Re: [Hampshire] Repeated server crash overnight

[Simon Reap via Hampshire]

Hi Rob, anything in /etc/cron.daily which would run at or about 
midnight? Or any files in /var/spool/cron/crontabs or /etc/cron.d? Or 
even a self-re-scheduling "at" job? ("sudo atq" will list any pending jobs)


On 13/03/2023 08:02, rmluglist2--- via Hampshire wrote:


Hi all

I have an Ubuntu box which is on 24/7/365.   It has ufw running 
allowing nothing from outside my lan.


A couple of times recently, I’ve come in to find the machine locked up 
with a lot of disk access (it can be ping’d but I can’t ssh into it 
and it doesn’t respond to mouse or keyboard on the console – only 
power cycling brings it back).   As I say, this has now happened twice 
in the last 3-4 nights.


It may have been hacked (but I doubt it looking at kern.log and 
auth.log – and I’m behind a NAT router with no ports open).   Does 
anyone know if Ubuntu (Jammy) does some indexing or some other regular 
task overnight?   The reason I ask is I’m wondering if it’s said 
indexing that’s crashed the (very old) system.   It’s fine for a file 
server but not really fit for anything else.   Incidentally, I’ve 
checked crontab and there’s nothing in there.


Anything else I should be checking?

Cheers

Rob

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Where to get Debian computer?

[Simon Reap via Hampshire]

Hi Peter,

I think your best bet is to get a barebones computer (Novatech?) and buy a 
magazine with a cover DVD, then install from that.

Good luck!
Simon 

 Peter Alefounder via Hampshire wrote 

>I have decided that I can modify my requirements. It seems that
>getting a computer with Debian already installed is not possible.
>There was a company in the USA that would do that, but they have
>gone out of business. In any case, I now think it is not Debian
>that provides what I want, but KDE: multiple desktops, focus
>follows mouse and Konqueror. Ubuntu can be made usable.
>
>Aidan said:
>> Here's some links that might be worth exploring (in no particular order)
>>
>> UK, Linux OEM
>> https://starlabs.systems/#
>>
>> https://www.entroware.com/store/
>>
>> https://junocomputers.com/uk/
>>
>> Overseas, Linux OEM
>
>Thanks Aidan. I have been exploring those. As far as I can tell
>from their web site, Starlabs only do laptops. 
>
>Entroware: have something interesting, looks just like a monitor,
>but incorporates a computer as well. It has a sufficient number
>of USB ports. Web site says it is out of stock. I have sent an
>enquiry about that.
>
>Juno Computers: have something that might do except the only
>video output is HDMI 2.0. My monitor is D-Sub or VGA1.
>
>As for overseas, I'm not keen on trying to import directly, and
>no telling how long it might take.
>
>Peter Alefounder.
>
>
>-- 
>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
> 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Debian flash drive mount problem

[Simon Reap via Hampshire]

Hi Peter,

On 01/06/2020 11:34, Peter Alefounder via Hampshire wrote:

mount /dev/sdb1 /media/flash

I can read from the flash drive, but only write to it using
the command line as root, which is not very convenient.


Before you get the pop-up to work again, you could try

    mount -o uid=xxx,gid=xxx /dev/sdb1 /media/flash

where "xxx" is the user/group name of your logged-in user. That way all 
files on the drive will appear to be owned by that user, allowing reads 
and writes from applications etc.


Simon


--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Grouping Files for backup

[Simon Reap via Hampshire]

To use multi-volume, do something like:

    cd to directory with files
    tar cvf /dir/out1.tar -M -L 52428800 *
(where /dir/ is a place to hold the 50GB tar files, and 52428800 is 
50*1024*1024, the number of 1k blocks in 50GB)


It will write the first 50GB to /dir/out1.tar, then prompt with:
  Prepare volume #2 for '/dir/out1.tar' and hit return:
Type in
    n /dir/out2.tar
(that's 'n space /dir' etc) and press return. The next 50GB goes to 
/dir/out2.tar and it prompts with

    Prepare volume #3 for '/dir/out2.tar' and hit return:
Type in
    n /dir/out3.tar
and press return. Continue for 37 more files!

(When I started writing this, I didn't realise how much effort it was!).



Another solution could be:

    tar cvf - * | split -b 52428800 -d - /dir/out

This will write /dir/out00, /dir/out01, /dir/out02 and so on to 
/dir/out40. The tar writes to stdout and pipes to split. The '-b' splits 
the file into that number of bytes per file, and the '-d' uses numeric 
suffices on the filenames (otherwise it would be aa, ab, ac etc to b0). 
The '-' reads from stdin, and the '/dir/out' is the prefix for the 
output filenames.




This splits the files at a given number of bytes, so all parts need to 
be connected together to extract data. The benefit of the 'tar -M' 
version is that each part is a valid tar file (though some files may be 
split across two tar files).


Simon

On 29/05/2019 16:12, James Courtier-Dutton via Hampshire wrote:

Hi,
 Tar already has such a feature. A long time ago, it would have needed 
to spread data across backup tapes.

look at the man page for tag for something like --multi-volume.

Kind Regards

James


On Wed, 29 May 2019 at 12:12, Rob Malpass via Hampshire 
mailto:hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk>> 
wrote:


Hi all

I’ve never been a bash script expert (to say the least!) but I
need a clever script (I assume that’s the easiest way but please
say if not) that can turn 120 files (amounting to 2Tb of data)
into 40 files of <=50Gb for an archiving project I’m about to
embark on.   Can anyone help / give me some pointers?

I can guarantee none of the files are over 50Gb in size. So it’s a
question of something like:

Create an empty archive (call it n.tar.gz)

Repeat

Find next (uncompressed) file

Compress it to tmp.tar.gz

If size of tmp.tar.gz < (50Gb – current size of n.tar.gz) then

    Append tmp.tar.gz to n.tar.gz

Else

    Close n.tar.gz

Alert me so I can write n.tar.gz to MD

    Create next empty archive ((n+1).tar.gz)

Add tmp.tar.gz to (n+1).tar.gz

End If

Until all files have been compressed

The end product should be 40 files called n.tar.gz (where 0-- 
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
--


 
	Virus-free. www.avg.com 
 



<#DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>



-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Configuring Sendmail to Internet

[Simon Reap via Hampshire]

On 01/08/2018 11:35, David Anderson via Hampshire wrote:

On 30/07/2018 21:20, Imran Chaudhry via Hampshire wrote:

I'm maintaining a server that configured using Sendmail to send
outbound mail to the Internet via a Smart Host, eg.
  

You have to be careful about which ISP you use. Zen Internet have told
me that they will disconnect me if they see me using my own mail server
through their smarthost
ssmtp is not a mail server - it essentially provides the same 
functionality as a mail client to send emails (but not receive them), 
and is callable from scripts and is easily configured to talk to an 
existing mail server. I'm pretty sure that Mythic Beasts will regard 
this as normal, and not threaten disconnection!


--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Configuring Sendmail to Internet

[Simon Reap via Hampshire]

I've taken to installing ssmtp on my raspberry Pis to send emails, and 
using my ISP's mail server as a forwarder (it's in my default Puppet 
configuration for new nodes).


One simple config file, and you're set!

Simon

On 30/07/2018 21:20, Imran Chaudhry via Hampshire wrote:

I'm maintaining a server that configured using Sendmail to send
outbound mail to the Internet via a Smart Host, eg.

 # "Smart" relay host (may be null)
 DS

The ISP says that because we are hosting our own mailserver, we cannot
use their mailhost this way (eg. it's probably only for mail clients,
smaller usage etc)

I understand that sendmail can be configured to just use itself
locally to send mail - happy days, but people have told me that it
might open up a can worms such as configuring SPF records etc.

I would rather make as few changes as possible so as not to disrupt
the existing mail sending functions. Has anyone configured sendmail
like this and is simple or complex, any good pointers to guides etc?

