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How to execute a simple command during boot (before mounts)
by Chris G 19 Nov '07

19 Nov '07

I have a Freecom network disk which needs the following to be executed before I can mount it using an entry in /etc/fstab :- echo 0 > /proc/fs/cifs/LinuxExtensionsEnabled Is there any neat way I can get this command executed during the boot sequence before the entries in /etc/fstab are mounted? -- Chris Green

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Freedomware Gamefest
by MJ Ray 19 Nov '07

19 Nov '07

Thanks to Bristol Wireless Cooperative for the tip-off. I think ALUG has some bzflaggers... Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2007 16:16:33 -0000 From: "Ben Green" Message-ID: <op.t1x15vj50bw284@spinach> Subject: [bristol] Freedomware Gamefest Anyone heard of this before? Well you have now. http://www.freedomware-gamefest.com/ [snip!] Regards, -- MJ Ray http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html tel:+44-844-4437-237 - Webmaster-developer, statistician, sysadmin, online shop builder, consumer and workers co-operative member http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ - Writing on koha, debian, sat TV, Kewstoke http://mjr.towers.org.uk/

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Norwich 2nd Thursday announce mails
by Jonathan McDowell 16 Nov '07

16 Nov '07

Can I have a volunteer to take over the monthly Norwich 2nd Thursday announcement mails please? I missed this month's and while I could blame the starting a new job and being in the US and just generally being busier than normal I think it makes more sense for someone who is regularly able to go to post the mails. J. -- ] http://www.earth.li/~noodles/ [] I think he's a few bytes short of [ ] PGP/GPG Key @ the.earth.li [] a checksum. [ ] via keyserver, web or email. [] [ ] RSA: 4DC4E7FD / DSA: 5B430367 [] [

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3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : The Milestone, Woodbridge Road
by samwise 16 Nov '07

16 Nov '07

The monthly "Third Monday" ALUG Ipswich Social Meeting returns next week (Monday 19th Nov) at 20:00: The Milestone Beer House 5 Woodbridge Road IPSWICH IP4 2EA Tel: 01473 252425 Map/Directions URI: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=IP4+2EA The Milestone pub is in the centre of Ipswich, near the now-defunct Odeon cinema and not far from The Regent Theatre. There is more information on the venue, including car parking info, on the ALUG wiki: http://www.alug.org.uk/wiki/moin.cgi/Meetings All are welcome, novices and experienced users. Hopefully, it shouldn't be too hard to find the pack, look for those huddled around a laptop! Feel free to ask for further information on the Main ALUG mailing list. This month's meeting is another mainly social one - as our imagination for tutorial subjects was running thin last month (and we've had a few top ones in recent months). However, me and PeteT did say we try and have a look at some linux games ... Hope to see you there, Peter.

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ISP-relay SMTP question
by ted.harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 15 Nov '07

15 Nov '07

Hi Folks, I'm hoping someone with the expertise can help me! In connection with trying to diagnose email delivery problems to a particular domain, I'd like to know the answer to the following. My email procedure is: 1. Compose the email "off-line" in my MUA (XFMail) 2. "Send" it -- so it goes in the outbox 3. Really send it (batch send) -- XFMail hands the outbox over to sendmail which then does SMTP with the mail server of my ISP (Zen). Up to this point, there is no problem; and receipt of a "check" Bcc: sent to me on an external email account via the ISP verifies that the ISP accepted the mail for delivery. And of course I usually have no problems with delivery of emails to their destinations by the ISP. Except for this one domain. Now the question. When my sendamil is doing its SMTP with Zen's mail server, the first substantive request it will make is mail from: <whatever.my.sendmail.uses> After the mail has been received by the ISP, the ISP's mail servers will try to initiate connections with the destination domain's mail server. Again, once a connnection is established, the first substantive request it will make will be of the form: mail from: <whatever.my.ISP.uses> My question is: What (if any) is the relationship between <whatever.my.sendmail.uses> and <whatever.my.ISP.uses> ?? Does <whatever.my.ISP.uses> take the email address from the "From:" header in the email? From the "envelope-from"? Or does it uses its own version, as in (e.g.): mailer-daemon(a)zen.co.uk Or what? One aspect of the background to this question is that, when I try myself to do a (test) manual SMTP dialogue with one of the remote domains mail servers, while I may well get through and successfully send the mail, on many other occasions I will get a response to "mail from:" on the lines of mail from: Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk 451 4.3.2 Please try again later which will be repeated indefinitely if I keep trying. So I'm wondering if it may be a negative response to the email address used in the "mail from:" request, or has some other reason. Since I don't know whether Zen's mail server would use the same (or similar) email address in its own "mail from:" request, I can't (as yet) link the delivery failures I get with my own SMTP dialogue with the delivery failures when Zen tries to forward my emails to the destination domain. [And, by the way, how should I interpret the error message 451 4.3.2 Please try again later ??] With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 15-Nov-07 Time: 11:36:23 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Motherboard memory problem
by Chris G 15 Nov '07

