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10369 discussions

Strange apache permission problem, can access anywhere *except* /tmp
by Chris Green 30 Oct '18

30 Oct '18

I want to put some temporary html files in /tmp (well, a sub-directory of /tmp) and view them using apache2. I always get permission denied and it seems as if apache2 refuses to access any files in /tmp. I have a very simple apache2 set up with the root set to /srv with an entry as follows:- <Directory /srv/> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All Require all granted </Directory> I add symlinks to /srv to get access to files around the system, it works for every directory I've tried (even including such places as /etc) but *not* for /tmp. (I've removed all the odd symlinks again of course!) What's so special about /tmp? I've searched for references to tmp in the apache configuration but there's nothing there. Can anyone suggest what the issue is? Alternatively where can I put a file that will get cleaned out periodically (like /tmp at reboot)? -- Chris Green

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2600 meeting at 18:00 on Friday the 2nd November.
by Viperfang 30 Oct '18

30 Oct '18

Quick heads up about this months Norwich 2600 meeting, more info at http://www.norwich2600.co.uk

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Evince
by Bev Nicolson 25 Oct '18

25 Oct '18

Now, I have googled and I understand Evince/Document Viewer crashing is not news. But how come it only does this with one document for me? Opens it, loads, crashes. Okular has been downloaded, btw. I'm asking this because I’m puzzled. Bev

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Re: [ALUG] Batch formatting documents in LibreOffice? (Phil Thane)
by mark fernandes 16 Oct '18

16 Oct '18

Would headless mode Libreoffice get you closer to your goal? https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Starting_the_Software_With_Parameters HTH, Mark

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Batch formatting documents in LibreOffice?
by Phil Thane 15 Oct '18

15 Oct '18

Hello Lugs, Like a fool I volunteered to edit the Great Ouse Boating Association magazine (GOBA News). Obviously I use LO on Linux so maybe someone can help. I get a lot texts sent in from members and others, mostly done on MS Word, various versions, different defaults and different user preferences in evidence. I change the lot as I edit them to my preferred font and remove all the odd line spaces, paragraph indents, justification and so on. It's a bit of a pain. Then I send them to another member who proof reads them, using MS word, and puts all the justification back. Eventually I send the text files (as docx) plus photos etc to the designer. I know from my past experiences with DTP the simpler the input text the easier the designer's job so I'd like to help out by stripping most of the formatting. I don't really want to go to .txt because writers use italics and bold for emphasis and that would get lost. Does anyone know if it's possible to set up a set of rules in LibreOffice then apply them to a batch of files (typically 20-30)? Can't find anything helpful online. -- Phil

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OT: SSD vs SD
by Mark Rogers 12 Oct '18

12 Oct '18

You can buy SD to SATA converters that will take up to 10 micro SD cards and turn them into a "hard drive" (2.5" form factor, SATA connector). In principle you could put 4x128GB SD cards in and get 512GB for about £100 using Samsung or Sandisk cards (Or 1TB for £200, 1.5TB for £300.) Cost wise that makes them a good percentage cheaper than equivalent capacity SSD drives. How would this compare aside from cost? Is it performance that would be a win for the SSD, or reliability (or both)? (I'm looking at this for a Ubuntu desktop but I don't think that justifies claiming it is on topic.) In part I'm looking at it as a way to re-use SD cards that I have floating around but I'm not sure if it's worth the effort. At least for the ones I have looked at the total capacity will be (smallest card) * (number of cards) so if you have a mix of card sizes it doesn't work very well. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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VNC recommendations wanted please
by Chris Green 08 Oct '18

08 Oct '18

I'm thinking of using VNC to remotely access a couple of GUI applications running on my home desktop machine. Both my home desktop and the remote client machine are running xubuntu 18.04. I don't need a full desktop so a simple GUi just giving the ability to run programs is all I need. I *may* sometimes run over slow links so good link efficiency would be helpful. ... and finally it would be nice if it could use ssh for the link. So what would people recommend, preferably from the Ubuntu repositories for server and client? -- Chris Green