I know some of you might say "Dude, use Postfix|Exim" but I want the
changes to be as minimal as possible.

Thanks!




--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Quick cron question

[Simon Reap via Hampshire]

One other thing - if you put day of week and day of month entries, it 
performs the task on both entries - e.g. if you put dom 1,15 and dow 1, 
it will happen on the first and fifteenth of the month *and* on every 
Monday.


--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Best place to buy a Raspberry Pi?

[Simon Reap via Hampshire]

I originally mostly use www.rs-online.com and cpc.farnell.com (the 
latter usually cheaper, but both do next day delivery), since they were 
the only outlets for a while.


Others are now supplying them - I have just bought a zero from the 
PiHut, and I've also used Pi Supply (https://www.pi-supply.com/) and 
pimoroni.com (yes, I do have a lot of Pis!). Ryanteck.uk and rasp.io are 
great for add-ons.


A pi3 is certainly the easiest to get going with WiFi, but a Pi2 and a 
dongle would probably work out cheaper, with only a small reduction in 
processing power.


Simon

On 09/01/2017 19:07, Roger Munford via Hampshire wrote:
I bought my pi(s) at the Pi Hut https://thepihut.com/. I think they 
started from scratch, have a range of extras and offer some support. 
Nothing has gone wrong with the purchasing (5 times) so I think they 
are well organised and probably pay UK tax and prices look OK. They do 
kits which make it worthwhile if you need all the components which you 
dont.


While I am writing has anybody used a twin socket with built in USB 
charger to run a Pi continuously. A few years ago when they first came 
out I asked MK and they said it wasn't designed for continuous use but 
I had the impression that they were just saying that to cover 
themselves. It would make sense to use one unless of course it was not 
100% safe.


Roger



On 09/01/17 18:27, Andy Random via Hampshire wrote:


Hi,

So I've resisted buying a Pi until now because I have way too much 
junk in the house I bought and never really used and given the way 
the Pi has changed since it was first launched that was probably a 
good plan.


However now I have something I want a low power always on wifi 
enabled device for and I'm think a Raspberry Pi fits the bill.


So where is the best place to buy one?

I'm happy to buy one from a real shop if there is one I can visit 
easily and won't make me pay significantly over the odds (hello 
Maplin) or order online. I'm an Amazon Prime member so ordering from 
Amazon is easy and delivery is free, but honestly I try not to buy 
everything from Amazon just on principal.


I'm looking for a Pi with wifi (Pi 3 model B?) an SD card for it and 
a power supply, I don't need a case but if the cheapest/easiest way 
to get what I want is some kind of starter kit that includes a case 
that's fine.


I really don't want an HDMI cable (I have too many already) or a 
Keyboard or mouse as once setup the Pi will run headless and be 
administered via SSH.


So recommendation please?

  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
--

Re: [Hampshire] IGMP protocol with BT home hubs

[Simon Reap]

On 06/03/2016 18:41, Roger Munford wrote:
I have a problem with a new, complex system for managing ethernet 
connected solar inverters and the problem may well be down to missing 
multicasts from a BT home hub.




For anybody that has followed what I have been trying to describe, do 
BT Home hubs support IGMP? is there something in the configuration 
that enables/disables it and is there a test that I can do to verify it?




The BT Home Hubs 3, 4  and 5 definitely support IGMP - BT Youview 
requires it.


When the old BT freeview service stopped and I was "upgraded" to 
YouView, I had to get a Home Hub 4 installed to replace my solid 
reliable Netgear DG384 which didn't support IGMP (as far as I could 
tell).  My old Homehub 1 (once I'd retrieved it from its hiding place in 
the loft) didn't work either.


There's a fairly old list of routers which support IGMP (and hence BT 
YouView) at 
https://community.bt.com/t5/YouView-Boxes/Known-Routers-to-Work-with-Multicast-IGMP/td-p/994338


Simon

--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Disk copy/duplication for upgrade.

[Simon Reap]

On 05/05/2014 15:27, Andy Random wrote:


Any suggestions on the best/current tools for duplicating a HD?

I have a Win7 laptop that I want to upgrade the disk in it so I can 
dual boot it with Linux.




I had to to do the same thing recently with a laptop.  I don't have the 
mini SATA connector on my USB adapter, so I too could only run one disk 
at once.


I attached a large USB disk (with at least as much space as the old 
drive size, and something like NTFS or ext4, so that huge files can be 
created).  I then booted from a live cd (Knoppix, but others will do 
fine), dd-ed the old disk to a file on the USB disk, powered off and 
installed the new disk, booted again  from live CD, and dd-ed the file 
back  to the new disk.


simon

--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] LibreOffice not working over SSH for one user but not another

[Simon Reap]

On 26/04/2014 15:20, Dr A. J. Trickett wrote:

If user V tries to do the same then LibreOffice starts but after about 1
second of any application (e.g. writer) running it vanishes without trace.
User V has no problem running other applications on F and having them
display on box M.



Maybe run strace on the command?  So,rather than just libreoffice as 
the command you tunnel through SSH,


   strace -o /tmp/lbo.log /usr/bin/libreoffice -writer

--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Selective file copy

[Simon Reap]

Something like:

cd /media/nas/music
find . -name \*.mp3 | while read nam; do
  mkdir -p /media/data/MP3/$(dirname $nam)
  cp $nam /media/data/MP3/$nam
done

On 02/05/2014 08:55 AM, LUG wrote:

Hello all,
I'm hoping to call on the group's collective bash-fu to come up with 
an incantation that will make this task a lot easier.


The situation is:
 - Nas drive at /media/nas/music which contains music files as 
/Artist/Album/multiple tracks.


 - Data drive at /media/data/MP3 which then has the same 
/Artist/Album/multiple tracks layout.


The music on the NAS is a mixture of FLAC and MP3 (and probably some 
WMA, but let's ignore them for the moment) depending on whether it was 
ripped from a CD (FLAC) or downloaded (MP3).


What I would like to do is copy the MP3s to the /media/data/MP3 
folder, along with their corresponding folder structure.


So for example, if the NAS contains
/Artist_A/Album_1/Song[1-10].flac
as well as
/Artist_A/Album_2/Song[1-10].mp3

I want to just copy the MP3s along with the /Artist_A/Album_2 folder 
structure.


This is made more complicated by the fact that the /media/data/MP3 
folder already has the Artist/Album/tracks structure in it as I have 
converted the FLACs into MP3s using that as the output folder (there 
wasn't enough room on the NAS to do them in-situ).


Does that sound possible?

Thanks,
Keith






-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] [OT] W7 wired client cant map to XP Pro share, wireless clients can

[Simon Reap]

On 25/01/2014 00:09, Mike Burrows wrote:


Could there be a difference in the router between the way it handles 
requests of wired and wireless clients?




I've come across the opposite setting on routers (you could decide 
whether wireless clients could see each other), but unless you have 
VLANs set up, I'd be surprised if wired ones can't communicate.
-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] NAS permissions

[Simon Reap]

Happy New Year Rob!

You are probably better off using -t cifs (smbfs is old-style!), and 
having rw,uid=fred,gid=fred in the options.


Simon

On 01/01/2014 11:54, Rob Malpass wrote:


Hi all

Happy New Year -- my first post for a while.

I'm having a bit of trouble setting permissions properly to mount a 
NAS device as read write for a given user.   It's a brand new QNAP 
TS-412 and seems to be a little Linux box with a nice graphical UI.   
Surprise, surprise, connect via Windows and I can move, read and write 
with no user or permssions problems.


If I then do:

sudo mount --t smbfs //sharename /mnt/abcd --o user=fred




-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] NAS permissions

[Simon Reap]

Have you added the rw,uid=fred,gid=fredgrp bit?

I've mounted a NAS disk on my machine with this in /etc/fstab:
//server1/disk /mnt/mydisk cifs 
_netdev,nounix,rw,username=myuser,password=pass1,uid=me,gid=mygrp 0 0


(where my user name is me and its group is mygrp)

An ls -ld /mnt/mydisk returns:
drwxr-xr-x 2 me mygrp 0 dec 30 15:54 /mnt/mydisk

(note the me and mygrp in the permissions).

