- main - earth.li

Church WiFi
by ted.harding＠wlandres.net 01 Sep '11

01 Sep '11

Hi Folks, Back in the early 2000's, when Internet access in my Little Ouse/Brandon Creek area was limited to painfully slow dialup (not to mention many other remote places throughout East Cambs and North/West Norfolk), I remember discussing with fellow nutters in the Anglia Linux Users Group the feasibility (as I wrote at the time, Feb 2002) of the following: Come to think of it, ALUG should be a damn good place to ask this question ... A friend of mine, much knowledgeable, tells me that with directional antennae a line-of sight range of 10-15 miles should be attainable for wireless LAN. But it's equally a question of finding hospitality at the far end. Well, out here in the midst of optically flat nowhere, line of sight to almost anywhere is no problem. Problem is, almost everywhere is uninhabited. Nearest place which might have an accommodating college or such is Ely (10 miles, but on a nice mountain which boosts line-of-sight visibility). So there you are. I'm groping. But there must be some of you who've at least thought about this in similar terrain; so if anyone has any comments or suggestions I'd be most interested to hear! It might lead to an improvement on my current 33.6K bit rate ... and, come to think of it, converting Ely Cathedral to a LAN hub is a tempting notion. Best wishes to all, Ted. Well, the Broadband Revolution has rendered such thoughts obsolete at the Brandon Creek exchange, of course. But a news story this morning revives the notion, and has inspired me with a new twist to the idea. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-14734574 Inquiry into Norfolk church WiSpire scheme Plans to use church towers in Norfolk to transmit wireless broadband signals to provide better internet access for rural areas have stalled. [...] The scheme is a venture by the diocese and internet service provider Freeclix. Wireless receivers would be installed on church spires, acting as high spots, to give nearby businesses and homes access to high-speed broadband. Wi-fi hot spots would also be created in churches. So it seems there is still scope for my original concept out there in Norfolk. But I have a bigger concept now. These days, most people have Wireless Internet enabled mobile phones, so can be in contact wherever there is a signal. Not forgetting all those home computers. Which prompts me to think that we no longer have a need for priests and parsons to communicate with the Almighty. And the proposal that "Wi-fi hot spots would also be created in churches" is based on a narrow and outdated vision. I do not believe that God is so obsolete that he can't fill the Universe with WiFi signals, and receive any that are transmitted. He created all this stuff in the first place, and has been ahead of us ever since (though we may be starting to catch up). So, from now on, if you want to communicate with Him, just switch on your mobile and dial the Divine Number (which is not "666" -- that connects you to a different Infernet Service Provider). Then the ancient channels of Priest and Parson (whose information transmission rate has been stuck at about 0.001 bits/sec for millennia) can be closed down, and their infrastructure put to better uses (as seems to have been the idea behind the WiSpire idea in that news item, though still based on backward thinking). Then you can talk directly to God, and He can talk directly to you. If you pray ever so nicely, perhaps He will favour you by setting up a cosmic Internet hub, which will route all wireless communications from anywhere in the world to anywhere else in the world. All He needs to do is to will it, and it will happen. Onward! Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.harding(a)wlandres.net> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 01-Sep-11 Time: 09:53:09 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

2 2

Updating Seamonkey
by Bev Nicolson 31 Aug '11

31 Aug '11

So, the best way of upgrading Seamonkey would be (I guess) via Synaptic, except Synaptic doesn't have the most up to date version available. <<apt get install>> followed by the version ? Or not? Thanks. Bev.

3 5

Full swap space on vm
by Jenny Hopkins 29 Aug '11

29 Aug '11

Hullo there, I admin a vm with Bytemark, and am wondering why the swap is showing as full. Htop shows Mem usage to be roughly half (out of 984MB), but swap is at 255/255MB and hasn't shown any signs of changing for several hours now. vmstat procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu---- r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa 0 0 262116 237032 58540 258224 2 1 5 1 4 4 19 10 69 2 swapon -s Filename Type Size Used Priority /dev/vdb partition 262136 262116 -1 cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness 60 Is there any way i can see what the swap is full of, or why it is full when there is plenty memory available? Thanks, Jenny

2 5

Load averages
by Mark Rogers 23 Aug '11

23 Aug '11

I've been playing with monit[1] to monitor a server which has been having some problems (specifically a service would stop responding to TCP requests, so although it was still "running" it was no longer any use; monit is able to make connections periodically and check whether or not the they're being accepted and giving the expected response). It comes with an example configuration for monitoring the system (memory/swap/cpu usage, and load averages). I have it monitoring load averages based on the configuration but I'm getting a lot of alarm reports every day and I need to tweak the config. The existing config is fairly self explanatory: if loadavg (1min) > 4 for 2 cycles then alert if loadavg (5min) > 2 for 2 cycles then alert On other words, if the 1 or 5 min load averages exceed the level shown for two or more consecutive tests (which take place every 2 mins) I'll get an alert. My question is: what would be sensible load averages to set the thresholds at, or are they essentially meaningless and I should ditch them? The server has a AMD Athlon(tm) II Neo N36L Dual-Core Processor so as I understand it a load average of anything up to 2 means the CPU is under-utilised anyway? [1] http://mmonit.com/monit/ -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

