Re: Flash Problem

[Alan Cox]

> I believe you live in England. Does the BBC, who mainly developed

No - next door in Wales

> Dirac, use Dirac for webcasting? Who are the associates who
> participated in development. AI couldn't find any after a quick at
> Google's.

The BBC uses flash primarily, and has previously used realplayer. The BBC
isn't just a state TV business - it does real R&D and Dirac was part of
that work. Some time after the Dirac work the BBC went with a windows
only based iplayer project, got beaten up by the BBC trust (which is
responsible for keeping the BBC in order - a full time job because the
BBC at times has problems remembering its public service duties or even
following its own charter) and introduced the flash player as well. As I
understand it the flash player is basically all their traffic now.

Unlike youtube the BBC flash doesn't yet work with gnash unfortunately.

> Because of DRM, it even seems unsure the BBC itself will use it:
> 
> 

This doesn't affect webcasting. OFCOM regulates the free to air service
which the BBC are busy trying to corrupt (in almost certain violation of
their charter). As the agreements for the free to air service stand they
require the specifications used are "open" (for some version of open).
The BBC is thus obliged to ask for permission to sneakily screw it all
up, and fortunately got caught with its pants down.

I imagine that will end up in court with the BBC having to make an
embarrasing climbdown as they did with their internet tv platform, their
educational internet project, and a list of other fiascos where they
wasted tons of public money on by not following the rules that forbid the
BBC from distorting markets with public money unless they can show clear
public interest.

As I understand it the BBC is perfectly at liberty to encrypt and DRM its
web streaming services to death without the permission of OFCOM. It might
have trouble showing public interest in the proposal however, unless it
was truely cross platform and didn't distort markets.

That said there are certainly content providers with concerns about the
ease with which people record the flash streams for long term watching as
it eats into follow on DVD sales. Of course DRM won't fix that problem
anyway but their are people in the BBC food chain dumb enough not to get
it, or short enough of backbone to explain this to the content creators.

Alan

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Re: Flash Problem

[Alan Cox]

On Fri, 8 Jan 2010 17:55:43 -0500
Marcel Rieux  wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 5:25 PM, Chris Smart  wrote:
> 
> > However the website (and BBC site) say that it can employ lossless 
> > compression:
> > "Dirac has the capability of compressing high resolution files for
> > production, compression for broadcast content, and compression for web
> > 2.0 applications. Compression can be either lossless or visually
> > lossless."
> > "http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/projects/dirac/uses.shtml";
> 
> Excuse me for being so down to earth, but I don't believe that, to
> deliver content on the Web, a lossless codec is essential. If I'm
> right Ogg Theora could have been proposed to state TVs years ago.

Theora is not lossless.

The BBC code is intended for lots of things - such as *production* where
you don't want loss. 

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Re: help

[Alan Cox]

On Thu, 7 Jan 2010 23:40:16 +
"Joseph L. Casale"  wrote:

> >we at work have some PC's with 256 MB RAM, the graphical mode doesn't load, 
> >so we choice the text mode, but in all machines we get the same error, 
> >Anaconda 12.47
> >
> >do you have an idea how to solve it?
> 
> Yeah, add ram. Anaconda needs like 1/2 gig, and nevermind trying to
> Fedora w/ < 1/2gig as well...

Text mode install for a minimal system, then installgroup xfce and claws
and a few other apps instead of evolution and gnome. That's a reasonably
quick way to debloat Fedora and actually get work done. Useful on bigger
boxes too as the desktop is much snappier and starts far faster.

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Re: Does anyone else think yumex is broken?

[Alan Cox]

> the guts of package management.  However, PackageKit is neither
> unreliable nor barely communicating in my experience, and I use it
> most of the time in Fedora.  Yum also has bits that allow it to
> communicate with PackageKit when run on the command line.  This system
> works quite well.

This one doesn't. Several times it has told me graphically about updates
and then spewed nonsense errors when told to apply them. Running yum
always works. Not figured out why but there is a real bug somewhere.

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Re: Which model raid adapter controll card is good for work with Fedora 12 ?

[Alan Cox]

> Also, with the right hardware, failed drives can be swapped without shutting 
> the server down. AFAIK it can only be done with SCSI drives, but with SATA 
> hardware being supported by the scsi subsystem, it'll probably work with 
> SATA drives too.

SATA supports hot swapping of disks if you have the right power cables
(SATA not old ATA style plugs) but not all controllers do - in general
AHCI ones have full support for this.

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Re: TV over the internet

[Alan Cox]

> I did wonder if I could use my son, in Cardiff,
> to re-send the stream over to me in Dublin (or Italy)?
> Could I do that without using up all his bandwidth?

For low quality probably - or I imagine you could just buy yourself a
cheap UK hosting package with cgi and add yourself some kind of forwarder
script ;)

Alan

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Re: Which model raid adapter controll card is good for work with Fedora 12 ?

[Alan Cox]

> To be completely fair and honest, I should cop to the fact that I used
> to be an AMCC 3ware employee:

I'm not a 3ware employee and I'd second that recommendation *if* you want
to go for something with battery backup and some oompf. If you just want
low end raid (ie 'I'm sick of disks dying' raid mirroring) then on a PCI
express box there probably isn't any point getting hardware assisted raid
of any kind.

A modern PC is rather good at doing RAID in software and PCI Express
fixes the main bottleneck of RAID1 in software. Its also generally true
that a desktop PC has lots and lots of spare CPU cycles to use for RAID
work.

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Re: Kernel boot problems or is my hard drive failing ?

[Alan Cox]

> If I power down my laptop via the usual KStart->Shutdown means, it can
> take up to 4 restart attempts before it fully boots. 

That sounds like wonky hardware

> It has no problem launching grub and the kernel selection screen.  That
> it does reliably every time.   After that, there are issues.  

If it launches grub the disk is fine (Grub is loaded off the disk) and I
assume the laptop has one disk.

> Twice I will get a back screen with a flashing cursor.  Then I will get
> an ehci -19 error.  Then it will boot properly. 

The EHCI error is from USB so perhaps points to a USB problem.

> Is anyone else experiencing a problem booting ?   Does this sound like a
> kernel problem or is my hard drive failing ? 

If a soft reboot fails but a hard reboot (reset button held down) works
I'd suspect its something hardware related not getting properly
shutdown/restarting etc.

For diagnostics boot with "verbose norhgb" that should spew lots of
messages and not hide it all with the graphical stuff - meaning you can
actually see what is going on. See where that hangs.

You could also see if reboot=acpi helps. That changes the way the reboot
is done and might be better for modern machines. Len Brown is currently
collecting data on making this a default so your box may be a useful data
point.

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Re: Problems ripping DVDs I legally own to my media server

[Alan Cox]

> To make clear - I am only doing this with DVDs I legally own.  I am not 
> pirating, I am just trying to get all my DVDs onto a media server I am 
> building instead of having them strewn all over the entertainment center.

It doesn't matter

> Specifically, I tried to rip Transformers 2 Revenge of the Fallen.  It 
> apparently has some new copy protection scheme where it reports that it 
> is 80 gigs, and every method I tried to decrypt them under Linux failed.

Please hand yourself in to the thought police for punishment.

> I wound up having to fire up my dusty old Windows box and use Ideal DVD 
> Copy to rip them successfully (http://tinyurl.com/yg8269g).

For two offences, oh no a link - make that three 8)

> What, if anything, are you using to make legit backups of your newer, 
> copy-protected DVDs under Linux?

Move country outside the USA or the EU or a few other similar places. In
the US case even posting a link to tools for cracking crypto on DVDs is
not permitted (the 2600 case)

Alan

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Re: Fedora 11 network share browsing using Natuilus with Samba - Fixed?

[Alan Cox]

> way through the user account preferences to turn this "feature" OFF. Various 
> posts on the 'net claim this violates the documented way DNS look ups work. 

It is

> The suggestion is to either turn it off if you can, which may involve a 
> phone call to your ISP, if not then LOUDLY complain about it screwing up you 
> network.

Oh and one other if you are particularly evil. If they are redirecting
stuff which contains trademarks you can let the trademark owners know
their marks are being used this way 8)

Fortunately you can also run your own nameserver which generally works
around the ISP.

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Re: Compiz -- Discussion

[Alan Cox]

> e.g. Open menu, instantly pick choice, versus open menu, wait for effect
> to subside before you can even read menu, then pick choice.
> 
> The effects are *NOT* that quick that they add insubstantial delays.

