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IMAP (Gmail) archiving
by Mark Rogers 27 Jul '16

27 Jul '16

A quick Google suggests there are lots of ways to archive IMAP accounts so I thought I'd see if anyone here has any recommendations. Specifically: I have a handful of Gmail accounts which I'd like to archive (by which I mean keep permanent accessible backups offline). I'd like the archive to be viewable with a GUI mail client like Thunderbird. I'd like support for OAuth2 authentication if possible. I'd also like anecdotes from anyone who's tried this. I can see conflicts between me deleting spam or other rubbish at the "live" end that I would also want deleted from the archive, for example, but also accidental deletions (or deletions of old emails to save space) at the live end that I would not want removed from the archive. -- 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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Re: [ALUG] Anyone know how to use gpg-zip?
by Ewan Slater 14 Jul '16

14 Jul '16

> I want an encrypted archive that uses the passphrase I give when encrypting and requires the > passphrase again to decrypt it. What about 7zip easy, AES-256 symmetric encryption (see below): Cheers, Ewan ***create file*** ewans@chatterbox:~/Downloads$ 7z a -p commentary.7z commentary.txt 7-Zip [64] 9.20 Copyright (c) 1999-2010 Igor Pavlov 2010-11-18 p7zip Version 9.20 (locale=en_GB.utf8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,1 CPU) Scanning Creating archive commentary.7z Enter password (will not be echoed) : Verify password (will not be echoed) : Compressing commentary.txt Everything is Ok ***bad password*** ewans@chatterbox:~/Downloads$ 7z e commentary.7z 7-Zip [64] 9.20 Copyright (c) 1999-2010 Igor Pavlov 2010-11-18 p7zip Version 9.20 (locale=en_GB.utf8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,1 CPU) Processing archive: commentary.7z Enter password (will not be echoed) : Extracting commentary.txt Data Error in encrypted file. Wrong password? Sub items Errors: 1 ***good password*** ewans@chatterbox:~/Downloads$ 7z e commentary.7z 7-Zip [64] 9.20 Copyright (c) 1999-2010 Igor Pavlov 2010-11-18 p7zip Version 9.20 (locale=en_GB.utf8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,1 CPU) Processing archive: commentary.7z Enter password (will not be echoed) : Extracting commentary.txt Everything is Ok Size: 40193 Compressed: 9539

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Anyone know how to use gpg-zip?
by Chris Green 14 Jul '16

14 Jul '16

I'm trying to create an encrypted archive of some files in a ditrectory. It seems like gpg-zip should do what I want but I can't get it to do simple symmetric encryption. The trouble is that even though I'm specifying --symmetric gpg-zip still insists on being given a user:- chris@esprimo$ gpg-zip --encrypt --symmetric --output fred glomtest Enter passphrase: Repeat passphrase: You did not specify a user ID. (you may use "-r") Current recipients: Enter the user ID. End with an empty line: chris Current recipients: 2048g/8FC95300 2015-10-05 "chris <chris@esprimo>" Enter the user ID. End with an empty line: File `fred' exists. Overwrite? (y/N) y I can then just decrypt the archive with:- gpg-zip --decrypt fred no need for the passphrase! That's useless for what I want. I want an encrypted archive that uses the passphrase I give when encrypting and requires the passphrase again to decrypt it. Otherwise anyone walking up to my computer when it's turned on (and I'm logged in) can decrypt the archive. Can gpg-zip do what I want and, if so, how? Otherwise what are the alternatives? -- Chris Green

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Lubuntu install
by Chris Walker 12 Jul '16

12 Jul '16

I have a Pentium machine here and I'm trying to install Lubuntu on it but without success. I've looked at this page - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Lubuntu/AdvancedMethods and have added the -- forecepae command to the end of the command string but all I get is a cursor in the top left of the screen and nothing else happens. I've had other distros working on the machine - I installed MX last week - but thought I'd have a play with something else but I'm not having any success. What's the remedy here? -- __ __| |_ __ __ .----------------------------------------------. / _/ _` \ V V / | mailto:alug_cdw@the-walker-household.co.uk | \__\__,_|\_/\_/ |______________________________________________|

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[ALUG Announce] ALUG Norwich Pub Meet Thursday 14th July
by Viperfang 11 Jul '16

11 Jul '16

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- Hello Norwich Aluggers, Our monthly ALUG Norwich social meeting will be held this Thursday, 14th July 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 http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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Search all text files for a text string
by Mark Rogers 09 Jul '16

