab relating to how links are to be opened. If the box has the path to firefox and absolutely nothing else, then that's your problem. When you click a link, evolution is running the command /usr/bin/firefox, without ever having a chance to pass in the URL to actually open. What you want to do is change that command to something like /usr/bin/firefox %s. That way, when you click a link, evolution will substitute the %s for the URL to be opened before running the command. So, when you click on http://google.com/ evolution will run /usr/bin/firefox http://google.com/;. Of course, you can run absolutely any command you want there. Just substitute %s where the URL to open is supposed to go. Good luck, -- Pete It's occurred to me since posting my original query that maybe there's something that's changed without my knowing it in the Firefox configuration editor and that that's what's caused me to lose the automatic opening of links. In the absence of any other suggestions, maybe I should have a look at that (though there are an awful lot of entries in it, aren't there!). Thanks again, Leslie -- 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] Oddball memory usage?
Hey hey. On Fri, 2007-02-23 at 14:09 +1100, Sonia Hamilton wrote: correct me if I'm wrong vmstat is your friend. A figure consistently 0 for the so column (swap out) often indicates problems. My understanding is the memory manager in 2.6 will use a lot of swap on purpose. /correct me if I'm wrong That's the way I understand it as well. Ran vmstat over a 15 minute period yesterday that showed no activity at all either in or out of swap. I've been meaning to run it over a longer period today, but with one thing and another I've spent about three minutes actually in front of a computer today. IBM do a good book on Linux Performance Tuning, which explains this well. Oh, cool. I'll have to add it to my reading list. Thanks. -- Pete -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Oddball memory usage?
I'm a little puzzled by this: total used free sharedbuffers cached Mem:50050844816352 188732 0 1566443165540 -/+ buffers/cache: 14941683510916 Swap: 10526161052616 0 Is this sort of usage normal? Filling a gigabyte of swap space while just under 1.5GB of memory is going towards buffers seems odd to me. And vmstat reports no usage of this swap space over a 15 minute period. What sort of utilities are around to analyse swap space? I'd like to get an idea of exactly what's using all of that memory. -- Pete -- 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] Oddball memory usage?
On Thu, 2007-02-22 at 05:22 +, Rev Simon Rumble wrote: This one time, at band camp, Peter Hardy wrote: Is this sort of usage normal? Filling a gigabyte of swap space while just under 1.5GB of memory is going towards buffers seems odd to me. And vmstat reports no usage of this swap space over a 15 minute period. Just trust it. It knows what it's doing. Better minds than ours have worked long and hard on this and they're pretty good add it. Swap not getting hit in 15 minutes sounds like it's doing the right thing. Oh, there's absolutely no plans to fiddle with it. But it's a pattern that I've never seen before, and I'm curious about how the memory is being used. And, given the uptime on the machine in question (250 days so far), I'm mildly concerned about very slow memory leaks in the web application it's running. Unless you have some really weird requirements, you should be able to leave it be. If you do wanna tweak/learn: http://linux-mm.org/ Ooo, looks like a pretty good resource. Thanks for the link. -- Pete -- 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] Oddball memory usage?
On Thu, 2007-02-22 at 16:24 +1100, Zhasper wrote: On 22/02/07, Peter Hardy [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm a little puzzled by this: total used free sharedbuffers cached Mem:50050844816352 188732 0 1566443165540 -/+ buffers/cache: 14941683510916 Swap: 10526161052616 0 Is this sort of usage normal? Filling a gigabyte of swap space while just under 1.5GB of memory is going towards buffers seems odd to me. And vmstat reports no usage of this swap space over a 15 minute period. What sort of utilities are around to analyse swap space? I'd like to get an idea of exactly what's using all of that memory. You're running Linux, right? Aye. It's a 2.4 kernel dating from somewhere before swappiness became tuneable. This can be really great on a system with not much ram where large apps that you haven't used in a while (eg, OOo) will get swapped out when they're not being used, to make lots of space to cache all the pr0^H^H^Himages of your grandmother's birthday party that you're scanning through agressively.. In my rush to be as detailed as possible, I completely forgot to mention what the machine in question is actually doing. Well, it's a web server for a single (fairly high-traffic) domain. Apart from apache and the web application software, there's nothing running on it apart from the usual collection of processes that are essential to a well behave unix system. init, crond, syslogd. This is easily the biggest system I've found myself responsible for, and the way the memory's been allocated doesn't line up with anything else I've seen before. Just curious as to how and why it's being used like this. -- Pete -- 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] Oddball memory usage?
