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Re: [ALUG] cp -a puzzle
by Ted.Harding＠wlandres.net 16 Jan '12

16 Jan '12

On 14-Jan-2012 James Bensley wrote: > rsync has this option Unfortunately rsync is not present on that system (SuSE Linux 8.2 installed in 2003). I should add that I'm doing this for a friend (predominantly a Windows user) who wants to dispose of the machine, but keep the files. I do not have access to the installation disks (and they may well have gone into a black hole by now). Thanks for the suggestion! Ted. > On Jan 14, 2012 9:12 PM, "Ted Harding" <Ted.Harding(a)wlandres.net> wrote: > >> Greetings All, >> I am currently engaged in copying files from a desktop >> machine to an external USB hard drive. >> >> The machine has both Windows 98 and Linux on it, and >> dual-boots. Because Win98 does not recognise the external >> drive, while the Linux installation does, I'm booting >> into Linux to do the copying. >> >> The objective is to transfer every file on the desktop >> onto the external drive. The external drive is mounted >> as /media/sda1 in Linux, and has a vfat filesystem. >> >> The Windows drives \C, \D, \E, \F are mounted, when the >> machine is booted into Linux, as: >> >> /windows/C /windows/D ... /windows/F >> >> With the Windows files, no problem: I make the directories >> /media/sda1/WinLinMachine/C >> (and similar for .../D, .../E, .../F, these being all the >> Windows drives). Then I do the likes of: >> >> cd /windows/C >> cp -a * /media/sda1/WinLinMachine/C >> >> (and similar for D, E and F). This has worked fine. >> However, I now want to copy over all the Linux files >> as well. I have made a directory >> >> /media/sda1/WinLinMachine/LinuxFiles >> >> but now, of course, >> >> cp -a /* /media/sda1/WinLinMachine/LinuxFiles >> >> will not work, because the external drive is mounted >> under / and so will be itself copied and recopied in >> an infinite recursion. There would be no problem if >> there was an "exclude" option for 'cp' (say "-X") so >> that >> >> cp -a -X /media /* /media/sda1/WinLinMachine/LinuxFiles >> >> would inhibit anything under /media from being copied. >> But I can find no such option for 'cp'. >> >> So how to proceed??? >> >> With thanks, >> Ted. >> ---------------------------------- >> E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)wlandres.net> >> Date: 14-Jan-2012 >> Time: 20:49:49 >> >> This message was sent by XFMail >> ---------------------------------- >> >> _______________________________________________ >> main(a)lists.alug.org.uk >> http://www.alug.org.uk/ >> http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main >> Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above! >> ---------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)wlandres.net> Date: 14-Jan-2012 Time: 22:07:57 This message was sent by XFMail ----------------------------------

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Naive spreadsheet question - how to produce a running total?
by Chris Green 16 Jan '12

16 Jan '12

I'm a total newcomer to spreadsheets but I think/hope a spreadsheet is what I need to fulfil a very simple requirement. I want to maintain a simple balance of income and outgoings, e.g.:- Date Description Credit Debit Balance 1/1/2012 Monthly charge £200.00 -£200.00 5/1/2012 Received cheque £200.00 £0.0 21/1/2010 Miscellanous expense £5.00 -£5.00 .... etc. I can manage the various data entry columns in Gnumeric but what formula do I need in the Balance column? Firstly I can't find the syntax for "all cells to the end", all the Help seems to tell me is how to enter a range, i.e. C2:C12 means the range from C2 to C12, but how do you say "to the end"? Secondly how do you get a running balance without having to re-enter the formula in the Balance column for every row you enter? -- Chris Green

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cp -a puzzle
by Ted.Harding＠wlandres.net 15 Jan '12

15 Jan '12

Greetings All, I am currently engaged in copying files from a desktop machine to an external USB hard drive. The machine has both Windows 98 and Linux on it, and dual-boots. Because Win98 does not recognise the external drive, while the Linux installation does, I'm booting into Linux to do the copying. The objective is to transfer every file on the desktop onto the external drive. The external drive is mounted as /media/sda1 in Linux, and has a vfat filesystem. The Windows drives \C, \D, \E, \F are mounted, when the machine is booted into Linux, as: /windows/C /windows/D ... /windows/F With the Windows files, no problem: I make the directories /media/sda1/WinLinMachine/C (and similar for .../D, .../E, .../F, these being all the Windows drives). Then I do the likes of: cd /windows/C cp -a * /media/sda1/WinLinMachine/C (and similar for D, E and F). This has worked fine. However, I now want to copy over all the Linux files as well. I have made a directory /media/sda1/WinLinMachine/LinuxFiles but now, of course, cp -a /* /media/sda1/WinLinMachine/LinuxFiles will not work, because the external drive is mounted under / and so will be itself copied and recopied in an infinite recursion. There would be no problem if there was an "exclude" option for 'cp' (say "-X") so that cp -a -X /media /* /media/sda1/WinLinMachine/LinuxFiles would inhibit anything under /media from being copied. But I can find no such option for 'cp'. So how to proceed??? With thanks, Ted. ---------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)wlandres.net> Date: 14-Jan-2012 Time: 20:49:49 This message was sent by XFMail ----------------------------------

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[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : McGintys, Northgate Street
by samwise 13 Jan '12

