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[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : McGintys, Northgate Street
by samwise 16 Feb '09

16 Feb '09

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- The monthly "Third Monday" ALUG Ipswich Social Meeting is back tonight (Monday 16th February) at 20:00: P J McGinty & Sons 15 Northgate Street Ipswich Suffolk IP1 3BY Tel: 01473 251 515 Map/Directions URI: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=IP1+3BY WWW: http://pjmcginty.moonfruit.com/ McGintys pub is in the centre of Ipswich, not far from our old haunt - The Milestone. It's directly opposite the town's central library and has a reputation for good Irish beer. All are welcome, novices and experienced users. Feel free to ask for further information on the Main ALUG mailing list. We'll attempt to improve on last month's fiasco - I'll most certainly be there from 20:00. If anyone is planning on turning up late, please let me know by email or via the mobile, so I'll know to hang around, if the turnout is low! Hope to see you there, Peter. ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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Problems with Maxtor Basics 1TB USB Hard Disk
by Jan T. Kim 15 Feb '09

15 Feb '09

Dear All, I continue to have problems with a 1TB "Maxtor Basics" USB hard disk, after returning one disk of this kind and getting it exchanged on warranty this is now the second one that's developing problems so I wonder whether I'm doing something wrong. The disk came with an NTFS partition which I scrapped and replaced with an ext3 partition using gparted. That seemed to work ok, although I recall that I wondered a bit about the noises it made already at that time. After putting a bunch of files (movies from a Topfield PVR) onto the disk, the file system developed problems that weren't fixable with fsck. I therefore partitioned and formatted the disk again. First I tried fsck -c option to check for bad blocks. After running a whole night, fsck had gone to (about) 1200000 out of 200000000 blocks, and the hard disk made a rhythmic, clicking noise. It had obviously slowed down during the night (it was at about 1000000 blocks when I checked before going to sleep), so I stopped that. Now I've done things from scratch the traditional way with fdisk and mkfs (without -c). The disk made a lot of weird noises while mkfs was running, but eventually mkfs completed. I then mounted the file system and exercised it by repeatedly copying a Linux kernel source tree onto it. This worked ok for a few times, then I decided to have a look with du at the growing amount of stuff on the disk. Upon that, the copying process started to fail with messages like cp: writing `/media/mnt/dummy0008/include/net/ieee80211.h': Read-only file system cp: cannot create regular file `/media/mnt/dummy0008/include/net/checksum.h': Read-only file system and ``tail -f /var/log/messages'' at this time showed multiple repetitions of Feb 15 14:01:31 paxarchia kernel: [ 8431.175590] Info fld=0x0 Feb 15 14:01:31 paxarchia kernel: [ 8431.175590] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Add. Sense: Internal target failure Feb 15 14:01:32 paxarchia kernel: [ 8431.280559] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE,SUGGEST_OK Feb 15 14:01:32 paxarchia kernel: [ 8431.280559] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Sense Key : Hardware Error [current] The hard disk made a constant, whirring sound and its green LED was blinking at 1Hz (approx). When I umounted the file system, the whirring continued for several minutes and the umount command hang. After several minutes, though, the hard disk made a few clicks and stopped whirring, and umount completed. Can any of you make sense out of all this? Best regards & thanks in advance, Jan -- +- Jan T. Kim -------------------------------------------------------+ | email: j.kim@.uea.ac.uk | | WWW: http://www.cmp.uea.ac.uk/people/jtk | *-----=< hierarchical systems are for files, not for humans >=-----*

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Acer Aspire One Wireless
by Richard Lewis 15 Feb '09

