[Hampshire] PC turns itself off after a few minutes

[Imran Chaudhry]

Hi All,

I have a Pentium IV desktop PC from a recycle centre with an Asus
P4S8X motherboard that is acting up. What happens is that after
turning on, the POST completes and it starts loading the OS but then
turns itself off after a few minutes.

On boot up again, the PC boots into the BIOS where a message in red
says that the CPU Frequency was set incorrectly. It then gives me two
options - 2400 and Manual. Whichever I choose I get the same problem.

The PC had a broken 360W PSU which I replaced with a 300W unit. Could
the lower wattage be the cause of this?

Thanks,
Imran

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Re: [Hampshire] PC turns itself off after a few minutes

[Imran Chaudhry]

> Also check the capacitors on the motherboard for the dreaded "capacitor
> failure"
>
> http://www.capacitorlab.com/visible-failures/
>
> http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=195
>
> We've lost loads of machines at work because of this, both motherboard &
> PSU's have been affected :-(

Thanks all for your replies. I've sorted it out now with a few dabs of
Antec Silver Thermal Paste. I put a thin bead down on one side of the
CPU and spread it evenly using an old business card. A small dab was
also placed on the heatsink. Now if only this heatsink fan wasn't so
damn noisy...

All the capacitors look fine thank god. When capacitors have been a
problem in the past I have heard a high pitched whine once the PSU has
been energized.

Imran

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[Hampshire] Virtualization Project advice

[Imran Chaudhry]

Hey all, I'm embarking on a project involving virtualization and
thought I'd consult the list in a wisdom-of-crowds fashion :-)

At my workplace we use virtualization to support test and development
of our products. That is, we have a team of about 8 staff creating VMs
of a custom Linux distribution and sometimes many such VMs connected
in virtual networks. There is also a requirement to add VMs of 4 or 5
other staff (each of those with up to 200Gb of VMs) to this workload.

Basically, I'm wondering what folks use to provide a reliable,
fast and highly-available virtualization infrastructure for
internal use only to serve the above usage scenario. In my research,
it seems the big virtualization vendors are geared to folks
using constantly running VMs that are serving websites, databases etc.

Our existing infrastructure is creaking a bit - solely for VMWare we
have a single Dell
1750 1U with Dual Xeon 2.4Ghz (with hyper-threading stuff it acts like
4 cores),  4 GBs of RAM (10Gb of swap) and SCSI discs in hardware
RAID5 using the Dell hardware raid gubbins. We have problems with slow
response, weird ARP issues and suchlike. I should add that it has a
Gigabit ethernet nic but our network is not all gigabit yet but thats
coming soon. This is with VMWare Server 1.0.4 (Free edition).

We look to spend time to save money so the free versions of software
from the "big 2 or 3" look very attractive. I have been looking at
VMWare (Free or ESXi), Citrix Xen (XenServer 5 Express) and
VirtualIron. My users need some kind of GUI client or agent to perform
management and admin of their own VMs/networks (and ideally kept
separate from everyone else). This means a Linux GUI client (for
Ubuntu/Fedora would be lovely) is a MUST. I take it as read that each
vendor has a Windows client. We're using the free VMWare Workstation
at the moment which has a Linux client. I'm finding it hard to find
out who exactly has a Linux client and their websites are often
confusing if one is new to virtualization. (sometimes Wikipedia can
help cut through the marketing puff in these kinds of cases :-)

Regarding hardware I was looking at going one of two ways -

a) expensive - a Dell 1950 + DAS (direct attached storage) such as
their MediaVault MD1000 + some fast SAS discs. This particular Dell
has support for VMWare ESXi at the firmware level which effectively
turns it into a "VMWare appliance" with the resulting VMs having a
smaller footprint.

b) cheaper - several cheaper Dells such as the PowerEdge T105 with say
8Gb RAM each and fast SATA drives acting as a cluster. That is, each
node with their own VMs running but the whole cluster with one central
management console. Both XenSource and VMWare have features to allow
moving VMs between nodes in clusters without interruptions to the
running VM.

I'm going to be at the meeting this Saturday so if anyone there is
willing to chat to me about their own virtualization infrastructure
experiences then I am all ears :-)

Cheers,
Imran

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Re: [Hampshire] Anyone else having serious issues with Fedora 10?

[Imran Chaudhry]

I recently installed it and after a promising start could not get a
wireless connection. It's very bizarre, all my neighbours wifi
networks show but not my own.

I've made a thread here with the details but no reply:
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=209100

Wired network is fine. A shame as wireless is a must-have. I last
tried Fedora Core 2 on a laptop way back in about 2004. Back to Ubuntu
8.04 for now. :-)

Regards,
Imran

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Re: [Hampshire] Low capacity 2.5" IDE hardisk?

[Imran Chaudhry]

> Hi,
>
> Anybody got any suggestions where I can source a small (under 20GB, 6
> would do fine) 2.5" IDE hard disk?
>
> Second hand would be ok, if it comes from a reputable/reliable source, I
> gave up buying HDs at auctions/on ebay a long time ago.
>
>   Andy

Hi Andy,

Computer Exchange (used to be near the Bargate, now in Marlands) might
stock used disks. I bought some 3.5" 20Gb units recently from one of
their London branches. They have a short warranty period, not sure of
exact length.

Other suggestion is the computer fair that occurs in the Novotel hotel
near West Quay once a month.

I have some low capacity 3-4Gb 3.5" HDDs (and other bits) which I'm
planning to give away for free at the next Soton LUG meet. Might be
useful if you're building a cheap software firewall appliance.

Im

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Re: [Hampshire] Media players

[Imran Chaudhry]

>   I've currently got a Freecom MediaGate MG-35 sat next to my telly,
> and it does a reasonable job of playing MPEG2s that I've recorded off
> DVB-T. However, I've recently tried re-encoding some things as various
> forms of MPEG4.
>
>   With XviD or FFMPEG, I get unacceptable (to me) encoding artefacts
> with any sane bitrate (i.e. less than half the size of the original).
>
>   Someone suggested using x264 to get a better-quality encoding --
> which it is, but my MG-35 won't play H.264 videos.
>
>   So, I'm keeping an eye out for a replacement. I'd like something
> HD-capable (for future upgrades), capable of playing H.264 video, Ogg
> and FLAC audio, handling .avi and .mp4 containers, and able to read
> files from NFS. Handling streaming audio (MP3, Ogg, FLAC) would be
> nice, too. Oh, and I'd like it to be silent. Not quiet -- silent.
> Everything else in my sitting room is solid state and fanless, and I'd
> like to keep it that way.
>
>  Does anyone have any suggestions? The current front-runner is this
> one[1], or one of its friends, but that has a 40mm fan in the back,
> which says to me that it'll make noise.
>
>   Hugo.

Hugo,

Take a look at Popcorn Hour: http://www.popcornhour.com/

I think that will satisfy your tech requirements regarding video but
unsure of NFS support. I recall the reviews praising it's lack of
noise. Can't vouch for it's stability as I don't have one myself.
There are several reviews on the web. Check the forums on the site for
user feedback.

I'm waiting for something like Popcorn Hour but with XBMC (xbmc.org)
installed on it. For now, I have an Xbox-based XBMC system which apart
from the fan-noise and non-HD support is very good.

Im

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Re: [Hampshire] Running linux/BSD on an xbox?

[Imran Chaudhry]

>> Hey Everyone,
>>
>> I've got an xbox that is sitting around not doing much so I thought I
>> might like to have it set up as a server. I'd like to run Apache, MySQL,
>> PHP (for playing around with stuff) but I'd like to keep the media
>> centre functionality too. What is particularly important is that I'd
>> still be able to use the remote control, mainly so my girlfriend can use
>> it without any drama.
>>
>> Has anyone had experience setting this kind of thing up? I'm looking for
>> hints/tips on which OS, partitioning options, application
>> recommendations, etc. It has been modded and contains a 320GB HDD.
>>
>> All suggestions welcome (including alternate hardware that would suffice
>> and is cheap/green as I think the xbox consumes about 100w when running
>> flat out ).
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Stuart.
>>
> http://www.xbox-linux.org/wiki/Xebian_HOWTO

Stuart,

I have an Xbox running Xebian and upgraded to Etch, it works pretty
well but be aware of the following:

- I think the stock Xebian kernel is 2.4. I have a 2.6.8 (i think)
kernel in mine but I can't remember how I did it. I think some chap
produced his own Xebian.
- If run from the loopback device performance is very slow. I
experimentally tried a Wordpress (PHP, MySQL) install from it and the
pages were taking 5-10 seconds to load. Install Xebian in a spare
partition. This might be difficult from the default 8Gb HDD. I've
dropped a spare 20Gb HDD in mine.

I have mine almost running "headless" in that I can boot the Xbox, it
boots into the Unleash dashboard where Xebian is the first menu item.
So I can just press A on the joypad to start Xebian, no monitor/TV
need be attached. Also this way, you can launch XBMC or anything else,
as you wanted to keep it.

I also wanted it as internal LAMP box but I also had an idea to
install Trixbox on it with a Cisco VOIP phone. Trixbox required a
later kernel and I didn't get around to taking a vanilla kernel.org
kernel and applying the Xbox patches. I was going to call it TriXBOX
:)

Im

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Re: [Hampshire] Server Security

[Imran Chaudhry]

> Thanks for all your advice. There is a lot to work through but I am
> grateful for the practical advice.
>
> One of the joys? of working with computers is getting something working
> and seeing a benefit. Sometimes you can achieve something with only a
> vague idea of what you are doing. Unfortunately these days you have to
> be on top of the game and there seem to be so many vulnerabilities to
> know about.
>
>
> Roger

Hi Roger,

Along with the good advice you've been given I thought I'd offer a few hints:

- As Ubuntu has it's roots in Debian it benefits from config files
that are normally commented helpfully for the sysadmin who is securing
the service. Normally there are sensible default settings. Also, you
can often just "man " to get even more info about
configuring that service.
- Essentially a system is more secure with the less services running
on it. Run pstree and scrutinize the list for any services you do not
need (eg. NFS, samba).
- If it was me, I would also check for all the services listening on
TCP, UDP and Unix sockets so run netstat -tl, netstat -ul and netstat
-xl and scrutinize the list and question anything that looks like it
doesn't belong or unneeded.
- I can't remember if you were running MySQL and PHP - but if so, run
the mysql_secure_installation script as superuser. This is an
interactive script that will perform some basic hardening steps.
Ubuntu has the Suhosin patch for PHP which hardens it somewhat
(package name: php5-suhosin)
- If running Perl, run in Taint mode (-T on the shebang line)
- Run a script via cron to email you of updates available for all
installed packages and take action to update it regularly. With Debian
there is a helpful debian-check-updates script we use but hopefully
Ubuntu has something more polished in its repositories.

Once you've got a basic secure set-up...
- I would look at running denyhosts (package name: denyhosts), mainly
to frustrate the automated ssh login attempts. Make sure legitimate
hosts are whitelisted in it though.
- I would like to recommend an IDS (intrusion detection system) but
I'm fairly new to these. The one I am investigating is "aide" which
iseems to be the defacto, well maintained package for Debian. This
essentially provides detection of an actual break-in and integrity
checks.

Hope that helps.

Securing external-facing systems is a big topic in my final LPI-2 exam
which I am hoping to sit and pass next week.

Im

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[Hampshire] [JOB] MySQL developer - Chichester, West Sussex, UK

[Imran Chaudhry]

Hi Folks, thought this might interest some folks on the list. Please
do not contact me about this role. The contact details are below.

Many thanks,
Imran

###

MySQL developer - Chichester, West Sussex, UK

The web sites you will be working on are the top boating sites in the
UK and Europe:

www.boatsandoutboards.co.uk

www.boatshop24.co.uk

www.boatshop24.com

Overview of Role:

Responsible for supporting, managing and monitoring the MySQL
databases; coding, queries, optimization, performance tuning,
infrastructure, performance, availability, security, backup/restore
processes and scheduling.

Working  alongside 2 existing PHP developers you will be complementing
their skill sets to run the database side of the operation. Early
tasks include site migration, data feed stability and database query
optimization.

Experience:

The ideal candidate will have:

At least 5 years experience with LAMP development (Linux, Apache,
MySQL and PHP).

Proven experience of working on high-traffic websites built in PHP
with large MySQL databases.

Performing database coding and optimization of applications.

Rate: expectation is around £140 to £180 per day depending on experience.

Duration: if you like the work and we like working with you then this
could be months or years...

Contact: m...@brownbook.net – 07977 130 934 – www.twitter.com/marc_lyne

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Re: [Hampshire] NAS device recommendation (Philip Stubbs)

[Imran Chaudhry]

> Hi all
>
> Short of building one from a dedicated Linux box (or a Drobo which is 
> prohibitively expensive for me) - can anyone recommend a decent NAS USB 
> device?
>
> I've had a Netgear NSLU2 for about 18 months now and fine though it is, it is 
> beginning to try my patience.   In particular:

Hi Rob,

Did you mean Linksys NSLU2 aka the "Slug"? My Slug caused me pain
recently when a Debian Etch to Lenny upgrade caused it to stop booting
(orange power LED, green network LED, frozen). I managed to recover by
re-flash using the new Debian Lenny installer.

> 1) Access is slow.   I was copying 45Gb recently and it went more than twice 
> as quickly if I bypassed the NSLU2.

I have found copying with scp slow (even with compression -c). I
believe this to be the caused by the low CPU power and encryption
overhead. Using samba/smbmount I was able to quadruple the transfer
speed to approx 5Mb/sec. I am using WD MyBook's with 8Mb cache. It's
over a home LAN so security isn't a concern.

> 2) The NSLU2 insists on an ext3 partition - which is fine - but if I wanted 
> to encrypt the drive - the only workaround is to write a 100Gb encrypted file 
> and use that as a container.
>

I have a feeling that would try your patience even more but I'd be
interested in how well it performs.

> I suspect 2) might be a sticking point and might well mean a dedicated Linux 
> box - but is there anything out there (known to work well with Linux) that 
> simply allows an external USB HDD to be accessed via a (cabled) network.   
> I've seen them as cheap as ?30 on Amazon but write ups are poor (only one 
> user at a time etc).

If you want to use encryption for lots of things then I would avoid a
dedicated solution and source an old Pentium III 1Ghz tower PC with
plenty of RAM. Try FreeNAS and Debian on it? FreeNAS can work with USB
HDDs but I'm not sure of the encryption support. http://freenas.org/

Cheers,
Im

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[Hampshire] [JOB] Linux Developer and Software Tester

[Imran Chaudhry]

SmoothWall are hiring for two tech vacancies:

Linux Developer:
http://www.smoothwall.net/news/newsitem.php?id=1617

Software Tester:
http://www.smoothwall.net/news/newsitem.php?id=1618

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Re: [Hampshire] Ultimate Linux Media PC?