For certain things and hardware some of the compositing costs are visible
(but it seems not as bad as they were in the past). I disabled
compositing on the my main box because it made both gimp and cad work
slower as the pointer became a bit too laggy to put up with when doing
fine work.

XFCE presents compositing much better than Gnome - you can turn it on/off
trivially and you get a meaningful user interface for configuring the
degree of transparancy on various objects.

The Gnome one on the other hand is all a bit strange, random bits of it
are hidden elsewhere (eg in the terminal app), and various things get
confused if you turn it on/off (eg gnome-terminal) - a bug thats a good
three years or more old now.

Alan

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Re: F12 and wi-fi dongles

[Alan Cox]

> hand load usb-storage. Unfortunately I hit several other showstopper FC12
> bugs (random crashes of kvm etc) that I've not debugging it bug gone back
> to a working release.
> 

(Engage brain before posting)

I've not debugged it but gone back to ..

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Re: F12 and wi-fi dongles

[Alan Cox]

On Fri, 18 Dec 2009 14:34:27 +0100
Antonio M  wrote:

> As I cannot connect by a Huawei dongle in F12 (on two different
> boxes), I re-installed F11 on a third machine and bam, I was
> immediately on-line (after some modification on usb_modeswitch.conf
> file).
> Digging on different files I could not find any usb_modeswitch.rules
> files in /etc/udev/rules.d
> Is this the reason why the system is not working with wireless dongle
> It can be a clue also for  Bug 541686 -  Huawei 1692 is not recognized
> as a 3G card with standard file
> Or am I wrong??

Same problem with the Huawei dongle I have here. It sort of worked if I
hand load usb-storage. Unfortunately I hit several other showstopper FC12
bugs (random crashes of kvm etc) that I've not debugging it bug gone back
to a working release.

Try hand loading usb-storage though - it may help

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Re: How to enable surround 5.1 output on laptop

[Alan Cox]

On Thu, 10 Dec 2009 01:22:09 +0100
Major Péter  wrote:

> My Sound card is Intel ICH8, so I guess this means, that my card isn't
> supported. :(

Should be (depends on the actual codec your vendor used) - more likely the
problem is pulseaudio.

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=225630

may be helpful

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Re: Advantages of 64-bit on my laptop?

[Alan Cox]

On Sun, 06 Dec 2009 15:32:25 -0600
Robert Nichols  wrote:

> I just noticed that the CPU in my Lenovo laptop is 64-bit capable.  It
> came with a 32-bit OS installed, so I never bothered to check.  Is
> there any real advantage to running the 64-bit version of Fedora on a
> laptop that is limited to 2GB RAM?  Just wondering.  The F-12 x86_64
> Live CD does boot and run just fine.  I've been running the i686
> versions of F-11 and (now) F-12.

Performance - anything above about 900MB is much happier 64bit

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Another preupgrade update mess up

[Alan Cox]

Only this time I know what happened.

A word of warning. Pre-upgrade has a fun failure mode which occurs
because it doesn't lock out updates from occurring behind its back. An
update while preupgrade was sitting waiting a couple of hours for me to ok
the reboot pulled in some new packages for the old distro...

So if you are using preupgrade, make sure you shut down automatic updates
and the like first.

Alan (and I'll stick it in bugzilla tomorrow am)

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Re: Activating wireless channels 12 and 13

[Alan Cox]

> Finally, I am curious --- if I live in Europe, have wireless channels 12 and 
> 13 active by default on my laptop, and then decide to travel to USA for a 
> week, am I breaking some law? I mean *unintentionally*, since I might not be 
> aware of the details of my computer setup? I guess one could ask similar 
> question wrt strong encryption algorithms and other stuff illegal in 
> US-only...
> 
> So what is the story here? :-)

The story for the usual case is that the access point beacon includes
regulatory information so usually your wireless will turn the power down
in the EU, drop frequencies in the US and you'll not notice. That is
someone thought about the problem.

In a pure ad-hoc environment then yes you might use wrong channels going
EU->US and you might be over the power limit the other way. In theory you
can have your equipment confiscated plus fines in the UK but I know of no
case it ever occurred ;) I think they have bigger fish to fry - pirate
radio stations, CBers with 1KW amps etc...

There are certain people who can legally fiddle with their regulatory data
and transmit other power levels, notably radio amateurs subject to some
restrictions and usage rules.

Alan

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Re: F12 on a P4

[Alan Cox]

On Sun, 22 Nov 2009 23:21:57 -0500
Marcel Rieux  wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 2:22 PM, Alan Cox  wrote:
> 
> > Pentium Pro is the original "i686" system.
> 
> And since it was introduced in 1995, if your computer is less than 14
> years old, you'll be doing fine.

That is the "first". The last non i686 chips are I believe still in
production for embedded systems and embedded PC. Also in the desktop
world the VIA C3 is an i686 equivalent but due to a years old historic
bug [which we are now stuck with] in the gcc machine definitions won't
run gcc "686" code.

Alan

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Re: Curiosity re the term 'Kit' ?!?

[Alan Cox]

On Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:46:19 -0500
William Case  wrote:

> Hi;
> 
> As I get ready to upgrade/install to F12 an old curiosity question comes
> to mind.  Fedora now has several programs it has packaged with the
> designation 'Kit'.  PolicyKit, PackageKit and FirstAidKit come to mind.
> I assume it just means a bunch of programs, libraries and dependencies
> bundled together.
> 
> However, I have never actually seen a definition of a kit.  Has it ever
> been formally defined?  Is it a Fedora/RedHat thing or is 'Kit' used
> more generally.
> 
> Don't get me wrong, I am not objecting.  In fact, I think adding 'Kit'
> to a bundle is descriptive and memorable. 

I must say I found it misleading in intent, but horribly accurate in some
cases.

Kit to me means a collection of parts that are completely useless
until you glue them together yourself, patch up the bad joins and the
like ;)

Alan

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Re: F12 on a P4

[Alan Cox]

On Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:28:14 -0700
stan  wrote:

> On Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:57:34 -0600
> Aaron Konstam  wrote:
> 
> > In the F12 Release notes it indicates that i586 support is gone in F12
> > and i686 is the the support available.
> > 
> > Are there any implications of that to running F12 on a Pentium 4
> > machine?
> 
> I think that Pentium 4 was the start of the i686 regime for intel.

Pentium Pro is the original "i686" system.

Alan

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Re: suggested DVD editing toolset?

[Alan Cox]

> So, I'd like to to modify my own DVD's and watch the cleaned up copies. 
> However I'm totally oblivious to even the slightest details about this area 
> of 
> computing (I'm a database guy). So, Im looking for suggestions per user 
> friendly oss tools to pull this off and possibly info/web sites that will 
> explain more about how to do this.

You need to ask that question outside the USSA on a non US hosted list.
See the 2600 magazine judgement on even linking to such material

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Re: Fedora 12 upgrade sucks

[Alan Cox]

> I appreciate the amount of work people put in for new releases, but I
> would rather new releases were delayed, rather than be broken with
> regard what most users require.

The problem you have is that it's probably a single card, or a single
variant of a single card in a specific combination that's failing. You
can do all the testing you like in rawhide but the chances are some of
those will always get through.

Keeping the regression count down is a bit different from catching every
single corner case - and there is so much PC hardware out there you just
can't do the latter.

Alan

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Re: Auto CAD drawings

[Alan Cox]

On Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:22:54 +0100
Antonio M  wrote:

> 2009/11/16 Alan Cox :
> > On Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:58:23 +0530
> > RAMAKISHOREBABU KOPPULA  wrote:
> >
> >> Is there any software available for fedora to open Auto CAD drawings?
> >
> > For DXF you can usually open them in qcad and in inkscape.
> >
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> >
> Alan
> 
> Autocad's user loves dwg format ;-)

Most of the people I know who deal with autocad file submissions from the
outside actually prefer not to accept DWG files because they never quite
feel confident that what appears the other end will match what was saved.

Mind you with DXF having a 600 dpi tiff of the drawing as a check
reference is a good idea as well. I've had funnies between qcad and
autocad where things like linesizes changed mysteriously or extra bits
appeared.

Alan

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Re: Auto CAD drawings

[Alan Cox]

On Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:58:23 +0530
RAMAKISHOREBABU KOPPULA  wrote:

> Is there any software available for fedora to open Auto CAD drawings?

For DXF you can usually open them in qcad and in inkscape.

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Re: help

[Alan Cox]

On Mon, 9 Nov 2009 10:16:28 -0800 (PST)
Ralph Gorrill  wrote:

> I yhave a DELL lap top that one of my employess loaded FEDORA on with out 
> telling anyone...I need to remove it...he is gone and I have no 
> password...can anyone help me please.

