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anonymous proxy servers
by Peter Alcibiades 08 Sep '10

08 Sep '10

What does anyone use and or reccommend for an anonymous proxy server? I have come on anonymizer.com and also anonymouse.com. Are these decent? Are there any others to think about? Any that are better? Peter

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IMAP Mail Hosting
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 08 Sep '10

08 Sep '10

Hi Folks, Since it appears that Manchester University has taken a decision that its retired folk shall now be obsolete, email-wise, it is very likely that my current email account will be de-activated soon (I'm already using it on borrowed time). So I shall be looking for a new email address. I'm very happy (in terms of general quality of service) with my ISP (Zen) and would not want to change. However, Zen's email only offers POP3 download and does not offer IMAP access. The webmail interface is clunky and slow, so preliminary sampling and deletion of delivered emails would be very tedious. On the other hand, previewing using IMAP (when it works properly) is very fast. I'm therefore asking if poeple can recommend a provider of email hosting on which I could have an account with IMAP access. I would want this to be of high quality and reliability and capable of handling high levels of incoming traffic (for various reasons, I can get up to 500 emails a day -- most of which I delete on the basis of the Subject alone, some others after a quick look at content, leaving typically some 5-10% to download; so I need to be able to do this quickly). Recommendations? With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 04-Sep-10 Time: 18:41:52 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Merging the changes between directories
by Mark Rogers 07 Sep '10

07 Sep '10

Suppose I have: DirectoryA - contains a PHP web application, unchanged, exactly as downloaded DirectoryA2 - contains a customised version of DirectoryA DirectoryB - contains a new version of the PHP web application I want to merge the changes that represent DirectoryA -> DirectoryA2, into DirectoryB to create DirectoryB2. This seems to me the sort of thing that diff can do in its sleep but my past attempts have failed. It also probably points at some kind of version control solution, although there is no version control in place at the moment (if this is a good time to implement it then I'm all ears!) I don't expect this to be completely automated, but I believe and expect that using the right tools I can substantially improve the job from the starting point of comparing individual files manually. I have so far got as far as diff --brief -r DirectoryA DirectoryA2 [If specifics help, DirectoryA is version 1.3.8a of ZenCart, DirectoryB is version 1.3.9f of ZenCart, and DirectoryA1 is a site built on version 1.3.8a of ZenCart, but with obvious changes (changes to stylesheets, new images, new plugins, etc). From a practical point of view, DirectoryA2 is mostly a superset of DirectoryA (new product images, plugins, templates, etc) but there are customisations (usually fairly trivial ones) to core files, and there will be a number of files from DirectoryA that were deleted (installation files, docs, etc). There would also be some file and directory permission changes.] -- 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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Remote access challenge
by Mark Rogers 07 Sep '10

07 Sep '10

I have a file open on my desktop PC at home, which I want to read now I'm at work. It's just some notes I started writing in a new document in gedit, it's not been saved (I don't think, anyway). I have SSH and NX access to my home desktop. If I connect with NX I get access to my home desktop GUI but not to the session I have currently open with the document in it. Suggestions? -- 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] Remote access challenge
by Steve Engledow 07 Sep '10

07 Sep '10

On 7 September 2010 10:17, Ted Harding <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> wrote: > On 07-Sep-10 08:53:26, Simon Ransome wrote: >> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- >> Hash: SHA1 >> >> On 07/09/2010 09:22, Mark Rogers wrote: >>> I have a file open on my desktop PC at home, which I want to read >>> now I'm at work. >>> >>> It's just some notes I started writing in a new document in gedit, >>> it's not been saved (I don't think, anyway). >>> >>> I have SSH and NX access to my home desktop. If I connect with NX >>> I get access to my home desktop GUI but not to the session I have >>> currently open with the document in it. Possibly overkill but you could ssh in, install x11vnc (which is a vnc server that provides vnc access to a running X session), run it and then vnc into your machine - tunnelling through ssh for security of course :) Cheers, Steve

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Malicious Javascript
by Dan 07 Sep '10