[Imran Chaudhry]

> My girlfriend is moving out of her current splace and will no longer have
> access to the expert she had there (ie someone with an xbox with xbmc). I'm
> looking for a quiet multimedia PC that can be plugged into a TV for watching
> iplayer, youtube and other online video as well as video files and possibly
> a dvd (I have an external dvd player she could use though so it isn't a deal
> breaker). She said the xbox was quite noisy though so she'd like something
> quiet. Something that shouldn't have much trouble running something like
> xbmc (which she is familiar with, or any other easy to use program) and can
> connect to a SD tv would be great. A remote will also likely be required. An
> internal or external HDD would be fine as I have one spare. She is also
> interested in wii fit so a nintendo might be an option, but I have no idea
> if it would fit the bill in regards to the other requirements.
>
> What can people recommend for this (unit and remote)? It doesn't necessary
> have to be brand new so 2nd hand laptops/refurbished PCs aren't out of the
> question. Like most people (or in her case, public servants) she is pretty
> skint so the cheaper the better.
>
> All suggestions welcome :)
>
> Cheers,
>
> Stuart

Hi Stuart,

I'd look at XBMC on XBox again - I recently upgraded XBMC to a 2009
build from a 2007 build. With features like HDD spindown timeout and
acoustic management for the fans - it's now alot more quiet than
before. There's also some new power management features available that
I never noticed before. I never notice the XBox being on now. If you
have a glass-door type AV cabinet for your gear then placing it in
there would help further. You can pick-up an Xbox extremely cheap
these days. Your local Game or Gamestation outlet should have some for
£20 or less. Check car boot sales - I bought a modded Xbox + 120Gb HDD
installed with XBMC for £4 with a little haggling (you can't return it
if it's a dud!). Modding it is of course another matter!

I never really watch YouTube, iPlayer etc on XBMC although I have
played with plugins that do that. I would advise a cheap 2nd hand
wireless G laptop with at least a P4 if streaming is your main diet.

Regarding the Wii - I have heard of media center software available
for that but I have no idea on how they perform.

Hope that helps!
Imran

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[Hampshire] Sheeva PlugComputer anyone?

[Imran Chaudhry]

Hi, just wondering if anyone has one of these?

http://plugcomputer.org/plugwiki/index.php/Main_Page

The guy who produced a debian installer for NSLU2 has produced a
Debian Lenny tarball for the it. He calls Sheeva an NSLU2-killer:

http://www.cyrius.com/journal/debian/kirkwood/sheevaplug/nslu2-killer
http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/sheevaplug/
http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/sheevaplug/unpack.html

Debian support is "coming along" but not quite to the same level as the NSLU2.

http://computingplugs.com/index.php/SheevaPlug_Performance

interesting points:
- an SD wi-fi card *should* work with it.
- the CPU has been compared in performance to a P3 800Mhz
- It comes with Ubuntu 9.04 already installed.

I want to buy but I'm a bit put off by stories of being charged high
import duty. However I heard that the senders state a lower value to
mitigate this.

Buy from: http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-25-sheevaplug-dev-kit-uk.aspx

Cheers,
Im

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Re: [Hampshire] High availability database

[Imran Chaudhry]

> Hi,
>
> I have a situation where I need to keep data on several PCs on a LAN in
> sync. Any PC may update the data, with suitable locking, which must be
> pushed out to all the others. It must be possible for a PC to go down
> and be brought back on line again without impacting the others. The
> amount of data is not large - say a few thousand items - and the
> population of PCs is also modest - maybe 50 of them. All will be running
> some version of Red Hat Linux.
>
> Has anyone worked on something along these lines?
>
> One option I have considered is using, say, MySQL with one master node
> replicating to all the others and some mechanism to elect a new master
> if the original went down. But, that sounds messy. There must be a
> neater solution?
>
> Bye for now,
> Chris.

Hi Chris,

I have set-up and maintained MySQL Master-Master  configs which will
do something like that but I think it's going to be overkill although
that depends fully on what you need out of this system.

To keep things simple, I'm going to assume only one PC in the
"cluster" does an update at any one time. As you mention "just a few
thousand items" I'm thinking sqlite along with a cron that runs every
minute with a Perl script. This checks the stored MD5 of the sqlite
database (which is just one self-contrained file), if the MD5 is
different to the stored MD5 then this PC has updated the database and
it is pushed out to all the others. This also means that each PC has
the hostnames of every other and it's ssh keys in the authorized_keys
file of every other. It's still messy but each PC can effectively be
the "master" node and be written to. I think the maximum a PC can be
out of date with data here is about 2 minutes.

Regards,
Im

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[Hampshire] Anyone going to LRL2009 and OGGCamp?

[Imran Chaudhry]

http://lugradio.org/live/2009/
http://oggcamp.org/

I'm planning on attending and perhaps giving a talk at OGGCamp (topic
a secret at the moment!).

My plan right now is to travel up on Saturday early morning, attend
LRL, stay overnight in Wolverhampton, attend OGGCamp and return to
Southampton in the evening.

Anyone planning the same thing? If I'm driving, I'm happy to car-share
in return for a bit towards fuel costs.

Feel free to contact me offlist,
Regards,
Im

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Re: [Hampshire] Anyone going to LRL2009 and OGGCamp?

[Imran Chaudhry]

They are indeed sold out: http://lugradio.org/live/2009/tickets.html

Andy, if I can get tickets I'm happy to detour to collect/drop you
off. I'm trying to source two spare tickets and will let you know how
I fare.

Regards,
Im

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[Hampshire] Boot-up hang and "Invalid PBLK length"

[Imran Chaudhry]

Hi,

Most of the time when I boot-up the PC hangs with a message like this:


Starting up...
ACPI: Invalid PBLK length [7]

It's pretty random, sometimes it hangs for a minute then loads,
sometimes a few seconds. Sometimes it hangs for more than a few
minutes and I reboot or give up and boot another PC.

After booting into the desktop successfully some of the context from dmesg is:
1.154410] ACPI: Power Button (CM) [PWRB]
[1.15] fan PNP0C0B:00: registered as cooling_device0
[1.154448] ACPI: Fan [FAN] (on)
[1.154625] ACPI: Invalid PBLK length [7]
[1.154699] processor ACPI_CPU:00: registered as cooling_device1
[1.156241] thermal LNXTHERM:01: registered as thermal_zone0
[1.156464] ACPI: Thermal Zone [THRM] (45 C)

OS:
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=9.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=jaunty
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 9.04"

Kernel:
Linux imran-desktop 2.6.28-15-generic #52-Ubuntu SMP Wed Sep 9
10:49:34 UTC 2009 i686
GNU/Linux

Hardware: Shuttle XPC ST20G5

>From Googling, I've tried various kernel options like pnpacpi=off,
noapic etc. Some of these result in the desktop going into
low-graphics mode. None reliably fix the issue.

Some background is that the PC was previously running Ubuntu 8.04. The
problem was not present then. The BIOS intermittently reported "CMOS
Checksum error" a while back. I reloaded the BIOS defaults and that
problem has gone away. I did a fresh install of Jaunty over Hardy
sometime after this.

Any ideas please?
Thanks,
Im

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[Hampshire] SheevaPlug catch-up

[Imran Chaudhry]

So a few weeks back I made a posting asking if anyone had a SheevaPlug.

Well, I've taken the plunge and bought one.

Initially they we being sold from the Far East and you had to
wait ages for delivery. New-IT are the UK distributor. I bought it
from their online shop: http://www.newit.co.uk/
I got the package with Debian pre-installed on a 4Gb SD card. Arrived
very quickly and their service is excellent.

It works great. If using Ubuntu 9.10 then you can get at the USB-
serial console really easily (it auto-loads the driver etc), then
configure for ssh. Also there is a ton of good docs on the
plugcomputer.org wiki - eg. there are tweaks on reducing the writes to
the SD card.

I'm using it as an openvpn gateway but plan on using it as a webcam
server and then maybe a git repository and maybe backup MX.
I have a "slug" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2) already which is
serving media (Samba) to several XBMC systems and DNS for my local
network and wanted something with more power.

Anyhow, just thought some folks might be interested.

Oh, and a Happy New Year to everyone in the LUG!,
Imran

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Re: [Hampshire] Hampshire Digest, Vol 39, Issue 2

[Imran Chaudhry]

> It it plausible to connect it to a wireless network via a USB dongle? I can't
> think why it wouldn't be, but was wondering if you'd tried?

Hi Mark, nope sorry - I have a wired connection.

I did a quick search on the plugcomputer.org forum and there are folks
who have done it, check:

http://plugcomputer.org/plugforum/index.php?topic=358.msg2034#msg2034

Hope that helps,
Imran

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[Hampshire] CAcert assurers at Saturdays meeting?

[Imran Chaudhry]

Will there be any CA cert assurers at Saturdays meeting?

At the last meeting, Tony and Ciemon assured me (I think I gave
details to Hugo who has yet to assure me). I need another 15 points
before I can create 2-year certs. Eventually I'd like to become an
assurer myself.

Thanks.

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Re: [Hampshire] CAcert assurers at Saturdays meeting?

[Imran Chaudhry]

> On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 14:37:05 + (+), Imran Chaudhry wrote:
>> Will there be any CA cert assurers at Saturdays meeting?
>>
>> At the last meeting, Tony and Ciemon assured me (I think I gave
>> details to Hugo who has yet to assure me). I need another 15 points
>> before I can create 2-year certs. Eventually I'd like to become an
>> assurer myself.
>
> Yep, I'm one.  I have to say though, I've lost all faith in CAcert's
> ability to execute.  Getting a cert from trustico is cheap, from
> star-ssl (IIRC) they are free (and in browsers unlike self-signed
> ones).  So a major reason for me (avoiding paying astronomical fees to
> Verislime) has gone.

http://cert.startcom.org/

Thanks, interesting, it really does seem to be free. The root CA is
even in my Firefox 3.5 by default.

Part of the reason I wanted to go with CAcert is that one gets a warm
fuzzy feeling from being part of an effort that is a community-led,
anti-corporate, stick-it-to-the-man sort of way.
I figured I'd use them if I need to secure say an open-source or demo
project site. Anything more and I'd go with Thawte or RapidSSL.

With regards commercial CAs, I have used rapidssl.com is the past
which provide a pretty good service (they gave me a free re-issue when
I pointed out the MD5 signature algorithm vulnerability).

So weather permitting, I will try and be there with my ID docs. Will
you have the CA assurer forms with you if you're attending?

Thanks!

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Re: [Hampshire] OggCamp10 - 1st & 2nd May 2010, Liverpool

[Imran Chaudhry]

> Hi all,
>
> Some HantsLUG members attended the OggCamp event last October and seemed
> to have a good time! This year's event is being held in Liverpool on the
> 1st and 2nd May. As there's no LugRadio Live any more, we've extended
> the event to two days, so you get twice the geeky fun!
>
> Please read my blog post to find out more:
> http://tonywhitmore.co.uk/blog/2010/01/12/oggcamp10-free-software-free-culture-free-thinking/

Yay, there really is going to be another OGGCamp then. Nice one team.
I enjoyed OGGCamp "00" alot and it shows that "crowd-sourcing" can
work.

I'm glad it's in Liverpool as it's an opportunity to visit a new city.
I have never been there before.

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Re: [Hampshire] CAcert assurers at Saturdays meeting?

[Imran Chaudhry]

Looks like I cannot attend now, sorry to any CA cert assurers who were
going to bring paperwork for me.

I was also going to bring the SheevaPlug [1] in too. Maybe next time.

Have fun!

[1] http://www.newit.co.uk/ - note the new model with an eSATA interface.

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[Hampshire] [Advert] NSLU2, 250Gb WD MyBook HDD and Palm Treo 650 for sale

[Imran Chaudhry]

NSLU2 (aka "the slug") with firmware flashed with a Debian Lenny
kernel, was being used with 250GB WD MyBook HDD and works great as a
low-power always-on Linux server [1]. I had an uptime of 200-odd days
before shutdown. It can be re-flashed back to the original Linksys
firmware IIRC. Comes with original box, Ethernet cable, PSU. HDD comes
with PSU and USB2 cable. I'd like to sell the HDD and NSLU2 together
for £50

Palm Treo 650 [2], unlocked to all networks, PalmOS 5, car-charger,
original box and discs (Mac/Win), PSU, USB sync cable, leather belt
clip case, very good condition (screen is perfect as I have always
used a protector), absolute gem of a PDA - £40

Please contact me off-list. I can also drop these off at the next
Southampton LUG meet or the IBM meet, you can collect from me or I can
post recorded delivery.

Photos of both:
http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/ichaudhry/PalmTreo?authkey=Gv1sRgCN2m2YqupuH35wE&feat=directlink
http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/ichaudhry/Slug?authkey=Gv1sRgCJ7BtqDeuc-fQA#

Thanks.

[1] http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/Applications/HomePage
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_650
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[Hampshire] Recommendations for LLU Broadband Provider with Fast Upload

[Imran Chaudhry]

Hey All,

We're moving office premises soon and the local exchange [1] supports
a number of broadband providers that are LLU enabled, so this gives us
some providers that do not use BT's network.

We're after a reliable fast upload provider that won't break the bank,
thus proper full SDSL is out. The idea is to help improve performance
for home workers on VPNs with VOIP phones etc and also for remote
offsite backup and the occasional large upload (isos etc).
We've evaluated an "Annex (M)" pseudo-SDSL package which offer a
guaranteed upload/download rate but the performance has been poor over
the regular BT phone line.

Some ideas put forward are Virgin Cable Broadband, which offers something like
Download - 31.87Mb/s Upload - 1.44Mb/s (Mb = Megabit) (source: speedtest.net)
Another idea was ADSL bonding but nearly everyone I talked to had
negative comments about its reliability. Yet another idea was to find
a provider that has "reverse ADSL", with the up and download speeds
reversed.

Any suggestions? Thanks!

The exchange is due for upgrade to 21CN [2] soon which I understand
increases the upload speed "for free". Has anyone had their exchange
move to 21CN and noticed improvements? One respected ISP has stated
some negative things about 21CN [3].


[1] http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/STLOCKH
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BT_21CN and
[3] http://aaisp.blogspot.com/2009/09/info-bt-single-box-design-still.html

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Re: [Hampshire] 06 February at IBM Hursley

[Imran Chaudhry]

>> Hi, please add me to the list. If people are interested I could give a
>> talk about the state of "embedded" Linux, covering the better known
>> Andriod and Maemo distributions but also looking at the wide range of
>> devices that have Linux inside them. The vast majority of people in this
>> country use Linux every single day, even if they don't realise it.
>
> I'd certainly be interested in hearing that talk.
>
>   Andy

As someone who has recently become the owner of an Android HTC G1, I
would also be very interested.

Thanks.

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[Hampshire] CAcert and GPG signing at tomorrow meeting?

[Imran Chaudhry]

Hi, for the CAcert assurers and GPG users - I'm interested in further
GPG signing and folks assuring me for CAcert.org. I'll be at the
meeting tomorrow and aim to be there from approx 1000 to after Adrians
puppet show. [1]

Many thanks,
Imran

[1] Don't worry, I know he means http://reductivelabs.com/products/puppet/ :-)

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[Hampshire] [JOB] Sysadmin Placement Student vacancy (Southampton)

[Imran Chaudhry]

SmoothWall began in the year 2000 as an Open Source Firewall Project,
written by a group of computer enthusiasts from the Southampton area.
The project grew quickly with the involvement of programmers and other
contributors from around the world. At the end of 2001, SmoothWall Ltd
was formed to offer a commercially supported suite of security
products and services. SmoothWall Ltd. now supplies web content
filtering, firewall and email security software and hardware
appliances to large enterprises, medium sized companies and education
institutions.