Set the BIOS to boot off CD first and shove in the CD/DVD that came with
the Dell to reinstall the original OS image. That should do the trick
just fine.

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Re: Upgrades driving me crazy....

[Alan Cox]

> That's a remarkable upgrade feat, I managed Fedora 7 to 8 and then 10 to
> 11, but all the way from Fedora 1, respect. Just curious did you upgrade

The early ones were a bit fun but doable. ftp.linux.org.uk started with a
late Red Hat (RH9 I think) and has done the same but live updated each
time. It took some handholding and in one case a minor mad panic and
loopback mounting the iso on the ftp area to get a static rpm that worked
8)

Not what I'd recommend in general. Live updating now is a bit easier,
although I avoid preupgrade as it seems to do more harm than good.

Alan

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Re: Upgrades driving me crazy....

[Alan Cox]

> To make things more difficult, our servers need to be up 24/7.
> 
> Is FC simply a bad choice for enterprise production.

It depends on your environment but probably - yes
> 
> I'm starting to want to try CentOS soon. Unfortunately this will mean  
> not always being able to take advantage of the latest features in  
> software and so on.
> 
> So I was just wondering what other people in this situation do?

Run Centos or RHEL...

"Latest" and "Stable" are usually opposite ends of the same scale.

Centos is boring - in all the good senses of the word.

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Re: should I go for 64bit version of Fedora 11 ?

[Alan Cox]

On Wed, 4 Nov 2009 14:22:22 +1100
Cameron Simpson  wrote:

> On 04Nov2009 14:01, I wrote:
> | On 03Nov2009 23:45, Alan Cox  wrote:
> | | Such as the kernel ... which is much happier in 64bit mode with over 1GB
> | | of RAM.
> | 
> | Is there some URL I could visit that qualifies this?
> | I'm not doubting you, but I would like to have a mental model of roughly
> | why and how 64-bit mode benefits a system. [...]
> 
> BTW, I found this:
>   http://forums.amd.com/devblog/blogpost.cfm?threadid=93648&catid=317
> which is interesting but doesn't give me much clue about why the kernel
> might like it.

If you have more than 1GB of memory then the kernel in 32bit mode has to
do extra work because it needs to maintain access to both virtual
mappings and physical mappings

Normally 32bit memory is laid out as

[0-3GB]User application address mapping (as the user space sees it)
[3G-3.xG]  Mapping of almost 1GB RAM of physical ram
[3.xG-4G]  Vmalloc/io mappings/etc

which takes all the 4GB. To support > 1GB of RAM the kernel has to create
and destroy mmu mappings and access them indirectly which has a big cost.

In 64bit mode there is plenty of space for all the application and
mappings of main memory so that isn't required.

Alan

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Re: should I go for 64bit version of Fedora 11 ?

[Alan Cox]

> Any software that can make use of more than 3 GB of virtual memory space
> will benefit from a 64 bit install. This could be something like the

Such as the kernel ... which is much happier in 64bit mode with over 1GB
of RAM.

Alan

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Re: VIA Rhine II Compatible Fast Ethernet Adapter

[Alan Cox]

On Sat, 31 Oct 2009 21:24:54 +0100
Athmane Madjoudj  wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 9:20 PM, BrainStorm  wrote:
> > Sorry my english.
> > I've tried many distros: ubuntu, debian, backtrack and Fedora.
> > And when i try to configure/use my wireless internet connection in the many
> > ways of this distros i get frozed
> > everthing freeze, and the keyboard leds 'caps' and 'scroll' keeps
> > flashing...
> > All the distros, the same thing, the problem surely is the adapter, i've
> > searched for a long time but no one could help-me...
> > I hope someone know anything about this sad error.
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> 
> you had a kernel panic

And the VIA Rhine II is an ethernet interface not wireless so I doubt it
is related ?

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Re: Is my Harddrive failing?

[Alan Cox]

> Oct 31 08:05:04 merk kernel: res 41/40:00:af:3a:d7/30:00:1e:00:00/00 
> Emask 0x409 (media error) 
> Oct 31 08:05:04 merk kernel: ata1.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
> Oct 31 08:05:04 merk kernel: ata1.00: error: { UNC }

That is the drive reporting a bad block yes. Whether it is a one off
failure or the start of a pattern of fails ending in doom is
unfortunately rather harder to tell.

Alan

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Re: two major failures after yesterday updates - anyone else

[Alan Cox]

> waits till you install new software to break. I've
> seen it happen way too often over the years in our lab
> at work for it to be a coincidence :-).

Powercycles do shake down hardware so there is more than an element of
truth to the belief. It's particularly visible for disks.

("How do you get a small disk array", "Buy a big one and wait for a power
cut")

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Re: compiling modules - HighPoint RAID controller

[Alan Cox]

> The module rr232x.ko exists after an attempted compile, but after chmod 
> +x, modprobe rr232x.ko has FATAL errors stating that it is not a module.
> 
> ? - anyone

I would suggest you ask the vendor for support presumably they can make
the stuff they shipped work.

You can build modules out of tree and the build system is specifically
designed to handle this. It can even be automated (dkms etc)


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Re: sound recording with Fedora 11

[Alan Cox]

On Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:34:19 -0600
Kevin Kempter  wrote:

> Hi all;
> 
> my son (the musician) has Fedora 11 installed on an HP HDX-16 laptop.
> 
> He wants to record some of his band sessions, we tried using 'sound recorder' 
> and plugging the output of his mixer into the mic input on the laptop.
> 
> It does record but the sound is fuzzy and to say it was poor quality would be 
> an over-estimate, since it's there but barely audible.
> 
> 
> Can anyone give us some direction per sound recorders for linux in general 
> and 
> specifically how to debug & correct this issue with the mic input?

Same as any other audio system

Start by

- Making sure the deck output and the laptop input impedance match
- Probably you want line-in not mic
- Try and get the levels right each end - usual rule of thumb is that the
  analogue amps are most linear around 66%, digital doesn't matter.
- If at all possible use the digital input (and to be honest with the
  noise you get in a PC environment if you are doing anything remotely
  serious [1] then you probably want to get hardware with a digital input
  if the laptop doesn't have it anyway (eg a USB dongle)


Alan
[1] If you didn't spend $200+ on the microphones you probably aren't in
this category ;)

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Re: Anyone running F11 on a Dell mini ? (Or another mini ?)

[Alan Cox]

On Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:42:27 -0600
Linuxguy123  wrote:

> On Wed, 2009-10-14 at 15:34 -0500, Richard Shaw wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 1:54 PM, Linuxguy123  wrote:
> > > How is it working for you ?
> > >
> > > Thanks
> 
> Do the netbooks (Atoms, AMDs et al) just run a plain x86_64
> distribution ?  Or does one need to mod a few things ?

For the Intel based ones generally a plain x86-32 distribution. It's a
win to compile a custom kernel optimised for Atom, and ditto glibc so
that you get the later instruction optimisations.

Be careful which Dell mini and do your research on compatibility. A lot
of the netbooks have unsupported broadcom wireless devices, and the Dell
mini-10 also has unsupported video (the 10v has more 'normal' video)

Another problem is that a lot of the touchpads on mini laptops suck so
try, test and see. I have a Dell mini-9 which actually gets used as a
firewall/router (small, built in console screen, built in UPS !) where
the wireless doesn't work and the touchpad isn't great, and a Samsung
NC-10 with real hard disk which has become my travelling box and runs a
full Fedora.

Definitely try before you buy...

Alan

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Re: Can ISPs be trusted?

[Alan Cox]

The question is as much "can they ISP employees be trusted"

Most of the tools assume not for anything critical

- Firewalls on PCs are user not ISP managed
- SSL uses digital signatures so that if your ISP or its staff try to
  like about name to address mappings you get warned
- ssh uses crypto and host keys and the like

There are plenty of people in the ISP world who can earn good money from
installing loggers for people without needing to worry about the
government ;)

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Re: hde: lost interrupt

[Alan Cox]

> The drive is a 500GB EIDE drive, connected via a Promise Ultra 100TX2 
> controller to some ancient motherboard. (This is a 300MHz Pentium II, 
> acting as a server, including a media server.) The controller is needed 
> because the old mobo bios won't deal with such large drives. There's 
> another drive connected to the Promise, as hdf, and I'm not seeing 

Wrong list.. Fedora releases use an entirely different ATA disk subsystem
so the question is completely unconnected to Fedora. The old code had
(and the new code does still) niggling problems with some combinations of
Promise PATA and drive setups that never really got 100% resolved and
some of which seem to occur in Windows too.