The underlying /mnt/mydisk directory is owned by root:root, but that 
doesn't show after the disk is mounted.


What does your mount command, or /etc/fstab line, look like now?

Simon

On 01/01/2014 18:14, Rob Malpass wrote:


Hi

Thanks -- using sudo tee did indeed work -- and I can create a 
subdirectory with


sudo mkdir /mnt/abcd/foo

Here are the permissions ls --l /mnt gives:

drwxr-xr-x 14 root root0 May 6  2003 wxyz

drwxr-xr-x  1 root root0 Jan  1 17:16 abcd

and ls -l /mnt/abcd gives:

drwxr-xr-x 0 root root0 Dec 27 05:07 2013-14

-rwxr-xr-x 0 root root  104 Jan  1 18:08 fred

-rwxr-xr-x 0 root root 8922 Dec 26 19:15 hello2.odt

drwxr-xr-x 0 root root0 Oct 17 16:33 lost+found

hello2.odt was created with windows and fred was created with the 
uname command above.   However despite the mount point using the same 
user as the one windows created hello2.odt, Ubuntu cannot do anything 
without sudo at the start of the command.


Cheers

Rob

*From:*hampshire-boun...@mailman.lug.org.uk 
[mailto:hampshire-boun...@mailman.lug.org.uk] *On Behalf Of *Michael 
Daffin

*Sent:* 01 January 2014 18:00
*To:* Hampshire LUG Discussion List
*Subject:* Re: [Hampshire] NAS permissions

Chris is correct, if you want to write a file as root you should pipe 
the output through 'sudo tee'


uname -a | sudo tee /mnt/abcd/xyz

This invokes uname as the normal user, but pipes it to tee which is 
running as root, so writes to the file as root (it also prints the 
output to stdout as well, so can be redirected further if you wish).


What are the current permissions of the mount and its contents? Can 
you write to a sub directory?


On 1 January 2014 17:39, Chris Malton chr...@cmalton.me.uk 
mailto:chr...@cmalton.me.uk wrote:


H Rob,

On 01/01/14 17:31, Rob Malpass wrote:

sudo uname --a  /mnt/abcd/xyz

uname -a will run as root, the output redirect runs as the invoking 
user.  Therefore, it sounds like a Linux permissions issue over who 
owns the mountpoint.  I need to understand this myself - so I'll let 
you know if I come up with anything.


Regards,

Chris


--
Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk 
mailto:Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk

Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire
LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk
--



--
Michael Daffin james1...@gmail.com mailto:james1...@gmail.com



No virus found in this message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com http://www.avg.com
Version: 2014.0.4259 / Virus Database: 3658/6963 - Release Date: 12/31/13





-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Raspberry Pi Questions

[Simon Reap]

On 04/02/2013 20:13, Dr A. J. Trickett wrote:


1) Where is the best place to get one? Maplin or Farnell or RS?



I've got mine from Farnell (2 off) and RS - Farnell were faster, but the 
RS one was ordered in the initial rush for them, so took forever - they 
are quicker now.


2) What else does it need?

An SD card for the OS and local storage

As others have said, a 2GB+ one.  Some cards work well, and others 
badly.  I've had some (Sandisk mostly) which either didn't work at all, 
or failed after a couple of unexpected reboots. Integral ones seem 
pretty good (all of mine currently have 2GB Integral ones). If you use 
one larger that 2GB, you can usually expand the main partition to use up 
the whole of the card, the first time you boot. That's certainly the 
case with Raspbian.


A case

Farnell sell coloured plastic ones for a fiver - I went for clear, so 
you can still see the insides.  The problem with most cases is that they 
hide the GPIO pins, one of the USPs of this wonderful machine. I've also 
just bought a Piface (I/O card with buffere I/O pins, 8 LEDs and a 
couple of relays) which stacks onto the Pi like an Arduino shield, and 
that wouldn't fit in most cases either.  For those occasions, Lego is 
probably your best bet, or just leave it bare and be careful handling it.


A USB power supply

Yes, almost any micro-USB phone charger (1 Amp is plenty, 700mA usually 
enough), though I also run mine from USB ports on laptops, or even 
better from the back of my router (so the Pi is powered on whenever the 
router is).


A USB keyboard and mouse if you want to drive it directly

Yes, but if you pre-edit the config files (i.e. mount the partitions 
just after you have used dd to write the OS image to the SD card), 
including forcing SSH server on, you can run it without ever attaching 
keyboard or screen to it.  I've bought one of those tiny wireless 
keyboard/touchpad things (about the same size as the TV remote control 
[1]) - you plug the dongle in to a USB port on the Pi and it just 
works.  For a portable solution, the Motorola Atrix LapDock [2] (screen 
and keyboard) looks a bit like a laptop - it was designed to take a 
Motorola mobile phone, but with some connector magic (connecting male 
micro USB and male micro HDMI connectors on the LapDock to their female 
full-size equivalents on the Pi), it works pretty well.


Simon

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004FSFYG8
[2] 
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Motorola-Laptop-Station-Cradle-Lapdock/dp/B00B0VHW90 
(though I got mine from Ebay)
-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Ubuntu Unity

[Simon Reap]

On 27/09/12 19:27, Gordon Scott wrote:

How can I get stuff grouped in a context-related way?
 In the recent past, as an example, I have a menu from the toolbar
 with top-level headings like Graphics, Programming and so on.
 Right now I find nothing like that on Unity, but I feel sure 
there must

 be a way .. dedicated lens or something?
I did this by installing cairo-dock - it's a bit of overkill, since I 
don't use any of the application icons, but I do use the menu icon at 
the left-hand side to find context-based items.  This is handy if you 
don't know which music programs or games, for example, are installed on 
the machine - you don't really mind which they are, you just want the 
installed one(s).


Simon

--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] [OT] Citrix

[Simon Reap]

On 19/07/12 09:20, Rob Malpass wrote:
I freely admit to knowing next to nothing about Citrix but I thought 
this was something akin to remotely controlling another PC - except 
that the PC you're remotely controlling was virtual - is this wrong?   
If I'm right, surely it means that all this wonderful Intel i5 power 
is effectively being used as a terminal and the speed we'll have is 
the speed of the machine we're controlling.


If this is a remote service, then having just two people testing may not 
expose load limitations. We have to use a terminal server in Ireland - 
it's fine for a few people running xterms and web browsers, but really 
struggles when people start running huge databases.


Simon
--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Booting 3 distros.

[Simon Reap]

On 04/07/12 11:16, Clive Woodfine wrote:

I have Ubuntu 10.04 and 12.04 on the first hard drive of my desktop
machine. I thought I would try Fedora 17 so I installed it on the
second hard drive and had it boot from that drives MBR not wanting to
risk not being able to boot the other two. I thought Grubs os-prober
on the first drive would find Fedora. It does not.



I had a problem where grub2 on Ubuntu woudln't find Centos installed on 
a separate partition.  It turned out that Centos used LVM for its disks, 
but I hadn't used that on Ubuntu.  As soon as I installed the LVM 
libraries on the Ubuntu (apt-get install liblvm2app, as far as I can 
remember), grub found Centos.


Simon

--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] rsyslog query

[Simon Reap]

On 27/04/2012 23:33, Leo wrote:

However the dhcpd one still isn't being working, it is:
:msg, contains, dhcpd: /var/log/dhcpd.log
 ~


Chris,
I tried your suggestion and that indicates that it's definitely 
reading the file, but it's still writing all the dhcpd logs to syslog, 
rather than dhcpd.log




If the lines above come before the line that writes syslog, and the 
messages contains the exact text dhcpd:, then I can't see why that 
wouldn't work.


