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Compaq Proliant servers going free
by mick 29 May '13

29 May '13

I'm not sure how many freeglers there are on this list, but I thought I'd pass this on anyway. "THREE complete Compaq PROLIANT 8500R servers offered in Eaton: http://norfolkfreegle.org/Post/ViewPost/13591" Mick --------------------------------------------------------------------- blog: baldric.net gpg fingerprint: FC23 3338 F664 5E66 876B 72C0 0A1F E60B 5BAD D312 ---------------------------------------------------------------------

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Software RAID error
by Mark Rogers 29 May '13

29 May '13

I'm having problems understanding what is happening on my RAID array. $ cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10] md0 : active raid1 sda1[0] sdb1[1](F) 976629568 blocks super 1.2 [2/1] [U_] To me, that suggests that sdb has failed, however, syslog contains lots of errors on sda but no mention of sdb. Amongst the things I've learned this morning, is the fact that I'm not getting any notifications; this only came to light because a VM that is hosted on this RAID array has lost the ability to write to one of its virtual disks (but not all of them). Should I conclude that both disks have failed? What is the best route to recovery here? Ie which disk do I swap out first with a new disk? Logically swapping out sda is the only thing that makes sense to me but advice welcomed. smartctl reports that neither disk had SMART enabled, which is odd because I thought they had, so there's no information there. I have enabled it this morning but don't want to try doing self-tests at this stage unless someone more knowledgeable than me says I should. Mark -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Re: [ALUG] how to block new connections whilst allowing existing established
by mick 27 May '13

27 May '13

On Sun, 26 May 2013 20:34:24 +0100 Adam Bower <adam(a)thebowery.co.uk> allegedly wrote: > On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 08:09:07PM +0100, mick wrote: > > > > Before I start playing in earnest, does anyone know of a more > > elegant solution? > > Have you looked at profiling the connection length and how the client > works? I work for a CDN and to be honest since we acquired a > particular customer the scenario changed from us having a traffic > pattern that when taking a node out of our delivery group after 2 > hours it would see no connections, since this new customer even after > removing a node from delivery it will still see significant amounts > of traffic after 24 hours. > > The way we deal with it is to let some customers get "unlucky" but > then given the client immediately does a new dns lookup and goes to a > new server it means the interruption to them would be very brief. > > Anyhow, you might want to look at some kind of load balancer like > varnish for this scenario as if not a stuck connection might mean your > reboot never happens. > > Also, see if the clients can support range headers, if so they can > resume the download from the missing bit. This means it's not the end > of the world when a download fails. > Adam Thanks for this. But I should have said that my mirrors are on VMs in datacentres I don't control. So I have no chance of sticking a load balancing proxy in front of the servers. Furthermore, the "customers" are not paying me anything (I give the mirrors to the community) so I have no form of communication with them. I /could/ just be brutal, but I don't want to be - and as you will see from my answer to Nev, it turns out I don't have to be either. Cheers Mick --------------------------------------------------------------------- blog: baldric.net gpg fingerprint: FC23 3338 F664 5E66 876B 72C0 0A1F E60B 5BAD D312 ---------------------------------------------------------------------

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how to block new connections whilst allowing existing established
by mick 27 May '13

27 May '13

Hi guys I run a couple of mirrors serving "tails" over http. Occasionally I need to shut those servers down and reboot (for example I have just upgraded both of them to wheezy). Both servers are reasonably busy (they ship out about 2-3 TiB each per month) and normally have active connections at the time I want to power cycle them. Connections can (of course) come from anywhere and some people may be on slow lines and may be over half way through a download of one of the 700 meg iso files. If I simply power cycle the server they will likely lose the connection and the download. I'd like to be more friendly than that. So what I have in mind is some mechanism that I can invoke to prevent new connections being established but permit the existing ones to complete before I switch off. I've thought about cobbling together an iptables script which will change the lines: BLAH –dport 80 -m state –state NEW,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT to BLAH –dport 80 -m state –state ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT temporarily and then switch it back afterwards. But I have yet to try it. Before I start playing in earnest, does anyone know of a more elegant solution? TIA Mick --------------------------------------------------------------------- blog: baldric.net gpg fingerprint: FC23 3338 F664 5E66 876B 72C0 0A1F E60B 5BAD D312 ---------------------------------------------------------------------

