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installing Linux over Windows
by Bev Nicolson 20 Oct '23

20 Oct '23

I have done this before but I think I may need a little help. Finally got round to wresting the info from my old laptop. (Note that if the keyboard is stuffed, clicking on the human figure on the top right of the screen brings up an on-screen keyboard. You probably know this, but I pass it on anyway.) But to the point of this email. Stuck the usb drive in which has Mint on it and powered the laptop up. Clicked on ESC as it said that would bring the boot menu up. It did not. Not fast enough? What speed should I aim for next time? I found out how to shutdown before it got me all the way through the Windows set up so that's something. Thanks in advance. Bev.

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Trojans....
by Peter 19 Oct '23

19 Oct '23

I took some files today to a local print shop on a usb stick to get them printed. They have the very sensible procedure that, when given files on a stick, they first insert the stick into a laptop which is not on their network, and scan it. The stick is a Maxell FAT32, and my systems are Debian 11. To my horror they came back and said it had trojans! There were two phishbank.ajy JSI:trojan.cryos.3892 This last had three copies installed, the first only one. I'm pretty confident these are not false positives, they get their systems and network from a very competent IT shop. I don't know what AV they use. They are a windows shop of course, so it will be one of the usual windows AV products. So I am pretty sure these trojans were the real thing. They asked what did I want to do. Leave them alone, delete them? I said delete, after making a note of what they were. At the moment I am downloading and installing clamav for my Debian installation. I did a scan of the Windows 10 VM that I have running in Virtual Box, using the MS antivirus that comes with Windows, and it came up clean. I'm also proposing to insert the stick, hopefully now disinfected, into my Debian system, copy a few files to and fro, and go back to the shop to see if it has got itself reninfected from Debian. Unlikely, but it seems like a useful precaution. Should I be worried, and what else should I do? Be grateful for any thoughts. The only other thing about my Debian machine that I've noticed lately is that on one Wordpress site I sometimes get a 429 too many requests error, in Firefox. This happens on first clicking on a link on the site or first visiting it, so there has not in fact been more than one request. Don't see how that could be related but thought it best to mention, just in case. Peter

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Using testdisk to fix a corrupt thumb drive
by Mark Rogers 12 Oct '23

12 Oct '23

I have a thumb drive which is formatted to FAT32 but not recognized in Windows. Using "testdisk" I can find the partition OK, but testdisk reports: Disk /dev/sdc - 30 GB / 28 GiB - CHS 29327 64 32 Current partition structure: Partition Start End Size in sectors Warning: number of heads/cylinder mismatches 255 (FAT) != 64 (HD) Warning: number of sectors per track mismatches 63 (FAT) != 32 (HD) 1 * FAT32 LBA 0 1 1 29327 63 32 60063712 [DATADISC] If I select the partition and view files then i see what I expect to see, and I can manually copy off individual files from there. So from a data recovery perspective I have everything I need. However, if I try writing the partition information back using testdisk the thumb drive is still not recognised in Windows and if I reopen it in testdisk it reports the same issues. I tried changing geometry to 255/63 as testdisk suggested, but then analyse says "Bad relative sector". What do I need to do so that the disk is recognised in Windows? Mark -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Re: Weird freezes in Firefox
by Phil Ashby 11 Sep '23

