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NAS Drive mounting help
by steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk 06 Sep '10

06 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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