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Network printing again
by Chris Walker 25 May '13

25 May '13

I'm having another try at making network printing work. I bought a Buffalo ADSL router recently with the facility to print using the inbuilt USB port. I connected up the printer and tried to make my system see the it. But it never does. If I set the host address as 192.168.1.1, the system picks the port number as 9100. I've looked on the router and all I can see is a WebAccess External Port set to 9000 so I'm guessing that 9100 isn't likely to be about right. The router can also be used as a media server with a USB disc plugged in instead of the printer. If I do that, the disc is seen as smb://ap0024a5bdb4dc/disk1_pt1/ and I can see and read the files (the buffalo is seen on a wifi network as Buffalo-BDB4DC so that ties in too). But I'm still stuck as to why I can't print. Can anybody suggest a way forward please?

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Fire FTP trying to confuse me...
by Anthony Anson 23 May '13

23 May '13

and succeeding. Up to this morning Fire FTP has been intuitive and easy to use, however, from having a local and a remote side in separate panes on the same page, it has taken the liberty of listing everything on one side, and only having an upload arrow - no download one. I may have accidentally clicked something which has brought this about, but I can't find anything to restore the default position. Any ideas? -- Tony http://www.girolle.co.uk/

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DHCP Error
by steve-alug＠hst.me.uk 21 May '13

21 May '13

Hi folks, I'm confused about another thing too. I have an external backup drive, connected via a network cable. When things boot up, it gets IP addresses for its drives from my dhcp server. This used to work fine. Recently however, I find that the drive's complaining of a "DHCP network addressing problem" (according to the blinking light code!). If, before the drive boots I disable my UFW firewall with sudo ufw disable, then boot the drive, then enable the firewall, everything's OK. If I don't disable the firewall while the drive's getting an IP address, I get the error. I'm running dnsmasq as a dhcp server. My ufw rules are like this $ sudo ufw status Status: active To Action From -- ------ ---- 67 ALLOW 169.254.0.0/16 68 ALLOW 169.254.0.0/16 67 ALLOW 0.0.0.0 68 ALLOW 0.0.0.0 192.168.55.66 ALLOW 192.168.55.0/24 I've omitted 4 rules which open up specific ports, with a format like this as they're not relevant (at least I think they're not relevant) 192.168.55.66 123 ALLOW Anywhere 192.168.55.66 456/tcp ALLOW Anywhere As I understand it, the ports I need to allow access to are 67 and 68. When something asks for an IP address and it hasn't already got one, it broadcasts from the broadcast address 0.0.0.0. Sometimes, a machine will assign itself an IP address in the 169.254.0.0/16 range - e.g. a Windows machine that can't find a DHCP server on the network. If I allow this range then such machines can contact the DHCP server. The final line should allow anything with an address in the range 192.168.55.0 - 192.168.55.255 to contact any port on my server 192.168.55.66, which is where the DHCP server is. It seems to me I must have something wrong with the UFW rules, otherwise why would disabling it allow the drive to get a DCHP lease? What have I got wrong? Any ideas appreciated. Cheers Steve

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Network Engineering
by James Bensley 21 May '13

21 May '13

Hi All, I'm Not sure how many people know about the following here already, and hope fully this isn't against any list etiquette rules; I'm sure many of you use the various Stack Exchange sites, such as http://serverfault.com/, http://stackoverflow.com/, http://unix.stackexchange.com/ and http://askubuntu.com/. Now there is a new site that recently came out of Beta for public access, http://networkengineering.stackexchange.com/. If anyone has networking questions I urge you to sign up and start asking! If the site doesn't get enough traffic in this initial stages it could get shut down, and so far it is proving to be a great well of knowledge. Many thanks, James.

