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RE: clug List proposal (admin)
by Ian Wells 05 Nov '01

05 Nov '01

> I was told that the CLUG listserver maintainer is long gone, > however. So > changes to CLUG are probably not advisable / impossible. It's majordomo. Youcan control it remotely, but nobbing over the global settings isn't possible. > Keeping UseNet discipline and self-moderation is probably > best for clug - > just be (self) disciplined about threads? An FAQ can be > supported if the > anarchy / total freedom approach breaks down irretrievably. I'd say - very small mailing lists don't work so well because no-one has the information others need - medium sized mailing lists work well, because the information's available and people pay attention to conversations they're not actively participating in, so that the same questions aren't repeated over and over; and - in big mailing lists, there's too much noise to continually pay attention, which means that people with answers give up replying to questions and others don't spot the useful information in the flow of traffic, leading to the same things being asked over and over. Given Wells's theorem of mailing lists, I think that a CLUG+ALUG list should be about the right size to get useful discussions going and that (judging by the volume of technical traffic, as opposed to 'anyone coming out this Sunday') the CLUG list alone isn't quite big enough. -- Ian.

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RE: clug Re: [Alug] "VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed for nmbd"
by Ian Wells 05 Nov '01

05 Nov '01

> John Fremlin: > > MJ Ray <markj(a)cloaked.freeserve.co.uk> writes: > > > Hold AltGr and SysRq, then tap out s u u b (sync, > unmount, unmount, boot) > > You should sync after umount too or else you'll probably > get spurious > > fscks on boot (it needs to write a clean umount flag to the > superblock) > > Surely a sync won't do anything to a read-only disk? (OK, I > lied: "u" is > actually remount-read-only.) Depends whether a remount-read-only flushes out the 'file system clean' bit when it's done at this level, or whether the change waits for the next sync, which is presumably the concern. Aiui a normal remount/umount wouldn't return until the flush is complete, but this method is far from normal.

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Re: [Alug] List proposal (admin)
by MJ Ray 05 Nov '01

05 Nov '01

James wrote: > A nice idea. Same complaint here: I post using a number of source addresses, > and I'm certainly not going to go through the @rse ache of subscribing > multiple addresses to ALUG just to workaround dumb moderating software. Well, sod you. These CLUG people seem to have an aversion to trimming quotes and their mailserver is still not accepting my subscription request, so maybe they deserve to be held. :^) Seriously, there are reasons why the ALUG lists are set up in the way they are. Bitter experience is one of them and I think the issues around them have been talked to death on-list, so the archives might make interesting searching. > When a friendly human admin has time to moderate, that's bearable. I don't > object to moderated lists, when there is a good reason to use that approach. This list is not moderated, but posts by unknown addresses and ones which match certain other common features of past spams are held for one of the (currently three) list admins to take a look at before they are allowed through. > I was told that the CLUG listserver maintainer is long gone, however. So > changes to CLUG are probably not advisable / impossible. One possible change is to move the CLUG list to more useful location. > Nor should anyone get the hump at ALUG over criticism - let it be > constructive. Can you tune the moderation? Yes, but the current settings seem optimal. > Keeping UseNet discipline and self-moderation is probably best for clug - > just be (self) disciplined about threads? An FAQ can be supported if the > anarchy / total freedom approach breaks down irretrievably. The ALUG FAQ is http://www.alug.org.uk/articles/2001a/alugfaq.html > Its _all_ about Linux - innit! Indeed. Our areas overlap and I always hoped our activities would overlap at some point. It's nice to see it starting to happen. -- MJR

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RE: clug Re: [Alug] "VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed for nmbd"
by Ian Wells 05 Nov '01

05 Nov '01

Might I suggest that we set up a joint mailing list for techie discussions, and then have separate ones for clug/alug meetings and other geographically-based discussions? -- Ian (who keeps getting 'message moderated' messages from the alug list)

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"VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed for nmbd"
by Jenny_Hopkins＠toby-churchill.com 05 Nov '01