13 Jan '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 Monday, 16th January, at 20:00: P J McGinty & Sons 15 Northgate Street Ipswich Suffolk IP1 3BY Tel: 01473 251 515 Map/Directions URI: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=IP1+3BY WWW: http://www.pjmcgintys.co.uk/ McGintys pub is in the centre of Ipswich. It's directly opposite the town's central library and has a reputation for good Irish beer. We're usually to be found in the lowest section of the bar, near the library entrance to the pub. All are welcome, novices and experienced users. Feel free to ask for further information on the Main ALUG mailing list. ** I should be there this month to welcome in a new Linux year, after last month's absence. Hope to catch 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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bandwidth throttle needed
by mick 11 Jan '12

11 Jan '12

Hi Guys I have recently devoted a VM to tails (tails.boum.org) That VM appears in a DNS round robin with five other servers. When I first offered the server, trials showed I could expect to see outbound around 20-30 GB per day. I can live with that. Unfortunately, the traffic has now jumped to 150-180 GB per day. I can't live with that. It will cost me too much. So I need some advice on bandwith shaping. Can anyone recommend any tools which will allow me to set limits so that I can throttle web traffic to around 30 Gb per day (or 250 GB per week or 1000 GB per month for example). Cheers Mick --------------------------------------------------------------------- The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this? Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc854.txt ---------------------------------------------------------------------

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Web photo management - are there any simple systems?
by Chris Green 10 Jan '12

10 Jan '12

I have a couple of family members who have photo albums on the web which I host. For the past two or three years I have been using gallery2 to do this but I'm getting increasingly fed up with the hassle involved whenever anything changes. A recent OS upgrade has made the gallery2 installations fall in a heap yet again and I'm wondering if I might find something easier than gallery2. Apart from not being easy to upgrade it requires quite a few non-standard changes to php.ini which I'd prefer to avoid if I can, and it uses a mysql database which I'd also like to avoid if I can. My two users don't need most of gallery2's abilities, all they want to do is to be able to upload photographs and organise them into albums with (presumably) thumbnails to select them. There's no need for multiple users, no need for tags, no need for extra information, just the EXIF and IPTC from the image files. So is there anything out there that can do this with as little hassle as possible? -- Chris Green

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This apache2 default (maybe ubuntu's doing) seems a bit unhelpful
by Chris Green 10 Jan '12

10 Jan '12

In the default apache2 installation on Ubuntu you get the following setting in the default virtual host:- ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/ This means that CGI scripts are in the /usr hierarchy which doesn't seem very helpful. Is the the norm for apache2 or is it just Ubuntu's doing? I'm thinking I either want to point it to some suitable /home/<user> directory or possibly somewhere below /var/www, is there anything wrong with doing either of these (assuming suitable security protection of course). -- Chris Green

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Is there a known security weakness in gallery2?
by Chris Green 10 Jan '12

10 Jan '12

Well after having decided I don't want to run gallery2 any more I have another question related to it. I'm getting hundreds of hits (well, attempted hits, it's no longer there) on the old gallery2 site, logged by logwatch as follows:- /mandy/gallery2/main.php?g2_view=shutterfl ... en=26321822fb67: 1 Time(s) I seem to get thirty or forty every day and today's logwatch has logged well over a hundred. It's not a issue really as it's not eating much bandwidth or loading my web site significantly but I was just wondering if anyone knows whether it's a well know security weakness in gallery2 or what? Or is someone just very desperate to look at the pictures on Mandy's blog? :-) Maybe I should put a note at /mandy/gallery2 saying that the pictures have moved. Though come to think about it the link from the blog now points at where the pictures really are so whatever is hitting that gallery2 URL must be pretty mindless. -- Chris Green

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Is there anything better than 'locate'?
by Chris Green 10 Jan '12

10 Jan '12

I find (pun not intended) the locate command very painful, it rarely produces anything useful when I use it and its command line options don't seem to help very much. First problem is that by default it returns every single file that has the search expression in its path, so if I search for 'home' for example I get thousands and thousands of lines returned because it lists every sub-directory and file under /home. Surely it would be more useful if it just returned /home plus any files (or other directories) actually called 'home'. As it is the default is nearly always not what one wants. Secondly I want a search for 'home' to return files and directories called 'home', not ones called 'homeAndAway' or anything else with 'home' in them. If I'm searching for something which has 'home' in it then I'll search for '*home*'. I know there are ways of getting over the above two problems but IMHO the syntax to do so is a bit clumsy and inconvenient. The man page gives the syntax (in the only example it gives, maybe suggesting others have the same complaints as I do) :- locate -b '\home' Finally I want some way to exclude large chunks of my system from the search (or to *include* specific areas), my short-term backups are on my desktop system under /bak. As a result locate finds dozens of hits for any file which happens to be in the incremental backups. If only locate worked the same way as find does, find does almost exactly what I want most of the time (but is very slow of course because it's not got a cron built database). I guess I'm going to write a custom script round locate that makes it produce results much like find, but quickly. I'm just wondering if someone happens to have done it for me already. -- Chris Green

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[ALUG Announce] ALUG Norwich Pub Meet Thursday 12th January
by Viperfang 09 Jan '12

09 Jan '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 January 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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