main January 2009

main@lists.alug.org.uk

32 participants
29 discussions

Trying to get rid of dollar symbol for pound sterling symbol
by Jenny Hopkins 24 Feb '09

24 Feb '09

Hi All, Happy New Year! I'm trying to replace the $ symbol on a friend's laptop with a £. The laptop is American, with only a $ key (HP Pavilion DV9600), and is running kubuntu 8.04. Running locale shows LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 LANGUAGE=en_GB:en and some other stuff - I'm not sure if that has anything to do with anything. Can anyone offer assistance? Thanks, Jenny

5 8

".ece" file -- aka "The Lords Video"
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 31 Jan '09

31 Jan '09

Hi Folks, Having read, a couple of days ago on timesonline, that: Exclusive: Peers for cash investigation - new undercover footage The Sunday Times has released secret video and audio in which Lord Truscott offers to help reporters 'facilitate' a bill amendment I clicked on the link [see below]. Where the video should have been was a blank space with a box which said: THE VIDEO YOU ARE TRYING TO WATCH IS CURRENLY UNAVAILABLE. PLEASE CHECK BACK SOON. After checking back a few times over the next couple of days, with the same result, I thought: "Either the lawyers have put this in a locked box, or else I'm supposed to be using WIndows". So, just now, I went to the same URL using Internet Explorer, and enjoyed a nice little video. Just the job if your self-righteousness needs a boost. Then went back to Linux (just in case), but with the same negative result as before. The URL is: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5618786.ece A bit of browsing on "ece file" linux threw up: http://www.fileinfo.net/extension/ece .ECE File Extension File Type Escenic Dynamic Web Page Category Web Files Common? No File Description Web page dynamically generated by the Escenic Content Engine, an advanced platform for Web publishing and content management; typically contains server-side code that is parsed by the Web server, which generates HTML for the Web page. The ECE file extension is used for news article pages on the independent.co.uk and timesonline.co.uk websites. (which was my experience). I have no trouble with "ordinary" web pages in timesonline or independent, but this one is a show-stopper. Any suggestions for viewing such stuff on Linux? My web-browsing didn't throw up anything that looks useful. With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 31-Jan-09 Time: 13:05:00 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

4 5

aptitude
by James Freer 29 Jan '09

29 Jan '09

"aptitude is a terminal-based package managemer with a number of useful features, including: a mutt-like syntax for matching packages in a flexible manner, dselect-like persistence of user actions, the ability to retrieve and display the Debian changelog of most packages, and a command-line mode similar to that of apt-get. aptitude is also Y2K-compliant, non-fattening, naturally cleansing, and housebroken." Using ubuntu 8.04 LTS. I was a bit surprised to find in synaptic the above - is this someone poking fun, if so it doesn't seem very professional to me. I read that Aptitude was the Debian preferred package manager and i use to use it with versions 6.10 ,7.04. In 7.10 i found that it didn't seem to close and was listed in launchpad. Since then i haven't used it and the fault doesn't seem to have been rectified. Has anyone else found this. james

5 8

Getting a message when something remote stops - how to do easily?
by Chris G 29 Jan '09

29 Jan '09

I want something that will tell me when something on a remote system has stopped working. I.e. I want silence (no E-Mail) when it's working and I want to receive an E-Mail when it stops working. For local tasks cron does this quite nicely, as long as the job produces no output (no errors), cron is silent but as soon as there's an error that produces output you get an E-Mail message. The task I want to keep tabs on is a cron job on a remote system, it's OK as long as the remote system is up and running and connected. The cron job will work similarly to a local cron job and will send me an E-Mail if anything goes wrong (well, most things). However if the system dies completely or if one can't connect to it then I'll never know. I suppose all I need to have is a silent test to see if I can connect to the remote system which becomes non-silent if one can't connect. I can then run this from cron. As long as I can connect to the remote system its cron will tell me if the job I'm interested in has worked. Can anyone suggest such a test? I guess a script using ping could do it but is there a more elegant and/or ready made utility to do it? -- Chris Green

2 1

A complement to Asus for a BIOS fix
by Chris G 28 Jan '09

28 Jan '09

Ever since I built my latest box I've had *very* occasional total crashes. By "very occasional" I mean once a week or even less, they only ever occurred when I was actively using the system, it runs all the time as a disk server for our home LAN and never died in the middle of the night or while we were away. Just recently (like yesterday and the day before) it crashed more frequently, like twice or three times, and I decided to try and work out what the problem was. A quick Google showed that I was getting kernel panics as when the system froze the Caps Lock and Scroll Lock lights flashed which apparently indicates a kernel panic. There was absolutely no clue in the logs anywhere, not a murmur of anything wrong before the burst of messages for the reboot. A while ago (when I first built the system) it seemed as if it might be an Intel video driver issue but there have been a few updates since then and I decided to see if there might be a hardware problem. First I looked at the temperatures, nothing untoward there, CPU was 32 degrees, motherboard was 20 degrees. Then I tried running the memtest you can get to from the Grub menu, aha! Test 5 produced some errors (it's the block copy test). I tried moving the DIMMs around to see if that helped, it just moved the errors around but didn't fix them so it seemed there was a real error. Then I looked at the Asus web site (and my motherboard manual) to see if there were any clues there. The latest BIOS upgrade says "1. Improve the compatibility with some memory.", hmm, I wonder if that means me? So a BIOS upgrade seemed a good idea, first looks suggested that it might be a bit difficult because I don't have a floppy disk drive in the system. However I was pleasantly surprised to find that the BIOS upgrade utility built into the system BIOS which you get to by hitting ALT/F2 at boot can read the BIOS file from CD and USB as well as from a floppy (this wasn't very well documented anywhere) so I needed neither a floppy disk nor an MS operating system. I just wrote the updated BIOS file to a CD and the system did the rest. .... and now I appear to have error free memory according to memtest! :-) It remains to be seen whether it *was* the memory problem causing my kernel panics but it does seem likely. So, thank you Asus for finding the bug and fixing it and for providing utilities etc. that will work on Linux. They also have Linux drivers on their web site (not that I needed them, ubuntu detected everything without problems). -- Chris Green