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Network Engineering
by James Bensley 21 May '13

21 May '13

Hi All, I'm Not sure how many people know about the following here already, and hope fully this isn't against any list etiquette rules; I'm sure many of you use the various Stack Exchange sites, such as http://serverfault.com/, http://stackoverflow.com/, http://unix.stackexchange.com/ and http://askubuntu.com/. Now there is a new site that recently came out of Beta for public access, http://networkengineering.stackexchange.com/. If anyone has networking questions I urge you to sign up and start asking! If the site doesn't get enough traffic in this initial stages it could get shut down, and so far it is proving to be a great well of knowledge. Many thanks, James.

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[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : The Mulberry Tree
by samwise 20 May '13

20 May '13

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- The monthly "Third Monday" ALUG Ipswich Social Meeting is back today, 20th May, at 20:00: The Mulberry Tree 5 Woodbridge Road IPSWICH IP4 2EA Tel: 01473 225776 Map/Directions URI: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=IP4+2EA WWW: https://www.facebook.com/MULBERRYHOSPITALITY The Mulberry Tree, previously known as The Milestone Beer House, is a grade 2 listed building in the centre of Ipswich. It is located at the intersection between Woodbridge Road and the A1156, across the road from the old Odeon cinema and not far from the Regent Theatre. It re-opened on Thursday March 29th 2012 after a major refurbishment, under its original name of The Mulberry House and has already begun to regain a good reputation for its selection of beers and ales. It has a sizeable car park to the rear of the building. All are welcome, novices and experienced users. Feel free to ask for further information on the Main ALUG mailing list. Apologies for the late reminder, I was away all weekend and missed my own reminder reminder!!! Cheers, Peter. ----- 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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Debian linux 3.8 and grub
by Richard Lewis 18 May '13

18 May '13

Hi ALUG, I recently upgraded my Debian unstable system and it included the 3.8 Linux kernel. There seem to be some problems with this kernel and my wireless network card. So I just want to set the old 3.2 kernel as the default boot option for now. However, setting: GRUB_DEFAULT=2 in /etc/default/grub and running update-grub seems not to have taken effect (the 3.8 kernel still gets booted). I notice GRUB now seems to have a new initial menu with just two options (paraphrased): "Boot Debian"; "Advanced Options". Selecting Advanced Options presents the more familiar list of kernels to boot. Where did this new menu come from? Could it be interfering with my GRUB_DEFAULT=2 option? Is there a way to remove it? Or any other suggestions why my default kernel option may not be working? Thanks, Richard -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard Lewis j: ironchicken(a)jabber.earth.li @: lewisrichard http://www.richardlewis.me.uk/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

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Claws mailbox over quota?
by Chris Walker 14 May '13

14 May '13

Following a query from Mick, I decided to try importing all my mail from Thunderbird into Claws (v3.8.0) and it's all been going well until I tried to import a mailbox from 2009. The messages in the import folder total 399 and yet there are only 350 in the imported folder. I clicked on the red exclamation mark at the bottom of the Claws window and it tells me '*** IMAP4< Alert: Mailbox is at 99% of quota' but despite searching everywhere I can, I can't find any mention of quotas. Can anybody help please?

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Debian linux 3.8 and grub
by Richard Lewis 12 May '13

12 May '13

Hi ALUG, I recently upgraded my Debian unstable system and it included the 3.8 Linux kernel. There seem to be some problems with this kernel and my wireless network card. So I just want to set the old 3.2 kernel as the default boot option for now. However, setting: GRUB_DEFAULT=2 in /etc/default/grub and running update-grub seems not to have taken effect (the 3.8 kernel still gets booted). I notice GRUB now seems to have a new initial menu with just two options (paraphrased): "Boot Debian"; "Advanced Options". Selecting Advanced Options presents the more familiar list of kernels to boot. Where did this new menu come from? Could it be interfering with my GRUB_DEFAULT=2 option? Is there a way to remove it? Or any other suggestions why my default kernel option may not be working? Thanks, Richard -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard Lewis j: ironchicken(a)jabber.earth.li @: lewisrichard http://www.richardlewis.me.uk/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

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Routers
by Chris Walker 12 May '13

12 May '13

Hello, Does anyone have a need for either one or two BT Home Hubs? They're V2 and I've hacked them to enable use on something other than a BT line. They have 'n' wifi and I've had them working on my Talktalk line as a test. They belonged to one of my sons who moved house and wanted to remove clutter from the new home. Good old Dad will take them! If nobody wants them, I'll bung them on ebay and if nobody there wants them, they'll go for recycling. I'm in Wymondham near Norwich but might be prepared to travel within Norfolk/Suffolk/Cambs.