Alan

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Re: Advice for "crossgrading" from 32 bit F11 to x64 ?

[Alan Cox]

> 1) force-install a 64-bit kernel, 64 bit glibc, and 64 bit init. I'm pretty 
> sure that the 32 bit mkinitrd will barf when it tries to assemble an initrd 
> for the 64 bit kernel. You'll have to unpack your current mkinitrd, look 
> inside, enumerate all the modules that it loads, than manually build an 
> equivalent 64 bit initrd, with the analogous kernel modules. Cross your 
> fingers, and attempt to boot the new kernel into single user mode.

Not how I would do it - start with a complete backup, test the backup and
then boot a 64bit rescue cd image. Some of the updates you need to do
will require a 64bit kernel is actually running.

>From there you can install the 64bit fedora-release package and the 64bit
yum/rpm packages which in turn will drag in much of the 64bit library
stuff. After that you can update various other things like mkinitrd,
kernel, module utilities etc

> hand. I'm rather skeptical that "yum upgrade" will figure it out 
> automatically. More than likely, neither yum nor rpm will have any idea how 

It won't do the updating itself because they are not "upgrades". It will
figure out dependancies happily enough and pull in needed 64bit libraries.

Another problem is space - you need to get a lot of 64bit stuff on before
pruning 32bit libraries etc

Doable but only if you know the system well and can think on your feet

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The joy of Reply-To (was Re: Setup of DNS caching name server for home server)

[Alan Cox]

> header.  It IS the case that in the absence of a reply-to header it uses
> the from header, but where the reply-to header exists it should ONLY
> reply to the reply-to header address(es).  Do more reading about how
> e-mail works...

If you mean RFC 8.2.2 section 4.4.4 then remember

" This recommendation is intended  only  for  automated  use  of
  originator-fields  and is not intended to suggest that replies
  may not also be sent to other recipients of messages.   It  is
  up  to  the  respective  mail-handling programs to decide what
  additional facilities will be provided."


What the buttons do is entirely up to the mail client. Most sane ones map
Reply to honour the Reply-To: field and things like Reply-All to the
from/cc and to add the Reply-to: address to the cc: list


PS: if you are going to be pedantic it would have been good manners to
have changed the subject line  

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Re: Guess who's right behind Ubuntu at Distrowatch

[Alan Cox]

> There are two very distinct types of Linux Admins:  Those who prefer 
> BSD, and those who prefer SYSV5.

I smell manure

> Those who prefer BSD enjoy working on Debian or Debian based distros 
> (Like Ubuntu) and provide base level tools and administration likely to 
> please the BSD centric crowd.  The problem is that BSD and SYSV5 both 
> had very rudimentary packaging tools, with the SYSV5 pkg tools being 
> best of class for the time.

I smell more manure

> I don't mean to create revisionist history here, just point out that 

Well some real history (puts on old-fart "I was there" hat)

> after Linux became popular, as in usable, the package management issue 
> came front and center, and the two camps remained divided.
> 
> The BSD camps chose deb (for the most part) and the SYSV5 camps went 
> with RedHat's package manager, rpm.

The SYSV packaging was incredibly crude and BSD basically had none except
at source level. BSD today has kept the source packaging religion and
honed the tools and process to modern system management. I guess Gentoo
would thus be the one that fits the old BSD world, but Gentoo is pretty
un-BSD in most respects.

The nearest thing to the SYSV packaging was probably the SLS/Slackware
one, although with some differences. Technologically its quite different,
functionality very similar. Ironically perhaps given this Slackware for a
long time had the more BSD file layout and init style
(eschewing /etc/init.d etc)

The first Linux "serious" packaging came from the BOGUS distribution and
variants of that work led to dpkg in Debian (tools based on Solaris which
is System 5 not BSD !) and rpp in Red Hat, which in turn was replaced by
rpm. Not many people realise rpm and dpkg are effectively forks of the
same original work

Alan

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Re: Question on shredding a terebyte drive

[Alan Cox]

> CAUTION:  Note that shred relies on a very important assumption:
> that the file system overwrites data in place.  This is the tra-
> ditional  way  to do things, but many modern file system designs
> do not satisfy this assumption.  The following are  examples  of
> file  systems on which shred is not effective, or is not guaran-
> teed to be effective in all file system modes: ...
> 
> Again, dd gets around this.

Actually it doesn't because you've no idea how the disk itself lays out
data.

> Maybe run the secure erase 25 times.

If the drive supports it a single secure erase should be fine. If not
then you need to pick an alternate disposal mechanism. The favourite
these days sometimes appears to be to pay someone to do it - so your
business can claim its discharged its liabilities and anyone in a
disaster should sue someone else ;)

Discs are smart enough to be considered as a small storage appliance
these days so are quite capable of re-arranging data internally as and
when it feels like it.

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Re: In the news: Soon to be published, Skype back-door trojan code?

[Alan Cox]

On Sun, 30 Aug 2009 11:28:58 +0100
Marko Vojinovic  wrote:

> On Sunday 30 August 2009 09:20:59 Tim wrote:
> > On Sat, 2009-08-29 at 14:09 -0700, Joel Gomberg wrote:
> > > I thought Skype was P2P application
> >
> > Supposedly it is, but with closed source, you've no real idea what it's
> > going to do.  Even hacking software to reverse engineer it may only give
> > you a partial picture, particularly if it's convoluted.
> 
> Is there any initiative or attempts to reverse engineer its protocol?

There have been but it uses every malware like trick of the book to self
encrypt and the like. With virtual machines it isn't of course quite so
safe any more.

There are also some other awkward factors

- The person who completely reverse engineers skype probably destroys it.
  If you can write a skype client than the spammers can write skype spam
  tools as well.

- Skype appears to contain various law enforcement intercept facilities
  judging by the evidence - although mostly circumstantial.

- The Skype business model depends upon interoperability not working
  (like early instant messaging systems), so you would expect a mix of
  protocol changes and thermonuclear level legal responses if the work
  was done in the USA or other countries with broken DMCA type laws.

> programming... But surely *someone* does, is there any known attempt to do 
> this?

I would imagine anyone doing so is keeping fairly quiet - there is big
money on offer from the bad guys for skype trojans, intercepts and
clients, while anyone on the good side fiddling with it faces jail and
harrasment - a fine example of perverse economic incentives.

Alan

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Re: Updating methods

[Alan Cox]

>   Would somebody please explain to me, again, in words of one 
> syllable, why we're putting up with all the un-Linux-like rebooting? What 
> am I gaining on my machines, or losing on hers??

Updated libraries for apps that are running.

Basically if you know what you are doing you can look at what updated and
restart a few daemons or tell the user to log out and log back in, or
restart firefox and so on.

PackageKit is a bit brainless in this area (but on the other hand takes
the right default - safety first). Send patches to package kit to make it
smarter and know about reboot v restart daenons v relogin. That probably
also needs some packaging changes and some extra triggers so its not
trivial.

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Re: BCPL compiler in LINUX/Fedora?

[Alan Cox]

On Fri, 14 Aug 2009 13:17:20 +0200
Joachim Backes  wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I'm looking for a BCPL compiler realized in LINUX, especially Fedora, 
> for i386 CPUs. Somebody knows where to download a rpm, or the compiler 
> source? All hints are welcome.

Sounds fun. The reference compile is publically available from the
original author:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mr10/BCPL.html

I'm not aware of anyone having done a full bootstrap and package in rpm
format however.

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Re: low-level formatter for linux

[Alan Cox]

> In the bad old days, we used to do low lever format of a disk using a dos asm 
> command and hand enter a set of instructions.
> 
> I do not recall what those instructions were, and I am not certain they would 
> work on a 500GB drive.
> 
> Now that all I have is linux, and my HD has developed many bad blocks,
> I need to back it up and do low level formatting. So, I need a Linux based
> low level formatting tool.

I suspect you need a new disk. What does the smart data for the drive
say ?

Writing zeroes over the whole drive should reallocate any dud sectors.
You can also rewrite specific sector numbers with

hdparm --write-sector


However a drive generating a lot of bad blocks often means the drive is
ill and likely to fail again.

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Re: low-level formatter for linux

[Alan Cox]

On Wed, 05 Aug 2009 03:33:25 +
g  wrote:

> Markus Kesaromous wrote:
> 
> > Is there a low-level HD formatter for linux?
> 
> linux-google search "low-level+format", will give 97k hits.
> 
> mainly, for a truly oem *low-level format* you need an oem format program.
> they are available in dos format.

