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Pubmeet report
by Steve Engledow 25 Jul '12

25 Jul '12

Hi all, It's been a while since a pubmeet had a write-up but I thought it was worth a go :) On a suggestion from rlp10, last night ended up being somewhat of a PGP key-signing party. All of us around the table (there were 6 of us) - plus one passer-by that I happened to know - had PGP (or rather GPG) keys so, over the course of the night, we managed to each sign eachothers keys. There was even provision of ID and encrypted emails sent to verify identity and key ownership. A fairly textbook key-signing I'd say. Additionally, we collectively managed to get a sensible mutt config together for getting GPG integrated and working. For reference, the magical invocation to make mutt understand encrypted/signed mail from Macs and Thunderbird is: message-hook '!(~g|~G)~b"^-----BEGIN\ PGP\ (SIGNED\ )?MESSAGE"' "exec check-traditional-pgp" Stick that in your .muttrc and it all works nicely. (You need a `source /path/to/muttrc.gpg`) line in there somewhere too. The path varies by distro.) Aside from the PGP-related fun, katsmeat had brought an interesting old PC that had a built-in LCD display and ran Microsoft BASIC (I don't remember what the machine actually was) and I offloaded a load of old hardware onto rlp10 \o/ The food didn't seem as good as usual. The beer did. Until next month! Steve (Stilvoid)

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SyncNorwich
by Paul Grenyer 25 Jul '12

25 Jul '12

Hi All I just wanted to make sure you guys were all aware of www.syncnorwich.com, a new group for people in Norwich interested in Technology, Startups and Agile. Out next event is some lightning talks on the 16th August and there's a Norwich lunch on the 23rd August. -- Thanks Paul Paul Grenyer e: paul.grenyer(a)gmail.com b: paulgrenyer.blogspot.com t: pjgrenyer SyncNorwich: http://www.syncnorwich.com ACCU Member: License to code: http://www.accu.org

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kernel:journal commit I/O error
by Mark Rogers 19 Jul '12

19 Jul '12

I have an ARM box which was working fine until it went to site. It's running Debian and I only have access to it via SSH (although at the moment I have someone on site who can force it to reboot). Twice today I've received the error "kernel:journal commit I/O error" to my SSH terminal, after which point the root filesystem gets unmounted and I can't do anything even though the unit is still "up". Eg: $ ls -bash: /bin/ls: No such file or directory Any ideas what would be causing this? It's an expensive SD card in these units (not a cheap no-brand) This is the unit in case anyone is interested, it's running Debian 6: http://www.newit.co.uk/shop/proddetail.php?prod=DreamPlug_N I'd also be interested to know if there's anything I can do down an SSH connection to force it to reboot, given the lack of access to the filesystem to even run "sudo" never mind "reboot". I'm guessing that sending Alt-Ctrl-Del or Alt-SysRq-B via SSH are out... -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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linux apparel
by Peter Alcibiades 18 Jul '12

18 Jul '12

Hi everyone, I have three huge, I mean xxxl, linux apparel t-shirts looking for a good home. One looks like its been worn a couple of times since the brilliance of the yellow has faded slightly, the other two I don't think have been. Does anyone want them? They are fairly brilliant yellow, with a large black and white plastic penguin on the front, and on the back there is a black and white legend to the effect that this garment requires appreciation of open source freedom. Several years old. Maybe 10? Should have brought them to last Thusday, but I have not come to those for some time now. I can mail them if you let me have an address. Otherwise, its going to be the charity shop. Peter

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torcl
by richard.lee.parsons＠gmail.com 14 Jul '12

14 Jul '12

Hi all After some conversations with some Aluggers, I've thrown together a bash script for downloading torrents from the commandline. It searches isohunt, downloads your selected torrent file and kicks off the torrent client all from the warmth and safety of your favourite terminal. Perhaps it may be useful to some others on the list. https://github.com/rlp10/torcl It's pretty ugly scripting, so please forgive that. :) Richard

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Calendar GUI that has hooks for entering code when you click on a date
by Chris Green 14 Jul '12

14 Jul '12

I'm looking for a basic calendar display program that has a hook to allow me to execute a script (or other code) when I click on a date. Can anyone suggest anything like this? It can be desktop or Web. -- Chris Green

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[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : The Mulberry Tree
by samwise 13 Jul '12

13 Jul '12

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 this week - Monday, 16th July, at 20:00: The Mulberry Tree 5 Woodbridge Road IPSWICH IP4 2EA Tel: 01473 225776 Email: mulberrytree.ips(a)btinternet.com 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. After a stupidly quiet meet last time, let's see if we can drag a few more people down this month. I'll be there, and we may also have a couple of guests including, possibly, a friendly chap a few of us ALUGers met recently in the pub, who has a fair share of career stories involving the likes of Chris Curry, Clive Sinclair etc. and is currently involved in a project building unmanned aerial drones. Plus someone else may arrive armed with a MacBook who is looking to be persuaded why he should try out Linux ... Hope to see some of you there! 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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Strange code in DNS packet unravelling - any ideas why anyone?
by Chris Green 12 Jul '12

