November 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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"thumbnail"-type application
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 23 Dec '08

23 Dec '08

Hi Folks, I'm looking for an application (preferably light-weight) which sould do the following kind of thing. I have a good number of images (*.jpg) stored in sub-directories of sundry directories. The main directory names are rather generic (e.g. a regional location, or names of friends or family). The subdirectories are fairly specific and can descend to very spcific (e.g. a sub-sub-sub-directory with just a date, like "2007.03.05"). I'd like to be able to whistle up screenfuls of thumbnails, possible grouped thematically, with a property like being able to "hover" the mouse over a thumbnail and get a little pop-up with the date of the photo and a brief description. There's an implication, therefore, that there's a kind of basic database engine behind it, together with the "pop-up on hover" capacility. There's no shortage of applications capable of making a bunch of thumbnails (especially from a single directory), but I'm not aware of a light-weight application with the above capability. Gthumb does (clumsily) the sort of thing I'm after, so I could think of using it on machines with Gnome, but not, e.g. on KDE machines. Ideally, in a main directory I would do something like find . -name '*.jpg' -print > image.list edit the file image.list to remove uwanted stuff, and then submit this file to the thumbnail viewer. As an example of scale, one major directory has 4 principal subdirectories hanging off it, with sundry sub-dirs of these, and a total of 170 images. Another is similar, with 150 images. On could probably write something suitable in Tcl/Tk, butit would be nice to find one ready-made! Suggestions welcome. With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 09-Nov-08 Time: 09:07:15 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Issue/Bug Tracking Systems
by Mark Rogers 03 Dec '08

03 Dec '08

I have just found out that a client is looking at bug/issue management systems, with the ones they've mentioned being Axosoft, Track Studio and Projector. (All but the latter are easy to find online, I've not found Projector's website). The client will be using them, I believe, to track maintenance and other issues on their site (ie not software bugs). Are there any good FOSS alternatives I should suggest to them or should I stay out of their way? I suspect that none of the off-the-shelf packages will do what they want and a FOSS option would make it easier to modify, but the other suggestion of building something from scratch will probably be a big uphill struggle unless it turns out they have very simple needs. -- 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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Migrating e-mail _to_ pst
by Dan Hatton 28 Nov '08

28 Nov '08

(I guess this is about half on-topic. Apologies for the other half.) I'm helping out a user who would like to migrate from Evolution to Outlook. Which means I'll need a tool that works something like readpst in reverse. Can anyone suggest such a tool, please? Thanks, Dan

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Display error when switching to console from X
by Chris G 27 Nov '08

27 Nov '08

I'm running xubuntu 8.10 (though I suspect the problem is common to all 8.10 ubuntu versions). I can run X fairly reliably though I do have some issues when logging in and out presumably due to switching resolutions. However switching to a console using CTRL/ALT/F1 (or any of the others) doesn't work. I just get an error message from my monitor saying the resolution is invalid. My monitor is a Dell 2001FP capable of up to 1600x1200 so I suspect that the CTRL/ALT/F1 is switching to a totally impossible resolution. How can I fix this problem? Is there any way to specify the mode and resolution to use for the text mode consoles? -- Chris Green

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[Fwd: Re: Display error when switching to console from X]
by Stevey.eu 27 Nov '08

27 Nov '08

On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 11:03:46AM +0000, Stevey.eu wrote: > > Chris G wrote: >> >> I'm running xubuntu 8.10 (though I suspect the problem is common to >> >> all 8.10 ubuntu versions). >> >> I can run X fairly reliably though I do have some issues when logging >> >> in and out presumably due to switching resolutions. >> >> However switching to a console using CTRL/ALT/F1 (or any of the >> >> others) doesn't work. I just get an error message from my monitor >> >> saying the resolution is invalid. My monitor is a Dell 2001FP capable >> >> of up to 1600x1200 so I suspect that the CTRL/ALT/F1 is switching to a >> >> totally impossible resolution. >> >> How can I fix this problem? Is there any way to specify the mode and >> >> resolution to use for the text mode consoles? >> >> > > Chris, > > > > Ever considered trying www.google.com it is a marvelous invention. > > Strangely enough I am familiar with Google, I'd recommend using www.google.co.uk personally, it does offer advantages for UK users sometimes (although not in this case of course). I have spent quite a lot of time searching around using Google on this issue and have follwed a few leads but I don't have a solution yet. Asking on alug was just another approach. -- Chris Green

