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Re: [Alug] Next Meeting - Jan 27?
by MJ Ray 10 Jan '02

10 Jan '02

> If anyone going to the January (Cheveley) meeting > would like a lift from the Ely/Downham Market/Brandon > area, please let me know and I'll see what can be > done (just hoping I don't get takers from all three). Similarly, anyone from King's Lynn area or along the A134, A1065 who is happy to share a lift can email me off-list... -- MJR

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Something is killing my box each evening, need help
by James Green 10 Jan '02

10 Jan '02

Hi all, I'm writing this for some help in tracking down whatever is causing my machine to lock up once every day, usually in the evening between 6pm and midnight. The hardware: AMD K6-2 300, 256MB RAM, 40Gig ATA100 hard disk with all partitions ext3. The hardware has not altered in several months, and the computer has not been moved in an equally long period. The software is Debian Sid. I had this problem, dist-upgraded and it still occurs. I am inside X when the crash happens, I have not tried closing X down for the day to see if it repeats. I am running kernel 2.4.17, and whilst I did have crashes in previous kernels (I jumped from .13) they were not daily. The crash occurs at random. I am not doing anything heavy at the time nor anything common. Today's crash happened whilst scrolling a webpage in Galeon. Yesterday it occured whilst flicking tabs in XChat. The screen freezes. Gkrellm stops updating all indicators including the time. The mouse pointer works, but does not update window focus, and the mouse buttons have no effect. The keyboard freezes. Hitting the numlock key does not change the state of the light. Ctrl+alt+F1-4 has no effect, nor does ctrl+alt+backspace/delete. I can however use alt+sysreq+s to sync the disk, and then use the machine's reset button to perform a reboot. Works a treat when used with ext3 :). The modem apparently continues downloading data and getting irc traffic. I do not have other equipment with which I can log in to this machine to attempt any form of 'rescue'. Looking at /var/log/kernel.log I see nothing out of the ordinary. It shows nothing, then the disk sync, then the reboot. So I'm looking for ideas as to what to look at/for, tests to run, etc. Any ideas? :-) Thanks. James Green

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March Meeting
by Syd Hancock 10 Jan '02

10 Jan '02

Serious forward planning happening here... If we are having the March meeting at Newton Flotman, which I look forward to, I would prefer it not to be the 24th because that is school holidays. Can we pencil in sunday March 17th instead? Syd

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RE: [Alug] Next Meeting - Jan 27?
by Ashley 10 Jan '02

10 Jan '02

At 14:53 09/01/02 +0000, Earl Brannigan wrote: >Hi >Cheveley is grrrrreat!!! for me (after my frosties). >(I'm assuming its the Cheveley near me thus - next village being Ashley.... >the Cheveley Nr Newmarket. ...). Cool, a village named after me :) Ashley

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Re: [Alug] isdn card and connection (a bit long)
by MJ Ray 10 Jan '02

10 Jan '02

Syd: > Earlier this evening I got off my arse and searched a little harder > and found what I needed on one of the mandrake support sites. All > working now. Glad to hear it! > Essentially, there is a file /etc/rc.d/rc.local which is the last > init file to be loaded - therefore various useful bits and bobs can > be stuck on the end and they will over-ride what has gone before. > > Not elegant but it works. Not the debian way I assume :) Not the Mandrake way either, I suspect. I assume that you're getting one of the hisax errors still? Adding a correct options line to modules.conf will solve that. > I did ned to edit some of the other files as well and I was > particularly pleased to see that according to the hardware database > on the mandrake web site, my card should not work. So one up! Hehe... time for you to go and correct their database, then. Well done! -- MJR

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Re: [Alug] Something is killing my box each evening, need help
by Ricardo Campos 09 Jan '02

09 Jan '02

> > The software is Debian Sid. I had this problem, dist-upgraded and it > > still occurs. I am inside X when the crash happens, I have not tried > > closing X down for the day to see if it repeats. I am running kernel > > 2.4.17, and whilst I did have crashes in previous kernels (I jumped from > > .13) they were not daily. I had a similar problem twice: 1) after installing nVidia drivers (maybe it's an X/videocard driver prob) 2) It'd just randomly do it, even in (cough cough) that *other* OS (splutter) so I attributed it to hardware. It seemed to fix itself. I'd go with Mark, maybe focussing on X and/or video drivers, and then going for the kernel. Not much help either, I'm afraid! _______________________________________________ "There are several codes, and I know several of them." -Mr. Precise. http://www.rscampos.net Check my online diary out: http://www.rscampos.net/blog.html -- Get your free email from www.linuxmail.org Powered by Outblaze