09 Jul '16

Is there a quick way to search all text files for a string? By "text file" I mean ASCII files, like log files, config files etc, but excluding binaries like executables, database files, etc? What I want is something like: find / -type a -exec grep 192.168.100.1 \{\} \; .. or similar, except that I made up "-type a" for ascii. (I'm trying to find all places that an IP address is mentioned so that I can change ones that need to be changed.) -- 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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DD LUKS USB Drive
by steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk 06 Jul '16

06 Jul '16

Hi Clever People! I have a USB drive that's encryped and mounted using LUKS. It's used to hold backups (using backuppc and another backup system). This drive appears to be a bit flaky so I'm going to have to replace it. My silly question is, if I use dd to copy the entire contents from the old disk to the new one, am I going to be able to mount the new one via LUKS and it be able to access the data or is there some hidden gotcha that will prevent this from working? Cheers Steve

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MicroSD card read issues
by Mark Rogers 30 Jun '16

30 Jun '16

Can anyone shed light on what the following entries in /var/log/syslog actually mean? Jun 16 11:43:45 mark-pc kernel: [92204.212656] sd 11:0:0:2: [sdf] tag#0 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_ERROR driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE Jun 16 11:43:45 mark-pc kernel: [92204.212669] sd 11:0:0:2: [sdf] tag#0 Sense Key : Hardware Error [current] Jun 16 11:43:45 mark-pc kernel: [92204.212675] sd 11:0:0:2: [sdf] tag#0 Add. Sense: No additional sense information Jun 16 11:43:45 mark-pc kernel: [92204.212683] sd 11:0:0:2: [sdf] tag#0 CDB: Read(10) 28 00 06 87 47 30 00 00 08 00 Jun 16 11:43:45 mark-pc kernel: [92204.212688] blk_update_request: I/O error, dev sdf, sector 109528880 Jun 16 11:43:45 mark-pc kernel: [92204.212696] Buffer I/O error on dev sdf1, logical block 13690854, async page read Background: This a pretty new Sandisk [1] 128GB MicroSD (UHS) card, taken out of my phone and plugged into my PC via a card reader (USB2). A previous card caused issues in my phone so I replaced it with this one, and it now is not behaving well (usually OK but sometimes if I try to look at photos on the card the phone will lock up temporarily). I'm trying to back everything up onto my PC so I can copy it across onto a Samsung card to see if that's better. The above errors crop up periodically in syslog whilst copying. Is the issue the card, the card reader, the PC, the drivers, ...? [1] I believe it to be genuine Sandisk, it was purchased from Amazon. Advice on how to verify it's not a fake welcomed! -- 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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Raid10 degraded
by John Cohen 30 Jun '16

30 Jun '16

I have a small server Thinkserver ts140 for serving files via sftp to my colleagues, as well as a few other services. I run ubuntu 14.04 from a 500gig drive backed up nightly offsite, and have a separate raid10 array 4x 4TB (WD Reds) for the storage. They've been running fine for over a year until yesterday, when I received an email saying the array was degraded. " A DegradedArray event had been detected on md device /dev/md/0. P.S. The /proc/mdstat file currently contains the following: Personalities : [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10] md0 : active raid10 sdb1[0] sde1[3] sdc1[4] 7813772288 blocks super 1.2 512K chunks 2 near-copies [4/3] [UU_U] unused devices: <none>" First thing I did was backup the most important files to an external drive via rsync. (I have run out of space for a full 8TB external drive backup and can't afford to buy any more drives just now) We also keep these more important files offsite) mdadm -D /dev/md0 shows that my third drive sdd1 was removed. I checked the smart tools to see if the drive was failing and saw nothing, even after running a self-test. I didn't check for disk errors on the drive itself as I'm not sure how this works in a raid setup. I did try re-adding the disk to the raid and it immediately picked it up and started recovering. This was the mdadm --examine shows of the raid status *before* I tried re-adding the removed drive: http://pastebin.com/P4Q4YhN7 I can't see anything wrong here, the only difference I saw was in the sdd section showing Array State AAAA instead of AA.A as the others were (. = missing) This morning I woke up to another email with the same message, and the disk sdd1 was removed again. I am adding the drive again to see what happens, but suspect the same results. Here's the mdadm --detail now: http://pastebin.com/CkBm6SbH dmesg since a recent reboot, with a lot of the repeats taken out: http://pastebin.com/jzWnYizV 1) Should I run any more tests on the drive itself? Any specific suggestions? Do you think it could be a hardware fault unrelated to the actual drive? I'm nervous of starting to swap things around to test this. 2) The drives are in warranty so I have contacted WD to ask for a replacement, although if the SMART tests don't show anything I don't know if they'll replace the drive 3) Should I tell my colleagues we're going to have to switch the machine off until the new drive arrives? (I am paranoid of a second drive failing before I get a new one) Any advice as to what I could do to test the drive/setup is appreciated. Please be aware I'm no linux guru, my field is in something completely different and I just happen to love learning about linux and have found it very useful to complement my office setup and work. Many thanks John