12 Jul '12

This is again related to my Nanode (Arduino lookalike) programming, it's more of a "why on earth is it like this" sort of question than needing to know how it works. The Nanode/Arduino sits waiting for things to do which are sent as requests to its ethernet interface. It also handles DHCP, DNS, ARP and other requests in the same loop. When it gets a DNS request it checks a few things and then does the following:- // // // Check if we have a valid query for us, compare name in DNS request with our name // p=(uint8_t *)settings.Name; // set pointer to our name stored at startup if (valid) // valid set by earlier checks { for (i = NBNS_NAME+1; i < NBNS_NAME+1+32; i += 2) { c = ((buf[i] - 0x41) << 4) + (buf[i+1] - 0x41); if (*p) { if (*p!=c) { valid=0; } p++; } else { if ((c != 0) && (c != 0x20)) { valid=0; } } } } The comment at the top is mine, I *think* that's what it's doing! However I really don't understand why it's doing that strange shifting and subtracting 0x41 (yes, I know it's 'A'). It's as if the name coming in with the DNS query is two bytes per character with a strange encoding as well. I can't see anywhere else in the code where characters are spread over two bytes, and the SPI interface seems to transfer 8 bit bytes all the time to/from the ethernet hardware. I also don't understand why it's comparing only 16 characters (is it just an arbitrary local limit) and/or why the name it's receiving in the DNS request is just the hostname, not a fully qualified name. It doesn't work for lower-case characters either, the name defined for the Nanode/Arduino has to be upper case for it to respond to DNS requests. If valid is still non-zero after this it sends its IP address back to the DNS requester. Have I missed something obvious or is this really wierd? Any/all ideas very welcome. -- Chris Green

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deb/alien dependencies
by Mark Rogers 11 Jul '12

11 Jul '12

I'm trying to install hamachi [1] on Debian (arm). I want the smallest install I can get away with, but at the moment I'm getting the following dependencies: alien at autopoint bc binutils build-essential bzip2 cpp cpp-4.4 cups-bsd cups-client cups-common debhelper dpkg-dev fakeroot g++ g++-4.4 gcc gcc-4.4 gettext gettext-base git html2text intltool-debian libalgorithm-diff-perl libalgorithm-diff-xs-perl libalgorithm-merge-perl libc-dev-bin libc6-dev libcurl3-gnutls libdpkg-perl libelf1 liberror-perl libgmp3c2 liblua5.1-0 libmail-sendmail-perl libmpfr4 libnspr4-0d libnss3-1d librpm1 librpmbuild1 librpmio1 libstdc++6-4.4-dev libsys-hostname-long-perl libtimedate-perl libunistring0 linux-libc-dev lsb-core lsb-release m4 make manpages-dev ncurses-term patch pax po-debconf rpm rpm-common rpm2cpio time It installs and runs OK but I don't want all that stuff on my box afterwards! Seeing alien in the list makes me conclude that this is a repackaged rpm and maybe that's what's causing the problem. However if I try to "apt-get remove alien" afterwards, hamachi gets removed. What are my options to work around this? Unfortunately Hamachi is not free and therefore I don't have access to the source. [1] https://secure.logmein.com/labs/ -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Capturing Olympic torch relay footage from BBC website
by Mark Rogers 09 Jul '12

09 Jul '12

Does anyone have any idea how to capture the torch relay footage from the BBC website? I expected get-iplayer to do the job but it can't find the stream if I just paste the URL in. Specific example: http://www.bbc.co.uk/torchrelay/day46 (Afternoon section) Mark Rogers

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FTP server mirroring (push not pull)
by Mark Rogers 06 Jul '12

06 Jul '12

I have a system which uploads data to my FTP server periodically. I need to upload any files that arrive to a second (and possibly third) FTP server. The points that make it not fit a traditional mirroring is that (a) my FTP server needs to push the files out to the other server(s) rather than have them pull the files in, and (b) the data needs to be synchronised as fast as possible after it arrives (the files are alarm logs amongst other things). So an hourly or daily cronjob won't suffice. Although I have control over my own FTP server, I can't make any assumptions about the third party servers in terms of their O/S, functionality, FTP server software, etc. Any suggestions for the best place to start with this? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Barclays Online Banking
by Ted.Harding＠wlandres.net 05 Jul '12