On Thu, 2007-02-22 at 16:24 +1100, Howard Lowndes wrote: It's recommended that your swap space should be 2x your RAM. In your case it's .2x Has anybody seriously made such a recommendation this millenium? In my experience, the formula doesn't really scale at all. I suppose, in certain limited applications, a huge swap space could come in handy. But I'm yet to see a desktop or server system where more than a gigabyte of swap wasn't just plain ludicrous. As for your suggestion I should have TEN gigabytes of swap space? ...why? -- Pete -- 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] dns lookup with host works, other apps doesn't.
Hey hey. On Wed, 2007-02-21 at 13:24 +1100, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote: I have a number machines sitting in another country with access to them via a VPN. On one of these machines host www.google.com returns valid IP addresses, but wget www.google.com results in Resolving www.google.com... failed: Temporary failure in name resolution. However, using wget with the IP address does work. Attempting to access other servers results in similar behaviour. host server works, wget server doesn't, wget ip address does. In addition, the problem is not restricted to wget; telnet, ping, lynx etc are all broken, but host works. Anybody have any explanation for this weird behaviour? How is your /etc/nsswitch.conf ? This file controls how name resolution for different things is done. A default Linux install will most likely include the line hosts: files dns Which says that to resolve a hostname, first check /etc/hosts, then do a DNS lookup. If you take dns off of this line, then nothing on your system will do DNS lookups any more. Except tools like host, which are designed specifically for doing DNS lookups, and don't seem to jump through the standard hoops to resolve an address. -- Pete -- 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] dns lookup with host works, other apps doesn't.
On Wed, 2007-02-21 at 13:50 +1100, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote: Peter Hardy wrote: How is your /etc/nsswitch.conf ? Sorry, should have mentioned that I already looked at this. This file controls how name resolution for different things is done. A default Linux install will most likely include the line hosts: files dns hosts:files dns mdns Is the mdns ok? All I know about mdns is what I learnt from the last five minutes googling. :-) It's probably worth trying, especially if you know you don't need or don't use the libnss-mdns package. -- Pete -- 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] Vista preview on Seven Sunrise
Howard Lowndes wrote: I've just watched a preview of Vista on the Seven Sunrise program and ^ ^ Your reasoning has a fatal flaw. -- Pete -- 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] ssh and vnc
Alan L Tyree wrote: It fails with all programs. The problem is that the DISPLAY variable is not getting set. After logging into both machines with ssh -X machine_name - [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ echo $DISPLAY localhost:10.0 ** Ubuntu machine where everything works - [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ echo $DISPLAY ** Xubuntu machine where nothing works [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ -- The /etc/ssh/sshd_config files are the same in both machines. I don't know how DISPLAY gets set If you add -vv to your ssh flags, you'll see something like: debug2: x11_get_proto: /usr/X11R6/bin/xauth -f /tmp/ssh-2fcsElfWeT/xauthfile generate 127.0.0.1:0.0 MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 untrusted timeout 1200 2/dev/null debug2: x11_get_proto: /usr/X11R6/bin/xauth -f /tmp/ssh-2fcsElfWeT/xauthfile list 127.0.0.1:0.0 2/dev/null debug1: Requesting X11 forwarding with authentication spoofing. debug2: channel 0: request x11-req confirm 0 after the connection is authenticated. Every time I've had a problem like this, it was because xauth wasn't installed on the server. -- Pete -- 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] bash problem - renaming files with their time stamp
david wrote:
A directory with files of unknown names.
