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[OT] Firefox loses cookies periodically
by Bev Nicolson 11 Jul '22

11 Jul '22

I'm on vs 101 I think now, and periodically Firefox will dump the cookies that I have given an exemption to. (I ask it to delete all the others on closing the browser and have a limit on how much disk space the rest can take up.) What can I do about it? Bev. (Mint 19.1)

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Sharing disk space between servers
by Mark Rogers 27 Jun '22

27 Jun '22

I have several virtual servers with the same provider. Typically I have around 50GB disk space. On some I have largish databases, with consequently large database backups. The backups are for recovery from cock-ups rather than disaster recovery so retaining them on the same server is convenient, but they do tie up disk space, and the ones with the biggest databases lose the most to database backups. So ideally I want to do something to share the spare capacity on other servers, but safely. for example in the event that one server got hacked I don't want that to provide a backdoor to another server, and nor should any data that's been shared onto it be easily accessible. In an ideal world, it would be nice to ring fence (say) 15GB of capacity on server A and make it available over the network to server B such that A can't access B's files even though they're stored there (I accept that I can't stop someone with root on A deleting the files, but they should at least be encrypted so that they can't be read). And whilst B can use that allocated chunk of A's disk, it must not be able to access anything else on A. Ideally the capacity that's shared should be pretty easy to change so I can easily adapt if A needs more space. (I wondered about trying to remotely mount an encrypted file on A as a filesystem on B, but adapting the size later would be difficult.) As anything I do will be making changes to already functioning servers A & B the changes need to be relatively narrow to avoid the risk of breaking something. Thoughts / suggestions / experience of doing something like this? I can think of various paths to take, from simply pushing files over scp and working out how best to secure it (and manage the quota), to something far more complex like GlusterFS, with lots of options in between. So it's not really a lack of ideas as any idea which ones would be best! -- 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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Editing files on remote servers over SSH
by Mark Rogers 26 Jun '22

26 Jun '22

What's the best way to edit files on remote servers over SSH? Using a text editor directly over SSH is fine, but a GUI editor like VSCode is easier to work with. But I never have much luck getting SSH/SFTP plugins to work reliably, so I wondered what other people do. Preferably cross-platform as I have to switch between platforms a lot. -- 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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SSD HDD and simlinks?
by Phil Thane 01 Jun '22

01 Jun '22

After plaguing this list for months about my ailing desktop PC I finally skipped it and bought a (basic) new one. It comes with 128GB SSD. It's fast of course but not very big. So here's the plan but any advice would be good... I took the (almost new) 1TB drive out of the old PC and there's a lot of stuff on it. I've fitted it to the new machine but not installed anything yet as my ancient keyboard with a PS2 plug won't fit! Once that's sorted I'll install Mint. I *think* I'll do a standard install to the SSD and ignore the HDD. My user data on the HDD is mostly in /home/phil/Nextcloud and it was synced to my Nextcloud server. I assume, hope, I can keep that synced data on the HDD and just link the directory to my new /home/phil/... Not sure if that means using the link as the Nextcloud directory when setting up the client or maybe Nextcloud will allow me to connect direct to the HDD. Either way though I'm hoping to avoid taking all day to sync my data across the network. I remember long ago having a PC with 2 small HDD and setting it up with / on one but /home on the other. Is that still a thing? Is it worth doing in this case? Though bearing in mind it means formatting the HDD and re-syncing all the data. -- Phil

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Re: Comparing large folders of mostly identical file contents with different filenames (Mark Rogers)
by Peter 31 May '22

31 May '22

A query, not a suggestion, because you are all far, far better informed than me about this stuff! I was curious and looked up what tools are available for this, and came on: rdfind Fdupes dupGuru which all seem to find dupes by content. I am sure Mark is well aware of these and more. So why can't one of them be used to find the dupes? Also, is any of them significantly better than the others? Different but related issue, the app I have used to sync folders in the past is Unison, which I found very simple and effective. Also Grsync. Do people use these? Or is something else preferable? Peter On Sun, 22 May 2022 12:00:03 +0100 main-request(a)lists.alug.org.uk wrote: > Send main mailing list submissions to > main(a)lists.alug.org.uk > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via email, send a message with subject or > body 'help' to > main-request(a)lists.alug.org.uk > > You can reach the person managing the list at > main-owner(a)lists.alug.org.uk > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of main digest..."

