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Mostly-OT: Strange ADSL issues
by Mark Rogers 14 Oct '06

14 Oct '06

I have two ADSL lines from completely different providers (Demon and The Phone Coop (www.thephone.coop), both behaving the same. The lines are both in the Peterborough area but on different exchanges. Although this isn't a Linux problem I think Linux is most likely to give me the tools to resolve it. Basically, some of the time the ADSL lines just work: I can browse the web, collect email, download ISOs, etc. However the rest of the time (and its becoming increasingly "most of the time") I can't. To all intents and purposes the connection has gone. Except, and this is what's throwing me, connections which were already up will continue to work (eg if I have an SSH connection somewhere it'll still work, I use Hamachi (www.hamachi.cc) as a VPN client and I can still access my home PC from work and vice-versa through it when the connection is otherwise useless, if I'm downloading an ISo using BitTorrent it'll usually continue just fine). The ADSL router isn't showing anything unusual (I have different hardware at home from at work and have swapped both with no effect). All I have managed to do is: (a) Confirm that DNS is not the problem. DNS doesn't work properly during an "outage" but equally I can't access sites/email/etc by IP address either (b) Small packet stuff seems OK. Often (not always) I can ping a site which I can't view. (c) Following on from the above, if I tweak the ping packet size so that fragmentation occurs the ping becomes unreliable. (d) Optimised sites like Google are far more likely to work than non-optimised sites with lots of data. There's no obvious patterns to the time of day/day of week (non-peak times are probably better but its not clear cut). Rain makes things worse (but our office ADSL line has never liked rain, and I think that's a different problem). Any idea what is going on or how to find out? The ISPs so far haven't been much help, but since I have the same problem with two different ISPs I don't think its an ISP problem. A traceroute from my office to somewhere and from my home to the same place don't show any obvious points of commonality until they reach the destination (ie I'm pretty sure that apart from going through BT cables the two ISPs aren't sharing the same hardware/connectivity somewhere). At home my router uses an embedded Linux which I can SSH into, so suggestions for things I can try from there welcome. It uses BusyBox and has limited tools but there may be some useful stuff under /proc if I knew what to look for. PS: This has been going on for a few weeks but is definitely getting worse. -- Mark Rogers More Solutions Ltd :: 0845 45 89 555

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Meeting Report: Thursday 12th Oct 2006
by Simon Elliott 13 Oct '06

13 Oct '06

A short warning before I begin; [02:22:16] <Sionide> my meeting report is going to be rubbish, but nevermind - better than nothing and people can always reply with corrections / more info And so I'll begin... Hello all, Summary: A good pub meet up, with 2 new faces - Jerry and Michael, which is great and is definitely what I like to see... So if you're reading this and haven't been to one of our pub meets, make sure you come along next month! Role Call: Jerry Michael Martjin (mak) Myself, Simon (Sionide) Adam (quinophex) Mike Paul (paul_c) JT (mChicago) Ross (RossF) Richard (ironChicken) Neil (or maybe Neal?) and a late appearance from Joe (Joeboy) I think it was Paul who had the bright idea of reserving the tables at the Reindeer as we've had problems getting decent seats in previous meets. We should probably continue this for future meets... So there we were in the corner by the door, and discussing, as we do, open-source, linux as well as other general rubbish & nonsense.. *coughJTcough* Discussed Topics: (which I heard) -Development of Scouting through the ages. -Adam's new job. -NiLith Batteries, pros and cons. -Lost, the TV series. -Rock Linux. -Can you drive tanks on the road? -The possibility of creating a huge aerial using 4.6km of wire to receive 9KHZ radio signals. -Discussions of Paul's very "flashy" looking camera (haha, I'm so not funny) If anyone remembers anything else talked about or would like to continue any of these particular discussions on the mailing list, feel free! Mak said I had to mention the fact that JT came straight from work, wearing his suit. Hehe... Well, it tickled us at the time anyway. Thanks for coming every body, see you next month! -Simon

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How to get mouse working (Slackware 11)
by cl＠isbd.net 13 Oct '06

13 Oct '06

I have finally got Slackware 11 installed on my Abit AB9 motherboard system - hurrah! However the mouse doesn't work. It's a standard PS/2 mouse and worked in other installations so I'm prety sure it's connected right etc. An "ls -l /dev/mouse" shows that /dev/mouse is linked to /dev/input/mice. What else should I be checking? -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

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Problem with lilo on suse 10.0
by John Woodard 11 Oct '06

11 Oct '06

My apologies if this appears twice but I'm not sure it sent. Suse 10.0 box the lilo bootloader has been corrupted. I'm trying to get it to boot but I'm coming up with errors I don't fully understand The system has an IDE disk which has a vfat windows partition hda1 and an ext3 partition mounted as /home and a scsi disk with an sda1 being swap and sda2 ext3 mounted as /. So far I've used a Suse 10.1 instillation DVD to get into the machine via rescue system option. I then mount the root partition as /mnt and chroot to make it the root filesystem. Running lilo gives me the following error message. **************** Warning: '/proc/partitions' does not exist, disk scan bypassed. Warning: The boot sector and map file are on different disks. Added Windows Fatal: open (Hd2,1)/boot/vmlinuz: No such file or directory **************** Windows will boot from this lilo configuration. It needs to be able to boot between windows and suse 10 and at a later date have a suse 7 installation added to it. Below is a copy of linux.conf. Any help here would be really appreciated. Cheers, BJ lilo.conf **************** # Modified by YaST2. Last modification on Mon Oct 9 12:33:56 BST 2006 menu-scheme = Wb:kw:Wb:Wb timeout = 80 lba32 change-rules reset read-only prompt default = 2.6.13-15-d boot = /dev/hda other = /dev/hda1 ###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: windows### label = Windows ###other = /dev/fd0 ###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: floppy### ### label = Floppy image = (hd2,1)/boot/vmlinuz label = 2.6.13-15-d append = "selinux=0 resume=/dev/sda1 splash=silent showopts" vga = 0x317 root = /dev/sda2 ****************