07 Sep '10

Dear All, Browsing with Namoroka 3.6.8 on Gentoo, I just stumbled across a webpage containing Javascript that was probably trying to install malicious code on my system. The script - claimed (implausibly) to be a malware scanner, and (even more implausibly, because the places it claimed to have looked were Windows-specific directory names that don't exist on my system) that it had found half a dozen items of malware on my system; - generally made a nuisance of itself by grabbing focus with dialogue boxes (this seemed odd - my browser settings forbid Javascript to raise or lower windows, yet my main browser window was, to all intents and purposes, irreversibly lowered by the presence of the dialogue boxes, and the only browser actions possible were to click on dialogue box buttons or do a window-manager close on the dialogue box) - did a passable impersonation of Windows Update (or at least, it would have been passable if the system I was looking at it with had been running Windows ;-)); and - finished up by offering me a download of an executable Windows binary, which I rejected. I took a look at the Javascript source code, but it was _very_ obfuscated. My question is - could the script have got any sort of access to my local filesystems or otherwise done any damage? -- Thanks, Dan

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Copy files and change case - any ready made utliities around?
by Chris G 06 Sep '10

06 Sep '10

I want to keep two directories in sync but with a slight difference, I want the 'destination' directory to have lower case names only. I.e. any file in the source directory that has an upper case name (or any upper case characters in its name) I want copied to the destination directory with a lower case name. I guess I can come up with solutions that need me to write a wrapper script of some sort for rsync but I was wondering if anyone has any ideas for a ready made solution. This needs to be run as a cron job by the way. -- Chris Green

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NAS Drive mounting help
by steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk 05 Sep '10

05 Sep '10

Hi Gurus! I've been given a Netgear SC101 which I'm intending to use for backups. I found a post somewhere about how to mount it, and I have mounted it, or at least I thought I had until I rebooted and it was no-longer mounted. The steps I have to take are: sudo modprobe nbd sudo ut listall sudo ut attach {DRIVE_ID_FROM_LISTALL} /dev/nbd0 sudo mount -t ext4 /mnt/sc101 /dev/nbd0 Line 1 adds a device driver to the kernel line 2 finds the drive's "id". You only need to run this once - the ID doesn't change line 3 "attaches" the drive to the system. line 4 mounts the block device at my chosen mount point. I've added a line to FSTab to take care of line 4, but the problem is, I seem to need to do line 1 and line 3 after a reboot before I can mount it. Q1: How can I make a modprobe "stick" to survive a reboot? Q2: Where should I execute line 3? Q3: Should I should manually mount there too, rather than using FSTab? I'm attempting to use BackupPC to backup my files. This runs as a service, and requires that drive to be running to start. Q4: Is there a way to conditionally start a service, dependant on whether the drive is present or not, or should I just let it attempt to auto-start and live with it failing if the drive's not there? Any help much appreciated! BTW, the reason I'm attempting to use BackupPC is because it "folds" identical files from multiple PCs into 1, i.e. it doesn't store multiple copies - i.e. it de-duplicates the backup, hopefully allowing me to backup multiple machines without buying loads of disks! Cheers Steve

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What keeps creating files called '%1'?
by Chris G 04 Sep '10

04 Sep '10

Something keeps creating a file called %1 on my system, has anyone else had this happening and, if so, do they know what's doing it? -- Chris Green

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BMJ and Firefox
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 03 Sep '10

03 Sep '10

Hi Folks, I've just had an interesting experience with the BMJ website: http://www.bmj.com With Firefox (Iceweasel) 2.0.0.19 all I see is the banner logo at the top of the page. The rest is pure blank, though this blank page is long. With an old IE, all is fine. I next tried Firefox (Iceweasel) 3.0.6 on another machine again all is fine. I've never had trouble with the BMJ before. On their front page they do state that "bmj.com has moved to a new technical platform" and that there are some problems; but that seems a bit unlikely as explanation for complete failure to display content on one browser version, yet display properly on another. Any comments? With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 03-Sep-10 Time: 14:13:02 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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program focus
by nev young 02 Sep '10

