Re: Linux in China?

2012-11-15 Thread R P Herrold

On Thu, 15 Nov 2012, Ted Gould wrote:


The MS representatives believe that the reason Ubuntu is big in China is
because people are buying machines to pirate Windows.  Unfortunately
it's hard to prove that isn't the case (which is one of the reasons they
argue it).  So, in general, it's hard to say how big in this case, but


There is nothing 'unfortunate' about it at all -- The MSFT 
representatives are parrotting a party line, and trying to 
frame a debate about intellectual property rights which China 
agreed to enforce as part of joining WIPO.  Open Source does 
not have a dog in that fight


Open Source does not control the actions of its purchasers or 
users, nor have an obligation to facilitate control schemes 
that others might want adopted.  Just the opposite -- see 
Stallman's Four Freedoms essays over time -- By and large, it 
seeks to provide software freedom of many forms


I don't recall Microsoft _asking_ the FSF about the new UEFI 
bootloaders which vastly complicate the rights of owners of 
hardware wanting to use Open Source before functionally 
mandating it to the large manufacturers.  They just rammed it 
through with market power


-- Russ herrold
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Chase access w/ linux

2012-10-22 Thread R P Herrold

On Mon, 22 Oct 2012, Robert Holtzman wrote:


Anyone in the group have an account with Chase? If so, are you having
any problems logging in while running Linux?


They've moved the password box since the last time I logged in 
(previously it was stacked, now it is side by side) but no 
problems at all


CentOS 6, current updates, firefox

-- Russ herrold
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website hosting

2012-01-22 Thread R P Herrold

On Sun, 22 Jan 2012, Michael Havens wrote:

Well, I'm going to to register my first domain and get 
hosting with godaddy (unless you know of something better). 
Anyways, I don't know which hosting plan to go with, web 
hosting economy or 5-page website builder.


It rather depends on WHY you feel the need for a domain, and 
one assumes (b/c of the mention of hosting, and the subject 
line) website


blog sites are free with a google account at blogspot.com. 
email handling in a custom domain is free for up to ten users 
with google apps (down a rather had to find link).  mimimal 
websites are free thru google sites, as well.  domain 
registrations are $10 a year at google apps [they hand off the 
registration to emon or go-daddy, which is a hard price to 
get under for a low volume domain registrant


But all this is self support and has no learning opportunity; 
if you want to have a live person at the other end of the 
phone to ask questions of, you may want more


Not enough info to really frame a good answer

-- Russ herrold
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Re: Scientific Linux

2012-01-12 Thread R P Herrold

On Thu, 12 Jan 2012, Ben Browning wrote:


Its primary purpose is to reduce duplicated effort of the labs, and to
have a common install base for the various experimenters.

EG not a prod OS, in my opinion.


ehh?

It and CentOS are almost indistinguishable to a sysadmin who i 
not a distribution builder; the remaining principal of the 
distribution is: Connie Sieh, who is a friend.  the other long 
time member recently went to work at Red Hat


-- Russ herrold
herrold centos org

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Re: Scientific Linux

2012-01-12 Thread R P Herrold

On Thu, 12 Jan 2012, Ben Browning wrote:


On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 3:34 PM, R P Herrold herr...@owlriver.com wrote:


It and CentOS are almost indistinguishable to a sysadmin who i not a
distribution builder; the remaining principal of the distribution is: Connie
Sieh, who is a friend.  the other long time member recently went to work at
Red Hat


My understanding is that it's a limited release cycle to aid in
stability from a development point of view.


Nope ... tracks along with RHEL, just like CentOS, PU-IAS, and 
others



If the patch cycle is as
quick as Cent/RHEL, it may be prod-ready.


net patch cycles have historically track out substantially 
identically; CentOS just completed a re-engineering cycle with 
the 6 major release which, with any luck, will shorten the 
release turn



But saying It's
indistinguishable from CentOS just makes me think Why not just use
CentOS then? If it lacks any compelling, distinguishing feature , I
don't know why I wouldn't use the ubiquitous, widely supported option.


Under that argument, simply pay for RHEL [1].  Diversity is 
good


-- Russ herrold

[1] http://orcorc.blogspot.com/2009/03/i-saw-mommy-kissing-santa.html
and
http://orcorc.blogspot.com/2009/03/nine-pregnant-gals-in-queue.html
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determining 'arch' -- was: blank

2011-11-25 Thread R P Herrold

On Fri, 25 Nov 2011, Michael Havens wrote:


how do I tell if I have a 32 bit system or a 64 bit?


Functional test:

test booting with a live CD of each type --- a 32 bit only 
capable processor will 'choke' on the 64 bit CD -- the 64 will 
handle either.  SO .. a 32 bit CD will boot on either type of 
hardware



'Read the label' test

Once the unit is up with a 32 bit CD, inspect the processor 
strings and verify at the vendor's


cat /proc/cpuinfo


If it is a unit with a vendor provided 'build sheet' it may 
call out the specific processor and stepping, but be wary here 
--- some hardware manufacturer's disable capabilities the 
processor has ...   Laptops particularly may have a 
virtualizaion capable processor, but such is disabled often


-- Russ herrold
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Re: SSH Tutorial?

2011-11-23 Thread R P Herrold

On Tue, 22 Nov 2011, der.hans wrote:


Does anyone on the list know of a good tutorial on SSH Tunneling?
I am interested in learning how to create a tunnel to a POP3 port?



ssh -L 1110:localhost:110 your.mail.server.com


The fetchmail man page discusses such, and fetchmail will do 
it for you.  I did this for many years when I pulled mail 
locally for reading


-- Russ herrold
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Re: , Maybe you missed it....

2011-11-20 Thread R P Herrold

On Sun, 20 Nov 2011, Michael Havens wrote:


lshw was not to be found. I even tried 'find lshw.txt /'


clearly not valid find syntax ...
find / -name lshw.txt
would be one proper one

-- Russ herrold
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Re: I've got a VPS, now what M's should I RTF?

2011-08-08 Thread R P Herrold
==
 .-- -... ---.. ... -.- -.--
Copyright (C) 2011 R P Herrold
  herr...@owlriver.com
   My words are not deathless prose,
  but they are mine.
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I've got a VPS, now what M's should I RTF?

2011-08-07 Thread R P Herrold

On Sun, 7 Aug 2011, Steven wrote:

As I do consider RTFM do be a decent answer, does anyone have some preferred, 
How not to be an idiot with your new VPS, guides?


harden it, take backups so you can get back online with a 
baseline image


http://www.pmman.com/usage/hardening/

-- Russ herrold
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PXE Menu Screenshots

2011-08-03 Thread R P Herrold

On Thu, 4 Aug 2011, lthiels...@gmail.com wrote:

Does anyone know how to do screenshots of PXE menus? The only things I can 
imagine are

- running something like a menu.c32 emulator on the PXE server, or
- faking a PXE boot from a running OS pretending to be a PXE client.

I've not yet found anything to do it short of a camera. Any ideas?


It is pretty easy to do a domU inside a dom0, under Xen,, 
where there is an option to show a VNC console of the unit 
being installed to an arbitrary viewer of the VNC data


Once can then screenshot (or even record a flash movie) to 
taste, and get 'to the pixel' clarity


-- Russ herrold
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adding an rpm to a kickstart repo

2011-07-12 Thread R P Herrold

On Mon, 11 Jul 2011, Steven A. DuChene wrote:


I have copied the various files off of a Redhat dvd to a kickstart server and 
created a working ks.cfg file. I am able to kickstart servers with the default 
install files that were on the original DVD media. However I want to be able to 
update some of the rpms with newer ones like a newer kernel. I also need to add 
one or two custom rpms of my own.

I tried just copying my small add-on rpm into the Packages directory and then 
adding that rpm name into my ks.cfg file but I got an error during the 
resulting kickstart operation that the rpm was not available. I am pretty sure 
I need to update the repo files that tell the system what rpms are available. I 
installed the createrepo rpm along with some other dependencies required but I 
have not been able to find any definite directions on how to accomplish this.

Has anyone here ever done something like this and can provide some direction on 
how to proceed from this point or point me towards some definite documentation 
on the process?


The usual approach is to set up a separate local archive, and 
to run 'createrepo' to build the files 'yum' needs, and to 
handle it in %post


but it is perfectly possible to dump new (later NEVR) packages 
into a local image of an archive and to run 'createrepo' on 
that directory --- RPM and anaconda, and in recent RHEL, yum 
will pick up the change


That said, there is (or at least was, I have not verified this 
is still present for a while -- doco indicates it is still 
there, but anaconda doco is notoriously bad) the ability to 
add a './RHupdates/' directory to hold such a package 
repository that anaconda will 'automatically find'


http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Updates

all that said, it is easier usually in the ks.cfg %post 
stanza, to:


a) use a 'HERE' document to drop the local repostitory 
specification into /etc/yum.repos.d/  and then


b) run
yum -y --enablerepo=(localrepo) update
yum clean all

-- Russ herrold
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Re: CentOS 6 almost ready!

2011-07-11 Thread R P Herrold

On Mon, 11 Jul 2011, Dennis Kibbe wrote:


On Sun, 2011-07-10 at 12:00 -0400, R P Herrold wrote:



There are are no publicly known SSL issues in the openssl
maintained by CentOS

Please state the CVE, or if a private zero day, Lisa, please



One thing that people might not realize is that Red Hat back ports
security fixes so you can't just look at the version number and assume
that if it's not the latest it's flawed.


That is not unique to Red Hat derived matter.  It is true with 
anything relying on external banners, whether from an external 
package name, or from a greeting banner advertised, only 
publishes what its author wants to say ...


We formerly offered shell accounts at an ISP I adminned, and 
we consciously editted /etc/issue to advertise that the host 
was a plain old i386 architecture, when in point of fact it 
was on an Alpha


People regularly carried in exploits for that particular 
version of Red Hat Linux, or RPMs for the i386 architecture, 
and sought to install or unpack and run them ... it did not 
work of course, and it permitted us to identify people who 
needed closer attention by looking for the core files left 
behind


In a similar fashion, for colocated hosting, a client will 
occasionally send along the results from a naiive 
vulnerability scanner service, that is merely reading such 
banners.  In speaking with the people selling such snake oil, 
they are at least honest enough to admit that they don't have 
working exploits, but are rather just a banner scanning 
service, building a list from reading various mailing lists


First we check if the report is accurate; as they almost never 
are [when they are, they imply that some updates were needed], 
we therefore change the banners displayed, and silence the 
report --- one received a few weeks ago asserted a 
vulnerability in our Linux IIS webserver ... how else to fix 
it?  ;)



In the case of Lisa's asserted exploit against the current 
CentOS openssl, one might trivially see what CVE are 
addressed, and which are not thus:


rpm -q --changelog openssl | grep CVE

which yields for this CentOS 5 box:

[herrold@bronson ~]$ rpm -q --changelog openssl | grep CVE
- fix CVE-2010-4180 - completely disable code for
- fix CVE-2009-3245 - add missing bn_wexpand return checks (#570924)
- fix CVE-2009-3555 - support the safe renegotiation extension and
- fix CVE-2010-0433 - do not pass NULL princ to krb5_kt_get_entry which
- mention the RFC5746 in the CVE-2009-3555 doc
- fix CVE-2009-2409 - drop MD2 algorithm from EVP tables (#510197)
- fix CVE-2009-4355 - do not leak memory when CRYPTO_cleanup_all_ex_data()
- fix CVE-2009-1386 CVE-2009-1387 (DTLS DoS problems)
- fix CVE-2009-1377 CVE-2009-1378 CVE-2009-1379
- fix CVE-2009-0590 - reject incorrectly encoded ASN.1 strings (#492304)
- fix CVE-2008-5077 - incorrect checks for malformed signatures (#476671)
- fix CVE-2007-3108 - side channel attack on private keys (#250581)
- fix CVE-2007-5135 - off-by-one in SSL_get_shared_ciphers (#309881)
- fix CVE-2007-4995 - out of order DTLS fragments buffer overflow (#321221)
- CVE-2006-2940 fix was incorrect (#208744)
- fix CVE-2006-2937 - mishandled error on ASN.1 parsing (#207276)
- fix CVE-2006-2940 - parasitic public keys DoS (#207274)
- fix CVE-2006-3738 - buffer overflow in SSL_get_shared_ciphers (#206940)
- fix CVE-2006-4343 - sslv2 client DoS (#206940)
- fix CVE-2006-4339 - prevent attack on PKCS#1 v1.5 signatures (#205180)
[herrold@bronson ~]$

=

Lisa?  Still waiting on a reply to:


Please state the CVE, or if a private zero day, Lisa, please
state the vector so I may set up a unit running the allegedly
vulnerable service or services [ie over http, smtp. pop,
whatever] for you to demonstrate this assertion


-- Russ herrold
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Re: CentOS 6 almost ready!

