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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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Nextcloud Pi
by Phil Thane 17 Feb '22

17 Feb '22

Hi Folks, I think I might have asked a variation of this about this time last year but I'm better informed now with a better question! When I'm away on my canal/river boat I like to run a tracker so friends and family can see where I am. I have Phonetack on my phone and on my Nextcloud server and it works OK. What I'd like to do is embed the Phonetrack map page from the server in my Wordpress blog but that throws an error: /To protect your security, 192.168.178.20 will not allow Firefox to display the page if another site has embedded it. To see this page, you need to open it in a new window./ Opening in a new window was last year's work around but a bit clunky for my non-techie friends and family. So I looked into a bit more and there is loads of advice online about editing Nextcloud lib files, ie: /www/nextcloud/lib/public/AppFramework/Http/ContentSecurityPolicy.php/ Unfortunately my Nextcloud server doesn't anything like that as far as I can see. It doesn't even have /lib/public/ Maybe because it's actually NextcloudPi which comes preconfigured as an SD card image for the Pi. I could create the file and insert the recommended lines but would it even be read if the rest of the OS isn't expecting it? And will I bugger up something else? Any other suggestions? (But please not 'start again with a fresh install of standard Nextcloud' The Pi 'just works'.) -- Phil Thane www.pthane.co.uk Tweet @pthane 01767 449759 07582 750607

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[OT] SD card not fully recognised
by Peter 16 Feb '22

16 Feb '22

I got a Chuwi for exactly this reason, to have a larger screen ebook reader which could handle pdfs, and seem to recall the same problem. I think I fixed it by installing a different file manager. The other thing worth trying might be to format the card from the tablet. I have a vague recollection of being prompted to do this at least once, but can't recall now if I did it or not. Peter

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[OT] SD card not fully recognised
by Bev Nicolson 10 Feb '22

10 Feb '22

I got a Lenova tablet (Android 10) not long ago, mostly to read e-books on. I also got an sd card for it but it seems only settings recognises it, not the file manager app. I shall run out of storage space soon. (Much of it is taken up by the OS.) Thoughts? Ideas? Bev.

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pdf viewer - evince
by Bev Nicolson 03 Feb '22

03 Feb '22

The background is this. Suddenly document viewer wasn't in the list of options to open a pdf a while back. I've always used Evince so I found and installed it. All was well, but now it only shows the Adobe logo, not the front page of the pdf. How do I fix that, and is it connected to the fact that Mint doesn't seem to have an up to date version of it? (It used to just be a case of renaming the file but this doesn't work any more.) Bev

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Tool(s) for processing text file line by line using state etc.
by Chris Green 21 Jan '22

21 Jan '22

I'm looking for tools (if there are any) for processing a text file line by line sequentially. As it goes through the file it needs to make decisions based on the contents of the line(s) of text and change its state as it goes. The decisions it makes depend on the state it's in. Basically I'm processing some (fairly) fixed format messages from a forum to remove some matched header and trailer lines, modify and output a few other matched lines and simply output the body of the message. The (most) difficult bit is removing blank lines before something. E.g. we have a message that starts:- A new topic has been created on the forum Message Subject : weed webinar 31 January Category : Waterways Continental Europe Posted by : Fred Bloggs I want to delete everything up to and including the blank line after 'Message Subject' then keep (i.e. output) the 'Category' line and the 'Posted by' lines without the blank lines in between. I can't delete all blank lines because I want to retain spacing in the message body later. So I need to be able to do things like deleting blank lines unless I am in the message body. Are there specific tools for doing this sort of thing or should I just write a program (probably in Python) that reads lines, does actions as required and remembers its state as it goes? I got some of the way using sed but it's very difficult to 'delete the line before XXXX' with sed. It *might* be that awk would be better but I don't see it handling the state/sequential bit any better than sed. Any/all advice would be very welcome. -- Chris Green

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boot log messages
by Phil Thane 13 Jan '22

13 Jan '22

Hi, Does anyone understand the boot process well enough to know if this is important? During boot I see a lot of errors but they scroll past to fast to read so today I actually view the log and find messages in red such as: Jan 13 11:32:06 phils kernel: xhci_hcd 0000:02:00.0: AMD-Vi: Event logged [IO_PAGE_FAULT domain=0x0010 address=0xbea0a740 fl> and Jan 13 11:32:06 phils kernel: AMD-Vi: Event logged [IO_PAGE_FAULT device=02:00.0 domain=0x0010 address=0xbea0a740 flags=0x00> There are a lot but the numbers seem repeated so maybe it's just several attempts to find something before giving up. I'm on Mint and the Mint forums suggest it might be a mismatch between the number of USB expected and those actually found, I guess that'd be a motherboard fault though the ports I use all seem to work. Should I worry? -- Phil Thane www.pthane.co.uk Tweet @pthane 01767 449759 07582 750607

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Quick and Easy External Displays for Raspberry Pis etc.
by Steve Mynott 10 Jan '22

10 Jan '22

Occasionally one of the RPs crashes and since it's headless I can't see why it's rebooting. It's always awkward to put a full screen display on it. Can anyone recommend a small LCD screen (maybe 1024x768 or 800x600) with HDMI to use? Alternatively I've a number of retro systems which use RCA, Scart, VGA etc. and had a lot of success with early gen LCD screens (12"/14") cheap from car boot sales for around 10-20 quid. Although they usually have loads of ports, I've never seen any with HDMI. Do these exist? Or is any sort of cable/converter possible? I think I used to be able to use DVI as HDMI (?) But I've not seen DVI on these either. -- Steve Mynott <steve.mynott(a)gmail.com> rsa3072/629FBB91565E591955B5876A79CEFAA4450EBD50

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