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Possible Chess moves
by Ted.Harding＠wlandres.net 11 May '13

11 May '13

Greetings All! I have a query. Is there some program which, given a Chess position and which player has the move, can output a (preferably numbered) list of the possible moves for that player in that position? Ideally, it should be possible to enter the position by placing pieces on an image of the board (and to change the position by moving pieces, e.g., after a move, by making the move). With thanks, and best wishes to all, Ted. ------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)wlandres.net> Date: 11-May-2013 Time: 12:23:02 This message was sent by XFMail -------------------------------------------------

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"Highly visible"
by Max Folker 08 May '13

08 May '13

Hi, I'm new here and would like to come along to the Norwich meeting this Thursday. This page (http://alug.org.uk/PubMeetings) says: "New Members are advised to arrange contact (swapping telephone numbers etc) or ask for us to make ourselves highly visible, so you don't end up sitting at a table full of random strangers who aren't interested in Linux." ...I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask, but yes - if the group could possibly be highly visible that'd be great. Hopefully see you there. : ) - Max

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Where am I going wrong?
by Chris Walker 08 May '13

08 May '13

I have 2 mail readers on this machine, Thunderbird (which is what I'm using to write this mail) and Sylpheed. I also have a Blackberry Playbook which is configured to use one of the same email addresses as used on Sylpheed. I had previously used Sylpheed in POP3 mode but when I realised that it wasn't displaying the mail I'd sent from the Playbook, I figured I'd change the setup to IMAP. Sylpheed wouldn't let me change it so I deleted the account and recreated it as IMAP. But Sylpheed still won't display the sent mail. I then looked around for another free mail reader and found Claws. If I set that up in IMAP mode, it *does* show the sent mail. Further googling showed that Claws was developed from the same code base as Sylpheed so if one program can display the sent mail, why won't the other? Any help/ideas appreciated.

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Qemu networking
by Barry Samuels 08 May '13

08 May '13

I have been using Qemu on my Debian machine running Windows XP for some years including being able to access a directory on the Debian system using Samba from Qemu. Qemu was updated in the recent past and the networking/Samba side of things stopped working. Well, actually, the command line I had been using to start Qemu was no longer accepted and Qemu wouldn't start until I removed the networking bit. I have been struggling to get it going again ever since. I can get Qemu to run but I can't get the networking/samba side to work. My original Qemu command was: /usr/bin/qemu -boot c -m 256 -hda '/usr/local/storage/qemu/win-xp2.img' - cdrom '/usr/local/storage/qemu/mm.iso' -hdb '/usr/local/storage/qemu/win- xp3.img' -net nic,model=rtl8139 -net user,vlan=0 -smb Linux -redir tcp:9100::9100 -soundhw sb16 -localtime -usb -usbdevice host:067b:2303 - usbdevice host:04b8:0005 The current Qemu command is: /usr/bin/qemu -boot c -m 256 -hda '/usr/local/storage/qemu/win-xp2.img' -cdrom '/usr/local/storage/qemu/mm.iso' -hdb '/usr/local/storage/qemu/win- xp3.img' -netdev type=user,id=mynet0,smb=Linux_m,smbserver=10.0.2.4 Qemu starts but I get no access to the network. I get the following message: 'An error occurred while connecting L: to \\10.0.0.2\linux' Not particularly helpful. I also see sometimes 'The network cannot be reached'. I'm sure I used to have an entry of some sort in the Windows Hosts file but the entry is not there now and I don't remember what it was. Searching on the internet has not provided any useful information. Can anyone offer any help please? -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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[ALUG Announce] ALUG Norwich Pub Meet Thursday 9th May
by Viperfang 06 May '13

06 May '13

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 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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BASIC and Linux
by Bev Nicolson 04 May '13

04 May '13

I'm not asking for myself by the way. Would it be possible to run BASIC and create programmes in Ubuntu? A quick Google suggests WINE would be necessary. Thoughts? (Other than 'Why would you?') Bev.

