February 2010 - main

MySQL table crashes
by James Bensley 19 Feb '10

19 Feb '10

Hey List, We have a CentOS VPS with a hosting provider hosting one of our company websites. We are finding recently that about once a week a table will "crash" and needs repairing via phpMyAdmin. This is a recent development as this never used to be a problem. I wondered if any has any insight as to why this might be happening? -- Regards, James ;) Stephen Leacock - "I detest life-insurance agents: they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so." - http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/s/stephen_leacock.html

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Sheeva and other NAS solutions
by Peter Alcibiades 19 Feb '10

19 Feb '10

Do you generally think it best to make your own file server, or just buy one ready done? I'm wondering between the following 1) Sheeva plug off ebay, and add a usb hard drive. £100 or so. 2) The Ryan Alubox, which is around £85. I am having trouble seeing why the sheevaplug is better than this. http://www.specialtech.co.uk/spshop/customer/home.php?cat=842 3) Or, we could buy the £140 Acer with FreeNAS or Clark Connect and add a usb double enclosure to it for another £40. http://www.ebuyer.com/product/167153 4) Or the Netgear dual enclosure which right now is coming with a FREE 500G drive, and it does RAID automagically if you put in a second drive, and that is around £150 http://www.ebuyer.com/product/149510 On the whole I'm inclining to the £140 Acer + usb enclosure, but I've never done this stuff before so would be really interested to hear the opinions of people who have. We do have one or two old machines lying around which we could fill up with drives, but I'm veering away from that as they are big, quite old, noisy, rather power hungry, and I am not certain of durability if running 24/7. Probably you guys have been through this and have favored solutions. Its a smallish charity with three or four computers which at the moment are only networked for printing. But we do need a simple internal web server, and we do need some central file storage, and we will have a couple of spare new 160G drives from another purchase. Peter

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Virgin (ex NTL) Broadband with Linux - how to set up?
by Chris G 19 Feb '10

19 Feb '10

My brother-in-law has a new computer with Ubuntu 9.10 installed in it, we put it together here at my house and it connected to the internet with no problems via my router here - just plugged the RJ45 in and it worked. So, basically, it's networking must be configured about right. Now he's back home and wants to connect to the internet via an NTL cable modem (now Virgin Media). The cable modem model number is NTL 250 - Model E08c007. When the RJ45 from the cable modem is plugged into his old Windows machine it works, when it's plugged into his new Ubuntu machine it doesn't work. Can anyone tell me how to get this to work? Is it a question of telling NTL/Virgin that there's a new machine (with a new MAC address) connected or does the Cable Modem expect authentication across the ethernet cable, or what? -- Chris Green

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Recommendations for Java Build Box Linux
by Paul Grenyer 19 Feb '10

19 Feb '10

Hi All I want to create myself a Java build box. Basically it requires: Java SDK Hudson TomCat Apache Webserver Ant SVN client MySQL Windows 2008 & SQL Server 2008 running on VirtualBox. All it will do is spend all day monitoring my SVN repository (which is hosted elsewhere), check out code when it changes, build the code, deploy it to TomCat and run some tests. So, VirtualBox permitting, all I think I need is a very simple server version of Linux. Any suggestions? Can I run VirtualBox on a Linux distro without a Windows manager? -- Thanks Paul Paul Grenyer e: paul.grenyer(a)gmail.com b: paulgrenyer.blogspot.com

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Site suspended?
by Chris Walker 18 Feb '10

18 Feb '10

I've just had a mail from sombeody that's trying to resubscribe to ALUG but when looking at the site, it says it's suspended with the owner being aware. Can anybody say what's going on here please as it's preventing the subscription? Thanks.