Responsibilities will include:
Assisting the sysadmin department in identifying and resolving LAN problems.
Assisting the sysadmin department in identifying and resolving
problems with our external infrastructure.
System upgrades and maintenance and record keeping.
Internal support of our systems.
Testing of new developments on internal systems.
Tracking updates and vulnerabilities in 3rd party products used by SmoothWall.

Candidates should posses the following skills and experience:
Passed the 2nd year of any relevant degree.
Love of computing.
Reasonable scripting experience.
Strong fault-finding / analytical skills.
Good communication skills.
Experience using Linux.
Good knowledge of Internet technologies and how they work.
Sysadmin experience (even as a hobby, bring examples to interview)
with at least two of the following:
Linux
Apache
MySQL
PostgreSQL
Exchange
Google Apps

Experience of the following would be beneficial:
Programming in Perl.
Debian Linux
Revision control software.
Internet-facing server and application security.
Intrusion prevention.
Web and database clustering.
Penetration testing

This is an excellent opportunity to join a highly motivated team that
believes passionately in what it is doing. Ability and enthusiasm are
things that we prize.

The role is for a placement university student only. It is based in
the Southampton area.
Applicants should in the first instance email CVs to placeme...@smoothwall.net

Thank you.

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[Hampshire] HantsLUG Wiki

[Imran Chaudhry]

> Anyway, let me know what you think. Does this seem like an improvement? Can 
> you
> spot any places where the converter has done a really dreadful job? You can 
> edit
> this copy of the wiki if you want to experiment but the changes you make won't
> be copied to the live site.

Hi Dan,

Wow - that looks excellent. Nice and fresh. I like it. Dovecot also
use this for their docs: http://wiki.dovecot.org/

I had a very quick look and could not spot anything wrong. (I stress
very quick :-)

If I can give some general feedback in that the HantsLUG "general
meeting info" should be more obvious. eg. on the current site
http://hantslug.org.uk/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?SeminarRoom1 has info about
general meeting information like start and end times. That link was
linked from the word "Southampton University" which is probably not
ideal. I mention this because a new visitor to the meeting last
Saturday could not find this info.

Imran

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Re: [Hampshire] SheevaPlugs and offshoots.

[Imran Chaudhry]

> There has been some discussion lately about SheevaPlugs. Does anyone
> have any comments on using this device or their derivatives? Or better
> still willing to give a talk at the next Southampton BaB. I have been
> looking at the TonidoPlug which is reasonably priced and can be used
> for storage on the LAN which would probably be my main use. Has anyone
> bought on of these?

I have a SheevaPlug which I bought from New-IT [1]. I think it's an
excellent choice for an always-on Linux server for the home. It came
with Debian Lenny pre-installed. I use it for various things but
primarily it's a fileserver (Samba, NFS) and backup server (rsnapshot)
with an attached 1TB USB HDD. It's very stable and "just works". It
has about 10 times the power of the NSLU2 [2] so you can generally do
more stuff quicker with it. Whats neat is the in-built USB serial port
so if there is a problem, or you want to re-install with Ubuntu or you
want to mess with the bootloader it is very easy - it's like having a
mini-VGA port on it. That is a useful advantage over the NSLU2.

At the next Southampton meet (sometime in May and TBC) I'd be willing
to give a talk about it and present some uses for it. There's a thread
right now about OpenDNS and someone mentioned running your own
resolver for speed and (geek bragging rights ;-), the 'plug is ideal
for this. If your home LAN has several machines on it then you could
also manage your own DNS with it. In my home it is "imran.local", so I
can always get at things with desktop.imran.local, router.imran.local,
debian1-xen.imran.local etc

I've toyed with the idea of turning it into a firewall/router but the
single Gigabit port is rather limiting and I didn't want to mess with
USB ethernet adaptors. Since I bought it though, they have released
models with two ports and wireless so I'm sure someone somewhere has
done this kind of thing.

[1] http://www.newit.co.uk/


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Re: [Hampshire] Hmmm.....

[Imran Chaudhry]

> Hmmm
>
> I'm afraid my love affair with Linux is beginning to wane.?
>
> After finding that the spellcheck in OpenOffice was failing to work (despite 
> Hunspell being apparently installed), and that the OoHelp was giving me blank 
> pages, I decided to install Abiword.? This looked promising until I tried to 
> Print or PrintPreview whereupon Abiword self-destucted into nothingness.
>
> I'm running Zenwalk 6.0
>
> My wife's needs are to be able to run a?basic wordprocessor, do emails and 
> internet.? These would, I would have thought, be pretty universal 
> requiremants.? The fact the Zenwalk can't seem to be able to do this is 
> worrying.
>
> Is it now time to give up on Linux and 'ask Bill'?

Hi Ben, sorry to hear of the problems you've been having with your Linux distro.

I'm posting not to delve in to the root cause of your problems but to
convince you to try the latest Ubuntu, in fact if you wait until next
Thursday a landmark Ubuntu release will be out which promises to be
the best yet.

http://www.ubuntu.com/

As James and Isaac have said it might very well be hardware. If it is
an older PC then hard disk, memory or motherboard might be at fault.
If you download and install an Ubuntu CD then I recommend you choose
the "run without install" option as a test to see if you like it and
that it plays nicely with your PC - this will load Ubuntu into memory
and allow you to run things like OpenOffice by default.

I didn't know about Zenwalk until your post and it's home page says
"Modern and user-friendly (latest stable software, selected
applications)". This is also one of Ubuntu's strengths and after your
experience with Zenwalk I understand if you might be cynical but
please give it a try.

For several non-techie family members I have set up PC's with Ubuntu
9.10 to do "basic wordprocessor, do emails and internet" and they are
happy.

I'm 100% positive that Ubuntu will "save the relationship" you have
with Linux :-)

Regards,
Imran

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[Hampshire] [JOB] SmoothWall are hiring - Junior Developer and Support Engineer

[Imran Chaudhry]

More details can be found here:

Junior Developer: http://www.smoothwall.net/news/newsitem.php?id=1794

Support Engineer: http://www.smoothwall.net/news/newsitem.php?id=1793

Please do not contact me about these roles, the contact procedure is
in the vacancy description.

Thanks!

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Re: [Hampshire] Backing up your data with Duplicity and Amazon S3.

[Imran Chaudhry]

> Martin A. Brooks wrote:
>> http://hinterlands.org/wiki/index.php/BackupsWithDuplicityAndS3
>>
>> Mostly what it says on the tin. Comments and feedback appreciated.
>
> Thanks, interesting... I'll be picking apart the S3 API sometime later in the
> autumn.
>
> Perhaps a way to limit the amount of storage you can use would be useful?
>
>  -- Damian

Thanks for that Martin, looks very interesting! At $work we were
looking for reliable, fast, cheap and secure remote offsite back-up
and I was going to recommend a combo of rsync.net with Duplicity. This
is from Debian Lenny systems.

I found that Duplicity takes some getting used to and the requirement
for encrypted backups makes recovering data non-trivial - oh well.

When I have more time I will look into your solution and give some feedback.

Side note: I get digest emails but did not see Martins original post,
only Damian's reply. Weird!

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[Hampshire] Due Diligence of Service Providers

[Imran Chaudhry]

This is one for the Sysadmins or IT Manager type people.

We're assessing service providers for offsite backup of hosted
business data. The business data resides in Software-as-a-Service type
offerings that have no provision for historical backups (eg. you
delete a document and it's gone forever).

The backup service providers are often US-based small businesses who
outsource functions to other service providers such as Amazon Web
Services. What is the best way to perform "due diligence" on these
small companies?

What I'm doing is something like:
* Google search
* Crunchbase profile
* emailing their support dept lots of questions
* Get testimonials
* read reviews in trade press and customer reviews

Thanks

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Re: [Hampshire] Due Diligence of Service Providers

[Imran Chaudhry]

Many thanks for the replies. I get the digest so I'm going to munge
several replies into one.

>> The backup service providers are often US-based small businesses who
>> outsource functions to other service providers such as Amazon Web
>> Services.
>
> Be careful with putting data on US servers.
>
> The Data Protection Act states :-
>
> "Personal data shall not be transferred to a country or territory outside
> the EEA unless that country or territory ensures an adequate level of
> protection for the rights and freedoms of data subjects in relation to the
> processing of personal data."
>
> Note that the US is *not* on the list of countries with an adequate level
> of protection...
>
> If this is simply backup data - and particularly if you store it in an
> encrypted filesystem - then the backup process may not qualify as a
> "transfer" under the Act. But this is the sort of thing you need to check.

There exists a solution to this called the US Safe Harbor Framework:
http://www.export.gov/safeharbor/eu/eg_main_018365.asp

>
> How much data are you talking about? It might be a lot easier to host in
> Europe...

Because of the nature of the SaaS provider we're limited to specialist
providers. Some of them use Amazon Web Services which offer a regional
service based in Ireland. AWS specifically mention this as a way of
being compliance with regulations:
http://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#How_do_I_decide_which_Region_to_store_my_data_in

> Ask if you can get a definitive list of the backend services in use
> so that you can avoid shared fate (e.g. you lose an important file
> at the same time that Amazon Web Services suffers a global outage,
> and you find that all three of your offsite backup providers
> actually resell AWS). This might be difficult to get them to commit
> to, since they probably want the flexibility to change that behind
> the scenes.
>

The service provider is being cagey about specific details. The claim
to follow security best practice. AWS appear to have a very good
security policy in place regarding their setup
http://aws.amazon.com/security/

> In all honesty if my needs were great enough that just spreading my
> encrypted data over three or so different storage providers wasn't
> enough then I would be tempted to build it myself, using the cloud
> storage services directly.

We're moving more towards SaaS for many things so this idea is out.

Thanks
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Re: [Hampshire] Due Diligence of Service Providers

[Imran Chaudhry]

> Hello all,
>
> I think I'm getting old, since I read this thread with a growing sense of
> horror. If you outsource the total gamut of your IT infrastructure in a
> SaaS sense (fancy name for cloud-space), are you really saving in the long
> run?

Hi Jan,

As with anything, there are caveats and SaaS isn't appropriate for all
scenario's - but for a business of a certain type and size then I
think it makes a whole load of sense.

>> We're moving more towards SaaS for many things so this idea is out.
>
> Sorry to say this (I feel very old fashioned at the moment), but be very
> very careful. Having all your applications and data off-site is a security
> risk of almost incalculable proportions. The possibility of somebody
> cracking your encryption is the smallest risk, the biggest is not having
> access to your corporate data for whatever reason. I am very glad that I'm
> not the I.T. manager who has to work on this particular project. I was
> taught by my (quite conservative) parents that the further you are from
> your property, the closer you are to your calamity! :-)

Not all applications and data by any means - but quite a bit. We have
quite a few on-premises systems. I would advocate anyone trusting
business data to SaaS to have redundancy in ADSL providers and make
sure they have top-notch support and security credentials.

>
> Yes, off-site storage is cool, and if you use it in the right way, it's a
> great way to safeguard your data. But Saas? How are you going to access
> your data if all you have is a single candle burning in the middle of the
> room? I hope you have multiple contingency plans ready. I have to admit
> that I did not have time keeping up with the technical niceties of the
> specific SaaS offerings out there, but I cannot help but viewing it with
> intense distrust.

There is so much innovation going on in the SaaS field that it's hard
to keep up. We used to run co-located hardware running Linux servers
back in the day and now we don't think twice about trusting  dedicated
hosted providers - I think SaaS is a natural extension but for
applications - Gmail being the most well known example. However there
is still a lot of complexity in administering them from a user point
of view and because you can't get at logfiles under the hood you have
to ensure the support from the SaaS provider is A+.

Personally, I'm excited by "Platform as a Service" PaaS such as Google
App Engine and "Infrastructure as a Service" IaaS - an example would
be the Amazon Web Services for scaling out MySQL. That is not to say
that good old fashioned sysadmin knowledge is unnecessary as one does
have to think about backup and security but a lot of the fiddly
scaling problems with availability and scaling have been thought out.

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Re: [Hampshire] Ubuntu Server and Wordpress

[Imran Chaudhry]

> On 01/12/10 17:54, Benjie Gillam wrote:
>> Personally, I'd install it straight from Wordpress. I see no advantage
>> to installing it from the Ubuntu repository, and when you later update
>> your Ubuntu to the next LTS I would guess that it's likely to corrupt
>> your Wordpress install with a different version to what you're running,
>> or leave around security vulnerabilities that Wordpress' own updater
>> would have deleted.
>>
>> Keep in mind that you need to update Wordpress very often as there's new
>> security holes found in it very frequently :(
>>
>> Installing?Wordpress?is pretty easy - just follow these
>> instructions:?http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress#Famous_5-Minute_Install
>
> I'd agree with that.  Installing WordPress the Debian/Ubuntu way results
> in configuration files scattered around in the 'standard' places such as
> /etc and /usr/share.  That makes it difficult to then move the site to
> another computer or upload it to a hosting service.
>
> Do it the non-repo way.

I'd advise the repo way too. When I last looked at this choice, the
Debian version seemed to be poorly maintained and it's frequency of
backporting to fix security vulns was not too good. We use the
upstream version.

To help mitigate the upgrade chores I wrote a perl script a while back
to make it easier, it might be of use:
http://opticalgarbage.com/perl/upgrade-wordpress.pl

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[Hampshire] [JOB] Placement Sysadmin Student at Smoothwall

[Imran Chaudhry]

This is an exciting opportunity to learn about Systems Administration
in a mixed environment of hosted, Software-as-a-Service and
on-premises systems.
You will be joining a progressive and forward-thinking company and a
highly motivated team that strives for a quality service. We look for
ability and enthusiasm in our candidates.

http://www.smoothwall.net/c/article/315/sysadmin-student-placement/

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Re: [Hampshire] ssh permission denied?

[Imran Chaudhry]

> Hello,
>
> On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 09:34:36AM +, Hugo Mills wrote:
>>    It needn't be a single root-gaining attack: it could be a
>> combination of a remote non-root attack (e.g. on apache) and a local
>> root escalation.
>
> If this is a Debian install then the recent Exim exploit is a good
> candidate. I've had quite a few people caught by that and expect to
> find more who still haven't realised they've been compromised yet.
> :(
>
> Cheers,
> Andy

I get the daily-digest and have just seen Andy R's reply in the
archive who seems to confirm that this was the culprit.

I was aware of a patch to exim just recently, from
/usr/share/doc/exim4/changelog.Debian.gz

exim4 (4.69-9+lenny1) stable-security; urgency=high

  * Non-maintainer upload by the Security Team.
  * Fix SMTP file descriptors being leaked to processes invoked with ${run...}
  * Fix memory corruption issue in string_format(). CVE-2010-4344
  * Fix potential memory pool corruption issue in internal_lsearch_find().

http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2010-4344

The unattended-upgrades package is useful here so things like this are
applied automatically (see "aptitude show unattended-upgrades").

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Re: [Hampshire] ssh permission denied?