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2600 meeting at 18:00 on Friday the 1st July.
by Viperfang 28 Jun '16

28 Jun '16

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

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Synchronising a few 'isolated' files between systems - how?
by Chris Green 23 Jun '16

23 Jun '16

I have set up syncthing on my systems and it works very well for folders where one wants to synchronise all the files. However I have a few what one might call 'isolated' files that I want to synchronise and I can't see any easy way to do this with syncthing. It's possible to use syncthing's .stignore file to do it but it's very clumsy and one would need to edit several files just to add one file to the list to be synchronised. I have pondered putting the 'isolated' files in a directory by themselves (which syncthing can synchronise) and having symbolic links to them from where they are actually used. However adding one file to the list would mean edits in several places. Any better ideas anyone? -- Chris Green

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Re: [ALUG] MicroSD card read issues
by Noel Galer 16 Jun '16

16 Jun '16

Hi I'm new to this, but have been 'Lurking' for a while as recommended for 'Noobs'. However, this is something I may be able to shed some light on, so here goes! There is an excellent website with lots of carefully prepared info on this topic and tools to help diagnose problems, test cards and make images. However, it is in Russia, and similar sites it is hosted alongside can have a bad reputation. Antivirus companies will make sweeping assumptions and some class the site as 'Bad'. I disagree, but you must decide for yourself. I suggest using Virustotal.com to check all the links and files before you download anything. I have successfully downloaded all the tools and have not had any issues. If you are not familiar with Virustotal you will be happy to know it scans what is on the internet before you download, simulating the use of the top 60 AntiVirus packages in the world and providing a comprehensive assessment. Having said that, 1 or 2 may try to indicate generic this and that. I believe this is just reverse engineering of one A/V by another based on a false positive. But you may decide to keep well clear - that's fine. You could always use a machine off your network that can be rebuilt / reimaged easily. But hey, isn't this one of Linux's strengths ? Here is the link, the text on it's own is quite informative and unlikely to infect anyone, many of the tools can also be found elsewhere too... https://www.raymond.cc/blog/test-and-detect-fake-or-counterfeit-usb-flas h-drives-bought-from-ebay-with-h2testw/ Cheers, Xorsyst -----Original Message----- From: main [mailto:main-bounces@lists.alug.org.uk] On Behalf Of Mark Rogers Sent: 16 June 2016 11:54 To: alug-main Subject: [ALUG] MicroSD card read issues Can anyone shed light on what the following entries in /var/log/syslog actually mean? Jun 16 11:43:45 mark-pc kernel: [92204.212656] sd 11:0:0:2: [sdf] tag#0 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_ERROR driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE Jun 16 11:43:45 mark-pc kernel: [92204.212669] sd 11:0:0:2: [sdf] tag#0 Sense Key : Hardware Error [current] Jun 16 11:43:45 mark-pc kernel: [92204.212675] sd 11:0:0:2: [sdf] tag#0 Add. Sense: No additional sense information Jun 16 11:43:45 mark-pc kernel: [92204.212683] sd 11:0:0:2: [sdf] tag#0 CDB: Read(10) 28 00 06 87 47 30 00 00 08 00 Jun 16 11:43:45 mark-pc kernel: [92204.212688] blk_update_request: I/O error, dev sdf, sector 109528880 Jun 16 11:43:45 mark-pc kernel: [92204.212696] Buffer I/O error on dev sdf1, logical block 13690854, async page read Background: This a pretty new Sandisk [1] 128GB MicroSD (UHS) card, taken out of my phone and plugged into my PC via a card reader (USB2). A previous card caused issues in my phone so I replaced it with this one, and it now is not behaving well (usually OK but sometimes if I try to look at photos on the card the phone will lock up temporarily). I'm trying to back everything up onto my PC so I can copy it across onto a Samsung card to see if that's better. The above errors crop up periodically in syslog whilst copying. Is the issue the card, the card reader, the PC, the drivers, ...? [1] I believe it to be genuine Sandisk, it was purchased from Amazon. Advice on how to verify it's not a fake welcomed! -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER _______________________________________________ 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!

