Re: [PLUG] Recommended SMTP Smart Hosts?

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Thu, Apr 27, 2017 at 12:13 PM, Paul Mullen  wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 25, 2017 at 01:52:45PM -0700, Paul Mullen wrote:
> > Which smart host providers do PLUGgers endorse?  Or are there any
> > alternatives to paying someone to handle outbount mail?
>
> Thanks to everyone that offered recommendations.  A few appear to
> offer full e-mail hosting only (inbound and outbound, web-based
> client, etc.), but DNS Made Easy's "SMTP Authentication" service may
> be just right.
>

Zoho.com looks like this (and does offer all those features), but will work
in the mode you described too.  You don't *have* to use anything else about
their service including the web thing (I use them and I never log in to
send or receive)
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Re: [PLUG] Recommended SMTP Smart Hosts?

[chris (fool) mccraw]

I don't love their UI, and you do have to pay in case you have >25 users
(addresses), but zoho.com is my current "free mail host" on the internet,
when I need mail for a domain (rather than just an address) and can't use
google apps.

On Tue, Apr 25, 2017 at 2:07 PM, Michael Barnes 
wrote:

> I have been using 1&1 for over 15 years for all my domain hosting. Their
> email services are easy to manage and I have never had any problems with
> blacklisting or spam issues. I have found their hosting services to be
> reasonably priced and reliable. Granted, I do not have any high visibility
> or high traffic sites, and I don't use many of their services. I think I
> have needed to contact their customer service maybe twice.
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 25, 2017 at 1:52 PM, Paul Mullen  wrote:
>
> > The 800 lb. Internet Gorillas are making it increasingly more
> > difficult for the Little Guys to run their own mail servers.  Even if
> > all of the various spam-fighting techologies are in place (DKIM, SPF,
> > DMARC), if your server is located in an IP block with a bad
> > reputation—pretty much any VPS service these days—messages still end
> > up classified as spam, or in some cases, silently dropped.
> >
> > Which smart host providers do PLUGgers endorse?  Or are there any
> > alternatives to paying someone to handle outbount mail?
> >
> >
> > --
> > Paul Mullen
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Re: [PLUG] Using ssh-agent and ssh-add

[chris (fool) mccraw]

I've had good luck making sure that my entire session runs under ssh-agent
- before the days of ubiquitous desktop managers and login panels, I just
ran 'ssh-agent startx'.  Then one 'ssh-add' was good for the duration of my
xwin session, including suspends.  I think modern login panels/managers do
this for you?  I no longer ssh out of my linux machines very often so I
haven't tried this in...years.

Other options if you don't trust your laptop is running 'ssh-agent screen'
or 'ssh-agent tmux' on a remote "bastion" host that you enforce secure
login to, and then you can reconnect to that session to Do The Thing,
rather than carrying around a loaded gun, you just have one set up in a
safe somewhere allready...

On Thu, Mar 30, 2017 at 2:16 PM, Galen Seitz  wrote:

> On 03/30/17 13:12, Rich Shepard wrote:
> >My laptops are not always on. When I do fire up one and want to
> exchange
> > files with the desktop each transaction requires my typing my passphrase.
> > Can I add ssh-agent and ssh-add to ~/.bash_profile so I need type the
> > passphrase only once after booting a host?
>
> I don't recall the details, but I believe I'm using some part of the
> GNOME keyring manager here.  After logging in, the first attempt to use
> ssh will pop up a window asking for my passphrase.  All subsequent use
> of ssh does not require the passphrase.
>
> My desktop is XFCE, but I have the appropriate GNOME pieces installed to
> make this work.  What those pieces are, I don't remember.  It's been a
> while since I set it up.
>
>
> galen
> --
> Galen Seitz
> gal...@seitzassoc.com
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Re: [PLUG] Reverse SSH tunnel

[chris (fool) mccraw]

I too have never heard of any problem with this setup (which I've also used
with success, including the autossh part).  Would be curious to know if
anyone has substantive issues they can point to rather than scuttlebutt!

On Fri, Mar 3, 2017 at 1:10 PM, Tom  wrote:

> Reverse ssh tunnel is secure solution, if configured properly and using
> robust keys, access control and strong password. It keeps control over
> the connection with the connecting user/site as it should be in normal
> customer/supplier relationship.
> I do not want to speculate about what you've heard. If you were not
> told why/what the problem is, I would do due diligence on the ssh side
> (patching CVE reviews, access logs, configuration, best practices, key
> rotation, etc.), formally request details from the person making the
> security issue claim. If the outcome is not negative for the existing
> ssh proxy/tunnel a measured by data, not by fear, and there are not
> other considerations against it (such as maintainability, existing VPN
> infrastructure, etc.), I would recommend keeping it.
> There are many FUD type claims against openSSH, openSSL,
> insertYourFavouriteProtocolHere based on past issues in favor of other
> closed, small, not well maintained/updated alternatives. Despite the
> bad press/performance in the past, Network Time Protocol, OpenSSH and
> OpenSSL are Linux Foundation Core Infrastructure Projects for a while -
> with significant quantitative quality and funding improvements, reviews
> and full disclosures in the open.
> I hope it helps, Tomas
> On Fri, 2017-03-03 at 09:13 -0800, VY wrote:
> > Unfortunately, I have no access to that person anymore.
> >
> > Based on your experience, there were no issues that you have run into
> > with
> > such deployment?
> >
> > -v
> >
> >
> > On Fri, Mar 3, 2017 at 9:07 AM, Robert Citek 
> > wrote:
> >
> > > I would ask the person who told you that this is not secure to
> > > elaborate.
> > > I have worked with a number of companies that do this. So I am as
> > > curious
> > > as you are.
> > >
> > > Regards,
> > > - Robert
> > >
> > > On Fri, Mar 3, 2017 at 9:01 AM VY  wrote:
> > >
> > > > Dear All:
> > > >
> > > > I am supporting a client that has product linux PCs running in
> > > > the field.
> > > > The person before me has built a reverse SSH tunnel (connection
> > > > initiated
> > > > by the device itself back to us and the connection is monitored
> > > > by
> > > > autossh).
> > > >
> > > > I was told this is not secure.   I am no expert in security.
> > > >  What are
> > > the
> > > > possible issues with this approach?  And what would be a more
> > > > secure
> > > > mechanism than reverse SSH?
> > > >
> > > > thanks
> > > >
> > > > -v
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Re: [PLUG] Looking for Recruiter Recommendations

[chris (fool) mccraw]

I've had stellar success as a job hunter with Edgelink :
http://www.edgelink.com.  They are more about "let us figure out what
you're good at and filter jobs for you" than "throw you at everything
available and see what sticks".  They'll interview you before suggesting
anything.  They found me two kickass jobs in a period of a couple of years
and that's it - never sent another opportunity my way other than the 2 that
I took.  Batting 1.000 for a recruiting agency feels amazing to me (since
just about every other recruiter experience I had before them was crappy),
so I recommend them over and over again.

Even before I look on craigslist and linkedin (and indeed, I'm assuming?) I
check out this job board: https://jobs.siliconflorist.com/



On Fri, Feb 24, 2017 at 3:31 PM, c  wrote:

> I am trying to find work in Portland from out of town. I have some friends
> in town, but no-one that has gotten their jobs through an agency or
> recruiter.
>
> Can anyone recommend anyone that they have worked with as being reasonably
> decent?
>
> Thanks,
> Purcell
>
> p.s. Yes I am doing the standard searching for jobs on linkedin and
> craigslist too.
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Re: [PLUG] Towards a minimalist network

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Fri, Jan 20, 2017 at 8:10 AM, Richard Owlett  wrote:

> For the purposes of this thread "minimalist network" a collection
> of exactly *three* physical objects -- specifically 2 computers
> and 1 Cat6 patch cable.
>

Do you care if the software is minimalist too?  PPPoE is hardly necessary -
it's like wrapping a ferrari in a moped to get across town.  Why not just
drive the (built-in) Ferrari instead of bolting a moped on and using its
motor instead?  If you have "ethernet connectivity" and you are going to
use TCP anyway seems like you are making this a lot more complicated than
it needs to be.

Interesting that your reading list includes UUCP - sounds like a
silly/interesting project to get familiar with some old technologies?  I
have fond memories of things I read via uucp in 1992 and it was a real yuk
to get configured between unix systems via screaming fast modem connection,
but it's hardly minimal and I can't imagine configuring the windows end of
it is going to be remotely fun.

Just my $.02
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Re: [PLUG] Linux job hunting...

[chris (fool) mccraw]

Hi Michael,

Advice I give to anyone who wants to work in tech is to work in tech!
Contribute to open source, work on a project for your portfolio, expand
your horizons - I realize this was kind of what school was supposed to do
for you, but if you find yourself without the skills for the jobs you want,
as someone who knows one programming language, you should be able to pick
up others pretty easily.  If you want my opinion, Java is a good feather to
have in your cap (some people poo-poo it, but it's not going anywhere and
has an incredible ecosystem and is really well-optimized for lots of
tasks), but something front-end (javascript in the form of Node or Angular
perhaps) or something that can span the stack a little better (Ruby,
Python) might be a good one to add to your resume.

I don't know how you learn, but I only learn by doing, so making a sample
project while you learn gives you an instant portfolio that you can host
for free on GitHub, seems to me.

Another option for breaking into tech is starting in developer support.
Places in town like New Relic are always hiring folks who can program -
you'll be working on interesting technical problems with developers (both
folks inside the company as well as customers) and learning as you go - I
joined that team with negligible python experience for instance, and came
out understanding quite a bit more, able to write API wrappers and having
some code on github.  Plus, they pay way way better than seasonal anything
(check glassdoor.com if you want to know more).

One caveat to that path - while it is totally a "foot in the door" at a
company with tons of developers on staff as well, and it is a fabulous
learning opportunity using tools that the industry is using like JIRA,
GitHub, etc, you need to be careful about how you position yourself when
applying.

As a proud support professional who hires people, nothing turns me off more
than someone saying "I'm doing this just as a stepping stone".  It can *be*
a stepping stone, but you need to give your focus to the work at hand and
be willing to stick with it for a year+ if you're going to try it, or else
it's not really worth their time to train and onboard you.

Just my $.02

On Mon, Nov 14, 2016 at 6:10 AM, Michael C. Robinson <
mich...@robinson-west.com> wrote:

> I have a major problem, I'm a college grad in computer science with 0
> years of experience.  That PSU allows this when granting a degree is
> sad, but that's another issue for another time.  Everything I can find
> is for senior level people and a lot of the programming jobs require
> .NET or some other Microsoft thing.  Short of an internship, no college
> graduate can have experience programming in a Linux or any other
> environment professionally.  How do you land a job in this market? With
> Intel laying off so many senior level people, I cannot compete with the
> talent out there.  The tech industry in Oregon doesn't need college
> graduates and doesn't seem to want them either.
>
> I'm thinking of volunteering somewhere, possibly at freegeek.  Thing
> is, I need coding experience.  The only other thing I can think to do
> is build a code repository and certify in Java.  Don't know if there
> are Python, C++, PHP, and Perl certifications that companies care
> about.  I'm looking at seasonal work in retail because I can't get a
> computer job.  That doesn't cut it, I worked too hard for a degree in
> computer science to be shut out of the field.  I need in, I'm too old
> to wait: 1, 5, or 10 years longer for that first progamming job.  I've
> been job hunting for 2 years as it is.
>
> Interested in any good tips or advice people may have.  I admit I'm
> discouraged, but I'm not giving up.  Giving up won't solve the problem
> of being unable to land that first programming job.  This isn't a
> situation I want to deal with much longer, an entry level programming
> job would be very welcome.  Barring that, all I can think to do is
> prove I have the experience necessary to function in a more senior
> position.  That's a heck of a place to start though.
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Re: [PLUG] Joy++

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2016 at 4:07 PM, Rich Shepard <rshep...@appl-ecosys.com>
wrote:

> On Wed, 14 Sep 2016, chris (fool) mccraw wrote:
>
> >  When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi
> >  *and* Emacs are just too damn slow.  They print useless messages like,
> >  'C-h for help' and '"foo" File is read only'.  So I use the editor
> >  that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time.
>
> >  Ed, man!  !man ed
>
>Yeah, and in the early 1960s I fed paper tape into a Burroughs
> mainframe,
> in the early 1970s I fed 80-column Hollerith cards into the IBM S/360, and
> in the
> late 1970s I used a Teletype terminal and Diablo typewriter/printer. Using
> ed is like flipping logic switches on the front of the computer to program
> it.
>
>Now is much better. Both emacs and vi do the job; pick the one you like.
>

Just so it was clear - that was a joke posting I was reposting from
1991not intended to start a flame war about who has the most history :)

I have both written an ed clone and used ed, but gosh, I sure enjoy using
vim and even emacs a lot more!
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Re: [PLUG] Joy++

[chris (fool) mccraw]

lest we forget, today's editor wars are nothing like as fun as they used to
be back in the 90's:

  From: p...@athena.mit.edu (Patrick J. LoPresti?
)
  Message-ID: <1991jul11.031731.9...@athena.mit.edu>
  Sender: n...@athena.mit.edu (News system)
  Subject: The True Path (long)
  Date: 11 Jul 91 03:17:31 GMT
  Path: 
ai-lab!mintaka!olivea!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!think.com!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!bloom-picayune.mit.edu!athena.mit.edu!patl
  Newsgroups: alt.religion.emacs,alt.slack
  Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  Lines: 95
  Xref: ai-lab alt.religion.emacs:244 alt.slack:1935


  When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi
  *and* Emacs are just too damn slow.  They print useless messages like,
  'C-h for help' and '"foo" File is read only'.  So I use the editor
  that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time.


  Ed, man!  !man ed


  ED(1) UNIX Programmer's ManualED(1)


  NAME
ed - text editor


  SYNOPSIS
ed [ - ] [ -x ] [ name ]
  DESCRIPTION
Ed is the standard text editor.
  ---


  Computer Scientists love ed, not just because it comes first
  alphabetically, but because it's the standard.  Everyone else loves ed
  because it's ED!


  "Ed is the standard text editor."


  And ed doesn't waste space on my Timex Sinclair.  Just look:


  -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  24 Oct 29  1929 /bin/ed
  -rwxr-xr-t  4 root 1310720 Jan  1  1970 /usr/ucb/vi
  -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  5.89824e37 Oct 22  1990 /usr/bin/emacs


  Of course, on the system *I* administrate, vi is symlinked to ed.
  Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog
  message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K;
  and 3) RUNS ED!!


  "Ed is the standard text editor."


  Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:


  golem> ed


  ?
  help
  ?
  ?
  ?
  quit
  ?
  exit
  ?
  bye
  ?
  hello?
  ?
  eat flaming death
  ?
  ^C
  ?
  ^C
  ?
  ^D
  ?


  ---
  Note the consistent user interface and error reportage.  Ed is
  generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm
  the novice with verbosity.


  "Ed is the standard text editor."


  Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all.


  ED IS THE TRUE PATH TO NIRVANA!  ED HAS BEEN THE CHOICE OF EDUCATED
  AND IGNORANT ALIKE FOR CENTURIES!  ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS
  BODILY FLUIDS!!  ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR!  ED MAKES THE SUN
  SHINE AND THE BIRDS SING AND THE GRASS GREEN!!


  When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless
  help screens and cursor positioning code!  I just want an EDitor!!
  Not a "viitor".  Not a "emacsitor".  Those aren't even WORDS ED!
  ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!


  TEXT EDITOR.


  When IBM, in its ever-present omnipotence, needed to base their
  "edlin" on a UNIX standard, did they mimic vi?  No.  Emacs?  Surely
  you jest.  They chose the most karmic editor of all.  The standard.


  Ed is for those who can *remember* what they are working on.  If you
  are an idiot, you should use Emacs.  If you are an Emacs, you should
  not be vi.  If you use ED, you are on THE PATH TO REDEMPTION.  THE
  SO-CALLED "VISUAL" EDITORS HAVE BEEN PLACED HERE BY ED TO TEMPT THE
  FAITHLESS.  DO NOT GIVE IN!!!  THE MIGHTY ED HAS SPOKEN!!!