[Imran Chaudhry]

>> The unattended-upgrades package is useful here so things like this are
>> applied automatically (see "aptitude show unattended-upgrades").
>
> Unattended upgrades on servers you care about? Doesn't seem wise to
> me. But better than no upgrades, I grant you.
>
> apti-cron or similar for notifying you of available updates.

Hi Andy,

I've been using unattended-upgrades since June 2010 and it has worked
great. The only black mark was a couple of weeks back when it
auto-upgraded MySQL but mysqld did not come back up :-( A shame as I
could have then given it a flawless record. One can blacklist packages
to counter this. It also will not upgrade packages that require user
input to answer a confirmation prompt. My original thinking of
installing it was because I had about a dozen servers to look after
and wanted to automate as much as possible. I also wanted to avoid a
situation where vuln is exposed and used in the wild before I had a
chance to patch.

Cheers,
Imran

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Re: [Hampshire] simple description of open source etc. (Lisi)

[Imran Chaudhry]

> Oh - and lending someone a laptop running Linux while his desktop is out of
> commission being repaired/rebuilt works brilliantly!  (I found that one out
> by happenstance!)

I get asked to save Windows virus-infected laptops quite often.
Sometimes the infestation is so bad that I ask if it's OK to simply
save their data (Office docs etc) and to give Ubuntu Lucid Lynx a try.
I recently did this for a friend and was pleasantly surprised to find
him using it happily and, heavens above, syncing with his iPod via
Rhythmbox - I didn't tell him about Rhythmbox he must have just
plugged in the iPod and figured it out himself. I have not been asked
for user-support issues in the few months it has been on there. I
think it reinforces the "normal users don't care whats underneath as
log as it works" idea.

There is more of a chance for Linux to get the "toe in the door" these
days as a lot of apps that people care about are web-based (Facebook
etc).

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[Hampshire] Ubuntu Network Manager and local DNS zone not playing nice?

[Imran Chaudhry]

I've configured a private DNS zone imran.local [1] on my LAN, I'm
using bind9 on Debian Squeeze.

The problem is that while servers on the network will resolve and ping
hosts in the private zone fine, the desktops (Ubuntu Lucid Lynx) do
not when using a FQDN.

$ dig xenserver.imran.local
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;xenserver.imran.local.         IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
xenserver.imran.local.  86400   IN      A       192.168.98.30

My problem is that while I can ping by hostname...

$ ping xenserver
PING xenserver.imran.local (192.168.98.30) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from xenserver.imran.local (192.168.98.30): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64
time=4.12 ms
64 bytes from xenserver.imran.local (192.168.98.30): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64
time=0.245 ms
64 bytes from xenserver.imran.local (192.168.98.30): icmp_seq=3 ttl=64
time=0.245 ms

...which I would expect to work given my search domain.

I cannot ping by FQDN:
$ ping xenserver.imran.local
ping: unknown host xenserver.imran.local

$ cat /etc/resolv.conf
# Generated by NetworkManager
search imran.local
nameserver 192.168.98.3

192.168.98.3 is Debian Squeeze running bind9.

What is going on? I suspect NetworkManager as this works OK
from another standard Debian server on my network configured to use
192.168.98.3 as DNS.

One other thing to mention is that I had dnsmasq running. I think was
installed with convirt package? Anyhow, I purged that package but that
did not fix it.

[1] Yeah, I know it's probably not good to make up your own TLDs, I
plan to use a .net domain in future.
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Re: [Hampshire] Ubuntu Network Manager and local DNS zone not playing nice?

[Imran Chaudhry]

> This fact may be related as the .local domain is used (reserved?) for
> Avahi and mDNS.
>
> On Fedora, my /etc/nsswitch.conf file has the following:
>
> hosts:      files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns
>
> I expect Ubuntu's is very similar, so if the mdns lookup fails the
> entire host lookup will also fail.  You could probably move
> mdns4_minimal to the end of the line, so your DNS takes precedence:
>
> hosts:      files dns mdns4_minimal
>
> This might affect Avahi though, but if you don't care about it just
> remove or disable the Avahi services entirely.
>
> Or the best solution might be to change your internal domain sooner
> rather than later!  There are a few domains and TLDs reserved for
> internal use:
>
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606#page-2

Thanks very much Dominic, this must be it.

I set-up a .bogus domain which worked as expected, I then scooped out
all the .bogus bits and replaced with .local and it still didn't work.
As you say, .local must be reserved. I thought it must be something
specific to the client.

I have now decided to use one of my .net domains for internal. I had
been advised against making my own up since a ICANN are planning to
create many new gTLDs in the future:
http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtld-program.htm

The next challenge for me is configuring the domain to point to my own
nameservers, which looks a bit fiddly with GoDaddy.

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[Hampshire] Recommendations for a PPPoE Router for VDSL

[Imran Chaudhry]

Hi, I'm after some recommendations please for a VDSL router, the
requirements are:

* supports PPPoE (it's being used with Zen Fibre broadband)
* Non-NAT mode
* 8-ports
* "business-grade", eg. something in the £50 - £150 range? and beefier
cpu and ram
* it would be nice to have features like 3G for internet failover

Thanks!

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Re: [Hampshire] Recommendations for a PPPoE Router for VDSL

[Imran Chaudhry]

On 13 May 2011 16:49, Ian Grody  wrote:
> Your safest bet would be a routerboard, either the 750G or the 450G.
> http://linitx.com/viewcategory.php?catid=194 is probably the best place to get
> them from.
>
> As I understand it, version 5 of RouterOS supports mini-jumbos over PPP,
> allowing full 1500 MTU frame, yes, over PPPoE :-) (1508)
>
> They do NATless, as well as can native or tunnel IPv6.
>
> They are not for the faint hearted, non-techie though.

Thanks for the suggestion Ian, looks interesting! Definitely for techies :-)

>
> The only thing it falls on, it is 5 ports. However, it will happy go lucky
> VLANs etc.

I think 4 ports in addition to the uplink port would be a minimum. The
reason for the extra ports is so we can use our public IP range.

>
> However, failing that, the Draytek Vigor 2820 series might be of interest as
> that has pretty much everything all minus the 8 ports.
>

Thanks, I'm was looking at something in the Draytek Vigor range - lets see.

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Re: [Hampshire] FreeBSD VPS Providers

[Imran Chaudhry]

On 11 May 2011 14:55, Ian Grody  wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> I have a new project plan coming up but am in dia need for reliable FreeBSD
> VPS. I have found switchlink, who so far seem reliable. Google yields little
> results & would love to hear from anyone who may be fortunate enough to know
> of places that are reliable.
>
> Xen HVM is preferred and IPv6 support at VPS DC is a must. EU locality is
> preferred.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Ian

Hi Ian, my friend recommends http://www.kimsufi.co.uk/ks/ - reliable,
but he says the support is not that great but he self-supports.
Dedicated server but cheap and should meet all your other
requirements.

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Re: [Hampshire] confused ssh newbie

[Imran Chaudhry]

On 24 June 2011 04:03, Mike Burrows  wrote:

> On 6/23/11 11:12 AM, Benjie Gillam wrote:
>
>> Can you ssh -p  from another computer/device on your LAN? (You may
>> need to use your internal IP address to do so.) If so then you at least know
>> SSH is working. If not, then I'd use netcat.
>>
>>
>>  No.  I have the same problem whether I use the external Dyndns address of
> home network or staying within the LAN and using the ip address of the
> server running ssh.
>
> Cheers
> Mike
>
> PS. I am thinking it would be a whole lot simpler to learn how to do key
> based logins and stick with port 22 :)
>
>
Hi Mike, you've got some useful stuff to try from others in the thread.

When you're changing sshd_config you're restarting sshd afterwards?

>From an Internet-based Linux host, does "nc some.dyndns.org " produce an
openssh banner?

My next steps would be ssh -v on client side and a simultaneous multitail on
/var/log/auth.log on the server.

When running Internet-facing ssh it would be prudent to look into running
some means of defence against the inevitable intrusion attempts. Look at
DenyHosts and fail2ban - both are packages in Ubuntu/Debian.

Security through obscurity may be scoffed at but imho it's a good way to
counter unstructured attacks.

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[Hampshire] Laptop Linux distro recommendations

[Imran Chaudhry]

Can anyone recommend a good Linux distro that meets the following
requirements:

   - must work easily with a Huwei 3G dongle
   - Gnome 2.x
   - easy to set-up encrypted home dir
   - makes good use of a modern laptop (eg. usable webcam)

I have been living with Ubunty 11.10 & Unity for the last two weeks and
while it has eye-candy, usability and much promise, I found it hard to be
efficient with it compared to Gnome 2 (especially where one has multiple
terminal windows). My conclusion is that it is not suited for technical
users. One can login with "Gnome Classic" but for some reason the menu and
icons look rather odd and I did not have the patience to fix it. I really
hope 12.04 maintains Gnome 2.x as 10.04. I did try Gnome 3 but discarded it
as it was not as "obvious" to use as the alternatives.

Right now I'm using Windows 7 dual-boot. My next steps were trying Debian
Squeeze (simple and does the job, not flashy, I have concerns of older
drivers and software here and not getting the most out of the hardware).
Arch Linux looks interesting also.

The laptop is a Dell Latitude E6410.

While I am here, has anyone done a dual-boot Windows and Linux with
encrypted home dir or partition on both? I want to use Truecrypt for Windows
but this would overwrite grub and I found one blog post describing a
workaround with some hairy commands.

thanks!

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Re: [Hampshire] In need of a project

[Imran Chaudhry]

On 23 October 2011 11:47, Rob Malpass  wrote:

> Hi all
>
> ** **
>
> Can anyone suggest a good Linux project?   I have 4 boxes, three of which
> are reasonably "specced" but I've not done much with them (apart from the
> usual emails/web etc) since I had them all running the lam-mpi [1] software
> a while back.
>
> ** **
>
> Things I've thought of are:
>
> * Getting compiz-fusion to work - but gave up on this - it never seemed to
> work for me - changing settings seemed to have little result
>
> * Multimedia: Recording music or Podcasts / Video editing aren't really my
> thing
>
> * Building a bespoke firewall / router.   I'm tempted by this but (as I'll
> be most likely doing this over the festive season) I don't want to render us
> without net access!
>
> * Render farm - too similar to lam-mpi
>
> ** **
>
> I'm after something that's more a challenge to setup as opposed to
> something that looks flash.   It would also be good if it really uses a lot
> of CPU - I like to see my boxes work hard!   Can anyone recommend anything?
> 
>
> ** **
>
> Cheers
>
> Rob
>

More i/o bound than cpu but that set-up would be good to experiment with
MySQL and Galera for multi-master synchronous replication.

http://codership.com/products/mysql_galera

More for the challenge and coolness of making it work than anything
practical. Taking a nodes down one by one and seeing it all continue to
work.

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Re: [Hampshire] In need of a project

[Imran Chaudhry]

On 23 October 2011 11:47, Rob Malpass  wrote:

> Hi all
>
> ** **
>
> Can anyone suggest a good Linux project?   I have 4 boxes, three of which
> are reasonably "specced" but I've not done much with them (apart from the
> usual emails/web etc) since I had them all running the lam-mpi [1] software
> a while back.
>
> ** **
>
> Things I've thought of are:
>
> * Getting compiz-fusion to work - but gave up on this - it never seemed to
> work for me - changing settings seemed to have little result
>
> * Multimedia: Recording music or Podcasts / Video editing aren't really my
> thing
>
> * Building a bespoke firewall / router.   I'm tempted by this but (as I'll
> be most likely doing this over the festive season) I don't want to render us
> without net access!
>
> * Render farm - too similar to lam-mpi
>
> ** **
>
> I'm after something that's more a challenge to setup as opposed to
> something that looks flash.   It would also be good if it really uses a lot
> of CPU - I like to see my boxes work hard!   Can anyone recommend anything?
> 
>
> ** **
>
> Cheers
>
> Rob
>

More i/o bound than cpu but that set-up would be good to experiment with
MySQL and Galera for multi-master synchronous replication.

http://codership.com/products/mysql_galera

More for the challenge and coolness of making it work than anything
practical. Taking a nodes down one by one and seeing it all continue to
work.

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Re: [Hampshire] Btrfs

[Imran Chaudhry]

On 25 September 2011 21:10, Anton Piatek  wrote:

> Has anyone tried btrfs? The ability to stripe and mirror data across disks
> of varying sizes really appeals.
> I understand it is not production ready, but sounds really promising.
>
> Anton
>

No replies? I was curious about this too. Sounds promising but my concerns
were bugs as not as mature as ext3/4 and does it really work as advertized.
Did you get anywhere with it Anton?

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Re: [Hampshire] Laptop Linux distro recommendations

[Imran Chaudhry]

On 29 October 2011 10:24, Alan Pope  wrote:

> On 29 October 2011 00:58, Imran Chaudhry  wrote:
> > I really
> > hope 12.04 maintains Gnome 2.x as 10.04. I did try Gnome 3 but discarded
> it
> > as it was not as "obvious" to use as the alternatives.
> >
>
> It won't. GNOME 2 will be disappearing from most distros over the next
> year or so. Have you tried GNOME 3 fallback mode? It looks and feels
> more like the old GNOME 2 2-panel environment than Unity or GNOME
> Shell.
>
> Al.
>
>
That affirms what I've read on the GNOME Wikipedia page and elsewhere -
looks like Gnome 2.32 will be the last release while all development effort
goes to GNOME3. I really hope someone does a "xbmc4xbox.org" and continues
to maintain the 2.x branch somewhere. GNOME3 will take a while to mature I
think.

Not sure which option "fallback" mode is or what the GNOME Shell relates to.
I tried every option that the cog gave me on the Ubuntu 11.10 login screen.

I invested quote a bit of time getting the Ubuntu install right so my post
was really a last resort. The turning point came when in "crunch time" I
really needed to switch between multiple ssh sessions and it was simply
inefficient with the way Unity does things. I got frustrated. Yesterday, in
the Ubuntu 11.10 install I also tried xfce4-desktop (lightweight, clean but
too simple and barebones for me) and Awesome (do not have time to learn it).
These days I simply do not have time to put up with some things, my
tolerance is lower for stuff like this.

I am going to do two things next:

   1. Try Arch Linux on this laptop as I like what I've read of their "keep
   it simple" philosophy and the rolling releases. If this does not work out
   then Debian Squeeze.
   2. Continue to use Windows 7 for working with multiple ssh sessions to
   Linux. I am using the ZOC Terminal app for that. It is currently the best,
   most efficient desktop OS for this laptop considering I use some proprietary
   apps (Skype, 3G dongle software) which are superior on Windows. I may even
   make this my primary OS on this laptop.

Well, I kind of did expect that my post would stimulate some opinion over
Unity. Can I give my 2p worth? Canonical are probably right to focus on
Unity. To fix bug#1 they need a really a good GUI that differentiates the
Ubuntu brand and reinforces "Linux for human beings". I like many things
about Unity even though it requires me to adjust eg. the way the app menu
bar melds into the top-panel like OSX, the animated dock icons if something
needs my attention, the app search box, the way the dock can be rearranged.
However, If ultimately it is not for me then fine, Ubuntu does not owe me
anything and I will look at the alternatives. I will continue to wear
proudly the large "Ubuntu: Linux for human beings" sticker on this laptop
lid - if it makes a someone curious and they ask me about it then I'll
recommend Ubuntu and talk positively about it. Maybe it will convert that
person and I would have repaid Ubuntu in a small way. I think my Ubuntu
desktop days will end with 10.04 (imho the best Ubuntu release so far) but
it has been a great ride and I wish them the very best.