2011-07-10 Thread R P Herrold

On Sun, 10 Jul 2011, Lisa Kachold wrote:


Thanks - I am especially interested in see the SSL updated.  Currently the
stable SSL available from the repo for CentOs 5 is exploitable.


There are are no publicly known SSL issues in the openssl 
maintained by CentOS


Please state the CVE, or if a private zero day, Lisa, please 
state the vector so I may set up a unit running the allegedly 
vulnerable service or services [ie over http, smtp. pop, 
whatever] for you to demonstrate this assertion


-- Russ herrold
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Re: CentOS 6 almost ready!

2011-07-09 Thread R P Herrold

On Sat, 9 Jul 2011, Dan Lund wrote:


Just in time for Red Hat 7 to come ;)


The RHEL following 6 (unnamed, presently) is slated for Q4 
2012 presently [1] at page 5 being a recent publicly released 
document by Red Hat


-- Russ herrold

[1] http://www.pmman.com/doc/Red_Hat_IBM_s390_ISV_call_May-2011.pdf
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Re: ZoneMinder Video - Configuration

2011-06-16 Thread R P Herrold

On Wed, 15 Jun 2011, Jim March wrote:


Zoneminder...umm...

IT'S A TRAP!

Seriously, it's the most hideously evil critter around.  It's
basically the worst form of open source project.  MASSIVE
dependencies.  Not just Video4Linux, but Apache, MySQL and more.
Hell, for best efficiency you need to set the disk up as ReiserFS due
to the bazillion tiny files it creates.


so harsh ...

I packed up all the dependencies for doing the install under 
CentOS 5 is less than 2 hours.  No big deal


It DOES splat all over SELinux, but as most Zoneminder 
installations (such as the initial inquirant's usecase) are 
dedicated to function without end user accounts having login's 
(I cannot believe I am saying this), it is probably OK to 
disable SElinux in this particular case


Writing the SELinux rules takes less than a couple of hours 
running the darn thing (I did it), but ... I'll agree that 
THAT is a bear, due to the overly formal approach that SELinux 
doco takes [or perhaps, as there is not enough 'real world, 
'Joe Admin' entries out there for Google to find  ;) ]


I tried to add to the ZM and SELinux pile with:

http://orcorc.blogspot.com/2011/05/what-not-to-buy-dynex-13mp-webcam.html
which blog post enumerates the dependency chain in install 
order ... I dunno that I ever 'pushed' the soluton out to FTP 
space, but I could ...


-- Russ herrold
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basic LAMP security 101

2011-04-15 Thread R P Herrold

On Fri, 15 Apr 2011, Stephen wrote:


on security i can read, there is quite a bit out there, but its a
muddy mess to know who is talking out their collective backside and
who actually is giving you something useful. I do know we have some
very good security geeks here and hope to borrow (beg) some pearls of
wisdom.


Take and test periodic backups

Run your updates

Only run network listening services that you intend to; remove 
un-used packages, disable unused accounts, disable shell 
access where not appropriate (email only type clients)


As possible add wrappers, and iptables to restrict unwanted 
probes (does a netblock from Bulgaria REALLY need to connect 
to your box?)


Read your log files, and if repeated probes, dictionary 
attacks are occurring, consider rate limiting such (see 
fail2ban, and the like)


http://www.pmman.com/usage/hardening/

-- Russ herrold
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Configuring repositories for Yum on RHEL 6

2010-12-15 Thread R P Herrold

On Wed, 15 Dec 2010, keith smith wrote:


I've been trying to find a list of official RHEL yum repository and all I 
find are beta  repositories.

Do I want to use yum or RPM?


Either can do remote archive retrievals -- but Red Hat does 
not release the post-Beta binaries of its enterprise product 
to the general internet, choosing to provide access only 
through their RHN (Red Hat Network) which uses strong 
authentication methods keyed to each individually licensed 
install


CentOS 6 will be along, soon enough ; Scientific Linux has a 
candidate out there as well


-- Russ herrold
herrold at centos dot org
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Re: How do I free swap

2010-11-04 Thread R P Herrold

On Thu, 4 Nov 2010, Bryan O'Neal wrote:


Setting swapiness is how I can deal with a recurrence but it will not
flush current swap. And I can not shut down any process to perform
swap off. :(


then you have not yet adequately provided for failover -- If a 
process 'can not be shut down', it has not business being on 
only one server without a failover capacity


Solve the failover problem, and you both increase reliability 
of the service, and make possible regular administration


-- Russ herrold
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Re: [OT] android phone, possible to get a good deal?

2010-09-18 Thread R P Herrold

On Sat, 18 Sep 2010, Jim March wrote:


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16875176145

To get Android 2.1 you have to spend almost $500:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16875176195

Wait just a bit and that should be upgradeable to 2.2?


Not being sold at at New Egg, but I see Archos 7 and 10 
internet tablets, for about $300, running Android 2.2 out of 
the gate, and seemingly well supported as to following new 
releases at Angstrom


I have devices at older Android levels (it is not clear they 
have the processor 'horsepower' and ram to support later 
Android levels, which I imported directly from China) being a 
couple of essentially unsupported, no-name development 
chassis. I will be seeing about building trimmed down 
versions, and loading later Android versions over the mext 
couple weeks, via the Angstrom builder


-- Russ herrold
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URGENT question on Qwest WiFi routers...

2010-08-26 Thread R P Herrold

On Thu, 26 Aug 2010, Jim March wrote:

I need to know if anybody has encountered a WiFi router that 
automatically creates an SSID consisting of myqwest 
followed with no spaces by four numbers - seems to be 
standard base 10 vs. hex or whatever.  I need to


I have encountered such, but not specifically in the 'myqwest' 
vendor namespace; Many '2-wire' routers chose to set a SSID, 
based on a hash of the MAC address plus a 'salt', and perhaps 
an initial setup 'password' based on the UUID (serial number) 
of the unit


A hash is used to prevent a predictable sequence attack inot a 
search space bigger than afforded by say WEP; I have not 
looked as to the later wireless WPA / WPA2 -- as I recall 
there was a design flaw in WPA necessitating the '2' variant


This is, I believe, a common and reasonable approach to permit 
a customer to have limited config rights, and if it becomes 
necessary to reconfig from scratch, to push a 'restore to 
factory' recessed button with a paperclip, and clean up a 
mess


-- Russ herrold
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Re: OT (slightly): SSL Requirement

2010-08-16 Thread R P Herrold

On Mon, 16 Aug 2010, Shawn Badger wrote:


Also, some SSL providers allow for wild card certs as well, *.domain.com,
that may also work for you, but they are expensive from what I heard.


less that $200 per year from almost any 'in the chain' CA -- 
dunno if that is considered high or low.  If you NEED a lot of 
secured content traversal, it would seen that one can amortize 
that pretty quickly.  If you simply want to hand out certs to 
lots of friends boxes, all mashed into a communal domain, 
perhaps not


-- Russ herrold
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OT (slightly): SSL Requirement

2010-08-13 Thread R P Herrold

On Fri, 13 Aug 2010, Eric Shubert wrote:

I don't necessarily believe everything I see, and would like to check on 
something I read.


Is the following statement true or false?

SSL requires a distinct outbound IP for every distinct certificate
(different domain name).


Clearly technically not true, but not in the way you probably 
expect -- One can have a SSL certificate for the purposes of 
securing web content, and a separate one for the purpose of 
securing email transfer -- check the headers of this piece, 
whch use a StartSSL [highly recommended] certificate for 
opportunistic SSL layer transport of content


If you had added the qualifier 'for a given protocol (TCP) and 
port (443) pair', it would be true in the usual case, absent 
heroic and non-customary approaches


My understanding is that multiple hosts with distinct certificates could 
coexist behind a NAT'd firewall on a single public address and still provide 
SSL connections via the public address.


Would someone who's more knowledgeable than I about this 
care to shed some light on the subject?


I assume web connection here.  I put to one side a 'wildcard' 
certificate where several boxes all offer a connection secured 
by a single credential.  TLS/SSL protected email to multiple 
clients using differing certificates, as the negotitaion 
occurs 'late enough' that one could 'hand off' a connection, 
perhaps, to a second unit inside a load balancer, to 
complete the SSL/TLS connection setup.


The flaw with a webbish (port 443) delivery in your 
setup is based on when in the request the secured connection 
is set up


The negotiation and establishment of the SSL tunnel occurs 
BEFORE any hostname part (indeed, any part) of the URL is 
transmitted.  How would the NAT device know which credential 
to offer?  How can the remote end verify that an offered 
certificate is not on a recovation list at the CA?


If a connection were established to point A on the outside, 
with a 301, 302 type redirector to  a 'new' URL 'inside' it 
might be doable as a new secured connection setup can occur, 
and if there is low volume and a unique client IP at the far 
end, but this cannot be counted upon ...


I see a suggestion tht a Level 3 router can sniff the request 
and do internal direction.  I am aware of no such mechanism to 
do this only up to L3 of the stack in a web session.  The 
needed session credentials are not yet knowable at the time of 
the negotiation ond DH key exchange of the session encryption 
key.  Once that session is set up, there is not a mechanism 
for a 'handoff' of a running session, for that is the essence 
of a Man in the Middle attack


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Re: Kaseya Agents You

2010-08-12 Thread R P Herrold

On Thu, 12 Aug 2010, Lisa Kachold wrote:


It can be used for malicious reasons.


so can almost any tool

As you later note:

It is not cheap.  Free applications and online tools exist 
to do the samething.


drop in a VNC server, pre-key it, and hide it from the 
process table listing, and one is home in a Windows environment; munge 
a kernel module, and one can attain the same effect in Linux. 
Apple has similar in OS/X ...


back to the lead post ...

It is currently being used by NSA and government 
surveillance of citizens of interest, or it can be used for 
technical support purposes.