  ?




On Wed, Sep 14, 2016 at 3:50 PM, Rich Shepard 
wrote:

> On Wed, 14 Sep 2016, Paul Heinlein wrote:
>
> > Someone at work tried this logic:
> >
> >   24 > 8; ergo emacs > vim. qed
> >
> > To which I replied,
> >
> >   counter example:
> >   10 > 4.7.3 but Windows < Linux
>
>And I thought the text editor flame wars died out years ago. I guess
> that
> the War on Text Editors is similar to the Wars on Poverty, Crime, Drugs,
> and
> Terror: never ending. :-)
>
> Rich
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Re: [PLUG] Shell script error explanation needed

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Thu, Aug 11, 2016 at 8:25 AM, Rich Shepard 
wrote:

>
>I passed at the full pathname to the script just as I've done before.


Be that as it may, the shell script would have said "/path/to/mail.list -
file not found" if it was *using* that full path, so you are still (IMHO)
looking for an unqualified pathname use.
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Re: [PLUG] Shell script error explanation needed

[chris (fool) mccraw]

well, here's where I'd start:

On Thu, Aug 11, 2016 at 7:41 AM, Rich Shepard 
wrote:

>A shell script that has worked flawlessly in the past was set to run
> using
> the 'at' command. And it did run ... I think.
>
>My inbox received this message:
>
> Subject: Output from your job   63
>

That was job #63, whose run is logged somewhere so you can be sure of which
script it is.  unfortuantely the queue for at(1) is emptied after the job
runs so you can't use a tool like atq(1) to examine what happened.



> sh: line 67: mail.list: No such file or directory
>

this is saying that the 67th line of some script referred to a file that
was unavailable at runtime.  That's where I'd start looking for a mail.list
file reference - and one that does not have a /full/path in front of it, so
perhaps a cd to an expected directory failed, and/or the file moved
(perhaps temporarily) from where the script typically finds it, or a
filesystem was missing at runtime, or a million other reasons...



>I tried a Web search for this string but found nothing enlightening. The
> file, 'mail.list' does exist and the script referring to it has only 7
> lines, including one blank line.
>

Seems like some script that ran has at least 67 lines.  It could be the
case that a subordinate script called from the master script is the one
throwing the error message.  The shell's built in error reporting is pretty
minimal, as you see here :)


   Please provide me with a clue on how to seek the meaning of this message
> and an idea how to determine if the script actually sent the message to the
> addresses in mail.list.
>

Well, I'd check my mail logs to determine that.  That error message doesn't
specify what was happening with mail.list - perhaps it was *read*
successfully, and then the script attempt laters to remove it or add to it
and it had vanished in the meantime.  Sounds like your processing scripts
could use some more error handling (check the shell's last-job-exit-code
variable: $? after you do things you care about and explicitly log that
status code or a success message).
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Re: [PLUG] Show of hands/poll on tcpdump

[chris (fool) mccraw]

somewhere between 2 and 3, but i would refer to the man page for anything I
hadn't done recently.  Much like every other unix utility with more than a
handful of flags (eg ls, tar, bash) - even the ones i use extensively &
daily - I refer to the man page despite familiarity with the tool.

On Mon, Jun 27, 2016 at 2:45 PM, Bill Barry  wrote:

> On Jun 27, 2016 10:56 AM, "Michael Rasmussen"  wrote:
> >
> > If asked to self assess your tcpdump comfort level would you reply with:
> >
> >  * I'm great, what do you need done?
> >  * I'm comfortable, can do capture with filtering
> >  * I'm rusty, but could spin up quick
>
> I am right in here. It has been about three years since I needed it.
>
> Bill
>
> >  * Only use it with the man page handy for reference
> >  * tcpwhat?
> >
> > Back story after a few responses roll in.
> >
> >
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Re: [PLUG] Universality of USB Cables

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 2:54 PM, Rich Shepard <rshep...@appl-ecosys.com>
wrote:

> On Wed, 18 May 2016, chris (fool) mccraw wrote:
>
> > My understanding is that while they will all be usable to some extent,
> > there are differences in cabling that actually matter for transfer speed
> > or power transfer:
>
> Chris,
>
>Probably won't make any difference for me. Transferring images from the
> camera via cable rather than removing the SD card and mounting that in the
> desktop, or occasionally updating GPS maps are not speed dependent since
> the
> amount of data is comparatively small. Won't use them for charging
> batteries
> so power transfer is not an issue.


Dunno what kind of camera you have, but the last camera I had, had images
that were many megabytes in size and speed made a huge difference when
transferring.   If you transfer 1-2 pictures at a time no problem, but I
transferred hundreds / huge movie files and it made a noticeable - 10x -
difference when i upgraded to usb3.
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Re: [PLUG] Universality of USB Cables

[chris (fool) mccraw]

This was fascinating!

Highly recommended reading (though, also depressing, because all the usb C
accessories I just bought for my new nexus 6p phone are going to get binned
- I already threw out the packaging so can't return)

On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 2:30 PM, John Meissen  wrote:

> USB-C cables can be tricky. If you ever intend to get anything using one I
> recommend you read Benson Leung's reviews:
>
> https://plus.google.com/u/0/collection/s0Inv
>
> In fact, I would recommend reading them anyway. A bad cable can damage your
> equipment.
>
> john-
>
> gen...@gmail.com said:
> >
> > My understanding is that while they will all be usable to some extent,
> > there are differences in cabling that actually matter for transfer speed
> or
> > power transfer:
> >
> > USB3 cables are in some way physically different and enable much higher
> > transfer speed:
> >
> http://www.howtogeek.com/222400/do-usb-3.0-connections-require-usb-3.0-cables/
> >
> > Fast-charge-capable usb cables with Type C (there is no upside down to
> the
> > plugs - symmetrical) have some special sauce that allows for fast
> > charging.  I don't claim to understand how after a lot of reading, but it
> > seems like some are better than others (eg, charging is faster with one
> > cable than with another, measured in some way that struck me as
> > "sufficiently scientific for my belief-needs")
> >
> >
> >
> > On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 2:01 PM, Rich Shepard 
> > wrote:
> >
> > > On Wed, 18 May 2016, Aaron Burt wrote:
> > >
> > > > Yep, that's the idear.
> > >
> > >I thunk so, Aaron. Thanks.
> > >
> > > > And you can get 'em from at the dollar store.
> > >
> > >Really?? I'll have to check this out at the local one. Guess they're
> > > now a
> > > commodity and used for cell phones, too.
> > >
> > > Rich
>
>
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Re: [PLUG] Universality of USB Cables

[chris (fool) mccraw]

My understanding is that while they will all be usable to some extent,
there are differences in cabling that actually matter for transfer speed or
power transfer:

USB3 cables are in some way physically different and enable much higher
transfer speed:
http://www.howtogeek.com/222400/do-usb-3.0-connections-require-usb-3.0-cables/

Fast-charge-capable usb cables with Type C (there is no upside down to the
plugs - symmetrical) have some special sauce that allows for fast
charging.  I don't claim to understand how after a lot of reading, but it
seems like some are better than others (eg, charging is faster with one
cable than with another, measured in some way that struck me as
"sufficiently scientific for my belief-needs")



On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 2:01 PM, Rich Shepard 
wrote:

> On Wed, 18 May 2016, Aaron Burt wrote:
>
> > Yep, that's the idear.
>
>I thunk so, Aaron. Thanks.
>
> > And you can get 'em from at the dollar store.
>
>Really?? I'll have to check this out at the local one. Guess they're
> now a
> commodity and used for cell phones, too.
>
> Rich
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Re: [PLUG] Snappy response not so snappy anymore

[chris (fool) mccraw]

My primary suggestion is to check swap usage (can also be done with top, or
free).  I know we're not running MS Windows here, but I have yet to find a
perfectly behaved browser that doesn't eventually leak memory, and if
you're like me, you have a browser running for Quite Some Time between
restarts, and you may end up using swap even with very little actually
currently "happening" on the system.  I usually don't need a reboot to
reclaim the swap, but I'll restart the browser, and if I want to verify
that the swap usage is gone, I'll swapoff -a; swapon -a (as root) to verify
that all of that 'used' swap isn't really being used anymore.

This last step is not necessary, since the stuff that is swapped out is
either unlikely to swap back in and is fine sitting on disk, or does swap
in once and then isn't swapped back out (until the next iteration of the
vicious cycle), I just like seeing Swap at 0 because it satisfies some
compulsion I have for closing things :)

That's what tends to cure my "occasional slowdowns" that aren't
network-filesystem-related, YMMV

On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 7:54 AM, Dick Steffens  wrote:

> My desktop machine used to respond quickly to the opening of a program,
> or the return from screen saver. Now those actions are slow. The
> programs appear to run fine. This didn't used to be the case, as
> recently as just a few months ago. The most noticeable thing is when
> returning from screen saver. I have two monitors, one VGA and the other
> DVI. The VGA screen does come back quickly, but the DVI screen takes a
> couple of seconds. And when it does, the windows that are open are blank
> for another second before their content returns.
>
> Any recommendations on where to start looking for why this happens and
> how to fix it?
>
> A few of the machine details (built by ENU):
> Motherboard: ASUS B85M-G
> CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-4130 CPU @ 3.40GHz
> Memory (Bank 0 and Bank 2): DIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1333 MHz (0.8 ns),
> 4GiB each
> Display: NVIDIA GT218 [GeForce 210]
>
> --
> Regards,
>
> Dick Steffens
>
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Re: [PLUG] Virtualbox Issue?

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Tue, Dec 1, 2015 at 2:56 PM, Ronald Chmara  wrote:

> What have you tried doing to clean up windows itself? Dump update files and
> whatnot already?
>
> http://www.cnet.com/how-to/delete-windows-update-files-to-regain-hard-drive-space/


+1


> > 52.8% is Windows\winsxs
>

This directory in particular is likely to have reclaimable space:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2795190
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Re: [PLUG] Virtualbox Issue?

[chris (fool) mccraw]

perhaps you can install it to and run it from the remote shared directory
you use for storing your recordings?

On Tue, Dec 1, 2015 at 10:24 AM, Dick Steffens 
wrote:

> On 12/01/2015 10:10 AM, Ken Stephens wrote:
> > Dick Steffens wrote:
> >> On 12/01/2015 07:59 AM, Robert Citek wrote:
> >>> On Mon, Nov 30, 2015 at 10:02 PM, Dick Steffens 
> wrote:
>  I run Windows 7 on VirtualBox.
> >>> To be sure I understand correctly, Ubuntu 14.04 is the host OS running
> >>> the VirtualBox hypervisor, which runs a VM instance that has Windows 7
> >>> as a guest OS.  Is that correct?
> >> Yes.
> >>
>  The virtual C: drive has a capacity of 24.8 GB, and has only 18.6 MB
>  free space.
> >>> ...
>  I thought it was an Win7 problem, but can't find any large files in
>  temporary or hidden locations, so I'm wondering if it's somehow
> related
>  to VitrualBox.
> >>> What is taking up the 24.8 GB?  Is there a Windows 7 equivalent to
> >>> running a 'du' ? e.g.
> >>>
> >>> du -ma / | sort -rn | head
> >> I don't know about an equivalent command, but a slow and dirty approach
> >> was to search through the places where temporary files go, and I set it
> >> so I could see hidden files. I didn't find anything out of the ordinary,
> >> just a small handful of files showing KB sizes.
> >>
> >>> A quick-n-dirty workaround may be to attach another virtual disk to
> >>> your Windows 7 instance.
> >> I spoke with tech support for GearPlayer. He said that they run
> >> GearPlayer on virtual Windows 7 machines hosted on Windows Server, but
> >> he's never seen a virtual Windows 7 install in less than 40 or 50 GB,
> >> and that that's barely enough to keep up with Windows updates. I've got
> >> mine in 25 GB. I did the install back in August of 2014, but I can't
> >> find any notes, so I don't know if I took a default virtual disk size or
> >> set something on my own. I've got a laptop with another transcription
> >> program on it that I'll use this morning to get today's work out, but
> >> after that I'll follow up on some instructions I found on the web for
> >> increasing the size of the virtual hard drive. If worse comes to worse I
> >> can always recreate the virtual machine and reinstall GearPlayer on it.
> >> There's an advantage to this in that I would do the installation on the
> >> 1TB drive Ubuntu 14.04 is on instead of the drive Ubuntu 12.04 is on,
> >> which is where I installed Windows 7. I've been pointing VirtualBox at
> >> that drive to get the Windows 7 virtual machine. It appeared to be
> >> working for a couple of weeks. I noticed that I had something under 100
> >> MB available on the virtual drive yesterday, but this morning it's down
> >> to zero. I don't know what would be filling up that drive. I don't run
> >> anything else on it except GearPlayer, and the tech support guy
> >> confirmed that since I keep the audio files on a shared drive, and don't
> >> use Gear Player features to fetch the files from an ftp site, and don't
> >> use their "completed" feature to save backup copies of the audio files
> >> when I'm finished with them, that there's nothing GearPlayer is doing to
> >> chew up space.
> >>
> >> Thanks for the reply. I'll dig into it more after I finish today's
> >> assignment.
> >>
> >>
> > Dick,
> >
> > Get windirstat command at https://windirstat.info/download.html.  It
> > will get you a map of your windows system that will tell you exactly
> > what you need to know about file sizes.
>
> Thanks. I'll do that. But at this point there's zero available space, so
> I'll need to extend the virtual drive first before I can install it.
>
> --
> Regards,
>
> Dick Steffens
>
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Re: [PLUG] Xfinity cable modem suggestions?

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 5:24 PM, Russell Senior 
wrote:

> > "Larry" == Larry Brigman  writes:
>
> Larry> Arris Surfboard wifi version with 802.3AC1900.
> Larry> http://shop.surfboard.com/
>
> FWIW, even when you buy and own the cable modem it is under Comcast
> control.  The first 15 minutes after you hook it up is them loading
> their own firmware onto the thing.  Having Comcast in control of the
> wifi is suboptimal, in my opinion.  I recommend a bridging device, one
> coax, one ethernet, no wifi on the device, so that you can control the
> network on your side.  The SB6141 is such a device.  Hook up your own
> gateway and wifi router that Comcast doesn't control.


yikes, good to know, as I am getting one of these based on the
recommendations in this thread (once I found out how cheap they are
compared to the monthly rental fee...it would be insane not to!  Last time
I looked I was seeing them costing hundreds of bucks, but I was probably
looking in the wrong placeS)
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Re: [PLUG] Configuring Dual SSD/spinning HD System

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 3:27 PM, Paul Heinlein  wrote:

In general, though, I'm with Ken: put your OS on the SSD.


agree with this advice!

Additionally, when I had my system set up like that, I found that there
were certain applications which responded a lot better when their cache (a
browser with 2 dozen+ tabs open) or source data files (fast dvd burning)
were on the SSD, so I made a little /local partition that held just the
stuff that had been problematic/showed a dramatic benefit when placed
there.  Those were literally the only two things I came across in my normal
workflow, but you'll know yours best :)


> --
> Paul Heinlein
> heinl...@madboa.com
> 45°38' N, 122°6' W
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Re: [PLUG] Configuring Dual SSD/spinning HD System

[chris (fool) mccraw]

I think you should put /opt on the SSD.  It is, for the effects of this
conversation, "your OS".  Nearly every other distro keeps all of its meat
in /usr, i guess slackware uses /opt for the installed packages instead.