Maybe try

:programname,isequal,dhcpd /var/log/dhcpd.log

--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] rsyslog query

[Simon Reap]

On 28/04/2012 11:17, Leo wrote:

Aha, I think I've got it! Just found this line in dhcpd.conf:
log-facility local7;

So I changed the rsyslog rule to local7.*, rather than a :msg one and 
it's started working. Although I'm now curious: how would I combine 
the two, i.e. log to dhcpd.conf if the message is on local7, and if it 
contains dhcpd:?




(I did the same thing for some JBoss logging I was handling - it was 
easier to force it to be local5 than to enforce particular and unique 
strings!).


To handle either case, just send both streams to the same file - send 
local7 to dhcpd.log followed by ~, then send dhcpd messages to 
dhcpd.log and ~.


Is the :msg,contains problem that the dhcpd tag is followed by the PID 
then the colon?  If so, the :programname,isequal fix I suggested 
should work better.


--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] rsyslog query

[Simon Reap]

On Wed, 2012-04-25 at 22:21 +0100, Leo wrote:
 On 25/04/12 08:05, Simon Reap wrote:
  SOn 24/04/2012 20:21, Leo wrote:
  (rsyslog.conf does contain $IncludeConfig /etc/rsyslog.d/*.conf)
 
  Have your tried this instead?
 
  #includedir /etc/rsyslog.d
 
 Just given that a try but it doesn't seem to make any difference.
 

Sorry, Leo - I got mixed up - I've been working with rsyslog and
logrotate for a couple of months, and posted the logrotate equivalent by
mistake!

I've tried your $IncludeConfig line in a RedHat 6.2 system, and it
picked the code up fine.

Did you restart rsyslog or reload it?  We have problems with reload, as
called by the standard rsyslog lorotate file (actually a kill -HUP) -
rsyslog doesn't seem to close all of the files properly, and lsof shows
it writing to the old file, even though that file has been renamed and
compressed by logrotate.

If you try Chris's check and get an error reported in your main
rsyslog.conf, correct that error and try introducing one in your
included file.


--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Ten Best Netbooks - article in The Independent today (Thursday 26.4) ...

[Simon Reap]

On Thu, 2012-04-26 at 10:55 +0100, Tony Wood wrote:
 
 ...  might be of particular interest to readers of these lists.
 It's on P47 if you happen to be passing a WHS Reading Room.
 

or at [1]!

[1]
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/the-10-best-budget-laptops-7679055.html




 -- 
 Tony Wood
   (Netbook)
 --
 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
 --



--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] rsyslog query

[Simon Reap]

SOn 24/04/2012 20:21, Leo wrote:

(rsyslog.conf does contain $IncludeConfig /etc/rsyslog.d/*.conf)


Have your tried this instead?

  #includedir /etc/rsyslog.d

Simon


--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Shutting down a server cleanly

[Simon Reap]

On Thu, 2012-04-19 at 16:06 +0100, Chris Dennis wrote:
 Hello folks
 
 I've got a Debian server sitting in an office near some desktop 
 computers, so occasionally people press the power button on the server 
 by mistake, and it turns itself off.
 
 [snip]
 
 Before I do that, does anyone know of a similar solution that already 
 exists?

Have you tried a big stick?

Simon


--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Shutting down a server cleanly

[Simon Reap]

On Thu, 2012-04-19 at 16:34 +0100, Chris Liddell wrote:
 On 19/04/12 16:28, Simon Reap wrote:
  Have you tried a big stick?
 
 On the server or the users.?
 ;-)
 

Definitely a LART[1]  (big stick, mains wired up to the power switch -
you choose...) :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lart


--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Defective laptop

[Simon Reap]

On 05/02/2012 13:48, Jon Wilks wrote:

I have an Acer 8730ZG laptop that is about 2 years old but is no longer
working and I am after some ideas as to what to do with it as it is not
economic to repair it.

[snip]

It seems a shame to just take it down the dump.  Any ideas?



Buy another dead one from ebay (e.g. one with a broken screen) and try 
to make one good one out of the bits?


Simon

--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Linux Answers

[Simon Reap]

That's clutching at straws: gei means art or craft, and was only ever 
mapped to gay after gay changed from happy to homosexual.  You've 
confused causation and coincidence.


On 28/12/2011 10:06, john lewis wrote:
Perhaps in this case it wasn't a change of usage so much as adoption 
of a Japanese word. Edmund de Waal mentions in his book (The Hare with 
Amber Eyes, p298) that the word 'gei', written in roman script, was in 
common usage during the American occupation of Japan after the end of 
WW2. 



--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Linux Answers

[Simon Reap]

On 23/12/2011 17:46, hants...@googlemail.com wrote:

Many people, I know, use Fahrenheit. But does it make sense to anybody??


Centigrade clearly doesn't to weather forecasters, several of whom have 
recently said that temperatures of 11 degC are twice the seasonal 
average - since twice implies an absolute rather than relative scale, 
they must mean that temperatures would normally be 142K (or minus 131 
degrees Centigrade).


(Sorry for the pedantry - just been listening to More or Less, and 
their more rigorous approach is hard to shake off!)


Simon

--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] [OT] BT Broadband?!

[Simon Reap]

On 14/07/2011 13:05, Bob Dunlop wrote:

Hi,

On Thu, Jul 14 at 12:19, Chris Dennis wrote:

* I need a new wifi router anyway, and I'll get a free one with BT.

You can buy a wifi-adsl router for under a tenner online.
I think the one BT gives you retails for about 25+VAT without the
broken firmware.


I've got a Home Hub 1 somewhere - it worked at the beginning, and was 
useful when my original cheap replacement stopped working, but the 
Netgear I replaced that with has worked solidly ever since.  BT Vision 
still works through it, and there is no danger of me becoming a FON 
hotspot.  Home Hub was never as flexible as the Netgear, and hid lots of 
useful stuff in its arcane menu system.  I've only tried FON itself a 
couple of times - in quite residential parts of Andover I got a couple 
of networks identified, but I only ever connected to one of them once 
with a tiny bandwidth, and the connection dropped terminally after 10 
minutes.


The broadband has been down twice.  The first was when the extension 
cable from the phone socket to the router failed, and the other  took BT 
support a short while to sort out - this Indian call centre was pretty 
efficient.


I only went with BT because otherwise they'd have charged me £50 to 
remove my ISDN line.  I've generally been happy, and keep on getting 
useful discounts to keep me that way.  I get 6.5 Mbits on an 8Mbit line, 
which is good enough for me.


The only real problem I have is that one of the BT-supplied Comtrend 
mains ethernet devices stopped working last night, but I've had it 
several years now.  Time to put in a proper Cat5/6 cable in!


Simon

--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] [OT] Network Query

[Simon Reap]

On 11/07/2011 21:36, Leo wrote:
On my network when I copy data from one computer to another slowly, it 
seems to slow down other connections, anyone know why this might be? 
The details are:

Computer A is connected to switch 1
Computer B is connected to switch 1 via a powerline connection.
switch 1 is connected to switch 2
Device C is connected to switch 2


Are the devices definitely switches, and not hubs?

Simon

--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Wireless Repeaters

[Simon Reap]

On Tue, June 14, 2011 1:37 pm, Rob Malpass wrote:
 Does anyone have experience of wifi repeaters?   I bought one [1] from
 Novatech for under 40 quid but its manual is awful and badly translated.

I'm not a fan of the Novatech cheapie items - I bought a 40 quid wireless
ADSL router from them which worked on and off for a few weeks (after a
year in its box - took me a while to install it!), but required regular
reboots.  I then bought a Netgear router from them which worked
immediately and is still going strong.

Simon

--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Sudo question

[Simon Reap]

On 13/06/2011 07:36, Owain Clarke wrote:



  %users ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/pm-suspend
Thanks, Keith, but I've done this, and it still prompts for password.  
I am a member of  the users group. Any other ideas?


The order of entries in sudoers is important - I think it uses the last 
match in the file, and a later line in the file may match you but not 
have the NOPASSWD: field.