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Problem with lilo on suse 10.0
by John Woodard 10 Oct '06

10 Oct '06

Suse 10.0 box the lilo bootloader has been corrupted. I'm trying to get it to boot but I'm coming up with errors I don't fully understand The system has an IDE disk which has a vfat windows partition hda1 and an ext3 partition mounted as /home and a scsi disk with an sda1 being swap and sda2 ext3 mounted as /. So far I've used a Suse 10.1 instillation DVD to get into the machine via rescue system option. I then mount the root partition as /mnt and chroot to make it the root filesystem. Running lilo gives me the following error message. **************** Warning: '/proc/partitions' does not exist, disk scan bypassed. Warning: The boot sector and map file are on different disks. Added Windows Fatal: open (Hd2,1)/boot/vmlinuz: No such file or directory **************** Windows will boot from this lilo configuration. It needs to be able to boot between windows and suse 10 and at a later date have a suse 7 installation added to it. Below is a copy of linux.conf. Any help here would be really appreciated. Cheers, BJ lilo.conf **************** # Modified by YaST2. Last modification on Mon Oct 9 12:33:56 BST 2006 menu-scheme = Wb:kw:Wb:Wb timeout = 80 lba32 change-rules reset read-only prompt default = 2.6.13-15-d boot = /dev/hda other = /dev/hda1 ###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: windows### label = Windows ###other = /dev/fd0 ###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: floppy### ### label = Floppy image = (hd2,1)/boot/vmlinuz label = 2.6.13-15-d append = "selinux=0 resume=/dev/sda1 splash=silent showopts" vga = 0x317 root = /dev/sda2 ****************

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[ALUG Announce] 2nd Thursday Norwich Meet : Reindeer, Dereham Road
by Jonathan McDowell 09 Oct '06

09 Oct '06

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 "Second Thursday" ALUG Norwich Pub Meet is this Thursday, 12th October. It's at the Reindeer pub on the Dereham Road, just opposite the City Gate. People will be there from 8pm-ish, though there may be a few people there earlier. I will unfortunately not be present this month. Topics for discussion will no doubt be as varied as ever. The Reindeer has a reasonable selection of beer as well as decent coffee (with biscuits, if you're lucky). Directions to the Reindeer can be found at: http://www.alug.org.uk/venues/reindeer.html Pictures of some of the regulars, and irregulars, and, well, just some pictures of people that might or might not turn up are available from: http://www.earth.li/~noodles/Photos/2006-02-ALUG/ http://the.earth.li/~noodles/stilvoid-alug/mp20050811/ http://www.earth.li/~noodles/Photos/2005-01-ALUG-Xmas/ http://www.earth.li/~noodles/Photos/2004-08-ALUG/ Which should hopefully aid those of you wondering who to look out for. We're /normally/ just to the left of the main entrance, though sometimes we've ended up at the far end of the pub beside the pool table, as there are comfy seats at that end. J. -- "'And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days.' from The Book of Mozilla, 12:10" -- about:mozilla ----- 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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SATA CD/DVD has solved most of my installation problems
by cl＠isbd.net 09 Oct '06

09 Oct '06

Well, just to report success, the SATA CD/DVD drive I bought in the hope that it would overcome my installation problems on my Abit AB9 Pro motherboard has done just that. I can now successfully install any current relase of Linux (well at least the ones I have tried so far, Ubuntu, Suse, Mandriva and Slackware). It needs a reasonably up to date kernel to work but not the latest, latest, latest version. You have to turn on AHCI in the BIOS (for some distributions, Suse seems to manage without this somehow) and, of course, connect the SATA CD drive to the main (Intel chipset) SATA interface which the hard drives use as well. You also can't then boot from "SATA CD" you have to boot from the actual CD drive detected by the BIOS, presumably a consequence of turning AHCI on. >From there on it's plain sailing, installations run with the nowadays expected smoothness. Strangely I found that the sata.i kernel (2.4.33) in Slackware didn't work but the 2.6.xx alternatives were fine. Other distributions I tried were all 2.6.xx kernels I think, you don't get a choice. I guess only the newer kernels have the Intel SATA chipset support. -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

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how to buy a SATA power adapter cheaply?
by cl＠isbd.net 09 Oct '06

09 Oct '06

I need a SATA power adapter, one of those things to connect a standard (Molex) 4-pin power connector to a SATA drive. They're about a quid each or less (best I've found is 68 pence for a two-way one) but carriage charges make that irrelevant. Does anyone have any suggestions as to where I could get one at a reasonable price in the Ipswich area and/or a company that sells them that will stick one in a jiffy bag and send by Royal Mail for a pound or so? -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

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Help with grub
by cl＠isbd.net 09 Oct '06

09 Oct '06

I have what would appear to be a very simple grub question but I can't find the answer in the grub info or the grub-install info. How do I remove a partition/OS from grub? -- Chris Green (chris(a)halon.org.uk)

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Gnome "calendar" is incorrect!
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 08 Oct '06

08 Oct '06

Hi folks, A distraction from this weekend's ADSL woes. Specifically: The "calendar"/"clock" application in the Gnome panel is incorrect for the year 1752 (and therefore for all preceding years). It is described as the "Clock Applet", and its Help only describes its time functions. However, when you left-click on it a calendar comes up, which is what I'm referring to. This is not described anywhere that I can find. Nor can I locate what program is executed for the "Clock Applet". Any thoughts? [trivial question of course...] Best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 08-Oct-06 Time: 15:58:22 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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