On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 3:40 PM, Rich Shepard 
wrote:

> On Fri, 23 Oct 2015, Derek Loree wrote:
>
> > I would create one bootable partition on the SSD drive for everything
> that
> > is not /var and /home. Then create two on the spinning platter drive, one
> > for /var and one for /home. These two directories are written to a lot
> > more than the others. Unless you are dealing with very large files, EXT4
> > should be good enough.
>
> Derek,
>
>That's good advice. In addition to /home and /var I'll put /tmp and /opt
> on the HDD. Most of what I add here goes in /opt, but some tools (not those
> from SlackBuilds.org) default to /usr/local. Since they're installed and
> updated infrequently there should be sufficient write cycles to
> accommoddate
> them.
>
>Thanks for the advice on EXT4 for both. That makes life simpler for
> non-professionals like me.
>
> Much appreciated,
>
> Rich
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Re: [PLUG] Altered Directory Permissions

[chris (fool) mccraw]

My guess is, poorly behaved installation scripts for some package(s) that
insists $install_dir have the permissions it thinks are sane.
On Sep 26, 2015 12:52 PM, "Rich Shepard"  wrote:

>This has been going on for a long time; now I want to understand what's
> happening.
>
>I use the /opt directory (owned by root.root) for locally-built,
> non-distribution applications. As such I set the permissions to 777 so I
> can
> access it and all subdirectories. Every now and then, on an infrequent and
> unpredictable schedule, the permissions revert to 755.
>
>What might be possible causes of this change?
>
> Rich
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Re: [PLUG] VMPlayer host network only

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Tue, Aug 4, 2015 at 4:05 PM, Ken Stephens k...@cad2cam.com wrote:

 Michael Rasmussen wrote:

  Both hosts can ping their own interface, yet neither can ping the other's
  interface.


No surprise there - you can ping any address you configure as local by
default :)


 Check your firewall settings on both the virtual and real machines. You
 are probably blocking port 22 on one of them.


...but blocking ICMP by default as he mentioned ping doesn't work?  That
seems odd and unexpected to me.

Michael, can you tell us what the setup is on each machine (eg VM =
10.1.1.1/255.0.0.0 w/route to that network via the interface, host=
10.1.1.2/255.0.0.0 route - note that I am more interested in what the Host
machine's network settings are on the private network that gets setup for
the VM than what its external IP/routes are)?  Also, what host passes out
the DHCP address to the VM - that should be in the logs somewhere? (My
centos 7 VM puts it in /var/log/messages as 'server identifier x.y.z.q' in
the middle of a bunch of NetworkManager output.)

In my setup, that IP is given out by my host machine - which is not running
DHCPd, so VirtualBox is using its builtin DHCP server, and just passes on
many the same settings (eg nameservers) as the host OS is already using -
but this is NAT, not host-based networking, mode.  I used to use the
Host-based networking, but lately I've fallen back to NAT which I realize
won't work for you, but hopefully the above can give us some ideas as to
what's wrong.  In my old setup I'm pretty sure I had Host-based networking
and still used the auto-dhcp and the default route on that VM got an
automatic gateway set that was the IP of the host machine (from the point
of view of the VM).
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Re: [PLUG] Webcam desktop recording software for Linux

[chris (fool) mccraw]

If I were trying to do this, I'd record them separately and then use some
video compositing software to put them together.  It's more work, but then,
kick starters almost always seem to be more work than planned...

Now, I have no idea what software exists to even do that, but I think
you're more likely to find something for free that does it :)
On Feb 21, 2015 10:10 PM, Damon Getsman damo.g...@gmail.com wrote:

 -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
 Hash: SHA1

   Hello, all!
   I was wondering if anybody about might have any suggestions for
 software packages that might be able to handle recording a stream both
 from the webcam and from the desktop of the computer at the same time.
   Let me disclaim this (for those of you with kids) by saying that no, I
 am not going to become one of the guys on youtube that plays video
 games with the webcam pointed and recording all of my profanity and
 mockery of the games.
   Basically, I'm working on a kickstarter project, and I think that one
 of the best ways to do the describing video would be a webcam screen
 inset at a corner, with the rest of the desktop free to demonstrate the
 functionality of the software that I am emulating, and where my code is
 currently at in the process of writing this.
   Any help would be greatly appreciated in locating a suite like this.
   TIA!

   -Damon Getsman
 -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
 Version: GnuPG v1

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Re: [PLUG] Linux (pref Debian) brainstorming group - does one exist?

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 6:50 AM, Richard Owlett rowl...@cloud85.net wrote:

 I'm working on a personal project has some rather odd (OK already
 WEIRD ;) goals and constraints. I wish to ask questions without
  getting referrals to How to ask a question or don't do that etc.


Wes put his response to this well, and I agree with it.

I think your title was even more spot-on when it used the term
brainstorming.  The best place to get rapid interchange of ideas is in
some real-time forum:  say, a PLUG meeting after-beers (or even an explicit
meeting to brainstorm on this topic :))  Fall back to a group chat like IRC
which has some benefits over in-person meeting:  serves geo-distributed
participants and can allow a history upon which people who couldn't attend
due to time constraints can still comment.

Your constraints are as Wes pointed out pretty narrow and specific.  How
about you tell us the *problem you're trying to solve* so we can use this
existing forum - which draws upon a lot of expertise across many of the
areas touching features you mention - to suggest already-existing pieces to
contribute to your solution?

I work with my company's product management organization closely and while
customers often want a (sometimes very specific) feature, they are always
trying to solve a problem.  Finding out that problem allows us to say this
is already solved in a way you didn't expect. try doing it this other way
or we have no plans to solve that problem, by your suggested feature
(which it sometimes turns out won't even solve their problem) or otherwise;
 our best suggestion is to try another vendor.  talking about problems is
IMNSHO a much more productive way to frame goals:  when you have a problem,
solutions are many.  when you have a narrow set of guidelines without a
specified problem, you are liable to receive narrowly focused
recommendations (or none at all) that end up not solving your problem.

That said, it sounds like some fertile grounds for what you *appear* to be
trying to accomplish would be in distributions (surely some are
debian-based) designed for space or third world countries, where bandwidth
to the outside is extremely limited.
Those communities (sorry, I don't know any, but I think the pointer is
valid) might be a good place to start looking for information on working
completely off-line as well as stripping down existing distros to remove
unneeded features.
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Re: [PLUG] RPM installing an RPM

[chris (fool) mccraw]

Last time I had to do something like that, I shipped a shell script with a
bunch of rpm's embedded in it (in a shell archive), which first extracted
them and then installed them serially (where needed) and in a group (where
not needed).

This worked well enough to circumvent the problem.

This was 2001.  Sad to hear things haven't improved in that world, yet!
On Dec 3, 2014 5:56 PM, Daniel Herrington herd...@gmail.com wrote:

 All,

 Can you have RPM call a third party installer that then calls RPM?
 I tried this a month ago and could not get around a lock error on the rpm
 db, I googled and saw an email thread form some years ago where the reply
 was no. I'm wondering if I just didn't look hard enough. I eventually
 abandoned for a self-extracting installer, but thought I'd revisit the
 problem

 thanks,

 --
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Re: [PLUG] Troubleshooting SSL Configuration for SNI

[chris (fool) mccraw]

I support some customers who use SNI and this is far and away the most
frequent problem we see:

https://wiki.apache.org/httpd/NameBasedSSLVHostsWithSNI

and this is my favorite tool for anaylzing SSL issues:

http://ssllabs.com

It doesn't have much of interest to say about saunter.us except:  This site
works only in browsers with SNI support.

Interestingly, it does not say the same thing about jamhome.us





On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 7:04 AM, Michael Rasmussen mich...@jamhome.us
wrote:

 I have three SSL enabled hosts on an Apache web server with SSL services
 provided by GnuTLS.

 mod_ssl does not support (at least at the time I first set these up) SNI.

 SSL is working properly for two of the three jamhome.us and michaelsnet.us
 The third site, saunter.us, is having the jamhome.us SSL cert provided
 resulting in a
 ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID

 debug level logging is enabled for Apache.

 When Firefox is used to access saunter.us this message is recorded:
   [Wed Nov 26 06:43:50 2014] [info] GnuTLS: Fatal Alert From Client: (42)
 'Certificate is bad'

 (Side note: Chrome does not trigger that log message.

 Certificates have been validated, a CSR decoder was used to validate the
 CSR I submitted for the saunter.us cert.

 I've run out of troubleshooting ideas.   What suggestions do you have?

 Relevent portions of config files follow.

 Conf file jamhome.us
 VirtualHost 173.246.104.35:443
 ServerName  www.jamhome.us
 ServerAlias jamhome.us

 GnuTLSEnableon
 GnuTLSPrioritiesNORMAL
 GnuTLSSessionTicketson
 GNUTLSExportCertificates on

 GnuTLSCertificateFile   /path_to/certs/certificate-49851-jamhome.crt
 GnuTLSKeyFile   /path_to/private/jamhome_us.key
 GnuTLSClientCAFile  /path_to/certs/gandi-ca-2014.crt
 # other options snipped
 /VirtualHost
 End of jamhome.us

Conf File michaelsnet.us
 VirtualHost  173.246.104.35:443
 ServerName  www.michaelsnet.us
 ServerAlias michaelsnet.us

 GnuTLSEnableon
 GnuTLSPrioritiesNORMAL
 GnuTLSSessionTicketson
 GNUTLSExportCertificates on

 GnuTLSCertificateFile
  /etc/ssl/certs/certificate-49850-michaelsnet.crt
 GnuTLSKeyFile   /etc/ssl/private/michaelsnet_us.key
 GnuTLSClientCAFile  /etc/ssl/certs/gandi-ca-2014.crt
 # other options snipped
 /VirtualHost
 End of michaelsnet.us

Conf File saunter.us
 VirtualHost 173.246.104.35:443
 ServerName  www.saunter.us
 ServerAlias saunter.us

 GnuTLSEnableon
 GnuTLSSessionTicketson
 GnuTLSPrioritiesNORMAL
 GNUTLSExportCertificates on

 GnuTLSCertificateFile   /path_to/certs/certificate-100672-saunter.crt
 GnuTLSKeyFile   /path_to/private/saunter_us.key
 GnuTLSClientCAFile  /path_to/certs/gandi-ca-2014.crt
 # other options snipped
 /VirtualHost
 End of saunter.us

Conf File gnutls.conf
 IfModule mod_gnutls.c
   # all options commented out
 /IfModule
 End of gnutls.conf

Conf File ports.conf

 NameVirtualHost *:80
 Listen [::]:80
 Listen 0.0.0.0:80

 IfModule mod_gnutls.c
 Listen 443 https
 NameVirtualHost 173.246.104.35:443
 /IfModule
 End of ports.conf


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 Be Appropriate  Follow Your Curiosity
 Objects in the calendar are closer than they appear.
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Re: [PLUG] Samsung S5 and Ubuntu 12.04,

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 3:55 PM, Chuck Hast wch...@gmail.com wrote:

 On my 12.04 it is pretty fast. I wonder why they abandoned the USB
 block mode?


it's not about ubuntu version - it's about android (v4 i guess?).  i too
loved the hey it's a hard drive! situation.  I use something other than
gMTP (something else MTP-related - ah, there it is:
https://github.com/hanwen/go-mtpfs - also my first exposure to go, which is
pretty darn neat!) that uses FUSE and still lets me mount the device and
access its filesystem from the command line (or i suppose a file browser
like nautilus, though i never use those) after some convolutions.
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Re: [PLUG] Sound quality driving me to the dark side

[chris (fool) mccraw]

I like Michael's suggestion, but if that can't be easily scripted, there
are other transcoders (might be as easy as something like mp3gain set to
reduce clipping - which doesn't re-encode the audio - or maybe it would
take a reencode (or a decode - mpg123 -w for instance, if you don't mind
having a .wav temporarily).


On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 4:17 PM, Michael Rasmussen mich...@jamhome.us
wrote:

 On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 02:32:11PM -0700, Dick Steffens wrote:
  On 08/09/2014 09:21 AM, chris (fool) mccraw wrote:
  I tried using Audacity, but it cleans up the audio so the problem
  disappears. Does anyone know of a gstreamer based audio editor that
  works with Ubuntu 12.04?

 This implies you could open and save the file in Audacity to solve your
 problem.
 Would that be too onerous?

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 The horizon of most people is a circle with a radius of zero.
 They call it their point of view.
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Re: [PLUG] Sound quality driving me to the dark side

[chris (fool) mccraw]

Would be most useful, I think, to have a file that demonstrates the issue
rather than a recording of the sounds.  Not sure what format you have but
hopefully it's easy to take a snip out of without completely re recording.
On Aug 9, 2014 8:49 AM, Michael Rasmussen mich...@jamhome.us wrote:

 On Sat, Aug 09, 2014 at 07:40:25AM -0700, Dick Steffens wrote:
  On 08/09/2014 03:45 AM, Nat Taylor wrote:
   Dunno, !maybe qt/KDE does it better or maybe ardour?
  By contract I can't play any of the audio recordings while others can
  listen.

 Can you get one of your clients to make a sample recording that you can
 share?

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Re: [PLUG] Sound quality driving me to the dark side

[chris (fool) mccraw]

I've used virtualbox successfully with win7.  installation was simple.  I
have done this awhile ago on ubuntu, currently on OSX - both worked without
complication.


On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 5:03 PM, Dick Steffens d...@dicksteffens.com wrote:

 Readers with unfortunately good memories will recall that I use an old
 program called Transcribe along with a separate old program called
 Footpedal to play back audio recordings for the purpose of transcribing
 them. Some of you may also recall that I've been fooling around, from
 time to time, with updating those programs to run well on Ubuntu 12.
 When I switched to Ubuntu 14 they wouldn't work at all. A few months ago
 I realized that those programs work well on Ubuntu 10, so I created a
 VirtualBox Ubuntu 10 machine just for the purpose of running them. This
 solution has worked well, for the most part.

 Yesterday I ran into a problem that tells me that explains why I haven't
 been able to dedicate the time to those programming projects. Some of
 the audio files I get are plagued by distortion. I commented about a
 particularly noisy file to the fellow I get the work from. He listened
 to it on his end and said that it was clean. This made me wonder if the
 problem was on my end. I listened to the file with Audacity and
 discovered that the noise was considerably reduced -- not completely
 gone, but much better than when played on Transcribe.

 I had been planning on re-writing Transcribe so that it would run on
 Ubuntu 14, but since I would be using the same library calls as the old
 version I wouldn't be getting rid of the noise. Transcribe -- and Totem
 Movie Player (which seems to go by a different name as Ubuntu releases
 progress) -- both use gstreamer for playing audio. So, when I listen to
 a file with either tool it sounds the same. Being in a hurry to meet a
 deadline I borrowed my wife's Win7 laptop, installed a demo copy of
 GearPlayer 4, and got the work out.

 As I mentioned above, the noise was reduced with Audacity, so they must
 use different libraries for reproducing sound than gstreamer. Audacity
 was good enough that, if I could figure out a way to control it with a
 foot pedal, I'd consider using it. However, that's not what Audacity is
 designed for, and it's not all that clear that there is a way to insert
 the foot pedal into its controls.

 Now for the part related to the dark side. From my experience using
 GearPlayer yesterday and again today, I've concluded that I need to
 spend the money for it. However I'd rather not have to run two machines.
 (I've done this before, and will probably continue to do it for the time
 being, but I'd rather just run the one machine.) My current desktop has
 the resources to support virtual machines, so I'm considering setting up
 a Win7 virtual machine just to run GearPlayer. Does anyone have
 experience setting up VirtualBox with Win7? Are there any gotchas I need
 to worry about before going out and getting a legal copy of Win7?

 Thanks for understanding my unfortunate need to proceed to the dark side.

 --
 Regards,

 Dick Steffens

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Re: [PLUG] Raspberry Pi to buy/borrow?

[chris (fool) mccraw]

I have a pi unused that I've be happy to loan out in case you don't find
something suitable.  Unfortunately have no more details handy till late
tomorrow night but it has Wi-Fi and is less than  3 yr old
On Aug 4, 2014 8:32 PM, Dan Pape dp...@dpape.com wrote:

 Replying to myself ... (after searching the list archive)

 I have just learned about http://www.oregon-electronics.com/ I'll try
 there tomorrow and see what they have in stock.

 thanks,
 Dan Pape

 On 08/04/2014 07:13 PM, Dan Pape wrote:
  Hi List,
 
  I'm participating in an internal corporate hackathon this
  wednesday/thursday. I was planning to use a Pi plus Pi camera that I
  bought from element14 last wednesday, but two day shipping apparently
  doesn't mean much because I just found out today that it won't arrive
  until friday--after the hackathon is over!
 
