Re: sleep on a low-usage NAS ?

[Tixy]

On Tue, 2022-12-13 at 08:39 +0800, jeremy ardley wrote:
[...]
> Ideally, I'd like it to go to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity, but 
> wake more or less instantly when a new smb connection is initiated.

Look at the -S option to the 'hdparm' command.

I find disks seem to occasionally forget their power settings, so I
reissue the command in my script that does some daily backup tasks.

[...]
> I need advice on what else I can do to keep the device with disks unspun 
> for most of the day, yet still be available almost immediately when 
> other clients on the LAN need some NAS services.
> 

It won't be 'immediate' as it takes time for the motor to get a disk
spinning at the correct speed, about 3 seconds for my 3 inch drives.

-- 
Tixy

Re: stopping mass surveillance

[Andy Smith]

Hello,

On Tue, Dec 13, 2022 at 01:06:10AM +0100, 
operation.privacyenforcem...@secure.mailbox.org wrote:
> I have an idea to stop mass surveillance, hamper it, make routing of traffic
> invisible. This is treated as impossible currently. Appreciate feedback.

Can't comment on something you haven't elaborated upon.

First step, explain why your idea is better than, say, Tor.

Cheers,
Andy

-- 
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

Re: t-bird vs filters to sort msgs

[David Wright]

On Mon 12 Dec 2022 at 14:11:38 (-0500), gene heskett wrote:
> There is a terrible echo in here, mbox is a pita I'd druther not have
> to deal with. Some of the screwups I've had are probably directly
> blamable on tbird using mbox for its database.

You don't have to, because mutt will handle mbox, mmdf, mh or maildir.

> I learn best in the reading room, reading a pdf, but debians version
> of mutt is html only,

You wrote this two hours after I posted the text version's
filename in my reply to your post further up this thread. Look:

  $ ls -l /usr/share/doc/mutt/manual.txt.gz
  -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 162988 Apr 23  2022 /usr/share/doc/mutt/manual.txt.gz

> how the heck do you print that?

  $ zcat /usr/share/doc/mutt/manual.txt.gz | paps --font='FreeMono 10' 
--left-margin=40 --top-margin=40 --paper "letter" | ps2pdf - - >| 
/tmp/mutt-manual.pdf
  $ 

or even

  $ zcat /usr/share/doc/mutt/manual.txt.gz | paps --font='FreeMono 14' 
--left-margin=40 --top-margin=40 --paper "letter" --landscape | ps2pdf - - >| 
/tmp/mutt-manual.pdf
  $ 

which would consume a little over seven quires.
But WV probably has sufficient trees.

Cheers,
David.

Re: multiple messages

[David Christensen]

On 12/11/22 22:50, John Conover wrote:

Charles Curley writes:

On Sun, 11 Dec 2022 10:59:02 -0800
David Christensen  wrote:


Thunderbird message duplication bugs have existed for several years.
My work-around is to periodically delete older messages and/or delete
duplicates in Junk, Trash, etc..


This is one place claws-mail would come in handy. It has a tool for
deleting duplicate messages.



Or, if you are filtering/sorting incoming email through procmail(1),
the References: header will contain a same ID for duplicate emails,
(which is derived from the Message-ID: header.)

Something like:

 :0 Wh :msgid.lock
 | formail -D $idcache_size msgid.cache

in ~/.procmailrc will eliminate a duplicate email.



Interesting.  But MIME and UTF support seem to be lacking:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procmail#Criticism


David

Re: multiple messages

[David Christensen]

On 12/11/22 20:07, Charles Curley wrote:

On Sun, 11 Dec 2022 10:59:02 -0800
David Christensen  wrote:


Thunderbird message duplication bugs have existed for several years.
My work-around is to periodically delete older messages and/or delete
duplicates in Junk, Trash, etc..


This is one place claws-mail would come in handy. It has a tool for
deleting duplicate messages.



Apparently, so does Thunderbird:

https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/removedupes/


David

sleep on a low-usage NAS ?

[jeremy ardley]

I have just converted a qnap TS-212 NAS from the vendor software to a 
stock Debian 10. (Armel)


I notice immediately that the NAS never spins down its disks when idle - 
as it used to with the vendor software.


The NAS is used maybe once per day to take backups via smb.

Ideally, I'd like it to go to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity, but 
wake more or less instantly when a new smb connection is initiated.


Less ideal would be to have some process that wakes it for specific time 
periods.


Checking the logs I see an hourly cron process is running, but not much 
else. I'm fine with installing a ramdisk for syslog if required.


I need advice on what else I can do to keep the device with disks unspun 
for most of the day, yet still be available almost immediately when 
other clients on the LAN need some NAS services.