A strong assertion.  A search turns up just another vendor, in 
the marketing hunt trying to sell to the Homeland Security 
'garrison state'

http://www.kaseya.com/
with a FIPS-140-2 certification.  They are co-marketing with 
Microsoft

http://www.microsoft.com/sbs/en/us/software-solutions.aspx
and they seem to advert having sold to the U S Air Force

Conspicuously absent from a google search is non 'tinfoil hat' 
evidence beyond supposition and capabilities, and actually 
showing improper use by a federal agency


Please, prove me wrong with URLs I missed

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Re: Kaseya Agents You

2010-08-12 Thread R P Herrold

On Thu, 12 Aug 2010, Lisa Kachold wrote:


OPPS, I seem to have started a political conversation!


no, you made some assertions as to technical matter [with 
seemingly a Linux client hook], and I asked for some URLs to 
demonstrate the basis for your belief.  A third party wanted 
to be a lawyer on a mailing list with some hearsay as well, 
but that is out of scope here


My question echoes that of Joe Friday:
All we want are the facts, ma'am

I can perform my own analysis and argue almost any side of an 
opinion given facts I can rely upon



--- On *Thu, 8/12/10, R P Herrold herr...@owlriver.com* wrote:



Lisa, for context:
It is currently being used by NSA and government 
surveillance of citizens of interest, or it can be used 
for technical support purposes.


herrold: 
A strong assertion.

   ... snip ...
Conspicuously absent from a google search is non 'tinfoil 
hat' evidence beyond supposition and capabilities, and 
actually showing improper use by a federal agency


Please, prove me wrong with URLs I missed


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Re: Kaseya Agents You

2010-08-12 Thread R P Herrold

On Thu, 12 Aug 2010, Lisa Kachold wrote:


http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/eo/eo-13224.htm
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/FreedomofInformationAct/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_controversy



My question echoes that of Joe Friday:
   All we want are the facts, ma'am


conspicuously absent from any of those links is any mention of 
Kaseya


FISA warrants may be disliked but have been judicially upheld 
[footnote 89 in the wiki article]. As that article notes one 
may structure one's affairs to address the possibilities they 
afford the US federal government [how being out of scope here]


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Re: Kaseya Agents You

2010-08-12 Thread R P Herrold

On Thu, 12 Aug 2010, Lisa Kachold wrote:


conspicuously absent from any of those links is any mention of Kaseya



There are too many links to reference.

This is common security knowledge.


as they are so profuse, let's agree to just look at the best 
two you know of.  Standing by


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ChaosVPN Agoralink warzone CTF

2010-08-11 Thread R P Herrold

On Wed, 11 Aug 2010, Lisa Kachold wrote:


This is a development network with specified CTF areas and warzones.


CTF as in 'Capture The Flag' by rooting another's instance?

Why would one want to encourage a person dedicated to taking 
over a boxes access to bandwidth one is accountable for, let 
alone machines?  I confess I don't 'get it', other than on a 
testing bench setup in a physically  isolated network.


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RE: The inevitable eventual cost of computers.

2010-07-27 Thread R P Herrold

On Tue, 27 Jul 2010, Stephen Partington wrote:


For me MS is going to be part of the world for a long time, even if the
company self destructs next year. And a Large portion of software will work
only on MS, if I want to use any of this software I will have a compatible
platform.


I am truly interested.  Putting to one side use cases of 
recreational computing [dedicated game platforms, whether Wii, 
X-Box, etc have protocol format blockers as well as as other 
'proprietary' stickiness to try to lock a person to a given 
platform, and frankly, better 'pedal to the metal' 
performance], and putting aside applications which need to 
manipulate a intentionally properietary data API (DRM'd, 
patent wall, or public key protected content), what 
applications are you using that 'require' a non FOSS platorm?


Stated differently:  What do you need to do to earn a living, 
that FOSS cannot do?


I would love to have the core API's used open sourced and 
see wine get the funding to work with it. But that's 
unlikely.


Patent protected codecs, and per seat licensed DRM wrapped 
'trade secret' implementations become available that way ...


Wine provides operability at the 'use a binary intended a 
foreign OS' environment level, sort of like a sparrow wearing 
scuba gear to go after a meal of grubs in a creekbed.


If a person is willing accept moving around on crutches, that 
is a future, I guess, but is it worth committing to using 
adaptive devices, or to find or participate in building the 
FOSS alternative?


-- Russ herrold

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Re: How to report Internet Abuse

2010-07-26 Thread R P Herrold

On Mon, 26 Jul 2010, Shawn Badger wrote:


What about adding the ip into the /etc/hosts.deny fie?
I don't know if Apache uses TCP wrappers, but if it does then this would be
an easy solution.


ask it, and see if libwrap is present:  ;)

$ ldd /usr/sbin/httpd | grep wrap


I think the best solution is to use iptables though, because you should
really already be running it on anything that is public facing.


iptables to just port 80/tcp will work fine

-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp -s \
the.bad.guy.ip --dport 80 -j REJECT

[backslash continueations used here, to avoid wrapping issues 
-- not supported in the real config files, in say CentOS, in

 /etc/sysconfig/iptables ]

but 

The 'correct method; from an apache POV is a 'Deny' rule in 
the config file, which avoids some workarounds


Directory / 
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from the.bad.guy.ip
Allow from All
/Directory

or such

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Why is %#$ X11 failing to authorize this SSH connection? :(

2010-07-26 Thread R P Herrold

On Mon, 26 Jul 2010, kitepi...@kitepilot.com wrote:


So I do:


kitepi...@beechjet:~$ ssh -vvv -fCX ay...@turbocommander VirtualBox  
/tmp/junkX11-VirtualBox.log 21 
And I get my Virtual Box screen up and I can do whatever I want except to 
star a VM because:



When I do this:
kitepi...@beechjet:~$ ssh -vvv -fCX ay...@turbocommander 'VBoxManage startvm 
Unum'  /tmp/junkX11-VBoxManage.log 21 
X11 fails to authorize!


You flopped the URLs and the session logs relative toyour 
narrative so I identify them


the first   http://www.kitepilot.com/junkX11-VBoxManage.log

debug1: client_input_channel_open: ctype x11 rchan 3 win 65536 
max 16384

debug1: client_request_x11: request from 127.0.0.1 33887
debug2: fd 4 setting O_NONBLOCK
debug3: fd 4 is O_NONBLOCK
debug1: channel 1: new [x11]
debug1: confirm x11
debug3: Wrote 48 bytes for a total of 3015
debug2: X11 connection uses different authentication protocol.
X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication.
debug2: X11 rejected 1 i0/o0



the secondhttp://www.kitepilot.com/junkX11-VirtualBox.log

debug1: client_input_channel_open: ctype x11 rchan 3 win 65536 
max 16384

debug1: client_request_x11: request from 127.0.0.1 33888
debug2: fd 4 setting O_NONBLOCK
debug3: fd 4 is O_NONBLOCK
debug1: channel 1: new [x11]
debug1: confirm x11
debug3: Wrote 48 bytes for a total of 2999
debug3: Wrote 464 bytes for a total of 3463

The MIT magic cookie exchange, needed for xauth and 
credentials forwarding is failing on the first


The command being passed in is:

debug1: Sending command: VBoxManage startvm Unum

Something like this may work from the client side

su - -c VBoxManage startvm Unum

per: info su:

...
 login startup file(s).  Additionaly `DISPLAY' and `XAUTHORITY'
 environment variables are preserved as well for PAM functionality


Run the first inside a terminal login subshell, and it should 
succeed  The management interface probably does not spawn a 
pty by default and it is needed for the authentication 
exchange


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Deleting specific files from many sub folders

2010-07-26 Thread R P Herrold

On Mon, 26 Jul 2010, Bryan O'Neal wrote:


I have a bunch of .au files I want to get rid but I don't want to hunt
them down in every darn sub directory. Suggestions?


Move into the top directory of that set

find . -name *.au  manifest.txt

Scan manifest.txt with your favorite editor and look for stuff 
you wish to retain -- mv them into new name suffixes


Repeat the first step and make sure are happy for all listed 
there to go away


Run one more time then like this:

find . -name *.au -a -exec rm {} \;

All done

-- Russ herrold

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Re: Deleting specific files from many sub folders

2010-07-26 Thread R P Herrold

On Mon, 26 Jul 2010, Bryan O'Neal wrote:


Thanks :)


for extra credit, if you are worried about ever wanting them 
later, manifest.txt may be handed to tar and a backup file 
created and tuen burined to archiving media ;)


from that same directory

tar zcf acme.tar.gz -T manifest.txt

- R
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Re: OK, how do I count files in a directory QUICK!!!

2010-07-02 Thread R P Herrold

On Fri, 2 Jul 2010, Matt Graham wrote:


That's a bit strange.  I'd think ls -1U --color=never would spit everything
out almost as fast as possible, considering.


nope: 'ls' sorts

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MySQL reporting question

2010-06-22 Thread R P Herrold

On Mon, 21 Jun 2010, der.hans wrote:


I need to match the most recently entered status from t2 with stuff from
t1 in MySQL.



t1.stuff, t2.status == $some_val where max(t2.timestamp) and t1.varchar1
== t2.varchar1 and t2.varchar2 == t2.varchar2



I can also add columns to either table.


ugghhh -- you mention MySQL in the subject line, but just 
because one has a hammer does not mean everything is a nail. 
The MySQL database server kernel engine can use a journal and 
serialization of transactions to attain ACID.  This can slow 
things down a lot if used


There is the 'new' interest in 'eventually consistent' 
databases.  Can you use 'almost the latest' data?  [some 
problem domains do not admit a use case permitting this, but 
some do: consider: DNS which might update detail all the way 
through only every couple of weeks in some cases]


I would take a hint and amend my code to emit both the insert 
to t1 AND a destructive update write to 'last seen' location 
outside of the database.  A strict SQL approach is gonna kill 
you on retrieval time and lock serialization


This avoids that killing JOIN

I would also generate a hash of t1.varchar1, t2.varchar1, 
t2.varchar2 and t2.varchar2 as each is written and as you are 
sorting (selecting, but ... ) on max(t2.timestamp) and 
generate a series of the first four directory permuted values, 
each in their own tree, and spread that across sufficient 
spindles that the write and read load performance can keep up


As this point we need to look at the structure for the problem 
domain

t1.stuff, t2.status == $some_val
and we lack enough to design further the structures needed ...

I had to automate precompution of 'cribs' of subsets of data 
and pre-populate a cache for a call center application I wote, 
to keep up with the database read load on one project.  If I 
were doing it again, I would drill in even more 'out of 
database' cacheing


Financial markets data is often like this -- one needs very 
fast access to arbitrary data, and usually just the latest 
trade or the lastest day's trade data; after that it is 
merely of less time critical access needs.  We recently spent 
several months with the trading-shim working in this area


-- Russ herrold
614 488 6954
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google CL tools

2010-06-20 Thread R P Herrold

On Sun, 20 Jun 2010, Stephen wrote:


http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/20/google_command_line_tool/

I think this is a great thing...


I have seen on the relevant mailing lists that it has been 
moving through the review and packaging process in both Debian 
and Fedora for the last week


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Re: CloudLinux

2010-06-18 Thread R P Herrold

On Fri, 18 Jun 2010, unixprgrm...@gmail.com wrote:

Cloud computing is like having sex in Time Square. 
Everything is viewable to everyone, but only those who are 
interested are going to delay their busy schedules to stop 
and see what is going on.


As far as encryption goes, cracking it is only a matter of 
time and computing power.  You may not be able to crack it 
in an amount time that makes the data usable or valuable; 
but, it is only a matter of time, before computing power  
cracking algorithms catch up and allow you to crack in 
seconds what was previously uncrackable in decades.


'CloudLinux', the CentOS downstream fork is not cloud 
computing, although in their marketing puffery, they position 
themselves as:

'CloudLinux is the only commercially supported OS
designed specifically for the service provider market'
-- http://www.cloudlinux.com/solutions/compare/

I call B*ll sh*t

http://www.cloudlinux.com/support/index.php

Serverity [sic; thus in the original] 1
2  Buiness [sic] days  ...

where:

Severity One (Urgent)
Catastrophic - OMG help me now. Includes loss of production, 
data and no workaround, major security breach.