1 0

Postfix store-and-forward
by Mark Rogers 27 Jan '09

27 Jan '09

Any Postfix gurus here? Some time ago I set up Postfix based on a collection of How-To's and it works but I don't sufficiently understand the configuration to make changes safely. At the moment it received email on port 25 for a number of domains (specified in a MySQL database); it sends them via a dspam content_filter which redelivers on port 10026 from which the majority of email is dropped into MailDir mailboxes for Dovecot to make available via POP3, although some mail is forwarded to other addresses (eg gmail accounts). All of that is working. What I want to add is that for some domains, after spam checking they get forwarded to another SMTP server (specified in the database per-domain). Those servers will typically be Exchange servers within people's offices. I'm not sure what info I can offer to enable someone to help me, as I'm sure the above is nowhere near enough. I'm running on an Ubuntu server using standard repo packages only. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

1 0

How to override X security to run a remote network-admin?
by Chris G 26 Jan '09

26 Jan '09

I'm trying to run network-admin on a remote[ish] system on my LAN. I.e. I'm using ssh to connect from my desktop machine to another machine on the LAN (same subnet) and I want to run network-admin on that machine. Whatever I do to relax X security I still get:- root@garage:/home/chris# network-admin X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication. X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication. (network-admin:9918): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: localhost:10.0 I have connected to the garage system using both 'ssh -X' and 'ssh -Y' and I have done 'xhosts +' on the desktop system so that *any* X connection should be allowed. I'm still getting the above error. What do I need to do? Ah, a little further information, I can run network-admin as the non-root user on the remote system with the display on the desktop system. However it's no use because the 'Unlock' button is greyed out. What's the command line equivalent to network-admin? I know it's not a single program, I just want to 'un static IP' the remote system and the easiest way was (except for the above problem) to run network-admin. What files do I need to edit to undo the static setup? OK, I can find out myself really by looking at an un-static system. -- Chris Green

4 6

Is there a lightweight version of YP/NIS for sharing passwords?
by Chris G 25 Jan '09

25 Jan '09

I'd like to make my life even easier by having some sort of simple/lite version of YP/NIS+ on my home system. I now have three xubuntu boxes and would like to be able to set up user logins in one place for all three systems. Is there some moderately easy way of doing this? -- Chris Green

1 0

Local machine names/DNS - how to handle?
by Chris G 24 Jan '09

24 Jan '09

I know we've been here before but now I actually have everything working pretty well I'd like to decide how I *should* be doing this, i.e. the most elegant way of doing it. Our home network has a number of machines and devices on it:- My desktop machine - xubuntu 8.10 The TV/Lounge machine - xubuntu 8.10 The garage backup machine - Ubuntu server (8.10 too I think) An HP7310 printer A Siemens DECT VOIP box My wife's Windows XP machine plus occasional 'visiting' machines and devices These are all on the same 192.168.1.xxx subnet and a Draytek Vigor 2820n router connects them to the internet. There is a second backup ADSL connection provided by a BT "Business Hub" (2Wire) router on a different subnet. The Draytek Vigor shares its own ADSL and that of the BT router between users. I want to be able to refer to machines on the network by name, e.g. they are called isbd, lounge, garage, hp7310 etc. The methods I know about are:- Static IPs plus dnsmasq: Currently I do this by giving them fixed IP addresses which I put in the /etc/hosts file on my desktop machine (which runs all the time) and run dnsmasq in that machine to provide the other local machines with access to the names. Static IPs I used to set up /etc/hosts in all machines (well, all the Linux machines) separately before I used dnsmasq but although very simple it gets annoying to do this when a something is added or removed. It also means that one has to set up DNS host addresses everywhere. Dynamic IP This is where I get a bit lost. If I let everything go the the default then all IPs are assigned by DHCP. I.e. an ubuntu machine 'as installed' will ask for DHCP on the LAN, similarly the printer and the VOIP box will do so. The Draytek Vigor 2820n provides (as do nearly all routers) a DHCP service. If left like this though nothing wil have a name (as far as I know) and I will have no easy way to ssh to the garage machine for example. People keep telling me that this should be easy to resolve using (if I understand it correctly) the router but at the moment I don't really see how. If I *could* get names for everything using dynamic IP (i.e. DHCP provided by the router) then it would make for a simpler life as, at present, I have to change the Ubuntu default networking to give machines static IP and I also have to do slightly more configuration on the printer etc. There's a section in the router set-up called "Bind IP to MAC" which will allow the router to always give the same IP to each device/system but I don't see how I can get names in there. Am I missing something obvious somewhere? I don't think I've seen the ability to attach names to MAC addresses in any of the routers I've used over the past few years (Zyxel, Speedtouch). The BT 2Wire router allows you to manually give names to the MAC addresses but I'm not sure that it will let you use them to refer to them. -- Chris Green

3 5

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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------

2 4

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

main January 2009