--
Jeremy

stopping mass surveillance

[operation . privacyenforcement]

Hello,

I am using Debian since lots of years.
I have an idea to stop mass surveillance, hamper it, make routing of 
traffic invisible. This is treated as impossible currently. Appreciate 
feedback.


operation privacyenforcement

Re: multiple messages

[Martin Smith]

On 12/12/2022 03:24, David Wright wrote:

On Sun 11 Dec 2022 at 17:52:56 (+), Martin Smith wrote:

I am getting multiple messages, all with the same time and date, has
my thunderbird gone belly up or is anyone else seeing it

this one I have about 50: Re: e-mail with line in body beginning with "From"

and this one:  10/12/2022, 14:49
Re: Monitor traffic on a port

The specific email that you mentioned is at
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2022/12/msg00262.html
and shouldn't cause any trouble. But it does quote a couple
of header fields from an earlier post, and that may be a clue
to your underlying problem, but not to its immediate cause.

I suggest you read the thread (about a dozen posts) starting at
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2022/12/msg00250.html
and particularly messages #252 and #269. These discuss
a /possible/ cause of your reported symptoms—you've quoted
the topic of the thread at the top of your post.

You need to determine whether "getting multiple messages"
means that you are seeing multiple displays of the same
message, or the display of local duplicates of one or two
messages, or actual newly arriving copies of these same
messages. Knowing which of these is occurring will help
trace the source.

I think it's an unlikely coincidence that these messages
(particularly if the duplicates are all in the set 252/262/269)
would just happen to be the ones causing a random Tbird
duplication bug to trigger. The problem could lie further
up the chain of processes that deliver the emails.

BTW are you running any filters, like procmail etc?

Cheers,
David.


well thanks for all the suggestions, I am just using thunderbird and 
having discussed it with my mail provider I changed the account from pop 
to imap and now its looking fine, it seems to have been a random 
thunderbird bug, it seems to have been a random thunderbird bug


--

Martin

Re: t-bird vs filters to sort msgs

[gene heskett]

On 12/12/22 13:22, Roy J. Tellason, Sr. wrote:

On Sunday 11 December 2022 09:51:05 am gene heskett wrote:

Greetings all;

Nov 22 is the last time that about half my filters stopped working. I
have recreated 3 or 4, putting them at the top of filter list displayed,
but they don't work either.

Is it time to learn a new to me but more stable emailer, like
alpine or such?

The error log claims the messages were properly sorted, but the targeted
local folder remains empty and the message remains in the inbox. Most of
the errors it does log are swahili to me.

Cheers, Gene Heskett.


Gene,

I prefer the maildir rather than mbox format,  which narrows my choices 
somewhat.  What I ended up doing was running virtualbox with a rather early 
version of Slackware in there,  with the correspondingly early version of KDE,  
and use kmail to do all of my mail.  Filters are rather extensive,  since I 
keep on adding spammers to that list,  and haven't given me any trouble,  so 
far.

There is a terrible echo in here, mbox is a pita I'd druther not have to 
deal with. Some of the screwups I've had are probably directly blamable 
on tbird using mbox for its database. One alpha hit on one bit of a 75 
meg mbox file and the whole thing is un-repairable. How that ever got 
past even 3rd grade grammer school checking is beyond me.


A year ago when all this aggravation started, I gave the new kmail a 
try, but it destroyed its database about weekly, so that experiment was 
terminated, with prejudice after about 3 weeks.


I learn best in the reading room, reading a pdf, but debians version of 
mutt is html only, how the heck do you print that? No one has succeeded 
in reformatting that into fixed length lines for a printer that doesn't 
leave whole paragraphs out of what it sent to the printer. More 
aggravation...  I'll see if ddg can spit out a place to get the pdf.


Thank you to another fan of R.A.H.

Cheers, Gene Heskett.
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
 - Louis D. Brandeis
Genes Web page 

Re: t-bird vs filters to sort msgs

[Gökşin Akdeniz]

12.12.2022 01:16 tarihinde gene heskett yazdı:



local Address of log files?



For filter logs, it is in that dialog box which user defines filter 
rules and there exists a button for viewing for logs.


Simply click and copy & paste all entries. Good news is it is in human 
readable format which is in other words: The same language which you 
selected at install.





OpenPGP_0x648AAD2AAA3BAD5F_and_old_rev.asc
Description: OpenPGP public key


OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature

Re: Fwd: Xen backup and restore

[Andy Smith]

Hello,

On Mon, Dec 12, 2022 at 05:42:21PM +0100, Toth Zoltan wrote:
> I have operated DomU system and other people operated IOT-gateway.
> I would like create snapshot every day. If they missconfigure
> something on IOT-gateway I would like  restore from saved snapshot the
> whole system..

