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Isolating a smart TV
by Peter 11 May '23

11 May '23

I just got a smart TV (android based), and going through the install process discovered that if you connect it to Internet it transmits a truly astonishing amount of data to a company based in Ireland, which is in turn a subsidiary of another company in Turkey. Neither of which I have previously heard of. I didn't particularly want the smarts, but there don't seem to be any dumb ones available any more, and our old one had expired in its sleep so we had to get something. There is basically nothing you do on this box that is not logged, if you have connected it. Heaven knows what they do with it when they have it. You watch Eurovision, and turn to another channel after 15 minutes, its logged to your particular box and IP address and hardware. Probably every commercial where you turn the sound down is logged (that's just my guess, I don't know it for sure). So I haven't connected it to our router and am using it like a dumb TV. But my question is, is it possible to put this device and only this device through something like pi-hole and so isolate it from the LAN, and also block it from sending data to these companies? Because I would quite like to be able to watch youtube music on it, but not at the price of sending my musical tastes to Turkey in real time! I see on Amazon that you can get fanless industrial mini-pcs for about 70.00. Or there are NUCs on ebay for around 50.00. The industrial ones have two network ports. Would it be possible to get one of the industrial ones, connect one of the ports to the TV, the other to our router, and install pi-hole so as to put the TV into a LAN zone of its own, and also to use pi-hole to block any transmissions to the company? I'm not clear how this would (or would not) work. Essentially, can you have the pi-hole box sit between the TV and the LAN so that the rest of the LAN is unreachable from it and it blocks unwanted calling hime? How should one handle addressing in this case? If you think it would work, that would be enough to encourage me to have a go and try and stumble through it. Any hints most welcome! Or suggestions for how to get the same result in some other way. Peter

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Re: KVM/QEMU
by Phil Ashby 03 May '23

03 May '23

On 03/05/2023 12:00, Mark Rogers <mark(a)more-solutions.co.uk> said: > > What do I need to do to achieve something simple like creating a new > VM, booting it from a Windows ISO and installing Windows 10 on it? > > I need to do it all from the command line or via a web interface - > preferably having both options open to me. The server is headless so > a traditional GUI is no use to me. Hi Mark, For a number of years now I've used QEMU/KVM, via libvirt and associated clients: virt-manager (Gnome GUI), and the CLI tools in libvirt-clients package (in particular virsh). There's this available from RedHat on using virsh for remote admin that provides a good intro: https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/virsh-subcommands ..and this walk through of creating a VM from an ISO.. https://adamtheautomator.com/virsh/ your chosen web search engine and 'virsh tutorials' is your friend as usual ;) HTH, Phlash.

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Boot to a web browser (nothing else available)
by Mark Rogers 03 May '23

03 May '23

I need to set up an Ubuntu 22.04 box so that on startup it enters a graphical environment with a web browser showing a specified page. No access to other applications. (I'd call this a "kiosk" configuration but having spent some time with Google that phrase can mean different things so I wanted to be clear). There's going to be quite a lot of other stuff going on behind the scenes in support of the web interface but I have all that working. It's just the boot-to-browser bit that's an issue. It's not public facing and I don't care if the boot sequence is visible, provided that as long as the box is left alone for a couple of minutes it will eventually end up at a web browser directed to localhost. I've done stuff like this before but Ubunti 22.04 uses snaps rather than .deb packages and that changes the way the applications interact with the O/S - previously I've had systemd start lightdm start a bash script which starts Chromium or Firefox in kiosk mode, but it doesn't seem possible that way any more. But the reality is that I don't need a minimal install so I may well have overthought things in the past. -- 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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KVM/QEMU
by Mark Rogers 02 May '23

02 May '23

I've used VirtualBox for years, most recently either as a desktop tool (eg on a laptop) for testing things out (managed by the VBox GUI), or as a server tool hosting multiple VMs (managed via a combination of CLI and the web-based phpVirtualBox tool which mimics the VBox GUI via a web interface). For a long time I've thought I should use KVM instead so today I had a crack as installing it on my home Linux server (Ubuntu) but I've gone around in circles and got nowhere useful. What do I need to do to achieve something simple like creating a new VM, booting it from a Windows ISO and installing Windows 10 on it? I need to do it all from the command line or via a web interface - preferably having both options open to me. The server is headless so a traditional GUI is no use to me. -- 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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No pdf thumbnails
by Bev Nicolson 15 Apr '23

15 Apr '23

I'd not been having any trouble with pdf's for a while but suddenly no recent pdf's show a thumbnail, just an Adobe logo. I've got Master pdf and the simpler Evince (for when I just want to read something.) In the past, if this happened, all I had to do was change the file name and then a thumbnail would appear. That doesn't work here. (I think I've asked a similar question before but on hunting through the archive couldn't see a clear answer.) Bev

