January 2008 - main

[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : The Milestone, Woodbridge Road
by samwise 17 Mar '08

17 Mar '08

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- The monthly "Third Monday" ALUG Ipswich Social Meeting is back next week (Monday 17th December) at 20:00: The Milestone Beer House 5 Woodbridge Road IPSWICH IP4 2EA Tel: 01473 252425 Map/Directions URI: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=IP4+2EA At 20:30, however, many of us will be going to Mr. Wing's for a Christmas buffet: Mr. Wing 7 St Helens Street IPSWICH Suffolk IP4 1HE Tel: 01473 212884 or 212885 Google Maps: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=IP4+1HE We'll return to The Milestone after we've eaten - probably at about half nine, but to be sure where we are, feel free to call one of our attendees. If you need a mobile no. for one of them, request it on the main mailing list. Both The Milestone pub and Mr. Wing's are in the centre of Ipswich, near the now-defunct Odeon cinema and not far from The Regent Theatre. There is more information on the venue, including car parking info, on the ALUG wiki: http://www.alug.org.uk/wiki/moin.cgi/Meetings All are welcome, novices and experienced users. Hopefully, it shouldn't be too hard to find the pack, look for those huddled around a laptop! Feel free to ask for further information on the Main ALUG mailing list. This month's meeting is the Xmas celebration. On top of that, I have some more games working under Linux, including both Simon the Sorcerer's in ScummVM, and American McGee's Alice and Road Rash in WINE. Finally, we've invited along a guest who we hope will be bringing along his OpenMoko phone - the Linux geek's equivalent to the iPhone (albeit it doesn't quite make calls yet!). Hope to see you there, Peter. ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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Re: [ALUG] Linux can't connect to the Internet
by CDW (Linux) 13 Feb '08

13 Feb '08

(Ted Harding) wrote: > On 19-Aug-07 18:17:50, CDW (Linux) wrote: >> (Ted Harding) wrote: >>> There's a lot of possibilities for this! >>> >>> One thing to look at is whether you have a default gateway set up >>> in Linux. If (as root) you enter the command >>> >>> route >>> >>> you should see somthing like >>> >>> Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface >>> 192.168.1.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0 >>> 127.0.0.0 * 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo >>> default 192.168.1.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0 >>> >>> where the "192.168.1.1" should be replaced by the IP address of >>> your actual router. If you don't get a "default" line in the output >>> from "route" then nothing for outside will get to the router. >> I get the following :- >> Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface >> 192.168.1.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 10 0 0 eth0 >> 169.254.0.0 * 255.255.0.0 U 10 0 0 eth0 >> 127.0.0.0 * 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo >> default 192.168.1.51 0.0.0.0 UG 10 0 0 eth0 >> >> Ah. I've just noticed that there's a 169.254.0.0 address in my list. >> That would appear to come from a DHCP config but I purposely didn't >> set that so would that be stopping it working? If so, how do I remove >> it? > > I don't think it matters. I get the same too (on a Red Hat 9 system) > without any DHCP going on. It's supposed, I think, to represent some > alternative network numbering, and as far as I know is simply a dummy. Thanks for that info. -- __ __| |_ __ __ .-----------------------------------------------. / _/ _` \ V V / | mailto:cdw_alug@the-walker-household.co.uk | \__\__,_|\_/\_/ |_______________________________________________|

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hosts.allow syntax
by Jenny Hopkins 05 Feb '08

05 Feb '08

Hullo there, I've got ("have taken over") a hosts.allow file as below: ftp: ALL cvspserver: ALL svn: ALL sshd: ALL telnet: ALL ALL: <domain-we-allow>.co.uk ALL: LOCAL I don't understand why if the ALL keyword is called in the first half, aliases are then described in the second. Surely ALL means just that? What I want is for the cvspserver to be ALL and the others to be restricted to LOCAL and <domain-we-allow>.co.uk. No matter what I try with wildcard *, UNKNOWN, etc, the hosts.allow will only allow anonymous cvs log in with adding ALL:ALL at the bottom, which I don't want to do obviously. Sorry to not rtfm; I have done but it sort of went in one ear and out of the other leaving a puffy pink cloud in the middle. Thanks, Jenny

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Characters on screen wrong using SSH
by Barry Samuels 01 Feb '08

01 Feb '08

When I use SSH to log in to a remote machine and use something like Aptitude or MC on the remote machine some of the characters on the screen e.g IBM box characters appear as something else which makes the screen difficult to read. Is there a way to cure this? -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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Backup servers (r)synchronised between sites
by Mark Rogers 31 Jan '08

31 Jan '08

I have two sites that are Internet connected via standard ADSL, and that want to have a simple backup server in each site that uses the other site to store an off-site redundant copy of the data. I plan a Linux server at each site, each with a small o/s drive and two pairs of large SATA drives using software RAID (one pair for each site). That combination should give a good idea of the budget available for this.... Forget hot-swap SCSI drives on hardware raid cards etc! I can easily see how I could rsync the first raid array on site A ("A:md0") across to B:md0, and B:md1 to A:md1. Where I need advice is picking the best backup approach for the users at each site to use to populate their respective backup storage in the first place. (Most of the users will of-course be using Windows, and should be treated as untrained monkeys for the sake of this project.) Given the bandwidth limited ADSL link between the two sites (but with high off-peak limits) I need a backup method which does not cause rsync to needlessly send unchanged data. If I used something like Cobian Backup to create incremental backups, although the disk space usage would be relatively small the periodic full backups will cause rsync to send full backups across the link even though 90% of the content of those backups will already have been synchronised previously. I've seen solutions that use hardlinks between identical files to provide rolling backups on Linux, but I need to support Windows. Any suggestions? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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PDA to use with Linux?
by Jan T. Kim 30 Jan '08