15 Feb '09

Hello ALUG, How's anyone else's experience with wireless on their Acer Aspire One? I'm running Debian unstable on mine and wireless is quite dodgey. It's the stock 2.6.26 kernel from unstable along with the madwifi drivers (0.9.4) installed via m-a. Initially, if I do $ sudo iwlist scanning it says: wifi0 Interface doesn't support scanning. ath0 Interface doesn't support scanning : Network is down it's only after I've done: $ sudo ifup ath0 that it'll actually search for networks. This doesn't seem right. This aside, once I've added a suitable configuration to my /etc/network/interfaces it's very reluctant to connect to it. Normally when I do $ sudo ifup ath0 the little wifi LED doesn't flash, it waits for 20 seconds or so while it does DHCPDISCOVER a few times and then gives up. After this iwlist returns no results: wifi0 Interface doesn't support scanning. ath0 No scan results Then occasionally it connects. The LED flashes as normal, it connects almost immediately and reconnects without problems after suspend to RAM or shutdowns. Usually I go all day Saturday without it working and then it starts working on Sunday. (During the week I use ordinary ethernet.) But this weekend the wifi elves seem to have forgotten to visit my computer. I wondered whether being on AC power vs. battery may make a difference but it doesn't seem to. (Thankfully. It'd pretty useless if it needed to be plugged in to connect to a wifi network.) I also tried installing the 2.6.28 kernel from sidux which has the ath5k drivers in it but that doesn't seem to make any difference either. Is anyone else finding their's bad? Or is it just me? Best, Richard PS. resending after some SMTP error. Apologies if it comes twice! -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard Lewis ISMS, Computing Goldsmiths, University of London Tel: +44 (0)20 7078 5134 Skype: richardjlewis JID: ironchicken(a)jabber.earth.li http://www.richard-lewis.me.uk/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- +-------------------------------------------------------+ |Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.| |http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html | +-------------------------------------------------------+

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Google question, somewhat OT
by Chris G 15 Feb '09

15 Feb '09

I know this isn't strictly a Linux question but it is general computer knowledge. I've been hunting for suppliers of the Foxconn G31MG-S motherboard over the past few weeks. There's one hit comes up in Google Products but I'm not entirely sure that I trust it so I've been doing straight Google searches as well. I've just noticed that if I search for just "G31MG-S" (no quotes) and click on the "pages from the UK" button I get just 26 results whereas if I search for "Foxconn G31MG-S" (again no quotes) I get "about 244000", huh? I thought adding terms was meant to narrow the search. In fact lots of the "Foxconn G31MG-S" results don't appear to have "G31MG-S" in them at all - is Google losing the plot and trying to be too clever for its own good? I don't want it second guessing me and offering results with only some of my search terms in them. -- Chris Green

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1234567890
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 13 Feb '09

13 Feb '09

Hi folks, It's almost upon us: $ date -d "20090213 23:31:30" +"%s" 1234567890 Enjoy! it won't last. Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 13-Feb-09 Time: 18:56:07 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Network connections hanging - further info
by Chris G 13 Feb '09

13 Feb '09

Well after a while I have just got a network connection hanging and was able to do a traceroute to the site:- chris$ traceroute www.broadbandbuyer.co.uk traceroute to www.broadbandbuyer.co.uk (195.224.249.41), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets 1 * * * 2 * * * 3 * * * 4 * * * 5 * * * 6 * * * 7 * * * 8 * * * 9 * * * 10 * * * 11 * * * 12 * * * 13 * * * 14 * * * 15 * * * 16 * * * 17 * * * 18 * * * 19 * * * 20 * * * 21 * * * 22 * * * 23 * * * 24 * * * 25 * * * 26 * * * 27 * * * 28 * * * 29 * * * 30 * * * Hmmmm. The rest of the internet works fine, no problems at all but any connection to anywhere on www.broadbandbuyer.co.uk just hangs. A host or dig to www.broadbandbuyer.co.uk works fine. So I think it something getting stuck at this end but I wish I could work out what! Ah, another clue (or not), connecting to www.broadbandbuyer.co.uk from another computer on the LAN here works OK while the connections from my desktop are still hanging. Connecting from a different browser on my desktop computer doesn't work though. Any suggestions for further diagnosis? -- Chris Green

