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Re: [Alug] Your reply
by MJ Ray 19 Mar '01

19 Mar '01

Jenny_Hopkins(a)toby-churchill.com writes: > I've been thinking about this reply for a day or two. I was actually bit > shocked by it. With all respect to the guys who run the show, I wonder if > you mean to be so elitist? [...] Whoa whoa whoa! It's not intended to be elitist, it's just a self-defence mechanism. Indeed, the point I was trying to make was that OK, ALUG is informal, but we can't let anything go. Security announcements are blatantly best done elsewhere, else malicious types could put out alerts that most of us don't have the knowledge to check and we stop getting any useful work done. There are countless other mailing lists for security announcements. It would be a shame if this list becomes another one and kills our user group in the process. I doubt anyone wants that. Similarly job ads: from some discussions, I'd suggest either adopting Adam's proposal of only allowing a few people to vet and post job ads, to point people to some jobs site or other, or to set up an alug-jobs mailing list. It's probably time to compile a list "Charter" or FAQ, pointing people towards other more appropriate resources for common requirements like good security alerts. Anyone able to help on this? > PS. I am running 6.2 and had no idea that patches were needed. Read The Fine Manuals. You should *always* follow security announcements, regardless of distribution, operating system, etc. All computers are insecure, except when switched off and locked away. Perhaps a "Securing Linux" talk or two at the next meeting? Any takers? Once again, I'm sorry if I upset or intimidated anyone. That wasn't my intention at all. Please don't take it as such. Like the job ads, there's a real danger we could drown in real (new and old) and fake security alerts, which would kill this list. I just didn't want that to happen. The open atmosphere on here is something I love, but sometimes a little note of caution has to be sounded. Sorry for making it a bit loud this time. -- MJR

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irc meeting reminder
by Adam Bower 19 Mar '01

19 Mar '01

Hi People, I havn't put it in cron yet, but here is my sample text for the meeting reminder if there is anything wrong or obviously or broken in this please let me know so I can correct it. Adam 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. Popular irc clients include tkirc, bitchx, xchat and ircII on Unix, and Mirc under windows. Here are some links to help you get started with irc. Unix http://www.bitchx.com http://www.xchat.org http://freshmeat.net Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!) -- Adam Bower, <abower(a)zeus.com> Tel: +44 1223 525000 System Administrator Fax: +44 1223 525100 Zeus Technology Ltd http://www.zeus.com Zeus House, Cowley Road Cambridge CB4 0ZT England

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Sun Sparcstation
by Chris Allen 18 Mar '01

18 Mar '01

Thanks for the many requests for the SparcStation. The first to reply was Andrew Savory - sorry to everyone else who requested it.. Amazingly I offered this machine to our local school, together with help and advice on setting it up, etc, and they weren't interested. It wasn't windows compatible!!

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ALUG-IRC 8pm tonight (Monday)
by MJ Ray 16 Mar '01

16 Mar '01

ALUG-IRC meetings are held Monday evenings at 8pm on eu.openprojects.net channel #alug ... see you there! (So who said they'd put this email in a crontab?)

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Re: [Alug] who's clever with bash scripts?
by MJ Ray 15 Mar '01

15 Mar '01

bsamuels(a)datamansys.co.uk writes: > I copied this from a posting I saw on a newsgroup and it works > perfectly well when run by root from the command line. However if I > set it up to be run as a root cron job it doesn't work as it should. [...] > Can anyone offer advice as to why this should be happening? Almost certainly a path problem, I would expect. While ifconfig may be in root's default path, cron tends to run with a different environment to minimise security problems. Try giving full path of things like ifconfig and see what happens. -- MJR

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who's clever with bash scripts?
by bsamuels＠datamansys.co.uk 15 Mar '01

15 Mar '01

I have created a script as under: #!/bin/sh # Start the connection pon # Wait until the connection is made until ifconfig ppp0 | grep "inet addr" > /dev/null; do sleep 1; done; # Get the mail and then poff. Using ; is better than && because # fetchmail exits with an error if it doesn't get any mail. fetchmail -d0 > /dev/null ; poff I copied this from a posting I saw on a newsgroup and it works perfectly well when run by root from the command line. However if I set it up to be run as a root cron job it doesn't work as it should. After the script has been started by cron I see an entry for the script and an entry for 'sleep 1' in the list of running processes. If I run ifconfig ppp0 at this time I see a line starting 'inet addr' but the 'until' loop never exits. Can anyone offer advice as to why this should be happening? Barry Samuels

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Software for Sunday
by Adam Bower 15 Mar '01