Simon

--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] ubuntu server 10.04 annoyance(s)

[Simon Reap]

On 09/05/2011 03:32, Isaac Close wrote:

1) user password has a maximum of 8 characters, i've tried to change this with 
passwd but it wont let me. (IMHO this is absolutely ridiculous and should NEVER 
EVER be allowed on a production server).


I've got 10.4.1 on my MPC-L, and it happily takes long passwords (I've 
just set a 30-character one, as a normal user).


Simon

--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Any grep gurus here?

[Simon Reap]

On 06/03/2011 17:42, Vic wrote:

Hi All.

I need some help with regexes in grep.

I'm trying to search for a pattern along the lines of:

   foo(bar



I just did

grep 'foo(bar' file

and it worked fine.

(Ubuntu 10.10)

--
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
--

[Hampshire] Really simple podcast setup

[Simon Reap]

I've recently acquired an iPod nano (cast-off from my daughter!).  The 
iPod supports podcasts, with the major feature that it remembers where 
you have listened to in each one, and starts from that point if you come 
back to that podcast after listening to something else.  I have 
subscribed to a number of podcasts in the usual way (yes, including the 
Ubuntu UK one), and find that feature very useful.


I have a number of mp3 files (of Radio 7 programs, mostly) which I have 
copied to the iPod, but they are treated as Music files.  I would like 
them to be treated as podcast files, so that I can listen to them in 
sections.  Can anyone suggest an easy way to do this?  I have Googled, 
but the solutions seem to involve setting up complex streaming systems - 
I would like to run this on an MPC-L, so not much spare horsepower.  New 
mp3s are added to the list on a daily basis.


Any ideas?

Many thanks,
Simon



--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] [OT] Writing an Audio CD 64 minutes : possible?

[Simon Reap]

On 29/01/2011 16:06, Dr A. J. Trickett wrote:

Apparently the original CDs were going to be even smaller but some head
honcho's wife at Sony wanted a specific pieces of music without having to swap
a CD, so they added a few extra minutes to the standard (they could have added
more as it turns out).



It was Beethoven's 9th Symphony.

It's a real pity that the sample rate was so fixed.  I used to record 
talking newspapers onto cassette - we could get a very reliable 90 
minutes on each one.  Several of our blind clients were asking for CD 
versions, but even though we were just recording speech, so that a much, 
much lower sample rate and in mono would have been fine, the 80-minute 
limit mean that we often had to use 2 CDs rather than one cassette.  The 
march of progress is not always forwards!


--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] [Way OT] PVR recommendations

[Simon Reap]

 On 06/10/2010 19:17, Rob Malpass wrote:
So basically this is the best of both worlds - if I know a programme 
(especially radio) is coming on - I can set the PVR to get it.   Or if 
I've missed something good (I'm a big Radio 4 fan but not in during 
the day) - I can get it via iplayer.


Radio programmes are added to iplayer fairly soon after transmission, so 
I rarely need to listen to radio 4 live, and have never actually heard 
radio 7 live, but grab lots of stuff from both to listen to when I can.  
get_iplayer works fine for me on an MPC-L [1], beloved hardware of the 
_Ubuntu Podcast [2] _listeners, but I do then put it on an mp3 player 
(Archos 1 Vision [3], so I can watch the TV programmes I get, too), 
rather than through an audio system.  My MPC-L is running Ubuntu (Server 
10.04.1), so the request is not as OT as it could be!


Simon

[1] 
http://www.viglen.co.uk/viglen/Products_Services/Product_Range/Product_file.aspx?eCode=XUBUMPCLType_Info=DescriptionType=Desktops

[2] http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/
[3] 
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Archos-Vision-Digital-playback-display/dp/B002TGEYOQ


--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Seeing all processes running.

[Simon Reap]

 On 25/08/2010 18:13, Clive Woodfine wrote:

On 25 August 2010 17:29, Russell Morrisgren...@gmail.com  wrote:

Is this Ubuntu?

I've seen System Monitor itself cause the CPU to show at 100%.


On 25 August 2010 17:25, Simon Reapsi...@simonreap.com  wrote:

Yes it is a version of Ubuntu specifically for the eee 701. It has
worked well until about 2 weeks ago, possibly occuring after
installing the Opera browser. It is not the system monitor as the
mouse pointer shows a rotating wheel prior to starting the monitor.



Ah, that could be it.  I have seen Opera keep on using more and more CPU 
and memory on various Linuxes - including Debian and Crunchbang (the 
latter on an 701 too).  I have nowhere near enough information to report 
a bug, though.


Simon

--
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] [OT, I suppose] Router

[Simon Reap]

Roger Munford wrote:
Why not disconnect the domestic circuit from the main BT box and then 
connect the router to see if the fault persists. If it doesn't the 
fault lies in your domestic circuit so you can methodically work your 
way through the circuit connecting parts until the fault re-occurs. If 
the fault persists with nothing but the router connected and you are 
confident that the router is OK then it probably is a BT fault.


That's what BT Broadband would get you to do before they sent out an 
engineer.  If your main phone socket has an unscrewable fromt plate, 
undo that and plug the router directly into the socket under the plate 
(that will disconnect your domestic wiring).


Simon



--
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
--

[Hampshire] headless MPC-L (was Re: Cobalt RAQ4)

[Simon Reap]

On 06/06/2010 14:30, Vic wrote:

 Cobalt Linux
 expects a Ctrl-D on the keyboard before it will start that. And there is
 no keyboard...

 I wouldn't deploy a RAQ4 into an unattended production environment.

 Vic.


Talking of which, I am happily running my Viglen MPC-L at the moment 
doing various 24/7 tasks, but it does not turn itself on after a power 
failure, until the front button is pressed.  Can anyone suggest a 
similarly small + low-powered machine which does turn on when power is 
applied, or alternatively, a hack which will make the MPC-L power on?  I 
know there are various hacks for the NSLU2 to do this, but I haven't 
seen anything for the MPC-L.

BTW, one of the things it does is capture BBC7 programmes for my later 
amusement - I have noticed that about a week ago, they stopped updating 
the realplayer listen-again streams  - the streams are still there, but 
the programs on them don't change week by week.  e.g. 
rtsp://rm-acl.bbc.co.uk:554/bbc7coyopa/bbc7_-_
saturday_1000.ra is the Saturday morning 3-hour programme, is still 
giving the John Shuttleworth Comedy Controller from 22nd May.  Thank 
goodness for get_iplayer!

Simon

-- 
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
--

[Hampshire] get i player gone!

[Simon Reap]

The author of get underscore i player (at linux centre dot net) has 
retired his program which is a shame.

The latest one I have is 2.42, but 2.72 seems to have been available.  
Does anyone have a copy of it?  It seems to be quite hard to find, 
belying the old internet adage that once it's out there, it stays out there!

TIA,
Simon

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] get i player gone!

[Simon Reap]

On 25/04/2010 19:48, Alan Blanchflower wrote:
 I have 2.72:
 http://alanblanchflower.co.uk/stuff/get_iplayer_2.72.tar.bz2


Thanks to Alan, Stephen and I now have 2.72, and thanks to jack we have 
future versions too!

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Test, please ignore

[Simon Reap]

On 12/03/2010 20:52, Dee Earley wrote:
 (And wait for the inevitable replies of ignored :)
 (Or will I get nothing now I have predicted it?)
 (Anyone good at paradoxes?)


Every now and again, with some apparently random periodicity, my 
daughters' school sends a test email to us saying, for example, Year 
11 Schoolscomms test or Year 8 Schoolscomms test (two daughters), but 
rarely for both daughters at the same time.  The most recent one didn't 
even have a year on it, so we don't know which daughter they were aiming 
at.  They always say that if you received it OK ignore it, but if you 
didn't, let them know.  For some reason, I never have let them know.