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Diagnosing web page timeouts
by Chris G 12 Feb '09

12 Feb '09

I seem to be suffering from a lot of web page timeouts at the moment. I navigate around a site for a while and then I can access no more pages at that site, if I leave the browser tab waiting I eventually get a timeout error. Usually if I then retry the page appears instantly. Can anyone suggest what might be going on and/or any way to diagnose what the problem is? Just being able to work out whether it's something wrong at my end or if there really is something wrong with the site I'm accessing would be useful. -- Chris Green

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[ALUG Announce] 2nd Thurs Pub Meet 12 February 2009
by David Reynolds 11 Feb '09

11 Feb '09

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- Dear ALUG, The monthly second Thursday social meeting of ALUG will take place on 12 February 2009 at The Reindeer (10 Dereham Road, Norwich, NR2 4AY; tel. 01603 762223). It's very near the junction of Dereham Road and the Norwich inner ring road (Grapes Hill) and serves a selection of real ales, nice pub food (if you fancy going early to eat) and coffee. There are generally people there from 20:00 onwards and we tend to sit to the left of the main entrance. We look forward to seeing you there. Cheers, David -- David Reynolds david(a)reynoldsfamily.org.uk ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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USB sticks and Acer Aspire One's
by Mark Rogers 10 Feb '09

10 Feb '09

An uncle (just mistyped that as "unclue", oops!) of mine has bought an Aspire One and can't get his USB stick to work. Can anyone offer advice? His message below: ------------------- I've just bought an Acer "Aspire One" note book and it runs on Linux It's got 120Gb of memory which is useful and so I want use some of the space so I thought I'll use a memory stick. But I can't make it work........ having searched the Help files(under Using removable media" that "Thunar supports removable media if it is built with support for HAL" My memory sticks are either Sandisk Cruzer or I have a Freecom "Toughdrive" neither seem to work. So had a look on the internet and it seems to be a common problem "Hal compatibility with memory sticks". Is there anything you can recommend, Ideally I want to use this notebook as a secondary backup and at the moment it's looking a bit useless! ------------------- -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Netbooks, Xandros and 3G USB
by James Taylor 09 Feb '09

09 Feb '09

Lo all, long time reader, haven't posted in a while, but for once a serious question (passed on from a friend). He's bought himself a net book running Linux and a broadband dongle, but is having some problems: "I have been and bought a mobile broadband dongle today from O2, It is a Huawei E160 but the Xandros does not see it." I'm not good when it comes to Linux on the desktop, can someone give me a hint what I should be looking for when I go back to him. Best Regards, thanks in advance, etc etc etc JT / mchicago

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monitor traffic to usb port
by Peter Alcibiades 07 Feb '09

07 Feb '09

Hi, I've a couple of usb dataloggers on order, which are said to be incompatible with Linux. They record events, and then you plug them into the usb port to use a windows only software package to pull the accumulated records off them. Without really knowing how much of a task this might be, I'm wondering about using a usb logger to catch the messages. But which one? Any ideas or suggestions or experience? And then writing my own little hack to do the same from linux using some suitably noddy high level language of course. Has anyone ever done this, and is it going to be so forbiddingly difficult that it should not even be attempted? Or did you do it and it was a snap? Or somewhere in between? Peter

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Linux coping with mainboard, memory and graphics card replacement?
by samwise 06 Feb '09

06 Feb '09

Hi, My PC hardware is getting somewhat long in the tooth now, and is running Debian Testing AMD64. At some point, I'll probably end up inheriting or buying a new mainboard, RAM and graphics card. I've spent an awful lot of time getting my OS configured the way I like it, though, and am not really looking forward to having to rebuild it again. How well would Linux cope if I swapped out the guts of the PC like this? I appreciate I'd have to update X to use the correct drivers for the new graphics card, but I'm not sure about the on-board sound card. That was auto-recognised on install, so is it likely to be detected if the mainboard is changed? Perhaps also worth mentioning that I selected to encrypt my OS hard drive when I installed it. Thoughts on anyone who's tried it ... ? Peter.