15 Nov '07

I have just bought an extra 4Gb memory for my Abit AB9 Pro motherboard, I have plugged it in and it works fine (so I now have 6Gb) but I'm not convinced I understand the optimum way to install the memory. There are four memory slots numbered 1, 2, 3 and 4, they are laid out as two pairs, 1 and 2 close together and 3 and 4 close together. The manual is very ambiguous/confusing, it says:- To reach the optimum performance in dual-channel configurations, install identical DDR2 DIMM pairs for each channel. So does that mean a matched pair in both slots of channel A and a matched pair in both slots of channel B? That's not how the dealer had installed the existing memory and it isn't how their examples are either (see below). It's pretty definite that Channel A is slot 1 and slot 2, Channel B is slot 3 and slot 4, that at least is clear enough. However this is where it gets confusing, the sample layouts are for "Dual Channel Asymmetric" and "Dual Channel Symmetric", it doesn't say which is the best and they don't make a lot of sense. For example some "Dual Channel Asymmetric" layouts are:- Slot1 256Mb, Slot2 256Mb, Slot3 512Mb, Slot4 512Mb Slot1 256Mb, Slot2 256Mb, Slot3 256Mb, Slot4 512Mb Whereas a "Dual Channel Symmetric" examples are:- Slot1 512Mb, Slot2 empty, Slot3 512Mb, Slot4 empty Slot1 256Mb, Slot2 256Mb, Slot3 empty, Slot4 512Mb Slot1 256Mb, Slot2 512Mb, Slot3 256Mb, Slot4 512Mb Slots 1 and 3 are pink, slots 2 and 4 are red. I *suspect* that I have it right, as follows:- Slot1 1Gb, Slot2 2Gb, Slot3 1Gb, Slot4 2Gb (the dealer installed 1Gb were already in slots 1 and 3) but I'd really like to *know* that I have it right! -- Chris Green

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Re: [ALUG] more about sendmail
by mbm 13 Nov '07

13 Nov '07

>> You shouldn't use a CNAME for a host that you want to receive mail. I >> suggest you try changing it to an A record instead. > > To quote RFC1123 section 5.2.2: > > The domain names that a Sender-SMTP sends in MAIL and RCPT commands MUST > have been "canonicalized," i.e., they must be fully-qualified principal > names or domain literals, not nicknames or domain abbreviations. A > canonicalized name either identifies a host directly or is an MX name; it > cannot be a CNAME. > > Can someone explain why this restriction exists (or point to a good resource)? One obvious point is DNS inefficiency. If the sending MTA gets back an answer to an MX query pointing to a CNAME it then has to query again to get the A record. If there is a CNAME chain (and there may well be) then there have to be multiple queries until the A record is reached. Check out the Bat book. Mick

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More about sendmail sending to local machine
by Chris G 13 Nov '07