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Sharing 2FA (TOTP)
by Mark Rogers 31 May '22

31 May '22

Are there any good ways of sharing 2 factor authentication credentials? Scenario: I have probably 20 accounts secured by 2FA using (currently) Authy to manage them. A colleague similarly has their own 2FA setup (not sure what they use). However there are some accounts we both need access to, and therefore at present we haven't enabled 2FA on. I want to set up 2FA in such a way that either of us can generate a code without sharing anything else to do it. I believe this is using TOTP protocol? I don't know enough about how it works but I can't see any technical reason why the shared secret can't be shared between multiple people (Authy already lets me share between multiple devices, but in an "all or nothing" way.) Obviously sharing 2FA credentials weakens security. But at present the alternative is not using it at all, and surely shared 2FA is better than that. -- 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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Comparing large folders of mostly identical file contents with different filenames
by Mark Rogers 23 May '22

23 May '22

I have a backup of a GMail account which creates folders by year, month, date and within them .eml files for each email. I'm migrating to a different GMail account so I'm moving the emails to the new account, and I have a backup also of the second account. So it's something like: Account1/2022/5/1/aaaa.eml and Account2/2022/5/1/bbbb.eml .. with each being identical emails (a diff of the two files will confirm that). Of course I don't just have 1 email. I have about 200,000, and the number of files in the two backups is slightly different so I want to find the discrepancies. So: Any suggestions? I could run a standard dedup program but that'll be very slow given that it'll be comparing 200k files with another 200k files. In most cases I suspect the missing file(s) will stand out just from their file sizes on a per-directory comparison. -- 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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RAM
by Phil Thane 17 May '22

17 May '22

Hi, Over the last few months I've posted a few enquiries about my steadily worsening PC. A few tweaks have sometimes improved things slightly for a while but long term it's getting worse. It's now very unstable given to hanging whenever asked to do anything like move/close a window, so hope I get to the end of this without a problem. I *think* there might be a problem with RAM and/or mainboard RAM slots. There are 2x4GB modules fitted. (Crucial Ballistix not cheapo stuff). UEFI setup and lshw both report 8GB but free only shows 4GB. That was the case under Mint, and still is with a fresh install of Kubuntu. Any suggestions before I lash out on new RAM? Because if I do it's pretty much guaranteed to be something else. Or do any of you have old DDR 3 you've replaced with bigger sticks and not got around to selling on Ebay? Cheap preferred but no reasonable price refused! If all else fails I guess a new MoBo/CPU/RAM bundle might be required... -- Phil

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Re: RAM
by Srdjan Todorovic 13 May '22

13 May '22

On Fri, 13 May 2022 at 19:59, Phil Thane <phil(a)pthane.co.uk> wrote: > > Memtest isn't installed and isn't available from Ubuntu repositories. > probably could get it from elsewhere but chances are I just crash/hang > the thing again! Memtest is supposed to be booted off a usb drive or a cd. You can get it from https://www.memtest.org/archives and get version 5.31, follow the instructions to write that to a bootable media and then test the ram. Secondary computer you could use? > Kubuntu system monitor shows 4GB but no error messages, and trying to > run it just hung the PC again so doing this from a different machine. Nothing in the kernel logs? dmesg? No exotic PCI cards in the system or other experimental drivers loaded? > uname -a shows kernel version 5.15.x.x and AMD X86-64 > > Can't see anything in UEFI to suggest setting problem. It shows 8GB > installed and 8GB available. Suggests your linux install is messed up? Can you reinstall or re-download the ISO again, verify that the ISO is not corrupted and burn another install disk and try re-installing? > On 13/05/2022 19:41, Srdjan Todorovic wrote: > > On Fri, 13 May 2022 at 19:30, Phil Thane <phil(a)pthane.co.uk> wrote: > > > >> It's now very unstable given to hanging whenever asked to do anything > >> like move/close a window, so hope I get to the end of this without a > >> problem. > > What does Memtest86 say about your ram? This should be the very first > > thing you do. > > > >> I *think* there might be a problem with RAM and/or mainboard RAM slots. > >> There are 2x4GB modules fitted. (Crucial Ballistix not cheapo stuff). > >> UEFI setup and lshw both report 8GB but free only shows 4GB. That was > >> the case under Mint, and still is with a fresh install of Kubuntu. > > Which version of Kubuntu? > > What kernel version and architecture? uname -a > > > > Are you sure your kernel is not 32bit without PAE extensions? That > > would limit to 4GB usable RAM even if you had more. > > Any weird BIOS / UEFI settings that might put it into some sort of > > legacy mode to only give you 4GB? > > > >> Any suggestions before I lash out on new RAM? Because if I do it's > >> pretty much guaranteed to be something else. Or do any of you have old > >> DDR 3 you've replaced with bigger sticks and not got around to selling > >> on Ebay? Cheap preferred but no reasonable price refused! > > I have 2 sticks of 4GB each, DDR3 ECC server ram - not sure if it > > would work (you would need to check if your CPU + motherboard could > > support it), but might be open to taking £10 or something + postage? I > > would need to do Memtest86 on that ram to make sure it's ok. > > > > Thanks, > > Srdjan