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Are there any remote backup systems that don't require ssh access? Recommendations?
by Chris G 05 Feb '09

05 Feb '09

I backup our important data (e.g. /home and some other bits and pieces) to a couple of remote 'servers'. At present I'm using rdiff-backup which does what I want except for one issue - it needs passwordless access to the remote system if it is to run unattended. (At least I think it does, I'm willing to listen to anything that suggests it doesn't) Having passwordless ssh access to the backup machine means that a malicious attacker who gets into the backup client machine can destroy all the backups as well as the files being backed up. While this is a fairly remote possibility (a malicious attacker getting in) I'd like to protect against it if I can. So I'm looking for a backup/mirror/remote copy facility that will allow me to 'push' files from a client machine to the backup machine without needing passwordless access. It also needs to do either timed or incremental backups in some shape or form as otherwise, of course, destroying files on the backup client would probably also destroy them on the backup. Any ideas anyone? I'm toying of playing with rsync with an rsync server on the remote backup machine though I haven't investigated this enough to see if it will work as I hope. There are a number of backup utilities that use rsync and provide timed and/or incremental backups but I'm not sure if they'll use rsync server on the remote. -- Chris Green

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Importing a big mail hierarchy into Evolution - how?
by Chris G 03 Feb '09

03 Feb '09

I am moving my wife over to xubuntu from windows XP, the move has been precipitated by the disk drive on her XP system dying. Fortunately I was able to extract all the data before it expired completely - but that's another story. (I'll post about that in a minute) She was using Thunderbird and Firefox on XP so the initial transition to Linux has been fairly painless. I have got all of her Thunderbird mail on the Linux system now. However it would be better if I could move her to Evolution because that synchronizes "out of the box" with her Palm Treo - I have the synchronization working already. The trouble is I need to get all of her mail across from Thunderbird to Evolution. It's easy enough copying individual mailboxes across but she has an extensive, hierarchical, mail archive with hundreds of messages in a complex hierarchy of fifty or sixty folders. It would take forever to copy this folder by folder. So, can anyone suggest a way to export the folders from Thunderbird and import them into Evolution preserving the structure? I have found the ImportExportTools add-on for Thunderbird but Evolution doesn't seem to understand the format of what it exports. -- Chris Green

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"Cannot run druid if PDAs or devices already configured" - what's druid?
by Chris G 03 Feb '09

03 Feb '09

When I start up my wife's new machine it pops up an error box saying:- Cannot run druid if PDAs or devices already configured I assume this is something to do with the gpilot set up for her Palm hotsync but I'm not clear how to fix it. Even when there's no actual USB cradle plugged in it still gives the error. -- Chris Green

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Securing wireless on a dedicated laptop/netbook
by Mark Rogers 02 Feb '09

02 Feb '09

Suppose I have a "black box" (which is Ubuntu Server 8.10) running in a cupboard and accessible via a web interface from the local network. Suppose also that they want some kind of access in the event of the local network going down. One idea I had was to add a USB wireless dongle to the black box and supply a small laptop or netbook, and set up the laptop so that it can access the web interface on the box. However, I need to make sure that this access is reasonably "secure" in that only that laptop can access the box. I can set the laptop up using wireless security passwords/keys which are not disclosed to the end user, however the end user will of-course have access to the settings from the laptop which they could duplicate on another laptop should they choose to, and we've been asked to tie it to the laptop that's supplied as far as possible. Presumably: (a) I should be able to find a USB wireless dongle with suitable drivers to make the initial connection work on Ubuntu, in ad-hoc mode (I have very little experience of wireless under Linux having had little need for it), (b) I should be able to restrict connections to specific MAC addresses? Is there anything else I should be able to do that would make it hard to duplicate the connection to other hardware? Is there any reason why something like an EEE or any other Linux based netbook wouldn't be ideal for the laptop end? In case it's not obvious, keep in mind that the black box has no GUI installed. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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".ece" file -- aka "The Lords Video"
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 31 Jan '09