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] jaunty boot procedure

[Simon Reap]

On 21/02/2010 11:00, Rob Malpass wrote:


Hi all

Need some advice about how to automatically mount a nas at bootup on 
jaunty.   The googling I've done [1] suggests that the easiest way to 
do this is to edit /etc/fstab which I've done.


However on reboot, I find that the directory is not mounted and I also 
find myself exposing another gap in my knowledge.




I have lines in /etc/fstab such as:

//192.168.0.1/disk   /mnt/mynas   cifs   
rw,username=me,password=secret,_netdev,uid=me,gid=me  1   3


where my userid is me.  This mounts the disk using my credentials 
(username= and password= fields), treats the owner and group of any 
files there as me (the gid= field), and only mounts the disk when the 
network is running (the _netdev field).  An alternative to having userid 
and password here is to use a credentials file, e.g. replace 
username=me,password=secret with credentials=/etc/cred, and have a 
file called /etc/cred, readable only by root, with (here)

  username=me
  password=secret
if you need a domain logon, set the username entry to
  username=mydomain\me

Simon

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] unable to connect from one system to another using ssh

[Simon Reap]

On 16/02/2010 12:05, john lewis wrote:
 Which suggests the problem is only with ssh into benden, but am at a
 loss as to what the problem actually is.


Permissions on benden?  .ssh directory and known_hosts only readable by 
the user?

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Allegations made by LinuxLearner (Was: Re: stuart biggs added you as a business connection on Plaxo)

[Simon Reap]

On Wed, 03 Feb 2010 01:31:13 -0500
Mat Grove m...@grove.me.uk wrote:

 PS. I think this is the longest single message I have ever seen to
 any Lug mailing list. You get the high score.

An honour which immediately passes to you, Mat, since you quoted
the whole of LL's email and added a bit of your own!

Simon
 
 LinuxLearner wrote:
[snip]

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] OT [tech] result of overloading memory slots?

[Simon Reap]

Lisi wrote:
 Put otherwise, could too much RAM fry the mobo, and could it not do so until 
 the second boot up after installation?
   

I've done this a couple of times with no ill effects (usually when I 
don't know the motherboard limit, but do have spare sticks or RAM of the 
same spec as the existing memory).  The machine just recognises its 
limit and ignores the rest.  I had one laptop which had a limit of 
1.2GB, so put a 2GB stick in - it simply ignored the top 0.8 GB.

One worry is that the extra stick might overload the PSU - very unlikely 
as memory power draw is not usually large, and the machine is clearly 
designed for three sticks so should support them comfortably.

Simon

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Periodic filesystem checks

[Simon Reap]

Leo wrote:
 I'm just looking for a way to skip the occasional check at boot, because 
 I don't want to wait ages for the computer boot. A lot of Ctrl-C does 
 the trick but then no disks get mounted so I end up spending just as 
 long mounting them manually as the computer takes checking them!
   

mount -a as root should mount all of the disks which the machine would 
have mounted automatically.

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Viglen MPC-L

[Simon Reap]

James Ashburner wrote:
 Is the hard disk drive user replaceable? I'm interested in replacing my 
 home server with one of these to cut down on both costs and noise, but 
 I'd like more storage space.
   

I've not tried myself to replace it, but it is a standard laptop disk 
drive, so should be easy.  The current ones come with 80GB.  The only 
worry is any BIOS limit, since it's a very simple BIOS.

(typical engineer- I dismantled it before I even turned it on, just to 
see what it looked like inside!)

Simon

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Viglen MPC-L

[Simon Reap]

James Ashburner wrote:

 Thanks Simon, just the information I was looking for :) Did you notice 
 if it was a SATA or PATA disk?
   

I've just checked /var/log/messages, and the installed disk is reported as:
 hda: FUJITSU MHW2080AT, ATA DISK drive
so PATA.


-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] xorg defaults on MPC-L

[Simon Reap]

Alan Pope wrote:
 2009/10/5 Simon Reap si...@simonreap.com:
   
 I am running my lovely new Viglen MPC-L (yes, the UKUbuntu
 podcast offer is still available!) as a headless home server.
 

 If it's headless why start xorg at all? Why not just start vncserver
 with whataver resolution and colour depth you require?
   

That's what I do on my current main home server, but it doesn't help 
with the one at work - in that case I've not got my laptop with me, so I 
don't have another computer to run the VNC client on!

Simon

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] xorg defaults on MPC-L

[Simon Reap]

Philip Stubbs wrote:
 2009/10/5 Simon Reap si...@simonreap.com:
 This is on xubuntu 8.04 (which is what the MPC came with), but I
 have the same problem on a debian sid server at work - on that one I
 normally run it headless, but sometimes (i.e. when I accidentally
 leave my work laptop at home), I want to plug in a real screen and
 see a reasonable resolution.
 

 Have a look for EDID. This is the info that xorg gets from the
 monitor. You should be able to extract it manually, and there are
 tools to create the correct file for it. Then you can add an option to
 your config file for x that uses this information. It was some time
 ago that I was playing with this, but I know EDID is one option open
 to you.
   

Thanks!  I'll have a dig around with that and report on progress.

Simon

-- 
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
--

[Hampshire] xorg defaults on MPC-L

[Simon Reap]

I am running my lovely new Viglen MPC-L (yes, the UKUbuntu
podcast offer is still available!) as a headless home server.

I do have a couple of things I need to work on.

One is that if I boot without a screen attached, the graphical
display defaults to 640x480 and, I think, 16 colours (certainly
not many). Trouble is, I want to run x11vnc on the server, and
run the display from another PC.  I want it to default to, for
example, 1280x1024 and millions of colours.  I know the graphics
card can do it, because that's what I get if I *do* have a screen
attached when I boot.  Does anyone know what I need to set, and
where, to change the default?

This is on xubuntu 8.04 (which is what the MPC came with), but I
have the same problem on a debian sid server at work - on that one I
normally run it headless, but sometimes (i.e. when I accidentally
leave my work laptop at home), I want to plug in a real screen and
see a reasonable resolution.

The other problem I have is the power-on behaviour.  As a headless home
system monitor/controller (with the CC128 plugged in, if I solve this
problem), it would be great if the machine turned itself on after a
power cut (like we had last Sunday morning). At the moment it stays off
until I press the power button. Has anyone found a way to get it to
turn on in those circumstances, as they have for the Slug (on page
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/HowTo/ForcePowerAlwaysOn)?

Thanks in advance!
Simon

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Hants LUG meeting at IBM Hursley on Sat 12th Sept

[Simon Reap]

Anton Piatek wrote:
 For those that attended the Hants LUG meeting at Hursley on Saturday I
 would appreciate feedback on how the day went.
 Things that went well
 Things that could have been done better
 This should help improve any further meetings I run at Hursley
   
Anton,

Many thanks for a very enjoyable day.  This was the first HantsLUG 
meeting I had been to, so I have little to compare it with.  The talks 
were all interesting, though some seemed to whizz by - will some of them 
make their way to the wiki?  Tony's talk on the structure of debian 
packages was particularly dense (in the information sense of the term) - 
I made some notes but they need some work before I can understand them!

The lunch break was very welcome, though next time (hope there is a next 
time!) another enforced beak in the proceedings might be an idea, to 
enhance the social side of such a meeting.  I came away not having had 
the chance to mingle and meet familiar names as much as I would have liked.

The location (apart from the sticking blinds in the auditorium) was 
superb.  To be honest, that was one of the main drivers for my going - I 
worked there for a year 26 years ago, and wanted to see how much it had 
changed.  The building I'd worked in (a 7-storey tower block, right next 
to the main house) has, unsurprisingly, gone, but the elderly scale 
model of the site near the lecture room showed it in all its glory.  The 
visit to the little museum was fascinating - I think the disk drive I'd 
been working on was one of the exhibits, along with the circuit boards 
we used (clever 4-layer jobs, with ground and +5v available at useful 
intervals across the board, just in the right place for the TTL chips we 
were using at the time).