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"Upgrading" Ubuntu via fresh install
by Mark Rogers 25 Apr '22

25 Apr '22

Over the years I have upgraded my Ubuntu desktop twice a year using do-release-upgrade. My root drive SSD is nearly full so I've just bought a bigger one, and I'm looking at migrating across to it. But... Ubuntu 22.04 is nearly here, so maybe it would make more sense to clean things up with a fresh 22.04 install on the new SSD instead? I know lots of people avoid upgrades and just do a clean install retaining /home (or something along those lines) but I've never done it myself. Is it the right way to go? It's a desktop PC, but 99% of the time I access it via SSH. Over the years it's had all sorts of stuff installed and uninstalled (or installed and no longer used but still there). So a clearout definitely seems like a good idea. So it seems like what I ideally want is a managed migration where I choose which things I have on the old install I migrate and which I leave behind. Is this going to be more hassle than it's worth? -- 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: "Upgrading" Ubuntu via fresh install (Martin Collins)
by Peter 24 Apr '22

24 Apr '22

I've been meaning to ask this question for a while, and this seems like a good occasion. I'm moving someone from a very old i3 machine to a new AMD machine. The key difference apart from performance is that the old machine was bios, and the new one is of course compulsorily EFI. So what I did was, do a new install, then use Clonezilla to make a copy of the /home partition, and moved it to the new machine. Everything seems fine, with one exception. The old machine is on Debian Mate. All the files seem to have moved fine. But desktop layout is a different matter. The user has an enormous desktop file on a quite large screen with every inch covered with folders, in a familiar order and positioning. Unfortunately the layout of the desktop doesn't seem to survive the transition, its alpha order. Where is the layout of the desktop file kept? And is there a way to keep its layout while doing the transfer? Its not the end of the world if it just has to be accepted, but it would make life a lot easier if I could keep it. This was never a problem in previous machine moves, because I made a clone of the hard drive, then booted on the new machine. But with the arrival of compulsory EFI this isn't possible any more. They have removed legacy mode on the new main board. I have looked up converting an installation from bios to EFI. It seems like a very fraught procedure. And after all these years there's a case to be made for a clean install, as people here have said. So if I could overcome the desktop layout problem that would be what I would rather do. Peter

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Firefox
by Phil Thane 24 Apr '22

24 Apr '22

Well, last week Firefox was grinding slow so I resurrected Ghostery Dawn which I'd previously tested but not used in earnest. GD is faster and I got all the same FF plugins installed and copied my saved logins and bookmarks. One snag, whilst it responds correctly to clicking on links in webpages it won't open links in other apps, eg email or Twitter. Even if GD is already open clicking a link (from another app) opens a new instance at the home page. So I did a 'Remove Completely' of FF in Synaptic, ran updates and re-installed. And lo, it works much better. But after a time it goes slow again. Running it from a terminal I get this: *phil@phils*:*~*$ firefox [GFX1-]: glxtest: libEGL missing methods for GL test [GFX1-]: glxtest: libEGL missing eglGetDisplayDriverName Checked libEGL is installed and it is. So moving on, opened a YouTube video and get this in the terminal: 2022-04-24T12:56:32Z*ERROR* mp4parse] Found 2 nul bytes in "\u{0}\u{0}" [2022-04-24T12:56:32Z*ERROR* mp4parse] Found 2 nul bytes in "\u{0}\u{0}" [2022-04-24T12:56:32Z*ERROR* mp4parse] Found 2 nul bytes in "\u{0}\u{0}" [2022-04-24T12:56:33Z*ERROR* mp4parse] Found 2 nul bytes in "\u{0}\u{0}" Despite the error the video plays OK. Every time I choose a different video I get the same four lines though with different (time/ID?) numbers before 'ERROR'. Does anyone understand this? And is it likely to have anything to do with the performance issues? -- Phil Thane www.pthane.co.uk Tweet @pthane 01767 449759 07582 750607