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Re: [Alug] Something is killing my box each evening, need help
by MJ Ray 09 Jan '02

09 Jan '02

James: > The software is Debian Sid. I had this problem, dist-upgraded and it > still occurs. I am inside X when the crash happens, I have not tried > closing X down for the day to see if it repeats. I am running kernel > 2.4.17, and whilst I did have crashes in previous kernels (I jumped from > .13) they were not daily. Summary of what I said on IRC: If you're tracking sid closely, you should be talking to Debian lists to cure this. If they coincided with the kernel change, try another kernel. Doubt that helped, but there you have it: replace bits until it stops crashing. Slow, tedious, but will work eventually. -- MJR

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RH 7.2 problem
by Ian Bell 09 Jan '02

09 Jan '02

I have RH 7.2 installed which provideds a couple of icons on the KDE desktop for mounting/unmounting CD and floppy drives. I have recently been trying to compile myself a kernel as yet without success. But a side effect seems to be that I can no longer mount/umount CD and floppy drives - even by hand as root. mount just hangs. Looking at it with Gtop shows it is asleep waiting for an interrupt. As I have a PIII, I wondered if when I did make modules and make modules_install I may have overwritten some functioning code with now non functioning code. Any suggestions? TIA Ian

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Re: [Alug] Next Meeting - Jan 27?
by MJ Ray 09 Jan '02

09 Jan '02

> This may not appeal to anyone but an alternative location near to > Norwich for an alug meet sometime is my house. It's free, warm and > there is always plenty of tea and biscuits :) That's very generous of you. Can you fit an ALUG meeting in it and are you sure you want ALUGgers there? > Other advantage - internet connectivity (64k isdn) and a 100tx hub > with a spare uplink port. Disadvantage - a few miles out of Norwich > for those not driving. Plenty of parking space though for those who > are. It is on the A140 south of Norwich, just off the A11 (Newton > Flotman). Bah, you can cycle to Newton Flotman fairly easily, IIRC. ;-) -- MJR

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Re: [Alug] isdn card and connection (a bit long)
by MJ Ray 09 Jan '02

09 Jan '02

Syd: > insmod hisax failing during boot. I looked at dmesg but did not see > these messages - should I be looking in /var somewhere? /var/log/syslog or messages, at a guess. > modprobe hisax type=35 protocol=2 id=hisax > Presumably I should be able to use this information to edit a > config file somewhere to have it happen during boot? No idea where It needs to end up in /etc/modules.conf, but some distributions build this from elsewhere (eg /etc/modutils/* in Debian). I think the line should be options hisax type=35 protocol=2 id=hisax > Also, MCC requires root password so I am not sure if I am dialing > out with root privs or with my user privs. I know its a mandrake > thing but any informed guesses? Dialouts are normally effectively root, as they have to add a network device and routes to the system. Can't help with ippp0, as I've never had an isdn system. There's an ipppd package in Debian, though. -- MJR

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Re: [Alug] Next Meeting - Jan 27?
by MJ Ray 09 Jan '02

09 Jan '02

> Mark - you mentioned some time ago having a Feb meet in King's > Lynn. Any further thoughts? I've yet to find a venue that is both: a) free or cheap b) available at weekends If anyone can help with this in the King's Lynn area, please email me and I'll try to help you arrange it, if you want. Is anyone (Alexis? Andrew?) on this list still at UEA and willing to do the room booking dance again? If so, shall we go to UEA for February, Newton Flotman for March (assuming that's OK), SomewhereElse(tm) for April and Syleham for May.. (any more venues want to step in?). Then we're probably planned far enough ahead to get in the magazines, for a change! -- MJR

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isdn card and connection (a bit long)
by Syd Hancock 09 Jan '02

09 Jan '02

Home Highway was installed yesterday. It's good! Forgive the long message and newbie questions following - I have tried to figure this out and have looked around the net and the system and *have* got it working after a fashion - using it now in fact - but its a terrible lash-up at the moment. So I'd really appreciate any advice and comments on what follows, including where else to look for answers since I don't really know where to go next. 1. OK, I am using Mandrake 8.0 and it hasn't completely recognised my internal isdn card (Asuscom ISDNink 128). I see something about insmod hisax failing during boot. I looked at dmesg but did not see these messages - should I be looking in /var somewhere? 2. But if I give this command (found in the documentation) then I can use it: modprobe hisax type=35 protocol=2 id=hisax Presumably I should be able to use this information to edit a config file somewhere to have it happen during boot? No idea where to find it though - there seem to be an awful lot of start-up files and I clearly have not found the correct one yet. 3. Finally, what app is recommended to dial an ISDN call in KDE (or on the command line)? I was using kppp for the modem but is does not see ippp0 - should it be able to find this or does it only recogniise the serial ports? At the moment I am having to use something called the Mandrake Control Centre to go to the network settings to find a place to dial out on the isdn. It is very long-winded, clunky and obviously just not the right way to do it. Also, MCC requires root password so I am not sure if I am dialing out with root privs or with my user privs. I know its a mandrake thing but any informed guesses? TIA Syd