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[ALUG Announce] ALUG Norwich Pub Meet Thursday 11th October
by Viperfang 08 Oct '18

08 Oct '18

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via https://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- Hello Norwich Aluggers, Our monthly ALUG Norwich social meeting will be held this Thursday, 11th October at The Coach and Horses (82 Thorpe Road, Norwich, NR1 1BA). The meeting officially starts at 8pm, although some people may arrive earlier. More information on those people can be found on the list and the IRC channel. If you are unsure if you will recognise us then make yourself and your intent to attend known by either posting on list or visiting us on IRC so we can look out for you rather than hiding in the corner. Optionally you could ask at the bar if they know where the geeky computer weirdos are and they'll point you in the right direction (seriously!). Another possibility is look for heaps of electronics on a table that may possibly look like movie props that would used for detonating explosives. Feel free to bring electronics/laptops/gadgets to the meet, you will by no means be alone. Ben Bewick aka Viperfang NB: This mail is automated, please refer to the usual sources for more information. ALUG Contact Details: Website : http://www.alug.org.uk/ IRC : #alug on irc.alug.org.uk List : http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo Twitter : http://twitter.com/anglianlug Identica: TBA Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2381613902 ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via https://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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2600 meeting at 18:00 on Friday the 5th October.
by Viperfang 02 Oct '18

02 Oct '18

Quick heads up about this months Norwich 2600 meeting, more info at http://www.norwich2600.co.uk

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Introduction
by Andrew Hutchings 30 Sep '18

30 Sep '18

Hi all, My name is Andrew Hutchings and I'm also known as LinuxJedi. I work as a Lead Software Engineer for a company called MariaDB. I've been a Linux user between a hobbyist and in industry for probably around 20 years. A really long time ago (about 15 years) I used to run a LUG in Wales, I've lived in Norfolk for 6 years now (Watton) and thought it was time to join one again. Look forward to chatting to you all. Kind Regards -- Andrew Hutchings - LinuxJedi - http://www.linuxjedi.co.uk/

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Samba users and permissions
by Mark Rogers 26 Sep '18

26 Sep '18

I'm rebuilding a Samba file server and my knowledge is rusty. Note this is a simple fileserver, no AD. What I want to achieve is that each user has their own user/pass but that all files stored on the server get allocated to one global user. As I recall, I need both a Linux user and a Samba user for each person. However, I still have access to the files on the old server (but cannot boot it) and looking at /etc/passwd on there I do not see the individual users listed. I know that I definitely used to access the share as "mark". Therefore I'm both confused how it used to work, but also the correct way to set it up now. It's Ubuntu Server 18.04, Samba 4.7.6. Right now I have my shares configured in /var/lib/samba/usershares and can access them all via a single user (my primary server login which I added to Samba as well). They're currently read-only because the files are all root.root owned, that's something else I'll need to change. (If I can do it, I'd like to have some users read-only and some read-write once I'm finished but that's not a priority.) -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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mdadm woes
by Mark Rogers 14 Sep '18

14 Sep '18

I have just moved two mdadm RAID1 arrays from an old server to a new one. Initially mdadm automatically created two arrays (md126 & md127), read-only and marked resync=pending. I mounted these and they were fine. I then stopped those arrays and rebuilt them manually as md0 & md1, and the resync started. Neither will now mount; mdadm seems happy but there isn't a recognisable filesystem on either array. I have stopped both arrays while I try to work out what went wrong and whether I can fix it. Suggestions? All the important data is backed up elsewhere but there's a lot of unimportant stuff that I'd nevertheless prefer to retrieve if I can. (Several TB of applications, distros, etc which can all be retrieved from the Internet if needed, which is why I don't waste space backing them up, but I'd still rather not have to throw them away and start again if I can avoid it.) One thought, although I'm fairly sure this isn't what happened, is that because I have two raid arrays I might have mixed my disks up when I created my new arrays (one of each in each). I would have thought that mdadm would have tried very hard to stop me doing that though? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Password managers
by Mark Rogers 14 Sep '18