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Disk half full, but full anyway
by Mark Rogers 21 Apr '22

21 Apr '22

Can anyone explain this? $ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda Disk /dev/sda: 50 GiB, 53687091200 bytes, 104857600 sectors Disk model: VBOX HARDDISK Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disklabel type: gpt Disk identifier: E225721B-FB64-4D48-B133-6758468EF9F6 Device Start End Sectors Size Type /dev/sda1 2048 4095 2048 1M BIOS boot /dev/sda2 4096 3149823 3145728 1.5G Linux filesystem /dev/sda3 3149824 104855551 101705728 48.5G Linux filesystem $ df -h . Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv 24G 23G 13M 100% / The scenario is that this is a new VirtualBox VM with Ubuntu 20.04.4 installed. It has a single 50GB disk as shown in VirtualBox and fdisk, but having copied 23GB to it from elsewhere (using rsync) the disk is now full. What am I missing and how do I get my disk space back? -- 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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Email hosting
by Mark Rogers 18 Apr '22

18 Apr '22

A bit over a decade ago, I took advantage of Google's free G-Suite, back when it allowed 50 users. I did this both for work (the domain I'm sending this from) and separately for personal use. As a consequence of there being 50 free users I set up several mailboxes for various purposes. Now that the free service is being migrated to a per-user pricing model I need to change to something else. For work I'll just accept that we've had a good run and pay the subscription charges (albeit we'll likely ditch a few of the users). But for my personal domain - where I am the only user - I want to switch. I don't need the other collaborative tools (I have a few Google docs/sheets but can migrate them to my work email). But having had it easy for a decade I've lost track of what my options are. Google has of-course spoiled me with very good anti-spam and I'm reluctant to go down the self-hosted route for that reason although that's not to say it's completely out of the question. (I'm happy running up a hosted VM but wouldn't have a clue what software to use these days, or how to administer it and keep it secure. But I could learn if it was the right approach.) What do people here use? (Client-wise I currently use the GMail site - I found it convenient to do that rather so I had a familiar user interface on any PC I might use to check my email. Before GMail I used TBird but that's a long time ago now.) -- 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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Firefox resources?
by Phil Thane 18 Apr '22