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Re: [Alug] Next Meeting - Jan 27?
by Dryden 09 Jan '02

09 Jan '02

>Mark - you mentioned some time ago having a Feb meet >in King's >Lynn. Any further thoughts? >Syd Ye a meat in kings lynn would be good :) i still havnt managed to get to a meat yet... ********************************************************************** IMPORTANT: This email and its attachments are intended for the addressee only and may be confidential. If they have come to you in error you must take no action based on them nor must you copy or show them to anyone; please telephone us immediately. The contents of this email and attachments represent the views of the sender and are not necessarily the representative of the views of The College of West Anglia **********************************************************************

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Re: [Alug] Next Meeting - Jan 27?
by Jenny_Hopkins＠toby-churchill.com 09 Jan '02

09 Jan '02

Syd Hancock wrote: >This may not appeal to anyone but an alternative location near to >Norwich for an alug meet sometime is my house. It's free, warm and >there is always plenty of tea and biscuits :) My house is expensive and cold. A warm free one sounds most appealing, to me anyway! Jenny.

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Next Meeting - Jan 27?
by Jenny_Hopkins＠toby-churchill.com 09 Jan '02

09 Jan '02

Hi All, a surfeit of blackberry wine and cheesy excalibur films last night prompted me to wonder when the next meeting was: There was talk of Simon P putting us up at his folks place in Cheveley again, and talk of end of January? How about Sunday 27th January - Cheveley (if that suits Simon?) Sunday 24th Feb - Norwich - anyone at the uni find somewhere? If enough people could come to one or the other we could have a small website and library discussion to organise them into shape.....both topics that crop up from time to time and get dropped without being resolved. The Central Scrutiniser

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Re: [Alug] apt problems
by Jenny_Hopkins＠toby-churchill.com 09 Jan '02

09 Jan '02

Andrew wrote: >What's in your /etc/resolv.conf? Can you surf the web ok? No! Stupid, d'oh. The routing table had lost its gateway setting (box did the weird crash thing again over hols) for the outside world. All working again, thanks Andrew and Earl. apt-get install libiodbc2 here i come. Jenny.

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apt problems
by Jenny_Hopkins＠toby-churchill.com 09 Jan '02

09 Jan '02

Hi all, I'm having problems with apt.... I was trying to install something (apt-get install libiodbc2) and it couldn't find stuff so i ran apt-get update. . Here is a snippet from apt-get update output: Err ftp://ftp.plig.org stable/non-free Packages Could not resolve 'ftp.plig.org' Err ftp://ftp.uk.debian.org unstable/contrib Release Could not resolve 'ftp.uk.debian.org' Err http://security.debian.org stable/updates/main Packages Could not resolve 'security.debian.org' And here is my sources.list, which has hitherto worked ok. Could I have set something somewhere on my box that doesn't allow ftp or anything? deb http://security.debian.org stable/updates main contrib non-free deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 r2 _Potato_ - Official i386 Binary-1 (20001207)]/ unstable contrib main non-US/contrib non-US/main deb ftp://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ stable main deb-src ftp://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib deb ftp://ftp.plig.org/pub/debian/ stable main contrib non-free deb ftp://ftp.plig.org/pub/debian/non-US stable/non-US main contrib deb-src http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US unstable/non-US main Any pointers welcomed! Thanks, Jenny.

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ALUG Linux Distro CDs
by Martyn Drake 08 Jan '02