14 Sep '18

Are there any password managers that can cope with the "pick characters 3, 5 and 11 from your password" security challenges? Santander has just moved to that, and if you have a secure unique password it's a pain. <RANT>Santander also require that the password is max 16 chars and alpha-numeric only. Because security, or something. The mere fact that they want me to pick certain characters from it already tells me that the password isn't being stored salted and hashed. It's a good job their app can use biometric because their website has just become pretty much unusable for me now.</RANT> -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Verifying files
by Mark Rogers 13 Sep '18

13 Sep '18

I'm looking for a way to search through an entire filesystem verifying file validity where possible. That is, if the file is a known file type that can be consistency checked, then run that check and see if it passes. So for a .zip file (including .jar, .odt, etc) run it through "unzip -t". And so on for other file types. I can't think of a suitable Google search that doesn't just throw up file system consistency checks, or tests against previously stored md5sum data (which I don't have, but wouldn't really be what I wanted anyway). I'll look at scripting something otherwise, but I'm not a wheel inventor if I can help it. On the assumption nobody has a good solution, the next best thing would be as many helpful hints as to file types I can test for consistency and what tools to test them with. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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[ALUG Announce] ALUG Norwich Pub Meet Thursday 13th September
by Viperfang 10 Sep '18

10 Sep '18

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via https://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- Hello Norwich Aluggers, Our monthly ALUG Norwich social meeting will be held this Thursday, 13th September at The Coach and Horses (82 Thorpe Road, Norwich, NR1 1BA). The meeting officially starts at 8pm, although some people may arrive earlier. More information on those people can be found on the list and the IRC channel. If you are unsure if you will recognise us then make yourself and your intent to attend known by either posting on list or visiting us on IRC so we can look out for you rather than hiding in the corner. Optionally you could ask at the bar if they know where the geeky computer weirdos are and they'll point you in the right direction (seriously!). Another possibility is look for heaps of electronics on a table that may possibly look like movie props that would used for detonating explosives. Feel free to bring electronics/laptops/gadgets to the meet, you will by no means be alone. Ben Bewick aka Viperfang NB: This mail is automated, please refer to the usual sources for more information. ALUG Contact Details: Website : http://www.alug.org.uk/ IRC : #alug on irc.alug.org.uk List : http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo Twitter : http://twitter.com/anglianlug Identica: TBA Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2381613902 ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via https://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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2600 meeting at 18:00 on Friday the 7th September.
by Viperfang 04 Sep '18

04 Sep '18

Quick heads up about this months Norwich 2600 meeting, more info at http://www.norwich2600.co.uk

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Photo management handling of IPTC, EXIF, etc.
by Chris Green 22 Aug '18

22 Aug '18

I think I've been here before but still..... Is there absolutely no standard at all for photo image metadata? Yes, I know there's EXIF and IPTC and XMP, but they only define the names of the fields one can store, they don't tell you *what* the fields are for. Firstly there's a ridiculous number of fields, the full list goes on for pages and pages, you might as well say 'store anything with a name like exif.abd,def'. Secondly there are no rules about what you put in which field and every program I can find seems to have a different idea of what you put where. As a result it's all pretty useless apart from a very few IPTC fields like Copyright. There doesn't even seem to be a 'most popular program' that has managed to set the default usage. All I really want to know is where to put:- Title Longer Description Tags While one can come up with sort of semi reasonable defaults for Title and Description there really doesn't seem any remotely useful way of handling tags if you want any sort of semi-sane hierarchy. To make *any* sort of sense tags need hiearachy. E.g. for our horses an image needs animal/horse/Mikey or something of the sort. Similarly for places one needs USA/Alabama/Birmingham or UK/Warwickshire/Birmingham. Birmingham by itself is fairly useless (as Mikey might well be!). Plus a final rant, there seems no widely accepted way of handling extended character sets, some programs reject ISO 8859-1, others reject UTF-8, etc. Bla, bla, bla. It's just *awful*. Is there no way out of this mess? -- Chris Green