13 Nov '07

I'm beginning to think this is impossible! :-) I've been doing some Google searching about the file local-host-names, one hit suggested trying the following to see what sendmail views as local domains:- echo '$=w' | sendmail -bt ... and what does it return .... ADDRESS TEST MODE (ruleset 3 NOT automatically invoked) Enter <ruleset> <address> > home home.isbd.net localhost [192.168.1.1] isbd.net Which certainly looks as if sendmail thinks that home.isbd.net is the local machine. However when I tried using 'mail' to send a message from root to chris(a)home.isbd.net (I used 'mail' to ensure little else was involved) it *still* tries to send it out to the outside world. The entries in maillog are:- Nov 11 11:38:20 home sendmail[7883]: lABBcJ9h007883: from=root, size=64, class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=<200711111138.lABBcJ9h007883(a)home.isbd.net>, relay=root@localhost Nov 11 11:38:20 home sendmail[7884]: lABBcKac007884: from=<root(a)home.isbd.net>, size=354, class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=<200711111138.lABBcJ9h007883(a)home.isbd.net>, proto=ESMTP, daemon=MTA, relay=localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1] Nov 11 11:38:20 home sendmail[7883]: lABBcJ9h007883: to=chris(a)home.isbd.net, ctladdr=root (0/0), delay=00:00:01, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay, pri=30064, relay=[127.0.0.1] [127.0.0.1], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (lABBcKac007884 Message accepted for delivery) Nov 11 11:40:20 home sendmail[7886]: lABBcKac007884: to=<chris(a)84-45-228-40.no-dns-yet.enta.net>, delay=00:02:00, xdelay=00:02:00, mailer=esmtp, pri=120354, relay=84-45-228-40.no-dns-yet.enta.net. [84.45.228.40], dsn=4.0.0, stat=Deferred: Connection timed out with 84-45-228-40.no-dns-yet.enta.net. -- Chris Green

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How to send mail locally, solved but I don't really understand why
by Chris G 11 Nov '07

11 Nov '07

Well I finally found a way to send mail to local recipients, quite by chance really. I have a POP3 mailbox set up at Gradwell.net to allow me to send mail to 'myself' on my home machine (I read just about all of my mail on a remote machine at Gradwell) which comes in useful occasionally when I want to send a file to my home Linux box. This is set up in my isbd.net on Gradwell so it's home(a)isbd.net. I just occasionally run mutt locally on my desktop machine and collect mail from this POP3 mailbox. So, I realised that one way around my problem of sending mail to myself on the desktop machine would be to put home(a)isbd.net as the alias for root mail in /etc/aliases. Before doing this I tried sending mail to home(a)isbd.net from my desktop machine, it failed with "Error sending message, child exited 67 (User unknown.).", huh? I then realised that this meant that sendmail was trying to send this *locally* and there's no user called 'home' on this machine. Euraka!!! If I send mail to chris(a)isbd.net on my desktop machine it gets sent to the local user chris and *not* to the place where it would get sent if it was sent from anywhere else on the internet (chris(a)isbd.net is one of my 'real' E-Mail addresses). So, problem solved, I can put:- root: chris(a)isbd.net at the end of /etc/aliases and all the root mail will get to me locally. Quite *why* it's like this is anybody's guess! :-) -- Chris Green

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How to get mail to local destinations delivered?
by Chris G 11 Nov '07

11 Nov '07

I have a fairly default Fedora 7 installation, certainly the sendmail is just as it was installed. How do I get sendmail to deliver mail to local destinations? The system's hostname is home.isbd.net and it's connected to the Internet via a router. I have a CNAME set up at the hosting provider that hosts isbd.net to point at the static address of my ADSL connection. When I send mail from my system to a local address it gets the hostname added, thus mail gets sent to root(a)home.isbd.net, postmaster(a)home.isbd.net, chris(a)home.isbd.net, etc. All of this fails because sendmail attempts to connect to the SMTP port of home.isbd.net, which isn't possible because my router's firewall doesn't accept connections on port 25. I don't want to open up port 25 and it seems a bit silly anyway to send mail on such a long round trip. Is there any way I can tell sendmail that home.isbd.net is localhost (or 192.168.1.1)? I have an entry for home.isbd.net in my /etc/hosts file which is:- 192.168.1.1 home home.isbd.net but obviously sendmail is doing a DNS lookup for home.isbd.net which returns the 'external' IP address. -- Chris Green

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Regex
by Ruth Bygrave 11 Nov '07

11 Nov '07

In a more-stupid-than-normal moment I ended up with a Text Edit document on my Mac with lots of capital I's in the middle of words. I tried 'check spelling' to see if it did an entire run of spell- checking through the document, but there was no dialog box. Tried to go through it in NeoOffice, which I'm not that familiar with, but NeoOffice bombed. Can somebody less brain-dead than I appear to be today come up with a bash script to pour the text into that does 'replace I not on word boundary with i'? (The infuriating thing is, I used to *know* this stuff, or at least where to look it up, but because I've been Abjuring Hackish Unixy Things since I was in mental hospital this summer, I don't even know where to start...) Also 'replace 'fI ind' with 'I find', because the reason I was messing about with I's in the first place was there's a timing error with my Alphasmart Neo keyboard and it has a tendency to transpose letters. Kthxbai, Ruth