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Re: [Hampshire] Help, please! Databases and computer architecture.

[Imran Chaudhry]

>From my days as a Computer Science student, my approach would be to ask
students in the years ahead of me (eg. Year 2 and 3). If the course has a
mentorship scheme they would be the guys to ask first. Also, try asking the
lecturer of the courses in question. If the department has a dedicated
library then try asking the librarian also.

Strange there is no recommended reading list - I remember those from my
course quite clearly. I would scan the Comp Sci. dept noticeboard for 2nd
years selling their books for the previous years courses and pick them up
on the cheap.

On 27 November 2011 18:09, Chris. Aubrey-Smith  wrote:

> Dear Fellow LUGers,
>
> My grandson has just started a Computer Science course. He writes:
>
> "I'm having trouble finding good/reliable/relevant books on database
> development and computer architecture. My database module doesn't really
> suggest any material and I can't choose between the architecture books. Do
> you have any suggestions?"
> This is a bit outside my confidence zone, so I'd be glad to receive any
> comments or suggestions.
>
> Chris
>
>
>
> --
> Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk
> Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire
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>



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Re: [Hampshire] "Big" storage

[Imran Chaudhry]

On 27 December 2011 21:35, Rob Malpass  wrote:

> Hi all
>
> ** **
>
> I'm wondering if I'm "missing a trick" here - perhaps someone can help...*
> ***
>
> ** **
>
> I have a pretty big (already 2TB and likely to be nearer 4TB+ by the time
> I've finished) media library (all mpgs) - how should I be making this
> available over my network?   Does anyone know of a device that will allow
> (for example) 6 USB devices (all HDDs) to be connected and shared as if
> they were one?   Googling reveals something called a Belkin network usb hub
> but the reviews are awful.
>
>
>

A couple of solutions spring to mind:

   - FreeNAS (BSD, not Linux) with a cheap desktop PC that has 6 USB ports
   or buy a PCI USB2 card. FreeNAS has a great, easy-to-use web GUI and is
   well supported with documentation, community support etc.
   - Something like Debian on a low-power device like a SheevaPlug + 6-port
   USB2 hub. Then share via Samba/NFS as needed (or UPnP with Mediatomb). I
   found Samba to be great solution because of the ease of support with mixed
   clients of XBMC, Windows and Linux laptops.



> ** **
>
> I can't be the only one with a huge DVD and video library
>

Nope, I have several XBMC systems and almost 1TB of media :-) If you have
optical disc copies of your DVDs you could save some more space by
converting them to a newer compressed video format like mp4.

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[Hampshire] Network laser printer recommendations

[Imran Chaudhry]

Hi All,

Can anyone please recommend a network laser printer for SOHO use?

My requirements are:


   - works well with Debian, Ubuntu and Windows XP/Vista/7
   - networked so I can put it anywhere
   - LCD screen (helps figure out whats wrong and makes it easy to
   configure)
   - preferably with a web gui
   - mono laser for crisp text printing, I do not need colour
   - does not have to be fast
   - quieter is better
   - not too big, desktop mountable
   - not new if I can help it, available to buy a second-hand/refurbished
   from eBay
   - good brand with easily sourced consumables


I've had good experience with HP printers and was looking for something
like the HP laserJet 1320N which I could get refurbished from eBay for £70
with a 3 month warranty. I'm open to all suggestions though!

Thanks!

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Re: [Hampshire] Network laser printer recommendations

[Imran Chaudhry]

Thanks very much for the recommendations and the offer of free
printers/cards. I took a look at some of the other brands such as Brother
and Samsung (Samsung make printers?!).

In the end I've decided to go for a refurb HP LaserJet P2015N, it's a
printer I've used in a previous job and works well either printing direct
or with CUPS.

Just an aside, my previous printer was a network mono laser Dell S2000
which I got at a bargain price of £4 from a car boot sale. It had no LCD
screen and on boot up it spat out a single A4 page showing how it was
configured, network settings etc. It worked well but was quite large and
heavy.

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Re: [Hampshire] backup migrations

[Imran Chaudhry]

Another vote for rsnapshot here. As Leo says it works over rsync and you
can just feed rsnapshot the rsync options you are already using. It
supports daily, weekly, monthly out the box so it's just a matter of
commenting out the relevant lines in the config. My approach would be to
set-up rsnapshot to do an immediate backup of something small so the
directory structure is correct, then copy your backup data into the
relevant place, then perform a "dry run" to confirm that only the diffs are
transferred.

The only snag would be that the backups are not encrypted, in which case
duplicity might be your best bet. However it comes at the cost of
complexity and I found that restoring backups becomes non-trivial. Another
HantsLUG member wrote a good guide to duplicity a while back on his
personal wiki.

On 14 February 2012 19:36, Leo  wrote:

> Have you seen rsnapshot? That might be able to do what you want and works
> on rsync, so you might be able to avoid copying everything again.
>
> Leo
>
>
> --
> Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk
> Web Interface: 
> https://mailman.lug.org.uk/**mailman/listinfo/hampshire
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> --**--**--
>



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Re: [Hampshire] Network laser printer recommendations

[Imran Chaudhry]

Just wanted to follow-up and say what a fairly painless experience setting
up the HP 2015dn with Debian was.

Just wanted to give a few helpful notes in case someone searched the list:

I consulted: http://wiki.debian.org/SystemPrinting

Get the HP PPDs here:
aptitude show hpijs-ppds

I connected the printer by USB first and used "hp-setup -i" I just followed
the prompts (make sure cups is running first).

The printer appears in System > Admin > Printing

I then put the printer on the network, "hp-setup" did not succeed here.
Instead I went to System > Admin > Printing and chose "printer" from the
dropdown next to "Add". I then went through the prompts after choosing
Network Printer and "HP JetDirect". The PPD file I had to specify was put
in: /usr/share/ppd/hplip/HP

Test page printed fine - yay!

So I think HP is a fine choice for a laser printer (also, other brands are
available ;-). Also it seems HP has an opensource effort:
https://launchpad.net/hplip

On 11 February 2012 14:59, Imran Chaudhry  wrote:

> Thanks very much for the recommendations and the offer of free
> printers/cards. I took a look at some of the other brands such as Brother
> and Samsung (Samsung make printers?!).
>
> In the end I've decided to go for a refurb HP LaserJet P2015N, it's a
> printer I've used in a previous job and works well either printing direct
> or with CUPS.
>
> Just an aside, my previous printer was a network mono laser Dell S2000
> which I got at a bargain price of £4 from a car boot sale. It had no LCD
> screen and on boot up it spat out a single A4 page showing how it was
> configured, network settings etc. It worked well but was quite large and
> heavy.
>
>
> --
> GPG Key fingerprint = B323 477E F6AB 4181 9C65  F637 BC5F 7FCC 9CC9 CC7F
>
> “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live
> forever.” - Indian political and spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
>



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Re: [Hampshire] HantsLUG Website

[Imran Chaudhry]

Hi Andy, while there is work being done on the website... :-) any chance we
could chuck one of these new HantsLUG logos up on the site?

http://opticalgarbage.com/images/hantslug/linux2.jpg
http://opticalgarbage.com/images/hantslug/linux2light.jpg

I asked a friend to whip them up ages ago.


On 19 February 2012 20:05, Andy Random  wrote:

>
> On Sun, 19 Feb 2012, Dominic Rodriguez wrote:
>
>  I was wondering why I can't access the HantsLUG website. It's been like
>> this for a couple of days now.
>>
>> Is there any work on the website going on?
>>
>
> The VPS that runs the Hants LUG website changed IP address and we are
> still in the process of getting the DNS changed over.
>
> The site is currently available via the alternative URL:
>
>  http://www.hants.lug.org.uk/
>
>  Andy
>
>
> --
> Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk
> Web Interface: 
> https://mailman.lug.org.uk/**mailman/listinfo/hampshire
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>



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Re: [Hampshire] discussion at the LUG meeting - web-enabled booking system

[Imran Chaudhry]

Hi Ed,

A few years back I built a visitor tracking web app for Jamies Computer
Club, no idea if they are still using it but I'll try and dig out the code.
It might be a good starting point (it was Perl/MySQL). Otherwise I plan to
be at the LUG meet tomorrow and we can talk ideas.

On 29 February 2012 13:22, Edward Beckmann wrote:

> Hi All
>
> If you are knowledgeable about mysql, database design or web access to
> databases you cold help - if you're not yet knowledgeable but want to learn
> then you may be interested as well.
>
> I am getting involved with motorcycle escorts for sport (cycle races,
> triathlons etc.) and because there are loads of events, regional reps, bike
> riders and so on there needs to be a booking system to keep tabs on who
> will be where. Currently lists and spreadsheets in various formats are
> emailed back and forth and take ages to wade through!
>
> This situation seems an ideal opportunity for me to build on rusty
> database knowledge and create a system accessible by the web, if anyone is
> willing to handhold me, learn with me or collaborate in any way.
>
> There are no constraints I know of (nobody in the organisation has tackled
> this yet, but of course I would do a lot of work on what exactly would help
> the most), and equally no budget except occasional beers from me for
> providing a learning experience.
>
> I just thought that this would be a meaty project that could provide
> learning / challenge / satisfaction / PR.
>
> So I'll run a short ideas session for anyone who would like to participate
> if I may. Happy to take expressions of interest from anyone who cannot make
> this weekend.
>
>
>
> Thanks
>
> --
> Ed
>
> --
> Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk
> Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire
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>



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Re: [Hampshire] [ADMIN] March Meeting reminder

[Imran Chaudhry]

Thanks Adam,

Are there going to be any talks at this meeting? Do we have use of the
seminar room?

I was thinking of giving a quick talk on "10 ways to make Debian more
useful" (or "10 ways to make Debian more like Ubuntu" :-) - basically a
collection of tips/solutions I scraped together when I went from Ubuntu
Lucid Lynx to Debian Squeeze as my main laptop OS.


On 28 February 2012 22:46, Hants LUG Chairman wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Here is your midweek reminder of our next meeting on Saturday 03 March
> 2012.
> Start up from 10:00, main meeting from 10:30, clean up 15:30 and doors
> close
> around 16:00.
>
> If you want WiFi access at the meeting can you please email you MAC
> details to
> Richard by midday Friday so he can add them to the University system. If
> you
> have registered in the past you probably want to register again as the
> University system changed and your MAC address probably isn't on the
> system.
>
> "Richard Oliver" < rjo2g10 [at] ecs [dot] soton [dot] ac [dot] uk >
>
> --
> Adam Trickett
>  Chairman, Hampshire Linux Users Group
>http://www.hants.lug.org.uk/
>
> --
> Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk
> Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire
> LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk
> --
>



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Re: [Hampshire] [ADMIN] March Meeting reminder

[Imran Chaudhry]

Good seeing you guys again.

A copy of my "slides" ;-) and my custom gedit markup can be grabbed from
here:
http://opticalgarbage.com/hantslug/

On 2 March 2012 15:32, Imran Chaudhry  wrote:

> Thanks Adam,
>
> Are there going to be any talks at this meeting? Do we have use of the
> seminar room?
>
> I was thinking of giving a quick talk on "10 ways to make Debian more
> useful" (or "10 ways to make Debian more like Ubuntu" :-) - basically a
> collection of tips/solutions I scraped together when I went from Ubuntu
> Lucid Lynx to Debian Squeeze as my main laptop OS.
>
>
> On 28 February 2012 22:46, Hants LUG Chairman 
> wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> Here is your midweek reminder of our next meeting on Saturday 03 March
>> 2012.
>> Start up from 10:00, main meeting from 10:30, clean up 15:30 and doors
>> close
>> around 16:00.
>>
>> If you want WiFi access at the meeting can you please email you MAC
>> details to
>> Richard by midday Friday so he can add them to the University system. If
>> you
>> have registered in the past you probably want to register again as the
>> University system changed and your MAC address probably isn't on the
>> system.
>>
>> "Richard Oliver" < rjo2g10 [at] ecs [dot] soton [dot] ac [dot] uk >
>>
>> --
>> Adam Trickett
>>  Chairman, Hampshire Linux Users Group
>>http://www.hants.lug.org.uk/
>>
>> --
>> Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk
>> Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire
>> LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk
>> --
>>
>
>
>
> --
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>
> “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live
> forever.” - Indian political and spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
>



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[Hampshire] Free to a good home

[Imran Chaudhry]

AMD Athlon XP2000 CPU, 512M, 40G HDD, base unit only, fully working with a
Philips DVD-RW. Was formerly running Debian Squeeze and Xen. Chuck in more
RAM and use as a server or it would make a good 2nd PC with Ubuntu etc.

2 x 512M sticks of Samsung DDR2 PC2 5300 ECC RAM

Loads of 8G ex-Xbox IDE HDDs (some are firmware locked, but can be unlocked
with free Xbox tools software)

Loads of softmodems (modem cards).

Please contact me off-list, thanks

If no response then they will go to local recycle centre.

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Re: [Hampshire] Quick question

[Imran Chaudhry]

I have had this problem before and this gave me an idea of creating a web
app that takes any file from the standard install and lists that results of
stat.

I have had a go, my first milestone is just to stat files on the host
system:
http://opticalgarbage.com/cgi-bin/ufs.pl

The distro choice does not work yet.

My approach was going to use dpkg or apt-find etc to take a filename and
derive the package it's in. Then I was going to stat the file from the
package somehow. I have an Ubuntu 11.10 iso loopback mounted and therefore
I can get an the core packages eg.

$ dpkg-query --search /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_rewrite.so
apache2.2-bin: /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_rewrite.so

dpkg --contents ./pool/main/a/apache2/apache2.2-bin_2.2.20-1ubuntu1_i386.deb

The problem is my base case with ssl-cert-snakeoil.key. It does not seem to
be easy to derive which package /etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-snakeoil.key is
in.

Can anyone give me any pointers here as to best approach?

On 8 March 2012 22:17, Leo  wrote:

> On 07/03/12 23:27, Andy Smith wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Mar 07, 2012 at 11:15:50PM +, Leo wrote:
>>
>>> Can anyone with an ubuntu install tell me the owner and group of:
>>> /etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-**snakeoil.key
>>>
>>
>> $ sudo stat /etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-**snakeoil.key
>>   File: `/etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-**snakeoil.key'
>>   Size: 887 Blocks: 8  IO Block: 4096   regular file
>> Device: fb01h/64257dInode: 262977  Links: 1
>> Access: (0640/-rw-r-)  Uid: (0/root)   Gid: (  106/ssl-cert)
>> Access: 2010-10-14 13:20:02.370681001 +0100
>> Modify: 2010-07-27 04:35:54.961966857 +0100
>> Change: 2010-07-27 04:35:54.981965139 +0100
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Andy
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk
>> Web Interface: 
>> https://mailman.lug.org.uk/**mailman/listinfo/hampshire
>> LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk
>> --**--**--
>>
>
> Thank you!
>
>
> Leo
>
> --
> Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk
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>



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Re: [Hampshire] Quick question

[Imran Chaudhry]

Thanks Andy.