And they don't do a low level format on anything but an ancient MFM (and
sometimes RLL) drive. They might appear to but the drive isn't really
doing it.

Alan

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Re: The ideal mail client?

[Alan Cox]

On Fri, 31 Jul 2009 16:17:36 -0700
Jonathan Ryshpan  wrote:

> On Fri, 2009-07-31 at 23:29 +0200, Christoph Höger wrote: 
> > For your personal needs evolution seems perfect.
> 
> I find evolution (which I am using right now) to be very buggy.  It has
> been crashing several times per day, sometimes only minutes after being
> started.  I have a fairly large number of messages now, 82,760 to be
> exact which may have some effect on this.

Evolution really can't cope with large amounts of mail. Thats one big
reason I moved to claws. The fact everything else was suddenely faster
was a big boon.


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Re: The ideal mail client?

[Alan Cox]

> Is there a single mail client that has a nice UI, can support both html mail
> and maildir format, as well as syncing caldav calendars and support gog
> encryption? Of course supporting multiple email accounts including imap is
> essential.

claws does all that except the caldav. Its a mail program not a calendar
and there are better calendar apps. I have a bit over a million items of
email in it right now and its not yet exploded although it might with
them all in one folder ;)

> Email clients have been a slight irritation for me since I never found one
> that supports everything that I need in a single application.

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Re: [Slightly OT] Re: Ranter or evangelist?

[Alan Cox]

> > I didn't say using wmv was the problem
> 
> If you don't, well, I do. Using proprietary formats on state television is
> ABSOLUTELY inacceptable.

So fix the tv company. 

> So, MPlayer must be included instead of Totem. From what I read
> everywhere, MPlayer does better. If the devil is behind MPlayer, the code
> is open, Totem can "borrow" it.

A US software company is bound by US law. That tends to cause problems
with all sorts of things particularly media software.

> 
> Now, I see even Alan Cox is following this discussion... at least when you
> intervene :) I'm sure you and him have better things to do.
> 
> I believe I made very clear that we can't always blame Microsoft for
> having a 1% market share. There also is need for amelioration on our side.

Wrong distribution: See the Fedora Project mission statement. Maybe you
should be using something else that doesn't care about freedom, isn't US
based or hasn't got any financial backing so isn't worth sueing in the
USA ?

Alan

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Re: [Slightly OT] Re: Ranter or evangelist?

[Alan Cox]

On Mon, 27 Jul 2009 01:13:59 +0530
Rahul Sundaram  wrote:

> On 07/26/2009 12:28 PM, gil...@altern.org wrote:
> 
> > If bugzilla had any effect don't you think that users would stop doing the
> > "let's see if this other application works" dance all the time? My feeling
> > is bugzilla works only for kernel developers.
> 
> Your feeling is wrong since bugzilla is hardly used by kernel
> developers.  If you refuse to file bug reports, what is point of
> ranting? It is reaching nowhere.

The kernel folks use bugzilla quite actively these days. There is also
a dedicated regression tracker at work and a policy of fixing regressions
which includes Linus locking down the kernel for anything but bug fixes
early each release cycle.

What makes it work however is people co-operating with the process and
also being willing to chase down and work on bugs.

What helps a lot is that there are not a large number of people with the
strange idea that the kernel is a product and bugzilla is tech support
they are somehow entitled to merely because they downloaded it for free.

Alan

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Re: Three kinds of packages

[Alan Cox]

> I mention this because vendor drivers, while not open source, are free and 
> legal 
> to use and redistribute. 

That depends if they are derivative works of a GPL work such as the
kernel.

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Re: Three kinds of packages

[Alan Cox]

> > of the closed source kernel modules are of questionable legality (and
> > not just in the US), because they may be derived works of the Linux
> > kernel.  A derived work of the kernel must be GPLv2, which can't be
> > closed source.
> > 
> 
> Why aren't they then being prosecuted? Too costly?

Various companies have been sued in Germany (where the law is actually
based more on evidence than wallet size). The case of binary kernel
modules is however very complicated and you also have to ask the question
"would it help to...".

Plus quite frankly there are enough people ripping off the Linux kernel
and other free software projects blatantly right now to put complex
questions about modules low down the list of easy to win cases.

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Re: F11: kill -9 doesn't work

[Alan Cox]

On Sat, 25 Jul 2009 22:24:57 +0100
Terry Barnaby  wrote:

> On 07/25/2009 09:03 PM, Tom Horsley wrote:
> > On Sat, 25 Jul 2009 20:57:14 +0100
> > Terry Barnaby wrote:
> >
> >> In my eyes as an old Unix
> >> developer standards are slipping ...
> >
> > I dunno. Perhaps the oldest code in Unix is the code that
> > generates corefile, and you've never been able to kill -9
> > that once a process starts coredumping multiple gigabytes
> > over a slow NFS link. I wish they'd put a check in there :-).
> >
> At least that would finish eventually and the system
> would continue running :)

Linux fixed that one. You can also core dump to dump directory, or
through a core dumper helper application.

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Re: fedora 11 worst then ever release

[Alan Cox]

> on a 5 years old hardware with raid1 system and boot partition anaconda
> crash with dmraid error while i don't use dmraid just mdraid:-( and since
> preupgrade also crash with the same error there is no way to properly
> upgrade from the latest release to the next release! not even with nodmraid
> kernel option.

md /boot is definitely broken, has been for ages and the bugs don't seem
to have been touched. It's also obvious nobody bothered to actually test
that case because the error paths in the install code don't actually
work for that case either !

Fortunately the usual updating fedora-release, yum upgrade approach
worked on my boxes. I'd avoid preupgrade anyway it seems to like breaking
systems and leaving them half upgraded so you have to rescue the mess by
hand.

"all of my system has a wrong openssl version"

all these symptoms sound like your upgrade went horribly wrong. I've seen
preupgrade mash up a box by half upgrading like that. It's the main reason
I don't think preupgrade is actually safe to use yet.

"i already install f11 yum show 2069 packages to update!!! just one month
after the release! my system consist of 2059"

In other words your box didn't update to F11 in the first place, it just
updated a few things and exploded, which is what it tends to do. You were
basically running FC10 and a few random bits of FC11.



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Re: What is this .gvfs directory?

[Alan Cox]

> I see a message when I use rsync of tar to make backups, but I
> interpreted this message as: "this directory is inaccessible, so it
> won't be backed up" but I don't think that the backup is interrupted for
> other directories. Is it?
> 
> For me this directory is empty, so If other directories are saved, I
> don't care.

In the case of rsync at least it breaks the --delete part of removing old
stale files from the backup. Rsync has a paranoid and very sensible
policy that errors mean do the sync but don't delete old stuff in case.

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Re: What is this .gvfs directory?

[Alan Cox]

> > If you are using rsync then simply excluding ".gvfs" should do the trick
> > nicely.
> 
> Does rsync's '-x' option work in this case?  I don't seem to have a
> mount handy to try.

Yes.. the rsync case is fixed by excluding .gvfs as I said. Not tried the
same with other apps that break eg tar.

It isn't clear what should happen though to be honest - should an rsync
of your home dir go off and rsync all the magic fake stuff ?


Alan

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Re: What is this .gvfs directory?

[Alan Cox]

On Wed, 22 Jul 2009 07:12:55 -0500
Bradley  wrote:

> I have my system do regular automated backups and just noticed that the 
> backups have been failing do to a ".gvfs" directory in one of the user's 
> home directories.  This folder can not be accessed or deleted until I 
> drop to at least runlevel 2 but then, in the normal runlevel, when the 
> user logs back on, the directory appears again with the same problems.  
> There is absolutely no information about this in the help docs and am 
> wondering how I can either keep the directory from coming back or to 
> make it accessable?

Its gnome vfs magic. There are few ways to get rid of it other than
running a better desktop. It breaks rsync as well horribly because its
a misimplemented mess that doesn't provide proper behaviour. The theory
is sound but the implementation (which is not entirely Gnome's fault
here) misbehaves horribly.

If you are using rsync then simply excluding ".gvfs" should do the trick
nicely.

Alan

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Re: Firefox steals alsa audio

[Alan Cox]

> So my problem seems to be that firefox wants to take direct
> control of the sound devices, even to the point of stopping
> system-config-soundcard.  Is it possible to configure Firefox to talk
> to pulseaudio?