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Good/bad/indifferent places to keep python modules and bash scripts with functions?
by Chris Green 13 Aug '18

13 Aug '18

I'm beginning to gather a number of Python modules and also bash scripts which contain just functions. I.e. these are all files that one doesn't run directly, they are imported/called by other scripts. I know *how* to do most of this, e.g. I know about setting PYTHONPATH and PATH etc., what I'm looking for is some recommendations about good names and places to put things. I have all my top level scripts (i.e. stuff called directly) in ~/bin which gets added to one's path automatically by the default .profile (at least on Ubuntu family). So ~/bin is a sort of linux default for these. What I'm looking for is, maybe, a default for python modules and other scripts. Currently I have python modules in ~/bin/pymods and I don't have bash 'libraries' anywere. Are there any obvious 'defaults' or should I just invent names I fancy and stop being so OCD? :-) -- Chris Green

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Looking for a simple, efficient static web gallery generator
by Chris Green 13 Aug '18

13 Aug '18

I'm looking for a simple, efficient way to generate an HTML gallery from a hierarchy of jpeg images. I.e. I have a directory ~/pictures which contains quite a deep hierarchy of sub-directories oranising my pictures organised as I want them. It's quite big, something like 30 thousand images which total something over 50Gb. I want a way to generate a web gallery with much smaller iamage files (e.g. maximum image size something like 1024x1024) in a hierarchy with simple HTML (or whatever) to make it navigable with a web browser. This is 'all on one system', not for export to the WWW, it will just be displayed using the apache server on the same system. I also want to be able to select just a few images and generate a gallery which will be possible to export to a web server. This is for showing people a few pictures by sending them a link in an E-Mail. Currently I use Photofloat (https://git.zx2c4.com/PhotoFloat/about/) which does a fair amount of what I want but I'm looking for something better. Photofloat's disadvantages (for me) are:- It puts all of its output in one directory, so for my whole hierarchy there are well over 100 thousand files in one directory. This makes some operations rather difficult and slow. As a result of the above it's also difficult to find the reduced size version of any particular image which I sometimes want to do for attaching to E-Mails etc. The navigation controls while adequate could be better. It's not particularly easy to run Photofloat on a subset of my images, I've written a script to do it but the whole thing gets a bit messy. So, any ideas for a relacement? -- Chris Green

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Keeping configurations in step on multiple systems - ways and means?
by Chris Green 08 Aug '18

08 Aug '18

I'm not expecting simple glib answers to this, just fishing around for ideas and possible approaches. I have quite a few systems spread around the place all running Debian derived versions of Linux:- Desktop machine in my study, main work machine, runs xubuntu Laptop, used around the house and when away, runs xubuntu Backup machine, headless, in garage, runs xubuntu Raspberry pi on home LAN for DNS/DHCP etc., runs raspbian Virtual machine on Gandi, runs ubuntu Beaglebone Black on our boat, runs Debian I have several bits of customised configuration that I would like to, somehow, keep in sync on all the above machines, these are things like:- ~/.vilerc - editor configuration ~/.dircolors - colours for ls ... Can anyone suggest a way of doing this? If it was automatic (like syncthing) than that would be lovely, but even a simple way to say 'please update all instances of ~/.dircolors' would be handy. I'm using syncthing to keep the laptop and desktop machines in sync and it works well but it's not perfect for synchronising just a few files. It also seems a rather heavyweight program to run on the pi and the BBB just to synchronise two or three files. I don't really need 'instant' synchronisation either (as provided by syncthing), something run by cron once an hour or even once a day would be fine. I can't just run rsync with a list of files from cron because not all systems (not *any* in fact) have ssh access to other systems without needing a password or key. -- Chris Green

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Can one execute a command on the *client* after ssh login?
by Chris Green 06 Aug '18

06 Aug '18

I need to run a command on the *client* machine immediately after making an ssh connection, is there any clever way to do this? Specifically I want to execute an rsync command whenever I connect to certain systems, I have 'ControlMaster auto' set in my ssh config file so the rsync command will run without asking for a password/key. Any ideas anyone? I suppose one could alias the ssh and fire something off in the background with a wait before the actual ssh but this does seem a bit crude. -- Chris Green

