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How to become another user, without password, but keep environment?
by Chris Green 16 Feb '06

16 Feb '06

In my role at work at the moment I frequently have to become other users (mostly build management logins rather than specific user logins). To make this easier for myself I put myself in the user's .rhosts file so that I don't have to give the password every time I become the other user. This is inside a small[ish] development group so this doesn't raise any difficult security issues really. However if you 'rlogin -l newuser hostname' you get newuser's environment. This is OK sometimes but often is a bit of a pain because I need to reset DISPLAY to get X applications to work on my screen and I also lose my favourite editor, etc., etc. So is there any way to preserve the environment in the same way that would happen if I did an 'su newuser' but, on the other hand, allow me to login in without entering the password (as I can with rlogin)? I can thing of various nasty scripting ways of doing it but su is so close to what I want it seems a pity to re-invent an almost invented wheel. -- Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk) "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

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Firewall routing problems
by Stuart Bailey 16 Feb '06

16 Feb '06

Hi, I have a customer who is try to give me access to some data for testing, on one of their server, port 5000. If I telnet to their port from my server, I can't get a connection, unless I disable my firewall - not something I like to do. If I look at a tcpdump for port 5000, I can see the connection going out to the internet (5000 is enable in my firewall), and I can see that the masquerading ports are in the same range as when I send SMTP or HTTP packets - which work fine. Any ideas what else can be causing the problem? I'm using Guarddog to configure the iptables. Many thanks. Stuart. -- --------------------------------------- Stuart Bailey BSc (hons) CEng CITP MBCS LinuSoft (Proprietor) Linux Specialist (01953) 601294 (07778) 383739 http://www.linusoft.co.uk ----------------------------------------

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Hosting questions
by Chris Green 15 Feb '06

15 Feb '06

My wife wants to register a set of domains for a small (long term) project she's thinking of starting. I've checked and a nice set of 'same name' domains are available as .com, .co.uk and .biz. The question is should I just register the domains and host them on the home Linux system or can I get a reasonable deal from anywhere for hosting and registration all in one go? Can anyone recommend a single registration company/site which can do all these TLDs at a reasonable price? I've used Just The Names for my isbd.ltd.uk domain and they are reasonably priced for .com and .co.uk but they're expensive for .biz. If I host them on the home system (which already hosts isbd.ltd.uk forwarded from Just The Names) is it possible to 'virtual host' a number of domains even when they're registered with (possibly) different companies? -- Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk) "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

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[OT] Fault puzzle
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 14 Feb '06

14 Feb '06

Hi Folks, Your experience may help here. Today I was phoned by a friend who'd switched on her PC only to get the message "Operating system not found", together with the observation that "DHCP" and "MBA" had come up on screen. The only special circumstance was that the machine had been left unused and switched off for just over a week. So I went round and had a look. Switch on, and enter Setup. Check Boot Order: Floppy, CD-ROM, HDD, Network, and MBA-UNDI. So decided that this was consistent with failing to boot off HDD and proceeding to try booting off the network ("DHCP") which failed (since no network) and then "MBA-UNDI" (whatever that is). So tabbed over to IDE setup to see what whas there, or not. Apparently the HDD and its parameters showed up OK. So quit Setup without saving and let it re-boot. Success: clean boot off HDD. Repeatable -- shut down, switch off, disconnect from mains, re-connect, switch on -> clean re-boot as if nothing had ever happened. Provisionally, therefore, thought that the week's off-time had resulted in the CMOS battery draining, so that it had lost its data which were somehow restored when I went into Setup and poked around. But then it occurred to me that if that were so, then the CMOS clock should have the wrong time (e.g. some hours or days slow). Not so: in fact it was 5 minutes fast. So that seems to not favour my hyptohesis. Leaving me wondering what might really have happened. The only thing I did was have a look inside the Setup and re-boot, not altering a thing. Any ideas? With thanks, and best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 13-Feb-06 Time: 22:00:00 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Netmasks and IP addresses for dual homed hosts
by Peter Onion 14 Feb '06

14 Feb '06

All of my boxes have got ethernet AND wireless interfaces and everything works fine, but I want to move to using "zeroconf" networking so I don't have to maintain /etc/hosts files on every machine (or go to the bother of setting up a proper DNS server). I've got the avahi daemon working and nss-mdns is working for resolving ".local" host names. Now seems like a good time to review the way I've allocated IP addresses to hosts. My ADLS modem/ethernet router/WiFi access point is a Dlink DSL-G640T which has the address 192.168.1.1 How would you assign addresses to hosts that have wired and wireless interfaces? BTW at home I normally run with the Wireless interfaces turned off but use them if I take machines "away from home" so I don't have to bother with network cables and hubs etc. However laptops sometimes gets used with wireless interfaces at home. Peter