15 Mar '01

Hi People, I have just placed an order with the linux emporium http://www.linuxemporium.co.uk for Debian 2.2r2 and a copy of John's Latest and Greatest CD. If you want a CD-R copy of any of the above could you let me know now so I can go and buy a spindle of CD-Rs and get burning (assuming that John get me the cd's to me before Sunday). If you want a copy of Debian please let me know which cd's you want i.e. only the 1st or all the binary cd's or all of them including the source. I will have to ask for the price of the blank CD-R's (or you can bribe me with old computer hardware or chocolate!). Also if anyone has a copy of partition magic could they please bring it on Sunday? we can then do an install on a Transmeta based laptop (Sony VAIO C1VE) if you do. thanks Adam

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Add one to the event distribution list
by MJ Ray 15 Mar '01

15 Mar '01

Is it worth emailing meeting announcements to lwn(a)lwn.net? Too late for this time, sadly. -- MJR

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[Various] Digested Articles
by MJ Ray 13 Mar '01

13 Mar '01

Spam4u... the second one is the most interesting to me. See what you think. MJR Topics: Open Source XML Programming Tutorial (fwd) Linux UK re-re-relaunch Linux@work 2001 Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2001 14:00:34 -0500 From: Steve Litt <slitt(a)the-oasis.net> Reply-To: slitt(a)troubleshooters.com Subject: Open Source XML Programming Tutorial Hi Mark, could you please post this to the mailing list of British Linux User Groups Homepage? Thanks. SteveT Hi all, Because most XML books and websites force the you to recite Microsoft incantations, I wrote an all Open Source XML programming tutorial using Linux and Xerces-Java from Apache Software Foundation. It thoroughly covers coding of DOM, SAX, and DTD's. http://www.troubleshooters.com/tpromag/200103/200103.htm Enjoy! SteveT Steve Litt Member: Linux Enthusiasts and Professionals of Central Florida (LEAP-CF) Webmaster, Troubleshooters.Com http://www.troubleshooters.com slitt(a)troubleshooters.com Date: 13 Mar 2001 17:37:21 +0000 From: Denny <denny(a)concretecow.com> Subject: Linux UK re-re-relaunch Linux UK will be attempting its annual tradition of rising from the ashes on April 1st, after the resignation of Jono as project leader. It may or may not relaunch under a different name and/or on a different domain, given the loss of interest and other problems generated by the continuing DNS issues. It will definitely do so with a different focus, as UK specific Linux news is not plentiful enough to sustain a website that people will want to read. The idea for the future is to have plenty of locally held content, articles about open source software and issues, written specifically for the site or republished there. While news will still have a place on the site, it will no longer be the only thing the site has to offer. If you want to be part of this relaunch process, please attend the IRC meeting occurring Thursday at 8pm (if you can't make it to this meeting, please email me to indicate your interest and suggest days/times that you could attend an IRC meeting). /server irc.openprojects.net /join #linuxuk Regards, Denny PS - I am also on IRC now if you would like to talk to me immediately. Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 23:36:52 +0100 From: Roberto Zicari <zicari(a)ltt.de> Subject: Linux@work 2001 Linux@work in 12 cities in Europe in 2001. For the third year, LogOn Technology Transfer will be organizing a series of Linux events throughout Europe called Linux@work. These 1-day, city-to-city events, will take place in 12 European venues in 2001. Linux@Work is unique because it is the only series of free business-to-business Linux events designed to unite the leaders in the Linux community with European IS professionals. More than 2,500 visitors attended the 2000 event series - triple that of 1999. The Linux@work schedule for 2001: Copenhagen May 8, 2001 Oslo May 9, 2001 Stockholm May 10, 2001 Helsinki May 11, 2001 Frankfurt May 15, 2001 Zurich May 16, 2001 Milan May 17, 2001 Vienna May 18, 2001 London June 12, 2001 Paris June 13, 2001 Brussels June 14, 2001 Amsterdam June 15, 2001 Bookmark: http://www.ltt.de/linux_at_work.2001/ Best Regards Roberto Zicari -- MJR

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Re: [Alug] IRQ's and hardware issues
by MJ Ray 10 Mar '01

10 Mar '01

David Freeman <david_freeman(a)rocketmail.com> writes: > > > 1) How do I get a listing of the boot messages under Peanut liniux? > > dmesg? > Where will I find this? /bin/dmesg ... hopefully they haven't removed it in Peanut Linux. > Whats lspci? Part of the pciutils. "man lspci" may help. Or look at the PCI or Plug-and-play HOWTOs... I've not had to use these yet myself. http://webdocs.essex.ac.uk/LDP/HOWTO/PCI-HOWTO.html and http://webdocs.essex.ac.uk/LDP/HOWTO/Plug-and-Play-HOWTO.html HTH. cc'd to alug mailing list. -- MJR

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