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[ALUG Announce] ALUG Norwich Pub Meet Thursday 9th August
by Viperfang 06 Aug '18

06 Aug '18

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via https://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- Hello Norwich Aluggers, Our monthly ALUG Norwich social meeting will be held this Thursday, 9th August at The Coach and Horses (82 Thorpe Road, Norwich, NR1 1BA). The meeting officially starts at 8pm, although some people may arrive earlier. More information on those people can be found on the list and the IRC channel. If you are unsure if you will recognise us then make yourself and your intent to attend known by either posting on list or visiting us on IRC so we can look out for you rather than hiding in the corner. Optionally you could ask at the bar if they know where the geeky computer weirdos are and they'll point you in the right direction (seriously!). Another possibility is look for heaps of electronics on a table that may possibly look like movie props that would used for detonating explosives. Feel free to bring electronics/laptops/gadgets to the meet, you will by no means be alone. Ben Bewick aka Viperfang NB: This mail is automated, please refer to the usual sources for more information. ALUG Contact Details: Website : http://www.alug.org.uk/ IRC : #alug on irc.alug.org.uk List : http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo Twitter : http://twitter.com/anglianlug Identica: TBA Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2381613902 ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via https://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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2600 meeting at 18:00 on Friday the 3rd August.
by Viperfang 31 Jul '18

31 Jul '18

Quick heads up about this months Norwich 2600 meeting, more info at http://www.norwich2600.co.uk

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Re: [ALUG] VHS archiving (Mark Rogers)
by Phil Wade 24 Jul '18

24 Jul '18

I can't help with the main question (automated skip empty tape) but a few words based on my own recent and ongoing experience of transferring VHS tapes to digital. When were the tapes last played? If it's some years (5+ or worse?) then there's a danger the tapes are a little "stuck" together at some points. I "Fast Wind Forwarded" them (not fast forward play) to free up any such sticking points. The VHS player showed what recorded time was being passed on its display, and stopped increasing this time figure when nothing was on the tape. I let them run on a bit to check it wasn't just a gap in recordings, then rewound. I understand that not all players will display this time figure when forward winding as opposed to FF playing. The PROBLEM I had was that those tapes that were a bit stuck completely F'd the player's ability to play the tapes, by stretching the drive belts (I think) when it came to a sticking point. I can now use both these players (yes, I F'd two of them...) just for forwarding and rewinding. I have a third player that is used for playing the freed-up tapes only. It's a friend's, so I have to be careful :( Not the technical answer you need, but maybe a useful warning. Phil

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VHS archiving
by Mark Rogers 23 Jul '18

23 Jul '18

A long shot, probably, but I'm wondering if anyone here has any experience of this? This is one of those subjects where Googling gives you lots of suggestions, none of them definitive, mostly questions without answers... I, like many people, have a box of VHS tapes. Stuff recorded from TV and other sources, none of it looked at for a decade or more. I want to go through them, archive the content on my PC and ditch the tapes (and VHS player). Many of the tapes aren't labelled (and the ones that are, I don't necessarily trust). Many of the tapes will be almost or completely empty. Most are 240m EP tapes (ie up to 8hrs). I have a USB video capture device that seems to work although suggests welcome. What I want to do is be able to put a tape in, rewind it, press "play", then walk away and leave it. Rinse and repeat until all the tapes are "imported". If I can do this without any interaction at the PC end at this point that would be even better (it means I can get the wife to cycle tapes through when they finish if I'm not here too). This seems simple in principle: I need my PC to "watch" the incoming video and record anything that isn't noise to a new file. Not recording the noise is the key challenge: if I put a tape in and leave it overnight, say, then there's potentially 8-12hrs of "recording" which will be mostly noise, and that's a lot of disk space to be using up. In an ideal world it would also detect program changes within a tape and split them into separate files too, but I think that might be asking too much and that's not so hard to do manually once they're on disk. Suggestions? Mark -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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