main January 2007

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30 participants
26 discussions

Crontab
by Barry Samuels 06 Jan '07

06 Jan '07

I get messages in my logs like this: Jan 4 00:00:04 localhost /usr/bin/crontab[20339]: (root) AUTH (crontab command not allowed) every day at midnight, 3:00 AM and 8:00 AM and I'm damned if I can find out what's generating them. Anyone with any bright ideas? -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

1 0

ALUG Annual Nosh - RSVP
by sfr 03 Jan '07

03 Jan '07

Votes from those who replied were for 8 February, so we shall meet for a meal before/during the February monthly pubmeet at the Reindeer, Norwich. Please reply with yes (how many) or no. You can reply just to me if you don't want to clutter the list. Please reply even if it's no, because then there will be an audit trail; some people have said yes or no in person and I'm easily confused. I'll take numbers at the January pubmeet and book the table. -- sfr

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How to manage domain names on an ADSL connection?
by cl＠isbd.net 03 Jan '07

03 Jan '07

I have my Slackware Linux box connected to the outside world via a Speedtouch router. The router firewall is set up to allow incoming ssh and http connections to the Slackware box. Currently my ADSL is UKFSN/ENTANet and I have a static IP address, the domain name is 84-45-228-40.no-dns-yet.enta.net. I have a number of more useful/memorable/long-lived domains registered, some of which are hosted and some are not. Currently I have isbd.ltd.uk registered with justthename.co.uk and HTTP requests are redirected to 84-45-228-40.no-dns-yet.enta.net. This works sort of OK in the main but it's far from perfect because my Slackware box doesn't really know whether it's 84-45-228-40.no-dns-yet.enta.net or [www].isbd.ltd.uk. What's the easiest and/or neatest way of sorting this out? Obviously my basic requirement is to make my slackware box think it's isbd.ltd.uk and to hide 84-45-228-40.no-dns-yet.enta.net completely. I currently have www.isbd.ltd.uk in the following places on my slackware system:- /etc/HOSTNAME /etc/hosts at the appropriate private IP address /etc/apache/httpd.conf as the ServerName value However this causes various minor issues and infelicities, for example TWiki complains about a mismatch in the HTTP_HOST environment variable when run locally. I'd also prefer not to have to put 84-45-228-40.no-dns-yet.enta.net anywhere in HTML etc. So, what's the proper and/or best and/or easiest way to sort this out? It's really only the HTTP issues that I want/need to resolve, can Apache virtual hosting do anything for me - I suspect not as that is only if I have multiple IP addresses *actually* resolving to my machine. I don't really want to go to the extent of making my Slackware machine host isbd.ltd.uk completely as that involves DNS, MX records and all sorts of complicated things like that. I just want 'transparent' forwarding of HTTP requests. -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

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This is the ultimate in "object oriented" programming????
by cl＠isbd.net 02 Jan '07

02 Jan '07

So I have been playing a little with Ruby on Rails. I have it up and running and it works in a way but I'm totally unconvinced that it's the answer to the ultimate question - or even the answer to writing database apps for the web. Here's one little bit of code from a *very simple* tutorial example:- <html> <head> <title>My todo list</title> </head> <body> Not done:<br /> <%= display_items(@not_done) %> <p> <hr size=3> <p> Done:<br /> <%= display_items(@done) %> <hr size=3> <form method="post" action="add_item"> New item: <%= text_field("new_item", "description") %> <input type="submit" value="Add item"> </form> </body> </html> If that's either structured or object oriented then I'm a purple hippopotamus! :-) I think the fundamental problem is that HTML is a mess, until such time as that can be hidden somehow then I think we're stuck with rubbish like the above. I was hoping that Ruby on Rails helped hide some of the above junk but apparently not. Sorry - just felt like a bit of a rant! :-) -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

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I've just realised what I really want re: database/web design
by cl＠isbd.net 02 Jan '07

02 Jan '07

Just a thought really, I don't think any such thing exists. What I'd *really* like is a Wiki (or something like it) which also has database access facilities. By that I don't mean a Wiki which stores its data in a database but a Wiki which allows me to design forms for database access as well as writing 'ordinary' web pages. -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

1 1

weird slowdown....
by Peter Alcibiades 01 Jan '07

01 Jan '07

Have you had or heard of odd behaviour apparently, at least partly, from the combination of Firefox and Gnome? After visiting a site to find out who an apparently well known singer is, I found FF paging through previous pages of its own volition, and the system as a whole hanging and slowing down. The site (devoted to one Lily Allen if it helps) kept reappearing, but the same thing happened also with the Independent site, several pages of which suddenly reappeared in the middle of reading OSNews. I thought it must be something nefarious, but what? The Independent? It seemed to hang on OSN while waiting for bilbo.counted. System Monitor doesn't reveal anything very odd, though there are spikes on the graph of 30% cpu usage, when the process table shows nothing using more than a few percent, and that is mainly system monitor itself. Moving to Konqueror didn't help. Deleting all cookies and turning off Java and Javascript didn't help. Epiphany didn't help. It happened a bit with OO but not to anything like the same extent. I more or less fixed it finally by moving to KDE. But the runaway process indicator occasionally pops up and warns about Firefox, if the threshold is set to 20%. This is on Etch AMD64, a reasonably decent Sempron with 1G memory, which of course has FF 1.5, not 2.0. Fully up to date. This am in fact, it just updated a bunch of stuff, including CUPS. Any ideas what it could be or on what else to check? I am also getting slowdowns while typing this into Kmail, which is also generating one of those warnings.... Crazy. How can it take 20%+ of cpu just to handle a few text entries? Peter

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