Firefox should be using pulseaudio - do you have various plugins and the
like loaded into it (flash, shlockwave, realplayer etc ?)

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Re: Linux "NULL pointer dereferece" in the News...

[Alan Cox]

On Sun, 19 Jul 2009 12:59:20 -0400
Tom Horsley  wrote:


> I do love that it only happens on systems with selinux or
> pulseaudio, both of which I eradicate to the fullest extent
> possible as soon as I finish the initial install :-).

Actually it happens whether you have SELinux or not. If you don't have
pulseaudio it won't occur that specific route but pulseaudio was just
used as a path to the attack.

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Re: Ranter or evangelist?

[Alan Cox]

> Just a question - does anyone know which modules need to be loaded for
> Audio CDs to play

None - the audio cd handling is part of the standard ATA driver.
Everything else is in user space.

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Re: Ranter or evangelist?

[Alan Cox]

> In short, regarding your problems:
> 
> Gnome desktop - nothing listed as a handler application for CDDA
> Nautilus - Not interfacing to your chosen CDDA handler.
 
Is Rhythmbox installed ? I would expect that to own CD playing (as it
does normally when in use)

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Re: Installing Fc11 on a 250gb Sata drive.

[Alan Cox]

> >  I had no issues.
> > Check your system board and use Sata port 1 for the system disk.
> 
> So the fact that my system disk is running on the 2nd SATA port is wrong?

Generally speaking the BIOS doesn't care about such things any more.

Alan

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Re: Installing Fc11 on a 250gb Sata drive.

[Alan Cox]

On Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:15:32 -0500
"Mikkel L. Ellertson"  wrote:

> Geoffrey Leach wrote:
> > 
> > There are none. I have both F10 and F11 on SATAs. The only difference 
> > is that the SATA drives show up as /dev/sda, etc.
> > 
> Please excuse my ignorance - what hard drives do NOT show up as SCSI
> drives?

These days pretty much none. Some RAID controllers. Also if you are using
an old PowerMac box that still uses /dev/hd* for some bits.

Alan

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Re: where's my memory?

[Alan Cox]

On Tue, 14 Jul 2009 07:43:06 -0400
Neal Becker  wrote:

> I have a argument with another user about memory.  He claims that on running 
> linux on his 4G Dell machine, top only reports 3.something memory, he says 
> the missing space is for pci bus.  I think this is only because he's running 
> 32 bit and that 64 bit would give all the memory.

Plenty of chipsets don't support mapping the RAM covered by the PCI
window up to the end of memory, especially older ones.

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Re: Suddenly I can't mount DVD

[Alan Cox]

> I tried three separate music cds and get the exact same problem
> including the failure on block 0.  Even the original music cd after a

How are you trying to play them ?

That error sounds like something is feeding the drive the wrong sort of
commands (music ones for data etc)

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Re: Upgrade from FC6 to FC11

[Alan Cox]

On Thu, 09 Jul 2009 23:30:05 +0200
Roberto Ragusa  wrote:

> Kevin Kofler wrote:
> > 
> > Well, you could try upgrading it step by step, like FC6->F8->F10 and then 
> > to 
> > F12 when it comes out. Skipping more than one release at a time isn't 
> > really 
> > tested or supported, so it can cause problems. But keeping the ancient 
> > release forever isn't a solution either.
> 
> Are you saying that skipping one release is supported? (that is, is it 
> supposed
> to work?)
> 
> Because I have a couple of FC5 servers, and I could upgrade through
> the odd releases 5->7->9->11.

You could. I've got boxes I manage that have been through this from RH9
to FC10.

Alan

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Re: any known working USB/serial converters?

[Alan Cox]

On Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:30:01 -0400
Gene Heskett  wrote:

> On Tuesday 07 July 2009, Alan Cox wrote:
> >On Tue, 7 Jul 2009 09:10:01 -0400 (EDT)
> >
> >"Robert P. J. Day"  wrote:
> >>   a while back, i was whining about the lack of functionality of a
> >> particular USB/serial converter:
> >>
> >> http://osdir.com/ml/fedora-test-list/2009-05/msg00398.html
> >>
> >>   does anyone have such a converter that just plain works out of the
> >> box?  i'm more than happy to buy and try another brand if it's the
> >> prolific product that's causing the trouble.
> >
> >pl2303 is pretty standard stuff. 
> 
> No it isn't Alan.  We found on the heyu list that 99% of the miss-comm 
> problems heyu was logging could be laid on their doorstep.  FTDI stuff just 
> works.

Is that statistically correlated for market share and also for the fact
that all your users are presumably using the same exact product that came
with the X10 hardware ?

pl2303 stuff just works as much as ftdi does (and both work well). The
pl2303 has one minor quirk which is that on mode changes (baud/char size
switch) it seems to dump its entire internal buffering so you lose more
data as you switch but thats really it.

Alan


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Re: any known working USB/serial converters?

[Alan Cox]

On Tue, 7 Jul 2009 09:10:01 -0400 (EDT)
"Robert P. J. Day"  wrote:

> 
>   a while back, i was whining about the lack of functionality of a
> particular USB/serial converter:
> 
> http://osdir.com/ml/fedora-test-list/2009-05/msg00398.html
> 
>   does anyone have such a converter that just plain works out of the
> box?  i'm more than happy to buy and try another brand if it's the
> prolific product that's causing the trouble.

pl2303 is pretty standard stuff. Check the baud rates and the like would
be my first guess. If they seem to match and csize and the rest match at
both ends then see if different baud rates each end helps (eg if the
board you have uses some strange non standard clock)


Alan

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Re: fingerprint login - some issues

[Alan Cox]

> But seriously, I've read about all sorts of things people have done to
> fool fingerprint scanners, and seen some of them demonstrated.  I put no
> faith in them to protect you when you need it.  And I put no faith in
> them to stuff you around when you need access.

The other problem with them for laptops is users like nice smooth black
shiny laptops and leave their fingerprints all over them - kind of like
leaving the keys in the ignition.

> It strikes me that you could have some image printed on a keytag, and
> swipe that across the scanner, just as effectively as using your finger.
> And, unless someone can steal your keys, that'd be a harder image for
> someone to surreptitiously copy than your fingerprints (which they can
> copy from anything that you've touched).

And more importantly - there is a revocation process. Fingerprints are an
abysmal security tool because you can't change them. Once a copy of your
print leaks from any possible source holding it or is copied from any
random object you touch the entire world has the key forever.

The tech for print copying is now very good - so good that its actually a
problem for law enforcement because "beats me officer, maybe someone made
a copy of my print at home like they show you on youtube" is actually a
rather good answer.

Alan

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Re: fingerprint login - some issues

[Alan Cox]

>If the login screen (gdm) behaves similarly to screen lock it too
> should have a password as alternate oetherwise you'd be locked out until
> your finger healed!

You can always make a copy of your fingerprint to use with scanners before
you cut your finger.

Alan

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Re: "One or more disks are failing" ?

[Alan Cox]

On Sat, 04 Jul 2009 16:07:18 -0700
Scott Beamer  wrote:

> On 07/04/2009 10:25 AM, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> > 
> > Drives typcially won't reallocate bad sectors if they can't get a good read
> > or the operation is a write. This is to give you a chance to recover the 
> > data
> > if you want to try. And if you want to spend some effort, you can figure out
> > what files, if any, were using these blocks.
> 
> Wouldn't checking for bad sectors (finding none) followed by formatting
> the drive eliminate this problem?

Most drives will reallocate a bad sector providing you write over it.
fsck will do this for problematic metadata (block counts, bitmaps, inodes
etc) if it has to.

For data hdparm --repair-sector offers a very low level interface. As
there is no easy way of finding out which file owns the problematic block
or how many there are and which files they are in without accessing that
bit of data a backup and restore is normally wise.

When ever possible I use raid 1 (mirroring). Drives are fairly cheap,
sizes are so big that capacity isn't a problem. Reliability without raid
isn't good enough IMHO.

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Re: i want to deny the access to facebook in my machine

[Alan Cox]

On Sat, 27 Jun 2009 14:22:40 +0100
Adel ESSAFI  wrote:

> Hi
> thanks,
> But actually, it does not work
> 
> [r...@localhost ~]# iptables -I OUTPUT -d 69.63.178.11 -j DROP
> [r...@localhost ~]# iptables -I OUTPUT -d 69.63.184.142 -j DROP
> [r...@localhost ~]# iptables -I OUTPUT -d 69.63.176.140 -j DROP
> [r...@localhost ~]# service iptables restart
> iptables : Suppression des règles du pare-feu :[  OK  ]
> iptables : Configuration des chaînes sur la politique ACCEP[  OK  ]er
> iptables : Déchargement des modules :  [  OK  ]
> iptables : Application des règles du pare-feu :[  OK  ]
> [r...@localhost ~]# telnet www.facebook.com 80
> Trying 69.63.186.11...
> Connected to www.facebook.com.
> Escape character is '^]'.
> 
> 
> 
> Have you any idea  why it does not work.