  Are there any places in town I could buy a Pi tonight or tomorrow?
  According to their site, fry's doesn't seem to have any. I suppose I
  could do with an external web cam of which I have quite a few laying
  around. Alternatively, does anyone have an extra Pi laying around that I
  could borrow for a few days? If I happen to break it I will of course
  replace it with the new one I have coming in the mail.
 
  thanks,
  Dan Pape
 
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Re: [PLUG] Capture of CSV data

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 2:57 PM, Ronald Bynoe ron...@bynoe.us wrote:

 So the syntax is probably wrong, but something like sudo nc -lkd -u $IP
 9010 | tee netcat_log.csv


also not sure of the netcat syntax, but that is the tool i'd suggest too -
no need to reinvent the wheel to write a program that can grab data forever.

once you have the netcat_log.csv (maybe multiple - netcat_log_addr_port.csv
to reflect your network?), you can try a bunch of different solutions for
the back end (db storage?  maybe not needed...) and presentation (graphing).

A question nobody has asked yet is what kind of data volume you're talking
about.  stream of data is vague.  if it's one value an hour, you could
probably do without anything more than that csv file for longterm storage -
processing 24 rows of data per day is quick from a text file, even if
you're talking about 10 years worth.

let us know more about the volume of data (i think we have the rest of the
characteristics nailed down) and we can help you come up with a storage
plan that is easy to read from.  (eg; db schema if needed)
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Re: [PLUG] Efficient/effective search of Linux documentation

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 6:59 AM, Richard Owlett rowl...@cloud85.net wrote:

 Unfortunately I mentioned, as an example,  the particle of
 information that had my attention at the instant. The replies
 focused on the particle only (one solved my immediate problem).
 When probing for an answer to the general question, the only
 response I got was experience.

i'll focus on the suppose you were offline aspect, and apply my experience :)

1) hopefully you have some man pages installed, and you have your
mandb up to date (methods vary, see the mandb(8) web page, but this is
usually automatic), you can use the apropos(1) command like so:

apropos keyword
or
apropos -r '^man'

to search all the command names and one-line descriptions provided
with any man page.

2) your distro probably stores additional package specific docs
somewhere.  ubuntu likes /usr/share.  You can probably find this
location with locate(1), assuming that updatedb(8) is run regularly
(or you can of course run it yourself).  In case your distro has
additional docs, I'd put money on 'locate README' turning up the
generic location (you'll find many README's wherever these docs are
located).

3) last-ditch desert-island fu.  if you remember only a keyword that
you saw in a file, you can always try recursively grepping the
directory you found in 2 above to see if you turn up the doc you were
thinking of:

grep -r dealybopper /usr/share

This will take a hot minute, and requires a fairly unique keyword, but
sometimes i can remember yeah, their examples used foobar.com or
something similarly standout.  can also be used on your man page
directory to search for things not in the command name or short
description (my man pages are in /usr/share/man, so the above hits
them anyway, but yours might be elsewhere, and you may want to include
/usr/local in your searches)

4) make note of any additional documentation systems your distro might
include.  redhat used to have their full installation, etc, manuals
installed in html, which also made for good grep'ing.  Many of the
commercial unices and maybe SuSE have a gui-searchable documentation
set that is even more thorough than man pages.  A lot of this kind of
documentation is not installed by default, but might be worth your
while to install if you see yourself reading a lot.


 I was looking for something like the many essays on Asking good
 questions.

I only refer people to this essay, in that category:

http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
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Re: [PLUG] resizing log file viewer in Ubuntu 12.04

[chris (fool) mccraw]

am away from any kind of test environment and haven't used unity much,
but my first thought was maybe running the utility in question inside
of a virtual display (vncserver would be my choice, but there are
likely others that would work similarly).  you can set the size of
your virtual display to whatever ridiculous geometry you want (ie
1x1) and when you connect with something like vncviewer,
there'll be scroll bars to move around the display, which will
hopefully allow you to, er, get to the bottom of things.  hopefully,
once resized, it will remember your last size on next launch (on
your normal desktop)?

On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 9:02 PM, Denis Heidtmann
denis.heidtm...@gmail.com wrote:
 Unity offers a log file viewer.  It comes up with a window with a vertical
 size larger than my screen.  The context menu has a resize option, but it
 does not provide access to the bottom of the window.  Google has not
 helped.  Ideas?

 Thanks,

 -Denis
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Re: [PLUG] Are dependences obsolete?

[chris (fool) mccraw]

I meant to sound off earlier about many things in this thread, such as:

- not all dependencies are libraries (need gnome = 2.0 because its
settings manager is how you change the color scheme in program Z or
must have an MTA so that the disk-health-checker can notify you of
impending failures) - so even if you statically linked everything,
well, you'd still want to be able to check some kinds of dependencies;
 they're not always ignorable or work-around-able.
- it's a really fragile thing to use different versions of libc and
ld-linux.so than your system runs with natively.  it's possible, i've
done it a handful of times (must run new debian program on ancient
redhat!), but supporting it is not something that you can do
reliably.  in particular, i wouldn't do it for more than one or two
programs that were rarely used.  it's a nicer idea in theory than in
practice.

however, i write mostly to reply to one idea here:

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 11:52 PM, Keith Lofstrom kei...@gate.kl-ic.com wrote:

 So far, the most practical solution suggested by this thread is to
 run other distros as virtuals - I can live with the virtualization
 performance penalty for small and quick programs.  For the big,
 slow stuff,  I'll have to keep tweaking C code, sigh.

If you run code for days on end, maybe this makes sense.  if your runs
are shorter, make sure you're optimizing for the right thing - your
time!  time spent waiting for an ever-so-slightly slower virtual
environment (depending on your CPU, the overhead is really *quite* low
these days!) to finish running something that installed with 0 hassle
is a lot more fun (since you can be doing, well, anything else!) than
spending the same amount of time hacking on the kind of code you
describe, which is not designed for (pleasurable) maintainability.
make sure your optimizations make sense :)
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Re: [PLUG] Building Ubuntu System With Mirrored Drives

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 8:18 PM, Chaz Sliger c...@bctonline.com wrote:
 Chris,  Thanks for the heads-up on hardware raid.
 I did some poking around and will definitely go with software raid.
 The whole idea behind the 3rd disk is disaster recovery.  Since you can
 periodically swap one of the raid-1 drives in the system with the drive on
 the shelf, it gives you the ability to recovery quickly to a point in time.

A reasonable goal which I solve with rsnapshot =)

 Q: Have you been able to recover using your rsnapshot data on the usb drive?

I've never tried a full recovery (I use it to recover old
versions/deleted files primarily), but since it is (several) full
copies of the filesystem, a simple cp -Rp or rsync would do the
trick.  To be clear, I can at this second browse (or fully recover) my
big data partition as it looked at the following times:

drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jul 21 13:04 monthly.2
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Aug  4 13:05 monthly.1
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Sep  1 13:04 monthly.0
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Sep 15 13:04 weekly.9
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Sep 22 13:05 weekly.8
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Sep 29 13:05 weekly.7
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Oct  6 13:05 weekly.6
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Oct 17 13:09 weekly.5
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Nov  3 13:02 weekly.4
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Nov 10 13:02 weekly.3
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Nov 17 13:02 weekly.2
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Nov 24 13:01 weekly.1
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Dec  1 13:08 weekly.0
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Dec  6 13:04 daily.6
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Dec  7 13:05 daily.5
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Dec  8 13:03 daily.4
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Dec  9 13:04 daily.3
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Dec 10 13:05 daily.2
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Dec 11 13:04 daily.1
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Dec 12 13:04 daily.0

It's not a drive image or anything, so you need to reinstall OS upon
drive failure if the drive held your / partition as well before
recovering...but those snapshots are fully portable to other
machines/architectures on the upside.
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Re: [PLUG] Building Ubuntu System With Mirrored Drives

[chris (fool) mccraw]

Hey Chaz,

On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 10:32 AM, Chaz Sliger c...@bctonline.com wrote:
 I would like to build a system that has removable mirrored drives.

I think you will have a hard time doing this the way you envision.

 I'm thinking of having 3 drives - 2 in the system, 1 on the shelf, and
 rotating them daily.

 Q: Is there a motherboard with good hardware mirroring support?

A: I've found a lot that don't, in my searches.  I'm wondering why
would you want to tie yourself to a specific motherboard? (hardware
raid volumes are very rarely usable on other breeds of card than the
one they were made on--sometimes even same-brand is not enough, it
must be same firmware revision!) The beauty of linux s/w raid is that
in 10 years, you can still put those disks in whatever machine is
available (with a legacy sata card) and reassemble the raid.  i have
rebuilt my raid on my underpowered (was VIA, now Atom, both fanless
single core machines) fileserver a whole lot in the past 8 months (due
to a failing hard drive that kept working for long enough to rebuild
before erroring out and requiring another rebuild) and the speed of
the rebuild has been pretty close to disk speed despite these servers
not being optimized for I/O - i regularly get 110MB/s rebuilds on
modern 2TB drives (the cheapest ones i could find though!)  plus, my
systems have been pretty usable while the raid rebuilds--they only
serve pretty small stuff except the occasional fire up virtualbox off
a networked drive to run windows for 5 minutes and that definitely
gets prioritized over raid rebuilds (you can tweak the settings from
the command line for s/w raid rebuild speed and priority)--so i
basically don't notice additional lag during rebuild (vs the 100mbit
network fileservice speed anyway)

The real problem I think you'll have is that raid 1 is about 2
disks--i don't know a way to proactively mirror that third disk while
the first 2 are working.  maybe some h/w raid solutions have this, but
linux s/w raid doesn't have a concept of 3-way mirroring (unless you
have 4 drives and have a mirrored-mirror kind of thing) so here's the
way things will go:

- you have a 2 drive raid.
- you mdadm --add md0 /dev/otherdrive
- you now have a 2 drive raid with an empty hotspare
- you pull a working drive
- you wait hours to rebuild the new drive from the one that's still
spinning and hope you don't have a failure of that first drive during
this process, since you'll lose data from the last 2 hours.

My 3-drive system is like this:

2 drive mirrored array (have /boot and / mirrored separately from my
data partition so i can upgrade the OS without touching my data
partition

1 external usb drive for use with rsnapshot which is online backups
with months of history for not much extra drive space.  If I'm going
on vacation, i unplug the USB drive and take it with me or anyway make
sure it's not vulnerable to fire/theft/lightning at the same time as
the rest of my system.

Not trying to poo-poo your idea, but wondering if having the solution
in mind instead of the problem (what problem are you trying to solve
with the constant drive swaps, esp if you keep the other drive next to
the computer?) might be narrowing your field of possibilities.

luck++;
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Re: [PLUG] Graceful sudo recovery

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 3:51 PM, Paul Heinlein heinl...@madboa.com wrote:
 I have sudo configured on the servers around our office to send me
 administrative notes when someone invokes sudo without having permission to
 do so.

 So I get a message (where YY is the server name and ZZ is the
 username):

   YY: Aug 23 15:41:32 : ZZ : user NOT in sudoers ;
   TTY=pts/1 ; PWD=/home/ZZ ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/bin/ls

 sudo let the user in question that his activity would be recorded and
 reported, so just a few seconds later I get another warning:

   YY: Aug 23 15:41:46 : ZZ : user NOT in sudoers ; TTY=pts/1 ;
   PWD=/home/ZZ ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/bin/echo Just checking

Back when I worked in a CS department with a thousand inquisitive
students, we wrote our own kernel modules to stop forkbombs and were
generally proactive and had few actual security incidents.  But the
best moment perhaps was a sudo message like this, which started with a
command like your first one, and then was followed by:

YY: Aug 23 15:41:46 : ZZ : user NOT in sudoers ; TTY=pts/1 ;
PWD=/home/ZZ ; USER=root ; COMMAND=make me a sandwich
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Re: [PLUG] Distributions for an ASUS eeePC 1000

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 9:00 AM, Roderick A. Anderson
raander...@gmail.com wrote:
 I'm ready to move on from the customized Fedora 12 install I've been
 using on my eeePC (with SSD drives and upgraded to 2Gbyte RAM).

 I've been fiddling with a F17-spins - LXDE, and XFCE - but feel my years
 of working with Redhat based distributions starting with Redhat (3.0.3),
 Fedora (Core 1), and CentOS (3?) might be limiting my experience. :-)

 Anyone have recommendations for distributions they've used or are using
 on a eeePC?

I use xubuntu on mine (also upgraded to 2g, but no SSD.  still runs a
windows VM or two acceptably) with a lighter weight WM than XFCE
(ratpoison--this is a great machine not to use the trackpad on!).  But
then, i tend to put something on and stick with it forever, and you're
clearly feeling the wanderlust, so maybe you should go with something
totally wacky like chromeos?
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Re: [PLUG] Distributions for an ASUS eeePC 1000

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 2:20 PM, Roderick A. Anderson
raander...@gmail.com wrote:

 Thanks Chris.  Not feeling whacky, feeling left alone since Fedora 12 is
 no longer supported.  I've been thinking of running some VMs (the last
 time was a _*long*_ time ago with VMware.

 I'll give xubuntu a look.

I use xubuntu on my eeepc (it's maybe an HE model?  less than 2
years old) and the performance of the VM's is acceptable, though not
stellar.  Then again, the native windows install that came with it
is pretty sluggish too.

Definitely would prefer xubuntu to ubuntu on this (though I haven't
tried ubuntu 12.04 to see if things have improved with Ubuntu's
desktop manager), since there's a ton less associated overhead with
running a simple WM rather than a desktop manager.
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Re: [PLUG] REALITY CHECK - was [Re: Debian netinst.iso vs Wifi hot spot]

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 6:17 PM, Richard Owlett rowl...@cloud85.net wrote:
 chris (fool) mccraw wrote:

 But IMNSHO it's kind of a dick move to install at a coffee shop
 (unless it's one that you own), since you will eat up all of the
 available bandwidth at a business that is trying to serve multiple
 people.

My apologies for assuming the worst.  I too have never tried it.
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Re: [PLUG] Debian netinst.iso vs Wifi hot spot

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 3:33 PM, Paul Heinlein heinl...@madboa.com wrote:

 That's my best guess as to what's happening.

seconded.

 You might have luck in a smaller, self-managed venue like a neighborhood
 coffee shop, but it's going to be a hit-or-miss proposition.

Or, run a live distro and accept the clickthru and then reboot into
the installer.

But IMNSHO it's kind of a dick move to install at a coffee shop
(unless it's one that you own), since you will eat up all of the
available bandwidth at a business that is trying to serve multiple
people.
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Re: [PLUG] Comcast DHCP Address changing

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Jun 12, 2012 3:19 PM, Russell Johnson r...@dimstar.net wrote:

 Mine has not changed in over a year and a half.

Me too.  Maybe 6 times in the past 5 years.
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Re: [PLUG] Network Attached Storage

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 14:59, Russell Johnson r...@dimstar.net wrote:

 I also don't have to remember to back up my files.

this, above all else is key IMNSHO.  it's my #1 backup requirement.
all else is just a matter of taste/expense/convenience.
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[PLUG] another tip of the hat to Paul Heinlein

[chris (fool) mccraw]

googled up secondary isc dhcp server and found a well-written
article about the topic of interest with useful code snippets, and as
I read, I got to the line:

If you’re bored sometime, try changing the hostname of your machine
when running a live X desktop. The recovery process can be amusing.

at which point I giggled  scratched my head a little and looked back
to see who'd written it.  Yeah, that guy!  Thanks for another great
(and full-of-google-juice, it seems) article, Paul.

Also, nice font! (when viewed in osx/firefox)

[re: http://www.madboa.com/geek/dhcp-failover/]
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Re: [PLUG] Once again Linux has proven to me it is good for the career

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 06:19, Michael Rasmussen mich...@jamhome.us wrote:
 A flip of Kirk's recent rant.