I want to rename each seperate file with it's date/time thus:
-rw-r--r-- 1 david david 105 2007-01-19 11:20 test
becomes
-rw-r--r-- 1 david david 105 2007-01-19 11:20 200701191120
I've been messing with it for a few hours, and I'm sure it's simple but
I'm not getting there.
Hooray for Friday afternoon scripting fun!
This isn't pretty, but will probably work[*]. Except on files with spaces.
for file in `ls`; do
date=`ls -l --time-style=long-iso $file | awk '{ print $6 $7 }'
newname=`date -d $date +%Y%m%d%H%M`
mv $file $newname
* Only partially tested. Your mileage liable to variance.
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Re: [SLUG] bash problem - renaming files with their time stamp
Peter Hardy wrote:
for file in `ls`; do
date=`ls -l --time-style=long-iso $file | awk '{ print $6 $7 }'
newname=`date -d $date +%Y%m%d%H%M`
mv $file $newname
Er, that should be awk '{ print $6 $7 }'
* Only partially tested. Your mileage liable to variance.
...told you so.
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Re: [SLUG] bash problem - renaming files with their time stamp
Michael Chesterton wrote:
Here's my very minor contribution. If you change
for file in `ls`; do
to
for file in *; do
It should handle spaces
Oh, cool. I seem to recall having problems with the for file in *
construct, but I don't remember what they were, so I'll try it again
next time I want a for loop.
date=`ls -l --time-style=long-iso $file | awk '{ print $6 $7 }'
I don't see a closing back tick.
You're right. I guess this is why I debug scripts before expecting them
to do anything important.
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Re: [SLUG] tail and rotated log files
Yo. Tony Sceats wrote: sounds like you want tail -F log or tail --follow=name --retry log Thanks Michael and Tony. I did some tinkering with the -F option yesterday and, yeah, looks like that one does the trick. Guess I misread the man page never used the max-unchanged-stats argument though - maybe it's used to delay the retry? wtf is an iteration in tail anyway? 5 poll's on the file?! Yeah, it seems to poll the file for changes at a fixed interval? max-unchanged-stats ties in with the --sleep-interval argument, in ways that don't seem terribly clear cut. -- Pete -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] tail and rotated log files
I have a script that uses `tail -f --max-unchanged-stats=5` to follow a log file. The way I read the man page, --max-unchanged-stats will cause tail to close and reopen the given file if it hasn't changed after 5 iterations. But after logrotate rotates the logfile, tail keeps watching the old file, and doesn't seem to open the new one. So: - Am I missing something here? The man page doesn't mention any, but is there I signal I can throw tail that'll make it reopen its file? - Is there a better way, short of application-specific trickery, to keep an eye on a log file? I'm considering having syslog log to a named pipe as well and have my script read from that. But I'd like to hear other suggestions for feeding a shell script from a system log. -- Pete -- 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] OLPC to consider trialling laptops in Australia
On Sat, 2007-01-13 at 03:10 +, Rev Simon Rumble wrote: One thing I don't get about OLPC is their opposition to selling the machines to people like us. It would increase their volumes and provide a corpus of people making Cool Shittm for the machine. Sure, we're not all educators, but we'll still help. A few days ago the BBC was reporting that one idea recently floated by the OLPC guys was a buy two get one scheme, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6246989.stm . If you're going to the LCA open day, make sure you ask them about it. :-) -- Pete -- 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] Re: Low-light webcam for 256K upstream
On Wed, 2007-01-10 at 19:37 +1100, Ben wrote: I noticed there are no patches or modules released after early January 2006, but there are reports of things working on the mailing lists at saillard.org Hrmn. I hadn't checked how recent the saillard driver was. But, at least on my model, it's been mature and very, very stable for a long time. -- Pete -- 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] Re: Low-light webcam for 256K upstream