08 Jan '02

Hi folks, It occurs to me that we don't have anything on the web site, nor do we have any proper mechanism (other than at meetings where copies can be made) for folk to get hold of Linux distributions. I tend to use the Linux Emporium (http://www.linuxemporium.co.uk) for the majority of my purchases and they are very good. However, I would like to offer the ALUG slightly cheaper discs which I will burn myself and post to anybody that wants them. CDs will cost £2.00, with postage and packing for any number of CDs at £1.50. 1) Red Hat Linux 7.2 (2 x CDs) - £4.00 2) Mandrake Linux 8.1 (3 x CDs) - £6.00 3) Debian Linux Potato 2.2rev4 (3 x CDs) - £6.00 4) Smoothwall Firewall 0.99 (1 x CD) - £2.00 5) FreeBSD 4.4 (4 x CDs) - £8.00 If this goes well, I'd like to add a page to the web site whereby people can purchase these CDs from the web at a much lower rate than Linux Emporium to help encourage use of Linux. Whatever my profits are on this (which will be very small) will be pumped into running the server running ALUG. If people think this is a wacky and pointless idea, then I shall return to my small corner and hide :) However, if anybody is interested in this scheme, then please let me know what CD(s) you'd like and if you'd like to pay by Paypal/NoChex or personal cheque. This has been another hair brained scheme by Quackers Enterprises of Surrey :) Kind regards, Martyn -- Web : http://www.drake.org.uk Web : http://www.martyn-drake.info Web : http://www.alug.org.uk

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Re: [Alug] Re: Next Meeting
by MJ Ray 08 Jan '02

08 Jan '02

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 John Seago: > If the 27th is settled on, and the venue is to be Cheveley, will this be > another joint meeting with CamLUG? I don't know. Cc'ing them to ask. Cam-LUG, would you like to come out to play with ALUG that Sunday? I really must go to a Cam-LUG meeting one of these days... [CLUG: if you reply to main@...alug you'll be held for approval if you're not subscribed to it. Sorry. spam-trapping etc :-/ ] - -- MJR Anglian LUG http://www.alug.org.uk/ No ePatents http://petition.eurolinux.org/ FSF Europe http://www.fsfeurope.org/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE8O016PcY2rvOKXY0RAgJ7AJ0eY7kbkaeB3eDbI/ImT7mp1hTCpACfYmdE V9gHlf9R5p5EKEbUovDzii8= =xc4S -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Next Meeting
by John Seago 08 Jan '02

08 Jan '02

If the 27th is settled on, and the venue is to be Cheveley, will this be another joint meeting with CamLUG? -- John Seago Change is not synonymous with `progress'.

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Re: [Alug] FTP restart
by Ricardo Campos 08 Jan '02

08 Jan '02

> I don't know of a client for Linux but then I've never > looked.. Anybody know of one? http://prozilla.delrom.ro/about.html -- Get your free email from www.linuxmail.org Powered by Outblaze

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Re: [Alug] On-Line Install
by MJ Ray 08 Jan '02

08 Jan '02

tom: > RH will allow this - simply make the install disks, > boot and load the network card and do an nfs install [...] Can you really bring up the PPP link easily from the install system now? That's a big step forwards then. > What might be worth considering is findin something that will 'background' > download files and allow restarts from whatever you've already downloaded. Do you mean that we can't restart if the PPP link drops? Not really usable for most people on dialup in this country then, where periodic kicks and noisy lines are the norm. -- MJR

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On-Line Install
by tom potts 08 Jan '02

08 Jan '02

re MJR: "Yes, getting some shared ISOs is probably useful, although I wish more distributions would follow Debian's lead of starting PPP network installations from nothing more than a few floppies and some hard disk files." RH will allow this - simply make the install disks, boot and load the network card and do an nfs install from RHat. Its still slow but <3 days on ISDN unless you install everything. What might be worth considering is findin something that will 'background' download files and allow restarts from whatever you've already downloaded. THis way you can download the ISO's in the background while your IRC'ng - unless you can type a bit faster than me! Tom __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com

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Re: [Alug] On-Line Install
by MJ Ray 08 Jan '02

08 Jan '02

My bad: > > Do you mean that we can't restart if the PPP link drops? Not really > > usable for most people on dialup in this country then, where periodic > > kicks and noisy lines are the norm. > GNU/GnomeFTP is a goodie for restarts mid file, if there was a way to script I meant restart if the PPP link drops during installation. With a little pestering, debian will restart its downloads from where it got to, as long as the base is installed (so maybe downloading them to hard disk will still be a good idea for us). For scripted general use, wget is quite easy to configure to make it timeout and retry. -- MJR

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Another Linux virus...
by Ricardo Campos 08 Jan '02

08 Jan '02

I guess it's best not to try and use an exploit whose code you don't understand.... http://www.vnunet.com/News/1127965 I wonder how long it will take for someone to engineer a more aggressive virus? (In the sense of self-propagating) _______________________________________________ "There are several codes, and I know several of them." -Mr. Precise. http://www.rscampos.net Check my online diary out: http://www.rscampos.net/blog.html -- Get your free email from www.linuxmail.org Powered by Outblaze

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