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Samba question/problem
by Chris G 07 Nov '07

07 Nov '07

I have Samba installed and working on my Fedora system, it mostly does what I expect but one entry doesn't. My smb.conf file has:- # global section default service = default encrypt passwords = yes null passwords = yes workgroup = IBMPEERS nt acl support = no [snip] # # # ISBD, user is set to isbd to allow read/write # [isbd] comment = ISBD force user = isbd path = /home/isbd guest ok = yes writable = yes By my reading of the smb.conf manual page that should allow anyone in to access /home/isbd, it should make them act as the user 'isbd' and it should give write access. (Remember this is a home intranet, two users, who both want access to the ISBD files) In practice when connecting from XP I always seem to have to enter a valid password to get access. In general what's the easiest way to make Samba shares appear in XP 'automagically' without having to enter passwords etc.? -- Chris Green

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Python question about reading files
by Chris G 06 Nov '07

06 Nov '07

Are there any Python people here? How do I do the equivalent of the C below in Python :- while ( (str = read(file)) != NULL) { do something; } I can read the data OK, i.e. I have opened the file and I can successfully read from the file with the line:- tagNum = tlvFile.read(3) but I don't see how to make that part of a for/while loop that exits at the end of the file. I can't use an iterator because the file is read in variable length chunks whose length depends on context. -- Chris Green

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BBC on amarok or whatever, how to?
by Peter Alcibiades 06 Nov '07

06 Nov '07

I'm seeking (for someone else) to get streaming BBC to play over some Linux player, don't really care what, on 64bit Debian. Once more cursing the day I ever installed 64 rather than 32bit, and on more than one machine, but that's another story. Amarok, attempting to tune into (for example) mms://wmlive-acl.bbc.co.uk/wms/radio1/radio1_nb_e1s1 gives the response Error loading media, there is no available decoder. I set up amarok in accordance with these instructions: http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/gaming-games-multimedia-entertainment/7934… and presumably having got to the point of trying to play, probably did it right. Assuming this is because there is no win codecs, I went to medubuntu and got the 32 bit ones. This was a large weighty package. They will not install being 32bit. OK, went back and got the 64 bit amd64 ones. This was a suspiciously small file, and one's fears were realized when the package installed and the message was unchanged. I have also downloaded Real Player, and made it executable, but now what to do with it? It too of course is 32bit and presumably that is why it will do zip when you try to start it. There is no problem downloading the mp3 files for previously broadcast programmes, and they play just fine (rhythmbox seems to be an acceptable interface for this). But what I'm really being asked to provide is streaming BBC internet radio. Anyone done it? Peter

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How do people here manage updates (or not)?
by Chris G 06 Nov '07

06 Nov '07

Now that I have been running Fedora 7 for a while I'm beginning to see its strengths and weaknesses. One area that worries me slightly is what seems to be the 'normal' way of keeping it up to date which is to run 'yum update all' (or an equivalent) automatically at regular intervals. Most of the time this works fairly smoothly but every so often there is a hiccough and you see as a result hundreds of messages in the Fedora mailing lists saying "it's broken". For me one of the major disadvantages of this approach is that when the kernel gets updated (which is quite frequently) I have to recompile both my Nvidia display drivers and Vmware. The Vmware recompile can be a bit difficult as Vmware is only guaranteed to build against certain kernel versions and you often have to use third-party patches to get it to compile with more recent kernels. So I don't update all the time now, at least not the kernel. I'm wondering if there is a 'happy medium' somewhere between Slackware which was very conservative and stable (only went to a 2.6 kernal just recently) and Fedora which seems a bit frantically on the bleeding edge. Is there a distribution which offers pretty close to latest versions of everything when it releases but then just maintains things with only security updates and such until the next release? General requirements are:- Not too "GUI and Windows oriented", Fedora is definitely as far as I'd want to go in this direction. A reasonably good package management utility, Fedora's yum makes life a lot easier than Slackware. I run FVWM2 as my window manager so any distribution that makes it difficult to do this is out! Must run Vmware fairly smoothly, I think most probably will, Slackware was slightly messy because of its different initialisation script structure. Vmware is important to me as I need MS Access to run our company's accounts. Running them via Vmware on my desktop is just *so* much nicer than running on a separate machine that I'll never go back. It's all well backed up and, if the Linux/Vmware goes completely pear shaped I could easily enough just put them on a dedicated machine so absolute reliability of Vmware isn't necessary. -- Chris Green