My story is quite similar:

As a freshman in college in 1994, I was fresh off an internship with a
SCO unix consulting agency; all of the employees had boats, worked
20-hour or less weeks, and billed fantastic amounts of money for doing
minimal amounts of work.  Banks were happy to pay.  It left an awful
taste in my mouth for what passed as unix business in the corporate
world (they wore ties, I had to wear a wig to cover my interesting
hairdo) and it left a copy of SCO in my pocket.

I got my first machine capable of running linux that fall.  And that's
all it ever ran (besides some emulated dos and macOS).  While I
pursued a degree in computer science, I consistently learned more
administering my machine and helping friends get linux installed (via
floppy, natch) than I did in my computer science classes.  I am fairly
certain nobody else in the intro-to-CS class had to patch a pascal
compiler written in C to get it to compile on their desktop =).  I got
a job as a work study in a department full of AIX machines and became
manager of their computing services and moved them to linux (including
some firsts on a campus with ~25,000 computers at the time - first
linux cluster, first department to switch entirely to ssh, first
spamassassin installation) during my 6 years on staff.

I always say I learned more on the job than I did in class.  That's
not strictly true--back then I read the kernel mailing list as
individual messages delivered to my mailbox and spent my spare time
hacking on source code I could see, rather than the dust-gathering
copy of SCO I would have had to guess about and purchase even the
tininest updates for.  What is definitely true is that I learned more
from linux than I did from class.  When I finally took the most
intense upper level classes, OS and Architecture, I sailed through
thanks to my familiarity with filesystems and cache/memory management
from years of watching conversations on lkml and reading patches that
people sent.  I learned more about things like the inside of a network
packet, DNS, and Sendmail from running the linux users' group on
campus than I did in the Networks class I later paid to take.

My career has spanned a lot of types of unix--I still consider IRIX to
be quite pleasant and better suited for the kinds of things it tended
to be used for (10 years ago) than linux.  Solaris has its advantages.
 But linux is why I stuck with the field, where I learned most of what
I know, and where I've had the most opportunities to do more than
overcharge for underwork due to knowledge obscurity.
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Re: [PLUG] Linux certifications

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 12:56, Rich Burroughs r...@richburroughs.com wrote:
 Hi,

 Some of you may remember me, I used to be pretty active in the group
 years ago :)

 I've been off in the Solaris world for the last few years but I'm
 interested in working with Linux again more. I was thinking about
 pursuing a certification and I wondered what recommendations people
 have about that.

 I passed the first LPI test years ago, I'm sure it's no longer valid.
 But back in the day it seemed like LPI or Redhat certification were
 the main choices.

 I'd appreciate any feedback on this, but if all you have to say is
 that certifications are worthless in general you can probably save
 your breath :) Part of the idea is for me to dig back into Linux, and
 I think it could be useful from that perspective, regardless of how it
 might help with employment.

My feeling is that the redhat certification is pretty useless as an
educational experience.  I was made to take the pre-qualification
test (what they have online) for a job application (I wasn't
challenged by it) and there were bugs in 2 of the questions (one with
2 correct answers and one with an answer that was clearly included by
accident).  When I tried to report the bugs to RH they were
unable/unwilling to even direct my report to the right place, though
they were happy to call me for months to try to sell me on paying them
to take a test and get certified for real.

Whether it's useful on a resume or not I couldn't say.  As an
occasional hiring manager, I'm far more interested in what you know
than what pieces of paper you have (or, what you got out of achieving
the certification *other than the piece of paper*).  I guess the
useful information I can say is go check out the test they have online
(https://www.redhat.com/wapps/assessment/tx/begin?asmt=sysadmin) and
see what you're missing (i learned that i hadn't used their new
partitioner, so i went and spun up a VM and did a few test installs
and then went back and aced the only part i hadn't the first time
through).
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Re: [PLUG] Linux certifications

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 15:10, Paul Heinlein heinl...@madboa.com wrote:


 So while the current versions of Debian and RHEL (and its derivatives
 like CentOS) still pack init scripts into /etc/init.d/, bleeding-edge
 distributions like Fedora are starting to use systemd, one post-SysV
 implementation:

  * http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd
  * http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Systemd

 A project with similar goals is called Upstart, but my reading of the
 literature suggests that systemd has a greater likelihood of future
 success than Upstart.

Well, to be fair, upstart is already in use in ubuntu and has been for
over 5 years, so it's got pretty wide adoption (you can also still use
sysv scripts there but they are mostly deprecated).  However I agree
that systemd is the future.


 It'll probably be a couple years before any of the distributions
 marketed at the entrerprise ship with systemd as the default init
 system, but I'd suggest gaining at least a reasonable level of
 familiarity with it during your Quest for Learning(TM).

+1
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Re: [PLUG] (...) construct

[chris (fool) mccraw]

It occurs to me..why not just ask Ward?
On Feb 17, 2012 4:37 AM, Michael Rasmussen mich...@jamhome.us wrote:

 Various poking around hasn't resolved the question.  So off to freenode
 and /join #bash


MichaelRpdxIn a Ward Cunningham interview he said I saw ( ... )
 in use once and had to call my unix geek friends to find out how that could
 possibly work.
MichaelRpdx   What does (...) do?
MichaelRpdx   fork in a script?
MichaelRpdx   complex evaluation?
Riviera   There is no (...).
MichaelRpdx   ( something ) ?
Riviera   MichaelRpdx: This command1 (command2)
Riviera   MichaelRpdx: would be
Riviera   MichaelRpdx: command1 
Riviera   MichaelRpdx: (command2)

 Riviera has less respect for Ward than I do.

 --
Michael Rasmussen, Portland Oregon
  Other Adventures: http://www.jamhome.us/ or http://westy.saunter.us/
 Fortune Cookie Fortune du jour:
 Of course I believe in luck. How otherwise to explain the success of those
 you dislike?
~  Jean Cocteau
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Re: [PLUG] Has Google taken over browser settings?

[chris (fool) mccraw]

Okay, place blame where it is due.  That is the decision of the browser
authors, not googles fault.  All google is guilty of is paying opera and
Firefox a lot to be their default search engine.  In the case of Firefox,
it was in the region of 100 million dollars which substantially helped the
Firefox mission.

Google is a hero here.  I really dislike the new browser setting too, and
am suspicious of googles motives in general, but let's not blame them when
they're doing good.

I googled how to fix opera not to do that with total success. Sorry I'm on
my phone now and can't find the reference but it wasn't hard to find
On Jan 21, 2012 6:54 PM, Denis Heidtmann denis.heidtm...@gmail.com
wrote:

 On Sat, Jan 21, 2012 at 6:30 PM, John Jason Jordan joh...@comcast.net
 wrote:

  It used to be that to go to eBay all I had to type in the URL bar was
  ebay (Firefox or Opera), and the browser would assume I wanted to
  add .com to the URL. Of course, if I wanted pdxlinux it would assume I
  wanted pddxlinux.com, so you could leave off the .com only with sites
  that were really .com sites.
 
  Several months ago I noticed that Firefox no longer did this. When I
  type ebay in the URL bar it takes me to Google. Google lists eBay at
  the top of the hits, but I still have to wait for the Google page to
  load and then click a second time. This is very annoying. Google gets
  the benefit of another web user going to their site and seeing their
  ads, at the expense of the user's time and convenience.
 
  And it does the same now for Opera as well. I've looked everywhere in
  both browsers for a setting to change it back to the old behavior, but
  I can't find it anywhere. Note that I said that I can't find it; I did
  not say it's not there. :) Both browsers have thousands of settings to
  sort through, half of which are incomprehensibly labeled.
 
  Is this another usurpation of the web by the giant that I love to
  hate? Has anyone else noticed this? Or is it my fault again?
 
 
 I have noticed it too.  I am contemplating a different search engine.

 -Denis
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Re: [PLUG] Debian and Arch Comparison

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Jan 16, 2012 7:01 AM, Michael Rasmussen mich...@jamhome.us wrote:

 The disadvantages of Ubunutu (the newly introducted desktop, the every
 six month re-install, the slowness of package updates for LTS versions)
 have finally outweighed my laziness.

Funny, I once moved a thousand-node department away from debian to Ubuntu
because debian's releases were so slow people couldn't use pre packaged
binaries easily (libc and friends would be too old).

How things have changed :)  (this was almost 6 years ago)
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Re: [PLUG] 2-System (KVM) Switches

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 15:34, Chaz Sliger c...@bctonline.com wrote:
 Has anyone had good experiences with any of the small 2-4 system kvm
 switches?

 I've tried several and they all seem to suck pretty bad.  The latest was a
 Belkin SOHO.

 I'm trying to set up a config where 1 screen/keyboard/mouse is used for a
 home desktop system and a work laptop.

I've got a 2-port vga/usb only iogear one that was...ok, kinda crappy,
but it worked once you resigned yourself to its limitations.  I've
just started using the cheapest 3-port DVI switcher in the world (this
guy: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003L1AIUC/ref=oh_o05_s00_i00_details)
and i don't like it much.

wish there was a cheap magic bullet.  haven't found it yet.
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Re: [PLUG] more info on background music??

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Sat, Jan 14, 2012,  dfhubb...@freegeek.org wrote:

 This is not a Linux question and may not even be a computer question, but
 I think I will get better opinions here than anywhere else I know.

so let's make it a linux question! =)


 What is the least expensive longterm (1-3 years) manner to continuously
 play background music or sound?
 I want to set the what ever up to repeatedly play the same 40 minutes
 over and over continuously with no or very little human intervention after
 the initial set up.

what are you playing it on?  a phone line?  headphones?  a PA system at a mall?
what requirements are there?  how small should the solution be?  how
much are you concerned or willing to pay to ensure that it never
fails?  if it does fail, will it be somewhere you can tell someone to
hit a reset switch easily (ie not in the ceiling or a remote
location)?  do you need to be able to update the sound ever?  does it
need a physical volume control?

seems like the cheapest with no other special requirements would be
just to find a free old computer from craigslist or maybe one that's
too wimpy for freegeek's standards but would be overkill for looping
sound (as would be anything that runs linux and has an audio out).
install read-only filesystems  a stripped down linux setup to do
nothing but loop the track on repeat at boot so it survives power
failures.  i used to work at a place that had a 386 laptop playing its
hold music (closed, sitting in the phone closet, plugged in) for
nearly 10 years straight.

if i were doing it, i'd maybe go for simplest  out of the box just
works factor and deprioritize linux and could probably find (for
free) an old hardware mp3 player with 64MB or other
laughably-small-by-today's-standards storage that runs off of a wall
wart instead of batteries and have it loop an mp3.  i used to own more
than one of those.  heck, i still have one of those though it has a
hard drive so it would suck more power than one without spinning disk.
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Re: [PLUG] ANSI Characters on Console

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 17:21, John Meissen j...@meissen.org wrote:
 Have you tried the 'reset' shell command?

+1.

there is a small class of things that typing into a shell echo
control-v control-o (where c-v and c-o are key combos, not literal)
will fix that reset won't.  past that you can try another startx from
a shell to fix it too (even if you can't read it, you can often still
run commands and login/out).
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Re: [PLUG] System Administrator freelancers

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 18:30, Jeff Schwaber frey...@gmail.com wrote:
 Hey fellow Linuxers,

 I'm looking for system administrators who work freelance, and I wonder
 whether you or anyone you know is in that boat? I regularly get
 requests for deeper system administration than I really want to do, or
 system administration after I'm done developing an application, and
 I'd really like to have people to recommend to my clients to talk to.
 Right now I'm especially looking for anyone who still knows (the
 modern) RedHat.

 I'm not sure how on-topic most users will consider this, so maybe a
 moderator will speak up, but either way you can email me directly.

I find this thread of extreme interest.  not only because i would have
replied offering my services 2 months ago, but because i often need
someone like this myself.

so would anyone who replied off-list please reply on-list too?  I
can't be the only sysadmin who is tired of not having someone local to
outsource to!

Also please list your willingness to be on call 24/7 -- that's a thing
i was never great at that i would have paid someone who was a hefty
retainer to be my backup for.

PS:  anyone do osx administration (that is, understand stuff like Open
Directory  Directory Services, setting up autoinstalls, etc) as well?
 that's a hole i've never been able to find a fill for.
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Re: [PLUG] Virtual Terminal Line Wrapping And Other Quirks

[chris (fool) mccraw]

I just use less -r these days
On Nov 18, 2011 11:45 AM, Rich Shepard rshep...@appl-ecosys.com wrote:

   I've pretty well isolated the line wrapping issue I've been suffering to
 something in my login shells. When I su to a root login shell, long lines
 wrap as they did before, but when I open a terminal as me the user, it
 doesn't.

   Also, the command 'ls | less' no longer works properly. It displays ANSI
 escape sequences at line beginings and end; for example,

 ESC[00mOpenVZ-Users-Guide.pdfESC[0m
 ESC[00mPEHJ0073-02.pdfESC[0m

   In my ignorance, I suspect these two issues are related. I commented out
 .inputrc in .bash_profile, but am out of ideas how to isolate what I broke
 that brought on this behavior.

   Please provide suggestions, advice, or solutions.

 Rich
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Re: [PLUG] Which Distribution has best staying power?

[chris (fool) mccraw]

ok everyone bust out your longest-running-linux story--this might get
hilarious =)

I'm still running ubuntu 6.06 (june 06) which just became unsupported
a few months ago, at a colo i can't get to until xmas.  it's been
rock-solid for 5 years now.

i just found out that a fileserver/firewall i set up for my dad's
office in late 2001 is still working fine.  i assumed it had crashed
and burned long ago, but apparently not.  it's running suse 7.3 and
has not been updated since i installed it.  by design, there are no
external services running on it.  i'm kind of surprised the hardware
(rescued from being thrown away at the time--probably a 2-300mhz CPU)
still lives  breathes, considering it's lived in a cabinet for the
last 10 years.  i am kind of afraid to touch it because it will
probably just crumble.  maybe i'll just go look at it
hopefully/encouragingly next time i'm at his office.

i somewhat recently got rid of a lot of sun  sgi hardware and even a
sony NEWS machine that all had 10-20 (sony - at least 20) year old
OS's and still ran, though they hadn't served heavy duty in the past
10+ years on my watch and were pretty much just toys (unlike the linux
boxes above that have been constantly powered on and in use).
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Re: [PLUG] Which Distribution has best staying power?

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 21:42, Michael Rasmussen mich...@jamhome.us wrote:
 On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 09:37:08PM -0800, Marvin Kosmal wrote:
 Hi

 I am setting up a computer for some folks I only see every four years.  I
 want to put a distribution on that will last time I see them next time.