11 Sep '23

On 11/09/2023 12:00, Peter<peter.northerly(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > Any ideas what this could be? Its happened a couple of times. > > I will be doing something perfectly ordinary in Firefox, like > shopping on Amazon was the last one. All of a sudden the mouse > cursor, as I move the mouse, turns into a broad black stream, which > makes a trail a half inch or so wide, quite jagged. Stays in place as > the mouse is moved on. In and out of the browser window. Its > impossible to close the window. More clicking brings up partial > truncated small windows. Right clicks have no effect. That sounds like the display output is frozen apart from a hardware mouse cursor. You should (hopefully) have something in an Xorg.log file (after a restart!) to help identify if the X server itself has died, or if Firefox has exclusively grabbed the screen then hung. As this only occurs with Firefox, then my hunch would be the latter. > The only thing I could find to do to get out of it was reboot. You could try Ctrl-Alt-Backspace (the default X server terminate 3-key-salute). If it's Firefox that has a problem you may get your login screen back. I have also used the magic SysReq keys (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key) to sync disk blocks then reboot which might get you more useful log file contents... > This is Debian 11, fluxbox, using the Nvidia drivers for their card. > Never happened with any other app, including not with any other > browser. Doesn't happen often, maybe three or four times over > several months. Another thing to try then: the nouveau drivers, although you will likely lose some performance depending on your particular card. > I shall be upgrading to Debian 12 fairly soon, so maybe that will > make it go away. But what could it be? And what would you do, other > than upgrading? I made the switch to 12 (bookworm) a couple of months back - all ok so far running sway atop Wayland with or without Xwayland support for older X11 apps (apart from Java, but that's another story entirely*) Good luck! Phil. * https://www.ashbysoft.com/articles/swingland/

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Weird freezes in Firefox
by Peter 11 Sep '23

11 Sep '23

Any ideas what this could be? Its happened a couple of times. I will be doing something perfectly ordinary in Firefox, like shopping on Amazon was the last one. All of a sudden the mouse cursor, as I move the mouse, turns into a broad black stream, which makes a trail a half inch or so wide, quite jagged. Stays in place as the mouse is moved on. In and out of the browser window. Its impossible to close the window. More clicking brings up partial truncated small windows. Right clicks have no effect. The only thing I could find to do to get out of it was reboot. This is Debian 11, fluxbox, using the Nvidia drivers for their card. Never happened with any other app, including not with any other browser. Doesn't happen often, maybe three or four times over several months. I shall be upgrading to Debian 12 fairly soon, so maybe that will make it go away. But what could it be? And what would you do, other than upgrading? Peter

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Nextcloud upload and share from commandline
by Mark Rogers 11 Aug '23

11 Aug '23

Any nextcloud users here who are familiar with the API? All i want to do is have a script which uploads a file to my nextcloud server, creates a read-only share link for it, and outputs that link. So when I have a file that's too big or otherwise unsuitable for email, I can simply push it to nextcloud and paste the supplied link into my email instead. This seems like a fairly obvious use case but my attempts at Googling a solution have thus far failed me. Uploading a file from a script is easy and there are plenty of examples out there but creating a share link from that point has me (and ChatGPT, and Google Bard) stumped. Mark -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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MPC playback or file converter
by BD 26 Jun '23

26 Jun '23

Hi So I have this headless Debian machine serving miniDLNA on my network. There's good few hundred GB files in its library but I have a problematic bunch too. A very old cache of mpc files that don't want to play. Does anyone have a way to either force miniDLNA to transcode the files on the fly or to convert those file in place (preferably retaining files structure). Cheers, Bart

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Viewing Quick Time videos on Linux?
by Bev Nicolson 24 Jun '23

24 Jun '23

I have two dvd's that use Quick Time. (Yes, they are rather old.) I wondered if there was any way of viewing them? Is there an alternative QT that could help here? Or would it depend solely of finding someone using Windows or Apple? Bev

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Dnsmasq appears to be setting 2 default routes
by Srdjan Todorovic 13 Jun '23

13 Jun '23

Hi all, I'm trying to get some dnsmaq stuff working on my desktop machine (Kubuntu). I've got a wifi interface that is my default (and only) route to the Internet. I've also got a wired ethernet interface that I want to use to: - provide DHCP service to a headless server - provide NAT to that headless server so that it can connect to the internet I've setup a dnsmasq config (using the defaults, but with some tweaks), but whilst it does actually serve DHCP to a laptop (for testing), it appears to set 2 default routes on my desktop, and I can no longer get onto the Internet. Routing table while dnsmasq was running: srdjan@serenity:~$ route Kernel IP routing table Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface default dsldevice.lan 0.0.0.0 UG 100 0 0 enp37s0 default dsldevice.lan 0.0.0.0 UG 600 0 0 wlp38s0 link-local 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 1000 0 0 docker0 172.17.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 docker0 192.168.1.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 600 0 0 wlp38s0 dsldevice.lan 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.255 UH 100 0 0 enp37s0 192.168.2.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 100 0 0 enp37s0 I'm not sure this is correct. Dhcp-option 3 and 6 were left as default, but I would have expected the impact of those to be felt on the client machine trying to get the IP address, and not the "server" (desktop). Perhaps option 3 might make sense to set to the same address as the wifi router? Once I tore down both enp37s0 and wlp38s0, and reconnected on wifi using the KDE network manager, did I manage to get back onto the internet. Of note, the default config uses: interface=enp37s0 port=0 dns-range that is on a different network to the usual wifi one Has anyone got any suggestions please on what plainly stupid thing I'm doing with my setup? Thanks, Srdjan