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Re: [ALUG] How should my hostname *really* be configured
by mbm 05 Nov '07

05 Nov '07

Chris > > I have a CNAME record in the zone file at the hosting provider that > hosts isbd.net so that home.isbd.net has the address > 84-45-228-40.no-dns-yet.enta.net which is my home machine (via ADSL). I'm assuming that enta.net give you a fixed IP address here. It certainly looks that way from their website. So the external world view of your "home.isbd.net" server will be OK and will resolve to the external address of your ADSL router. I also assume that you are either port forwarding 22 and 80 to your "home" machine or have it publicly available on a DMZ. > > So far so good, it all does basically what I want so that I can 'ssh > home.isbd.net' and log in to my home machine and http://home.isbd.net > in a browser gets to see the apache web pages on my home machine. > > > However I still don't seem to have the 'local' setup fully sorted, > i.e. how do I get things on my local intranet to work totally > correctly? As it is things work but there are some 'infelicities'. > > > In particular apache when it starts up has the message about "Could > not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name ...." > and I'd like to know the proper way to get the result of 'hostname' to > be right. Ther apache error is probably not a DNS issue, but more likely caused by a configuration problem in apache2.conf (or httpd.conf). Try setting the ServerName directive to the FQDN "home.isbd.net". Apache will then use that and should stop complaining. > My home network is behind a router and most machines have static IP > addresses in the 192.168.1 range, the router is set up to allow ssh > and http through (with limitations). > > In my /etc/hosts file I have:- > > 127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost > ::1 localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6 > 192.168.1.1 home home.isbd.net > 192.168.1.5 garage > 192.168.1.10 chris > 192.168.1.40 netpr > 192.168.1.44 hp7310 HPEDDBB7 HP000D9D068F7D > 192.168.1.254 speedtouch > > Searching in google suggests that I need to add my proper hostname > (i.e. home.isbd.net) to the 127.0.0.1 line in /etc/hosts but that > sounds like it's incompatible with the 192.168.1.1 line. I recommend you don't alias your hostname to local loopback. Leave that to localhost. The 192.168.1.1 entry is fine. So long as all your hostfiles are in synch and your machines all look at local hosts files first (/etc/host.conf says "order hosts,bind") then they will all resolve "home.isbd.net" to 192.168.1.1. Alternatively you could run a local DNS server (possibly on your router) but for a small network that is probably more hassle than it is worth. > I want to end up in a situation where:- > > /bin/hostname returns 'home' (as opposed to home.isbd.net, so that > my prompts and window titles are sensible) > > home.isbd.net is a valid address on my local network and connects > to the linux server machine > > There are no complaints from apache (or others) at startup Just set each hostname locally to "foo" and ensure that /etc/hosts has alias entries for "foo.bar.net" as appropriate. Your example hosts file is fine, but you should have aliases for "garage.isbd.net", "chris.isbd.net" etc. to ensure proper resolution. HTH Mick

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YUM: missing baseurl
by Yvonne Everett 05 Nov '07

05 Nov '07

I've just installed Fedora 6 and am having problems getting YUM and Software Updater to work properly. For instance, the extract below shows the "Error: Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: core" error which is exactly the same error I get with Software Updated: [root@ukl20943l etc]# su -c 'yum grouplist' Loading "installonlyn" plugin Setting up Group Process Setting up repositories Could not retrieve mirrorlist [url]http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=core-6&arch=i386[/url] error was [Errno 4] IOError: <urlopen error (-2, 'Name or service not known')> Error: Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: core Any ideas anyone? Thanks -- Yvonne Everett Email: ye103910(a)googlemail.com

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Boot question
by Chris G 05 Nov '07

05 Nov '07

My Fedora system has two (identical, but that doesn't matter) disk drives. Fedora is installed on /dev/sdb which uses LVM. Currently /dev/sda is partitioned the 'old fashioned' way. Now that I'm happy with the Fedora installation I want to tidy things up and use LVM for /dev/sda as well. Backing up and copying the data across is straightforward enough, I can cope with that. I have enough space that I can empty /dev/sda completely and partition it from scratch. However what worries me slightly is that there is presumably an MBR (that's what DOS used to call it) on /dev/sda which the BIOS goes to when the system is powered up. If I repartition /dev/sda will I lose this boot record? How does this get created in the Linux way of doing things? -- Chris Green