Oh well, I'll stick with just being able to stat any file from the base
Ubuntu and Debian packages. That might be useful and if anything this
project is a good way to renew my web Perl a little bit :-)

On 10 March 2012 13:39, Andy Smith  wrote:

> Hello,
>
> On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 09:20:12AM +, James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
> > apt-file search ssl-cert-snakeoil.key
> > might have found it, but it does not.
> >
> > apt-file does not appear to be as useful as it used to be.
>
> It's because ssl-cert-snakeoil.key is a generated file, created by
> make-ssl-cert on the install of the ssl-cert package. apt-file has
> never indexed such files, to my knowledge.
>
> I'm not sure if there is a good way of working out this sort of
> thing, since the only place I can find ssl-cert-snakeoil.key
> referenced is in the post-install script of the ssl-cert package
> (/var/lib/dpkg/info/ssl-cert.postinst).
>
> Cheers,
> Andy
>
> -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)
>
> iEYEAREDAAYFAk9bWaYACgkQIJm2TL8VSQuBDQCgkzCiKtNRnQxTIBeFwUW8nUWV
> qzcAmwW3OjTEe0FWFYDfA8g5xHD9dPGx
> =0Rov
> -END PGP SIGNATURE-
>
> --
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[Hampshire] Is my HDD on the way out?

[Imran Chaudhry]

Is my HDD on the way out? I recently observed errors such as those in
screenshot here, it seems to happen intermittently:

http://db.tt/QEQa7Pxj

As it is a relatively new HDD, I replaced the SATA cable just to be sure
and months passed with no errors until the above which happened about week
ago.

I performed a long SMART self-test which passed with no errors reported.
The SMART log also listed no errors.

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Re: [Hampshire] Is my HDD on the way out?

[Imran Chaudhry]

Interesting, many thanks. I will try the read test as you suggest.

My current HDD was cloned from the previous similar model which exhibited
similar systems before refusing to boot. Luckily the problems on the old
HDD were intermittent. I managed to get both new and old HDD online via
SystemrescueCD and used dd if= of= -
Would that somehow "transfer" badblock info? Should I have used Clonezilla
instead or something? The HDDs are WD Caviar Blue 500G and I have had a
generally good experience with this brand over the likes of Maxtor, Samsung
etc.

On 25 March 2012 14:41, Simon Iremonger (lugs)  wrote:

> On 2012-03-24 20:53, Imran Chaudhry wrote:
> > Is my HDD on the way out? I recently observed errors such as those in
> > screenshot here, it seems to happen intermittently:
> > http://db.tt/QEQa7Pxj
> > As it is a relatively new HDD, I replaced the SATA cable just to be sure
> > and months passed with no errors until the above which happened about
> week
>
> That message *usually* happens due to read-sector errors
>  -- i.e. sectors on the disk that aren't able to read properly.
>  Of course it *could* be some interface/driver bug but I
>  don't expect so given the error and my experience.
>
> This is actually quite normal -- go read about 'grown defects'.
> I have had many cases of new-ish hard-disks with 'grown defects'
>  as well as old disks that are actually failing, etc.
>
> I used to minimize this problem a lot by doing a full read/write
>  test on new hard disks before using them.  This would have the
>  effect of causing many iffy sectors to be 'mapped out' early
>  on, rather than finding these things out later.
>
>
>
> You can *read test* your disk with a command like
>  'badblocks -vs /dev/sda' ran as root (or with sudo).
> This can be very useful to 'test' if you *currently*
>  have any unreadable sectors.  It simply reads every
>  single sector on  /dev/sda  drive.
>
> WARNING:  Do not use the  -w or -n  options if you
>  don't know what you are doing.  -w  wipes the drive!
>
> --Simon
>
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Re: [Hampshire] Is my HDD on the way out?

[Imran Chaudhry]

>
> You can *read test* your disk with a command like
>  'badblocks -vs /dev/sda' ran as root (or with sudo).
> This can be very useful to 'test' if you *currently*
>  have any unreadable sectors.  It simply reads every
>  single sector on  /dev/sda  drive.
>

FYI, I have no badblocks reported:

# badblocks -vs /dev/sda
Checking blocks 0 to 488386583
Checking for bad blocks (read-only test): done

Pass completed, 0 bad blocks found.

I have a feeling it might be mobo/SATA bus glitch from a bit of Googling
"host bus error". It seems intermittent but it makes me uneasy. My PC is a
custom build in an Antec Sonata case which I've added to and upgraded over
the last 10 years or so. Maybe I've been unlucky with my hardware choice at
the last upgrade cycle but things like this make me wonder if my next
upgrade should be to a Dell Vostro or similar where all the hardware is
tested and "certified" to work together :-/

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[Hampshire] Fwd: [Southampton-pm] Initial meet-up: Wed 4th April, 8pm, Platform Tavern

[Imran Chaudhry]

An friend of mine is attempting to revive the local Southampton.pm Perl
Mongers group - please see below for more info.

-- Forwarded message --
From: Tim Retout 
Date: 30 March 2012 09:37
Subject: [Southampton-pm] Initial meet-up: Wed 4th April, 8pm, Platform
Tavern
To: southampton...@pm.org


Hi,

We need to decide when and where to have meetings.  To get the ball
rolling, I suggest we try to meet at the place/time in the subject,
and at least we'll find out if that's terribly inconvenient for
anyone. :)

If that does work, then perhaps "First Wednesday of the month" would
be acceptable for regular meetings?  Or will it clash with other
things?

Kind regards,

--
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___
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southampton...@pm.org
http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/southampton-pm



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Re: [Hampshire] Quick question

[Imran Chaudhry]

Just FYI, I have finished "Distro File Stat" which attempts to stat any
file from the base distro of Debian Squeeze and Ubuntu Oneric Ocelot:

http://opticalgarbage.com/cgi-bin/dfs.pl

Probably useless for most of you but there it is :-)

On 11 March 2012 12:03, Imran Chaudhry  wrote:

> Thanks Andy.
>
> Oh well, I'll stick with just being able to stat any file from the base
> Ubuntu and Debian packages. That might be useful and if anything this
> project is a good way to renew my web Perl a little bit :-)
>
> On 10 March 2012 13:39, Andy Smith  wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 09:20:12AM +, James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
>> > apt-file search ssl-cert-snakeoil.key
>> > might have found it, but it does not.
>> >
>> > apt-file does not appear to be as useful as it used to be.
>>
>> It's because ssl-cert-snakeoil.key is a generated file, created by
>> make-ssl-cert on the install of the ssl-cert package. apt-file has
>> never indexed such files, to my knowledge.
>>
>> I'm not sure if there is a good way of working out this sort of
>> thing, since the only place I can find ssl-cert-snakeoil.key
>> referenced is in the post-install script of the ssl-cert package
>> (/var/lib/dpkg/info/ssl-cert.postinst).
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Andy
>>
>> -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
>> Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)
>>
>> iEYEAREDAAYFAk9bWaYACgkQIJm2TL8VSQuBDQCgkzCiKtNRnQxTIBeFwUW8nUWV
>> qzcAmwW3OjTEe0FWFYDfA8g5xHD9dPGx
>> =0Rov
>> -END PGP SIGNATURE-
>>
>>
>> --
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>
>
>
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[Hampshire] [OT] Power alternatives to 2 x AAA?

[Imran Chaudhry]

Thought I'd ask here since there are some electrical/electronic modders
among us!

I have one of these but missing the charger:

The unit works really well in converting surround sound to headphone sound
however it is very heavy in terms of battery use. I use good quality Ni-MHs
and they tend to run down pretty quickly. Is there a way I can mod this or
use some kind of "AAA pack adaptor" that slots into the battery compartment
and lets me run it off the mains?

Photos:
https://picasaweb.google.com/117735389244586597840/DolbyHeadphone?authkey=Gv1sRgCO_w9IzT4rqglgE


Thanks!

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[Hampshire] Quiet and cool PC running?

[Imran Chaudhry]

These days I'm doing more development work at the PC. I'm noticing the fan
noise from my PC becoming more intrusive and I'm also finding it running
hot even when idle. I have tried different thermal compound (Artic Silver
5) application methods with two different standard Intel fan/heatsinks but
I cannot seem to keep the temperature down and thus the fan noise to an
acceptable level. The CPU is a 3Ghz P4 which are known to produce a lot of
heat so this may just be normal operation.

Having given up making this set-up quiet and wanting something with a bit
more horsepower, I want to upgrade to something quieter. I'm planning to
buy a motherboard bundle from eBay that features a Core 2 Duo (eg. E6750)
as I understand that these run much cooler. As for the fan I was thinking
of fitting an aftermarket CPU cooler, has anyone got any experience with
the Zalman type fan such as this:
http://www.zalman.co.kr/eng/product/Product_Read.asp?idx=164
Do they really make a difference?

Thanks!

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Re: [Hampshire] Quiet and cool PC running?

[Imran Chaudhry]

Thin client idea - funny you should say that because I do have the
"ingredients" already to do that! But for me doing development would become
a bit of chore because of having to await two machines to boot up instead
of one. Also the wife would not tolerate another server in my "data centre"
(aka "behind the living room sofa") so I would be back to square one with
respects to noise.

To answer some other questions - I never buy current generation hardware to
be honest and I like to grab a bargain where I can. I think I could get a
used Gigabyte-brand mobo + good C2D + 4GB for around £60. I think that
would be fine for my purposes for a few years. I never play games, strictly
productivity stuff and web-browsing really. As long as the system can
*quietly* run Debian Squeeze with Gnome 2 (and eventually Ubuntu 12.04 with
Unity 3D) in 1900x1200 (my GPU is a GeForce 8400GS PCI-e) with my usual
session: several gnome-terminals, Chrome with ~10 tabs open, Clemantine
playing music in the background, gedit, XChat and usual LAMP services such
as MySQL, Apache2, modperl etc then I will be very happy. Phew - listing
all that makes me think I should go for quad-core :-)

The P4 actually exposes 2 logical cores (via Hyper-threading I think) to
the OS and normally the load keeps low - however YouTube, Picasa and other
stuff seems to push the loadav to 3 or 4+ very easily. Thats when the
temperature rises and the fan noise kicks in.

On 1 May 2012 23:11, James Courtier-Dutton  wrote:

>
> On May 1, 2012 5:45 PM, "Tim Brocklehurst" 
> wrote:
> >
> > On Tuesday 01 May 2012 22:37:46 James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
> > > It depends what you are doing with it. You could use a thin client to
> > > connect to your faster pc. Put the pc far away from you so the noise
> does
> > > not matter.
> > > I do this when writing software or processing data sets. Let a fast
> remote
> > > system do the hard work needing the fans etc.
> > >
> > > James
> >
> > Teradici defined standards for KVM over IP (with a "zero client" on your
> desk)
> > a while ago, and we have been using the Dell variant of the kit (FX100)
> for
> > quite a while at work. It's very good stuff, but I wouldn't use it at
> home due
> > to the price!
>
> I was thinking more along the lines of VNC, or X over ssh on a 1gig local
> LAN.
>
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Re: [Hampshire] Quiet and cool PC running?

[Imran Chaudhry]

*4* GPUs? Wow - I take it you've some funky vehicle or aircraft simulator
running?

Anyhow, just thought I'd follow up and say thanks for all for comments. I
ended up getting a Core 2 Duo E6850 with an aBit I35-Pro mobo. The Zalman
CPU cooler is fantastic and the PC is just a quiet hum in the background
just as these things should be. My GPU has a heatsink, no fan so I guess
thats lucky.

A little OT but I also plumped for a 64GB SSD and am trying Ubuntu 12.04
with Unity (!) as my main desktop. From Grub hand-off I get to the login
screen in about 5 seconds :-)

I was intruiged by the "remote desktop"/VNC/SSH forwarding style
suggestions and will maybe try them out as an experiment.

Thanks again guys.


On 2 May 2012 20:53, Samuel Penn  wrote:

> On Wednesday 02 May 2012 09:31:02 Brad Rogers wrote:
> > No-one has mentioned water cooling.  Very quiet indeed.  Can be a scary
> > prospect for some, but it does work.  AS has been mentioned though, once
> > you've eliminated the loudest noise (usually the CPU fan), you start
> > hearing other things;  GPU fan, drive motors
>
> Heh. If you think the CPU fan is the loudest noise, you haven't heard
> a gaming rig with 4 GPUs... :-) The loudest noise in my study (which has
> three running computers in it) is my GF's video cards in the next room.
>
> (But then admittedly, if you're going for something quiet, you're
> probably not looking at a box with 4 graphics cards).
>
> --
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> Sam.  Posts: http://www.google.com/profiles/samuel.penn
>
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Re: [Hampshire] My 2p on the GUI 'Wars'

[Imran Chaudhry]

On 1 July 2012 22:19, Stephen Davies
wrote:

>  As a professional software developer who has been writing programms
> since the days of Card Decks, George 3 , SOFOR and paper tape, I find this
> latest craze on desktops (Gnome 3, Unity & Windows 8) rather depressing.
>
> (Ignoring the 'touchy feely' of touchscreens that everyone seems to rave
> ove these days)
> If they had been around at the birth of GUI/Windowing systems I would have
> understood them.
> Now IMHO, this searching and every icon on the desktop idea is frankly so
> silly, it beggars belief.
>
>
Just to add some balance to the thread - I recently installed Ubuntu 12.04
on my cousins laptop. It had Windows 7 on it which for some reason can get
out on the network but none of the web browsers get a connection - I
suspect a virus is causing problems and this was borne out by a malware
scan. I offered to install Ubuntu in a dual-boot fashion. I then installed
Chrome and Skype (test call made and works using in-built mic and webcam),
locked them both in the left-hand launcher and job done. Suspend and resume
also works cleanly. All easy, quick and without fuss (I was thankful that
Ubuntu made it easy to create a live USB to install from). All in all
pretty damn good "just works-ness".

Her 10 year old son (separate user account created) also took to it and
found his way around (finding apps, changing background and even installing
things from the Software Centre himself without problems). I think it is
these guys that Canonical are aiming for and this is something Alan Pope
was trying to highlight in the other thread.

Anyway, now she has a working laptop and is happy (the only slight gripe
being lack of Facebook Connect in Skype which Windows Skype has).

I was glad that there was available a nice looking modern Linux,
easy-to-use distro to come-to-the-rescue of non-techie users ("fluffies")
like this. I could have installed my own distro-of-choice Debian Squeeze on
there and everything would also be fine... but then I'd have to fiddle with
installing a back-ported version of iceweasel to get smooth fonts back, and
faff around getting users to log-in without a password and a bunch of other
things to make it more usable for fluffies. This is stuff that we put up
with but many others will not.

