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/var/log/lastlog
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 30 Oct '05

30 Oct '05

Hi Folks, It's spring-clean time again ... Been recovering disk space occupied by stuff I don't really want to know about. In particular, /var/log/lastlog is 19MB in size, but the output of 'lastlog' is 2225 bytes on 35 lines, telling me *ALL About the Very Last Time Each User Logged In*.[1] Most of these are, of course "pseudo" users like bin daemon adm lp sync shutdown halt mail news uucp operator games gopher ftp rpm vcsa nscd sshd rpc rpcuser nfsnobody mailnull smmsp pcap apache xfs named ntp gdm who never log in anyway! So that's 19136220/35 = 546749 bytes or half a MB for each "user", and from inspection nearly all of that is bytes with value "00"! (Indeed it gzips down to 18668 bytes, i.e. 1/1000). Now I can use an extra 19MB of space on that partition (whose free space varies from near-0 to about 400MB depending on what I'm up to), so I'm feeling mean about 19MB devoted to totally boring info. Hence I'm wondering (a) what's the best way to suppress this lastlog stuff; (b) would it traumatise the system to suppress it? Thanks for any comments! Best wishes to all, Ted. [1]. E.g. ftp **Never logged in** ted pts/12 brandy Sun Oct 30 10:09:37 +0000 2005 -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 30-Oct-05 Time: 10:41:23 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Penguins
by Anthony Anson 30 Oct '05

30 Oct '05

It has been reported that penguins can get avian 'flu as well: Now read on - nicked from a newsgroup: H5N1 BIRD FLU BELIEVED TO BE FIRST VIRUS UNABLE TO SPREAD THROUGH MICROSOFT OUTLOOK Researchers Shocked to Finally Find Virus That Email App Doesn't Like Atlanta, Ga. Scientists at the Center for Disease Control and Symantec's AntiVirus Research Center today confirmed that H5N1 bird flu cannot be spread by Microsoft's Outlook email application, believed to be the first time the program has ever failed to propagate a major virus. "Frankly, we've never heard of a virus that couldn't spread through Microsoft Outlook, so our findings were, to say the least, unexpected," said Clive Sarnow, director of the CDC's infectious disease unit. The study was immediately hailed by British officials, who said it will save millions of pounds. "Up until now we have, quite naturally, assumed that bird flu was spread by Microsoft Outlook," said Sir Liam Donaldson, Britain's Chief Medical Officer. "By eliminating it, we can focus our resources elsewhere." However, researchers in Romania, where bird flu has recently appeared, said they are not yet prepared to disqualify Outlook, which has been the progenitor of viruses such as "I Love You," "Bubbleboy," "Anna Kournikova," and "Naked Wife," to name but a few. Said Andrei Niculescu, director of the Molecular Virology Lab at Bucharest University: "It's not that we don't trust the research, it's just that as scientists, we are trained to be sceptical of any finding that flies in the face of established truth. And this one flies in the face like a blind drunk sparrow." Executives at Microsoft, meanwhile, were equally sceptical, insisting that Outlook's patented Virus Transfer Protocol (VTP) has proven virtually pervious to any virus. The company, however, will issue a free VTP patch if it turns out the application is not vulnerable to bird flu. Such an admission would be embarrassing for the software giant, but Symantec virologist Ariel Kologne insisted that no one is more humiliated by the study than she is. "Only last week, I had a reporter ask if the bird flu spreads through Microsoft Outlook, and I told him, 'Doesn't everything?'" she recalled. "Who would've thought?" -- Tony http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/hi-fi/

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Southern kit meet - any takers?
by Chris Green 28 Oct '05

28 Oct '05

It was suggested a little while ago that we might have a 'southern' kit meet, somewhere near Ipswich for example. Is there much support for this idea? E.g. how many people would actually come? Assuming that there aren't 500 people coming I could host it if the location was deemed suitable. I'm just about equidistant from Ipswich, Felixstowe and Woodbridge and very easy to get to from the A14, as long as you don't mind narrow lanes. Personally I'd prefer an evening rather than week-end as daylight is a precious resource needed for working outside. -- Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk) "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

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RE: [ALUG] PHP / MySQL web developer Job
by Keith Watson 28 Oct '05

28 Oct '05

> From: MJ Ray Sent: 28 October 2005 14:19 > > David Reynolds <david(a)reynoldsfamily.org.uk> > > I've been asked to post this job application here, in case anyone is > > interested: > > Please send job adverts to linuxjobs. You can find it at > http://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/linuxjobs > or linked from the FAQ. As a list subscriber I am quite happy for local people to post job vacancies for linux related local jobs here. Of course it's in their own interest for them to cross post to linuxjobs also. Regards, Keith ____________ All that is gold does not glitter; nor all those that wander are lost. - J.R.R. Tolkien

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RE: [ALUG] Penguins
by Keith Watson 28 Oct '05