05 Nov '01

This lovely message was waiting to greet me on all consoles of my debian box when i came in to work this morning, and I can't telnet in. A search on google says: >Upgrade to 2.2.19 , that should fix the problem. It's a bug in the >releases between 2.2.14 and 2.2.19, afaik. Has anyone heard of this before? I'm using kernel 2.2.18pre 21, activity on box over weekend should have been minimal apart from backups running. And what were those keys that try to reboot cleanly again? (not the ctl-alt-del) (Hope it isn't going to be one of "those" days....) Nice to meet so many folk yesterday. Jenny.

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RE: clug Ctrl-Alt-SysRq Enabling
by Ian Wells 05 Nov '01

05 Nov '01

> Ian Wells wrote: > > > > < Snipped > > > > > > Incidentally, when I've used SysRq I've found it needed > enabling with an > > echo 1 >/proc/sys/kernel/sysrq on boot. Do it. It's > invaluable when your > > machine goes tits up. > > < Snipped > > > Thanks Ian > > That gets my tip of the day vote! Just checked and found > that my Eridani > Linux 6.3 systems ( Redhat 6.2 update based ) all have that unset. > > Presumably it will be the same story for other default RedHat systems. > > One more change to default init that's highly recommended... It's also not there by default in Redhats to 7.1 (not tried 7.2), although RH-default kernels have sysrq compiled in. Strange. Dunno whether there's a nice way of turning it on; we just bodged up an init script for it.

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RedHat7.2 memory shortage?
by Glen Tyler 05 Nov '01

05 Nov '01

Hi everyone, I'm just starting migration, and was impressed enough with what I'd seen of an old copy of RedHat 6.0 to install RedHat 7.2 on my machine. Its a P133 with 64MB, and 4.0GB hard drive. While I'm impressed with all the eversocool features of this (desktop) install, it has slowed the system to a crawl. Everything seems to take ages to load and respond, and trying to do anything more than just move the mouse about or type in Kword seems to involve a huge amount of thrashing of the hard disc (the swap space being utilised?). I've noticed that balsa as and email client and Galeon as a web browser seem faster than Mozilla - is there a suite of 'lighter' programs that I should choose? Any recommendations? Glen

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Re: clug "VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed for nmbd"
by Jenny_Hopkins＠toby-churchill.com 05 Nov '01

05 Nov '01

Tom Huckstep wrote: >Just to clarify, I didn't get nmdb in my error messages, just what >ever happened to be running at the time, e.g. `VM: >do_try_to_free_pages failed for mozilla', particularly when running >memory hungry programs. That would make sense - nmbd would have been trying to allow NTserver to access the linux box to copy my backup file to its backup tape. But my backup file was getting its proverbial knickers in a twist. Thanks all. Jenny.

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Re: clug "VM: do_try_to_free_pages failed for nmbd"
by Jenny_Hopkins＠toby-churchill.com 05 Nov '01

05 Nov '01

Martin Oldfield wrote: >The problem stems from the machine running out of memory, so it's >probably unrelated to nmbd. I'd look at the time you saw the error, >and then look for cron jobs running just before that time. Groan. Thanks Martin, I had set a cron job for * 21 * * *. Stupid thing to do, but even more stupid as it is the 2nd time I've done that. Some people *never* learn....... ;-) Jenny.

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Neill Newman 05 Nov '01

05 Nov '01

This is the automated ALUG IRC meeting reminder sent to remind you that there is an IRC meeting tonight (Monday) at 8.00pm. The meeting takes place on the irc server irc.openprojects.net in the #alug channel, you can take a look at www.openprojects.net to get more info on the openprojects network. Most IRC clients should allow you to get there with the commands "/server uk.openprojects.net" or "/server eu.openprojects.net" and "/join #alug". Popular IRC clients include tkirc, bitchx, xchat 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://freshmeat.net/ http://www.epicsol.org/ Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!)

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