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Spam
by steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk 27 May '23

27 May '23

Hi y'all My mailserver has started getting a lot of spam in the last few days. Basically, people are sending emails with loads of random email addresses - approx 90+ per email. They're not getting through - they get rejected then blocked. I wondered if anyone else has noticed anything similar? I'm not entirely sure of what this gets them. The occasional spam getting through can't be worth it. Or are they trying a scattergun approach to try and find valid email addresses or accounts? Or are they trying to overwhelm mail servers to exploit bugs in them? Or something else? Anything I should do? I'm getting quite close to saying "ah to ${badplace} with it, lets use a commercial mail-server", but I'm quite attached to the features I have with mine. For my email accounts, I can have unlimited email suffixes on them e.g. example(a)mydomain.invalid example-mailinglist(a)mydomain.invalid example-somecompany(a)mydomain.invalid example-ALUG(a)mydomain.invalid etc - anything after the "-" can be specified. I use this so that I can work who spams email address, or leaks my email address to spammers, and for easy blockage. Does anyone provide a service like this for less than megabucks? Steve

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Isolating a smart TV
by Peter 11 May '23

11 May '23

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

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

03 May '23

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

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

03 May '23

I need to set up an Ubuntu 22.04 box so that on startup it enters a graphical environment with a web browser showing a specified page. No access to other applications. (I'd call this a "kiosk" configuration but having spent some time with Google that phrase can mean different things so I wanted to be clear). There's going to be quite a lot of other stuff going on behind the scenes in support of the web interface but I have all that working. It's just the boot-to-browser bit that's an issue. It's not public facing and I don't care if the boot sequence is visible, provided that as long as the box is left alone for a couple of minutes it will eventually end up at a web browser directed to localhost. I've done stuff like this before but Ubunti 22.04 uses snaps rather than .deb packages and that changes the way the applications interact with the O/S - previously I've had systemd start lightdm start a bash script which starts Chromium or Firefox in kiosk mode, but it doesn't seem possible that way any more. But the reality is that I don't need a minimal install so I may well have overthought things in the past. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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KVM/QEMU
by Mark Rogers 02 May '23

02 May '23

I've used VirtualBox for years, most recently either as a desktop tool (eg on a laptop) for testing things out (managed by the VBox GUI), or as a server tool hosting multiple VMs (managed via a combination of CLI and the web-based phpVirtualBox tool which mimics the VBox GUI via a web interface). For a long time I've thought I should use KVM instead so today I had a crack as installing it on my home Linux server (Ubuntu) but I've gone around in circles and got nowhere useful. What do I need to do to achieve something simple like creating a new VM, booting it from a Windows ISO and installing Windows 10 on it? I need to do it all from the command line or via a web interface - preferably having both options open to me. The server is headless so a traditional GUI is no use to me. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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No pdf thumbnails
by Bev Nicolson 15 Apr '23

15 Apr '23

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

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

01 Apr '23

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

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Linux Tablets
by Peter Berrie 22 Mar '23

22 Mar '23

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

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

13 Mar '23

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

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

07 Mar '23

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

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

06 Mar '23

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

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HP Microservers or similar
by Mark Rogers 20 Feb '23