I'd be embarrased to have written that (putting to one side 
the spelling errors)



advert PMman time to self-recovery is minutes to having the 
DRP back-up image fallback spinning and live, and depending on 
the care the instance owner took, and the depth of their 
purse, later fallback images.  If one wished to buy 24x7x365, 
we already have trained staffing in place for 'truck roll' to 
the DC, know our pricing, and will consult and quote to 
serious inquiries.  In most instances no truck roll is needed 
as we maintain out of band access to the backside network, 
have remotely controllable power and console access (KVM over 
IP backhaul to dedicated management servers), and there is not 
much other than re-plugging cables that we cannot do remotely 
.../


--


And opinions are like belly-buttons ...

'Everything is viewable to everyone' is laughably ignorant of 
the reality


3DES issued (giving ca 112 bits of symmetric cipher strength) 
because the horizon showed that governmental strength 
mechanical attacks were 'too close'.  FIPS 140 is in the -2 
update for just this reason, and to comply at the highest 
levels and to surmount obtaining a certification lab's 
'sign-off' on the same costs on the order of tens of millions 
of dollars.   But like RHEL and CentOS a person can obtain 
results to the FIPS level cited without the certification for 
little more than skull sweat and testing


I just generated a 2048 strength public/private key pair 
(asymmetrical crypto) as the horizon to cracking that is not 
within my life expectancy. the number of atoms in the universe 
are less than the number of sequential stir guesses needed. 
Frankly, without a defect in the algorithms to permit ruling 
out wide swaths of the key-space, the universe runs out of 
power before current crypto properly done.  OTP does not NEED 
hardware RNG's potted in epoxy as the early BellCore reference 
implementation showed


The cyber ninja swat team operatives getting into the data 
center need to successfully get past:

- fob based ACL 1
- fob based ACL 2
- all the cameras
- hand geometry ACL 1
- hand geometry ACL 2
- outer cage 1 (fob based ACL)
- inner cage door 1 (key locked ACL)
... each with continuous and redundant monitoring
'inside' the protected loop, and echoed to the outside
DRP site

to even get to anything [i.e., the physical layer attacks] 
more than they can get sniffing and journalling all the 
traffic in and out of a given IP for a 'corpus' to crack


This is far, far more than we had at the Naval Ship R and D 
center during the Nixon administration, except we do not have 
armed Marine guards with loaded M-16's at port arms at the 
entry point at that long ago data-center.  All I need to do is 
slow them down and be alerted


All management of hosts at that DC are done through SSH and 
certificate backed SSL; there are partitioning and 
fire-breaks, and two discrete and isolated back side 'God 
network' network segment for control that simply does NOT go 
out of the locked cabinet; it is based on an implementation 
that passed the then CISP (now PCI) credit card data security 
assessment, conducted by the author of the v2 of that 
specification without any down-tick or question at all as to 
the Unix/Linux part of the data security model and 
implementation.  The Windows side passed because of the use of 
physically isolated network segments, VPN tunnels, proxies for 
application isolation, and use of a doubly protected physical 
layer


_Some_ cloud computing may be performed as a public 
promiscuity, but I assure that that generalization quoted at 
the top this post is not meaningful, 

Re: Slicehost / xen hosting size

2010-06-01 Thread R P Herrold

On Tue, 1 Jun 2010, Matt Graham wrote:


From: Steve Phariss sphar...@gmail.com


looking at slicehost and a couple other hosts but I am not 
sure of the size host I should get (or even the best 
company to go with).  The website runs OSCommerce, 
Wordpress, Zenphoto, IMAP, Roundcube (or other webmail) 
and one or two various web apps for testing.  She also 
hosts short term, low traffic websites for misc uses.


Any ideas on proper sizing?



How much traffic per day does the server get?  How much disk space do all the
things installed and all the user data take up?  What's the average load on
the machine?  The answers to those questions will determine the size of the
host you need.  I'm using the smallest slicehost available because I just
don't need that much CPU.


I did a 'show and tell' talkthrough at a UAT meeting perhaps 6 
weeks ago, of the 'pmman' virtual server product.  One aspect 
it has is an ability to dial up ram and hard drive space (and 
bandwidth soft-caps) after the base install under the end 
user's control, in just seconds


Steve, please contact me offlist for a 30 day trial instance, 
gratis, to see if it meets your needs.

http://www.pmman.com/

-- Russ herrold
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ditching Apple products due to boycotts?

2010-05-17 Thread R P Herrold

On Mon, 17 May 2010, keith smith wrote:

Maybe. What if we were to go into deflation?  Wouldn't that help?



herrold, earlier:
This looks like wishful thinking. The outsourcing/offshoring
genie is out of the bottle, and nothing is going to put it back


Deflation relative to what?  Gold? The CHF? The JPY? The EUR? 
Why should a loss in purchasing power of a unit amount of one 
currency affect non-lockstep linked currencies at all? 
Bretton Woods ended those days


Prediction of the path financial markets will take appear to 
be a multi factor, non-linear problem, with path dependencies.


Anyone saying they _know_ otherwise should be encouraged to 
play against you in a markets simulation where you run a 
true random strategy.  If they can consistently articulate a 
durable strategy that produces above market gains, follow it


What if AZ were the first mover in a economic game where it 
restricted non-documented guest workers and TX and FL 
followed suit, but NM and CA did not.  Where will budget 
and employment crises continue longer?


Opinons are cheap; horse races are held regularly to settle 
differences of opinion as to which of a collection of horses 
can run the fastest.  One problem with the study of economics, 
and behavioural economics, is that there is no 'experimental 
lab'; and 'repeatable starting conditions' repetition of 
history, to settle arguments like this.


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Re: ditching Apple products due to boycotts?

2010-05-17 Thread R P Herrold

On Mon, 17 May 2010, keith smith wrote:

I think if taxes were reduced by 25% or even 50% we would 
see deflation.  We need to deflate.


If one reduces taxes (I assume here, you mean the net 
effective Federla ones), the federal deficit goes up faster, 
and the feds need to borrow more to fund its payment 
obligations.  This sucks funds away from the private sector, 
who then need to 'outbid' the feds for business borrowing.


Bidding up rates to but (here, rent the use of money) the use 
right of same asset sounds like price increases with no change 
in the underlying.


That is asset price inflation

I dont ses the causal link you are suggesting exists to cause 
a deflation.


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Re: ditching Apple products due to boycotts?

2010-05-17 Thread R P Herrold

On Mon, 17 May 2010, keith smith wrote:


So what would you do if you were in charge?


Negative agenda don't resonate with voters, so these need to 
be 'dressed up' as positives, but I wont sugar coat it here


Not suggest that protectionism (here, a boycott) is anything 
but a distorion of a market based economy


Remove 'too big to fail' guarantees, explicit and implicit, 
from the economic system, and move to a market based economy


Not lend money on no security into Western Europe and allow 
the Greece socialist experiment reform itself without my 
intervention


Not 'juice the stock market' to make people reading their 401k 
statements feel 'happy' at the expense of eating the heart out 
of the country's future


Not have liability caps on offshore drilling operations

Call 'bullsh*t' when people who have not read, or are not 
intellectionally honest about SB 1270 call it racist or 
anti-immigrant


Vote out and work effectively to remove from influnce people 
in and out of public office who hide behind lies


I am not a libertarian by any stretch of the imagination, but 
much they have long proposed simply makes sense standing alone


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ot- not even computer related

2010-04-22 Thread R P Herrold

On Thu, 22 Apr 2010, Michael Havens wrote:


when you watch and it goes to commercial sometimes they show less than one
second of a commercial and then go to another one... anyone know why?


local 'drop in' adverts run on top of (in place of) the 
national feed; additionally one can buy differnt drop in's for 
different customers, as is a commonly pitched 'advanage' of 
placing adverts through a Cable operator.


Obviously clock synchronization down to the sub second is not 
attained as to 'cuts' between content feeds; when this 
happens, the 'blips' appear


You can see this kind of 'missed switching timing' a lot on 
CNBC and so forth


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volatile repo for CentOS

2010-04-21 Thread R P Herrold

On Wed, 21 Apr 2010, der.hans wrote:


Does CentOS have something similar to debian-volatile that tracks packages
that change a lot and need more frequent updates than happen in
slow-moving distros like CentOS and Debian?


There are official and unofficial ones -- testing is close to 
what you seek, but not systematically fed, nor weeded


http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories

Most of what I package is either from scratch, or from Raw 
Hide, and ends up, in SRPM form, at:

http://www.owlriver.com/projects/ORC/
and my mirror

If you have a particular need, send me an enail, and I can 
usually publish a solution that works on CentOS in short 
order.  If it needs security updates and tracking, we need to 
discuss the matter more deeply.


- Russ herrold
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Re: Nigerian Scammers Are Now Calling On the Telepone!

2010-04-05 Thread R P Herrold

On Mon, 5 Apr 2010, Mark Phillips wrote:


Very cool.I wish I had the presence of mind to say something like that!


you dont follow the right blogs:

http://orcorc.blogspot.com/2010/02/caller-id-wiretapping-call-recording.html

;)

-- Russ herrold
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How to export text from a .chm file?

2010-04-01 Thread R P Herrold

On Thu, 1 Apr 2010, j...@actionline.com wrote:


How can I export the text from a .chm file?

In particular when it is broken into multiple chapters?


The FOSS project 'calibre' handles this

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26980

through internediate conversions to more portible formats. 
calibre builds and installs trivially under CentOS 5


-- Russ herrold
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Re: plug] VOIP Shopping time

2010-03-29 Thread R P Herrold

On Mon, 29 Mar 2010, gm5729 wrote:

I put together my own voip tis past weekend. After looking 
at like 4-5 FOSS websites. I was honestly more confused then 
when I started looking around. Everything to me looked like 
stuff for call centers. I just want a simple phone.


On my list, the Grandstream BT-201 and the -102 are each a 
conventional looking black telephone with some feature butons 
and lights, look like a 'desk keyset' in an office, but with 
the property that instead of running back to a local phone 
controller usually over CAT-3 cabling, these units are 
assigned an IP, and connected through a RJ-45 ethernet 
connection, and routed like any other computer device.  Call 
control signals, voice data, and other signals (think: hold 
buttons, and message waiting lights) are manageable through 
SIP to a central Freeswitch or Asterisk 'PBX' which need not 
be on site


The rest of the units I mentioned are ATA -- analog telephone 
adapters, exporting FXS and FXO -- subscriber, and central 
office type lines, respectively -- which a plain old 'dumb' 
POTS phone's RJ-11 may be plugged


-- Russ herrold
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VOIP shopping time

2010-03-28 Thread R P Herrold


I've been handed a short deadline project that includes a part 
in which I need to provision and ship a SIP based VOIP unit to 
a FOSS conference site, which would then offer dial-in and 
free SIP 'listen only' of the proceedings on a conference 
bridge


But I am away from my office, with the weekend preventing me 
from calling and getting a unit shipped out to me tonight


I have spent the day poking around, trying to find a local 
vendor I can drive to, here in the Valley, and pick up a unit 
or two to qualify (or borrow for a couple of weeks)


No joy at Best Buy or Fry's.  Anyone have a source that comes 
to mind?