These sites have lots of addresses so you will need to block every single
one of them. Depending upon the front ends used and where they are hosted
that may also block other stuff.

If you are not too worried about doing it securely then just
edit /etc/hosts and add fake entries for facebook.com/www.facebook.com.
If you are worried about doing it securely remove the network connector.

(Realistically its so trivial to use open proxies, gateways, tunnels that
you have to decide what you are trying to achieve)


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Re: Files corrupt on copy

[Alan Cox]

> > Try booting with mem=4G as a first experiment.
> 
> Still got the problem.  I had already tried physically removing 4Gb,

I assume you've also tried using just the other 4GB stick already

> 
> [trantor] /proc $cat cmdline
> ro root=/dev/VelociRaptor/F10root mem=4G
> 
> 
> Failed on the 4th attempt ...
> 
> $cp file1.zip new_file.zip  ; cmp file1.zip new_file.zip
> $cp file1.zip new_file.zip  ; cmp file1.zip new_file.zip
> $cp file1.zip new_file.zip  ; cmp file1.zip new_file.zip
> $cp file1.zip new_file.zip  ; cmp file1.zip new_file.zip
> file1.zip new_file.zip differ: byte 135644629, line 513910

Does feel like hardware or a BIOS setup failure of some sort
- is the IDE/AHCI controller on the mainboard or a plug in card ?
- Have you checked the box for BIOS updates and also tried resetting to
  the BIOS safe defaults and retesting ?

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Re: Files corrupt on copy

[Alan Cox]

> I've turned AHCI on in BIOS recently as I've install a WD Raptor,
> and re-installed F10 - would that affect filesystems on other
> drives - is AHCI buggy ?

That would show up very very fast for lots of people
> 
> I'm using Fedora 10 64bit,  Asus P5Q-E Motherboard,
> Q9950 ( stock speed ), 8Gb Corsair memory

Try booting with mem=4G as a first experiment.

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Re: Warning against preupgrade

[Alan Cox]

On Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:08:58 -0700
Aldo Foot  wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 4:36 AM, Alan Cox wrote:
> > On Thu, 25 Jun 2009 04:07:07 -0700
> > Kevin Bowling  wrote:
> >
> >> 2 out of 5 failures.  F10->F11 is completely unusable for any kind of
> >> "uncommon" setup, i.e. LDAP login, Linux RAID, Xen DomU.  Anything other
> >> than one IDE hard disk with default layout really.
> >
> > 2 out of 5 ? - I got 3 out of 4 fails including hitting error paths that
> > clearly were not tested because the error printing code didn't work but
> > spewed python traces - and yes its in bugzilla already.
> 
> 
> Is this the bug to which you referred?
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=505602

I've not seen that one here

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Re: Warning against preupgrade

[Alan Cox]

On Thu, 25 Jun 2009 04:07:07 -0700
Kevin Bowling  wrote:

> 2 out of 5 failures.  F10->F11 is completely unusable for any kind of 
> "uncommon" setup, i.e. LDAP login, Linux RAID, Xen DomU.  Anything other 
> than one IDE hard disk with default layout really.

2 out of 5 ? - I got 3 out of 4 fails including hitting error paths that
clearly were not tested because the error printing code didn't work but
spewed python traces - and yes its in bugzilla already.

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Re: Graphics card recommendation?

[Alan Cox]

> Actually, your post is bullshit. Have you ever tried playing HD video on 
> an Intel chipset? It just works if your definition of "works" is "looks 
> like glitchy shit". 

Works for me. I could believe it would struggle on the older
processor/memory setups where they probably don't have enough bandwidth
for full HD video and lots of other activity.

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Re: OT: Dual Pentium III, good enough for current 2.6 kernel linux?

[Alan Cox]

> >
> I have a friend with an even older box that I'm working hard to rescue. 
> That one has a 4 Gb SCSI hard drive and a Pentium II. It is old, old, 
> old, equipment. It runs OpenServer 5.0.4 which is another migraine 
> headache for me. That's my opinion of old hardware.

Old ???

I have a 386 here, and a DEC VT220 terminal. Pentium II is merely
"recent".

Alan

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Re: OT: Dual Pentium III, good enough for current 2.6 kernel linux?

[Alan Cox]

> F11 is -march=i586 -mtune=generic, F12 is going to be -march=i686
> -mtune=atom. Everything from PPro up is i686, so everything should work
> just fine.

VIA processors such as the C3 are PPro compatible *but* the GNU C
compiler definition of i686 is (was ?) broken and incorrectly used cmov
without checking if it was available. If gcc has been fixed or those
options avoid cmov then it ought to cover any vaguely recent processor
fine (and -mtune=atom seems to produce better code for older processors
than i586)

Alan

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Re: OT: Dual Pentium III, good enough for current 2.6 kernel linux?

[Alan Cox]

> > (Single-core Pentium III, 750MHz, 384MB RAM, Blah video hardware.)
> 
> All PIIIs are single cores, AFAIK. Mine is dual in the sense of having

Yes.

> two CPUs, including heatsink. You know, good ole "SMP" before the
> multicore craze started.
> 
> Good to know F11 runs OK. I wasn´t even sure it included i586 kernels.

Gnome ought to run ok on it given enough memory. It likes to eat memory
but fortunately many of the other most obvious problems with Gnome's
performance are design problems that make it very sensitive to latency
and to disk seek performance. Disk performance hasn't really changed in
years and the latency problems are going to affect all processors fairly
equally.

In other words on a lower CPU box most of the desktop will simply spend
a bit less CPU time waiting while performing pointless disk I/O and while
waiting for other bits of Gnome to respond. Like driving a fast car in
traffic you don't actually arrive any earlier 


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Re: SCSI Controller Card Compatible With RHEL and Fedora

[Alan Cox]

On Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:12:53 -0400
Robert L Cochran  wrote:
> My question is, what's a cheap, reliable SCSI controller card that I can 
> buy for this hard drive and will be recognized out of the box by RHEL 
> and Fedora?

SYMBIOS SYM53Cxxx PCI cards can usually be picked up for peanuts and are
good controllers in my experience.

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Re: Problem with Livecd and i586

[Alan Cox]

> Any idea if there are any switches to get round this or is it a case
> of custom kernel agai

Hard to guess - you'd need to boot with "verbose" so you can see what is
going on and if anything else peculiar spews forth. 

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Re: Problem with Livecd and i586

[Alan Cox]

> > IO APIC resources could not be allocated
> > Kernel Panic - not syncinging: attempted to kill init

Thats a kernel bug

> I believe you need i686 or better to run f11. I suppose you could recompile 
> everything for [345]86 processor, but I don't think it comes that way. And 
> there 
> may be some assumptions in scripts and commands that certain features are 
> present.

Even if you did - thats not related to this one. The K6/2 shouldn't even
have an IOPAIC resources *to* allocate or indeed an IOAPIC in the first
place so something is being misdetected

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Re: OpenJDK / IcedTea is ###p

[Alan Cox]

> work-related projects. I think the reality is, most people still do have 
> a real and pressing need (think "paycheck" and "promotion") for the Sun 
> Java version.

And hobby ones - such as JMRI as it still seems to be impossible to get
the Fedora one to support serial I/O via java.commx

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Re: F11 dvd media errors

[Alan Cox]

> What Alan is talking about is a little more difficult, because you'd
> have to have the network as a fall-back for the local media.  I believe

Other way up I think. If you do the install so that the view is that the
DVD or other media is a cache of packages you can also do things like
install latest version or installs where the DVD has the 2/3rd of
packages that fitted.

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Re: F11 dvd media errors

[Alan Cox]

> you from painful experience that media errors late in the install 
> process are Not Fun--especially if you don't have an alternative system, 
> with everything you need to burn a new disk image.

Somewhere around Red Hat 9 I filed an RFE that any package it couldn't
read off CD/DVD it would let you go to the network to download. Sadly its
not been followed up in all the years since.

In RH9 days it would have been quite hard, today it ought to be far
easier.