 I was thinking Ubuntu they have a version  that they maintain for four, ?,
 years.

if you can wait til april, that ubuntu release is gonna be supported
for 5 years.
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[PLUG] strange hotplug drive behavior

[chris (fool) mccraw]

hi folks,

this is a kind of involved question, sorry.  i've already asked the
vendor and the centos forums and gotten no useful advice or
confirmation that this problem has ever been seen before by anyone
else.  the main thing i'm looking for is:

a) has anyone ever seen anything like this before? and
b) any suggestions for ameliorating?


i'm seeing some strange behavior with hot-swap drives and am looking
for help in further debugging or solving the issue. here is our setup:

centos 5.5 x86_64, areca 1680x hardware raid card, external enclosure
with sata drives.

here is the behavior that is baffling me:

on the sata drives, we create a single drive volumeset and raidset via
the card firmware, using up the entire drive. we set the
channel/raid/lun combo to a unique value across all of the drives we
use (that information is stored in the raid card's metadata
associated with the drive--so it stays the same across
ejections/insertions/reboots, and you can end up with more than one
drive with the same raid/channel/lun and that creates known problems
with the raid cards, so we avoid it). we label it with the date of
initialization via the raid card, and then we format that drive
(/dev/sdf, for instance) with ext3fs and finally use it to make a
backup. all of this works fine.

when we unmount  eject the drives, it is sometimes but not always the
case that a different drive stuck into the enclosure next shows a
ghost filesystem from the old drive. it is always the case that if
we eject the drive corresponding to sdf, only another drive that
becomes sdf will see the old filesystem-not sdg or sde. the areca
volumeset and raidset labels (examined via the areca utility 'cli64'
that accesses the card firmware) have changed to reflect the new drive
(which had an old backup on it and is labelled as such).

however, in linux, the new drive will show up with part of the old
drive's filesystem, and the old drive's statistics (total size and %
of space consumed on the filesystem). so when i mount and browse the
replacement drive, i see the root directory of the old drive, and df
reports the same percentages as the old drive. it seems like the
filesystem metadata is cached or something, and the new scsi device
retains that cached information somehow. but no matter how many times
we eject and insert, or umount and remount the new sdf, we cannot
seem to get to the existing filesystem on the newly inserted drive.

to recap: areca's CLI64 utility shows new (correct) disk info. linux
(by navigating in a shell or file browser to the mount point of the
mounted volume) shows bad, old info. we effectively cannot use the
drives to restore from because their contents are hidden by the ghost
of the more recent backup. (i say ghost because though the drive
appears full, none of the (old) files and only a few of the
directories are on the filesystem).

the only way we've found to fix it is a reboot, after which the drive
shows up with everything correct (areca labels and filesystem). we
sadly cannot just unload and reload the drivers for the cards because
they are constantly in use by other filesystems. taking the erroneous
drive out and putting it back in, even in a different slot, does not
fix the issue--it still has the ghost image.

deleting and recreating the vs/rs does fix it too--but at the cost of
losing the data that was on the drive - which we'd like to use! the
way the areca driver and the scsi subsystem interact is not entirely
known to me, but upon deleting the raidset, the scsi device goes away,
and upon recreating it, a new scsi device appears (via the kernel
logs, seen in 'dmesg' output)

have you heard of this happening before? and is there way to fix this
or even examine the problem in more detail? (nothing unexpected is
logged by the kernel). i've asked areca's tech support about this but
they say nobody else has reported similar problems and they have no
suggestions. and the fact that linux seems to see the old info while
the card's firmware sees the new info suggests to me that it may be
more of a general kernel issue than an issue with the areca
card--though i don't know if the driver is to blame.

thanks for your advice. please feel free to ask any other questions
and i will get you answers ASAP!
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Re: [PLUG] strange hotplug drive behavior

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 13:37, Aaron Burt aa...@bavariati.org wrote:

 1. Do you also give each ext3 filesystem a unique label?

hmm, no!  i didn't even know ext3 filesystems could have labels!

 2. Does cli64 have a cache flush command?

nope, nothing like.  i did just realize i could try changing the lun
with the drive in to see if that would help.  now to get this
(intermittent but frequent but somehow not reproducible right this
minute) problem to resurface!


 3. Have you checked SMART status on the drives? (long shot, but...)

yup, they're good.  also it happens across a pool of 10 disks, none
seem immune (various sizes and at least 2 manufacturers)


 4. Assuming your OS is on a different type of controller, can you unload
 and reload the arcmsr module and see if the problem persists?  (You'll
 probably have to rescan for partitions.)

unfortunately, while my OS is on a different controller, there are
other always-in-use filesystems (render farm that rarely quits
pounding) on that card.

 5. Have you tried putting the Areca into JBOD mode and using swraid?

would love to, but see above re other filesystems.  it's 3 8 disk
arrays totalling 12 TB, not easily/quickly migrated (since all would
have to be migrated and can't be accessed from outside of this card.
i definitely hate hardware raid a little more every time something
like this happens.  i use swraid on my own machines with quite a bit
of joy at being able to plug a broken array into a different machine
to fix...)

 Beyond the potential issues with recovering from a proprietary RAID format,
 you might want to do some performance comparisons, too.

of course.  the bottleneck on their network is samba's available
transfer speed (did i mention that the render nodes are windows?)

you did give me some ideas, aaron, thanks!

still looking for that magic clear the cache utility.  i hear it's
made of silver bullets and unicorn horns...
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Re: [PLUG] Establishing Proper Line Wrapping In Virtual Terminal

[chris (fool) mccraw]

so i use urxvt exclusively and do not suffer this problem.

what version are you using?  i have

On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 14:02, Rich Shepard rshep...@appl-ecosys.com wrote:
   In an earlier thread on this mail list I figured out that the reason UTF-8
 did not display properly in virtual terminals and alpine is that rxvt does
 not support UTF-8. And xterm doesn't support some options I use, plus even
 the developers wrote that it's rather bloated and ancient. So, I went
 looking for a virtual terminal that supports UTF-8 to replace rxvt. Turns
 out that aterm, eterm, st, and mrxvt don't. But, urxvt (or rxvt-unicode in
 terminfo) does. But, there's one major problem that _I_ am experiencing with
 urxvt that has so far escaped resolution.

   A couple of days ago I discovered that there's a urxvt mail list,
 subscribed, and posted a request for help. That's the only message on that
 list since I signed up. Apparently it's a ghost mail list, like the Flying
 Dutchman.

   One person on the slackware mail list has tried helping, but so far it's
 not resolved the problem. I've added 'urxvt*loginShell: true' to
 ~/.Xresources, created ~/.inputrc (including /etc/inputrc) with the line
 'set horizontal-scroll-mode On' and exported that file. Logged out and back
 in each time.

   urxvt works fine except for not properly wrapping long lines. The result
 is quite distracting and annoying. I find nothing appropriate on the man
 pages or the wiki.

   When I cd to a subdirectory several levels down, or try creating a very
 long command line, it is improperly wrapped, and also truncated on the left
 side. Example:

 [rshepard@salmo ~]$ cd GIS/GRASS/grass-6.5svn/
 /configure --with-postgres --
 s --with-sqlite --with-cairo --with-freetype --with-cxx \
 --with-geos=usr/bin/geos-config --with-gdal=/usr/bin/gdal-config \
 ython-config --with-wxwidgets=/usr/bin/wx-config \

   With vanilla rxvt I'd see the entire lines. With urxvt this occurs no
 matter how wide I make the terminal window.

   I'm hoping the collective expertise here can guide me to a resolution of
 this problem. I don't know what other virtual terminals for the bash shell
 support UTF-8 and yet use few resources while being configurable.

 Rich
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Re: [PLUG] Establishing Proper Line Wrapping In Virtual Terminal

[chris (fool) mccraw]

grr, i don't know what i hit to make that go out early.  let's try again!

so i use urxvt exclusively and do not suffer this problem.

what version are you using?  i have several, one that works is 9.06
and another is 9.09.

what is the termcap or terminfo for the terminal?  you're probably
using terminfo, so if there's no entry for rxvt-unicode in your
termcap file (wherever your distro puts it--mine (ubuntu 10.04 with
the 9.06 urxvt) doesn't even have one anymore!), what is the output of
'infocmp rxvt'?  i'll compare it to mine and we can try swapping if
they are different.


 On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 14:02, Rich Shepard rshep...@appl-ecosys.com wrote:

   One person on the slackware mail list has tried helping, but so far it's
 not resolved the problem. I've added 'urxvt*loginShell: true' to
 ~/.Xresources, created ~/.inputrc (including /etc/inputrc) with the line
 'set horizontal-scroll-mode On' and exported that file.

hmm, so you think that it is a shell issue, not a terminal issue?
(that is what the attempted solution above does.  have you made
certain that the shell does in fact become a login shell, listens to
.inputrc, and that your xresources are taking effect?  btw, you can
source the .Xresources file with xrdb like so:

xrdb  ~/.Xresources (then run a new copy of urxvt from any shell or
menu or whatever--that affects all of xwin).

what shell are you using?


   urxvt works fine except for not properly wrapping long lines. The result
 is quite distracting and annoying. I find nothing appropriate on the man
 pages or the wiki.

well, if you are worried this is a shell issue, have you tried a
different shell so you can verify whether or not it is urxvt at fault?
 like, install and try zsh or tcsh and see if they behave the same.

i have no inputrc and use bash with a pretty stripped down bashrc,
fyi.  the only rxvt-related xresources i set are:

Rxvt.font:  -sony-*-*-*-*-*-24-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Rxvt.reverseVideo:  true
Rxvt.loginShell:true
Rxvt.colorUL:   Cyan3
Rxvt.color4:RoyalBlue
Rxvt.color12:   RoyalBlue
Rxvt*saveLines: 1
Rxvt.cutchars:  `()*,;[]{|}\
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Re: [PLUG] strange hotplug drive behavior

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 14:36, Aaron Burt aa...@bavariati.org wrote:
 On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 01:59:57PM -0700, chris (fool) mccraw wrote:
 of course.  the bottleneck on their network is samba's available
 transfer speed (did i mention that the render nodes are windows?)

 You got me curious about SMB performace optimization, and I stumbled
 across: http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Linux_Performance

 They claim a 66% bump in SMB write performance.

if only i'd been benchmarking writes!  i just benchmarked reads.  the
fileserver can crank out nfs at near-wirespeed (2Gbit (bonded)) esp
when working with cached files (on the raid card or in host mem), but
only seems to send smb at around 300mbits.  strangely, it sends out
multiple streams at that speed just fine, but none are faster than
that even when streaming a single one all alone.

i have to admit i was not paid to improve this, just profile it.
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Re: [PLUG] Establishing Proper Line Wrapping In Virtual Terminal

[chris (fool) mccraw]

you didn't send me 'infocmp rxvt-unicode' output.  that is what i am
most interested to compare to my own.


On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 14:54, Rich Shepard rshep...@appl-ecosys.com wrote:
 On Fri, 21 Oct 2011, chris (fool) mccraw wrote:

 what version are you using?  i have several, one that works is 9.06 and
 another is 9.09.

   9.12

 what is the termcap or terminfo for the terminal?

   /usr/share/terminfo/r/ has entries for rxvt-unicode and
 rxvt-unicode-256color.

   I thought someone suggested entries to /etc/termcap that I had put in
 /etc/termcap-BSD, but I find no references to rxvt-unicode or urxvt in
 either of those files.

 hmm, so you think that it is a shell issue, not a terminal issue? (that is
 what the attempted solution above does.  have you made certain that the
 shell does in fact become a login shell, listens to
 .inputrc, and that your xresources are taking effect?

   I've always used the '-ls' option for the virtual terminals. I think it's
 a terminal issue, but I'll try anyone's suggestions to resolve the problem.

 btw, you can source the .Xresources file with xrdb like so:p xrdb 
 ~/.Xresources (then run a new copy of urxvt from any shell or menu or
 whatever--that affects all of xwin).

   No difference.

 what shell are you using?

 bash-4.1.007

 well, if you are worried this is a shell issue, have you tried a
 different shell so you can verify whether or not it is urxvt at fault?
 like, install and try zsh or tcsh and see if they behave the same.

   Chris, I assumed it was a terminal issue since rxvt, xterm, and other
 terminals did not exhibit this behavior. When suggestions referencing the
 shell were provided on the slackware mail list I tried them. So, I'm not
 'worried' this is a shell issue. If I switch back to rxvt the line wrap
 problem goes away. Same shell, same distribution, same everything, but no
 UTF-8 support.

 Rxvt.font:              -sony-*-*-*-*-*-24-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
 Rxvt.reverseVideo:      true
 Rxvt.loginShell:        true
 Rxvt.colorUL:           Cyan3
 Rxvt.color4:            RoyalBlue
 Rxvt.color12:           RoyalBlue
 Rxvt*saveLines:         1
 Rxvt.cutchars:          `()*,;[]{|}\

   All I have in ~/.Xdefaults related to rxvt and urxvt are:

 rvxt*loginShell:true
 URxvt.font: -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--20-200-75-75-c-100-iso10646-1
 URxvt.boldFont: -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--20-200-75-75-c-100-iso10646-1
 urxvt*loginShell: true

 Rich


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Re: [PLUG] duplicating window in X?

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 12:25, Keith Lofstrom kei...@kl-ic.com wrote:
 I assume it is possible to duplicate the same identical graphic
 window from the same client on two different X displays (servers).

 Can this be done, how is it done, and what is the process called?

sounds like you want something like vnc.  you can certainly
multiply-connect and define the behavior to be either both-drive or
one-drives,one-watches.

there are a variety of other programs in the same vein (vnc extensions
like ultra  tight vnc, as well as completely different things like
nx) and wrappers around vnc that make things fancier/easier, so don't
stop looking just because stock vnc lacks one feature you need.

if all you need is text, gnu screen allows multi-attach again with
acl's that allow read/write as well as read-only for the second
attacher.

luck++;
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Re: [PLUG] Patient records on Live CD

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 08:26, Keith Lofstrom kei...@kl-ic.com wrote:
 My wife's new clinic will be running OpenEMR, an open source
 medical records program.  Sometimes patients (or their other
 doctors) want copies of their records.  Rather than kill trees,
 I am thinking about putting their patient record on a stripped
 down linux live CD, along with a specially configured version
 of OpenEMR.

while i would love it if my doctor did it, i'd also figure out how to
do my own tech support to make it boot.

imagine my mom, who got her netbook without a CD-rom drive and even if
she purchases (what kind do i need to buy?) and attaches (what kind
of cable do i need?) one, has to change the bios to allow her to boot
from it.  and imagine trying to figure out when to hit what hotkey to
bring the bios screen up (my netbook goes straight into linux without
showing the bios screen at all--i have to hit a key like crazy from
the instant of power-on to make it happen).

i think the added complexity will have *you* doing tech support,
remotely, on unknown hardware.  almost certainly, someone's hardware
will be broken or otherwise incapable of running linux.  and what
happens when the person who needs the records is an EMT who doesn't
have a computer handy or needs that tech support at 4am in an
ambulance?

i think i'd pay 10% more to go to that linux-savvy doctor, but i think
most people wouldn't appreciate it like the folks on this list =)
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Re: [PLUG] Program fails to start

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 23:05, Richard C. Steffens rst...@comcast.net wrote:

 In the words of the great philosopher Homer, D'oh!

well, it's not the solution you were looking for, but as the perl
folks put it, there's more than one way to do it =)


 I wonder why that never showed up while I was Googling. I never thought
 to look in Synaptic. Thanks for pointing it out.

man, i hate firing up synaptic to search.  i found it in 3 seconds
with 'apt-cache search transcribe'.

another nifty tool which would have worked even better (had the
utility you started out looking for been part of any of my repos) is
apt-file (which searches in the list of filenames that could get
installed with packages (vs dpkg -S which can search only in actually
installed filenames)).  it's handy because, for instance, you can
figure out that some random program you saw once belongs to some
completely other package (apt-file search pnmarith = netpbm).

it's one of the first packages i install after any ubuntu or debian
installation (see also: openssh-server, screen, vim).
 --
 Regards,

 Dick Steffens


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[PLUG] nscd

[chris (fool) mccraw]

as i tediously await the end of a wget process that is taking 5
seconds to resolve the same hostname over and over again to finish
mirroring this slow, distant site, i consider putting the hostname
into /etc/hosts.

and then i wonder whatever happened to nscd?  why is it no longer
standard (on ubuntu at least) to have a name service caching daemon?
i tried to install it for myself and found that whatever repo it's in
(bonus question, how can i tell what repo an available package is in,
from the command line?) is one which is clearly not official since the
packages for both nscd and unscd show up as untrusted and this
stayed my hand.

caching is generally awesome, and while i can find no evidence that
nscd was standard in ubuntu even as far back as release 6.06 (man, i
really need to make it back to texas to upgrade that machine!
shudder.), i swear it *used* to be standard in all the linuces i
used--since it was usually there but i never explicitly installed it.
but it's not standard in centos6 either (though at least they do
provide a signed package!)

did this functionality become deprecated, or otherwise obviated at
some point?  in my googling i see a little about nsc functionality in
glibc, but i can't really tell what's up with that.  there is an nscd
that is part of some eglibc and libc6-debug packages according to
apt-file, but those are clearly not intended for everyday use.

anyone know what gives?
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Re: [PLUG] nscd

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 10:41, Paul Heinlein heinl...@madboa.com wrote:

 The first question I'd ask is, why is your local DNS resolver not
 caching the results. Most sites provide DNS TTLs of over an hour;

(site in question has an hour TTL set in its SOA record)


 For most sites, however, your local nameserver should return the
 address for a frequently asked hostname in just 10s of milliseconds.