-- Russ herrold

Linksys PAP2-NA 2xFXS, 1xLAN port ATA VOIP Phone Adapter (SIP)
Linksys SPA1001 1xFXS, 1xLAN Analog VoIP Phone Adapter (SIP)
Linksys SPA2102-NA VoIP 2xFXS, 1xLAN, 1xWAN

... Linksys now being part of Cisco

Cisco SPA8800 IP Telephony Gateway
4 FXS, 4 FXO, or optionally 8 FXO

Grandstream HT-286 VOIP Adapter - PAP2  1xFXS
Grandstream HT-502, HT-503 1xLAN, 1xWAN, 1xFXS, 1xFXO ATA
Grandstream BT-201 1xLAN one line keyset, w 2.5 mm headset  jack
Grandstream GXW-4008 8 Port FXS IP Analog Gateway

Grandstream Budgetone-102 1xLAN one line keyset

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Best cable prices.

2010-02-05 Thread R P Herrold
On Fri, 5 Feb 2010, j...@actionline.com wrote:

 Someone just recommended monoprice.com for cables and I inadvertently

 information, why not have a menu/link on the PLUG page specifically for
 best sources and best prices?

 Who is the webmaster for the PLUG website?

the archives contain this answer, over and over

google: lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us webmaster of the PLUG site

Second cut is it really somethng that a webmaster needs to 
do, or would a wiki suffice -- their time is no lsee valuable 
to them than yours to you, and I dont se an offer to pay for 
such a service

and I think the broader issue is:  is this really Linux 
related [and thus PLUG], or something Google does better

-- Russ herrold
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RE: DNS

2009-11-29 Thread R P Herrold
On Sat, 28 Nov 2009, Bob Elzer wrote:

 You do know that you can use any DNS server you want to, right ?

two caveat's here:
1. a common policy to avoid load problems on 
nameservers is to limit relies to non-customer IP's to only 
those domains for which one is authoritative for
2. an ISP can use provide an interception of DNS 
answers fairly trivially for making sure a customer passes 
through a web view of a terms and conditions page (consider 
the usual intercepts one encounters at hotels, which may be 
done that way, along with other methods)
There is a crpytographically secure answer mechanism 
to prevent such false results from going undetected, but it is 
not yet in wide distribution.

--Russ herrold
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loading fresh system from rpm list?

2009-11-23 Thread R P Herrold
On Mon, 23 Nov 2009, Steven A. DuChene wrote:

 I have been requested to load a duplicate system based on the
 list of rpms present on the original system. This is a CentOS

 Does anyone know of a tool that would allow me to do a fresh
 load of a bare system based on a list of desired rpms?

master:
rpm -qa --qf '%{name}\n' | grep -v kernel | sort |  \
uniq   /tmp/rpmlist.txt

clone:
do a minimal install

scp master:/tmp/rpmlist.txt .

yum install rpmlist.txt

Then on the clone, run:
rpm -qa --qf '%{name}\n' | grep -v kernel | sort |  \
uniq   /tmp/rpmlist.txt

diff -u rpmlist.txt /tmp/rpmlist.txt

and
rpm -e any strays present on the clone,

and note anything not present, and repair to taste [this can 
happen over time as the items in a point respin change, or if 
a non-CentOS archive is used]

- Russ herrold
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Re: loading fresh system from rpm list?

2009-11-23 Thread R P Herrold
On Mon, 23 Nov 2009, Steven A. DuChene wrote:

 The original system is a VERY minimal install and that is what
 the owner wants me to mimic on the second system. He very carefully
 went through and removed any packages he did not absolutely need
 so rather than duplicate that work I thought I could somehow just
 work from his list of rpms on the original system.

I would worry that he broke dependencies unless he was using 
an audit tool.  To trust, but verify, see:

http://www.owlriver.com/tips/broken-system/

and I would like a pink pony.  ;)  As no such ponies are on 
my horizon, this paragraph was there for just that reason

http://www.herrold.com/pink-150x.jpg

I am also the initial reference author for the 'tiny centos' 
page, describing a methodology to getting to small installs

http://www.owlriver.com/tips/tiny-centos/

I'll probably re-work this email series up into another tip.

Dennis Kibbe also made me do some work on the weekend with a 
question he raised.   No rest for the weary.

http://wiki.centos.org/PackageManagement/Yum/Priorities

 Then on the clone, run:
  rpm -qa --qf '%{name}\n' | grep -v kernel | sort |  \
  uniq   /tmp/rpmlist.txt

  diff -u rpmlist.txt /tmp/rpmlist.txt

 and
  rpm -e any strays present on the clone,

 and note anything not present, and repair to taste [this can
 happen over time as the items in a point respin change, or if
 a non-CentOS archive is used]

We have a product we use for testing such stripped boxes, as 
well as for production, and we make it available to customers:

http://www.pmman.com/

-- Russ herrold
 (480) 389-6968
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x509's or ????

2009-11-17 Thread R P Herrold
On Tue, 17 Nov 2009, GK wrote:

 I am trying to figure out a way to tame the password beast. Is
 there something I can do along the lines of an SSL cert or a GPG
 key that I could use to sign the website in question and use that
 key as long as I want?

The internet police will not come and arrest you for using a 
self-signed SSL certificate with a very long expiration date 
-- I would probably avoid going into 2034, though as 
supporting subsystems may balk.

 I'm not picking anybody out but I bet Lisa answers first *grinz* ;)

yeah -- probably

-- Russ herrold
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Re: x509's or ????

2009-11-17 Thread R P Herrold
On Tue, 17 Nov 2009, Eric Cope wrote:

 I also think Lisa will have something to say... ducks /

I am probably beyond her range atm  ;0

- R
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Re: OT: Anyone know of a simple credit card billing option?

2009-10-31 Thread R P Herrold
On Sat, 31 Oct 2009, JD Austin wrote:

 I eventually went with Authorize.net with a real merchant account since it
 was too big of a risk selling some things on Paypal (they always side with
 the buyer).

hunh.  This has not been my experience, having qualified a 
merchant account for a couple of businesses under Pay Pal's 
clearing bank.  Actually, as I think about it, that merchant 
account have had not had a single disputed chargeback upheld 
in the last five years.

This does not mean that a 'hold' on funds is not placed during 
a dispute's resolution, but that is standard anywhere in the 
ISO (independent servicing organizations) part of the credit 
card industry [I worked as a consultant to a major national 
firm for many years in this space, on IT, PCI/CISP, and risk 
department automation matters].

An adequately capitalized and 'real' and non-adult content 
business addresses that 'risk' by having a 'throwaway' bank 
account (and at a financial instution not holding the business 
'normal' accounts to avoid a possible 'right of offset') 
behind the remittance account, and sucking funds out to taste. 
[Note that part of obtaining a merchant account usually 
includes signing a contract providing for guarantee by a 'deep 
pocket' behind an account, and an arbitration clause -- part 
of the cost of being a real business]

- Russ herrold
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Re: [securityalerts] New Moodle releases 1.9.6 and 1.8.10: Security fixes

2009-10-26 Thread R P Herrold
On Mon, 26 Oct 2009, Lisa Kachold wrote:

 Moodle announces more security issues.

 By sending out this advance security notice of known exploits to
 registered Moodle sites before the security fixes and press release
 it's clear that Moodle does not fully appreciate the state of web
 security today.   Literally thousands of web systems exploiters are
 already targeting school based Moodle php/mysql sites!

and so ?  so are sendmail and bind and the Linux kernel each 
of which announce their holes as well

 -- Forwarded message --
 From: mar...@moodle.com
 Subject: [securityalerts] New Moodle releases 1.9.6 and 1.8.10: Security fixes
 To: securityale...@lists.moodle.org

 You are getting this email because you subscribed to the Moodle security 
 alerts
 list when you registered your Moodle site.   (Thanks for registering, by the
 way!)

I would read this that moodle cares enough to run a security 
alerts ML exploder, and that they care enough to use it.  It 
seems like sour grapes to complain that the 'free soup' is not 
seasoned as you like it.

-- Russ herrold
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ot - I got a call today

2009-10-21 Thread R P Herrold
On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, mike havens wrote:

 This call was from Atlanta, Georgia. 770.999. was the number. After a
 little research I found out about ID Spoofing. Was this a soofed number? Or
 else is  a special number or something like that? The call was from
 someone verifying an application 'I' filled out.I don't think so!

perhaps spoofed, but is seems to be an assigned block

NANPA: Assigned Atlanta Nw, Georgia (Bellsouth Telecomm INC
DBA Southern Bell TEL  TEL)

per http://whocalled.us/lookup/770999

A person who controls a SS-7 switch through a PRI can do 
amazing things as to the displayed 'caller ID' to an end 
customer

-- Russ herrold
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Re: OT: TSA Secure Flight?

2009-10-05 Thread R P Herrold
On Fri, 2 Oct 2009, Dorian Monroe wrote:

 ...   If they don't have some kind of id, then 
 they're not flying.  Not much new about that.

well, no -- I lost a wallet, and at PHX just had my smiling 
face and a home-printed boarding pass as ID -- had to go 
through a secondary screening, but not more than an additional 
2 minutes.

-- Russ herrold
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Re: Time to Trade in My Blackberry

2009-08-31 Thread R P Herrold
On Mon, 31 Aug 2009, David Huerta wrote:

 With ammo prices being what they are now, maybe a small box of .45mm?

oohhh -- needle gun flechette ammo, straight out of Dickson's 
Dorsai series

-- Russ herrold
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Re: OT: Politics/Ethics: Operation PinWale - Obama Administration Seeks Emergency Control of the Internet

2009-08-30 Thread R P Herrold
On Sun, 30 Aug 2009, Lisa Kachold wrote:

 No,   I didn't notice it was right!

 My Bad!  OT is fine!

 Ryan, in case you didn't notice--there ARE NO RULES!

“If you are not one of us, you are one of them... They still 
live in a world that is based on rules; because of that, they 
are never going to be as strong or as fast as you can be.”

-- The Matrix
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Re: Sonoran Penguin

2009-08-05 Thread R P Herrold
On Wed, 5 Aug 2009, Joshua Zeidner wrote:

 Which is why practically nothing ever happens :(

 On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 5:26 PM, Lisa Kacholdlisakach...@obnosis.com wrote:
 Committee?

 No, we just make improvements.  No one gets to control things.

ignoring the top posting's misposition [ ;) ], that is because 
one cannot improve on perfection?

-- Russ herrold
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Re: Sonoran Penguin

2009-08-05 Thread R P Herrold
On Wed, 5 Aug 2009, Joshua Zeidner wrote:

  Nothing substantial can be organized unless there is clear
 management.  Who will determine what is an 'improvement' and what is a
 total failure?  PLUG needs to grow up and harness the talents that we
 currently have in abundance.  Stop with these silly games pretending
 no one is running the show.

Someone pays the domain renewal bill (if any); someone pays, 
or calls a favor, with the location the box is hosted; someone 
has root on that box.   Find those answers, and you have the 
throat to choke.

Unhappy with those answers?  Can't figure it out?  Fork and 
out-perform the incumbent.  Running code talks.  This is FOSS 
after all.

No slam on der Hans, or Lisa.  Running a LUG is hard; 
running it for years and years is even harder

Bring your own domain registration for a LUG, and I'll provide 
access to a host for a virthost website, mailing list, etc on 
a box that has in its past hosted Distrowatch, the Metro 
Detroit LUG, the Tampa LUG, a couple of defunct LUGs, and the 
Central OH LUG (currently).  Others as well, but I fergit.

But kvetching about it and not acting is just pointless.

-- Russ herrold
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Re: Sonoran Penguin

2009-08-04 Thread R P Herrold
On Tue, 4 Aug 2009, Joshua Zeidner wrote:

  I made it with GIMP.  How come no one liked it when I posted it
  I need to fire my PR manager.

I read email with [al]pine in a monochrome terminal, fast and 
low, and tossing read pieces out.  If it was in an early 
email, I missed it.  I cannot say that I saw repetition of a 
URL where I might view it, although the compliments seem to 
indicate its worth.

