March 2022 - main

Libre Office Calc
by Phil Thane 01 Apr '22

01 Apr '22

Database nerds look away now. I have two loads of data in .ods or .cvs. Basically two versions of a membership list, one with >500 rows, the other >700. I want a list of approx 200 who are on the big list but not the smaller. 'Compare' in LO just gives me a list of thousands of cells that are different, that's no help. Can anyone help? Lots on t'internet about merging and tracking changes but nothing about my case I can find. -- Phil Thane www.pthane.co.uk Tweet @pthane 01767 449759 07582 750607

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Re: Libre Office Calc
by cl＠isbd.net 29 Mar '22

29 Mar '22

On Tue, Mar 29, 2022 at 03:15:20PM +0100, Phil Thane wrote: > On 29/03/2022 14:42, Chris Green wrote: > > Can you export them (via CVS) to two tables in a database, it would > > then be trivial to get the answer you want. > > You're absolutely right of course but then I'd have to spend hundreds of > hours learning how to use a database. About 30 years ago I used Access. > Later the LO equivalent 'Base' but that was probably nearly 20 years ago. > Since then not needed anything. Not worth the time for a one off. Thanks > anyway. > It's a trivial bit of SQL to do what you want once the two sets of data are inthe database. No need to learn a lot, just use the command line sqlite3, nothing as complex as Access or anything like that. In this case, IMHO, a GUI just adds complication. -- Chris Green

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OT: DNS propagation delays
by Mark Rogers 16 Mar '22

16 Mar '22

I figured someone here might be able to explain this to me better than the ISP (or tell me they're wrong). A lot of domain registrars provide DNS hosting, but often only after the domain has transferred, and only after the DNS is set to use their servers. This means there is a delay between (a) switching to the new DNS and (b) adding the host records to it, resulting in potential downtime for anything that relies on the DNS. My question: If the time between (a) and (b) can be reduced to almost zero (such as by making both changes in a single hit via an API), I assumed that there'd (almost certainly) never be an incorrect DNS response given and therefore no propagation delays should apply. However the company in question told me that there would still be a propagation delay but disappeared from the chat when I asked where. Am I missing something, and if so what? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Manually creating "thunmbnails"
by Mark Rogers 16 Mar '22

16 Mar '22

I have 100+ images. From each I need to create what might best be described as a thumbnail, but manually rather than automated. I need to manually choose which part of the image is used. What I need "automated" is ensuring the correct aspect ratio. GIMP allows me to set the aspect ratio for the selection, which works well. But from there I still need to "crop to selection", "export as", enter a filename, and set export properties. Which makes it quite cumbersome when I have so many to work through. Any suggestions for a better tool, or way to automate the rest of the process in GIMP? My ideal workflow would be: - Open image "xxx.png" (or "xxx.jpg" etc) (with no additional prompts for how to perform the import) - Manually select the area I want to use as the thumbnail - Hit a key to save just that selection as (eg) "xxx.thumb.png", or "xxx.png" to a "thumbs" directory. As few additional steps as possible so that the focus is on the selection of area, not the process. Note that It's likely I'll want the output format to be png regardless of input format (or maybe jpeg, not yet decided - but it'll be a global choice not determined by the input format. That said I can post-process using imagemagick "convert" if I have to. Thoughts? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Zentyal as a domain controller.
by B D 14 Mar '22

14 Mar '22

Hi all, Just wanted to ask if anyone here is using Zentyal. I have a number of vlans on cisco L3 switches, two independent domains and fortinet firewall to make all more complicated. I'm having problems with gateways and multipaths in Zentyal. I'm guessing this will be better suited for Zentyal forum, but maybe some of you had/have experience with Zentyal. Cheers! Bart

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Thunderbird 91 will not open pdf's in preview
by Bev Nicolson 08 Mar '22

08 Mar '22

That's it really. I wasn't sure about the change for a time but I'd quite like it to revert now. But even though I've made sure the settings ask it to, it will not open pdf's in preview any more but in Firefox. Has anyone found a solution yet? Googling has got me nowhere. Bev (Linux Mint 19.)

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Part time sysadmin or business infrastructure consultant
by Jenny Hopkins 07 Mar '22

07 Mar '22

Morning, As some of you know, I've maintained a mainly internal business set-up for a local client, including the maintenance of currently two debian servers (one hosted at bytemark), 2 ubuntu desktops, wifi access points, data backups, and just generally helping the client get what he needs from his desktop. I'm now a very hand-on granny of two, and find I just don't have the time nor inclination to do the job, however I'm unwilling to leave the client in the lurch. I wondered if anyone on-list knows of anyone who would take over this set-up, which could consist of either five minutes a week, or several hours if something goes wrong? Failing this my techy brother tells me that they way the IT is run is very last century, and that nobody runs their own mail server internally any more or upgrades from the command line etc etc. Does anyone know of a consultant who might advise on how to get the company IT zooming into 2022? Many thanks, Jenny

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ntpclient
by Mark Rogers 03 Mar '22

03 Mar '22

I think this might be more about my expectation than anything else but I am struggling to get ntpclient to work (on an openwrt-based box). It is configured to update every 600s but my clock is drifting by about 2s/day so there's clearly no corrections taking place every 10 minutes, and if left for a week it just continues to accumulate so I don't think it's doing anything at all. But I don't really know what to expect. I'm measuring the drift using ntpclient -c 1 -h 0.openwrt.pool.ntp.org .. so I know it has access to the NTP servers if it chooses to use them, Any suggestions? When I google I find details on setting things like freq for far greater accuracy than I care about (a second or two out is fine by me as long as it isn't accumulating). I'd rather not move away from ntpclient as that's what's baked into the openwrt firmware I'm using and I'm trying to avoid making unnecessary changes, but I just can't get this to work. (I'm sure ntpclient -s in crontab would fix it but surely that isn't supposed to be necessary?) -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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