Ben wrote: I'm after a couple of webcams with excellent low-light performance (maybe even an infra-red option) I've selected a Philips ToUCam II, which I got on eBay for $93ea. including insured shipping, since they aren't available in Australia. I have an older relative of the ToUCam, a PCVC-680 or something. They work well in Linux, and are indeed very very good in low light. Apparently it should work ok in Linux, so but I'll reply again when it arrives. The pwc driver has had a somewhat rocky history. It was originally written by a guy who signed an NDA with Philips to get access to the specs and wrote a binary-only driver. Then, after further consultation with Philips, he was able to split it in to two parts - a basic open source driver, and a secondary binary-only compression module needed for higher framerates / resolutions. The base driver was added and removed from the linux source tree a couple of times amid intense discussion about proprietary, binary-only modules. The fuss it caused was one of the driving factors causing the original author to abandon the project. It's since been picked up by another group, who've also reverse-engineered the binary-only parts, and now ship a single open source driver that does everything the older two-module setup did. I'm not sure if there's a module in the linux.org kernel or not at the moment, but if there is, it's most likely the original discontinued driver, and not the newer fork. You can get the new driver from http://www.saillard.org/linux/pwc/ , and it's also packaged for ubuntu (and probably debian) as pwc-source. Install that, and you should find some documentation in /usr/share/doc/pwc-source/ that will let you build a package and install it in a couple of steps. Good luck! -- Pete -- 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] Re: Low-light webcam for 256K upstream
Peter Hardy wrote: You can get the new driver from http://www.saillard.org/linux/pwc/ , and it's also packaged for ubuntu (and probably debian) as pwc-source. Install that, and you should find some documentation in /usr/share/doc/pwc-source/ that will let you build a package and install it in a couple of steps. Ooo. Checking the pwc wiki at http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/PWC/WorkingWebcamsWithPWC , it looks like the ToUCam II uses a different driver altogether. Um... disregard everything I wrote. :-) -- Pete -- 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] recommended ip phone for experimenting with Asterisk?
Sonia Hamilton wrote: What are people's recommendations for an ip phone for experimenting with Asterisk? The book I'm reading (OReilly's Switching to VoIP) talks about a Grandstream Budgetone - what's an Australian equivalent? What about a recommended PCI card so Asterisk can communicate with the POTS? The book mentions Digium X100P. I know I don't need both; I want to experiment. I attended the SLUG talk on VoIP - back then a lot of it didn't make sense so I didn't take notes :-) You've got a few options here. - A softphone. Runs on your PC, uses SIP to talk to Asterisk. ekiga and linphone are great for this. - An analogue telephony adaptor (ATA). A little box you plug in to your LAN and lets you connect a regular analogue handset to your voip system. Again, uses SIP to talk to Asterisk. I use a Sipura SP2000 with a cheap cordless phone at home, and it works great. - A Digium PCI card. The X100P you mentioned only seems to have an FXO port, but you can get models with both FXO and FXS ports - they'll let you connect to the POTS network as well as plug in one or two analogue handsets. - An IP telephone. Again, most use the SIP protocol, but there's one or two that are starting to come out that understand IAX. I'll agree with others and say the Grandstreams are a bit dinky. But I don't have any recommendations about *good* IP handsets. :-) If you're just experimenting, I'd say stick to a softphone until you get everything sorted out. After that, well, there's not too much difference in price between an ATA and an IP handset, and the feature set is much the same unless you throw buckets of money at an IP phone (my knowledge here is a good six months out of date, though, so things might be different). Finally, O'Reilly's Asterisk: The Future of Telephony is an awesome book on how to drive asterisk, and it's under a creative commons licence - narf a copy from http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk:+The+Future+of+Telephony -- Pete -- 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] OpenGL on ATI Radeon (Ubuntu Dapper)
Erik de Castro Lopo wrote: Anyone know what package provides fglrx_dri.so? Er, do you have xorg-driver-fglrx installed? -- Pete -- 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] recommended ip phone for experimenting with Asterisk?
