status file probs??
I don't think this is serious, but whenever dselect's helper programs (I use dpkg-ftp) access the list of installed packages, one of the lists is missing something. How do I correct this error: Processing status file... Odd number of elements in hash list at /usr/lib/dpkg/methods/ftp/install line 75, STATUS chunk 7856. Processing Package files... development... Odd number of elements in hash list at /usr/lib/dpkg/methods/ftp/install line 124, PKGFILE chunk 15315. non-free... Odd number of elements in hash list at /usr/lib/dpkg/methods/ftp/install line 124, PKGFILE chunk 1590. contrib... Odd number of elements in hash list at /usr/lib/dpkg/methods/ftp/install line 124, PKGFILE chunk 553. As I said, I don't think it's serious, but it is rather blatantly obvious something isn't just so... Any suggestions? -- Todd Fries .. [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word unsubscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: PPP Manual Dial?
diald will allow one to dial manually and start ppp w/out requiring minicom. -- Todd Fries .. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: PPP Manual Dial?
Eric Query: Is there any way I can manually dial in, login, and initiat PPP, Eric then ask 'pppd' to start? There is a way using minicom, [...] but the cycle: becoming root issuing pppd reading /var/log/messages killing pppd reissuing pppd with another number/chatscript in case it was busy etc... is getting on my nerves It would me too. So what I would like is some graphical front-end to pppd, displaying the status, and with buttons to start/stop a connection. This could be started by root at boot time, solving the suid problems. This has been done. Including a prompt for the password in such a setup would be relatively trivial. Certainly. Does anyone know of something of this kind? Surething. I vaguely saw a related tool for diald Bingo. Exactly what I had in mind. Currently, if you setup diald, you can allow certain users access to the fifo that diald runs with. Then they, in turn, could use 'dctrl' which is a tcl/tk script that shows the current status of the link, allowing you to bring it up and down. However, with a chat script, you would have to either a) ask for the password in advance, write the chat script, and have chat do it's thing b) run chat so that it exits when it gets the 'Password:' prompt, then ask the user to enter a password somehow (through a simple X dialog box or something) and then echo $PASSWORD ...since the 'chat script' gets stdout as the modem, then start a 2nd chat script to continue the connection c) write another program that will take the place of chat that will allow interactive password input 'somehow' perl, tcl/tk, python come to mind. Hope this helps. -- Todd Fries .. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
perl
I've a friend who is installing debian and he asked me to ask these questions.. why does the perl package depend on csh? why does 'libc-dev' have a conflicting dependency with 'libc5' ?? It won't let him install libc5-dev for some odd reasion. -- Todd Fries .. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: module cdu31a fails on insert
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (renald loignon) May I ask, in all seriousness, and without a trace of sarcasm, where in the world (BUT preferably in the Debian installation instructions) one is expected to find this information? I was used to the old cdu31a=0xPORT,IRQ syntax from the boot prompt, or as an append=... line in /etc/lilo.conf I don't see that it is documented at all outside of the kernel source. And if you think that this is a serious problem in Debian, it is. And it's not going to be helped unless more people like you volunteer to work on the documentation. Is there any chance you have checked the bootparm-howto? http://sunsite.unc.edu/mdw ?? If it is not in there, I would suggest that would be the best place for it. -- Todd Fries .. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tin+Suck
Gith writes:
I've installed tin and suck as way to read newsgroups locally.
The problem is, i haven't figured out how to use tin to read the
newly downloaded articles. If someone is using the suck+tin
I might be wrong on this, but isn't this a feature in tin that has yet to
be implemented? From the man page:
-R read news saved by the -S option (not yet
implemented).
combination for news, could you post here or e-mail me directly
on how to do it..
Where is the advantage of using suck over using tin -S?
I don't know what tin -S does. Whatever it does, it is for a single user. It
in no way makes these articles available for other users on the same machine,
let alone other news programs even on other machines.
The advantage of using suck + innd is that you get a news server on your
machine that allows you or anyone else on your machine, plus anyone outside
your machine you allow to connect, the ability to read any news that is
on your machine. You literally setup your machine to be a news server, it is
just that suck downloads articles and uses either rnews or innxmit (your
choice) to post articles to the news server.