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KDE 4.14 instead of Plasma
by Chris Walker 11 Jun '16

11 Jun '16

I have just installed a beta of Mageia 6. In the description online it says that KDE 4.14 can be installed - https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_6_Release_Notes#KDE in the traditional manner but I can't see how I might select it and I don't like Plasma. I selected KDE out of the three choices - KDE, Gnome or XFCE - when I installed Mageia and I fully expected to see the usual KDE desktop. But I don't. What do I have to do to make it work please? -- __ __| |_ __ __ .----------------------------------------------. / _/ _` \ V V / | mailto:alug_cdw@the-walker-household.co.uk | \__\__,_|\_/\_/ |______________________________________________|

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[ALUG Announce] ALUG Norwich Pub Meet Thursday 9th June
by Viperfang 06 Jun '16

06 Jun '16

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- Hello Norwich Aluggers, Our monthly ALUG Norwich social meeting will be held this Thursday, 9th June 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 http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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2600 meeting at 18:00 on Friday the 3rd June.
by Viperfang 31 May '16

31 May '16

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

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Removing print jobs
by Bev Nicolson 14 May '16

14 May '16

So lprm should work, shouldn't it? It has done before so when I'd asked my printer to get going on a document a few days ago and realised I'd built up a print queue, I tried it again. Not this time, so I got it printed out (eventually) several times and it wouldn't stop. Ideas? (Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.) Bev.

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What will linux do?
by Chris Walker 13 May '16

13 May '16

I have been given a new(ish) PC. It's an i7 with 16GB of RAM. It currently has Windows 10 on a 128 GB SSD and has a couple of 1TB hard drives configured under Windows as RAID1 - they show up in the BIOS as RAID. My intention is to remove the SSD and replace it with a 512GB SSD so that I can have Mageia 5 on it as well (that's the distro I have run for some time and I'm familiar with it). My question concerns the Windows RAID. Does anybody have any idea what linux will make of it? If it helps, I've pulled the drive out and hooked it to my current machine via a USB adapter and it appears that it's a regular NTFS drive. But should there be any extra partitions or files on it to denote that it's part of a RAID array? I also intend to have my /home partition on a separate 1TB drive. The installation on this machine has Windows 10 on a 500GB hard drive with Mageia on a 1TB drive. I'm thinking that I might just bung that drive in to the new machine and at some point remove the extra partitions from it leaving just the /home on there. Once I've installed Mageia on the new SSD, is it as simple as amending the fstab file to point to that 1TB drive? Or should I do something different altogether? -- __ __| |_ __ __ .----------------------------------------------. / _/ _` \ V V / | mailto:alug_cdw@the-walker-household.co.uk | \__\__,_|\_/\_/ |______________________________________________|

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Re: [ALUG] Question about backgrounds on pdf
by Peter Berrie 13 May '16

13 May '16

>There doesn't appear to be any useful Export options in >Okular so can't you print it again to a PDF? Yes, that is possible. The problem is that what you see in print preview is the lightened image, but what you get when you print to file is the original again. I don't know how to get the version that Okular displays to print to file. Maybe I am missing something obvious or doing something wrong. Or maybe the only thing to do is to copy and paste page by page into Open Office, and then export as PDF. It will be a bit tedious but it may be the only way.