Penedo wrote: 2. I use Skype to call overseas too but Skype requires me to seat in front of my computer to talk to people and we virtually never hear it when people call us (we have headsets both to keep the house quiter and to avoid feedback loops). (Skype is supposed to support having the ring on one card (to which we can connect loudspeakers) and another on the headphones but I have troubles to make things work with my on-board sound card). For what it's worth, there's a proprietary Asterisk channel driver for Skype available from http://www.chanskype.com/ , and the voip-info.org guys have a bounty for an open equivalent. In theory, that'll let you call skype users from anything connected to your asterisk server. They've got a comprehensive list of assorted Skype gateways at http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Skype+Gateways In addition, I had problems getting skype to use a separate soundcard for the ringtone as well, but since upgrading to the 1.3 beta for Linux (which uses ALSA instead of OSS), this seems to be resolved. -- Pete -- 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] Is there a solution ...
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What I've lost is name virtual hosts. My router (dlink 604T) does suitable virtual hosting, but all the necessary name information is lost before it gets routed to apache2. ie router:80 - 192.168.1.254:80 Is there a way of hosting multiple sites with a router? So, what are you setting for NameVirtualHost in your apache2 config, and what do the VirtualHost sections look like? If I had to stab wildly in the dark, I'd be checking them to make sure they refer to your server's new internal IP of 192.168.1.254, and not the public address. -- Pete -- 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] OpenGL on ATI Radeon (Ubuntu Dapper)
Erik de Castro Lopo wrote: In Xorg.0.log I find: (II) LoadModule: GLcore (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libGLcore.so dlopen: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libGLcore.so: undefined symbol: __glXLastContext (EE) Failed to load /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libGLcore.so (II) UnloadModule: GLcore which according this this : https://bugs.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bug/3 is benign (although I should remove GLcore from the Modules section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf). I also have this which may or may not mean anything: (WW) fglrx(0): Specified desktop setup not supported: 8 I searched the Ubuntu forums (damn I hate web based forums) but everything there seemed to be at least a year old and highly unlikely to be relevant to Dapper. I've been keeping out of this one so far, because my ubuntu machine with an ATI card in it is nowhere near an internet connection. But it's worth checking your default colour depth, as well as the fglrx docs to see what it supports. I'm fairly sure 16 bit doesn't work, and 32 might have problems as well. I generally use 24 bit colour. -- Pete -- 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] ISP in Sydney??
Ben wrote: On 12/13/06, Nathan Eckenrode [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My wife and I are quite possibly moving to Sydney - maybe to Manly - in a couple of months. I go to school online and need a high speed connection, preferrably one with a static IP address, any recommendations for which ISP is 'best'? DISCLOSURE: I receive a commission on new services with Internode ordered through my business. If you find an area with an Agile DSLAM (Agile being Internode's sister company), you can get up to 2.5Mbps upload (starts at $70/month for 10GB) if you live close enough to the exchange) Other ISPs with ADSL2+ top out at 1.1, 1.0 or 0.5 upstream depending on how they've configured things, but may be adding support for faster uploads in the future. It's probably worth noting that, at least in theory, activating Annex M to increase upload speeds like this entails an approximately equal decrease in the maximum download speed for the service[1]. [1] - http://www.internode.on.net/adsl2/faq/annex-m.php#What_impact_does_Annex_M_have_on -- Pete -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Patching sound between different ALSA devices
Thought I might throw this one out there, as I have no idea yet where to even begin looking for information on it. I have two ALSA devices; a sound card and a USB headset. Is there any way to have sound input one one device routed and played via the other? Specifically, I've got input coming in on line in on the sound card, and I'd like to listen on my headset, without using the sound card's outputs. -- Pete -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Elementary DNS theory (Was: Re: Why DHCP ? (WAS: Re: [SLUG] My father wants an inexpensive computer))