31 Jan '09

Hi Folks, Having read, a couple of days ago on timesonline, that: Exclusive: Peers for cash investigation - new undercover footage The Sunday Times has released secret video and audio in which Lord Truscott offers to help reporters 'facilitate' a bill amendment I clicked on the link [see below]. Where the video should have been was a blank space with a box which said: THE VIDEO YOU ARE TRYING TO WATCH IS CURRENLY UNAVAILABLE. PLEASE CHECK BACK SOON. After checking back a few times over the next couple of days, with the same result, I thought: "Either the lawyers have put this in a locked box, or else I'm supposed to be using WIndows". So, just now, I went to the same URL using Internet Explorer, and enjoyed a nice little video. Just the job if your self-righteousness needs a boost. Then went back to Linux (just in case), but with the same negative result as before. The URL is: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5618786.ece A bit of browsing on "ece file" linux threw up: http://www.fileinfo.net/extension/ece .ECE File Extension File Type Escenic Dynamic Web Page Category Web Files Common? No File Description Web page dynamically generated by the Escenic Content Engine, an advanced platform for Web publishing and content management; typically contains server-side code that is parsed by the Web server, which generates HTML for the Web page. The ECE file extension is used for news article pages on the independent.co.uk and timesonline.co.uk websites. (which was my experience). I have no trouble with "ordinary" web pages in timesonline or independent, but this one is a show-stopper. Any suggestions for viewing such stuff on Linux? My web-browsing didn't throw up anything that looks useful. With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 31-Jan-09 Time: 13:05:00 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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aptitude
by James Freer 29 Jan '09

29 Jan '09

"aptitude is a terminal-based package managemer with a number of useful features, including: a mutt-like syntax for matching packages in a flexible manner, dselect-like persistence of user actions, the ability to retrieve and display the Debian changelog of most packages, and a command-line mode similar to that of apt-get. aptitude is also Y2K-compliant, non-fattening, naturally cleansing, and housebroken." Using ubuntu 8.04 LTS. I was a bit surprised to find in synaptic the above - is this someone poking fun, if so it doesn't seem very professional to me. I read that Aptitude was the Debian preferred package manager and i use to use it with versions 6.10 ,7.04. In 7.10 i found that it didn't seem to close and was listed in launchpad. Since then i haven't used it and the fault doesn't seem to have been rectified. Has anyone else found this. james

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Getting a message when something remote stops - how to do easily?
by Chris G 29 Jan '09

29 Jan '09

I want something that will tell me when something on a remote system has stopped working. I.e. I want silence (no E-Mail) when it's working and I want to receive an E-Mail when it stops working. For local tasks cron does this quite nicely, as long as the job produces no output (no errors), cron is silent but as soon as there's an error that produces output you get an E-Mail message. The task I want to keep tabs on is a cron job on a remote system, it's OK as long as the remote system is up and running and connected. The cron job will work similarly to a local cron job and will send me an E-Mail if anything goes wrong (well, most things). However if the system dies completely or if one can't connect to it then I'll never know. I suppose all I need to have is a silent test to see if I can connect to the remote system which becomes non-silent if one can't connect. I can then run this from cron. As long as I can connect to the remote system its cron will tell me if the job I'm interested in has worked. Can anyone suggest such a test? I guess a script using ping could do it but is there a more elegant and/or ready made utility to do it? -- Chris Green

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A complement to Asus for a BIOS fix
by Chris G 28 Jan '09

