October 2008 - main

recommended commercial hosting companies?
by mbm 23 Jan '09

23 Jan '09

The recent discussion about mail access via ssh and ssh tunnels prompts me to ask about list members' experience of commercial hosting services. I have long since ceased to have any direct responsiblity for publicly accessible servers and my only network is now my home system. As I have said in earlier posts, I don't run 24/7 servers on that network and my only public servers are those provided by my (limited, home user) 1and1 contract. However, I have recently been playing with egroupware and a few friends and colleagues have asked if I could make the poc system I have built at home available on a public server. 1and1 provide good, reliable, fast, mail, DNS and web services, but they also offer virtual servers for the home user at around 15 UKP pcm. The other likely looking candidate is fasthosts who are a lot cheaper, have no traffic cap, but have different limitations. What I am looking for is a good quality commercial provider offering the following: root ssh/sftp access to a linux server apache/mysql/php/perl (preferably with no limit on the number of mysql databases, but I'd settle for 5 rather than the typical 1). ssl certificates for the webserver personal DNS management ideally local email server not too many restrictions on the outbound traffic (e.g. I'd like to be able to ssh out as well as in...) Any recommendations? TIA Mick --------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a Microsoft free zone. Please do not send me Microsoft Word Documents. For some reasons, see: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html http://www.goldmark.org/netrants/no-word/attach.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------

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help with wpa_supplicant please
by CDW (Linux) 02 Nov '08

02 Nov '08

Can I say first off that I'm trying to make wpa_supplicant work with DesktopBSD so apologies if some of you feel I shouldn't be asking for help here. I have an old IBM Thinkpad and having tried various brands of Linux, DesktopBSD was the only OS that installed correcly. I then wanted to make it to talk to my other machines which meant networking. It doesn't have a LAN port so I bought what I thought was a good wireless card. I was wrong. It's a Netgear WG511v2 and I've had to install it using ndisgen. I can get the thing to recognise my wireless LAN and if I run ifconfig, it reports :- ndis0: flags=8842<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 ether 00:1b:2f:d0:69:59 media: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet autoselect (DS/11Mbps) status: associated ssid ss2_scanning channel 11 bssid 00:0f:3d:34:d6:f6 authmode WPA privacy OFF txpowmax 100 bmiss 7 My /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf file looks like this ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant ctrl+interface_group=wheel network={ ssid="ss2_scanning" proto=WPA key_mgmt=WPA-PSK pairwise=TKIP group=TKIP psk="c:(vo.............$-" } So the question is, does the psk data have to be in quotes and in hex? If so, how do I translate my ascii line into hex? I've read lots and lots of stuff online about all this and to be honest, I'm thoroughly confused. I'd appreciate any help. -- __ __| |_ __ __ .-----------------------------------------------. / _/ _` \ V V / | mailto:cdw_alug@the-walker-household.co.uk | \__\__,_|\_/\_/ |_______________________________________________|

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Print Postage (Royal Mail)
by Steve Fosdick 31 Oct '08

31 Oct '08

Has anyone had occasion to use the "Print Postage" service from Royal Mail? Does it reply on installing any proprietry software on your PC (including Adobe Flash) or is it usable from a normal web browser? Regards, Steve.

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Firefox 3
by Peter Alcibiades 31 Oct '08

31 Oct '08

Just upgraded to this. Am I alone in finding it very disconcerting? In fact, its so disconcerting that I'm seriously thinking of migrating to Konqueror. First there is the way fonts behave. Completely weird. Large spaces between words. It looks sort of like monospace, but for words, and the spacing on the page of a chunk of prose is weird. Tinkering at great length with the fonts helped a bit, I finally found one of the MS ones that looks not normal, but relatively bearable. Then there is the way that they have helpfully made the tab closures look all the same, whether for the open tab or others, so you can no longer see easily by the fact that the active one is red which it is. Then some pages simply don't display properly - ones which used to in 2.x That is, chunks of them are simply missing. 90% of the themes do not work with 3.x yet, so your ability to change any of the appearance is limited. Perhaps most disconcerting is the way autocompletion now seems to work. When you type in a url, it produces a list of suggestions in large font, with legends under them, most of which appear not to have been ones you've previously visited, and most of which I have no intention of ever visiting. It feels like a sort of weird spam. What on earth was wrong with just giving you a list in some reasonably sized and neutral font? Is there any way to get back to that? And is this actually advertising? Its hard to see that it could be, since many of the links are to sites that would likely not pay. Is it some idiot's idea of how to be helpful? I'd be on K now, except for the fact that migrating the bookmarks is a horrendous process. K seems to do imports in such a way that you end up with everything on one huge page which totally occupies the screen. Why it cannot simply import them in the folders they are in....! Or is this just me? Does everyone else think its the bees knees, the dogs unmentionables and so on? Peter