20 Feb '23

Over the years I've used a handful of HP Micro servers to run a Linux-based web server application. To be honest I suspect it would comfortably run on a Pi, to give you some idea of power requirements. However it does need to be dependable and one of the criteria is RAID (software RAID 1 is fine). We replace the hardware every few years so the question I have is: what is a good small server for Linux these days? Apart from the requirement to host 2 SATA drives there isn't much in terms of hardware requirements. We don't even use a lot of disk space - maybe a few dozen GB. One HDD gets replaced annually so that no disk is older than 2y, using commodity disks in the 1-2TB range but partitioned to only use 200GB on each disk, just because we don't need more and it makes the swap to a new disk quicker. Hot swap not needed. Would consider SSD for the new server. I was about to get a quote for an HP Gen10 MicroServer when it crossed my mind that maybe just buying the same server out of habit wasn't necessarily the right approach! -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Test post
by steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk 18 Feb '23

18 Feb '23

Not sure if I can post to ALUG at the moment. This is a test. Steve

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SPF Record problem
by steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk 17 Feb '23

17 Feb '23

Hi all I have just seen a message saying that Gmail is going to reject all emails without an SPF set up, so I thought I'd try for my mail server. Of course I have immediately run into trouble. My email gets sent via a virgin media server, currently smtp.ntlworld.com but I may update to smtp.virginmedia.com in future I used an SPF Wizard https://www.spfwizard.net It generated v=spf1 mx a a:smtp.ntlworld.com a:smtp.virginmedia.com ~all which if I read it right, accepts my domain, or smtp.ntlworld.com or smtp.virginmedia.com as valid email handlers for my email, with a "soft fail". [I used a soft fail for debugging - I want to swap to hard fail, but can't until I get this right] I've sent a couple of emails to test, and here's the snag. By the time they get to google, they're coming from 212.54.57.96 212.54.57.97 If I do a whois on that, I get back ziggo.nl (VODAFONEZIGGO) I expect email to smtp.ntlworld.com gets redirected to another server, or group of servers, inside virgin media, no doubt with a name like MAILSERVER.virginmedia.com (for some value of MAILSERVER), and that's handled by a range of IP addresses. How can I craft a valid SPF record, if I don't know which IP addresses or name to put in the spf? Why is virgin media mail ending up on a server in NL, or is that just an out-of-date or wrong whois lookup? Any ideas????? I'm struggling! Steve

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SPF Record problem
by steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk 17 Feb '23

17 Feb '23

Hi all I have just seen a message saying that Gmail is going to reject all emails without an SPF set up, so I thought I'd try for my mail server. Of course I have immediately run into trouble. My email gets sent via a virgin media server, currently smtp.ntlworld.com but I may update to smtp.virginmedia.com in future I used an SPF Wizard https://www.spfwizard.net It generated v=spf1 mx a a:smtp.ntlworld.com a:smtp.virginmedia.com ~all which if I read it right, accepts my domain, or smtp.ntlworld.com or smtp.virginmedia.com as valid email handlers for my email, with a "soft fail". [I used a soft fail for debugging - I want to swap to hard fail, but can't until I get this right] I've sent a couple of emails to test, and here's the snag. By the time they get to google, they're coming from 212.54.57.96 212.54.57.97 If I do a whois on that, I get back ziggo.nl (VODAFONEZIGGO) I expect email to smtp.ntlworld.com gets redirected to another server, or group of servers, inside virgin media, no doubt with a name like */MAILSERVER./*virginmedia.com (for some value of MAILSERVER), and that's handled by a range of IP addresses. How can I craft a valid SPF record, if I don't know which IP addresses or name to put in the spf? Why is virgin media mail ending up on a server in NL, or is that just an out-of-date or wrong whois lookup? Any ideas????? I'm struggling! Steve

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JOB | Engineer (London, UK)
by James Tobin 03 Feb '23

03 Feb '23

Hello, I'm working with an employer that is looking to hire someone to run a team of system engineers responsible for all on prem servers and related tools. Consequently, I hoped that some members of this list may like to discuss with me further. I can be reached using "JamesBTobin (at) Gmail (dot) Com". Kind regards, James

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