 Who provides your DNS service?

google :( [8.8.8.8]

to be honest, i just realized what is going on.  i have a huge
download streaming in the background which is saturating my pipe, so
that *all* lookups that go over the wire are actually taking that
long.  i just wasn't noticing as much since my connection to gmail and
twitter is basically streaming or anyway less frequently connecting
and dropping.


 I know that Fedora and Red Hat are migrating away from nscd to sssd,
 which (afaict) is intended strictly for authentication caching and
 doesn't support DNS caching.

i came to understand that to be the main point of nscd too but used it
for dns caching since it was already running.


 Even on machines I manage that rely on nscd, I don't use it to cache
 DNS results. I'd rather setup a caching nameserver. Use aptitude to
 search for dnsmasq, a lightweight DSN forwarder.

thanks, i'll check out options along those lines.
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Re: [PLUG] Solaris Uptime

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 11:26, Daniel Herrington herd...@gmail.com wrote:
 All,

 We're working an issue with extreme latency on one of our application
 servers. The lead tech, who hasn't established much credibility, keeps
 saying he wants to bounce the Sun Solaris servers, as they have been up for
 169 days. He feels that may be the cause of the issue. I highly doubt it as
 the System Administrators are saying that resources are available for the
 application. What's the recommended reboot cycle for Sun Solaris servers?

i don't know, but i have regularly used solaris servers under a fair
amount of constant load (not x86-based) that had uptime in the 2+
years range with no problems.  clearly this was a couple releases ago,
since i haven't worked with solaris in the last couple years.

still, nobody ever considered rebooting them to fix a problem.  that
is heresy =)
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Re: [PLUG] historical stuff

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 15:03, Rogan Creswick cresw...@gmail.com wrote:

 Is there any way we could digitize it? (does anyone have a bulk
 scanner + table saw to cut the bindings off?)

before you do that, you should ask jason scott of textfiles.com if
it's already done (since he spends a lot of effort doing that kind of
thing to those kinds of publications and has for some time).

i guess maybe since it isn't in danger of being lost (the OP said it
was (mostly?) available online?), it might not worth redigitizing?
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Re: [PLUG] Program fails to start

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 16:25, Richard C. Steffens rst...@comcast.net wrote:
 On 10/17/2011 03:04 PM, Richard Owlett wrote:
 Richard C. Steffens wrote:
 Alas, I
 have so far been unable to locate the source of the program on the
 Internet today. My Googling has turned up all kinds of things that
 aren't this program called transcribe.  [*SNIP*]

 Would you be looking for
 http://trans.sourceforge.net/en/install.php

 No. I saw that one, and may give it a try if I don't get this one
 working, soon.

and i suppose it's also not 'transcriber' which is available in the
standard ubuntu 10.4 repos?  i suppose this because that one appears
to be entirely written in tcl :/
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Re: [PLUG] Rxvt/Urxvt

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 13:48, Rich Shepard rshep...@appl-ecosys.com wrote:
   Is anyone here familiar with urxvt (rxvt-unicode)specifically?

yup, i use it exclusively.

I just
 added that package to my system in hope of resolving the problem of accents
 not displaying in virtual terminals and alpine, and seeing X in spaces in
 some received messages to which I compose a reply.

i can't remember the path that led me to it, but it was a variety of
display issues with international text vs gnu screen as i recall.
anyway, it did solve those problems and bring new ones :/.  still
overall it is an upgrade for me.


   I've read the man pages but am not sure just what options to specify (and
 I think they all go in ~/.Xdefaults) to return the console font to
 legibility and return the color of directory names back to yellow (as set in
 /etc/DIR_COLORS) from the blue to which urxvt changed it.

i specify almost all my options in .Xdefaults.  i set a few via the
command line, but they're the same as xterm command line
flags--nothing about the font or colors on the command line.

   There is no 'showfont' command here so I don't have any idea what console
 fonts are available to me. I use 10x20 which was quite clear and readable
 with rxvt windows but is larger and much less clear in the urxvt
 windows.

hmm.  my font looked the same in rxvt/urxvt, although urxvt has an
annoying propensity for bolding it at times--this fortunately stopped
being a problem at some point (now works fine under screen, whereas it
used to kind of trash my display under termcap-heavy apps like
screen/vim/centerim).  you might look for a font that has no bold, or
to somehow set the bold font to the normal font to work around that
tendency if that happens to be the problem you are experiencing.

to actually answer one of your questions, i explicitly change some of
the colors (dark blue is not visible against my preferred black
background) in my .Xdefaults like so:

*Rxvt.colorUL:  Cyan3
*Rxvt.color4:   RoyalBlue
*Rxvt.color12:  RoyalBlue

(affects Rxvt as well as uRxvt.  URxvt* appears to be the appropriate
Xdefaults class if you just want to affect uRxvt).

wish i could recall where i got the font color lists--might have been
in the well-hidden urxvt(7) man page--this is not the same as the
urxvt(1) man page.  you might check it out for more info (man 7 urxvt)

let me know how it goes!
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Re: [PLUG] Monitor Hardware Question

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 16:38, Rich Shepard rshep...@appl-ecosys.com wrote:

   So, it should allow me to select (if it doesn't by default) 1600 x 900.

   Any thoughts?

methinks we're gonna need to see your /var/log/Xorg.0.log (or whatever
the most recent logfile on your system from the xserver is).
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Re: [PLUG] determine OS bitness for remote servers

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 09:32, Daniel Herrington
dherring...@robertmarktech.com wrote:
 Yes linux, either centOs or RHEL.

 Problem is I don't have login access. I only have the ability to scan
 the server remotely.

an interesting conundrum.  i couldn't figure out a way to make any of
my services tell me that (sendmail connection header, apache version
#, sshd version string, etc).  i am kind of glad since hey, there's no
reason i'd want you to know whether i have a 64bit modern CPU or am
running ELKS linux on a 286 unless i was willing to tell you.

i'm certain some services (and some configurations of some
services--sendmail banner is entirely config-file-user-configurable,
for instance) leak that info even if not explicitly. what services is
it running?
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Re: [PLUG] Upgrade Xubuntu Distribution

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 12:42, Joe Shisei Niski joeni...@easystreet.net wrote:
 sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

out of curiosity, why is anyone still using apt-get on ubuntu?  i use
aptitude exclusively these days.  favorite feature:
/var/log/aptitude.log

second favorite feature:  dependency resolution scoring (this is
close...is it close enough? [Y/n])

i guess that dependency resolution scoring thing can be annoying
sometimes and i have fallen back to apt-get on rare occasion, but not
in cases like this =)
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Re: [PLUG] Macbook Air

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 07:43, Sean Ellefson scel...@gmail.com wrote:
 What about the X1?

 http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/16/lenovo-thinkpad-x1-review/
 http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Lenovo-ThinkPad-X1-Subnotebook.55370.0.html

it's pretty and zippy, but it's 2 bigger and $400 more than the 11
macbook air.  plus, less battery life.  that fast charge trick sure
does sound cool though, for systems with nonremovable batteries!
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Re: [PLUG] Macbook Air

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 06:31, Carlos Konstanski
ckonstan...@pippiandcarlos.com wrote:
 Does anyone have good things to say about linux compatibility with the
 Macbook Air? I hate to admit it, but it's the best piece of hardware out
 there in its category. The Samsung Series 9 falls short.

color me also interested.  while running 2 VM's on my eeepc is
possible and works tolerably once everything gets loaded, i'm looking
for something a little more pleasant than tolerable as my workload
continues to grow.  and someday i'm gonna want to run a third VM
simultaneously =)
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Re: [PLUG] eml file

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 14:41, Daniel Johnson tekno...@gmail.com wrote:
 I can't think of a handy
 tool for automatically extracting all of the attachments, of
 attachments out of an email file

I can.  It's called metamail, and it's been processing attachments
from rfc-compliant messages for at least as long as I've been on the
internet (20 years now, yikes).
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Re: [PLUG] RHEL, CentOS, SL

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 12:14, Keith Lofstrom kei...@kl-ic.com wrote:
 I run Scientific Linux, SL, a Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone.
 The most widely used clone of RHEL is CentOS, but there may be
 troubles in that community.  We are getting about 5 refugees a
 day from CentOS showing up on our mailing list and forums.

 Any CentOS users here?  I'm hoping the tales of woe are
 overblown, and CentOS is still healthy and moving forwards.
 If something happens to SL, I would rather not have RHEL as
 the only practical alternative.

I don't use centos by choice but most of my clients do (and so i am
dealing with it frequently and even have a VM on my laptop with it
in).

i have to admit my involvement with the centos community has been slim
of late, but the last time i had to report a kernel driver issue, i
just filled out the bugzilla form and they responded quickly,
usefully, and most importantly handled getting me in touch with the
right people upstream at redhat and the driver maintainer to determine
a fix (incidentally, redhat were also really quick and useful,
especially considering i am in no way a customer of theirs)--before
they were even convinced my bu was a real bug that others might
experience (it was, but it wasn't due to the hardware i expected--it
was the (brand new) motherboard's bios that wanted an update.  that
was about 5 months ago, though.

so i would say things were looking good back then, at any rate?
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Re: [PLUG] question on NAND solid state drives lifetime

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 07:04, Russell Johnson r...@dimstar.net wrote:

 writing to a new 64GB ssd at max speed continuously would still require your 
 app to run for 51 years before it would hit the ssd limit designed into the 
 drive... and fall over.

I didn't do the math recently, but around a year ago when i did it was
something like that--ridiculously improbable that you'd still be using
the media by the time it failed (though i still have some 15 year old
hard drives, i haven't used any of them in at least 10 years...and no
longer have a computer with the appropriate ancient scsi connector to
do so if i wanted to.)

first off, the drives are pretty smart about spreading writes around
the drive rather than leaving hotspots pinned to a certain sector.
but even if it is pinned to a spot that exceeds the write limit, these
drives also typically have some reserved percentage above their listed
capacity to migrate failing sectors to, and they notice the failure
when it happens and do so automatically under the hood so you don't
even ever become affected by it, except that maybe the write takes an
extra few milliseconds to complete.
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Re: [PLUG] Favorite Linux Netbook specific distro?

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 06:27, Roderick A. Anderson
raand...@cyber-office.net wrote:
 Mike Connors wrote:
 I'm going to purchase my first Netbook this week. What's your fav
 Linux Netbook specific OS and why?

i don't need a netbook specific OS for my netbook (i use stock
xubuntu, and pare down the list of running processes judiciously.
don't need cron if you run updatedb manually on occasion,
frinstance.).

then again, i also bend the fabric of time and space and do crazy
things like run two-three virtual machines simultaneously on it while
still using the console interactively.  it isn't awesome, but neither
is it terrible.

i did try out the netbook remix of ubuntu, but as a 20-year veteran of
the X window System who has his setup pretty tweaked, their little gui
immediately turned me off.

can't recommend gnome or kde on the thing, though.  i use xfce4 or
ratpoison depending on my mood.
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Re: [PLUG] rsync

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 12:00, Bruce Kilpatrick kd7...@gmail.com wrote:

 The question is which of the dot files are really necessary to keep, and
 will it save much room if they are not copied?

browser (and acrobat reader) cache are typically my biggest hidden
files.  here's how you can tell what's worth investigating/pruning:

cd ; du -sk .??* | sort -n

personally speaking, i don't have enough in there to think about
compared to the size of the rest of my homedir (300M:46GB)--and this
home directory is 11 years old ( = lots of stale old dotfiles i could
probably prune if i cared enough).

but then i also have most apps' cache sizes dialed down pretty low and
did once scrub the acrobat cache dir manually.

dotfiles used to be mostly config files.  and they still are, though
gnome's config file directory is bigger than my entire home directory
was for quite some time.  funny, since i don't even use gnome (but do
use some apps that use that framework under the hood, i guess, since
the config files are there and recently modified).

/ramble
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Re: [PLUG] Question on image stitching for movie making

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 16:48, website reader website.read...@gmail.com wrote:

 Thanks for letting me know if good linux image stitching software
 exists.  I appreciate hearing from anyone who has done image -- movie
 projects like this and what they used?

i have never used it for this purpose, but have you considered using
imagemagick?  it would stich all the pngs into one (something like
convert +append image1 image2 ... imagen output.png) and then chop it
up into a zillion pieces with geometries differing by a pixel or 5
(something like convert -crop -geometry XxY+Z+Q output.png 1.png;
convert -geometry XxY+(Z+1)+Q).  all command line and iterable.  you'd
end up with a zillion similar images that when appended into a movie
looked like panning, i think.
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Re: [PLUG] sshpass and ubuntu

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 14:02, Carlos Konstanski
ckonstan...@pippiandcarlos.com wrote:
 I am trying to use sshpass to log onto an Ubuntu server. While sshpass works
 great when logging onto Gentoo hosts, it hangs forever when connecting to
 Ubuntu hosts. I tried fiddling with sshd_config with no luck. Any ideas?

verbose output from client and server during a failed login would help
out a lot in any diagnosis i could provide.
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Re: [PLUG] Regression Testing and library versions

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Mar 26, 2011 2:51 PM, Rogan Creswick cresw...@gmail.com wrote:

 Building static binaries is the best solution I'm aware of at the
 moment, and clearly not an option at all for many, many things.

...but it does sound like a good solution for the programs keith himself
writes!

You could Get a little fancier and make sure you copy all shared libs (all
versions ever installed, including updates both minor and major) to a
different directory and then, per program you compile (or per group compiled
while the same libs are in /usr/lib anyway) and use the -Wl and -rpath flags
to the linker to point to a directory that you're symlinked all the proper
versions into.  I've done something like that in the past (when compiling
gnome or kde) and it works ok.  It is kind of tedious though.
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Re: [PLUG] NX and shared clipboard

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 16:34, Daniel M. Head dmhea...@gmail.com wrote:

 Does anyone know of an option to do this? Maybe by limiting X11's
 clipboard buffer or something?

before you spend a lot of time delving into this...is there really no
other way to ship the code out of a session?  they can't (possibly
download and) fire up ftp, scp, a web browser, or anything else that
takes an entire file as input, whether or not you limit cut and paste?

it just seems like you might be chasing a fox out of the henhouse but
leaving an army of cat burglars in there.

(if i had any ideas of how to implement your desire, i would have told
you them too =))
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Re: [PLUG] Trying to change gnome-terminal command behavior

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 10:33, website reader website.read...@gmail.com wrote:

 However if I am running on a different desktop and have a background
 program which issues the gnome-terminal command in a different
 desktop area, gnome-terminal brings up the active window in my desktop
 area, not the one of the issuing program running the script file.

 This is quite annoying, as it grabs the mouse and keyboard entries,
 right in the middle of my work and leads to problems.

i too am a hater of focus thieves.  but then, i use a window manager
that doesn't require a mouse most of the time =) (network-manager is
the bane of my existence on a flaky wireless network i'm forced to
use--it pops up the password dialog repeatedly whenever flakiness
occurs.  grr!)

in the grand tradition of this list in failing to answer the original
query, i have to ask why the background job is using a graphical
terminal at all?  perhaps if you describe the workflow of the
background job we could offer alternative non-gui suggestions, which
would certainly be my preference for a job i am not currently
interacting with.

to address the actual question, as far as i know (and i am no expert,
even after using the x window system for 17 years), there is no way to
address workspaces via xwin geometry which would be the easiest
suggestion:  just tell use the -geometry flag and specify a geometry
on the appropriate workspace.  unfortunately workspaces are a window
manager trick, not an x window server level trick, so i guess that
isn't surprising really--the x server doesn't really know about the
workspace phenomenon (or if it does, doesn't at a geometry level, just
at a cache the display from these various viewports level).  if
you were having it come up on the wrong *display* (monitor), that's
the right answer.

depending on your window manager (ok, every one i've ever used, which
is probably a dozen, but that leaves dozens i have no experience
with), most support you tying a window to a workspace in the window
manager--but you'll probably have to give it a title and key on that
title, otherwise all gnome-terminals will do what you want the rogue
one to do.  i don't even have gnome-terminal installed to test this
theory, but i would be surprised if it didn't have some way to set the
title on invocation.  that way might not be via command flags, but
perhaps via .Xdefaults/xrdb(1).

so if all that doesn't give you enough rope to figure it out on your
own, we likely need more info to provide you an actual answer.  such
as:  what window manager do you use ('gnome' is probably not enough.
'gnome with metacity' or similar is probably better).

this question probably has a simple answer in the end, but not knowing
it or being able to determine it without the more info requested, i
just said everything relevant to the situation that came to mind.
hope it helped.
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Re: [PLUG] Where Are Login Messages?