30 Jan '08

Dear All, my Palm Tungsten is getting increasingly short of breath (battery life) and so I think of getting a successor. I'd like a handheld of some sort that * uses flash memory (i.e. permanent storage that survives battery outages) * interoperates with Linux (the Palm can be backed up and restored using pilot-xfer, but I've not found anything useful to work with the data in the *.pdb ("Palm Database") files) * is small (the Zaurus SL-C palmtops seem interesting to me in many ways, but I think they're just a bit too bulky for shirt pockets, and also, they're quite expensive) * provides a decent choice of software for contacts, diary keeping, and (ideally) an advanced "To Do" tool that understands dependency graphs and integrates with the diary Any recommendations / experiences / comments? Please let me know. Best regards, Jan -- +- Jan T. Kim -------------------------------------------------------+ | email: jtk(a)cmp.uea.ac.uk | | WWW: http://www.cmp.uea.ac.uk/people/jtk | *-----=< hierarchical systems are for files, not for humans >=-----*

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TV adapter
by Barry Samuels 29 Jan '08

29 Jan '08

I would like to get a Hauppauge WinTV Nova T 500 adapter which I understand works with Linux. That's the easy part. It would be very inconvenient to install it in my desktop because it would require a connection to a TV aerial socket and I don't have one near my desktop. My idea would be to assemble another computer using some spare parts that I have together with some parts that I would have to re-aquire. I say 're-aquire' because I would have had all the necessary parts if I hadn't given away a lot of them (CPUs, hard drives, RAM) to a local computer recycling charity a few months ago. Why is it that one does not have a use for these parts until they've gone? I'm assuming that if I assemble the said computer with the TV adapter in it (putting it near a TV aerial socket) and can connect wirelessly to my desktop then I could access the TV adapter from my desktop using something like MythTV. Would such a thing be possible? I would be looking at a minimal install of Linux on the new box with all the processing done on my desktop. This would assume that I could connect the two boxes using nothing more than a wireless adapter in each i.e. no router. My desktop has an on- board wireless adapter and I have two spare PCI adapters one of which I could use in the new box. Is it possible to get two wireless adapters to communicate in this way? Would that be fast enough to cope with the data from the TV adapter? What sort of specification for the new machine would be required? I have a Gigabyte GA-7ZXE mainboard which takes a Socket A Athlon (which I would have to aquire) and it takes PC-133 SDRam (which I would also have to aquire). What's the minimum RAM I would need? I would also need to aquire an IDE hard drive. What's the minimum size I could get away with? I wouldn't normally want to use a screen or keyboard after the machine has been setup - would that cause problems when booting? What else haven't I thought of? -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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Cube cases ???
by James Freer 26 Jan '08

26 Jan '08

Be grateful if someone could comment from their experience of building PC's. I've been thinking about building one of these. I used to like the slim desktop as they were a convenient size - until i noticed the more recent ones have low profile pci card slots which i'm not so keen on. The cube case takes a standard power supply and standard pci cards - so i've had a look at a few. Looking at ebuyer i noticed this cheaper one and the comments a purchaser has made - a lot of ????? and yet 4 stars. For the price it seems a fair enough case... I couldn't make out what he was getting at... perhaps i'm just thick... if it's bad i've seen far worse!!!! comments please? http://www.ebuyer.com/product/135583 also #135581, 135582 slight variations it would appear in the comments is the following link http://forum.coolaler.com/showthread.php?t=171184 james

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Broken Gnome/Metacity account - how to fix?
by Martyn Drake 25 Jan '08

25 Jan '08

Hello, Having ham-fisted my way through trying to fix a knackered user account on RHEL 5 that is using Gnome/Metacity (i.e. the RedHat desktop), I can't seem to copy a set of healthy files across - the WM still moans about missing files and the what not. Is there a utility that I could run to re-generate a set of default working files so that the user can at least re-do their old settings manually? I confess ignorance to Gnome/Metacity, but then again, I'm not one for using Linux on the desktop these days, so I'm a bit out of practice.. Regards, Martyn

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Extracting from mbox files
by Mark Rogers 25 Jan '08

25 Jan '08

I need to extract some emails from a 600MB .mbox file, which is >99% spam. Its a dspam quarantine box that's gone unpruned and now has some emails I need to remove from the quarantine, and the whole mbox file can be deleted afterwards. Any suggestions? This is on a server to which I have SSH root access, so pretty much any non-GUI tools are open to me. I have tools that will handle it in principle, just not now its that size (eg the dpsam web UI tools would be OK if I could just remove everything older than the last couple of weeks first). So an mbox pruning tool would be fine too. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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