For me and my friends that live in a house, it is invaluable. We have five
comp sci types who like to read news. So I have setup my machine to be a
news server. I follow all the linux.* newsgroups, and am planning on making
all of my mailing list subscriptions into a newsgroup as well. It is alot
faster reading news, or grabbing binaries (my bandwidth waster is
alt.binaries.sounds.midi) from a local machine than over a modem. And if you
set it up right, you can even post articles back to the mailing
lists/newsgroups providing you have the ability to do so... For instance, at
UMR, like other colleges/universities, there is a set of 'local' newsgroups
that only machines with access to UMR can access. Some of these are also
part of what I 'spool' on my news server because suck is just like tin when
it connects to a newsserver: it reads articles. However, suck takes the
articles and allows either rnews or innxmit to transmit them to a newsserver
of your choice (usually your local machine), and thus you get your own
newsserver with the articles.
Personally, I have found suck's auto-recovery features lacking. That, and
I have more than one news-server I wish to contact. So, ever 1/2 hour as a
cron-job, I run the following script which grabs my mail from two different
news-servers and, from my experience, guarantees that all articles in are
eventually retrieved, even if on the next 1/2 hour run of the script.
#!/bin/sh
tmphome=/var/spool/news/in.coming/tmp
servers=usenet.umr.edu news.fuller.edu
suck=/usr/opt/bin/suck
lf=$tmphome/lock
cd $tmphome
[ -e $lf ] exit 1
touch $lf
count=0
grabit () {
se=2
while [ 0$se -gt 1 ] ;
do
if [ -s newgrps ]
then
for i in `cat newgrps`
do
/usr/lib/news/bin/ctlinnd newgroup $i y $0
echo $i 1 sucknewsrc
done
fi
rm -f newgrps
count=$[ $count+1 ]
$suck $1 -a -br spool ; se=$?
[ -s spool ] ls -l spool
[ -s spool ] /usr/lib/news/rnews -S localhost ./spool ; re=$?
rm -rf Msgs suck.restart spool suck.sorted
if [ -s suck.newrc -a 0$se -ne 255 ]
then
mv sucknewsrc.7 sucknewsrc.8
mv sucknewsrc.6 sucknewsrc.7
mv sucknewsrc.5 sucknewsrc.6
mv sucknewsrc.4 sucknewsrc.5
mv sucknewsrc.3 sucknewsrc.4
mv sucknewsrc.2 sucknewsrc.3
mv sucknewsrc.1 sucknewsrc.2
mv sucknewsrc sucknewsrc.1
sort suck.newrc | uniq sucknewsrc
rm suck.newrc
touch spool
fi
echo Suck Error: $se, Rnews Error: $re count: $count
if [ $count -gt 20 ];
then
rm $lf
echo Suck Error: $se, Rnews Error: $re count: $count EXITING
exit 1
fi
done
}
for i in $servers
do
cd $i ; echo $i
grabit $i
cd ..
done
rm $lf
The idea is that for each 'server' you have created a subdirectory in the
$tmphome subdirectory. You can add newsgroups manually to the local news
server by using ctlinnd manually, and then adding an entry into sucknewsrc, or
you can simply give the name each of the groups on a separate line in a file
'newgrps' in the server's subdir; if this file exists the script adds the
newsgroup to the local server and adds an entry in the 'sucknewsrc' file.
I'm also toying with a hack I've made of suck that, when I get it cleaned up,
I plan to send to the authors (or perhaps sooner, considering I've not worked
on it in a while). The 'hack' is so I can, given an account on a remote
machine, telnet to that machine and then from that machine telnet to the
news server. The reason being I have an account on the *.win.org machines in
my hometown, but am unable to read the newsgroups there unless I am logged in.
Obviously I would like to have them 'spooled'
Re: kernel size (was: How do I get GATEWAY2000 PS/2 mouse to work?)