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SAMBA vs NFS
by steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk 03 May '13

03 May '13

Hi Guys, I tried setting up NFS last night and I got it to work, but it was so slow compared to the Samba share I used to use. I've been meaning to try and set up NFS for ages. I was thinking that it was probably the best way to share files between my server and laptops, maintaining appropriate Linux user names/rights etc for files, rather than the kludgey way I have my Samba set up. I got it working using http://czarism.com/easy-peasy-ubuntu-linux-nfs-file-sharing and then I looked at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SettingUpNFSHowTo and I was trying to make it a bit more secure by editing hosts.deny/allow as described. Sometime during this modification, I managed to break it completely. So my questions: Is nfs the way to go to share files & directories from a server to laptops, or should I stick with Samba? Is the Ubuntu link above a sensible way of setting things up? I was thinking I'd just manually keep the user names/numbers in sync between the computers - is that OK? Is there a better way of doing things? I think it's stopped working because rpcbind can't link to localhost. I think I know how to fix it, but can't spare the time at the moment. Any thoughts? Thanks in advance! :-) Steve

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Re: [ALUG] BASIC and Linux
by Ewan Slater 03 May '13

03 May '13

On 3 May 2013 09:55, <main-request(a)lists.alug.org.uk> wrote: > Message: 9 > Date: Fri, 3 May 2013 09:55:36 +0100 > From: Bev Nicolson <lumos60(a)gmail.com> > To: ALUG <main(a)lists.alug.org.uk> > Subject: [ALUG] BASIC and Linux > Message-ID: > <CAAoXXvXrtMBtjpbyNya56Hzp_SmkYu83kP4p2A9LFkAQj40ODw(a)mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 > > I'm not asking for myself by the way. Would it be possible to run > BASIC and create programmes in Ubuntu? A quick Google suggests WINE > would be necessary. Thoughts? (Other than 'Why would you?') > > Bev. > Hi Bev, There is a Wikipedia list of BASIC dialects here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BASIC_dialects Quite a few of which look like they are for Linux native (caveat: I haven't tried them myself). I have done C# development on Linux using Mono and confirm that this works well. It now looks like Mono is starting to support Visual Basic on Linux (http://www.mono-project.com/VisualBasic.NET_support#New_Visual_Basic_Framew…) which I haven't tried, but based on the C# experience I would expect that it would be good. Cheers, Ewan

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iptables question
by Mark Rogers 01 May '13

01 May '13

I have an Internet facing server running pptpd. Users who connect via pptp need to be able to route through the server to the rest of the Internet. As well as configuring net.ipv4.ip_forward=1 I also have iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE .. and it all works. However, is the above iptables command too broad for an internet server? Doesn't it effectively mean that anyone can send traffic through it? Assuming the pptp interface is ppp0 I would have expected (having very little iptables knowledge) that: iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -i ppp0 -j MASQUERADE .. would be better but I'm just guessing and I don't want to kill access to the remote server by playing! Given that every howto I find says to use just "iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE" I assume that's actually right, so I think I'm just asking for help understanding why. Mark -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Widespread spamattack
by Anthony Anson 30 Apr '13

30 Apr '13

In case anyone doesn't know, there's a widespread infiltration of btinternet and yahoo accounts, spreading multiple spam messages. Beware of trying to open any unknown URLs contained in emails from those sources. (My firewall warned me of just such an attack, seemingly from an old friend. Whether it could have infected a Linux box I don't know.) -- Tony http://www.girolle.co.uk/

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Converting photogravure (back) to photograph quality?
by Anthony Anson 30 Apr '13

30 Apr '13

Does anyone know of a program which will take a (dotty) photogravure pic and convert it back (as far as is possible) to the original one from which the plates were made? -- Tony http://www.girolle.co.uk/

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