September 2018 - main

Reformatting a PDF
by Mark Rogers 03 Jun '19

03 Jun '19

On the Royal Mail website is a "handy" price guide available as a PDF: http://www.royalmail.com/sites/default/files/Royal-Mail-Our-Prices-March-20… It's only actually "handy" if you have a weird printer (or at least very unusual sized paper). I'm not sure what size/shape you'd call it but it would go into a DL envelope without folding... What I'd like to do is split the individual pages out and merge them to get three (maybe four) "pages" per A4 sheet so that I can print it on my very normal A4 printer. Suggestions? This is an annual headache and I'm fed up with a different manual solution every year. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Pdf measuring tools
by Bev Nicolson 31 Oct '18

31 Oct '18

I don't have Flash installed so I'm not able to 'measure' Adobe documents and it turns out this could be useful in some circumstances. Does anyone know of a Linux tool one could uses for this? Bev.

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Introduction
by Andrew Hutchings 30 Sep '18

30 Sep '18

Hi all, My name is Andrew Hutchings and I'm also known as LinuxJedi. I work as a Lead Software Engineer for a company called MariaDB. I've been a Linux user between a hobbyist and in industry for probably around 20 years. A really long time ago (about 15 years) I used to run a LUG in Wales, I've lived in Norfolk for 6 years now (Watton) and thought it was time to join one again. Look forward to chatting to you all. Kind Regards -- Andrew Hutchings - LinuxJedi - http://www.linuxjedi.co.uk/

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Samba users and permissions
by Mark Rogers 26 Sep '18

26 Sep '18

I'm rebuilding a Samba file server and my knowledge is rusty. Note this is a simple fileserver, no AD. What I want to achieve is that each user has their own user/pass but that all files stored on the server get allocated to one global user. As I recall, I need both a Linux user and a Samba user for each person. However, I still have access to the files on the old server (but cannot boot it) and looking at /etc/passwd on there I do not see the individual users listed. I know that I definitely used to access the share as "mark". Therefore I'm both confused how it used to work, but also the correct way to set it up now. It's Ubuntu Server 18.04, Samba 4.7.6. Right now I have my shares configured in /var/lib/samba/usershares and can access them all via a single user (my primary server login which I added to Samba as well). They're currently read-only because the files are all root.root owned, that's something else I'll need to change. (If I can do it, I'd like to have some users read-only and some read-write once I'm finished but that's not a priority.) -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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mdadm woes
by Mark Rogers 14 Sep '18

14 Sep '18

I have just moved two mdadm RAID1 arrays from an old server to a new one. Initially mdadm automatically created two arrays (md126 & md127), read-only and marked resync=pending. I mounted these and they were fine. I then stopped those arrays and rebuilt them manually as md0 & md1, and the resync started. Neither will now mount; mdadm seems happy but there isn't a recognisable filesystem on either array. I have stopped both arrays while I try to work out what went wrong and whether I can fix it. Suggestions? All the important data is backed up elsewhere but there's a lot of unimportant stuff that I'd nevertheless prefer to retrieve if I can. (Several TB of applications, distros, etc which can all be retrieved from the Internet if needed, which is why I don't waste space backing them up, but I'd still rather not have to throw them away and start again if I can avoid it.) One thought, although I'm fairly sure this isn't what happened, is that because I have two raid arrays I might have mixed my disks up when I created my new arrays (one of each in each). I would have thought that mdadm would have tried very hard to stop me doing that though? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Password managers
by Mark Rogers 14 Sep '18

14 Sep '18

Are there any password managers that can cope with the "pick characters 3, 5 and 11 from your password" security challenges? Santander has just moved to that, and if you have a secure unique password it's a pain. <RANT>Santander also require that the password is max 16 chars and alpha-numeric only. Because security, or something. The mere fact that they want me to pick certain characters from it already tells me that the password isn't being stored salted and hashed. It's a good job their app can use biometric because their website has just become pretty much unusable for me now.</RANT> -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Verifying files
by Mark Rogers 13 Sep '18

13 Sep '18

I'm looking for a way to search through an entire filesystem verifying file validity where possible. That is, if the file is a known file type that can be consistency checked, then run that check and see if it passes. So for a .zip file (including .jar, .odt, etc) run it through "unzip -t". And so on for other file types. I can't think of a suitable Google search that doesn't just throw up file system consistency checks, or tests against previously stored md5sum data (which I don't have, but wouldn't really be what I wanted anyway). I'll look at scripting something otherwise, but I'm not a wheel inventor if I can help it. On the assumption nobody has a good solution, the next best thing would be as many helpful hints as to file types I can test for consistency and what tools to test them with. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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[ALUG Announce] ALUG Norwich Pub Meet Thursday 13th September
by Viperfang 10 Sep '18

10 Sep '18

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via https://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- Hello Norwich Aluggers, Our monthly ALUG Norwich social meeting will be held this Thursday, 13th September at The Coach and Horses (82 Thorpe Road, Norwich, NR1 1BA). The meeting officially starts at 8pm, although some people may arrive earlier. More information on those people can be found on the list and the IRC channel. If you are unsure if you will recognise us then make yourself and your intent to attend known by either posting on list or visiting us on IRC so we can look out for you rather than hiding in the corner. Optionally you could ask at the bar if they know where the geeky computer weirdos are and they'll point you in the right direction (seriously!). Another possibility is look for heaps of electronics on a table that may possibly look like movie props that would used for detonating explosives. Feel free to bring electronics/laptops/gadgets to the meet, you will by no means be alone. Ben Bewick aka Viperfang NB: This mail is automated, please refer to the usual sources for more information. ALUG Contact Details: Website : http://www.alug.org.uk/ IRC : #alug on irc.alug.org.uk List : http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo Twitter : http://twitter.com/anglianlug Identica: TBA Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2381613902 ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via https://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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2600 meeting at 18:00 on Friday the 7th September.
by Viperfang 04 Sep '18

04 Sep '18

Quick heads up about this months Norwich 2600 meeting, more info at http://www.norwich2600.co.uk

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