28 Jan '09

Ever since I built my latest box I've had *very* occasional total crashes. By "very occasional" I mean once a week or even less, they only ever occurred when I was actively using the system, it runs all the time as a disk server for our home LAN and never died in the middle of the night or while we were away. Just recently (like yesterday and the day before) it crashed more frequently, like twice or three times, and I decided to try and work out what the problem was. A quick Google showed that I was getting kernel panics as when the system froze the Caps Lock and Scroll Lock lights flashed which apparently indicates a kernel panic. There was absolutely no clue in the logs anywhere, not a murmur of anything wrong before the burst of messages for the reboot. A while ago (when I first built the system) it seemed as if it might be an Intel video driver issue but there have been a few updates since then and I decided to see if there might be a hardware problem. First I looked at the temperatures, nothing untoward there, CPU was 32 degrees, motherboard was 20 degrees. Then I tried running the memtest you can get to from the Grub menu, aha! Test 5 produced some errors (it's the block copy test). I tried moving the DIMMs around to see if that helped, it just moved the errors around but didn't fix them so it seemed there was a real error. Then I looked at the Asus web site (and my motherboard manual) to see if there were any clues there. The latest BIOS upgrade says "1. Improve the compatibility with some memory.", hmm, I wonder if that means me? So a BIOS upgrade seemed a good idea, first looks suggested that it might be a bit difficult because I don't have a floppy disk drive in the system. However I was pleasantly surprised to find that the BIOS upgrade utility built into the system BIOS which you get to by hitting ALT/F2 at boot can read the BIOS file from CD and USB as well as from a floppy (this wasn't very well documented anywhere) so I needed neither a floppy disk nor an MS operating system. I just wrote the updated BIOS file to a CD and the system did the rest. .... and now I appear to have error free memory according to memtest! :-) It remains to be seen whether it *was* the memory problem causing my kernel panics but it does seem likely. So, thank you Asus for finding the bug and fixing it and for providing utilities etc. that will work on Linux. They also have Linux drivers on their web site (not that I needed them, ubuntu detected everything without problems). -- Chris Green

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Postfix store-and-forward
by Mark Rogers 27 Jan '09

27 Jan '09

Any Postfix gurus here? Some time ago I set up Postfix based on a collection of How-To's and it works but I don't sufficiently understand the configuration to make changes safely. At the moment it received email on port 25 for a number of domains (specified in a MySQL database); it sends them via a dspam content_filter which redelivers on port 10026 from which the majority of email is dropped into MailDir mailboxes for Dovecot to make available via POP3, although some mail is forwarded to other addresses (eg gmail accounts). All of that is working. What I want to add is that for some domains, after spam checking they get forwarded to another SMTP server (specified in the database per-domain). Those servers will typically be Exchange servers within people's offices. I'm not sure what info I can offer to enable someone to help me, as I'm sure the above is nowhere near enough. I'm running on an Ubuntu server using standard repo packages only. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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How to override X security to run a remote network-admin?
by Chris G 26 Jan '09

26 Jan '09

I'm trying to run network-admin on a remote[ish] system on my LAN. I.e. I'm using ssh to connect from my desktop machine to another machine on the LAN (same subnet) and I want to run network-admin on that machine. Whatever I do to relax X security I still get:- root@garage:/home/chris# network-admin X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication. X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication. (network-admin:9918): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: localhost:10.0 I have connected to the garage system using both 'ssh -X' and 'ssh -Y' and I have done 'xhosts +' on the desktop system so that *any* X connection should be allowed. I'm still getting the above error. What do I need to do? Ah, a little further information, I can run network-admin as the non-root user on the remote system with the display on the desktop system. However it's no use because the 'Unlock' button is greyed out. What's the command line equivalent to network-admin? I know it's not a single program, I just want to 'un static IP' the remote system and the easiest way was (except for the above problem) to run network-admin. What files do I need to edit to undo the static setup? OK, I can find out myself really by looking at an un-static system. -- Chris Green

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Is there a lightweight version of YP/NIS for sharing passwords?
by Chris G 25 Jan '09

25 Jan '09

I'd like to make my life even easier by having some sort of simple/lite version of YP/NIS+ on my home system. I now have three xubuntu boxes and would like to be able to set up user logins in one place for all three systems. Is there some moderately easy way of doing this? -- Chris Green