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Re: F11 dvd media errors

[Alan Cox]

On Thu, 11 Jun 2009 20:41:21 -0700
Dave Close  wrote:

> I see a problem which may be identical to the original report, but the
> solution discovered does not fit.
> 
> Fedora-11-i386-DVD.iso has precisely the correct checksum after download.
> Burn to DVD, boot, fails media test.

In a variety of situations the media test is buggy - ignore it.

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Re: Fedora 10 and plotters? - OT

[Alan Cox]

> I'm wondering if anyone out there has any experience running an HP plotter 
> via 
> Linux, are there any gotcha's? do I have to tweak anything to tell the 
> printer 
> (and Linux) that I'm printing to 36" paper as opposed to 24"? Will the 
> automatic roll feed and cutter just work? etc..

I run a vinyl cutter (same idea more interesting "pen") this way. You can
sort of drive it via the print layer but I gave up doing so and use some
scripts to take the HPGL from inkscape as I wanted more control.

There are lots of gotchas with trying to get normal printing working -
all the bitmaps vanish (naturally enough) and there are a lot of bitmaps
lurking in some postscript output.

Alan


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Re: Fedora version supporting Poulsbo

[Alan Cox]

On Tue, 9 Jun 2009 15:21:15 -0600
"Rao, Meghana S"  wrote:

> Hi,
> I am trying to boot Fedora 10 on Poulsbo chipset but am unsuccessful. Can 
> anyone suggest what version of Fedora supports the Poulsbo chipset?

Poulsbo is a bit of a "winputer" chipset.

You might get it to kind of work if you have a new enough kernel and the
BIOS IDE setting for AHCI but the video will suck totally if you can even
get it to work with the vesa driver.

If possible get a "normal" Intel chipset system instead and leave that one
for Windows.

Alan

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Re: /dev/sr0 disappeared after upgrade f9->f10

[Alan Cox]

On Tue, 9 Jun 2009 15:43:59 -0500
Bruno Wolff III  wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 09, 2009 at 18:04:52 +0100,
>   Alan Cox  wrote:
> > On Tue, 9 Jun 2009 18:12:43 +0200
> > Olivier Robert  wrote:
> > 
> > > Hi,
> > > 
> > > I'm facing a weird issue with /dev/sr0. It disappeared after the upgrade
> > > from f9 to f10.
> > 
> > To quote The Prisoner  "We need information" 
> 
> You mean number 2.
> 
> And of course, number 6's reply of "You won't get it." makes this probably
> not the best example.

Chuckle

However in this case we did - and it means I've got some things to look
into. Its either both devices trying to talk at once (confused cable
select perhaps) or us making a hash of the speed/mode setup. Some cases
of that have been fixed by 2.6.29 so the errata kernel might work.

Promise is probably the most problematic IDE driver we have and its one
of those annoying "works for most people including the author" things so
I've not been able to pin it down in depth.


Alan (numb...@the-village.bc.nu)

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Re: Boot fails, disk not recognized.

[Alan Cox]

> `scsi_wait_scan' because I also noticed previously long stalls during boot,
> 
> I am not sure how to resolve this. Does anybody have an idea?

Its very very odd that the FC10 live cd works but not the install one.
Are they both using the same kernel ?

The stall sounds suspicious - remove the "quiet" from the grub boot line
and see what the diagnostics show.

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Re: /dev/sr0 disappeared after upgrade f9->f10

[Alan Cox]

On Tue, 9 Jun 2009 18:12:43 +0200
Olivier Robert  wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm facing a weird issue with /dev/sr0. It disappeared after the upgrade
> from f9 to f10.

To quote The Prisoner  "We need information" 

The relevant bits from dmesg after boot, the type of controllers and
CD-ROM etc would make it rather easier to guess further.

Alan

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Re: Virtual Box install problem on FC10

[Alan Cox]

> Ok, if I need to go back to square one (the 4th email of this chain)... I
> compiled the stuff and then I had
> 
> Failed to start the virtual machine Kids.
> 
> VirtualBox can't operate in VMX root mode. Please disable the KVM kernel
> extension, recompile your kernel and reboot (VERR_VMX_IN_VMX_ROOT_MODE).

What its trying to tell you in a wonderfully user intutitive manner is

"Another virtual machine is loaded and you can only have one hypervisor
 at a time using the CPU hardware assist"

Or in even plainer English "Hey you don't need virtualbox, the stuff
supplied with Fedora will just work"

> How do I compile my kernel without this KVM kernel extension and what is the
> side effects of doing so?

It ought to be sufficient to "rmmod kvm" I suspect, however firing up the
virtual machine manager and creating a new virtual machine via kvm should
also "just work"

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Re: Skype under Fedora-10

[Alan Cox]

> but it was very interesting to see how something "useful" like Skype 
> is/maybe financed. I was surprised to learn from the article that S 
> belongs to eBay

They paid big money for it, although now the rumour is it's for sale -
and ebay just pulled all the skype icons from the auction site, which has
really started the rumours back up.

> Now... if one is to avoid supporting the proprietary market does 
> anyone have a quick guide (!) to the Open Source alternatives? An answer 
> to the questions like "can I hold an audio meeting with non-Linux 
> friends"; "does xyz allow video communication"; "can I use the white 
> board via xyz" & so on

Probably a good starting spot is:

http://www.gnomemeeting.org/

which will also talk to Microsoft Netmeeting

There are also other tools such as twinkle
(http://www.xs4all.nl/~mfnboer/twinkle/index.html)

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Re: Skype under Fedora-10

[Alan Cox]

> there is a lot of computers which cannot act as a server and no-one will 
> want to host voip server for free (in large scale) 

Skype users all appear to be very happy to do so

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Re: Skype under Fedora-10

[Alan Cox]

> I don't understand why there is not a similar Linux system.
> Surely developing a VoIP protocol can't be brain surgery?
> And what exactly is the advantage or using SIP?

Almost everything else on the planet except Skype uses SIP and they all
interwork. You can inspect your SIP code and be sure it contains no
suprises while you can't with Skype - see

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/25/skype_backdoor_rumours/

and the stuff about China and Skype. With open source you could verify
the situation, with Skype you can't.

Skype is essentially the MS Windows of the VoIP world: proprietary and
closed. It talks to nothing but itself, and even encrypts its own
binaries to prevent people reverse engineering it.

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Re: Graphics card recommendation?

[Alan Cox]

> I'm wondering if I install the card I've been given in the AGP slot,
> can I disable the built-in card, (a) in Linux, and (b) in Windows?
> 
> I guess I'd better ask about (b) elsewhere!

The priority is usually set in the BIOS, although some boxes simply
disable onboard video if an AGP card is present.

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Re: Upgrade FC3 to FC10

[Alan Cox]

On Wed, 3 Jun 2009 11:31:35 -0400
"Moessbauer, David"  wrote:

> Yes, we need applications to work in new OS too.
> 
> Would CentOS4 address following security concerns:
> 1. Disable Executive Stack - IE: kernel must support NX feature

Centos has it if I remember (assuming your CPU supports PAE and NX)

> 2. Linux Kernel Remote Denial of Service Vulnerability that affects
> kernels prior to 2.6.27.5

Insufficient information - which specific vulnerability (what
vulnerability id ?)

Centos is built from the same basic sources as Red Hat Enterprise Linux -
so its long term maintained but without the guarantees, support and
service stuff paying for Red Hat gets you. If you need long lifetimes of
old code its probably more appropriate than Fedora

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Re: Are you using LXDE?

[Alan Cox]

> Can you supply a package name? I tried "yum install noveau" and didn't find 
> squat. :-(

On the T61 I have:

xorg-x11-drv-nouveau-0.0.11-1.20090106git133c1a5.fc10.x86_64

and in /etc/X11/xorg.conf set

Section "Device"
Identifier  "Videocard0"
Driver  "nouveau"
EndSection

if it currently says "nv" or "vesa"

Alan

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Re: Are you using LXDE?

[Alan Cox]

On Tue, 02 Jun 2009 13:21:36 +0200
Kevin Kofler  wrote:

> John Aldrich wrote:
> > I don't know why KDE is so slow on my machine
> 
> Well...
> 
> > NVidia graphics card
> 
> ... that's why. Crap drivers.

Nouveau accelerates 2D and render for most stuff so even if using the
open source drivers that shouldn't be a material problem unless you have
all the wacky compositing wobbly window desktop effects enabled.

Definitely worth seeing if switching to the nouveau drivers helps if your
machine has for some reason default to nv.

If not then its worth more investigation

Alan

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