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AMD-V
by Paul Grenyer 18 Feb '10

18 Feb '10

Hi All I've recently upgraded to the latest VirtualBox (3.1.4 r57640) and want to install Windows 2008 64bit. When I try and start the VM I get the error message: "VT-x/AMD-V hardware acceleration has been enabled, but it is not operational. Your 64-bit guest will fail to detect 64-bit CPU and will not be able to boot. Please ensure that you have enabled VT-x/AMD-V properly in the BIOS of your host computer." My first thought was to disable VT-x/AMD-V for the VM just to get it going, but it gets turned on again automatically. So, of course I checked the BIOS as I was sure I had turned virtualisation on already, and yet I have and I can't see any further relevant settings. My motherboard is a GA-MA770-DS3 (F6) and I have a Phenom Quad Core 9850 processor.Do I need to upgrade the BIOS to get this to work? If so, how to I find out which revision of the board I have? The ASUS site says there are three revisions..... Any advice greatly appreciated... -- Thanks Paul Paul Grenyer e: paul.grenyer(a)gmail.com b: paulgrenyer.blogspot.com

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Last night's ALUG Ipswich meet
by samwise 16 Feb '10

16 Feb '10

Due to a combination family emergency and my Android phone getting confused about what day it was, and so failing to provide me with a timely reminder to send out my apologies, I ended up not turning up without any warning. Shockingly poor showing from my end. (though in my defence, this is my first no-show in the past few years!). Did any one else show up, to curse my name? If you wish to fill in a meeting report on the wiki ranting about it, I probably deserve it. ;) Peter. P.S. Pete #2 also earns a scathing mention for failing to turn up also!

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SheevaPlug
by Mark Rogers 16 Feb '10

16 Feb '10

Has anyone played with a SheevaPlug or variant (TonidoPlug, for example)? Arm CPU, USB and network connectivity, running Ubuntu-derivative on 512MB built in flash (with 512MB RAM), all in a "plug" design. Looks like they can be had in the UK (ie with UK plug) for just over £60 but with £30 shipping (and 2-3 week delay) from the US. I think I will probably get one to play with, so I don't know if anyone else wants to combine shipping. But first off I'd like to know if anyone has played with one already. Obviously with it being Arm based there won't be many binary packes to install on it but the obvious suspects should cross-compile OK I would think. The obvious question is whether 512MB on-device storage is enough to achieve anything useful, but then I have relatively low aspirations anyway! -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Charset conversion confusion - mutt works, nothing else does
by Chris G 16 Feb '10

16 Feb '10

I have an E-Mail (well lots actually) which has a text part with headers as follows:- Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable My system is all utf-8 now so just outputting the E-Mail via 'more' or opening it in vi doesn't decode/show the accented characters correctly. Mutt reads the above headers and converts the accented characters and shows them correctly. I want to do some processing on this file and then display the text parts but at the moment I can't get anything to do what mutt appears to be able to do with no effort! E.g. I have tried:- iconv -f iso-8859-1 <filename> and it doesn't change anything at all. Nor does viewing the file in Firefox with the charset set to iso-8859-1 work. What am I missing? It must be something blatantly obvious. -- Chris Green

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User & Group in recent Linux (Debian)
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 15 Feb '10

15 Feb '10

Hi Folks, I recently noticed something which struck me as strange. In the past, on my older Linux distributions, an "ordinary" user gets set up as user=<username> and group="users". Thus, for instance, on those systems an 'ls -l' gives the likes of -rw-r--r-- 1 ted users 16 Apr 2 2008 - drwxr-xr-x 3 ted users 20480 Jun 3 2008 00_junk drwxr-xr-x 2 ted users 4096 May 10 2005 00_misc drwxr-xr-x 2 ted users 4096 Jan 31 2008 00_realplay However, on recent Debian (since Etch), I see that it is user=<username> and group=<username>. Thus now 'ls -l' gives -rw------- 1 ted ted 4643403 2009-06-02 18:56 03-Iii_Sarabanda.mp3 -rw------- 1 ted ted 3476861 2008-04-27 21:38 2nd_week_004.jpg -rw------- 1 ted ted 2879890 2008-04-27 21:38 2nd_week_006.jpg So now I am user "ted" and am in group "ted"! This seems to have happened "in the background" without my being aware that it was going to happen -- I just happened to notice that it had happened! Is there a good reason for this change? And what would be the best way to revert to the old way (especially when creating new users)? With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 14-Feb-10 Time: 22:10:47 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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