So I think you're saying that you operate the dom0, some other
people operate a domU that is an IOT gateway, and you want to be
able to restore the storage of that.

You didn't answer my question about virtualisation type (PV, PVH or
HVM) but that probably doesn't make a difference.

The "save" and "restore" subcommands of the "xl" command save a
memory image. You might use that for live migrating a VM between
hosts (if you have some way of making the storage available at the
same path), but that doesn't sound like what you are looking for
here. I'm going to assume that when you restore the storage of a
domU you don't care if you have to reboot it.

Pretty much your only options are similar to if you weren't using
Xen. Just treat the domU as a machine by itself.

You're using LVM so you could use LVM snapshots. Snapshot the LV(s)
that the domU uses, copy the snapshot to a file on your backup
system, delete the snapshot. If you ever need to restore, just cat
the image file back over the LV device.

You can't really use LVM to keep many rolling snapshots, because
there is a performance penalty for each snapshot that exists. Clasic
LVM snapshots are meant to be short-lived. If you can reconfigure
things to use LVM thin snapshots then that would be more feasible.
Obviously you can instead use a filesystem inside the domU that is
amenable to snapshots like btrfs or zfs.

There are still some downsides of the LVM snapshot approach. Running
daemons inside the domU will have some data in their memory that is
not persisted to disk, so won't be captured by the LVM snapshot.
Competent software shouldn't corrupt anything, but it's something to
be aware of. The best way to backup most relational databases, for
example, is to dump (or replicate) them out and backup the dump.
That's no different when the DBMS is inside a virtual machine.

You'll also find that the image file you make from a snapshot is as
large as the block device, even when not all of it is used. e.g. a
100GiB LV with 100KiB of data on it will produce a 100GiB file if
you did cat /dev/yourvg/your_snapshot_lv > backup_image. There's
various things you could do to mitigate this such as piping it
through a compressor first; the "nothing" will compress well! It may
also be possible to script something that shrinks all the
filesystems in a disk image to as small as they can be for their
contents. Ultimately it's a problem of not using filesystem-aware
methods.

All of these LVM tricks work the same as if there were no hypervisor
involved. I'm guessing you were instead looking for some
Xen-specific feature that will make backups easier, but there isn't
anything like that I'm afraid.

On the theme of treating the domU just like a regular bare metal
host, you can use normal backup software like borgbackup, restic,
amanda, etc. These aren't really designed for restoring a complete
image of a system though, more like backing up and restoring data.

In summary, storing images of LVM snapshots is I think going to be the most
trivial thing to restore, but has significant challenges in
efficiently storing them. Using btrfs or zfs inside the domUs will
make for easy snapshot-based backups that can be easily restored,
but only for the things that are actually in those filesystems.

Personally I define systems with Ansible and backup data using a
normal system backup tool. Restoration then means letting Ansible
build a new VM and then I put the data back from backups. That's
more laborious than some sort of one-click restore and may not be an
option for an environment where you do not operate the VMs as you
won't be able to trust the VM admins to arrange for all their stuff
to be backed up. Your choices are likely to be restricted more
towards periodic imaging in that case.

Cheers,
Andy

-- 
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

Re: t-bird vs filters to sort msgs

[Roy J. Tellason, Sr.]

On Sunday 11 December 2022 09:51:05 am gene heskett wrote:
> Greetings all;
> 
> Nov 22 is the last time that about half my filters stopped working. I 
> have recreated 3 or 4, putting them at the top of filter list displayed, 
> but they don't work either.
> 
> Is it time to learn a new to me but more stable emailer, like
> alpine or such?
> 
> The error log claims the messages were properly sorted, but the targeted 
> local folder remains empty and the message remains in the inbox. Most of 
> the errors it does log are swahili to me.
> 
> Cheers, Gene Heskett.

Gene,

I prefer the maildir rather than mbox format,  which narrows my choices 
somewhat.  What I ended up doing was running virtualbox with a rather early 
version of Slackware in there,  with the correspondingly early version of KDE,  
and use kmail to do all of my mail.  Filters are rather extensive,  since I 
keep on adding spammers to that list,  and haven't given me any trouble,  so 
far.