The real question is whether the default kernel should be bloated with features, or pared down. I disagree. The default kernel need not contain anything that isn't necessary to boot. This means floppy, minix, and ramdisk drivers. Ide might be useful; this should (imho) be loadable as a module, though. But anyway, to the mouse. ps/2 mice can be loaded as modules. As long as it is loaded when it is determined that the user has a ps2 mouse, I see no reason why it can't be included in the available modules at boot time, and at the same time see no reason why it should be in the default kernel; modules work. Use them. If someone decides they'd rather not load the ps2 module, but compile it into the kernel, well, they can. -- Todd Fries .. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RAID in Linux (was Re: SCSI and EIDE)
Hi guys,
starting a new thread about the subject... ;-)
I'm still trying to get a grip on this...
Few questions:
1. can raid0/raid1 be done on either scsi or ide or both?
2. what's the difference between raid0 and raid1?
3. what exactly does it do? Does it mirror data accross multiple devices,
and if so, how does it maintain the data in all devices?
4. How does one go about creating an md device? Would it automatically
mirror a non-md drive into the multiple devices?
Please read the manpage for the 'mdcreate' utility. It answers all of these
questions. That said, I'll attemt to exlain it in my own words.
raid0/raid1/linear are currently functional raid personalities that can be
used for any block device. floppy+ide+scsi+zipdrive+whatever. I don't know
if you could use a ramdisk, but I wouldn't be surprised. ANY BLOCK DEVICE.
So, for my computer, I have:
/dev/hda hda1(1mb) hda2(90mb) hda3(50mb) hda4(60mb)
/dev/sda sda1(45mb) sda2(265mb) sda3(7mb)
/dev/sdb sdb1(45mb) sdb2(265mb) sdb3(7mb)
Long story on the reasoning behind this, but anyway, /etc/mdtab contains:
/dev/md0 raid0,4k,0,72e5f713 /dev/sdb1 /dev/hda6 /dev/sda1
/dev/md1 raid0,4k,0,7b8942ce /dev/sdb2 /dev/sda2
Which gets me an output of 'df' as follows:
LightHouse~:$ df
Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/hda2 89183 79028 5550 93% /
/dev/md0 149794 13167118123 88% /home
/dev/md1 515289 45853930134 94% /usr
(the 50mb partition on ide is swap).
Notice I am creating a /usr partition that is bigger than any one of my
drives alone, and also am using ide + scsi on the /home partition.
[ a note to those who would suggest I'm crazy to swap on ide when I have
scsi-- my ide is 2x faster than my scsi disks because they are VERY old ]
[ a note to those who wonder about the 2 unused 7mb partitions on my scsi
disks-- the 2nd scsi disk has problems reading the last 7mb of the drive
and causes lockups. So I decided to partition the drives around the 'bad'
blocks. ]
Anyway, raid (or multiple device, md) in linux has 3 personalities availble
at this time:
linear = appending all the block devices together. So if you had
md0 = /dev/hda1 + hdb3 + sda, the blocks would be accessed
in this order:
/dev/hda1 = { block1, block2, block3 }
/dev/hdb3 = { block4, block5 }
/dev/sda = { block6, block7, block8 }
raid0 = software disk striping. So if you had
md0 = /dev/hda1 + hdb3 + sda, the blocks would be accessed
in this order:
/dev/hda1 = { block1, block4, block7 }
/dev/hdb3 = { block2, block5 }
/dev/sda = { block3, block6, block8 }
raid1 = software disk striping + recovery; I am not certain of the block
layout but it is similar to raid0 with not as much physical space
available due to some data redundancies
So, when I was booting off /dev/hda2 on my machine, I simply typed:
mdcreate raid0 /dev/md0 /dev/sdb1 /dev/hda6 /dev/sda1
mdcreate raid0 /dev/md1 /dev/sdb2 /dev/sda2
And now, upon bootup, I simply type:
mdadd -ar
Which activates the md devices. At this point in time I am able to fsk and
mount the /dev/md* just as if they were hd*'s or sd*'s. They are a block
device, like any other.
Honestly, you will get the idea when you toy around and start planning to do
your own raid'ing. Especially when you grab the md utils and compile them,
while they compile you can read the man pages and you should have no problem.
It is actually fairly simple to use.