Simon

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Hants LUG meeting at IBM Hursley on Sat 12th Sept

[Simon Reap]

Simon Reap wrote:
 Tony's talk on the structure of debian 
 packages was particularly dense (in the information sense of the term)
Sorry, Anton, that was *your* talk!!

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Friday comic...

[Simon Reap]

Victor Churchill wrote:
 2009/8/7 Stephen Rowles step...@rowles.org.uk:
   
 Given the recent discussion of media centres on Linux I was amused to
 read xkcd this morning and see this comic from Wednesday:

 http://www.xkcd.com/619/
 


 aieee! it is impossible to read just one page of xkcd!

 ;-)

   
Don't read http://www.xkcd.com/609/ or you will end up doing the same 
thing on two sites at once.

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Software bugs impending liability

[Simon Reap]

Stephen Davies wrote:
 As someone who has been writing software professionally since 1975 the 
 issue of releasing software with known problems (or items Fixed in Next 
 Release) has always concerned me.
 At DEC, we used to document the 'known issues  limitations' in the 
 release notes. I don't see much of that in the FOSS world or even with 
 many of the hugely expensive commercial software packages I use of a 
 daily basis.
   
We deliver (very) expensive commercial software and always include lists 
of outstanding issues in the Release Notes - it sometimes depends on the 
customer receiving it, but such lists at a minimum contain bugs that 
they may possibly come across, and in others *all* bugs are listed, even 
in code they will never use.

Some customers ignore these lists - if the software does what it is 
supposed to do in normal usage, then they don't mind if some edge 
conditions don't behave perfectly.  Others bicker on about the bugs 
endlessly and usually too long (yes, they are usually the ones who want 
to see *all* of the bugs).

In the commercial world, when dealing with relatively small numbers of 
customers (10s rather than thousands or millions), having some bugs in 
little-used code or with reasonable workarounds is preferable to not 
getting the software for many months.  The customers are few enough that 
we have the time to support those workarounds and can talk to individual 
customers to help them.  If we had many more customers, the pressure 
would be either to spend even more time getting it right (but late), or 
keeping quiet about the bugs and hoping they didn't notice.

Simon

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Pipe issues

[Simon Reap]

Leo wrote:
 #!/bin/bash
 
 program | grep -v remaining\s*$
 
   

I would put the grep string in single quotes - anacron may be messing up 
the trailing $

(BTW, did anyone else read the subject of this email and assume it was 
carrying on the armoured ethernet thread?)

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Hantslug gallery update

[Simon Reap]

Alan Pope wrote:
 * Increased load on the server as the new version of gallery
 introduces cpu-intensive photo scaling features.

 If anyone has experience of mitigating these two outstanding issues
 then I'm happy for us to move with the times and move to gallery2.
   

I'm sure there'll be some spare capacity on Soton Uni's new iDataPlex[0] 
if you need it.

Simon

[0] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/31/southampton_uni_idataplex/

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] USB WiFi for WPA Network

[Simon Reap]

Alan Pope wrote:
 The solution, scrape off one of the tracks from the Intel card !
   

That takes me back a bit.  We had some ISA SDLC cards which would lock 
down IRQs 3 and 4, meaning that the serial port (also on IRQ4) wouldn't 
work (no IRQ sharing on ISA). It turned out, looking at the schematics, 
that the SDLC card didn't actually use IRQ4, so I too scraped off the 
track.  25 years of software engineering, and that was about the only 
time I ever got to use my electronics degree!

Simon

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] disabling flash adverts

[Simon Reap]

Isaac Close wrote:
 Within 1 minute of reading your answer I have installed Flashblock, it was 
 very simple to do. Has it proved reliable for people so far, I wonder ?
   

Works fine for me, though I had forgotten I had installed it at first, 
so wonderd why youtube and iplayer didn't show videos straightaway!  
Right-click and allow was an intuitive interface to allow some sites 
always to be allowed to show flash immediately.

Simon

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] OOo 3.1 supports anti-aliasing

[Simon Reap]

Alan Pope wrote:
 2009/6/16 pavithran pavithra...@gmail.com:
   
 How really cares about 20 -100 MB difference these days ? Can't you
 afford a 20 GB hard disk :P
 

 Not when the disk is soldered onto the motherboard in my Eee 900.

 The root filesystem on the eee is 4G, the home filesystem is 16G (in
 my setup). Running Ubuntu I run out of space now and then and so yes,
 20-100MB matters deeply.
   
Same on my 701.  I have installed debian-eeepc (lenny), with xfce rather 
than gnome or kde (kde filled up the disk when I first tried it).  I did 
a full OO 2.4 install.  Still got 1.7GB of my 3.7GB disk left for my 
files, and I can edit files from work with it, so I'm happy.  By the 
way, debian-eeepc can be recommended for anyone who's tired of the 
original xandros (which Asus appear to have abandoned).  It works pretty 
well - I even get horizontal scroll on the touchpad!

Simon

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Code style

[Simon Reap]

Hugo Mills wrote:
 On Mon, Jun 08, 2009 at 03:09:49PM +0100, Vic wrote:
   
 #define min(a, b) ((ab) ? a : b )
 
I'll live with this use. Concise, readable (once), and above all
 hidden from view at the point of use.
   

Until someone does
 min (a++, b++)
and wonders why it doesn't work (and yes, I *have* seen that happen)

Simon

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Legal DVD ripping

[Simon Reap]

Rob Malpass wrote:
 2) Is there a way I can scroll around my own desktop if this sort of thing 
 happens again?   To be clear, what has happened here is that, running in the 
 14 point font which I must observe with my eyes, the window is bigger than 
 the desktop.   Desktop is 1024x768 so what I need to do is pan down such 
 that the top of the window disappears off the top of my desktop and the 
 bottom of the window becomes visible.
   
Alt and left-click on the window should allow you to move it beyond the 
edges of the screen.  The cursor turns into a little cross, as it does 
if you click on the title bar of the window, but you can click anywhere 
in the window.  I have to do this from time to time on my eeePC 701, but 
I can do it on my main Debian desktop too.

Simon

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] constantly flickering LEDs on router: Solved - amid blushes

[Simon Reap]

Andy Smith wrote:
 Oh yes, definitely.  For example I find myself doing multiple file
 renames in a shell script even though almost every system comes with
 a rename script/command these days.
   

That's the important bit: *almost* every system has these commands and 
fixes.  It's good to know the basic way to do things when you come 
across a system which doesn't.

Simon

-- 
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
--

[Hampshire] Default X size with no screen attached

[Simon Reap]

I have an aged Dell GX110 under my desk, with an integrated i180 
chipset, which I normally run headless.  I do have a nearby screen that 
I sometimes plug in (a Dell P1110).  When I boot the machine with the 
screen plugged in and it starts X, it happily sets the resolution to 
1280x1024 (the screen's max resolution).  If I boot without the screen 
plugged in, the resolution is set to 640x480.

I run x11vnc on the system so that I can access it remotely (over the 
Internet, or from my laptop sitting on top of the desk that the Dell is 
under).  The trouble is that if I boot it without the screen attached, 
the x11vnc screen is also 640x480.

Is there a way to set that default resolution higher (1024x768, or 
1280x1024)?  The system is using /etc/X11/xorg.conf, which I can make 
available if necessary, but I was hoping that there was some generic 
setting that I could make.

Any ideas?

Many thanks in advance,
Simon

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Default X size with no screen attached

[Simon Reap]

Sean Gibbins wrote:
 I have a headless mini-itx box that I run as a server. When I want a gui
 session I log in over ssh and type the following:

 vncserver :1 -geometry 1280x768
   

I do use vncserver on other machines (Debian and Mandriva, for example), 
but here I want to be able to use the attached keyboard, mouse and 
screen from time to time, but to get the same main X resolution whether 
or not the screen is attached at boot time.  The x11vnc bit is almost a 
bonus!