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Firefox 3
by Peter Alcibiades 31 Oct '08

31 Oct '08

Here is another weird thing. Downloading, everything slows to a halt - FF at least. You can't open another site without a 5-10 second delay. Then after a short period speed falls from the normally scintillating tiscali 120k to around 5k. Gradually. Is this sounding like memory leak? Peter

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Firefox 3
by Peter Alcibiades 31 Oct '08

31 Oct '08

Wayne, it is really weird. This am Slax looks just fine. Then I go to another site, Climate Audit, look at the first post which contains some graphs. They are all black. Click on them, the enlarged versions are all just fine. Go back, the smaller ones are totally black. Close FF and restart it again, now they display perfectly with a white background. Its not the settings of the background or colors either, because when I checked use system colors, the charts did not change, but most everything else turned black! The right thing must be to uninstall and then reinstall probably. Very odd. Peter

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Firefox 3
by Peter Alcibiades 29 Oct '08

29 Oct '08

What doesn't display? Slax org of all things! The page itself displays, but in the background and around the edges there is a sort of collage of other bits of Firefox. Iceweasel actually. Repeated several times over. Only way to get to the page is with.... Konqueror! Maybe I have to get it from Mozilla direct, this one is an upgrade from the Debian Lenny repository. Peter

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Re: [ALUG] Intercepting TCP comms
by David Reynolds 29 Oct '08

29 Oct '08

On 29 Oct 2008, at 11:05 am, Mark Rogers wrote: > In contrast, netcat seems to need scripts to be written to spawn > processes when connections are made and is altogether more complicated > for this task than socat. If it weren't for the pointers to netcat I'd > not have found it, though, so thanks again all! We did have a chat about that in IRC and it was pointed out that Netcat might not be able to make to do it without a script. At least it was some help in enabling you to find socat ;) -- David Reynolds david(a)reynoldsfamily.org.uk

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Intercepting TCP comms
by Mark Rogers 29 Oct '08

29 Oct '08

I'm trying to write some application code which will communicate via a TCP connection to a device. I have complete control of my application (which runs on a server to which I have SSH access) and no control of the device. At the moment my comms code is not working and I want to debug it at a binary level. For sake of argument, let's say the server connects to port 10000 on the device. I want to (a) listen on port 10000 on my desktop, (b) configure the server to think the device is my desktop, (c) forward any data I get on port 10000 to port 10000 on the device, and send any replies back whilst (d) logging everything going to/from the device. Any suggestions as to how I might do this? Or some suitable terminology to Google for? My desktop is Ubuntu and I have the luxury of a GUI there if I need it. The application is a Modbus/TCP driver for an industrial unit if anyone is interested. The protocol is simple, but binary. -- 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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Re: [ALUG] Firefox 3
by Bev Nicolson 28 Oct '08

28 Oct '08

<<Just upgraded to this. Am I alone in finding it very disconcerting?>> <<Perhaps most disconcerting is the way autocompletion now seems to work.>> It was bit odd the first time I upgraded. I couldn't see how to go back several pages it's all become clear now. The spellcheck feature is a genius idea so that also helped to win me round. I don't mind the autocomplete feature. Most of the suggestions are of url's that I have typed in or looked at recently. The only wrinkle in this otherwise delightful browser is its tendancy to pick unicode/whatever for the character encoding so the question mark in the diamond appears where a pound sign should be etc. It can be changed manually but it has to be done fairly frequently as there is no option to save the setting. Sigh. I hope this gets fixed. Bev. -- _______________________________________________ Surf the Web in a faster, safer and easier way: Download Opera 9 at http://www.opera.com Powered by Outblaze

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