2 2

Re: [ALUG] Transferring audio to CD
by Anthony Anson 16 Aug '11

16 Aug '11

nev young wrote: > On 06/08/11 17:13, Anthony Anson wrote: >> >> Thanks. I'll look into it further. To connect to the audio bit on the >> flaptop I've got to make-up the cables (phono to midi-jackplug) before I >> do anything else - > Rusty, Take care if you're using a flaptop. The mic input is mono. The > second ring on the jack supplies volts to the microphone. > > see: http://www.epanorama.net/circuits/sb_micinput.gif Ah, oh, ta. Has to be the flatpot because the hi-fi isn't portable, neither is the (full) tower with Lenny on it. Tower's upstairs and hi-fi's down. The record should be mono (1961), so I'll experiment with the headphone jack and the amp set to mono - output there is on volume control, and I have a suitable cable for that. -- Tony Anson www.girolle.co.uk/

6 13

How to find (or navigate to) parent directory *without* following symbolic links?
by Chris G 13 Aug '11

13 Aug '11

The subject says it all really. For example I have a directory /var/www/wiki/lib/plugins/indexmenu which is a symbolic link to /home/chris/src/dokuwiki-plugins/indexmenu. I want a way (in PHP in particular) to be able to navigate up to /var/www/wiki but everything I try program-wise takes me back to the /home/chris tree. I'm sure on the old SunOs/Solaris systems I used if you navigated up on the command line it didn't go backwards up symbolic links, but on this xubuntu 10.04 system if I do, for example, 'ls ../..' when I'm in /var/www/wiki/lib/plugins/indexmenu I see the contents of /home/chris/src which somehow feels wrong to me. The real issue is in PHP though as there are many places in dokuwiki which use ../../.. to access things and there doesn't seem to be an easy way to do this when there are symbolic links involved. One can use regular expressions to prune /var/www/wiki/lib/plugins/indexmenu down to /var/www/wiki/ but this seems a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut. -- Chris Green

2 4

[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : McGintys, Northgate Street
by samwise 13 Aug '11

13 Aug '11

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 next week, Monday 15th August, 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'll definitely be there, so if any one new wants to drop in, look for the guy in the corner with the latest copy of LXF ... ;) We're normally in the downstairs-from-the-bar-bit, nearest the entrance on the library side. 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

1 0

Text email clients--Cone, Alpine, Mutt--anyone ever tried Cone?
by James Freer 12 Aug '11

12 Aug '11

I've just been installing the choice of text email clients - above three to try out. Mutt and Alpine fine, but Cone i can't get the smtp bit right. I've contacted the developer on the Cone list who just replies with very brief ambiguous replies. It can't be much different from Alpine but so far can't get it to go. To use Cone it seems one is expected to be a mind reader. I doubt if it's better than alpine but it would be nice to give it a go. I've got Alpine to work but setting 'Roles' for mail i'm still not 100% sorted. I never thought text email clients were worth bothering with... once i'd got Alpine going i could see why... speed. I find Thunderbird and Evolution too slow for large amounts of mail. Anyone really know the 'ins and outs' of email [oops on the witty side this morning!]. --james

2 1

Further, more 'philosophical' git questions
by Chris G 11 Aug '11

11 Aug '11

I'm getting my mind round the mechanics of using git better now but before I go too far I have a couple of more 'philosophical' questions about it - not in the Plato/Sophocles sense, more in the how to use it sense! :-) It seems to make sense to me to use git 'directly' to manage places like ~/bin where one has a mixed bag of shell scripts and python. I.e. make ~/bin into a git repository. I don't see any significant downside to this, ~/bin is only for one's own use so you modify/create a script, test it and then 'git add' it to preserve the history. However I'm not quite so sure how to handle bigger projects and/or ones where there are multiple users (or at least multiple installations on my system). Taking dokuwiki (my current example) I can set up a local git repository which is derived from the dokuwiki repository latest stable release and then I can add patches of my own etc. and when the stable release moves on I can merge the patches into the new release. So far so good. However I'm not clear how, having got the 'stable release plus patches' 'git add'ed into the repository how do I then copy out to the various installations? I can't just copy what's in the repository as it appears because that *may* have further un-added changes. I don't really want to run every installation as a git repository. Is there a command to extract all the files from a given branch in git (which doesn't create a new repository)? -- Chris Green

2 2

A rather more specific git question
by Chris G 10 Aug '11

10 Aug '11

OK, I have set up a local git repository on my machine and have checked out a mychanges branch so I can add local changes. Is there any git way of comparing the files in the git repository with files in a corresponding (but with *many* more files in) tree somewhere else on my system? I.e. I want to diff each file in the git repository with a file in a similar tree. I think all the git-diff commands just compare different branches within a git repository don't they? -- Chris Green

2 2