18 Apr '22

Hi, My desktop isn't state of the art but it's a quad core AMD64 so not too bad. It is by current standards short of RAM (2x2GB) but until recently has performed OK. Now it goes very slow after a little while on Firefox, especially if I play YouTube video. Last night I tried Ghostery (fork of Firefox with ghostery plug-in built-in plus some other security stuff) and it seemed better. So today I played the same vid in both at the same time and ran ps ux to see what was happening. Firefox phil 7854 46.2 8.5 3554956 345568 ? Sl 10:30 1:14 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox phil 7905 0.0 0.7 212184 28524 ? Sl 10:30 0:00 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin -contentproc -parentBuildI phil 7934 1.4 2.2 2476728 93236 ? Sl 10:30 0:02 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin -contentproc -childID 1 -i phil 7982 18.4 7.1 15488220 288656 ? Sl 10:30 0:27 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin -contentproc -childID 2 -i phil 8037 30.0 8.9 3006520 364668 ? Sl 10:30 0:43 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin -contentproc -childID 3 -i phil 8077 0.0 1.2 2403824 51920 ? Sl 10:30 0:00 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin -contentproc -childID 5 -i phil 8218 0.1 1.2 2396472 51924 ? Sl 10:30 0:00 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin -contentproc -childID 6 -i phil 8234 12.1 1.4 363900 58176 ? Sl 10:30 0:14 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin -contentproc -parentBuildI phil 8265 0.0 1.2 2396476 50232 ? Sl 10:30 0:00 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin -contentproc -childID 7 -i Ghostery phil 5849 0.0 7.6 9023124 311408 ? Sl Apr17 0:28 /home/phil/Downloads/Ghostery/Ghostery -contentproc -ch phil 5923 0.6 11.9 3019332 486688 ? Sl Apr17 5:42 /home/phil/Downloads/Ghostery/Ghostery -contentproc -ch phil 6076 0.0 0.6 2383328 24704 ? Sl Apr17 0:00 /home/phil/Downloads/Ghostery/Ghostery -contentproc -ch phil 6121 0.0 0.6 2383332 24596 ? Sl Apr17 0:00 /home/phil/Downloads/Ghostery/Ghostery -contentproc -ch phil 6146 0.3 1.1 264824 47156 ? Sl Apr17 3:27 /home/phil/Downloads/Ghostery/Ghostery -contentproc -pa phil 6184 0.0 0.6 2383328 24496 ? Sl Apr17 0:00 /home/phil/Downloads/Ghostery/Ghostery -contentproc -ch If you're not familiar the 3rd col shows % of CPU being used and the 4th is % of RAM. As you can see FF opens a lot more processes and three of them are serious resource hogs. Anyone else found this? Guess I'll just use ghostery all the time though it doesn't have all the FF plugins I use. But maybe that's the issue? -- Phil Thane www.pthane.co.uk Tweet @pthane 01767 449759 07582 750607

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Thunderbird annoyance
by Bev Nicolson 08 Apr '22

08 Apr '22

I subscribed to a mailing list and was getting emails from the company in my inbox. Now, however, despite having the address in my contacts list, and despite not having any kind of filter on their address, all their emails go straight to the deleted folder for spam. What can I do about this? (I cannot tag them 'not spam', btw. They won't move. My only option at the moment appears to be forwarding the email to another address. It's a bit irritating.) Bev

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Libre Office Calc
by Phil Thane 01 Apr '22

01 Apr '22

Database nerds look away now. I have two loads of data in .ods or .cvs. Basically two versions of a membership list, one with >500 rows, the other >700. I want a list of approx 200 who are on the big list but not the smaller. 'Compare' in LO just gives me a list of thousands of cells that are different, that's no help. Can anyone help? Lots on t'internet about merging and tracking changes but nothing about my case I can find. -- Phil Thane www.pthane.co.uk Tweet @pthane 01767 449759 07582 750607

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Re: Libre Office Calc
by cl＠isbd.net 29 Mar '22

29 Mar '22

On Tue, Mar 29, 2022 at 03:15:20PM +0100, Phil Thane wrote: > On 29/03/2022 14:42, Chris Green wrote: > > Can you export them (via CVS) to two tables in a database, it would > > then be trivial to get the answer you want. > > You're absolutely right of course but then I'd have to spend hundreds of > hours learning how to use a database. About 30 years ago I used Access. > Later the LO equivalent 'Base' but that was probably nearly 20 years ago. > Since then not needed anything. Not worth the time for a one off. Thanks > anyway. > It's a trivial bit of SQL to do what you want once the two sets of data are inthe database. No need to learn a lot, just use the command line sqlite3, nothing as complex as Access or anything like that. In this case, IMHO, a GUI just adds complication. -- Chris Green

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OT: DNS propagation delays
by Mark Rogers 16 Mar '22

16 Mar '22

I figured someone here might be able to explain this to me better than the ISP (or tell me they're wrong). A lot of domain registrars provide DNS hosting, but often only after the domain has transferred, and only after the DNS is set to use their servers. This means there is a delay between (a) switching to the new DNS and (b) adding the host records to it, resulting in potential downtime for anything that relies on the DNS. My question: If the time between (a) and (b) can be reduced to almost zero (such as by making both changes in a single hit via an API), I assumed that there'd (almost certainly) never be an incorrect DNS response given and therefore no propagation delays should apply. However the company in question told me that there would still be a propagation delay but disappeared from the chat when I asked where. Am I missing something, and if so what? -- 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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Manually creating "thunmbnails"
by Mark Rogers 16 Mar '22