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Re: [ALUG] How do people here manage updates (or not)?
by Bev Nicolson 05 Nov '07

05 Nov '07

FWIW.(Maybe not much but anyway...) Yes, it would be helpful if the Ubuntu update dialogue box gave more information about what was being fixed (when there is something to fix.) Mildly ironic given how user friendly it is. For relative newbie like myself the tech speak is not helpful so unless it actually looks useful I don't install it. On the other hand, most of the time you don't have to faff about configuring anything as it does it for you, although there are exceptions. I have had to venture into apt (with assistance) to get a program I wanted installed. Bev. > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Srdjan Todorovic" <todorovic.s(a)googlemail.com> > To: "ALUG ML" <main(a)lists.alug.org.uk> > Subject: Re: [ALUG] How do people here manage updates (or not)? > Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2007 10:27:37 +0000 > > > On 05/11/2007, Brett Parker <iDunno(a)sommitrealweird.co.uk> wrote: > > On Mon, Nov 05, 2007 at 09:45:59AM +0000, Chris G wrote: > > > Is there a distribution which offers pretty close to latest versions > > > of everything when it releases but then just maintains things with > > > only security updates and such until the next release? > > > > I believe that is the goal of most of the Enterprise versions out > > there... > > But Slackware's been doing this for ages. Also, doesn't Ubuntu do > this already? > I can't believe that Fedora Core would not have this capability. > > What I've found frustrating with Ubuntu (well, Kubuntu really), is > that when doing updates, there is very little information about what's > been fixed. Adept just > doesn't seem to list the security CVE codes. Maybe I've missed it and need > better glasses. Don't know much about Fedora's update mechanisms. > > Srdjan > > _______________________________________________ > main(a)lists.alug.org.uk > http://www.alug.org.uk/ > http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main > Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above! > -- _______________________________________________ Surf the Web in a faster, safer and easier way: Download Opera 9 at http://www.opera.com Powered by Outblaze

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Compiling backages for Debian-based distros
by Mark Rogers 05 Nov '07

05 Nov '07

I'm still trying to get my head around the correct way to configure a typical source tarball installation to fit into the Debian way of doing things. The best I've found so far is: ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc \ --sharedstatedir=/var --localstatedir=/var \ --libexecdir=/usr/lib Does all that look correct? The general idea is that if I want to try and build a replacement .deb for an existing package, using a more up to date source tarball, then I want all the files to end up in the same places as would have been the case for the original package. (For all the documentation I've found, the best so far was an answer to a similar question on a dbus mailing list: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dbus/2006-September/005618.html) For the time being I'm only looking at i386 packages but I think the only thing that would change for 64-bit would be /usr/lib to /usr/lib64? -- 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 should my hostname *really* be configured?
by Chris G 04 Nov '07

04 Nov '07

I have a CNAME record in the zone file at the hosting provider that hosts isbd.net so that home.isbd.net has the address 84-45-228-40.no-dns-yet.enta.net which is my home machine (via ADSL). So far so good, it all does basically what I want so that I can 'ssh home.isbd.net' and log in to my home machine and http://home.isbd.net in a browser gets to see the apache web pages on my home machine. However I still don't seem to have the 'local' setup fully sorted, i.e. how do I get things on my local intranet to work totally correctly? As it is things work but there are some 'infelicities'. In particular apache when it starts up has the message about "Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name ...." and I'd like to know the proper way to get the result of 'hostname' to be right. My home network is behind a router and most machines have static IP addresses in the 192.168.1 range, the router is set up to allow ssh and http through (with limitations). In my /etc/hosts file I have:- 127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost ::1 localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6 192.168.1.1 home home.isbd.net 192.168.1.5 garage 192.168.1.10 chris 192.168.1.40 netpr 192.168.1.44 hp7310 HPEDDBB7 HP000D9D068F7D 192.168.1.254 speedtouch Searching in google suggests that I need to add my proper hostname (i.e. home.isbd.net) to the 127.0.0.1 line in /etc/hosts but that sounds like it's incompatible with the 192.168.1.1 line. I want to end up in a situation where:- /bin/hostname returns 'home' (as opposed to home.isbd.net, so that my prompts and window titles are sensible) home.isbd.net is a valid address on my local network and connects to the linux server machine There are no complaints from apache (or others) at startup -- Chris Green