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Switch on after power loss

[Simon Reap]

Alan Pope wrote:
 2009/3/6 Lisi hants...@googlemail.com:
   
 On Friday 06 March 2009 09:55:21 Jacqui Caren wrote:
 
 FWICR There are ways to get a linux box to auto login to a desktop
   
 It can certainly be done with KDE, and is sometimes a good idea where 
 physical
 access to the computer is restricted, in order to simplify things for the
 unique user.  It also needs a strong root password.

 

 Not really. Stick a bootable CD/floppy/USB stick in and all bets are
 off for any locally define users/passwords - unless the filesystem is
 encrypted of course..
   
That's where the physical access to the computer is restricted comes 
in - mine is locked in a storeroom which is so out of the way that most 
people wouldn't find it.  As long as the power can be cycled from 
outside the room, a reboot can be forced.  It starts up X and logs in, 
so that I can vnc into it.  Works for me, anyway.


-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Where to buy electronics/computer stuff online?

[Simon Reap]

Paul Stimpson wrote:
 Hi,

 I'd recommend talking to Absolute Music in Poole. They are really nice people 
 and have some great prices (I picked up a £199 Tapco audio interface for my 
 PC for £70). If you call in advance they will make sure the item you want to 
 see is in the showroom for demo. 
   
Another vote for Absolute Music here - quick service, good end of line 
offers - not had to send anything back, so don't know what returns 
service is like, but I would be surprised if it wasn't good.  Have only 
used mail order so far - Poole is a bit of a trek!

Simon

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] [OT] DNS cache on Netgear DG834G

[Simon Reap]

Lisi wrote:
 I have googled, but without success. 

 How do I flush the DNS cache on a Netgear DG834G v.4?
   
Have you tried turning it off and on again?

(almost a joke - my ancient DG834Gv1 occasionally needs a solid kick to 
get its wireless working properly)

Simon


-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Moving Thunderbird

[Simon Reap]

Paul Stimpson wrote:
 Hi,

 I just installed Kubuntu Intrepid on my spare hard drive. I'm trying to move 
 all my Thunderbird mailboxes and settings over from FC10. I copied the 
 .thunderbird directory over by dragging it onto my Truecrypt-encrypted 
 external drive then booted the Kubuntu drive and dragged the thunderbird 
 directory into my home. I'm sure this is what I've done successfully in the 
 past. 

 This time Thunderbird opens with the create account wizard and totally fails 
 to acknowledge the contents of the .thunderbird directory. I've checked the 
 ownership is right. Can anyone give me a hint as to what has gone wrong?
   
We've had this before, and last time people came up with all sorts of 
ways of fooling thunderbird/firefox to use copied directories by 
renaming  (though it turned out the problem last time was that the 
copied files were owned by root!)

The easiest way to fix this is to start either program with the 
-profilemanager argument - that comes up with a dialogue which allows 
you to create a profile and, importantly, allows you to select an 
existing directory as the location for the profile.  You then make the 
new profile your default, so thatit is used next time you start the 
program normally.

I used this on Windows to move my profiles to under My Documents 
(instead of under Application Data) so that I could back it up more 
easily.  I've also used it to put my data onto a disk shared between 
Windows and Ubuntu on a dual boot machine (though that got confused when 
trying to use add-ons in both OSes).

Simon

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Am I correct

[Simon Reap]

Tim wrote:
 Secondly, where is the perl interpeter installed, is it /usr/lib/perl5 
 or /usr/lib/perl I need to make a link from the interpeter to /usr/bin/perl 
 or change the first line of a lot of scripts, I am opting to make the link
   
I would advise against making a symbolic link for perl - I have done 
that, and perl couldn't find its modules.  The symlink was from 
/usr/local/bin/perl to /usr/bin/perl, so perl looked in /usr/local/lib 
for modules, instead of /usr/lib.

Changing the header paths is very straightforward (assuming you are 
using a sh-based shell).  Use which perl to find out your default Perl 
program (here it is given as /usr/bin/perl).  If perl is not in your 
path, then whereis perl (UNIX) or locate perl (Linux) should find it 
- look for a line ending /bin/perl.  
list_of_programs_with_the_wrong_Perl_path could be something like 
/usr/local/bin/*.pl /usr/local/bin/startPerlPackage (without the 
quotes).  Then:

for ii in list_of_programs_with_the_wrong_Perl_path
do
sed '1s,^#![^[:space:]]*perl,#!/usr/bin/perl,'  $ii  
/tmp/perl.tmp  mv /tmp/perl.tmp $ii
done

There's probably a way to avoid the mv bit, but it's almost certainly 
not portable between Linux/Unix/shell variants.

Simon

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Am I correct

[Simon Reap]

Jacqui Caren wrote:
 I would advise against making a symbolic link for perl - I have done 
 that, and perl couldn't find its modules.  The symlink was from 
 /usr/local/bin/perl to /usr/bin/perl, so perl looked in /usr/local/lib 
 for modules, instead of /usr/lib.
 

 ???

 Perl -V will tell you the paths(plural) that libraries are included from.

 If you want multiple perls installed you will need ot install them
 yourself.
   
This appears to have inverted the original query (which was about 
referring to a single perl version from multiple places).
 There are tricks to get a single perl to use differnet include paths
 depending upon where it is installed but IMHo these are just plain
 shack-nasty and a possible security risk if you mess up.

   
I don't think this was required either - all that Tim was trying to do 
was to access the same libraries, but make the call to perl be different.

I've checked a number of more recent perl versions, and all seem to 
embed the library path in the executable, so *would* survive the 
symbolic link hack (maybe my problem was with older Perl versions).  
That said, I don't think that this is a good use of symbolic links - it 
only hides the actual program location.  Much better, I think, to fix 
the call to the program.

simon


-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Colour printing on Ubuntu 8.04

[Simon Reap]

Jim Kissel wrote:
 It's a bit behind the times, but colour printing via my Xerox 8550 
 Phaser was never a problem until I upgraded to 8.04.  Now the colours 
 are muddy  Printing the Ubuntu logo gives:
 reds that are dark brown
 oranges that are brownish ornage
 yellows that are a dull goldish colour
   
Your colour cartridge is not working properly?  The time of the failure 
may have been a coincidence.  What does a live CD or the printer 
self-test (if it has one) look like?

Simon

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] irritating ssh behaviour

[Simon Reap]

Victor Churchill wrote:
 The ssh man page sayeth:
 SYNOPSIS
  ssh lots of options [EMAIL PROTECTED] [command]
 ...
  If command is specified, it is executed on the remote host
 instead of a login shell.

 Something's not right..
I htink it is the 2instead of a login shell that is causing the problem 
- it isn't going through your normal login process, reading profiles and 
so on.

How about something like:

ssh qq3 '. .bash_profile ; oerr ORA 12152'

(you may also need to source /etc/profile, or whichever other startup 
scripts do something useful).

You could just try adding the full path to the command (ssh qq3 
'/opt/oracle/bin/oerr ORA 12152'), but that wouldn't do things like set 
environment variables which Oracle may require.

Simon

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Novatech Laptops...

[Simon Reap]

Vic wrote:
 At the moment, I'm only interested in what Amarok puts out. I can hear it
 through headphones, but not through the onboard speakers...
Sounds more like a  hardware problem to me.  Have the speakers output 
anything at all?  Do they work with a liveCD from another distro? 

Simon

-- 
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
--

Re: [Hampshire] Does anyone else have any mad ideas to do with computers for if they came into a large sum of money?

[Simon Reap]

Steve Kemp wrote:
 On Wed Oct 08, 2008 at 13:36:20 +0100, Stuart Matheson wrote:
   
   (Moving from the ceiling switch to a wall-switch would have required
  re-routing the power cables; definitely a job I couldn't manage
  myself.)

   
since it's in the bathroom, you ought to have it checked by a qualified 
electrician (Building regs, Part P [1]).

Simon


[1] http://www.partp.co.uk/consumer/consumer_doesit.asp

-- 
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
--