-- Russ herrold
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Re: Geek/Tech/Entrepreneur Stuff to do in PHX

2009-08-01 Thread R P Herrold
On Fri, 31 Jul 2009, Lisa Kachold wrote:

 Don't you know about Rule #999?

 Ignore all forum comments in regular press (outside of technical
 forums, where you ignore %50.

A sound rule.  I may quote you the next time The Register 
calls ;)

-- Russ herrold
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Re: Fedora rpmbuild direcories

2009-07-16 Thread R P Herrold
On Thu, 16 Jul 2009, Lisa Kachold wrote:

 Yes I remember the scripts!  That's a WHILE ago Russ!

 Brush ourselves off, we are in the company of FAME (dusty though it might be)!

* chuckle *  no flies nor dust on me -- stop in at #centos on 
freenode IRC any weekday for the show

I consider der Hans to be PLUG's most well known celebrity

Another pioneer, also in the Valley is Kirk Bauer (of autorpm) 
who has an updated Edition of his APress sysadmin book out
http://apress.com/book/view/9781430210597

-- Russ herrold
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Re: Fedora rpmbuild direcories

2009-07-15 Thread R P Herrold
On Wed, 15 Jul 2009, Lisa Kachold wrote:

 I believe that FC4 changed /usr/fedora to /src/redhat.
 When you import the kernel sources, you will then have a rpmbuild directory.

u ... actually I documented this practice and approach (a 
./rpmbuild/ in the user's home) long before that as part of a 
move to building all as non-root

http://www.oldrpm.org/hintskinks/buildtree/

seemingly in 2002, but it was common before that

see also:

http://www.owlriver.com/tips/non-root/

where I note at the end:

The techniques work from the earliest days of rpm, 
with minor changes. That is, it will work fine on: Red Hat 
Linux, Netwinder Linux, Alpha Linux, Aurora Linux, YellowDog 
Linux, cAos Linux, Red Hat Fedora and any other distribution 
which uses the RPM Package Manager.

For a while Fedora carried my little setup script in one of 
its packages.

-- Russ herrold
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Re: OT: [sorta]: from wired.com : Why Isn't Wireless [IP] Everywhere?

2009-06-09 Thread R P Herrold
On Tue, 9 Jun 2009, Mike Schwartz wrote:

I was thinking tangentially about this the other day -=- We 
forget it now, but recall the 'urgency' for the regulated 
telco's to 'add more wireline phone numbers' during the 
dial-up phase of the internet roll-in?

Wired number pool allocations with all the fax, dialup PPP 
links, pager, and related devices (I exclude cellular numbers 
here), and the pulling of copper in the 'last mile' 'outside' 
network were 'urgent', a crisis, and now are in the rate base 
we all end up paying for, essentially 'forever' for customers 
unable to totally drop wireline services [VOIP and wireless 
only go so far -- some businesses cannot take the risk of 
being 'unavailable']

The answer of course as to 'Why' usually includes a 
'TANSTAAFL' aspect ;)  What will WiMax, wireless, or whatever 
be supplanated by 'tomorrow', and what commercial company can 
'thread the needle' to provision it at just the right 'profit 
maximizing point'?

-- Russ herrold
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OT: What does this symbol mean §

2009-05-21 Thread R P Herrold
On Thu, 21 May 2009, Josef Lowder wrote:

 Can anyone tell me what this symbol means?

 §

a 'section' mark, in a legal context

-- Russ herrold
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Re: List of Command Line Tools

2009-05-19 Thread R P Herrold
On Tue, 19 May 2009, James Mcphee wrote:

 I have an admin that loves to open bunches of screen sessions and leave them
 open forever.  This eventually kills the box, obviously.  Screen is a great
 tool that does not in any way prevent people from doing goofy things.

Why should the application perform a task which ulimit can be 
configured to address, if there is an abuse?  ... and a 
'sysadmin' who does such needs after being appraised of the 
issue, not to be trusted with admin rights.  Again the 
solution is not in the space of the tool, but in the space of 
the management of the affected system ;)

-- Russ herrold
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Re: OT: Most fun in Arizona?

2009-05-16 Thread R P Herrold
On Sat, 16 May 2009, Eric Shubert wrote:

 If you're in the area, you might want to check out Biosphere II
 (http://www.b2science.org/visitor-tours.html). Haven't done this one myself.

I considered Biosphere a big fat nothing and with nothing 
around it as a fallback worth seeing [a wasted trip to a 
worthless stop]; much better to stay in town, and take the 
time to spend a half-day at Taliesin West

http://www.franklloydwright.org/t_west.html

If you take the time to read a bit about Frank Lloyd Wright 
and his work first and check out a 'coffee table' book or two 
first, you'll probably be able to convice the tour leader to 
let you 'hang back' and drink in the energy in the building. 
Next trip I'll probably do the 'Behind the Scenes' trip.

I talking my way into being able to self guide this way at 
the Oak Park home of Wright a couple weeks ago, and found that 
well worthwhile.

-- Russ herrold
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Your modest proposaal; was: Re: Free Webhost

2009-05-10 Thread R P Herrold
On Sun, 10 May 2009, Ed wrote:

 Would anyone like to start a state initiative that limits our ISPs to
 managing only the bandwidth of their service as provided to users
 (enforcing Network Neutrality),

require that all customers must be
 provided only static IP addresses, and full port ranges* - with rare
 technical  temporary exceptions granted by the corporation
 commission,

the option to the customer of IPv6 or IPv4 at no cost
 diffrerential as of 2010

, and finally that any customer that is
 experiencing a to the property line/to the wall monopoly on wire or
 optical line based service may elect to be covered under a corporation
 commision managed, rate  service monoply controle.

Would you like a pony with that as well?

Seriously, there is no such thing as a free lunch and passing 
a law to have the govenment entity, rather than the 
marketplace, add requirements on what may be offered, is a 
recipe for higher prices, and less features.

IPv4 vs. IPv6 pricing are simply two different kettles of fish 
-- I've been wresting with ARIN BGP block pricing issues this 
week, for a new 'slice' product -- and while I would LIKE a 
pony, it's not gonna happen.

I can probably give all my customers IPv6 at once -- but the 
infrastructure maturity, and application maturity, and tech 
abilities matureity for a pure IPv6 world are, as a practical 
matter, not there yet.  Prove it to yourself - can you run 
your residential net entirely IPv6 with sendmail/exim/postfis, 
and bind/tinydns, and ssh, and your dhcp server dishing out 
only IPv6 content.  As the problems are still there, there is 
a consumer desire for IPv4 for good reasons.

I would LIKE to be able to dish out contiguous blocks, and to 
reassign customers here and there within an allocation, but 
the truth of the matter is that there is overhead default 
route, network and network broadcast over head which varies, 
depending on the number of IP's assigned.  Solving allocations 
most efficiently is a 'knapsack packing' problem with the 
additional constraint that one has to co-ordinate changes with 
customers which may have nameserver details not easily 
changed.  TANSTAAFL

Having a monopoly provider out there adds yet another provider 
to compete against, and as a practical matter, they will 
either have subsidies of exonomies of scale that will eat 
alive a small niche provider such as I am affiliated with, 
into extincton.  Then you'll have only that 'choice' to turn 
to.  Wanna bet how FOSS friendly it will be?

- Russ herrold
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Re: OT: Problems with GoDaddy SSL cert request

2009-05-07 Thread R P Herrold
On Thu, 7 May 2009, Eric Shubert wrote:

 I've never been able to reach a real person at GD (phone or email).

strange -- I have a couple hundred registrations scattered 
among three businsses, and we have no problem reaching them 
at the stated phone numbers -- LD for us, but a local PHX call

-- Russ herrold
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Cross-platform virtual meetings

2009-03-23 Thread R P Herrold
On Mon, 23 Mar 2009, Joe wrote:

 My company is in the process of trying to set up virtual meetings,
 including things like screencasting/sharing, voice, video, whiteboard,
 etc. The office is all Mac, our clients are mostly Windows, and I'm on
 Linux.

I pitched something like this for the CentOS GSoC application 
-- see:  http://wiki.centos.org/GSOC/Projects at
Reference VVW Squawk Box
as I am pretty sure that FOSS space does not have a nice 
bundel doing all this (although the pieces and parts seem to 
be all pretty well done).  As the CentOS project was not 
selected in last week's round of projects, we'll not have an 
intern working this issue

BUT,  nothing says doing the further task decomposition and 
implementation has to be a GSoC project, though

-- Russ herrold
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Re: SELinux vs. AppArmor vs. Standard vs. What?

2008-10-31 Thread R P Herrold
On Sat, 1 Nov 2008, Ted Gould wrote:

 I'm going to top post, you'll have to deal :)

:0 w
* ^List-Id:.*plug-discuss\.lists\.plug\.phoenix\.az\.us
* ^From:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
/dev/null

no problem -- this procmail rule will handle the matter

-- Russ herrold

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Re: SELinux vs. AppArmor vs. Standard vs. What?

2008-10-31 Thread R P Herrold
On Fri, 31 Oct 2008, Craig White wrote:

 On Sat, 1 Nov 2008, Ted Gould wrote:

 I'm going to top post, you'll have to deal :)

 I suspect as iPhone's and other handheld convenient devices 
 become more prevalent, the top post will become normal and 
 accepted.

Yeah -- that is the argument that Notes and Outlook uses put 
forth; Gmail too.  But none of those were Ted's MUA:

 X-Mailer: Evolution 2.24.1

Having and using Gmail, and both a Blackberry and an iTouch 
which I use for email, I assure that all support trimming, 'at 
the bottom', and 'interspersed' posting in a straightforward 
manner.

 I'm not sure that kill file is always the best answer and 
 Ted Gould is pretty knowledgeable and one whose postings I 
 definitely want to read.

I'm pretty sure that consciously flouting known conventions of 
a mailing list [regardless of a smiley] is an indicator that 
the person doing it prefers to burden everyone else, rather 
than do what that person 'knows' the expectation is.

If you leave food out on the counters, you get roaches; if you 
reward improper behaviour, the exceptions swallow up the rule, 
and entropy wins sooner.  If the rule is wrong, lobby to 
change it; my vote on Ted's proposal to dump 'don't top post' 
was stated publicly in my post.

-- Russ herrold
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Re: ISP Infedelity / Touchy-Feelly Photons

2008-10-26 Thread R P Herrold
On Sun, 26 Oct 2008, Matt Graham wrote:

 After a long battle with technology, der.hans wrote:
 Am 26. Okt, 2008 schwätzte Tuna so:
 I don't know which ISP is the least evil and corrupt around here,

 Common problem.  They're all evil and corrupt, but some of 
 them are less evil than others.

wow -- harsh, coming from der.hans -- considering I manage an 
ISP and all as part of what I do.

Complaints are all monitored, and root cause analysis 
performed when needed.  Weekly management review of 
metrics.  Rates are published, and honored. Ombudsman 'fairy 
god-parent' 'make goods' as needed.

You must have ended hanging out with the wrong folks -- 
usually happens becuase people consider ISP services fungible 
and buy solely on price considreations.

-- Russ herrold
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Re: ISP Infedelity / Touchy-Feelly Photons

2008-10-26 Thread R P Herrold
On Sun, 26 Oct 2008, der.hans wrote:

 wow -- harsh, coming from der.hans -- considering I manage an

 Actually, those weren't my words. Matt was replying to tuna at that point,
 but using an email from me to do it :).

my apology -- the comment of attributon is of course 
withdrawn.