--
Todd Fries .. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: SCSI and EIDE
Ricardo Kleemann [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: That's wonderful! Now will Linux implement anything greater than RAID0? It does. Raid1 is in development. It does partial mirroring using about 1/3rd of the disk space for 'backup' data. Would you say your performance is significantly increased with striping? I have an ncr53c815 card with two 312mb XT 1986 scsi-1 SLOW maxtor drives. They definately perform much better after being raid0'ed. If there would be a point at which the data read from a drive was faster than the cpu could crunch the raid0 'virtual' device, it would be slower than no raid at all. I personally don't see how any setup could be this 'disk fast' and 'cpu slow'. From my experience it is significantly faster. It is literally (for me) doubling the number of read-heads that can be reading or writing data at a given time. How many drives can be striped? You can have 4 raid devices. /dev/md0 - /dev/md3. I am not aware of a limitation on the number of 'block' devices that can be grouped under each raid device. I would also be surprised if you were not able to increase the numbers if you needed to. Reminds me of ppp/slip in it's early stages. A default limit of 4. Then they raised it to 16, and finally to on-the-fly-creation of devices up to a default limitation of 256, with an easy #define to change to increase this limitation. I see no reason why the raid devices will not follow this pattern. md just groups a number of physical disk partitions into one logical one, /dev/md*. I'm being picky, but no, it groups block devices. I couldn't get it to work with a loopback device, so perhaps right now block device = hard drive. But it shouldn't have to. One happy raid0 user. -- Todd Fries .. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: How do I get GATEWAY2000 PS/2 mouse to work ?
From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tue Aug 13 16:44:48 1996 Someone (sorry, lost name) wrote: -- one never knows if/when PS/2 mouse is going to be available in a downloaded kernel, whereas serial support is virtually always there. Todd Fries ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) responded: Oh give me a break. Users shouldn't have to recompile their kernels to get their PS/2 mice to work. Fine. Tell me your kernel version number and processor type and I'll have ps/2 drivers targz'ed and uuencoded to you within a few hours. In my case, I used to select a module named psaux, and my PS/2 mouse worked fine. Recently I upgraded to Debian 1.1, circa July 1st. As far as I can tell, the psaux module is no longer an option. Sounds like someone forgot something to me. I haven't started using Debian yet; I am going to make a gradual migration as I like to do everything on my system so I understand what is going on. Needless to say, I would never trust a menu system to do things I should be doing myself anyway, but since you seem to, you are considerably correct in saying that if a piece of code is not in the kernel and it can be compiled as a module, I see no reason why it cannot be optionally loaded and included with a distribution. But that is my personal opinion and in no way represents Debian. Coincidentally, my mouse no longer works (when I startx, the system says Fatal server error: Cannot open mouse (No such device)). Duh. No driver, no mouse support. See above for a quick return. My situation is caused by one or more of the following: 1. I am doing something wrong. If the option is not there guess not. 2. There was a more serious problem with my OS upgrade. Newer kernels replace older kernel modules. Therefore upgrading should have gotten you everything you needed, instead of removing something you had. 3. Debian has a bug in its PS/2 mouse support. I certainly can't determine this. 4. Default support for PS/2 mice was intentionally removed. Hopefully not. My guess is an oversight/installation disk space concern. I recall some of the module tar files were reportedly bad; perhaps the mouse got left out? I am guessing here. Unfortunately, I haven't had time to look into this seriously so I'm still Debian-less. Just because a system attempts to make things easier for you shouldn't mean you ignore the details and rely on it exclusively without making any effort at all to fix what is not working. FYI, all you have to do is download the kernel source tree from one of many kernel tree mirrors. Say, ftp://linux.ucs.indiana.edu/linux/kernel/v2.0 is a favorite of mine. Grab linux-2.0.12.tar.gz. Type tar xvzf linux-2.0.12.tar.gz cd linux make menuconfig [ specify the processor type and make a module for non-serial mice and ps/2 ] make modules (as root) make modules_install (as root) depmod -a (as root) modprobe psaux Wow, you have ps2 mouse support. Now wasn't that difficult? But I'm suffering from a massive case of disbelief that this default capability would intentionally be removed. Whether it is or is not intentionally missing is a side issue. You wish to use your mouse. One thing I have found to be true in life is that if it needs to be done, and nothing is being done, do it yourself. So if debian isn't meeting your needs, in the several days you have been discussing this on this list, you could have compiled your module several times over. Not that that justifies Debian in not having ps/2 support for you, but you do what has to be done to get done what you want to get done. Thanks for your support, Hope I've come across as trying to help. -- Todd Fries .. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OS/2 HPFS File System - Is this a Bug?