-- 
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space,  a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed.  --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James 
M Dakin

Re: t-bird vs filters to sort msgs

[David Wright]

On Sun 11 Dec 2022 at 12:39:31 (-0500), gene heskett wrote:
> On 12/11/22 10:00, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> > On Sun, Dec 11, 2022 at 09:51:05AM -0500, gene heskett wrote:
> > > 
> > > Nov 22 is the last time that about half my filters stopped working. I have
> > > recreated 3 or 4, putting them at the top of filter list displayed, but 
> > > they
> > > don't work either.
> > > 
> > > Is it time to learn a new to me but more stable emailer, like
> > > alpine or such?
> > 
> > A lot of us use mutt - command line email client that seems to mostly
> > do the right thing when configured - and works well with included HTML
> > if you add urlview. There are a whole lot of good email clients.
> > 
> > alpine is, essentially, the grandchild of pine - so you may find you
> > already know the interface from years ago.
> 

[ ……………………………   etc. ]

> 
> So I need a WORKING email agent, with or without fetchmail & procmail.
> And it looks like after 20 years, I am going to have to learn how to
> use a brand new to me emailer. Neither mutt, nor alpine, has docs for
> a beginner that aren't buried 2+ more directories deep in
> /usr/share/doc.
> 
> No man pages...

man mutt   shows how to invoke it. The manual itself is in
/usr/share/doc/mutt/manual.txt.gz , which is two directories
deep in /usr/share/doc, and which you can probably work out
is as shallow as it's possible for the docs themselves to be.
They're also in HTML, and examples are included too. All
screens have keystroke help, by pressing ? (q to go back).

> So at this point I guessing that I need a fetchmail/procmail front end
> as I don't find any references to account setups for either one. Is my
> macular degeneration of my 88 yo eyes hiding that from me?

You can set up IMAP access to your emails in just one line
of configuration, typically something like:

  set 
spoolfile="imaps://ghesk...@shentel.net:mysec...@imap.shentel.net:993/INBOX"

You can send email directly with settings like these mangled ones of mine:

  set smtp_authenticators="plain"
  set smtp_pass="mysecret"
  set smtp_url="smtp://ghesk...@shentel.net@smtp.shentel.net:465"

With machines and networks as fast as they now are, I find it
much simpler to configure exim to handle local email between
my machines (with the benefit of queueing when machines are
switched off), and use mutt's direct access as above for
external email. And if the server is down, you get to know
about it straight away, rather than when exim deigns to tell
you. Queueing emails for sending is fine for busy, shared
systems, but somewhat OTT for individuals.

Cheers,
David.

Fwd: Xen backup and restore

[Toth Zoltan]

Dom0 debian 11
domU debian 11 on LVM volume
Xen xen-hypervisor-4.14-amd64  from deb package.
I have operated DomU system and other people operated IOT-gateway.
I would like create snapshot every day. If they missconfigure
something on IOT-gateway I would like  restore from saved snapshot the
whole system..

On Sat, Dec 10, 2022 at 11:45 PM Andy Smith  wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> On Wed, Dec 07, 2022 at 09:27:27AM +0100, Toth Zoltan wrote:
> > I am looking for a solution to backup and restore xen domU under
> > debian, but I did not anything.
>
> What does "backup and restore" mean to you in this context? Describe
> a scenario and what you would like to happen.
>
> Depending on what you want and what your existing setup is like
> there may be a few different solutions.
>
> It will also help if you describe your setup, such as what version
> of Debian you're using for dom0? Where you get your hypervisor
> packages from (Debian's own packages? Upstream source? Something
> else)? How are you providing storage for your domUs? Do you run PV
> domUs, PVH or HVM or a mixture of these?
>
> Cheers,
> Andy
>
> --
> https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
>

Re: Bookworm won't route ipv6 requests

[Jason Bigelow]

On 2022-12-11 23:59, Jason Bigelow wrote:
I haven't experienced similar issues on Windows and Android devices on 
the

same LAN, so I'm thinking it's an issue with my Debian Machine.


Scratch that, I have just figured out that nothing in the house seems to 
work

on IPv6, not the Windows machines, not Debian and not even my phone. I can't
connect to certain Minetest servers, at least unless they run IPv4 which 
is the
issue that triggered my investigation in the first place. Start with 
basics I

guess!

This is clearly no longer a Debian issue. I'll have to look into 
problems with my

ISP's router or configuration now instead. I'd like to thank you for your
time nevertheless.

Regards,
Jason

kmail: binary attachement crashes kmail

[Hans]

Hi folks,

did anyone get into the problem, that a binary attachement crashes kmail?

I got into it several times, but it appears very seldom.

One was a signatur file, that let kmail crash, in  two other cases it were a 
pdf-file, that was attached.

The pdf-file that were attached were both created by myself: first one was a 
bill from an application called "fakturama", second one was a (cv) pdf-file  
created with libreoffice from odt.

It looks like, if some random sequences appear in an attachement, then kmail 
crashes.

Maybe someone is interested in this information.

Best regards

Hans