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Local machine names/DNS - how to handle?
by Chris G 24 Jan '09

24 Jan '09

I know we've been here before but now I actually have everything working pretty well I'd like to decide how I *should* be doing this, i.e. the most elegant way of doing it. Our home network has a number of machines and devices on it:- My desktop machine - xubuntu 8.10 The TV/Lounge machine - xubuntu 8.10 The garage backup machine - Ubuntu server (8.10 too I think) An HP7310 printer A Siemens DECT VOIP box My wife's Windows XP machine plus occasional 'visiting' machines and devices These are all on the same 192.168.1.xxx subnet and a Draytek Vigor 2820n router connects them to the internet. There is a second backup ADSL connection provided by a BT "Business Hub" (2Wire) router on a different subnet. The Draytek Vigor shares its own ADSL and that of the BT router between users. I want to be able to refer to machines on the network by name, e.g. they are called isbd, lounge, garage, hp7310 etc. The methods I know about are:- Static IPs plus dnsmasq: Currently I do this by giving them fixed IP addresses which I put in the /etc/hosts file on my desktop machine (which runs all the time) and run dnsmasq in that machine to provide the other local machines with access to the names. Static IPs I used to set up /etc/hosts in all machines (well, all the Linux machines) separately before I used dnsmasq but although very simple it gets annoying to do this when a something is added or removed. It also means that one has to set up DNS host addresses everywhere. Dynamic IP This is where I get a bit lost. If I let everything go the the default then all IPs are assigned by DHCP. I.e. an ubuntu machine 'as installed' will ask for DHCP on the LAN, similarly the printer and the VOIP box will do so. The Draytek Vigor 2820n provides (as do nearly all routers) a DHCP service. If left like this though nothing wil have a name (as far as I know) and I will have no easy way to ssh to the garage machine for example. People keep telling me that this should be easy to resolve using (if I understand it correctly) the router but at the moment I don't really see how. If I *could* get names for everything using dynamic IP (i.e. DHCP provided by the router) then it would make for a simpler life as, at present, I have to change the Ubuntu default networking to give machines static IP and I also have to do slightly more configuration on the printer etc. There's a section in the router set-up called "Bind IP to MAC" which will allow the router to always give the same IP to each device/system but I don't see how I can get names in there. Am I missing something obvious somewhere? I don't think I've seen the ability to attach names to MAC addresses in any of the routers I've used over the past few years (Zyxel, Speedtouch). The BT 2Wire router allows you to manually give names to the MAC addresses but I'm not sure that it will let you use them to refer to them. -- Chris Green

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recommended commercial hosting companies?
by mbm 23 Jan '09

23 Jan '09

The recent discussion about mail access via ssh and ssh tunnels prompts me to ask about list members' experience of commercial hosting services. I have long since ceased to have any direct responsiblity for publicly accessible servers and my only network is now my home system. As I have said in earlier posts, I don't run 24/7 servers on that network and my only public servers are those provided by my (limited, home user) 1and1 contract. However, I have recently been playing with egroupware and a few friends and colleagues have asked if I could make the poc system I have built at home available on a public server. 1and1 provide good, reliable, fast, mail, DNS and web services, but they also offer virtual servers for the home user at around 15 UKP pcm. The other likely looking candidate is fasthosts who are a lot cheaper, have no traffic cap, but have different limitations. What I am looking for is a good quality commercial provider offering the following: root ssh/sftp access to a linux server apache/mysql/php/perl (preferably with no limit on the number of mysql databases, but I'd settle for 5 rather than the typical 1). ssl certificates for the webserver personal DNS management ideally local email server not too many restrictions on the outbound traffic (e.g. I'd like to be able to ssh out as well as in...) Any recommendations? TIA Mick --------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a Microsoft free zone. Please do not send me Microsoft Word Documents. For some reasons, see: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html http://www.goldmark.org/netrants/no-word/attach.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------

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