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10372 discussions

Laptops, desktops, and UPS
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 23 Jun '06

23 Jun '06

Hi Folks, I thought I'd push out for comment a thoguht which I've been pondering from time to time. A laptop is pretty nearly immune to mains supply failure, since its battery provides a backup and modern laptops can shutdown on low battery. Desktops, on the other hand, need an external UPS to guard it against mains failure; and of course a UPS can be configured to signal the computer to shut down if the power cut lasts more than a certain time. But it has occurred to me that there's no obvious reason why a desktop can't have its own internal battery like a laptop, and I'm wonderign why they don't. Of course, laptop batteries are notorious for not having a very long useful life -- you can be lucky, in some cases, if you get 5 years out of one. And they're even more notorious for being horrendously expensive to replace, if indeed you can still find one by the time yours fails. But I'd have thought that the space available in a desktop would offer scope for a more robust and cheaper solution. (In passing -- I have an ancient laptop whose battery has been shot for years, which however works well if you plug 12v DC into its PS socket; so I've happily been using it in "away from the mains" situations by attaching it to a motorcycle battery which weighs less than 4 pounds -- 1.7kgm -- so is within my definition of "portable"). So a robust lead-acid battery of the appropriate voltage could be installed into a desktop, if the appropriate circuitry were present in the box's PSU, and would presumably last longer, be easier to replace if necessary, and cost much less. Does anyone know of desktop boxes which do this? Thanks, and 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: 23-Jun-06 Time: 15:18:44 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Crazy question
by Peter 23 Jun '06

23 Jun '06

In a shop run by a friend, and he said his machine was behaving oddly. To his surprise, he had a 120G drive, but from the windows disk utility, there was only 30 in a partion, Drive C, and the rest as unallocated space. He did not know how this had happened or when, but was fairly sure it had not been bought set up like this. He is also getting notices on the screen that memory dumps are happening. He is firewalled and anti virused and updated. But he doesn't have specific anti spyware. Question: have you ever heard of anything like this happening as the result of an infection? Is it a reasonable investigative first step to boot from a live Linux CD and find out if it shows up as unallocated space in that too? And what would you then advise using to see if the space really is unallocated and with nothing in it? I have system rescue CD, and could get any of the other security oriented distros, but this isn't really my area.... Peter

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How to check for packet loss over a long[ish] period?
by chrisisbd＠leary.csoft.net 22 Jun '06

22 Jun '06

I want to run some checks on my ADSL connection to see what sort of level (if any) of packet loss I am getting. In particular I want to run some checks in the small hours of the morning because I'm getting some rsync errors which might be due to packet loss. What tools are available for checking packet loss? Is there anything better than 'ping' and/or what is a civilised repeat rate to use with ping to avoid it being seen as a DoS attack? The system I'm rsync'ing with does respond to 'ping' so that's a start. -- Chris Green (chrisisbd(a)leary.csoft.net)

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Strange hardware problem
by Wayne Stallwood 22 Jun '06

22 Jun '06

We have a server at a clients that has been showing random signs of instability (random reboots and a couple of panics) Suspecting hardware problems I brought it down and ran memtest86 on it. Then something odd happened. Memtest shows plenty of memory errors, spreading over pretty much the whole of the installed 512MB. When I stopped the tests halfway through the first pass there were two pages, the lowest error was at about 50MB the highest was at circa 430 But the really strange thing is that the error bits are 00000000 i.e the test data and "bad" data match perfectly. There is no ECC on this machine so how can the data I put in the memory and the data I take out be the same yet there be a memory error. Memtest clearly shows the "good" and "bad" column with matching data but still flags these as errors. I have ordered replacement RAM anyway, but I was just interested in what other type of memory error I am seeing here ?