28 Oct '05

> From: Anthony Anson > > The message > <63F7A21F1CA18143AFDBF28E2A7D6BBA02667C7D(a)endor.kewill-europe.com> > from "Keith Watson" <keith.watson(a)kewill.com> contains these words: > > > I definitely would not mix Lemsip and whiskey. Lemsip and brandy is > > better but I would recommend that you leave off the Lemsip and just > > keep taking the brandy (preferably French and over 10 years old :o). > > Expensive, yes, but after the 3rd glass who cares!! > > Make the first two glasses 50 year old Grand Armagnac, after > that you can guzzle cheapo - you'll hardly know the difference. > I'll drink to that! :o) Regards, Keith ____________ Everything that can be invented already has been. - This statement was released in 1899 by the U.S. Patent Office. - If these 'experts' ran the world we would still be sitting in the dark.

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RE: [ALUG] Penguins
by Keith Watson 28 Oct '05

28 Oct '05

> From: Wayne Stallwood Sent: 27 October 2005 18:48 > > (Before anyone asks...no I don't have bird flu, I have Man > Flu which is of course at least a thousand times worse) > I doubt that birds see it that way! :o) > On a related note, do you think it is safe to mix lemsip and Whisky ? > Doesn't specifically say you can't on the packet....or am I > better of drinking one after the other ? > I definitely would not mix Lemsip and whiskey. Lemsip and brandy is better but I would recommend that you leave off the Lemsip and just keep taking the brandy (preferably French and over 10 years old :o). Expensive, yes, but after the 3rd glass who cares!! Regards, Keith ____________ Knowledge is learning something every day. - Wisdom is letting go of something every day. - Zen Saying

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anyone got a kit-meet report?
by Nick Atkins 28 Oct '05

28 Oct '05

Would anyone be able to report on how successful your kit-meet was? I'd love to have made it but couldn't. I'd be interested to know how it went, how many turned up, how long was spent, were there any interesting moments where kit was saved from the trash can, any new inventions take flight, did you enjoy it, what would you do differently next time? etc. etc. I have never done anything like this before and it struck me that if you were meeting quite late then it would be midnight before you knew it, but then maybe you worked through the night? I very much look forward to any contributions, Nick Atkins, South Norfolk

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RE: Routing puzzle [solved]
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 27 Oct '05

27 Oct '05

Thanks to a number of people -- Bob Franklin, Geoff ("IT"), Simon Hobson, John Logsdon (also several private talks), on linux-users; Adam Allen, Guy Eastwood, Jim Rippon, MJ Ray, Wayne Stallwood, "Ten", Maz Walker, Keith Watson, on ALUG; it is now done! As more than a few pointed out, the trick (and I hope this solution will be useful to others in the same situation) is that the ADSL router needs to know how to talk back to the originating internal network. So it needs to have a static route to this configured on the router itself. To make it explicit: A: 192.168.0.1 eth0 default gateway -> C = 192.168.0.6 B: 192.168.0.7 eth0 default gateway -> C = 192.168.0.6 C: 192.168.0.6 eth0 default gateway -> ADSL = 192.168.1.1 C: 192.168.1.3 eth1 ADSL: Own address = 192.168.1.1, expects to be talking to 192.168.1.3 Now the following is at least partially specific to the BT Voyager 205 ADSL Router, since it refers to details of its Web interface config pages accessed via http://192.168.1.1 1. Go into "Advanced" & login as administrator 2. Go to "IP Routing" -> "IP Route" and then you see an "IP Address Table" (slightly pruned). Destn Netmask NextHop IFName RtType RtOrigin 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 62.3.82.17 ppp-0 Indirect Dynamic 62.3.82.17 255.255.255.255 xx.yy.zz.pqr ppp-0 Direct Dynamic xx.yy.zz.pqr 255.255.255.255 127.0.0.1 lo-0 Direct Dynamic 127.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 127.0.0.1 lo-0 Direct Dynamic 192.168.1.0 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1 eth-0 Direct Dynamic 192.168.1.1 255.255.255.255 127.0.0.1 lo-0 Direct Dynamic 192.168.1.2 255.255.255.255 127.0.0.1 lo-0 Direct Dynamic 212.23.3.11 255.255.255.255 62.3.82.17 ppp-0 Indirect Dynamic 212.23.6.35 255.255.255.255 62.3.82.17 ppp-0 Indirect Dynamic (where "xx.yy.zz.pqr" is my "public" Zen IP addressi, and 62.3.82.17 is Zen's gateway for this connection. The "212..." addresses are Zen nameservers.) 192.168.1.1 is the router's internal ethernet interface, and 192.168.1.2 is its USB interface. It looks to 192.168.1.{3,4,5,...} for outside connections via ETH/USB and in fact I set up C's eth1 to be 192.168.1.3 which works fine. So as we can see there is of course nothing to with with 192.168.0.0 in there. At this stage there is an "Add" button at the bottom which brings up a form for entering the details of a new route. So I entered "192.168.0.0" for Destinatiom, left "255.255.255.0" as it was for the Netmask, and entered "192.158.1.3" (the address of eth1 as seen from machine C) as the "Gateway/NextHop". This resulted in the following line: 192.168.0.0 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.3 eth-0 Indirect Local appearing in the abpve table, just above the "192.168.1.0" line. Click "Apply" and then "Close" on the subsequent window, and it's done! Thanks to all who joined in, and get me pointingin the right direction. Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 27-Oct-05 Time: 11:50:41 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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RE: [ALUG] Routing puzzle
by Keith Watson 27 Oct '05