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 17:01, Rich Shepard rshep...@appl-ecosys.com wrote:
   When I log in to the system some messages flash on the console before I
 get the user prompt. One of these messages is a warning of something not as
 it should be. These log in messages are not in /var/log/messages. Where can
 I find them?

so, my guess is that these messages are actually caused by something
in your login scrips (.login, .profile, et al).  of course those are
rarely the only thing that runs on login--there are usually system
versions in /.etc that run too.

perhaps a binary is suddenly missing, or a syntax error was introduced
somehow, or a thousand other possibilities..

anyhow that stuff won't get syslogged unless you've done something
special and kind of crazy like redirected stdout of those startup
scripts to the logger(1) command...

on to solutions: it seems like something is clearing your screen while
those scripts run and it could be a zillion things, but perhaps you
could slow things down so that you get a chance to read the messages
by inserting some 'sleep 5' commands at the beginning and end of your
shell startup files?  don't forget to login and test the changes
*before logging out* of another session in case you end up creating a
syntax error that screws things up (further =)), so your functional
window can be used to undo the madness.

somehow that answer was longer than it needed to be, but i hope it made sense..
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Re: [PLUG] Who are the top 10 interesting entrepreneur + open source companies in PDX?

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Jan 24, 2011 3:50 PM, Pete Lancashire p...@petelancashire.com wrote:

 even leaving TW in the mix, sure does not look like ten, wow the land
 of Open Source sure is not looking to sweet

I hadn't sounded off yet, but there are a couple more contenders:

Puppet labs
Seems like civic apps might fit into this category?  Not entirely sure but
my vague understanding leads me to think that group might fit in somewhere.

And we have several open source rockstars in our midst:

Linus torvalds
Randal schwartz
Steve kirkendall:  guy who wrote and still maintains the elvis vi clone
Selena d, postgres hacker
Etc

Not people or companies but still cool:

osuosl
psas (open source rocketry at psu)
Openconferenceware by igal

the list must be longer :)
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Re: [PLUG] Strange Build Error Needs Other Eyes

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 08:47, Rich Shepard rshep...@appl-ecosys.com wrote:
   I guess all the academics on the GRASS mail list are off since
 universities world-wide are closed, so I'll see if coders here can help me
 resolve an inability to configure the Makefile prior to building.

   When I run ./configure with all the necessary options (and all previous
 builds have not had problems finding libraries or headers for postgres or
 sqlite), it fails with these messages:

 checking for location of SQLite library... /usr/lib/
 checking for sqlite3_open in -lsqlite3... no
 checking for sqlite3_open in -lsqlite3... no
 configure: error: *** Unable to locate SQLite library.

so what does config.log say?  that's where you'll find the actual
output from the tests, including stderr that might tell you about
missing files, compilation troubles, and indeed even show you the code
that configure is attempting to compile before throwing that error.
(i make the assumption that this test is a compilation test--most that
./configure does are, even just checking for include files is usually
done not by looking for the file on the filesystem but trying to use
it in via the compiler in some dummy code)

config.log will often include line numbers from the ./configure script
for your further edification.  that script is never fun to debug, but
you can often see what is going on in it and adjust the system (or the
./configure script) appropriately.

if you're going to include config.log here, don't send us the whole
file,  just the part where the last tests fail.  you can leave off the
last many lines too--we don't need to know all the values of the
variables and all that jazz, just what the script is running right
before it announces those failures (should include code, a command
line for compiling, and the output from that attempt).
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Re: [PLUG] Strange Build Error Needs Other Eyes

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 10:52, Rich Shepard rshep...@appl-ecosys.com wrote:
 On Thu, 30 Dec 2010, chris (fool) mccraw wrote:

 so what does config.log say?

 Chris,

   I never noticed this before. That's valuable to know. Thanks.

yup.  it revolutionized my world.  but then i came from a history of
working with substandard unices (aix version 3, early post-sunos
solaris, irix, and some other really weird crusty one-offs back in the
90's), where configure is almost guaranteed to fail.  or anyway, was
back in the 90's.  most open source software has typically built
better on linux than commercial unices in my experience.


 if you're going to include config.log here, don't send us the whole
 file,  just the part where the last tests fail.  you can leave off the
 last many lines too--we don't need to know all the values of the
 variables and all that jazz, just what the script is running right
 before it announces those failures (should include code, a command
 line for compiling, and the output from that attempt).

   Interesting. conftest fails because it's not a Windows system and there's
 no cygwin or win32, but that's earlier in the file. Here's the tail:

there will be a lot of failures as it checks for things that aren't
on your system.  but the ones we care about are the ones that prevent
the script from continuing.

 configure:10149: checking for sqlite3_open in -lsqlite3
 configure:10166: gcc -o conftest -g -O2    -L/usr/lib/  -Wl,--export-dynamic
 conftest.c -lsqlite3 -lm  15
 /usr/lib//libsqlite3.so: undefined reference to  lsym'
 /usr/lib//libsqlite3.so: undefined reference to  lerror'
 /usr/lib//libsqlite3.so: undefined reference to  lopen'
 /usr/lib//libsqlite3.so: undefined reference to  lclose'

and there's the only important problem.  looks like another library
might be needed for libsqlite3 to be used successfully.  dunno what
library has those symbols in--whatever it is isn't on my system.  but
you can check yours with the following bash snippit:

for i in /usr/lib/*so ; do nm $i | grep lsym | grep T  echo $i ; done

if you get some output like this:

 T lsym
/usr/lib/libdl.so

(i fabricated that example output.  but it's what you're looking for,
with probably a different library name after)

then you've probably found a library you need to add to $LDFLAGS (in
linker syntax--something like -ldl) before running ./configure again
(remove config.cache first!)

from the missing function names i'd guess something like libdl, but
mine only has dlsym dlopen, etc, so i don't know.  presumably your
system has the right library on if other sqlite programs that are
dynamically linked work fine, configure just isn't including it
automatically.

luck++;
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Re: [PLUG] eee pc 900 original disks?

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 17:30, Denis Heidtmann
denis.heidtm...@gmail.com wrote:
 i wrote:

 http://rosenred.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/asus-eeepc-900-bios-update/


 OK.  10.04 is now installed.  I made a bootable thumb drive using UNetbootin
 and the iso I had.

keen.

 Now to update the BIOS.  The link says to use a drive formated and bootable
 in fat 16.  I have been trying to figure out how to do that.

i'd use mkdosfs -F 16 to make a fat16 filesystem.  it is rather
unlikely that unetbootin used fat16 since that's not so great for
large partitions.


I used
 unetbootin to install freedos on a thumb drive, and it boots, but I do not
 know how to find out what file format unetbootin used, and am uncertain what
 to do with the BIOS file.  Is the BIOS file an executable that DOS will know
 how to launch?

my reading of the blog post is that it is a bios file which the bios
will load and know what to do with.  i don't think you need dos
(bootable or otherwise) anywhere in the equation.

 What do you recommend?

i've never updated a bios like yours before.  all i know about how it
will work is in that blog post.  you might try asking this question on
one of the eeepc users' forums or otherwise poke around in them--it is
almost certain the question has come up more than once in the past.
but i thought the blog post was pretty straightforward already, so
your mileage my vary.
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Re: [PLUG] eee pc 900 original disks?

[chris (fool) mccraw]

Nowhere in that post does it say you are booting off the usb stick.
On Dec 26, 2010 6:07 PM, Denis Heidtmann denis.heidtm...@gmail.com
wrote:
 On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 5:44 PM, chris (fool) mccraw gen...@gmail.com
wrote:

 On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 17:30, Denis Heidtmann
 denis.heidtm...@gmail.com wrote:
  i wrote:

  http://rosenred.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/asus-eeepc-900-bios-update/
 
 
  OK. 10.04 is now installed. I made a bootable thumb drive using
 UNetbootin
  and the iso I had.

 keen.

  Now to update the BIOS. The link says to use a drive formated and
 bootable
  in fat 16. I have been trying to figure out how to do that.

 i'd use mkdosfs -F 16 to make a fat16 filesystem. it is rather
 unlikely that unetbootin used fat16 since that's not so great for
 large partitions.


 I used
  unetbootin to install freedos on a thumb drive, and it boots, but I do
 not
  know how to find out what file format unetbootin used, and am uncertain
 what
  to do with the BIOS file. Is the BIOS file an executable that DOS will
 know
  how to launch?

 my reading of the blog post is that it is a bios file which the bios
 will load and know what to do with. i don't think you need dos
 (bootable or otherwise) anywhere in the equation.

  What do you recommend?

 i've never updated a bios like yours before. all i know about how it
 will work is in that blog post. you might try asking this question on
 one of the eeepc users' forums or otherwise poke around in them--it is
 almost certain the question has come up more than once in the past.
 but i thought the blog post was pretty straightforward already, so
 your mileage my vary.
 ___


From the man page:

 mkdosfs can not create boot-able file systems. This isn't as easy as
 you might
 think at first glance for various reasons and has been discussed a
 lot already.
 mkdosfs simply will not support it ;)

 I need to study the blog post some more.

 -Denis
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Re: [PLUG] eee pc 900 original disks?

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 11:02, Denis Heidtmann
denis.heidtm...@gmail.com wrote:
 I seem to have an eee pc 900 that has gotten into a snit.  Does anybody here
 have the original disks I could borrow?  This was originally an XP machine,
 but a previous owner installed Ubuntu 9.04.  It is now only partially
 functional.

if you're going to get rid of the existing install anyway, why not
install the current ubuntu, which you can download yourself?  you have
a choice of 'netbook remix' which is what you may want if you were the
person who just wanted to use it to surf and edit documents--it's
simple and stripped down.  however, i run full/regular ubuntu on my
netbook and it works fine...but my netbook is also a little more
capable than yours, too (10  1366 x 768 screen, 320G hard drive, 2G
ram).

unless you want to install xp, i'd stay away from the original disks
entirely--any linux should boot just fine on the thing, netbook-aware
or not.



 Alternatively, I could install some Linux which is tailored for the SSD
 which this machine has.

current ubuntu should boot blazingly fast from that disk.  probably in
under 10 seconds.  they severely optimized the boot process in 10.4
(april) and i would suspect it is at least as good in the latest 10.10
release.  i'm not sure in what other way (that would be meaningful on
such an otherwise underpowered machine) someone would optimize for
the ssd.  even a complete ubuntu install shouldn't take even 16GB, and
you don't sound to need a complete install (developer tools, games,
etc)


 I would prefer Ubuntu, since that is what I
 am accustomed to.  I also need to update the BIOS, but I do not want to
 chance messing that up, so I want to get the machine in a stable state
 first.

one usually updates the bios independently of the linux install, with
a usb stick containing freedos or similar.  or anyway, this one does
=)
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Re: [PLUG] 8.9 Eee PC with 12GB SSD

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 00:54, Russell Senior russ...@personaltelco.net wrote:
 Paul == Paul Johnston keinschw...@spiretech.com writes:

 Paul Anyone out there have experience with the 8.9 Asus Eee PC with
 Paul the 12 GB SSD?

 Paul How do you like it?  I'm looking for a netbook to do strictly
 Paul word processing, email, and a little surfing.

 I don't have that one.  I have an ASUS 1005PE, with a spinning disk
 and an advertised 14-hour battery.  I don't get 14 hours, mind you,
 but I get enough (8-ish?) that I don't bother to carry the charger
 with me anymore.  I am quite happy with it.

i've had a similar experience with my asus 1005pr, which is a fairly
similar beast to the one Russell is talking about.  (the sea of model
#s in the asus lineup is pretty ridiculous.)

but both Russell's and my machine have 10 screens and decently sized
keyboards.  if you're ok with watching youtube in a tinier window than
your already tiny screen (i'm not sure fullscreen (non-HD.  HD will
definitely not play smoothly fullscreen!) will work on the earlier
eeepc's without being choppy?) and your fingers find the keyboard
usable, you'll probably be ok.  if i got one of those for free i'd
take it and use it if i didn't already have a better netbook, i guess,
but i wouldn't buy one unless it was like $50.  the cost savings of a
hundred or so bucks for a new machine whose overall size is no smaller
than the ones with 10 screens, with a smaller battery and lesser
keyboard does not seem worthwhile to me. (what bugged me about many
netbooks was the placement of the right shift key and cursor keys.
YMMV.)
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Re: [PLUG] Installing a Cisco Valet wireless USB adapter

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 13:28, Mark Jones mark.sina...@gmail.com wrote:

 I looked at that page. Specifically, the USB device page. So if I get
 one of the products listed on this page, and download the driver
 associated with it, I should be able to use it, yes? Would I still
 need to use ndisinstall?

no ndisinstall required--ndiswrapper is the thing that lets linux
(kinda) use (some) windows-only drivers.  i use it because i was
gifted some hardware, but i had to install a wired connection to that
server too since the ndiswrapper driver hangs occasionally and it's
really difficult to plug a monitor in to diagnose.  the hangs are the
sort that just hang the wireless card, so the server is still up.  yet
still the hangs require a reboot to fix and occur with varying
frequency--sometimes thrice in a day, sometimes not for months.
that's the level of reliability i'd expect from any ndiswrapper-driven
device :/


 I'm looking for the simplest way to get my machine to connect
 wirelessly, and I'm not sure I even know the right questions to ask.

the devices on that web page are probably supported already by your
distribution, most likely nothing required to install/enable except
plugging them in.


You can also use reflashed access points (like wrt54gl's or
equivalents) to bridge airgaps.

 I have no idea what this means. :D

he was just suggesting using a second wireless access point, changing
its os, and plugging it into your PC with a wire and having it do the
talking to the real wireless access point that is hooked to your
cablemodem.  if you happened to have a spare one laying around, maybe
it would be the cheapest route (and easy on the linux side.  though
more complicated on the second wireless access point.
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Re: [PLUG] ls listing with apt package column

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 11:16, Bill Barry b...@billbarry.org wrote:
 The one thing they are not
 doing is looking at /etc/alternatives. For instance the package
 xtightvncviewer created the following softlinks
 /usr/bin/vncviewer - /etc/alternatives/vncviewer
 and
 /etc/alternatives/vncviewer - /usr/bin/xtightvncviewer

 The package origin of these soft links are not reported, but it might be
 possible to add that ability to the find-cruft script.

so, run either one of those options and retain the list of files that
are not owned by any package.  before cleaning them up, see if they
are symlinks into /etc/alternatives (which, one supposes, you have not
mucked around in--only packages you've installed would have done so,
unless you ran update-alternatives manually or something).  if so,
assume good.  if no, examine further and/or delete.  it's not
perfectly programmatic, but i'd probably do something like:

 cat list_of_unowned_files | xargs ls -l | grep -v
/etc/alternatives

which would put you where you asked to be =)
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Re: [PLUG] Screenshots with Gimp 2.6.8

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 15:59, Rich Shepard rshep...@appl-ecosys.com wrote:
   Slackware-13.1 has gimp-2.6.8 included (yes, the GIMP is up to 2.6.11, but
 I'm using what comes in the distribution 'cause it's always been Good
 Enough). This version of the GIMP seems to have droped the screenshot
 acquire feature. The menus have moved off the tool window and I cannot find
 the acquire option anywhere.

   Does anyone know where that capability has gone? Alternatively, what other
 tool can do the job? (ImageMagick?)

i use the old standby xwd.  i think it must ship with x11 or something
because it's always Just Been There on whatever distro i've used.

and xwd has the benefit that it does its work mostly on the command
line (i can't imagine opening gimp just to take a screenshot--it takes
seconds to launch, has more than one window, and i have to click in a
lot of places..). imagemagick will convert its output into jpg's or
whatever else you want.
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