16 Mar '22

I have 100+ images. From each I need to create what might best be described as a thumbnail, but manually rather than automated. I need to manually choose which part of the image is used. What I need "automated" is ensuring the correct aspect ratio. GIMP allows me to set the aspect ratio for the selection, which works well. But from there I still need to "crop to selection", "export as", enter a filename, and set export properties. Which makes it quite cumbersome when I have so many to work through. Any suggestions for a better tool, or way to automate the rest of the process in GIMP? My ideal workflow would be: - Open image "xxx.png" (or "xxx.jpg" etc) (with no additional prompts for how to perform the import) - Manually select the area I want to use as the thumbnail - Hit a key to save just that selection as (eg) "xxx.thumb.png", or "xxx.png" to a "thumbs" directory. As few additional steps as possible so that the focus is on the selection of area, not the process. Note that It's likely I'll want the output format to be png regardless of input format (or maybe jpeg, not yet decided - but it'll be a global choice not determined by the input format. That said I can post-process using imagemagick "convert" if I have to. Thoughts? -- 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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Zentyal as a domain controller.
by B D 14 Mar '22

14 Mar '22

Hi all, Just wanted to ask if anyone here is using Zentyal. I have a number of vlans on cisco L3 switches, two independent domains and fortinet firewall to make all more complicated. I'm having problems with gateways and multipaths in Zentyal. I'm guessing this will be better suited for Zentyal forum, but maybe some of you had/have experience with Zentyal. Cheers! Bart

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Thunderbird 91 will not open pdf's in preview
by Bev Nicolson 08 Mar '22

08 Mar '22

That's it really. I wasn't sure about the change for a time but I'd quite like it to revert now. But even though I've made sure the settings ask it to, it will not open pdf's in preview any more but in Firefox. Has anyone found a solution yet? Googling has got me nowhere. Bev (Linux Mint 19.)

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Part time sysadmin or business infrastructure consultant
by Jenny Hopkins 07 Mar '22

07 Mar '22

Morning, As some of you know, I've maintained a mainly internal business set-up for a local client, including the maintenance of currently two debian servers (one hosted at bytemark), 2 ubuntu desktops, wifi access points, data backups, and just generally helping the client get what he needs from his desktop. I'm now a very hand-on granny of two, and find I just don't have the time nor inclination to do the job, however I'm unwilling to leave the client in the lurch. I wondered if anyone on-list knows of anyone who would take over this set-up, which could consist of either five minutes a week, or several hours if something goes wrong? Failing this my techy brother tells me that they way the IT is run is very last century, and that nobody runs their own mail server internally any more or upgrades from the command line etc etc. Does anyone know of a consultant who might advise on how to get the company IT zooming into 2022? Many thanks, Jenny

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ntpclient
by Mark Rogers 03 Mar '22

03 Mar '22

I think this might be more about my expectation than anything else but I am struggling to get ntpclient to work (on an openwrt-based box). It is configured to update every 600s but my clock is drifting by about 2s/day so there's clearly no corrections taking place every 10 minutes, and if left for a week it just continues to accumulate so I don't think it's doing anything at all. But I don't really know what to expect. I'm measuring the drift using ntpclient -c 1 -h 0.openwrt.pool.ntp.org .. so I know it has access to the NTP servers if it chooses to use them, Any suggestions? When I google I find details on setting things like freq for far greater accuracy than I care about (a second or two out is fine by me as long as it isn't accumulating). I'd rather not move away from ntpclient as that's what's baked into the openwrt firmware I'm using and I'm trying to avoid making unnecessary changes, but I just can't get this to work. (I'm sure ntpclient -s in crontab would fix it but surely that isn't supposed to be necessary?) -- 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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OpenVPN with IPv6 only clients
by Mark Rogers 17 Feb '22

17 Feb '22

Just playing with ideas really but I would like to try setting up a VPN, accessed over IPv4, but where everything within it is IPv6. There's a few reasons, but they're mostly that I don't know enough IPv6 so it would force me to get to grips with it when working within the VPN. (My objective is to host a VPN to which devices (typically things like Raspberry Pi's) and "users" connect, with users having access to the devices but devices not having access to each other or anything else. No doubt this might change in future to require that some devices can access specific other services but they'd always be tied down.) Does this sound plausible? As an OpenVPN novice, is this something I should park until I know OpenVPN better? -- 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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