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mount conundrum
by Chris G 04 Nov '07

04 Nov '07

Maybe I've got too involved in this and need to leave it for a while but I'll ask anyway..... A per the lvm thread I now have a whole new disk that has been lvm'ed. I think I probably want to move all my home directories and other such bits and pieces onto it. I.e. I will have one 'system' disk which has all the OS stuff on it and one 'data' disk which has home directories and anything else which is bascially data rather than programs (such as pictures, vmware guest images, etc.). So, how do I do it? If I create a /home directory on my root partition and then mount the new logical volume on /home it means that *everything* I create on that logical volume will appear as /home/<something>. That maybe alright for actual /home directories but doesn't make much sense for other stuff. Should I:- Split the new disk into more than one Logical Volume? Use lots of symbolic links? Stop drinking so much wine? I'm stopping now, doing things as root when I'm even slightly inebriated is probably not a good idea. :-) -- Chris Green

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How to use pvcreate?
by Chris G 04 Nov '07

04 Nov '07

OK, so I have cleared everything off my /dev/sda (except, presumably, the MBR) and all is well still, Fedora still boots and my Windows guest virtual machine is still working. How do I now set up /dev/sda using LVM? As I understand it the sequence is to create a Physical Volume using pvcreate, then a Logical Group that uses the Physical Volumes I have created and then I create a logical volume in the Logical Group. The problem is that I don't understand how you tell pvcreate what disk it is to use. The 'synopsis' on the pvcreate man page says:- SYNOPSIS pvcreate [-d|--debug] [-f[f]|--force [--force]] [-y|--yes] [-h|--help] [-t|--test] [-v|--verbose] [--labelsector] [-M|--metadatatypetype] [--metadatacopies#copies] [--meta- datasizesize] [--restorefilefile] [--setphysicalvolumesizesize] [--version] [-Z|--zeroy/n] PhysicalVolume [PhysicalVolume...] Which doesn't seem to give much clue as to what disk it uses, PhysicalVolume is (as I understand it) the name that pvcreate gives to the chunk of disk you want to use, so what disk does it use? -- Chris Green

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Some PDF printer jobs just hang (CUPS)
by Chris G 02 Nov '07

02 Nov '07

I have two printers on at home. both networked, an HP7310 which has its own network interface and an HP1320 which is networked via an old Axis print server. Most of the time they work fine with Word documents from Maxine's XP machine or my XP Vmware guest and documents from my Fedora box, etc., etc. However I'm having trouble printing some PDF documents, sometimes PDF prints OK and other times it just hangs leaving CUPS telling me that the job has been "Processing since ......". It even starts feeding paper on the HP7310, then stops. I *think* this may be on more complex printouts, e.g. when I have selected part of a PDF page to print but I'm not absolutely sure. Does anyone have any ideas what the problem might be? -- Chris Green

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Show the BBC that more than 600 GNU/Linux users try to use their web sites
by MJ Ray 02 Nov '07

02 Nov '07

I think this below is a good idea. Please leave a comment saying how often you try to use BBC web sites (I forgot) and don't feel pressured into donating to the hosting company if you don't want to. To: london(a)lists.greenparty.org.uk, fsfe-uk(a)gnu.org Date: Fri, 2 Nov 2007 10:49:15 +0000 From: Tom Chance Message-ID: <5929a53b6c2c6514d68d6686dac25b0f(a)acrewoods.net> Subject: [Fsfe-uk] GNU/Linux users - sign petition to say you use BBC web site! Hello there, The BBC's head of technology is claiming that only about 400-600 people use GNU/Linux to access the BBC, as part of their PR excercise glossing over how badly they've got it wrong with their M$-only iPlayer (see http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/15/1721229 and for background see http://tom.acrewoods.net/blog/2007/aug/bbc-corrupted-iplayer-protests-uk) If you've used GNU/Linux to access the beeb, can you sign the petition below? Please circulate widely. http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/linuxbbc Kind regards, Tom _______________________________________________ Fsfe-uk mailing list Fsfe-uk(a)gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-uk -- MJ Ray http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html tel:+44-844-4437-237 - Webmaster-developer, statistician, sysadmin, online shop builder, consumer and workers co-operative member http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ - Writing on koha, debian, sat TV, Kewstoke http://mjr.towers.org.uk/

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