-- Russ herrold
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Re: ISP Infedelity / Touchy-Feelly Photons

2008-10-26 Thread R P Herrold
On Sun, 26 Oct 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 I too run a wireless ISP.

hmmm ... an ISP I consulted at tried deployment of a non FCC 
type certified 802.11 solution a few years ago, but I was 
uneasy with their casual attitude, and certainly did not 
understand the business model.  Goodness, that was late 
2000.  They are gone now.

Another I worked with used the Motorola kit which is duly 
licensed, but it seemed too fragile around lightning and 
again, they are now gone.

 I could use some help shaping my line though...

I assume you mean the non-connectivity part.  That is the 
anchor which makes the case for using a local, rather than a 
national 'rackshack'

 Enrique

 PS: My ISP runs exclusively in Linux.  Mostly LFS.

As the customer is always right, we offer whatever the 
customer wants on the colo side of the shop; the Windows boxes 
are in migration into virtual instances, so we can move them 
between datacenters, after a local week long power outage 
exposed problems in one 'data hotel's backup power 
implementation.

For hysterical, historical reasons, billing is in Optigold 
(OS/X), but we batch post process invoice images, etc into 
well-named PDFs, and then out to the site, and back onto Linux 
hardware.  An ancient Sun running SunOS 2.4 ? was still 
doing DNS and the cutomer provisioning code (written back in 
1994 ?) in perl 4 until a re-write earlier this year. 
Linux everywhere else (CentOS actually) of course.

-- Russ herrold
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Re: gnuplot - HTML

2008-09-03 Thread R P Herrold
On Wed, 3 Sep 2008, Austin Godber wrote:

 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 My boss needs a moving rotating gnuplot to work on a web
 page.  We saw some docs point to some installable 
 severlets and API's but they were dead links.

 Has anyone done gnuplot on a web page?

 Can it be a video or animated gif or does it have to be interactive?

 I haven't seen anything on interactive gnuplot embedded in 
 HTML.  That would be interesting.

Check John Bollinger's Bollinger Bands and related websites -- 
the handles at the sides of the plots permit dialling through 
presentations.
http://www.BollingerBands.com/
http://www.EquityTrader.com/

Also the home gnuplot website has a rather nice collections of 
screenshots.
http://gnuplot.info/

There is also an R project web driven tool, but I forget the 
project name at the moment.

-- Russ herrold
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GCC C/C++ application to run on Windows

2008-08-15 Thread R P Herrold
On Fri, 15 Aug 2008, keith smith wrote:

 I'm thinking of writing a small application that can run on 
 both Linux and Windows written in GCC C/C++ that will 
 utilize MySql running on Linux .

sounds like the 'trading shim, about which I presented at PLUG 
a while back
http://www.trading-shim.org/

 Initially I need the application to run on Windows XP or 
 Vista and connect to the Linux box to access MySql.

* nod *

 Is it possible to write an application using GCC that will 
 run both on Linux and Windows?  If so what should I be 
 looking into?

sure -- use Cygwin, for the Windows side, and your favorite 
Linux distribution.  For extra credit, do it on OS/X as well. 
We also build the doco under TeX, and emit pdf's at the end of 
the process.

We have scripts which build:
Debian testing  shim-debian.sh
CentOS 4 and 5  shim-builder.sh
OS/Xshim-OSX.sh
Windows shim-Win.sh
all from a common tarball, at:
ftp://ftp.owlriver.com/pub/local/COLUG/

We talk through getting the shim going on Windows (until 
blocked by immaturity in the Windows C++ environment [not 
likely to be encountered, but we have sepcial needs), in the 
mailing list archive at:
http://www.trading-shim.org/pipermail/ts-general/2008-May/thread.html

 Is there a better approach?

None of which I am aware.

-- Russ herrold
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Re: GCC C/C++ application to run on Windows

2008-08-15 Thread R P Herrold
On Fri, 15 Aug 2008, David Bendit wrote:

 Using some pre-compiler flags and logic, it wouldn't be too hard to
 write code that would compile on both systems, though you cannot run the
 same executable on both systems.

The shim largely does it (in C++) without #IFDEF h*ll -- the 
trick is to use interfaces at the right abstraction levels.

-- Russ herrold
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Safely Landed in Ohio

2008-07-30 Thread R P Herrold
On Tue, 22 Jul 2008, Austin Godber wrote:

 I just thought I would mention that I am now in Ohio and settling in.  A
 syndicated summary of my trip out and first few weeks here is available
 here:

 http://friendfeed.com/godber

good news -- there is a COLUG meeting today (Wednesday) 
covering iScsi
   http://www.colug.net/

-- Russ herrold
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Multiple Boot from PXE Scenario

2008-06-12 Thread R P Herrold
On Thu, 29 May 2008, Jason Spatafore wrote:

Sorry about the delay -- I've been travelling, just returned, 
and am ploughing through the email compost heap ...

 1. I would like to use a system where servers can be 
 PXEBooted to the network.

doable for any reasonable hardware, thanks in part the Intel 
Wired for Management - initatives back in 1998 and 1999 - see:
http://www.owlriver.com/tips/pxe-install/
and of course H Peter Arvin's Syslinux efforts.

 2. The system needs to be able to boot from image files 
 after being PXEBooted. For example, image files can/will be 
 .iso (CD-ROM), .usb (USB Drive Images created with dd), .img 
 for floppy images, and .dvd for DVD based images.

Not sure I would use 'dd', but doable.  See Method C at:
http://www.owlriver.com/tips/hands-off/
but rather than upgrading a local HD image, chain-boot into 
the next (post selection time) operation system setup.  We use 
that initial image to collect the desired profile, and to 
'prime the pump' to use the MAC address NEXT PXE reboot

 Here's how I see the system working. A technician boots to 
 the PXE environment and is presented a menu...say the menu 
 is asking for an 8 digit number. The technician inputs the 8 
 digit number (12345678) and a script of some kind locates 
 the corresponding image file.

Once I had posted the desired profile, I would THEM use the 
MAC address.  I do something like this to emit 'custom' 
kickstart configurations on the fly.  See:
http://www.owlriver.com/tips/tiny-centos/

The script then determines the 
 type of image that is used based off the extension. In this 
 example, let's say the filename is 12345678.iso. The script 
 now knows that it must use iso9660 for the filesystem. The 
 script then loads that iso file and the system boots just 
 like it was running from a CD-ROM.

The 'smarts' can live on the back end in the PXE/Next server 
side and be of arbitrary complexity.  Databases, LDAP, and all 
the modern tools to tie into a LAMP server are MUCH easier to 
develop, debug, and handle on the server side than at the 
clients.

 Now, everything I have read so far states that this is 
 impossible due to the way systems boot.

ummm ... no.  Been there, done that, have the Tee-shirt.

 Does anybody have ideas on how to get something like this to 
 work? Can you boot an ISO file *as if* it was a direct 
 attached CD-ROM drive? Can you do the same with other image 
 types?

Yup -- done in xen instances all the time; before that, fond 
in LTSP applications -- no reason one cannot have a standard 
(and thin) Xen Dom0, and any DomU you wish -- Linux, Windows, 
whatever.

good luck -- very doable.

-- Russ herrold
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Re: Microsoft joins OLPC

2008-05-18 Thread R P Herrold
On Sat, 17 May 2008, Joshua Zeidner wrote:

  There were a lot of indications that something was amiss at OLPC,
 over a year ago there was this story:

  
 http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasicarticleId=9054618

a story datelined December 13 2007 is 'over a year ago'? My 
calendars must be running slow.  ;)

- R
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Re: CentOS for tomorrow as well

2008-04-11 Thread R P Herrold
On Thu, 10 Apr 2008, Mike Schwartz wrote:

 Yay, someone from my new LUG visiting my old LUG!

When 'der Hans' and I were talking about topics, I gave him a 
link to any number of topics I can discuss without further 
preparation from my consulting practice:
http://www.owlriver.com/tips/
which also outlinks to:
http://www.colug.net/presentations/
and he chose 'CentOS'

I find that LUG people are really interested in 'real world' 
work done using Open Source tools for paying customers, and so 
'sanitize' work done for customers, publish the sources to 
fully meet (surpass actually) GPL obligations at:
http://www.owlriver.com/projects/ORC/
and write up some presentation notes as documentation and 
present at the next LUG my travels take me to.  The page at:
http://www.colug.net/lugs.php
was initially assembled by me for MY convenience so I can 
schedule trips to match local LUG meeting timetables.

 I recall at least one occasion when this CentOS guy (R 
 Herrold) attended a West Side PLUG meeting, and his 
 knowledge of (in that case) licensing concepts was so great 
 that the speaker (wisely I think) relied a lot on audience 
 participation, to get optimal benefit from Mr. Herrold's 
 knowledge.

I tend to have strong opinions on FOSS and am trained as and 
enjoy being an advocate [U Mich Law School ;) -- but as I was 
there, I was also writing a LISP to implement RPG II printmask 
drivers on a Sycor 340 -- a very early 8080];  I always try to 
be respectful to local leaders, and I greatly respect 'der 
Hans' efforts on behalf of the Linux / BSD / LOPSA 'nix 
community here in the Valley; locals may not know it, but he 
casts a long shadow, and I listen as he speaks.

I might not attend tonight (I live *way* on the W side...)
 but IMHO it should be very worth while

Hope all had fun.  The 'aftermeeting' lasted another hour in 
the parking lot  ;)

-- Russ herrold
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Re: east side meeting and asterisk stuff

2008-03-29 Thread R P Herrold
On Fri, 28 Mar 2008, Geek Girl wrote:

 Lol it has noting to do with the spec file it has to do with 
 trixbox not being stable...

... but 'trixbox' is not asterisk;  in the #centos IRC channel 
on freenode, where I might be found daily, my lieutenants and 
I regularly are beseiged by refugees with the *BROKEN* 
downstream fork, of CentOS, called trixbox (and others too)

The problem was sufficently common that we have a whole wiki 
page devoted to the problem:
http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/BrokenVserver

Asterisk packagings are tricky as well, as most do not get 
along with the packaging system, but want to unroll and build 
tarballs as root (another *very bad idea*).  Mine do not share 
that defect, and will build as non-root, and run just fine.

 for example their 2.4 branch was pretty stable but now they released 2.6 and
 overwrote the 2.4 repositories and everything updates to 2.6. Plus 2.4 was
 still buggy...They are actually in the process of testing a nother revision
 this eve at trixbox but they are even skeptical of weather or not it is
 fixed.  Plus they they are known for hosing their repos regularly...