O Plameras wrote: The authority to associate NAME to ip address has to be propagated up to the ROOT servers. You mean to say that AARNET can do this without the express approval from the owners of 203.7.132.1 ? NO, aarnet.edu.au cannot, otherwise it is against the rules and perhaps against the law. The rest of my responses is implied by the above. I'd strongly suggest you get hold of a good book on DNS, and find out how it works before trying to explain it to anybody else. I found the introductory chapters of DNS and BIND ( http://safari.oreilly.com/0596100574 ) to be most illuminating. -- Pete -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: Elementary DNS theory (Was: Re: Why DHCP ? (WAS: Re: [SLUG] My father wants an inexpensive computer))
O Plameras wrote: Ben Leslie wrote: On Thu Dec 07, 2006 at 16:52:21 +1100, O Plameras wrote: *snip* I have first, second, and third editions. I have the third edition in front of me. The book covers the technical process. Unfortunately, it does not cover the bureaucratic processes. The processes not covered by the book is the one that I am revealing to you. For example, technically aarnet.edu.au can propagate up to the ROOT Servers. Technically aarnet.edu.au doesn't need to propagate anything up to the ROOT servers. That is not the way DNS works, rather the client contacts the ROOT servers and then goes down from there (ignoring any caching). So really, aarnet.edu.au doesn't need to propagate anything at all. Do you mean once aarnet.edu.au enters www.example.aarnet.edu.au IN A 203.7.132.1 it will be propagated ? This is wrong. aarnet.edu.au is only a branch in the DNS trees. What does aarnet.edu.au has to do to propagate ? If you can answer this last question correctly then we can proceed with the discussion. How does a query propagate? Well, to paraphrase Section 2.6.2 of that book that's right in front of you(*): - The local nameserver gets a request for www.example.aarnet.edu.au. It doesn't know where this is, but it does know where all the root nameservers are. So it picks one of those and asks it. - The root nameserver says, no, I have no idea where www.example.aarnet.edu.au is. But I do have this list of nameservers that are authoritative for the .au domain, maybe one of them can help you. The local nameserver picks one, and sends the query for www.example.aarnet.edu.au to it. - The .au nameserver says, no, I have no idea where www.example.aarnet.edu.au is. But I do have this list of nameservers that are authoritative for the edu.au domain, maybe one of them can help you. The local nameserver picks one, and sends the query for www.example.aarnet.edu.au to it. - The edu.au nameserver says, no, I have no idea where www.example.aarnet.edu.au is. But I do have this list of nameservers that are authoritative for the aarnet.edu.au domain, maybe one of them can help you. The local nameserver picks one, and sends the query for www.example.aarnet.edu.au to it. Do you see where this is going? The query keeps propagating down different levels until it finally hits a server who says Ooo! I *know* this one! and replies. It sounds like a lot of traffic, but the local nameserver also caches all of those replies it got along the way to resolving that query. So if the next query it gets is for, say, www.monash.edu.au, the local nameserver will say I don't know where that is, but I've already got this list of .edu.au nameservers that is still fresh in my cache, I'll ask one of those. In a perfect world, the root servers wouldn't get that much traffic at all, really, thanks to caching. But there's a *lot* of poorly configured nameservers out there. http://www.bind9.net/dnshealth/ makes the claim that 98% of queries to the root servers are unnecessary, and is full of lots of other interesting DNS-related factoids. Anyway, the point of all of this is, *all* of the propagation in DNS happens downwards. The root nameservers seriously don't know the first thing about subdomains of aarnet.edu.au, and you can verify this by sending a non-recursive query to one (using the +norecurse option to dig, for example). Not only do they not know whether a particular subdomain exists, they really don't care whether the object it resolves to (not all DNS records are IP addresses...) belongs to the domain owner, or Dexter Plameras, or whether it even exists on the public Internet at all. I desperately hope this clears up any misunderstandings. * I have the fourth edition. May be slightly different for others. Cheers, -- Pete -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: Why DHCP ? (WAS: Re: [SLUG] My father wants an inexpensive computer)