02 Sep '10

Hi all, One of the major annoyances I had with MS Windoze was the habit of programs to force themselves into the foreground. I would have some long running task running in the background, or will have started a "slow to fire up" program, meanwhile I continue working on "the task in hand" with the program in the foreground. When I looked at the screen I see the background task has popped up and forced itself into the foreground and the last half dozen sentences I had typed had been lost to it. I have noticed that this is also becoming more common with linux (unbutu 10.04) and was wondering if this behaviour is a part of the programs themselves or if there is a system wide setting that will stop it. That is, I want to be able to specify that the foreground task I am using does not lose focus unless I tell it to. Anybody out there have more in depth knowledge of this sort of thing? Nev

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Wanted - workaround for broken date entry on a web site - any ideas?
by Chris G 02 Sep '10

02 Sep '10

I'm trying to register my Mobistar internet dongle. Their web programmers are obviously a bunch of total idiots, especially on the usability front. Not to mention that they make the site ridiculously secure for no good reason, the only way you could lose information or money there is if you, by mistake, charged someone else's SIM. However that's all by the by, it would be really good if I could actually get our dongle registered to allow us to view our usage and to recharge it. When we tried a few weeks ago it was impossible because the Mobistar website wanted to send an SMS message to our browser and couldn't because we're not running IE on Windows. So we gave up. I just retried and now it allows me to say "I can't receive SMS" at which point it allows entry of the PUK instead. Whoopee I thought, now I can register. No such luck, I get past the first few entries of phone number and PUK but then in the personal information bit it wants to know my date of birth and the pull down boxes for the day, month and year don't work. No problem I thought, I'll do it in IE in Windows, just the same (well slightly different symptoms), can't enter date of birth. I've also tried Konqueror, still no good. Can anyone suggest any workarounds that might allow me to get a date into the right place? The symptom in Firefox is that the drop-down box is the size for just one number and is blank, the symptom in IE (and Konqueror if I remember right) is that the drop-down is quite tall but is still completely blank. I have tried entering numbers even though they don't appear and tabbing through the entries but it still refuses to think I've entered a valid date. -- Chris Green

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Windows domain interoperability
by Mark Rogers 31 Aug '10

31 Aug '10

My work desktop (Ubuntu 10.04) is in an office managed by an SBS 2008 install (as much as I hate it, I kinda like it being something that I can wash my hands of when there's a problem!) I'm looking at the extent to which I can "benefit" from the domain, as much as a learning exercise as anything else. At present I have a couple of CIFS shares mounted, and I get my IP via DHCP and my email from the server via POP3. I discovered www.likewise.com at the weekend. Does anyone have any experience of (the free open source version of) LikeWise? Are there better/different options? To be honest I'm not really sure what I would like to achieve that I don't already have, but like I said this is a learning exercise more than anything. -- 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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cheap laptop broken screen
by Richard 30 Aug '10

30 Aug '10

Please somebody put this to good use, a replacement LCD panel is about 50 quid. I think around 50 quid is enough to ask for it (or nearest offer). I wont be posting it though, I can bring it to meeting or you can come and get it. http://i.imgur.com/wDNej.jpg It's an Acer Aspire One A150 netbook. Atom 1.6GHz (N270), 1GB RAM, 150GB HDD. Charger and battery work perfectly. Cheers Richard -- Richard Bensley - 07540878285

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WiFi - what's the panel applet *supposed* to do?
by Chris G 27 Aug '10

27 Aug '10

Yet again I am totally confused trying to get a WiFi connection to work. The real problem is that I don't really understand what the Network panel applet is supposed to do for me. Is there any good HowTo or similar for this applet? The first question is what's it called? In order to try and find out anything about it by a Google search for example I need to know what I'm looking for. Ah, it does have an "About" entry, it's the NetworkManager applet, version 0.8. (Running on Xubuntu 10.04) Firstly what's *supposed* to happen when/if there's a wireless network available? Do I need to do anything or should something appear in the applet? If nothing appears and I know (hope?) there's a network about can I do anything to make things happen? I am sitting here at the moment (using a mobile phone dongle to send this) in a place where I know there's a wireless network available and I know what the key/password to us it is. My mobile phone quite happily tells me "WiFi network found" One computer here is totally silent about the presence of any Wifi, the other can see something but gives me little clue about how to connect to it. Am I supposed to Add a wireless connection, if so how do I find all the right values for:- SSID Mode BSSID (presume leave empty) MAC address (presume leave empty) MTU (presume 'automatic') Security (i.e. what sort is the 'norm', no one providing me with WiFi seems to be able to tell me) As I said there's very little help I can find for this, there are bit's and pieces of specific information for particular cases but I can't really find anything that tells me 'all about NetworkManager' (or at least the panel applet). A search for NetworkManager applet howto produces several little tutorials on bits and pieces but no proper overall help. -- Chris Green