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How to create an email autoresponder?
by Ian Douglas 13 Feb '06

13 Feb '06

Hi Folks, My little business currently has an automated brochure service describing the products we sell. The company has an "info" email address to which people can send keywords and receive an automatically generated email response describing that particular product. At the moment this "autoresponder" function is carried out by an ancient PC chugging away in a forgotten corner running Microsoft Outlook Express and using this program's message filtering rules to select and return the appropriate email/s in response to the keywords in incoming emails. It seems to work quite well and reliably but I was wondering if there was a Linux email prog which we could run on our fileserver to do this? I looked at this a year or so ago and found that although kmail (for example) could filter messages on keywords in the message body it was unable to respond by using this keyword to select an appropriate email reply (out of a possible 20) and actually send it (although kmail may have improved since then). Do any ALUGers already have a Linux based automated brochure service / email autoresponder running on their server? If so could you pass on some tips on how you set it up? Best wishes, Ian.

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 13 Feb '06

13 Feb '06

This is the automated ALUG IRC meeting reminder sent to remind you that there is an IRC meeting tonight (Monday) at 8.00pm. Historically, these used to be the only time a lot of us would be about, now the channel has some usual faces that are there most of the time (except at silly o'clock, when we might be sleeping, or on the second thursday of the month, where we might be drinking in the Reindeer), so don't feel limited to visit during this time, come visit us when ever you feel like it! The meeting takes place on the irc server irc.alug.org.uk in the #alug channel. Most IRC clients should allow you to get there with the commands "/server irc.alug.org.uk" and "/join #alug". Popular IRC clients include xchat, irssi and EPIC on Unix, and Mirc under windows. Here are some links to help you get started with irc. Unix http://www.xchat.org/ http://www.irssi.org/ http://www.epicsol.org/ Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!)

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Ignore last mailing
by robert 12 Feb '06

12 Feb '06

Hi i write this to inform you that since i sent out HELP WITH TARBALLS i have now got my snes9x up and running on Linux.Thanks Robert

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HPLIP and PSC 500
by Dan Hatton 12 Feb '06

12 Feb '06

Dear All, Is anyone having any luck using the HP PSC 500 all-in-one printer and scanner (or any other HP all-in-one on a parallel port) under Linux? If so, please can you tell me how? The story so far: Once upon I time, I was printing and scanning happily, using the hpijs back-end to CUPS and the hpoj back-end to SANE. Then scanning stopped working, apparently due to the bug described at <http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=339584>. About three weeks ago, I decided to deal with this by migrating to hplip's hpaio back-end to SANE, but have had no joy. Functionality seems to have steadily deteriorated since then, perhaps with successive upgrades to the SANE version in Debian Testing; at first, the scanner would freeze part-way through scans above a (low) critical resolution, then the scanner would freeze part-way through all scans, whatever the resolution, now SANE front-ends can't see the scanner at all. I note in passing that the list of available devices in CUPS contains the line "hp no_device_found," and I'm having to get printing to work using "Parallel port #1" from this list, which I suspect means I'm, in some sense, bypassing hplip, even though I'm using "HP(HPLIP)" as the model/driver option. I think this may have something to do with the following messages in syslog; maybe the first two lines represent two things happening in the wrong order? The first one seems to occur during loading of kernel modules, and the second on running of /etc/init.d/hplip start. Feb 11 19:21:36 (none) hp: unable to open /var/run/hplip/hpiod.port: No such file or directory: prnt/hpijs/hplip_api.c 84 Feb 11 19:22:04 (none) hpiod: 0.9.7 accepting connections at 32770... Feb 11 19:27:02 (none) tcpspy[4527]: disconnect: user hplip, local 127.0.0.1:52646, remote 127.0.0.1:32770 Feb 11 19:27:02 (none) tcpspy[4527]: disconnect: user hplip, local 127.0.0.1:32770, remote 127.0.0.1:52646 Any ideas are welcome. -- Thanks very much, Dan Hatton

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New Laptop Success
by Peter Onion 12 Feb '06

12 Feb '06

If anyone is thinking about a laptop for linuxhere is asuccess story....... There was a time (not so long ago) when installing Linux on a laptop was a bit of a lottery with respect to getting drivers for all the hardware. I decided my trusty old Dell Latitude was up for replacement, and having just built a desktop with a AMD64 mobo I decided to go for a similarly powered laptop. For several reasons I decided on one of these http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/nbrange.html?CSF After a bit of a delay ( and some trouble with UPS (that's the courier firm! )) it finally arrived yesterday. I've installed SuSE 10.0 from DVD and EVERYTHING WORKS, even the built in wifi that uses a chip set I'de never heard of before! As with my other boxes I've added the ATI proprietry X server to get openGL support (1280x800 is nice!). Peter

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