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Question about backgrounds on pdf
by Peter Berrie 12 May '16

12 May '16

Someone I support has a pdf with a too dark background and is having trouble reading it. By using the controls in Okular I can make it black font on white background, and its perfect, easy to read and straightforward. However, I can't figure out how to either export a copy with the changes, or make the same changes in some other package. To make the changes I used the accessibility options in Okular's configure control, and did convert to black and white, then threshold about 75% and contrast 100%. Okular remembers to apply this on my machine when the file is opened, but how to make the changes to the file itself so that other readers show the same thing? Any suggestions? Peter

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[ALUG Announce] ALUG Norwich Pub Meet Thursday 12th May
by Viperfang 09 May '16

09 May '16

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- Hello Norwich Aluggers, Our monthly ALUG Norwich social meeting will be held this Thursday, 12th May 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 http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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An old problem - how to manage permissions with web servers
by Chris Green 07 May '16

07 May '16

I'm always hitting this problem in one way or another and I've never really come up with a good solution. I have lots of personal information (not secret, just that it's mostly only useful to me) which I keep in a Wiki. To make my life easy I run apache2 as user 'chris' (me) on the servers where I have the wiki. This allows me to edit pages directly and do all the maintenance etc. without the rigmarole of becoming root and/or becoming www-data. However this then causes problems with other stuff that runs under the web server as they assume that it's going to run (in Ubuntu anyway) as www-data. My current hassle is with Owncloud which installs with www-data owning the data directory and I have to manually change the ownership to allow it to write. There are also other similar conflicts. Isn't there a way to tell the installation system that I want my browser to run as a specified user rather than the default (and really annoying!) www-data? I suppose I could bodge /etc/passwd so that chris and www-data are the same but it is rather a bodge, I'd like a better solution. -- Chris Green

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What permissions will apt use when installing? Will umask affect it?
by Chris Green 06 May '16

06 May '16

I want to be able to install a web app with a umask of 0002 rather than the default 0022. I have worked out how to get the www-data user to have a umask of 0002 when used by apache but I'm not sure how to *install* the app with the required permissions. It's being installed and kept up to date by using the standard apt in Ubuntu (it's on a PPA). Does anyone know if it's possible to tell apt to use a different umask? I.e. if I set the umask when installing will I get the effect that I want or does an application installed by apt set its permissions by configuration somewhere? -- Chris Green

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Ubuntu updates
by Bev Nicolson 06 May '16

06 May '16

On 12.04LTS but get security updates almost every day and I guess on the one hand that could be encouraging, on the other, I do start to wonder why they don't all arrive at once. (I know now. It's how it connects to the internet.) Is there any way of asking Update Manager to show them every fortnight instead? I can’t see that option. Ta. I'm on a limited broadband band deal during peak hours so saving them up would be useful if possible. Bev.

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Wanted: Non-realtime but automatic file synchronisation
by Chris Green 06 May '16

06 May '16

I have a number of large[ish] directory trees that I would like to keep synchronised across various systems. There are basically three systems involved: desktop, laptop and a remote server. They all run Linux (xubuntu and ubuntu). I don't need real-time synchronisation like that provided by btsync, syncthing or pulse. The directory trees are really too big for this sort of thing anyway. On the other hand I don't want a manual system like Unison which anyway seems beset by problems with different versions at each end. All I want (all?) is a way to keep the directories in sync when changes occur at either end. Since the changes will be mostly generated by me it will be very rare for changes to occur in two places at the same time. If they do then I'm quite happy for the system to require manual intervention. I just want the general case to be automatic. Updating once an hour or so would be quite satisfactory. I can do much of it using rsync with the --update option run first one way and then the other, this does nearly everything I want but there is one gotcha - files deleted will re-appear. File deletions will not be frequent but they will occur occasionally. Adding a --delete option to rsync doesn't necessarily help, it could also mean that new files added get deleted. It all depends on the relative timing of additions and deletions and the copying each way. Nearly all the 'directory synchronisation' tools I can find are one-way and do very little more than one can do easily oneself using rsync. Has anyone come across anything that might do something like I want? -- Chris Green

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Starting a web server on demand - sensible, easy?
by Chris Green 06 May '16

06 May '16

I want to run a Javascript/PHP application on my laptop which will at times be unable to get to the internet. Thus I need to run a web server of some sort on it to serve the PHP side of things. If the laptop is at home on the home LAN I want to be able to run the same Javascript/PHP application on my desktop machine so I can use the bigger screen etc. This will work fine of course with the web server on the laptop, as long as the web server is running. What's the neatest/easiest way to fire up the web server on demand? I don't really want to run it all the time. Ideally also I'd prefer not to run Apache as it's total overkill for what I'm doing. I tried PHP's built-in web server ("php -S localhost:80") and it works fine for me, the home LAN can't be accessed from outside so security should be OK. I suppose the modern equivalent of inetd would do what I want but I'm a bit worried about how easy it might be (or not). -- Chris Green

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