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Mystery "su" by root
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 26 Aug '10

26 Aug '10

Good morning! I just (and I hardly ever do this ... ) had a look at /var/log/auth.log on a Debian Etch running in a VirtualBox VM. Almost all the entries are simply references to CRON, e.g. Aug 26 03:17:01 localhost CRON[26804]: (pam_unix) session opened for user root by (uid=0) Aug 26 03:17:01 localhost CRON[26804]: (pam_unix) session closed for user root However, there is a short sequence of root su-ing to "nobody": Aug 26 07:35:05 localhost su[30229]: Successful su for nobody by root Aug 26 07:35:05 localhost su[30229]: + ??? root:nobody Aug 26 07:35:05 localhost su[30229]: (pam_unix) session opened for user nobody by (uid=0) Aug 26 07:35:05 localhost su[30229]: (pam_unix) session closed for user nobody Aug 26 07:35:05 localhost su[30232]: Successful su for nobody by root Aug 26 07:35:05 localhost su[30232]: + ??? root:nobody Aug 26 07:35:05 localhost su[30232]: (pam_unix) session opened for user nobody by (uid=0) Aug 26 07:35:05 localhost su[30232]: (pam_unix) session closed for user nobody Aug 26 07:35:05 localhost su[30234]: Successful su for nobody by root Aug 26 07:35:05 localhost su[30234]: + ??? root:nobody Aug 26 07:35:05 localhost su[30234]: (pam_unix) session opened for user nobody by (uid=0) Aug 26 07:37:52 localhost su[30234]: (pam_unix) session closed for user nobody These are the only occurrences of such things in about 80 oepn.close entries over 24 hours (the others being like the CRON one above). Anyone know what "nobody" has to do with anything? With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 26-Aug-10 Time: 08:13:26 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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keystroke?
by Anthony Anson 26 Aug '10

26 Aug '10

I've been experimenting with the function keys and the odd letter, to no avail. Is there a keystroke for minimising a pane on the page of a GUI - in Gnome and in KDE? -- Tony Anson www.girolle.co.uk/

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Upgrade Ubuntu 8.10 -> 10.04 broke RAID config
by Mark Rogers 24 Aug '10

24 Aug '10

I have just upgraded an Ubuntu desktop 8.10 to 10.04 The drive configuration is a single drive with the O/S, and two pairs of disks on software RAID1. When I reboot the server, I get error messages on startup telling me that /dev/md0 and /dev/md1 are inaccessible; I have to skip mounting them in order to proceed. However, if I use Syetem -> Administration -> Disk Utility once I have logged in, I can see the drives and if I tear down the two RAID devices and bring them back up again they both come back healthy. The problem only seems to be bringing them online on startup. Any suggestions? -- 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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Newbie Meeting & Repo Question
by Steve 23 Aug '10

23 Aug '10

Thanks for the feedback and the invite to the meetings. I guess that much of the content of these emails is soo far above my head I assumed the meets would be the same. To clarify my question about repos, my understanding was that "mostly" linux is a core kernel that at some particular point is basically the same, some distros use the cutting edge version others stay back a bit. If there's broadly a common basis and one overcomes the packaging differences (why can't they all be the same?), and the dependencies work themselves out shouldn't the bits basically all work. Anyways I don't really need a further response re repos as I have got the message from you guys that its best not to mix it up, and I suppose that the mainstream packages will appear in all the main repositories. It comes from not wanting to miss out on stuff it's the same thing that leads me to try different distros, Peppermint currently. Anyways, I didn't really get what the stuff about SFD was, but as I live near Syleham that location would get my vote for a meeting. Cheers Steve Card