05 Jul '12

Greetings all! Anyone out there who banks with Barclays and is having problems accessing Online Banking with Linux? I last logged in 6 days ago with no problems. Today, when I try to access it, no login page comes up -- it just hangs forever. So I can't even try to get started! I'm using (an admittedly slightly elderly) Iceweasel 2.0.0.19 of 2006 on a Debian Etch 2.6.18 last updated Feb 2010. Any suggestions most welcome! Best wishes to all, Ted. ------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)wlandres.net> Date: 12-Jun-2012 Time: 19:00:45 This message was sent by XFMail -------------------------------------------------

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Storing data samples with low overheads
by Mark Rogers 04 Jul '12

04 Jul '12

I'm writing an application to run on small ARM units. It collects data from various sources at varying frequencies (up to once per second) and needs to store them. The number of discrete values will vary but we're running tests on around 200 data points dropping the data into MySQL. By "varying frequencies" what I mean is that some items will be read every second, others less frequently (say once every 30mins), so I need a data structure that will cope with that but my tests are currently on the worst-case of storing everything every second (or trying to!) One option is to have a table per item, comprising little more than timestamp and value. Our tests so far have taken 2-5s to store 200 samples this way. We're looking at other ways (eg one table for all samples, storing an item id, timestamp and value). However I can't help think that MySQL is overkill and an overhead we could do without. So, does anyone have any suggestions? We could build our own data storage system - the applications I've seen before that do this would probably have a single binary file per day/week/month of data for any single item, storing a single timestamp (marking the start of the file) and sample period, followed by 4 bytes per sample at the appropriate offset into the file from there; reading or writing just becomes a case of working out which file to look at and the offset into that file. But I'd rather not go quite so low-level if I can avoid it. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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[ALUG Announce] ALUG Norwich Pub Meet Thursday 12th July
by Viperfang 04 Jul '12

04 Jul '12

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- Hello Norwich Aluggers, Our monthly ALUG Norwich social meeting will be held this Thursday, 12th July at The Coach and Horses (82 Thorpe Road, Norwich, NR1 1BA). The meeting officially starts at 8pm, although some people may arrive earlier. More information on those people can be found on the list and the IRC channel. If you are unsure if you will recognise us then make yourself and your intent to attend known by either posting on list or visiting us on IRC so we can look out for you rather than hiding in the corner. Optionally you could ask at the bar if they know where the geeky computer weirdos are and they'll point you in the right direction (seriously!). Another possibility is look for heaps of electronics on a table that may possibly look like movie props that would used for detonating explosives. Feel free to bring electronics/laptops/gadgets to the meet, you will by no means be alone. Ben Bewick aka Viperfang NB: This mail is automated, please refer to the usual sources for more information. ALUG Contact Details: Website : http://www.alug.org.uk/ IRC : #alug on irc.alug.org.uk List : http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo Twitter : http://twitter.com/anglianlug Identica: TBA Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2381613902 ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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2600 meeting at 18:00 on Friday the 6th July.
by Viperfang 03 Jul '12

03 Jul '12

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

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Lenovo T520
by Paul Grenyer 02 Jul '12

02 Jul '12

Hi All I'm still having lots of wifi and 3G card related problems with my Lenovo T520 and Linux Mint 13 (I though it was 12, it was 13). Does anyone have a similar machine (or even the same machine) that they're successfully working with? Maybe I could pick your brains at one of the pub meets? -- Thanks Paul Paul Grenyer e: paul.grenyer(a)gmail.com b: paulgrenyer.blogspot.com t: pjgrenyer ACCU Member: License to code. (http://www.accu.org)

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2600 meeting at 18:00 on Friday the 1st June.
by Viperfang 29 Jun '12

29 Jun '12

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

1 0

Open source alternative to full fat Adobe?
by Bev Nicolson 26 Jun '12

26 Jun '12

Evince is great for what it does, imo, but you can't extract pages with it. Does anyone round here know of a good alternative to the full-fat, all singing all dancing but not very cheap Adobe? Does such a thing exist? Bev.

7 9

SOund unavailable on Flash Player
by Ted.Harding＠wlandres.net 24 Jun '12

24 Jun '12

Greetings All! Just now, wanting to play a YouTube video, I found that the sound on Flash Player is turned off, and I can find no way to turn it on again. The "speaker" icon in the bottom bar as an "X" beside it, indicating that it is turned off, and I can find no way to turn it back on again (e.g. clicking on the icon, or on the "X", produces not response; and looking into Settings after right-clicking on the Flash Player screen offers no help). However, everything was fine a few days ago, and I'm not aware of having done anything which might cause this problem. Also, the YouTube video is indeed the same one which I had watched a fews days ago with no problem. Can anyone offer any help with this problem? Adobe Flash Player 10 Iceweasel 3.0.6 (2009) Debian Lenny 2.6.26 ------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)wlandres.net> Date: 24-Jun-2012 Time: 12:23:35 This message was sent by XFMail -------------------------------------------------