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Re: [Hampshire] My 2p on the GUI 'Wars'

[Imran Chaudhry]

>
> Interesting. Personally use Debian Wheezy (current testing). I have no
> gripe with iceweasel's fonts, though I may be less piccy than others,
> standard install, straight out of the repository. Log-in without password
> is not hard with either GDM or KDM. And to be honest, password-less login
> isn't something we all want enabled by default.
>

Just wanted to clarify:

I use Chrome almost exclusively. The Iceweasel thing is to address ugly
font rendering system-wide:
http://lovingthepenguin.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/squeeze-fonts-firefox-update.html

Log-in without password I found a hassle with Debian. I had to edit
/*etc/pam.d/gdm3,
add the user to nopasswdlogin group and finally delete their password if
they had one set. *
*
*
*I don't want it by default but it would be good to make it easy. This is
where Ubuntu excels - in making it easier for fluffies (the Ubuntu
"download and install security updates automatically" thing is another good
example). *
*
*
*Yes security is important but there are use cases where no password is
fine. I wanted passwordless login for the 10 year old in the example above
but not the adult user. However I do enable password less logins on my own
machines for my wife and daughter.*

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Re: [Hampshire] re skype

[Imran Chaudhry]

>
> This happens on both a 32 bit OS, a 64 bit OS.  I have tried machines from
> 2
> GB to 16 GB of memory and the problem with video and sound still occurs
> after
> 18 minutes.
>
> The video uses a 480x640 picture on a USB webcam.  The sound uses
> microphone
> and eaphones connected to a sound card.
>
> I am using pulse audio.  I have found that skype on some OS's needs the
> gnome-
> volume-control to be open before I can get any sound.
>
> Any suggestions on how to increase my video and sound time would be much
> appreciated.
>

We also observed problems with Skype recently, as packaged by the Software
Centre in Ubuntu 12.04 (I think this is version 2.x). It would stop working
after about 20 minutes. We would restart and then get a "problem has
occured with Skype" prompt after a little while.

Sorry, I have no suggestions other than to try Skype 4.0 [0] which was
released recently. Did you also get problems with Skype 4.0? I have yet to
try it on the laptop where the original Skype problem is.

Ubuntu 12.04 appears to use PulseAudio (at least, thats what I saw as the
sound device in the Skype settings). AIUI there are two major sound
architectures in Linux: ALSA and PulseAudio. Another experiment might be to
try ALSA instead of PulseAudio [1]? I didn't get that far so I would be
keen to hear if that improves the matter.


[0] http://blogs.skype.com/linux/2012/06/skype_40_for_linux.html
[1]
https://support.skype.com/en-us/faq/FA10964/Can-I-change-the-sound-system-used-by-Skype-for-Linux

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[Hampshire] Management of multiple gnome-terminal windows?

[Imran Chaudhry]

So there's a fair few coders and sysadmins among us here. What do you do to
manage multiple terminal windows open on a Gnome desktop?

I use Debian Squeeze with Gnome 2.x and often have ~10 gnome-terminal
windows open. About half will be running vim, the rest will be normal shell
or ssh sessions.

What I am after is some way to intelligently group them on the gnome-panel
or elsewhere. Maybe colour code them by "group" or purpose so I can quickly
access each one by sight. Right now the way I "group" them in the lower
gnome-panel is by manually keeping the vim terms on the right and others on
the left with gedit and Chrome between them as a "buffer". There must be a
better way to address this?

Can these help? I've earmarked a few desktop management tools that might
help but not got around to looking at them in any depth:
http://do.davebsd.com/ http://wiki.awn-project.org/


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Re: [Hampshire] Management of multiple gnome-terminal windows?

[Imran Chaudhry]

Thanks Tony, I forgot about Terminator and will look again.

Another idea could be to use virtual desktops with one desktop for each
terminal group.

I have a feeling that tiling window managers will also accomplish what I
want but this may be overkill for me. I am curious about them though - does
anyone here run XMonad or Awesome and have configured them to place their
terminal windows for efficiency?


On 12 July 2012 18:32, Tony Whitmore  wrote:

> On 12/07/12 18:24, Imran Chaudhry wrote:
>
>> So there's a fair few coders and sysadmins among us here. What do you do
>> to manage multiple terminal windows open on a Gnome desktop?
>>
>
> I use terminator, which is based on Gnome terminal. It's ace. If I need
> to, I run multiple terminator sessions to allow grouping of activities.
>
>
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Re: [Hampshire] Spinning rust

[Imran Chaudhry]

> BTW, I have good backups of my data...!
>
>
>
This.

Also, what I've learnt recently is to periodically archive your backup -
either to another HDD or to some other media.

I recently had some bad luck whereby my backup USB HDD developed a fault
(or a software bug triggered a fault?) and consequently had some filesystem
corruption. This was the only copy of the backup data I had. I managed to
recover the data by attempting to repair the filesystem (ext4) using fsck
which put the data in lost+found. The only snag was that all the (thousands
of) directory names (about 10 years of accumulated data) have been replaced
by their inode numbers. This was down to the corruption being related to
"multiply claimed inode blocks" or some such.

I observed a kernel panic at the same time and have raised a bug about it
with Debian: 

The trigger point seemed to be a manual rsync operation concerning a USB
HDD that overlapped an daily rsnapshot run (also rsync) to another USB HDD.
It's made me a bit leery about keeping my i/o ops on USB HDD devices rather
simple in future.

The long and short of it is: have an offline backup of your backups!

BTW, how much is expensive? I recently bought a new 2T WD Caviar Green from
an eBay trader for £75 inc postage.

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Re: [Hampshire] Spinning rust

[Imran Chaudhry]

>
> I've had a few such issues with ext4. I'm looking at moving all my systems
> back to ext3 - it might not be as fast, but it does seem a whole lot more
> resilient...
>

I thought the same (go back to ext3 or maybe bite the bullet and try btrfs)
but in fairness this is the only time it's happened. I have been running
this set-up for at least 1 year without problems. One advantage of ext4 is
the very fsck time over ext3.


>
> > BTW, how much is expensive? I recently bought a new 2T WD Caviar Green
> > from an eBay trader for £75 inc postage.
>
> I'm not sure I'd have done that deal. eBay is great for many things, but I
> don't think I'd trust my data to some guy flogging cheap knock-offs...
>

I didn't think fake HDD exists but after some Googling I think you have a
point. One thing I noticed with the recent HDDs I bought is that they seem
lighter than normal AND I have had a spot of bad luck with another eBay
drive...

The weight thing might just be progress though! Most of the scams I read
involve *adding* weight to fake USB flash drives!

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Re: [Hampshire] Spinning rust

[Imran Chaudhry]

>
>
> > I've had a few such issues with ext4.
>
> +1
>

Several developers have responded to my bug report:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=679830

In summary:
- ext3 a better safer choice for a backup filesystem at this time
- ext4 not a good choice in kernel version 2.32 but probably fine in 3.2
which is in the next Debian stable release (and is now
available in testing, unstable and squeeze-backports).


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Re: [Hampshire] Netbook batteries

[Imran Chaudhry]

>
> > > Does anyone have any experience / horror stories / good revies / etc.?
> >
> > Yes, I got a horror for my Acer Aspire One.  If I remember, I'll show it
> to
> > you.  A quite horrific waste of £40.  It came from somewhere in the Far
> East,
> > and the internal connections do not even meet.  Desmond suggested that it
> > might be worth prising the thing open and soldering the connections
> together.
> > I cut my losses, but keep it as an object lesson on the side-effects of
> > parsimony!!
> >
> > Branded batteries for me from now on.
> ** end quote [hants...@googlemail.com]
>
> Yes, this is what worries me about eBay!
>

I always go to eBay for laptop batteries and I know they are not OEM. I
always go for sellers that look established with very high feedback rating
and (most important) offer 12m warranty. I have had to use a warranty like
this once and got a replacement within a week. They are normally Chinese/HK
sellers that use (hopefully) branded cells such as Sanyo. As I understand
it, matching the cells is a tricky process which these sellers sometimes
skip QA on, hence variable quality. The batteries do not last as long as
OEM and will prolly drop to 1hr after a year or two of use but for ~£25 it
is a good price.

Your laptop that lasted 2hrs from new probably had a 6-cell battery. OEMs
normally put 6-cell batteries in by default hoping people will plump for
the more expensive 9-cell on purchase.

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Re: [Hampshire] [ADMIN] IMPORTANT PLEASE READ!

[Imran Chaudhry]

On 29 August 2012 09:09, Victor Churchill  wrote:

> LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk
>

Just FYI, I have seen several people with this URL in sigs but the www
address does not resolve.

But http://hantslug.org.uk redirects to the wiki site.

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[Hampshire] RDP from Debian to Windows 7 with dual monitors?

[Imran Chaudhry]

I sometimes work from home and use RDP using Remmima from Debian Squeeze to
connect to my Windows 7 desktop at the office over the VPN. The trouble is
the my Win 7 desktop is dual-monitor and I have the secondary display taken
up with a Virtualbox VM running Debian in full-screen mode. When I RDP in
everything is "flattened" to one monitor (or one display).

What this means is that I can only view one "monitor" at a time from home
but I want to be able to switch between the two remote monitors easily. I
thought about opening two RDP sessions and keeping each in it's own tab on
the Remimma side. If I try and open another RDP session then as soon as I
login to the Win7 box the existing session closes.

How can I easily get at both monitors via RDP with this arrangement? It
seems there is this capability in the Windows RDP client but I could not
see anything for Linux like this.

I thought about enabling the Virtualbox VM remote display capability and
then point different RDP sessions to the host and guest but have the same
problem with the existing session being logged out.

Right now it's a pain having to switch between "monitors", if I am in the
remote Debian VM what I have to do is:

- ctrl + f to get out of fullscreen
- minimize vm from virtualbox toolbar
- I now see windows desktop
- to get back to Debian desktop I click on virtual box task in the bottom
panel.

Thanks

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Re: [Hampshire] RDP from Debian to Windows 7 with dual monitors?

[Imran Chaudhry]

>
> Hi Imran,
>
> With version 7 or 7.1 multi monitor support (/multimon) was introduced,
> however it requires both the client and the server to support it, Win 7
> is fine but I suspect Remmima is only a V6 client.
>
> I was trying to get another feature introduced with V7 (bi-directional
> audio) working from home without much joy.
>
> The other problem you will have, as you have discovered, is that Win 7
> will only allow one active connection at a time due to licence
> restrictions, I have mess about with some hacks that change this, but it
> required me download some third party modified windows files., which I
> wouldn't recommend on a production system.
>
> Have you thought about VNC, I find it generally isn't as responsive on a
> WAN but you can tell it which screen to show. I think this would you to
> do what you want.
>
> Sorry it doesn't answer you problem, but hopefully enough you give you
> some ideas.
>

Thanks for that Peter, I have installed VNC and will give it a try tonight.
I have the free version but thats OK as I am using the VPN to handle
encryption and basic password is fine as long as it's strong.

In my previous Googling I did see mention of the patch to Windows but it
seemed a bit dodgy and I'm pretty sure the malware scanners will flag it as
a PUP.

Out of curioisity could you let me know which hack you tried though? The
one I saw was http://www.techspot.com/news/46927-story-page-2.html and from
the comments I was dubious if it would work and also if it was XP-only.
Even then I don't think it wise for me to trust applying closed-source
binaries from $random_internet_guy !

Thanks!

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Re: [Hampshire] RDP from Debian to Windows 7 with dual monitors?

[Imran Chaudhry]

>
>
> Thanks for that Peter, I have installed VNC and will give it a try
> tonight. I have the free version but thats OK as I am using the VPN to
> handle encryption and basic password is fine as long as it's strong.
>

Just wanted to follow-up: VNC is the best solution so far. I get to see
both desktops on the two remote monitors side-by-side on one large
rectangle, where I can use a scrollbar to view the entire width. I enabled
"scrolled window mode" and "grab all keyboard events" for best reulsts
(otherwise ctrl-alt-delete to unlock Windows produces the "shutdown" dialog
in Debian). I used Remmina to make the connection. RealVNC have a Linux
client but not sure if that will give me any advantage.

It's just shy of perfect though: I can also start another concurrent
session and my thought was to have each session viewing each desktop.
However in the second session, I can't interact with the remote side, the
mouse pointer is "stuck" as a double-ended arrow.

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[Hampshire] [JOB] Support Developer (Jobsite, Havant)

[Imran Chaudhry]

Come and join an online giant in the arena of digital recruitment!

Jobsite (now called Evenbase) are looking for a Support Developer. You will
be part of a small team making sure the Jobsite family of websites is
maintained and running "business-as-usual". There are varied and
interesting analysis and challenges involved. We use the renowned FogBugz
case management tool and every developer has a powerful desktop with
dual-widescreen monitors so we have excellent tools (we also have UltraEdit
licences but you can use what you are most comfortable with). The desktop
is Windows 7 and an Exchange environment but you can elect to use any
flavour of Linux as long as you can self-admin. The team is part of a wider
IT group of about 20 developers.

Examples of some of the websites:
http://www.jobsite.co.uk/
http://www.justengineers.net/
http://www.thisisderbyshire.co.uk/jobs

We're mainly looking for someone with Perl but if you're proficient with
another popular Web-language and can self-teach yourself Perl then we still
want to hear from you. You need to have a good grasp of the elements of a
modern website eg. templates, JavaScript/HTML/CSS, databases and SQL. You
also need to have at least basic knowledge of the Linux command line, shell
scripts and utilities like grep.

This role not only calls upon good analysis and technical skills - you need
to have a good "human" approach as you will be interacting with users and
other developers. Good written and verbal English is essential. Having an
appreciation of typical business functions and what goes on in them is also
a plus.

The offices are situated in Langstone Technology Park in Havant (about 5
miles east of Portsmouth). The facilities are excellent with a huge car
park, on-site gym, coffee shop, resteraunt serving breakfast and lunch,
free wi-fi, rest-area and even a table-tennis table. There is a large Tesco
superstore nearby and Havant town centre has all the usual amenities. It's
easily commutable by car being just off the M27/A27. Havant rail station is
about 15 minutes walk. It is close to the coast and beautiful woodlands and
there are ample lunchtime walks available. The company also allows working
from home on occasion and we have a VPN access to workstations.

If all that sounds like something that motivates you then please contact me
direct if you are interested, thank you.

(I am only interested in hearing from potential applicants, no agents
please.)

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Re: [Hampshire] [JOB] Support Developer (Jobsite, Havant)

[Imran Chaudhry]

On 1 September 2012 18:25, Jacqui Caren  wrote:

> On 01/09/2012 17:21, Imran Chaudhry wrote:
>
>> Come and join an online giant in the arena of digital recruitment!
>>
>
> It would help if you provided an estimated salary range.


It would be around £37k depending on experience.


> Stil at the same place!
> I spent some time "on site" some years ago and I can say that the jobsite
> locale, people and work environ
> is a "good'un" :-)
>

Thanks, yes it is :-)

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Re: [Hampshire] London Perl Workshop 2012

[Imran Chaudhry]

o/

On 21 September 2012 16:40, Andy Smith  wrote:

> Hello,
>
> On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 11:04:27AM +0100, Dr A. J. Trickett wrote:
> > May be of interest to some.
> >
> > Subject: London Perl Workshop 2012
>
> I usually try to make it. Anyone else here going?
>
> Cheers,
> Andy
>
> -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)
>
> iEYEAREDAAYFAlBcilEACgkQIJm2TL8VSQvP/QCgiv3mnz3zzstxSqYDQitMK5ey
> GvIAniB3QrKV5glLYo07bd5QDZcnxhS0
> =NPnj
> -END PGP SIGNATURE-
>
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Re: [Hampshire] "Gnome 2 is dead" (Was Re: Ubuntu Unity - Dash - context lists)

[Imran Chaudhry]

>
> From all of that I was under the impression that "sticking with
> Gnome Classic" was not really a long-term option, it would be either
> Unity, Gnome 3 or a completely different desktop environment.
>

There is MATE which seems to work well but I don't like the idea of
sticking with a desktop that does not have a groundswell of support behind
it.