On Tue, 13 Aug 1996, Jim Worthington wrote: I'm running OS/2 Warp with HPFS on several of my drives. I noticed that Linux 1.1 fdisk reveals two different file system identifiers for these HPFS partitions: /dev/sda5 id 7 OS/2 HPFS /dev/hda2 id 17 Unknown This a little bit of a guess, (I have never used os/2 and linux on the same machine, and I never got os/2 to run right either) but I am think that /dev/hda2 might be your os/2 boot manager partition. Are you using it? If you are, and linux's fdisk says it only 1 or 2 MB large, then I would just remove it from your /etc/mtab and /etc/fstab files. your suggestion doesn't hold water considering below he says it complains but mounts the filesystem id 17 fine. Has anybody else observed the two different identifers for HPFS filesystems? Is this a Bug? Linux produces some error messages when mounting the id 17 filesystem but it everything seems to work ok. I didn't observe any error messages when mounting the id 7 filesystem which also works fine. OS/2 Warp doesn't complain at all. Of course OS/2 shouldn't complain. But are you sure you have OS/2 Warp or the Merlin beta? I installed os/2 warp myself and never got this particular 'id 17' partition. Still, could you use os/2's fdisk and see what kindof partition os/2 thinks the partition on the ide hard drive is? Perhaps this is another id number we should add to the types that fdisk/linux recognizes. Especially if you can mount the os/2 volumes correctly, you should not worry but wonder when os/2 started using the new id and how to get the maintainers of fdisk to realize this fact, perhaps even to name it appropriately. BTW, there is available a rw os2 ext2 driver. It allows os/2 to mount ext2 read-write. Worked fine when I had os/2. But I ran out of space and lost the hd (shock therapy doesn't work with hd's :-) os/2 booted from, so I never re-installed. -- Todd Fries .. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re^3: How do I get GATEWAY2000 PS/2 mouse to work ?
My experience is that there are a couple of good hardware reasons for getting serial mice instead of PS/2 mice: -- we accidentally fried a BIOS chip by delivering a static charge through a PS/2 mouse. This has never happened with a serial mouse, and leads me to suspect that the PS/2 connector (or at least the connector we used to have on our R.I.P. Asus '486 motherboard) is less robust against static than an serial connector. This sounds like the only hardware reason to me. -- removing the PS/2 mouse frees up an IRQ. Perhaps for you. I cannot put ANYTHING on the irq used by my ps/2 mouse because my p60 does not let me disable it. -- one never knows if/when PS/2 mouse is going to be available in a downloaded kernel, whereas serial support is virtually always there. Oh give me a break. If you are not experienced enough to compile your own kernel for your own custom hardware you should never be giving advice to other linux users until you are. SHEESH. It is not that hard. Do a 'make config' once, cp .config to some safe place, then if you must remove your kernel source tree or upgrade or compile someone else's kernel, you can, and the copy the file back and say 'make oldconfig'. IT IS NOT THAT HARD PEOPLE! I personally have 14 different 'configurations' for different people in my 'safe place' away from the kernel tree. So I can compile for 14 different people if they ask me to. That said, I have a ps/2 port and am using a serial mouse. Why? Because before I had this pentium motherboard I did not have a ps/2 port and thus had a serial mouse. I am too cheap to go buy a ps/2 mouse, but when I borrowed one from a friend to verify the port worked (easily compiled as a module...no reboot) I experienced a much more responsive mouse than the three serial mice I have tried since. I for one intend to get a ps/2 mouse when I have the extra money. I have had some problems with some serial mice though, particularly those cheap ones which change their state when the power goes off. Hehehe, you mean the cheez-ball 3 button mice that when initialized must have the right button pressed or they go into 2 button mode? grin -- Todd Fries .. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