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Has anyone here used qawebhosting or know anything about them?
by Chris Green 01 Apr '23

01 Apr '23

I'm looking for a hosting service for a few web sites that I maintain for friends and family. One possibility is QA Webhosting who seem to be quite small but offer just about exactly what I want/need. Does anyone here know anything about them? -- Chris Green

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Linux Tablets
by Peter Berrie 22 Mar '23

22 Mar '23

I recently had occasion to wish, yet again, that I had a proper Linux tablet. So afterwards I dug out an old Linx 8 windows tablet and tried various distros on it. It came with windows 8, which was pretty bad, and I had upgraded to windows 10, which is better but glacially slow. I tried various distros on it including several Puppies, some of which not bad but no touch support, Fedora, which would not finish booting, slitaz (failed to boot), MXlinux (no touch). Several others. Zorin (failed to boot). A desktop derived from Alpine. So far the best I have found is Peppermint 32 bit. XFCE. Touch works, it sees battery status, its reasonably fast considering the hardware. I haven't got on screen keyboard yet, but there seem to be several choices of this. My impression is that it would be a viable solution on a more recent and powerful x86 tablet. But which? I'm thinking now about getting a used Surface. It seems like the Surface 5 is the best choice among them, apparently a significant improvement on the model 4, and that it should work with Linux. It should be able to manage Fedora which is widely recommended for touch devices. There is also a Lenovo with detachable keyboard of lower cpu spec and similar vintage, at about the same price. Lenovo Ideapad Miix 700. Bigger screen. The Surface 5 seems to have been a significant upgrade from the previous Surface 4. Do you all have any thoughts about this? Any other x86 tablets to consider? Any other distros that are more promising than Peppermint? Is Chrome worth considering? Peter

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gmail bouncing emails from my domain.
by Nev Young 13 Mar '23

13 Mar '23

I suspect this is a naive question but I'm at a loss how to fix this. I send emails using thunderbird and msmtp. I post via my ISP's smtp server (smpt.zen.co.uk) This has allowed me to send emails to any one as any one. e.g. this has come from alug(a)nevilley.org.uk very recently emails sent to gmail users have started to bounce undelivered with the likes of: (email address redacted) This message was created automatically by mail delivery software. A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed: ##############(a)gmail.com host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com [108.177.15.27] SMTP error from remote mail server after pipelined end of data: 550-5.7.26 This message does not pass authentication checks (SPF and DKIM both 550-5.7.26 do not pass). SPF check for [nevilley.org.uk] does not pass with ip: 550-5.7.26 [212.23.1.22].To best protect our users from spam, the message has 550-5.7.26 been blocked. Please visit 550-5.7.26https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#authentication for more 550 5.7.26 information. p9-20020adfe609000000b002ca647fe919si1349235wrm.527 - gsmtp Do I need to do something with thunderbird on my PC or is this a problem for Zen? Any help gratefully received. Nev

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Re: gmail bouncing emails from my domain.
by Nev Young 07 Mar '23

07 Mar '23

Hi, Some one (not me) has been "messing about" !! During a phone discussion with [1] at fasthosts we retried sending the previously bouncy emails. AND THEY WORKED !! The magic gremlins appear to have fixed it. What can I say? Thanks to all who put in effort. (no doubt it'll break again tomorrow) Nev On 06/03/2023 17:17, steve-ALUG(a)hst.me.uk wrote: > On 06/03/2023 16:54, Nev Young wrote: >> Hi Steve, >> >> This is too hard for my ikkle brain. > > Hi mate. > > Will have a look and get back to you. > > Just a mo... > > Steve

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gmail bouncing emails from my domain.
by Nev Young 06 Mar '23

06 Mar '23

I suspect this is a naive question but I'm at a loss how to fix this. I send emails using thunderbird and msmtp. I post via my ISP's smtp server (smpt.zen.co.uk) This has allowed me to send emails to any one as any one. e.g. this has come from alug(a)nevilley.org.uk very recently emails sent to gmail users have started to bounce undelivered with the likes of: (email address redacted) This message was created automatically by mail delivery software. A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed: ##############(a)gmail.com host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com [108.177.15.27] SMTP error from remote mail server after pipelined end of data: 550-5.7.26 This message does not pass authentication checks (SPF and DKIM both 550-5.7.26 do not pass). SPF check for [nevilley.org.uk] does not pass with ip: 550-5.7.26 [212.23.1.22].To best protect our users from spam, the message has 550-5.7.26 been blocked. Please visit 550-5.7.26https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#authentication for more 550 5.7.26 information. p9-20020adfe609000000b002ca647fe919si1349235wrm.527 - gsmtp Do I need to do something with thunderbird on my PC or is this a problem for Zen? Any help gratefully received. Nev

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