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Where (and how) are the default mouse actions set?
by Chris G 23 Aug '10

23 Aug '10

I'm trying to find out where the default mouse actions are defined. By that I mean what is it that says that when (for example) I double click the left button the word under the mouse pointer is selected. I know that the mapping of button physical numbers to logical numbers is done deep down in X by the function XSetPointerMapping and can be retrieved with XGetPointerMapping but this just sets up the mapping from the physical buttons such that, if one wants, one can make physical button 3 the 'Left' button and physical button 1 the 'Right' button (thus making the mouse 'left handed'). However the above mapping doesn't affect what actions occur when the (logical) buttons are clicked. So Left (logical 1) button always grabs things or selects text, Right (logical 3) tends to open menus and such. Is it really down to every individual application to map the button events to actions or is there a common library (gtk maybe) which defines default actions for button events? If it's gtk what/where should I look to find the relevant code? What I'm after doing is to change the mapping so that I can use a different button (button 9 in my case) to select text with a single click rather than a double-click of button 1. The normally recommended way of doing this (getting button 9 to emulate two clicks of button 1) has stopped working for me since an upgrade from ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 and anyway it strikes me as a clumsy way of doing things. There should surely be a mapping somewhere that links all the possible types of button click to actions:- click left - select click middle - paste text click right - .... CTRL + click left - soemthing else etc. ... or, as I said, is it really down to each individual program? -- Chris Green

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Any git users here - need beginner help
by Chris G 23 Aug '10

23 Aug '10

I want to use git to download a development version of some software. I have downloaded and installed git onto my system, so far so good! :-) However all the man pages tell me that I should read the "Git User's Manual" to see how to download something. However nowhere is there a clue as to what/where the "Git User's Manual" is. Can someone point me in the right direction please. -- Chris Green

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Easeus Partition Manager Home Edition
by Simon Royal 23 Aug '10

23 Aug '10

Hi IF you need a free non-destructive partition tool, check out Easeus Partition Manager Home Edition. http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm I have used it a number of time to resize Windows before installing Linux. I also just used it to remove Linux and resize Windows larger. Brilliant. Simon Royal --- Twitter: http://twitter.com/SimonRoyal - LowEndMac: http://tinyurl.com/macspectrum - Skype: Simon-Royal. --- IBM ThinkPad 240X running Linux Mint 9 LXDE & Windows XP Home - Apple iBook G3 running OSX 10.4.

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Moving from Xubuntu 9.10 to 10.04, sharpness seems to be worse
by Chris G 21 Aug '10

21 Aug '10

I have just upgraded my system from Xubuntu 9.10 to Xubuntu 10.04, it seems to me that the sharpness seems to have subtly deteriorated. I have checked some of the obvious things (like the screen resolution hasn't been changed). It was most immediately noticeable in my terminal windows but, on looking carefully, I think the effect is general, it's just that I use smaller font sizes in my terminals than elsewhere. Has anyone any ideas what I should maybe be checking to see what might have caused this? It could of course be that I'm getting older and my eyesight is failing! :-) -- Chris Green

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How do you set X resources for a remote client application?
by Chris G 20 Aug '10

20 Aug '10

I'm running a GUI editor (xvile) on a 'remote' (i.e. not my desktop) machine and I need to be able to set its X resources. For xvile run on the local machine it's easy, I just put them in .Xresources and when X starts up it automatically loads any resources it finds in .Xresources (and/or .Xdefaults). So how do I do the equivalent when xvile is running on a remote client? Do I have to install xrdb on the remote client and run it before running xvile? It somehow seems wrong as its the display machine (X server) which actually needs to set the resources, can't I somehow tell the local (server) machine to set resources for a remote client app.? -- Chris Green

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PHP tools
by Peter Alcibiades 19 Aug '10

19 Aug '10

A friend asked me what he should use to write PHP in. Never having done any of this stuff, I had no idea, except that maybe Geany or Kate would work. What do you guys use? Also, he is setting up Linux for the first time. I recommended Mandriva to him, as being more familiar than some of the alternatives. But if he wants to run his PHP, once he has written it, what does he need to install? I am guessing that Apache would work, but is there something simpler and lighter for him to get started on? Peter

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