O Plameras wrote: For a long time, I had wanted to ask: why use DHCP in home networks when one can use STATIC ip (using private network ip addresses)? Is it not that DHCP is mainly used in situations with the following combinations of circumstances ? 1. Networks with large numbers of workstations that are not permanently on line (e.g. customers-workstations-of ISP that connect only when required). 3. There are more workstations (customers) than there are public ip numbers available in an ISP. These are both valid uses, although I'm curious to know what happened to number 2. :-) 4. Prevent customers of ISP from running WWW(FTP,MTA,etc) sites without paying for fixed ip number(s). Sorry? How does a dynamic address help here? Dynamic DNS services make actually locating a service a snap. Only effective firewalling prevents access to the service. But, to answer your question, DHCP makes networking easy. Routers come preconfigured with working DHCP server. All the user has to know is to plug in to the switch and configure their computer to find an IP address automatically. Seeing as that's the default for Windows and most Linux installers, home networking has become pretty much a no-brainer unless you *want* to get your hands dirty in it. -- Pete -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: Why DHCP ? (WAS: Re: [SLUG] My father wants an inexpensive computer)
O Plameras wrote: Peter Hardy wrote: O Plameras wrote: 4. Prevent customers of ISP from running WWW(FTP,MTA,etc) sites without paying for fixed ip number(s). Sorry? How does a dynamic address help here? Dynamic DNS services make actually locating a service a snap. Only effective firewalling prevents access to the service. Clarification; prevent users from using the services for profit without paying for public ip addresses. For users to access a WWW site say, 'www.domain.com.au'(FQDN) one must have DNS entries in one or more DNS servers with 'www.domain.com.au' with ip address like 203.7.132.1 or 'www.domain.com.au' with ip address like 203.7.132.0/32, etc. Of course, users can put ip address instead of FQDN but it means that each time your server is disconnected and re-connected the users have to use different ip addresses to access your service. Not suitable for commercial operations. If you have an alternative can you show us ? Uh, I mentioned dynamic DNS in passing earlier. The Linux DHCP client has hooks built in to issue DNS updates whenever it gets a new lease. Another alternative is a daemon that polls the IP address and updates a service like http://dyndns.org/ whenever it notices the IP address changing. I'm using one of these to point casa.dyndns.tv at my ADSL link, which is notorious for changing its address a dozen times on a bad day. But the hostname always resolves to the current address, and there's very little stopping me from registering, say, stibbonsmegacorp.com, putting a zone on an external name server (like, say, the free service offered by xname.org), and CNAMEing it to my dyndns hostname. No, I don't consider it terribly suitable for a commercial operation either, but there's no pressing technical reason why not. But really, this is getting why out of scope for a discussion on DHCP. But, to answer your question, DHCP makes networking easy. Routers come preconfigured with working DHCP server. All the user has to know is to plug in to the switch and configure their computer to find an IP address automatically. Seeing as that's the default for Windows and most Linux installers, home networking has become pretty much a no-brainer unless you *want* to get your hands dirty in it. OK for off-the-shelf routers. What about Linux boxes configured as routers because one does not wish to pay anymore for a black-box modem/router apart from just ADSL modem ? One still has to configure DHCP. ...then there's a good chance that you *want* to get your hands dirty in networking. But, if not, configuring a DHCP server means you only have to do your network setup once. -- Pete -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] SNAT and Masquerading
John Clarke wrote: I should have also said that if the dual-homed host has a static address on eth1 then you should use SNAT instead of MASQUERADE: iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.0.0/24 -o eth1 -j SNAT \ --to-source 10.0.0.1 Something that I've always wondered about, but never taken the time to investigate: why is SNAT preferable to MASQUERADE? -- Pete -- 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] NAT stuff
Scott Waller (Lots of Watts) wrote: and I want to let all the computers on eth0 network to talk to an internet connection on the 10.0.0.1 network, how would I use iptables and/or NAT to make this happen? I have a theory but haven't tested it yet: Why not? :-) iptables -A FORWARD -j MASQUERADE -o eth0 -t nat I think I am missing something.??? Close. -o specifies the *output* interface. So it should be -o eth1 . In addition, the nat table doesn't have a FORWARD builtin chain. You should be using POSTROUTING instead. The man page for iptables is fairly comprehensive. It's also worth checking out the netfilter docs at http://netfilter.org/documentation/ . The NAT HOWTO covers precisely this situation; http://netfilter.org/documentation/HOWTO//NAT-HOWTO-4.html#ss4.1 Cheers, -- Pete -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