27 Oct '05

Hi Ted, seems to me that you need to end up with a routing table on A or C that looks like this; Routing table for C = 192.168.0.7 (similar for A = 192.168.0.1): ---------------------------------------------------------------- Destination Gateway Genmask Flags (blah) Iface 127.0.0.0 * 255.0.0.0 U (blah) lo 192.168.0.0 * 255.255.255.0 U (blah) eth0 192.168.1.1 192.168.0.6 255.255.255.0 UG (blah) eth0 <====== new entry default 192.168.0.6 0.0.0.0 UG (blah) eth0 so that A & C know to route everything for 192.168.1.1 via B (192.168.0.6) (though I would have thought that the default entry would pick this up!!) so try something like route add 192.168.1.1 gw 192.168.0.6 i.e. explicitly tell the box that traffic for 192.168.1.1 is to be routed via B. Regards, Keith ____________ Old CM people never die, they just get archived and can be reproduced at any time.

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Routing puzzle
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 27 Oct '05

27 Oct '05

Hi Folks, I have a bit of a conundrum. Maybe there's just some simple trick I'm missing. Sorry for the lengthy background below! I've been happily running a dialup connection to the outside world on my 3-4 machine home LAN. In this, one machine has the modem and does the dialup, and the others have a default route which points to that machine. This has no default route in general, but when kppp completes the dialup connection it installs one via ppp0, and deletes it when kppp closes down. This works fine: all the other machines can find any address outside when this machine has its default ppp0 route up. Now I finally have ADSL broadband as well. This connects via a Voyager 205 ADSL modem. This has IP address 192.168.1.1. Here the situation is that, if I put a second NIC in any of the machines as eth1, give it IP address 192.168.1.3 (since this is the first in line of IP addresses which the modem gives out) and also manually install a default route to the net 192.168.1.0 via eth1, then from that machine I can also readily access the outside world. However, I have not managed to configure the machines so as to route through the ADSL machine via its eth1 in a similar way to ppp0. Say machine C has the ADSL modem on eth1, and machines A, B and C are linked over a network on eth0 for each. The C can see the Net, while A and B can not. Here is the outline of the configuration. A 192.168.0.1 eth0 B 192.168.0.7 eth0 C 192.168.0.6 eth0 192.168.2.0 vmnet1 [bridging network for VMWare] 192.168.1.3 eth1 --> 192.168.1.1 [ADSL modem/router] xxx.yyy.x.w ppp0 [when dialled up, ISP's dynamic IP] The other side of the ADSL router gets a fixed IP from the ISP, but I never need to see this. Now for what happens when not using ADSL, just dialup. [1] 'route' for A gives ----------------------- 192.168.0.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 555 eth0 loopback * 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 11 lo default C 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 19 eth0 [2] 'route for B gives ---------------------- 192.168.0.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0 127.0.0.0 * 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo default Co 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 19 eth0 [3] 'route' for C, when not dialled up, gives --------------------------------------------- Destination Gateway Genmask Flags ... Iface 192.168.2.0 * 255.255.255.0 U ... vmnet1 192.168.1.0 * 255.255.255.0 U ... eth1 192.168.0.0 * 255.255.255.0 U ... eth0 [4] and, when C has dialled up ------------------------------ imsnet-cl10-hg1 * 255.255.255.255 UH ... ppp0 192.168.2.0 * 255.255.255.0 U ... vmnet1 192.168.1.0 * 255.255.255.0 U ... eth1 192.168.0.0 * 255.255.255.0 U ... eth0 default msnet-cl10-hg1 0. 0. 0.0 UG ... ppp0 In this configuration, as described above, all three machines can reach the Net without problems, routing through ppp0 on C. Now, with the ADSL router in place on C, I make the change analagous to [3]->[4] above, by adding the route to the ADSL 192.168.1.1 and the default route to the same on eth1. But this does not work. While C has no problems seeing the net, beither A nor B can. I feel stumped here, but -- as I say -- there's undoubtedly something simple I;ve overlooked. Comments and suggestions most welcom! 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: 25-Oct-05 Time: 18:54:56 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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