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What does 'seahorse' actually do?
by Chris G 27 Nov '08

27 Nov '08

Having just changed my login password on my new Linux box I have discovered that there's an application called 'seahorse' lurking in the background. After changing my password seahorse pops up a window when you log in to X demanding that you enter a password - what it's asking for is the *old* password which it has stashed away somewhere itself. What isn't clear though is what seahorse is for and reading the Help is no 'help' at all, it just tells you how to drive the program, which is fine in itself but doesn't help me at all in working out what it does. Can anyone here help? Does seahorse do the same as ssh-agent? Does it do it 'automagically' when you log in to X using your login password? I've found the seahorse home page http://projects.gnome.org/seahorse/index.html and that tells me just about nothing. The best there is (on the 'about' page) is:- With seahorse you can... * Create and manage PGP keys * Create and manage SSH keys * Publish and retrive keys from key servers * Cache your passphrase so you don't have to keep typing it * Backup your keys and keyring * more... It's rather a fundamental security thing to 'just happen' behind your back! -- Chris Green

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sSMTP
by Torben Stones 26 Nov '08

26 Nov '08

I'm trying to setup sSMTP on a small home server, so that I can get the output from the cron jobs e-mailed to me. I believe that I've got it all setup correctly, as the message seems to be sent, but I'm never reciving anything. The config is so that every thing is sent to my gmail account and I'm useing smtp.googlemail.com as the smtp server. I'm trying to test using the command echo "Hello from sSMTP" | sendmail -v root >From the output it looks like it is working OK, but nothing ever arives. Has anyone set this up using google and/or does anyone have any idea as what I can check next. Thanks Torben -- You've got a lot of choices in your life. If getting out of bed in the morning is a chore and you're not smiling on a regular basis, try another choice.

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PHP memory limit problem
by Chris G 25 Nov '08

25 Nov '08

I need to raise my memory limit as an upgrade of Gallery2 is failing due to running out of memory. I've increased the memory_limit in /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini to 256M but something else is preventing this from working. Running phpinfo() shows the following information (among other things):- Loaded Configuration File /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini additional .ini files parsed /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/gd.ini, /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/mcrypt.ini, /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/mysql.ini, /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/mysqli.ini, /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/pdo.ini, /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/pdo_mysql.ini Local Value Master Value memory_limit 24M 256M So, what's reducing the "Local Value" to 24M? There's nothing in those other "additional .ini files parsed", has apache2 got some sort of limit of its own somewhere? How can I find what's limiting it? -- Chris Green

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Security - part II
by Chris G 25 Nov '08

25 Nov '08

I.e. thoughts and questions on backups. Continuing on from making my system secure against the most likely attacks etc. I need to make backups of the 'important' data. Currently I backup from my main server system (the pre-update one at the moment) to a system on the home LAN in the garage. The garage is a fair way from the house so in the event of a serious disaster (e.g. a fire) it should survive. I also backup the *most* important files off-site to my account at my hosting provider. At the moment these backups are 'pushed' from the main system, i.e. it is cron in that system that runs the backups. This requires that I have passwordless access to the destination system and here I see a hole! If a hacker got into my main system [s]he could immediately gain access to the backup destinations as well and destroy data there. How can one overcome this issue? I can see a partial way around it for the LAN backups, I can remove the passwordless access to the system in the garage and change to a 'pull' backup that is run by cron on the garage system. The garage system can have passwordless access to the main system to enable this, there's no access through the firewall to the garage system so a hacker would need to guess the garage system passwords to get to it. This at least provides another layer of pretection against malicious attacks. However I can see no way to pretect the off-site (across the internet) backups from similar attacks. If the shell account at my hosting provider was to have passwordless access to my home system that would lay me open to all sorts of malicious attacks so obviously that's not possible so I can't use the 'pull' backup from there. If I'm going to backup as at present the passwordless access to the off-site system needs to remain and therefore is open to a malicious attacker. It occurs to me that I could *possibly* do the backups from the garage system to the off-site system, that would improve things somewhat. How does the world at large do backups to remote systems without incurring security problems? -- Chris Green

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