1 1

Wierd hang(s) when using grep
by Chris Green 20 Jun '12

20 Jun '12

Over the past few months I've noticed that when I run grep it sometimes appears to hang, I had put it down to doing "grep -r" down a rather large file hierarchy but now it's happening with a perfectly simple grep:- www-data$ ls *.txt sidebar.txt start.txt www-data$ grep xxx *.txt www-data$ grep fred *.txt www-data$ grep 'CLEARFLOAT' *.txt ... and there it sits, still (like 5 minutes later). The two .txt files are only a few tens of bytes long. It's not using any processor time, it's just stuck. I have just done it again in another terminal window, quotes removed but otherwise the same:- www-data$ grep fred *.txt www-data$ grep CLEARFLOAT *.txt ^C www-data$ ... and with a different user (in the same directory):- chris$ cd /home/www-data/www/wiki/data/pages chris$ grep fred *.txt chris$ grep CLEARFLOAT *.txt ^C chris$ So, what am I missing? -- Chris Green

5 11

Getting MAC address in a shell script
by Mark Rogers 20 Jun '12

20 Jun '12

This works: mac=$(ifconfig eth0 | grep -Eo '..:..:..:..:..:..' | sed -e 's/://g') .. but I'm sure there's a better way. Suggestions? Also, if I have something like: echotemplate="This is my MAC: (MAC)" mac=$(ifconfig eth0 | grep -Eo '..:..:..:..:..:..' | sed -e 's/://g') echo $(echo $echotemplate | sed -e "s/(MAC)/$mac/") .. is there a better way to do the substitution in the last line? I can't swap the top two lines around (one is a user-defined setting at the top of the script, the value of $mac is calculated in the body of the script), otherwise I would just use echo "This is my MAC: $mac" .. which would be nice and easy! But I'm using this as a learning exercise. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

5 9

Getting round lack of suid on scripts (not to become root!)
by Chris Green 20 Jun '12

20 Jun '12

Is there any way to run a script such that it executes as another user than the person running it? Normally (well, old-fashionedly) one would have set the SUID bit in the permissions, made the script owned by the desired user and that would be it but nowadays it no longer works because SUID on scripts is disabled. Is there any reasonably simple way to work round this? All I have found searching so far is to write a short C program to do the SUID change and use that to execute the script. I could do this I suppose but I'd really prefer an easier way to do it as the C program method needs to know both the desired UID and the name of the program to run so, while hardly complex, it will need command line parameters etc. -- Chris Green

2 3

Does anyone here know how gmail works?
by Chris Green 19 Jun '12

19 Jun '12

I am trying to sort out moving someone else's hosting. The web hosting has transferred fine along with the domain hosting but I'm a bit stuck with their E-Mail. I have their name/password for logging on to gmail but when I try and change things it just says:- Manage account information Google can't change personal information for jane(a)reshapers.org. To change the information, contact your reshapers.org administrator. Learn more ... er, but the reshapers.org administrator is now me and I haven't any idea how the E-Mail *was* getting to gmail from the old hosting account. Presumably there was some cleverness with MX settings or something but it seems a wierd way of doing things. Is there some sort of 'hidden' gmail address that a user has on gmail that I can forward mail to from the new hosting site? -- Chris Green

3 4

svn file "sets"
by Mark Rogers 18 Jun '12

18 Jun '12

I have a library of code already in svn. I want to create subsets of it that I can either export or checkout, so that I only download the files needed for a specific job. I know about (by reading[1], not doing) sparse checkouts, eg: cd C:\path\dir svn checkout https://server/path/to/trunk/dir/dir/parent_dir--depth empty cd C:\path\dir\parent_dir svn update filename.log (Edit filename.log) svn commit -m "this is a comment." (Copy and paste from an example, hence the Windows-esque paths, although I'm only working on Linux myself.) This will do what I need, except that I'm looking for a simple way to replace "filename.log" in the example above with a name for a set of files. Depending on what I'm trying to do, I might want to export that set of files rather than do a checkout. [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/122107/checkout-one-file-from-subversion -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : The Mulberry Tree
by samwise 17 Jun '12

17 Jun '12

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 this week - Monday, 18th June, 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. Hopefully, those there last month will remember that we've reverted our regular venue to be The Mulberry Tree, which was our home a few years back, after a successful trial at May's meet. Unfortunately, I may not be able to make it this month as I have a work evening do that I'll struggle to get out of. If I can make it, I'll arrive later on in the evening. A shame as I finally have a new gadget to show off! :) 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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