>From my point-of-view, I'm starting to feel like if I do not move to Unity
or Gnome then I will be a "2nd class citizen" (eg. are Dropbox really going
to keep Gnome 2.x in mind when maintaining their desktop app? Let alone
future services and apps from other providers). For this reason I'll
probably switch to Gnome 3 when Squeeze updates dry up or evaluate Unity
again on the next Ubuntu LTS release.

Right now I think it is Gnome 3 but I've been encouraged by reports of
users on this list in adapting to Unity so who knows which way I'll jump :-)

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Re: [Hampshire] [ADMIN] Chairman's intro and November meeting

[Imran Chaudhry]

> I think it is important to remember that everyone can participate in the
> LUG
> to some degree (in fact, to whatever degree they wish) and I will be
> making as
> many of the new iniatives open to everyone as possible. I would
> particularly
> like to encourage people to give talks at our monthly meetings. Talks don't
> have to be long, they can be about anything linux or FOSS related, you can
> even do a talk to demonstrate a problem and ask for help. If you are
> willing
> to give a talk, just let me know and I'll make sure you get to give your
> talk.
>

Hi Tim,

I'm highlighting the paragraph above because I have been thinking about
that for a while. I also was going to suggest "lightning talk" style
format. For me, these talks make the LUG meetings more engaging and become
a talking point for further discussion.

I will try and "put my money where my mouth" is and whip up something for
November. I sadly could not attend the AGM for family reasons and felt bad
about it.

All the best for your term in office Mr Chairman!

Imran

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Re: [Hampshire] 8TB Cloud

[Imran Chaudhry]

Hi Rob,

What Andy said pretty much.

My 2p on a few things:

1. Go for some good branded  SATAs that give you good £/G. When I was a
sysadmin I would choose SAS for their performance and lower failure rate
(MTBF) when building pizza box servers - you don't need that robustness for
a media server.

2. not sure sorry.

3. I run a media server (Compaq SFF PC) with 2 x 2T USB2 HDDs on Debian
Squeeze. Yes they are nice and economical and fine for serving even HiDef.
They also spin down when not in use so are good on electricity use and
noise. However I will go with SATAs and a Drobo or HP miniserver when I
outgrow this. If your network is Gigabit (or will eventually be) then it
will be the disc i/o that will be the bottleneck when doing large transfers
or backups. This became a bit of a pain after a while but maybe I am just
impatient. I would still choose SATA over USB3 as I perceive the SATA
kernel drivers more "battle tested".

The "spurious IDs" are prolly the file system IDs which are set when you
create the ext3 or 4 filesystem or RAID partition. They then keep that ID
permanently until you reformat. As mentioned, chuck them in fstab instead
of the device ID and then you can relax when doing maintenance when a HDD
needs to be replaced or you recable.

see: tree /dev/disk/by-uuid for the mappings

Hope that helps!

Sent from phone. Please excuse typos and brevity.
On Nov 25, 2012 11:24 AM, "Rob Malpass"  wrote:

> Hi all
>
> ** **
>
> I’m trying to build a PC which has 8TB of storage – to be my media
> server.   For the moment, I’m deliberately ignoring devices like
> microservers or Drobos – mostly on cost and the fact I have several towers
> with enough space to take 4*2TB drives.   I’ve not built a PC for ages so I
> have a few questions:
>
> ** **
>
> 1) Is SATA still the bus of choice?   According to Novatech, there is now
> “Serial attached SCSI”.   I don’t think any of my mobos have this bus, and
> indeed it seems the drives sizes here are a lot smaller than I need – but
> is there anything pushing this over SATA?
>
> ** **
>
> 2) Presumably I need a stronger power supply.   If there are 4 hdds and 1
> DVD drive – what sort of wattage should I be looking at?
>
> ** **
>
> 3) If, expense notwithstanding for the moment, I did this as 4*2TB
> external USB hard drives, I’ve had trouble sharing these with Ubuntu before
> now.   For some reason they’re mounted under /media under a strange (and
> seemingly random) string of characters (which change every time the server
> is restarted) such that permanent shortcuts from other devices on the
> network wouldn’t work and would need to be re-established each time I
> connect.   Has anyone worked around this?
>
> ** **
>
> Any constructive suggestions very welcome.
>
> ** **
>
> Cheers
>
> Rob
>
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[Hampshire] CoderDojo Southampton?

[Imran Chaudhry]

Hi All,

I've recently become aware of this "CoderDojo" thing from an article
in the Guardian [0]

It got me thinking on how great it would be if Southampton had one of
these. I have been reading the website and "Getting started" guide [1]
and it all looks doable.

For me, I'm thinking I have too many family and personal commitments
to give this a go as a mentor... but I thought I'd put it out there
just in case anyone is interested? It's something I am still thinking
about so who knows.

One challenge is lack of weekly venue perhaps, something the
Southampton Hackspace people seem to be having too [2].

Anyhow, just a thought!

[0] 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2012/dec/05/coderdojo-programming-kids
[1] http://coderdojo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/StartingaDojoCoderDojo1.pdf
[2] http://southackton.org.uk/

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Re: [Hampshire] Ubuntu spy program

[Imran Chaudhry]

Thanks Anton for that welcome injection of anti-tinfoil hat serum :-)

I don't use Ubuntu but would have no problem with the shopping lens
stuff. As I understand it Canonical Ltd is expanding quickly and so
they need to think about income because - shock, horror - they are a
business and have wages and bills to pay.

On 11 December 2012 18:53, Anton Piatek  wrote:
> Not sure if I got the url right via mobile phone but there's a post from an
> ex-canonical emoyee about this:
> https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z132szwbruiozdntp22iiziggr24tzlwg04?cbp=104mhlwf5d4ys&spath=/app/basic/109365858706205035322/posts&sparm=cbp%3Dix7bz3mtvnnl%26force%3D1%26partnerid%3Dt1&force=1&partnerid=t1
>
> Anton
> --
> Anton Piatek
> (sent from my phone, please excuse any typos)
> http://www.strangeparty.com
>
> No trees were destroyed in the sending of this message, however, a
> significant number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.
>
> On 11 Dec 2012 17:53, "Lisi"  wrote:
>>
>> On Tuesday 11 December 2012 17:40:25 Gordon Scott wrote:
>> > When I first read that I thought it was just Richard Stallman going off
>> > on one of his "software must be free or die" rants, but I followed some
>> > of the links and there seems to be a number of people who are convinced
>> > it's true. Of course one has to be cautious of things one reads in the
>> > media and especially on the 'Net.
>>
>> I had already heard about it, and I am pretty sure that it is true.  Some
>> people feel that Canonical is justified.  And I don't like Ubuntu anyway!
>>
>> Lisi
>>
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>
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Re: [Hampshire] Recommendations - Windows AV

[Imran Chaudhry]

I use Avast Free which I've been running for the last few years. The
only annoyance is the "scanning completed" alerts which you can turn
off and you have to re-register the licence annually (takes a minute).
I switched from AVG free as it was becoming more of a resource hog.

I also use the inbuilt Windows Defender on Windows Vista. I use
Windows 8 occasionally and I noticed in that OS that the inbuilt
"defender" stuff seems to be much more like a typical malware checker.
There is no longer the "white flag" notice to "choose an antivirus
program online".

I don't run any kind of firewall on Linux except for the in-built one.
I see no need for one as I always use it on a home network and apart
from directory sharing I do not run public services.

I have never run any Linux anti-virus on laptop/desktop but I hear
clamav is popular.


On 20 January 2013 21:15, Ally Biggs  wrote:
> Avast anti virus in conjunction with malware bytes both are free never had a 
> issue :)
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On 20 Jan 2013, at 16:24, "Chris Dennis"  wrote:
>
>> On 20/01/13 12:42, Paul Stimpson wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I use AVG free edition. I'm happy with it and it always used to get rid
>>> of the stuff Norton wouldn't.
>>
>> I've always used and recommended AVG Free Edition, until yesterday when I 
>> noticed that the free version no longer scans incoming emails!  So I think 
>> I'm going to switch allegiance to the freen version of Avast.
>>
>> cheers
>>
>> Chris
>> --
>> Chris Dennis  cgden...@btinternet.com
>> Fordingbridge, Hampshire, UK
>>
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Re: [Hampshire] Scamming call

[Imran Chaudhry]

Are you on the TPS[0] Roger? I did so some years back and it
dramatically reduced the cold calls I got via landline.

I have heard some unscrupulous companies do not comply with it but it
is better than nothing.

[0] http://www.tpsonline.org.uk/tps/index.html

On 25 January 2013 12:46, Roger Munford
 wrote:
> I just received a scamming call from Asia and spent some time playing
> gullible while trying to get my wife to phone the police/BT with a hope that
> the call could be traced and stopped.
>
> However the police, "actionfraud" operator told that there was nothing that
> could be done and BT operator services aren't working today.
>
> I managed to get the dog barking and told "Jeff" that I had to go and he
> could call me this afternoon.
>
> Is there anything further that I can do?
>
>
> Roger
>
>
>
>
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Re: [Hampshire] Promoting LUG meets via social networking

[Imran Chaudhry]

>> The beginners guide to MySQL was also very popular.
>
> Yes - MySQL per se is not for *total* beginners.  Pity I missed it. :-(

I think Tony might have meant my talk which I did years ago? There was
a huge attendance that day from several southern LUGs. Someone told me
that a few had come for my talk - no pressure! (and did I mention my
boss was in the audience?)

I never expected so many would be interested as I assumed everyone
would have that knowledge already or know how to access it easily. It
really challenged my assumptions. But I thought I would try a talk and
see what happens. Afterwards, quite a few people said they had learned
something new.

I'm thinking about an intro to Perl talk - maybe at next LUG meet
family commitments allowing.

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[Hampshire] Getting 3D Acceleration/Compiz working with Debian Squeeze VirtualBox guest

[Imran Chaudhry]

Hey All,

I'm having a spot of bother getting 3D hardware acceleration and
Compiz working in my Debian Squeeze Virtualbox guest. Whatever I try
it defaults to software rendering. I have obvious things set such as
"3D acceleration" checked in the guest settings (Display > Video >
Extended Features).

Please can anyone assist? The net is full of people getting it to
"just work" with Ubuntu so I'm hopeful! I feel it's a "driver missing
issues" from some of the Xorg log but thought it might require some
voodoo with xrandr...

Some of my findings, version info and current situation:

###

I have Virtualbox guest additions installed which matches the host
Virtualbox version.

glxinfo:
name of display: :0.0
display: :0  screen: 0
direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: Chromium
server glx version string: 1.3 Chromium

glxgears runs but not smoothly

[imran@debian ~]$ glxgears
XIO:  fatal IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on X server ":0.0"
 after 1414 requests (1412 known processed) with 0 events remaining.

the guest video device:

[ROOT@debian ~]# lshw -C video
 *-display UNCLAIMED
  description: VGA compatible controller
  product: VirtualBox Graphics Adapter
  vendor: InnoTek Systemberatung GmbH
  physical id: 2
  bus info: pci@:00:02.0
  version: 00
  width: 32 bits
  clock: 33MHz
  capabilities: vga_controller bus_master
  configuration: latency=64
  resources: memory:e000-e7ff(prefetchable)

guest = debian squeeze

[ROOT@debian ~]# cat /etc/debian_version
6.0.6
[ROOT@debian ~]# uname -a
Linux debian 2.6.32-5-686 #1 SMP Sun Sep 23 09:49:36 UTC 2012 i686 GNU/Linux

host = windows 7 pro sp1 64-bit
virtualbox version = 4.2.6
3d acceleration enabled in guest vm config

I added the "Virtual" lines in my xorg.conf on recommendation from link:
https://jeremy.visser.name/2009/10/no-dri-on-x-org-with-a-radeon-check-your-virtual-size/

SubSection "Display"
Viewport   0 0
Depth 16
Virtual 1920 1080
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport   0 0
Depth 24
Virtual 1920 1080
EndSubSection

notice these bits in Xorg log:

(II) AIGLX: Screen 0 is not DRI2 capable
drmOpenDevice: node name is /dev/dri/card0
drmOpenDevice: open result is 13, (OK)
drmOpenByBusid: Searching for BusID pci::00:02.0
drmOpenDevice: node name is /dev/dri/card0
drmOpenDevice: open result is 13, (OK)
drmOpenByBusid: drmOpenMinor returns 13
drmOpenByBusid: drmGetBusid reports pci::00:02.0
(II) Next line is added to allow vboxvideo_drv.so to appear as
whitelisted driver
(II) The file referenced, is *NOT* loaded
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//ati_drv.so
(EE) AIGLX error: vboxvideo does not export required DRI extension
(EE) AIGLX: reverting to software rendering
(II) AIGLX: Loaded and initialized /usr/lib/dri/swrast_dri.so
(II) GLX: Initialized DRISWRAST GL provider for screen 0

I have these Virtualbox packages installed:

[imran@debian log]$ aptitude search virtualbox | egrep '^i'
i A virtualbox-ose-guest-dkms   - x86 virtualization solution - guest additi
i A virtualbox-ose-guest-utils  - x86 virtualization solution - non-X11 gues
i   virtualbox-ose-guest-x11- x86 virtualization solution - X11 guest ut

these services are running in the guest:

imran@debian log]$ pgrep -fl VBox
885 /usr/sbin/VBoxService
3623 VBoxService
5144 /usr/bin/VBoxClient --clipboard
5153 /usr/bin/VBoxClient --display
5158 /usr/bin/VBoxClient --seamless
5162 /usr/bin/VBoxClient --draganddrop

i have these in `/etc/init.d`

vboxadd
vboxadd-service
vboxadd-x11
virtualbox-ose-guest-utils

this looks odd... no output!

[imran@debian init.d]$ ./vboxadd-x11
Usage: ./vboxadd-x11 {start|stop|restart|status}
[imran@debian init.d]$ ./vboxadd-x11 status
[imran@debian init.d]$ ./vboxadd-x11 start
[imran@debian init.d]$ ./vboxadd-x11 status
[imran@debian init.d]$

###

Thanks!

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Re: [Hampshire] Drobo

[Imran Chaudhry]

Hi Craig, not sure how simple "simple" is :-) and I'm assuming Debian
is OK when you say "Linux".

I found this site very helpful when I had my slug/NSLU2:

(The TS-209 isn't listed but it can't be a million miles off the TS-210?)

http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/qnap/ts-219/


On 7 February 2013 09:42, Craig George  wrote:
>
>
> Do you have any simple instructions on how to install Linux onto the QNAP 
> t209.
>
> I just want to run it as a Linux server (my own secure drop box) for clients?
>
> Cheers
> Craig
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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