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Linux 2006, Brighton, Sat 1st July: Introductory Session
by MJ Ray 21 Jun '06

21 Jun '06

Forwarded from lugmaster.mailman.lug.org.uk: > I have now placed the timetable for this event onto the website. [...] > If you're thinking of attending but haven't placed your booking yet, please > would you do so ASAP? We have to finalise numbers with the venue rather > early this year - first thing on Thursday this week (June 15th) - so > later bookings may miss out on food and accommodation:-( > > Also, if you know of any people who might be interested in the free > introductory talks on Saturday (see below), please consider inviting > them - perhaps by forwarding this message to them. > [...] > Introductory talks: Saturday 1st July > ------------------------------------- > This section of the conference is aimed at people who are relatively new to > linux and is free of charge. Lunch is included if you register on the > website before Thursday 15th June. Programme: > > * An introduction to Networking - Antony Stone > * Getting Started with Apache - Jim Kissel (OSM Ltd.) > * Securing Linux - Nils Magnus > * What are all these distributions and how should I choose one? > - Stuart Yeates (OSS Watch) > * Creating DVD videos on Linux and Unix systems - Ben Hutchings > > * The politics of Linux - Andrew Nicolson (Southampton Institute) > * Towards an All-Party Parliamentary Open Source Group - Leslie Fletcher > * OpenOffice.org beyond 2.0... - Michael Meeks (Novell) > * Kubuntu Dapper and KDE 4: The GNU/Linux Desktop > - Jonathan Riddell (Canonical) > > Venue: University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton. > > http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2006/saturdayfree/ > http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2006/programme/timetable_saturday.shtml > > Email: office(a)ukuug.org > Tel: +44 1763 273 475 > > Event sponsored by Novell, The Positive Internet Company and IBM

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Wierd DNS problem
by chrisisbd＠leary.csoft.net 20 Jun '06

20 Jun '06

We have a wierd DNS problem at work, it's almost certainly something to do with low level DNS setup and/or the firewall but we're a bit lost as to where to look. >From our Solaris boxes issuing an 'nslookup xxx.yyy.zzz' gives the correct IP address for the domain xxx.yyy.zzz. However every application lookup of domain name xxx.yyy.zzz gives the wrong result. The wron result is always that of a domain at Network Solutions, a US name registration business. DNS works OK from PCs on the network. So it looks like something adrift on our name lookup machine but we really cannot see what at the moment. When an application asks for a name resolution what is the normal order of things happening? -- Chris Green (chrisisbd(a)leary.csoft.net)

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The Pink Local Directory
by MJ Ray 20 Jun '06

20 Jun '06

Could someone from West Norfolk email rachel at pinklocaldirectory.co.uk with their telephone number to become the contact for ALUG in that fine upstanding publication, please? My telephone number is changing, so I cannot do it this year. Thanks, -- MJ Ray - personal email, see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html Work: http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ irc.oftc.net/slef Jabber/SIP ask

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Disk usage
by Wayne Stallwood 19 Jun '06

19 Jun '06

I think this question may have come up on the list before, but I can't find an answer in the archives. /dev/sda3 111G 102G 3.1G 98% /home Why is my free space only shown as 3.1G if I have used 102G out of 111 ? BTW Windows Vista is a disk space hog, a clean installation into a virtual machine took 8GB (minus 840MB for virtual memory) That's before you add any apps (and office 12 is Huge)

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 19 Jun '06

19 Jun '06

This is the automated ALUG IRC meeting reminder sent to remind you that there is an IRC meeting tonight (Monday) at 8.00pm. Historically, these used to be the only time a lot of us would be about, now the channel has some usual faces that are there most of the time (except at silly o'clock, when we might be sleeping, or on the second thursday of the month, where we might be drinking in the Reindeer), so don't feel limited to visit during this time, come visit us when ever you feel like it! The meeting takes place on the irc server irc.alug.org.uk in the #alug channel. Most IRC clients should allow you to get there with the commands "/server irc.alug.org.uk" and "/join #alug". Popular IRC clients include xchat, irssi and EPIC on Unix, and Mirc under windows. Here are some links to help you get started with irc. Unix http://www.xchat.org/ http://www.irssi.org/ http://www.epicsol.org/ Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!)

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Dual boot woes
by Simon Jude 15 Jun '06

15 Jun '06

Hello, Please can I pick peoples brains?! I've managed to kill off my MBR during a linux install on a machine with XP on it. I initially installed Fedora and got Grub error 17 messages on bootup. I've since installed Suse10 on it but get the same problem (error 18 this time). Evidently I should be able to install lilo from suse but this gives errors. I've also tried the XP recovery disk to fix the mbr but it doesn't recognise my password (a normal user with admin privilages). Can anybody possibly suggest a fix to this?! Thanks Simon

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