Then all you have done is confirmed that the trixbox 
developers cannot write an effective test plan, and cannot 
identify and fix regressions.  Or maintain repositories ;)

Seems to me this is a good reason not to use the particular 
product; or to get involved and displace the non-competents 
(if possible); or failing all that, fork and do it right 
(think: OpenPBX).  Brian Adams ? at OpenPBX had me speak at 
their 'ClueCon' convention a couple years ago about CentOS and 
telephony, and the OS in use split about 50:50 between CentOS 
and Debian, from a show of hands;

- Russ herrold

links from prior email:

 http://wiki.centos.org/PackageManagement/Rpm

 ftp://ftp.owlriver.com/pub/mirror/ORC/asterisk/

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east side meeting and asterisk stuff

2008-03-28 Thread R P Herrold
On Fri, 28 Mar 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 I recommend PIAF because you can see it from the source 
level without having to deal with crappy RPM's

If the rpms are poorly written (in their .spec file, one 
assumes), why not amend them;  Writing a good .spec file is 
reasonably trivial.

see:
http://wiki.centos.org/PackageManagement/Rpm

or use mine;  if you have a problem with their form, and it is 
a well formed objection, I'll glady improve them.  Just send a 
private email.

ftp://ftp.owlriver.com/pub/mirror/ORC/asterisk/

This set is a bit old in the ersions [I'll update at some 
point], but has worked here forom omnths without so much as a 
quiver.

  of course you may have issues with the RPM packaging 
system;  I can see how using the sources, so you cannot ask a 
package database when a new exploit comes along, to see if you 
are vulnerable, might be prefered, as it offers the 
opportunity to wade through sources and versions over and over 
again.  Job security, so to speak.  RPM managed sysadmin is 
boring.  ;)

-- Russ herrold
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Re: Getting a new package added to CentOS

2008-02-25 Thread R P Herrold
On Mon, 25 Feb 2008, Mike Schwartz wrote:

 On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 2:13 PM, Charles Jones
 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  Craig White wrote:
  On Mon, 2008-02-25 at 14:01 -0700, Charles Jones wrote:
  Craig White wrote:
  On Mon, 2008-02-25 at 13:57 -0700, Charles Jones wrote:
  I'm on a quest to get Hobbit Monitor ( 
 http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/hobbitmon ) added to 
 several linux

'Lots of back and forth with speculation without asking or 
research', I was thinking as I read the thread.  I'll speak 
only from my personal knowledge and observations, and would 
note that this in no way constitutes any sort of statement by 
any one but yours truly.

 distros. Someone has already gotten it into Mandriva and 
 Debian. I sort of volunteered to package it for Fedora 
 (hopefully fc9), and CentOS.

 I believe that dag is starting to bundle for EPEL too...

nope -- He was driven away with torches and pitchforks ;) -- 
the details are painful and recurrent with the Fedora folks 
holding to a policy of 'their way or the highway' as I see it.

This battle has raged since before CentOS existed, and at the 
end of the day, the long time 'independent packagers' cannot 
help but get tired of being a punching bag for the political 
nitpicking and posturing of the Fedora folks (who seem to 
posture well, but 'play well with others', less well.)  Then 
the packagers stop wasting their time on fedora, and turns 
back to productive pursuits (like actually packaging, running 
build systems, and the like).  I carry 529 packagings, it 
seems.  'Most all work with all CentOS versions:
 http://www.owlriver.com/projects/ORC/

Inter-repository co-operation is useful, as it prevents 
complaints from a casual user; clearly externally marking 
which repositority provided which package in a simple
rpm -q (packagename)
Such efforts have been torpedoed by 'onlookers' with 
@redhat.com in their email addresses.  Transcripts make this 
clear.

  What's the difference between EPEL and CentOSPlus ?

At the end of the day -- EPEL is the captive of Red Hat; the 
independent packaging efforts are not.  Red Hat committed to, 
and then backed away from its commitment to set up a 
freestanding foundation to make Fedora decisions -- their 
right, as they own it lock stock and barrel.

cAos, and later the centos-sub project to cAos (later spun out 
as a free-standing project) were a reaction for a need for 
freedom for RH derived RPM based packaging distributions.

https://www.redhat.com/archives/epel-devel-list/2007-May/msg00156.html
https://www.redhat.com/archives/epel-devel-list/2007-June/msg00031.html

There as a meeting at FOSDEM last weekend -- perhaps things 
will get better.

We'll see.. I've not heard a formal report yet.

my $0.02

-- Russ Herrold
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Re: OT: accounting via spreadsheet

2008-01-31 Thread R P Herrold
On Tue, 29 Jan 2008, keith smith wrote:

 You have quite the credentials there.

I was just feeling dog tired at the prospect of doing it 
again/  ')

- R
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Re: OT: accounting via spreadsheet

2008-01-31 Thread R P Herrold
On Thu, 31 Jan 2008, keith smith wrote:

 Seems like we are re-writing things every 10 years and that 
 cycle might speedup.

I thot 'internet time' ended at the dot com blow-up a few 
years back. ;)

- R
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Re: OT: accounting via spreadsheet

2008-01-29 Thread R P Herrold
On Tue, 29 Jan 2008, keith smith wrote:

 Is there a need for an accounting application that will give 
 the user access to their data?

 What platform would it run on?  Win or Linux or both?


not sure who that was directed to -- my reply below:

 R P Herrold [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Mon, 28 Jan 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Once upon a time I had the job of integrating QuickBooks 
 data with our online order processing system (PHP/MySQL 
 application). snip

 thanks!!

I have worked in heterogenous environments (dumb serial 
terminal, Windows putty, *nix terminal program, mac OS/X 
terminal program) providing accounting (GL, AR, AP, check 
writing, financial reporting, custom reports, PR) (and indeed 
full shop floor management: Job costing, BOM, scheduling, pick 
lists, bill of lading) with a TUI interface with a couple of 
solutions: ROI, and Add+On, running respectively on HP-UX, and 
SCO (pre Daryl);  I've written parts of over the years since 
s/360 days in COBOL (PR, inventory management, scheduling).

My particular desire it to be able to ditch QuickBooks (basic 
accounting [therefore not even with tamper resistant 
journalling], and checkwriting) and by so doing, poweroff the 
Windows 95 box I keep alive for it, and to move to a FOSS 
solution, but to retain the ability to have a accounting 
professional not 'ream me' (by requiring re-keying all from 
scratch) if/when I need that accounting professional to 
'bless' my books and the reports produced therefrom.

I _can_ write it again; I just don't _want_ to do it alone nor 
should it need to be done from scratch in the FOSS world at 
this late date ;)

-- Russ herrold
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Re: Semi-OT: Referral for Linux-friendly accountant

2008-01-28 Thread R P Herrold
On Mon, 28 Jan 2008, der.hans wrote:

 Am 28. Jan, 2008 schwätzte R P Herrold so:

 I do almost everything via my credit union's web interface. I'd rather
 have support for GNUCash to kick off the transaction electronically.

 To each his/her own :).

ouch -- web UI's are usually not 'touch-type' friendly

 Actually I was in N Scottsdale when I wrote that, but yes,

 Were your ears ringing? I mentioned several times this 
 weekend having someone sit in and correct my whole 
 presentation as I was giving it :).

;)  yeah -- the band at the Pinnacle Peak Patio was crankin' 
out both Western AND Country music Sat night.

- R
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Re: OT: accounting via spreadsheet

2008-01-28 Thread R P Herrold
On Mon, 28 Jan 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Once upon a time I had the job of integrating QuickBooks data with our
 online order processing system (PHP/MySQL application).  We set up
 scripts to periodically dump relevant QB data, parse it, and import it
snip
 anymore.  Just thought that might at least give you a new set of terms
 to Google for.

thanks!!

-- Russ herrold
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Re: plug] Re: Semi-OT: Referral for Linux-friendly accountant

2008-01-27 Thread R P Herrold
On Sun, 27 Jan 2008, der.hans wrote:

 Am 22. Jan, 2008 schwätzte R P Herrold so:
 I need that laser check printing capability, and want two way
 import /export, though ;)

 Were it supported and in GNUCash would FreeCheck do what you need?
 http://www.sandeen.net/freecheck/
 Looks like it hasn't changed in 5 years.

Yes - - I held this and one other project in mind when I was 
writing [my mention of LaTeX miniboxes to handle font 
alignment, was because my testing with one - I fergit which, 
had 'ragged' spacing on the MICR line, which I know from 
experience causes bank rejects and special handling fees ;( ]

 I have offered bounties in the past;  this thread from #centos
 at irc.freenode.net months ago; I affirm and renew it here.

 We need to concentrate the bounties and requests for service 
 such that someone sees the business opportunity in 
 supporting Free Software and open data formats.

 I need an accountant who'll work with Free Software. It 
 sounds like Vaughn does as well. You're $elsewhere, but 
 still need the Free Software aspect even if you don't need 
 an accountant in the Phoenix area.

Actually I was in N Scottsdale when I wrote that, but yes, 
when one needs an accountant, one needs one admitted in the 
$STATE the services are needed.  State by state, and political 
subdivision variances are to overwhelming, to pay for an 
account to be good at all of them.  Familiarity with local 
practice and requirements makes sense in selecting any 
professional services provider.

 I don't need to import data from a proprietary format, but 
 it would be awesome if we could move people from QuickBooks 
 to some Free Software program.

'Chicken and egg' problem to some degree in assembling the 
'critical mass' for any accounting firm to make the jump is 
providing competency in the market of servicing true FOSS 
accounting packages -- By articulating desire for an import / 
export interchange solution, my thought was that the 
accountant would not need to leave their comfortable fog of a 
familiar format.

A son in law is on the home stretch of a Masters of Accounting 
program, and set to work for one of the 'Big Four'.  He 
reports that part of his coursework last semester included 
getting good with a SQL-Server explorer / wizard which had 
pre-programmed routines to spot common accounting fraud tricks 
(gaps in PO or Check Number series; gaps in transaction dates; 
suspicious payee similarities; and so forth)  but practically 
focussing on where the real world usage is.

I assume that the corner accountant has similar tools to take 
the QB accountant interchange reports, and to 'cook' tax 
filings and so forth out of them.

-- Russ Herrold
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Re: Semi-OT: Referral for Linux-friendly accountant

2008-01-22 Thread R P Herrold
On Tue, 22 Jan 2008, Vaughn Treude wrote:

 Randy Melder wrote:
 Why stop at GNU Cash? You could always hand-write your ledgers,
 invoices, PLs, and Balance Sheets. Then you're truly liberated.

 I mean, why give them more money? They've stolen from you at least
 $250 over the last 10 years. Those evil-doers. How can anyone run a
 business with thieves like that?

chuckle -- I *still* run an 'ancient' Windows 95 box, which 
has moved through multiple chassis and hard drives (using 
rsync to move the entire system image from a failing drive to 
the next one [three such moves so far], and 'grub' to select 
booting into the W95 image rather than the Linux (CentOS) 
installation), __just__ for QuickBooks, and the laser check 
MICR printing print filter program I have used.

As I have accounting data going continuously back to 1992 from 
when I formerly used an earlier TUI Quicken, I am not eager to 
move from something that does not match those abilities.

 But it's not the money, it's the ownership of data issue. I 
 would willingly pay twice as much [$1000 was quoted] for a 
 program that would extract the data from QB and put them 
 into an open format than to get the QB update.

Writing such an extractor is clearly doable (and as we shall 
see in a moment with the emergence of a SDK, and a willingness 
to move to later versions), probably not _that_ hard to do.

I need that laser check printing capability, and want two way 
import /export, though ;)


I have offered bounties in the past;  this thread from #centos 
at irc.freenode.net months ago; I affirm and renew it here.

15:13 orc_orc LoF^[Lawbringer]: not at all -- I don't use 
Windows at all and in the main have not since 1995, except for 
a lone Win95 box printing MICR checks in QuickBooks on an 
isolated subnet

15:14 * Evolution shows orc_orc the wonders of gnu-cash

15:14 Zathrus Evolution: quickbooks != quicken

15:14 orc_orc Evolution: will it catch Windows printer driver 
calls and do HP LJ 6 font substitutions to print MICR ink 
checks directly? [the thought being to set QB up inside Wine]

15:15 Evolution orc_orc: probably not.

15:15 orc_orc if so, and if it can read the backfiles in QB, 
I am so gone

15:15 @hughesjr orc_orc: it will if you take the source code 
and write something to do that :P

15:15 orc_orc hughesjr: I will do so in my copious spare 
time  ;)

15:17 orc_orc I hereby offer a standing bounty of $400 for 
addition of those two features to gnucash, with conformance 
tests being acceptance of checks by my bank's clearance engine 
without reject; and import, use, export and availability of my 
QB company data

[Intuit formerly published a 'qif' -- quickbooks interchange 
format for (hopefully) lossless imports and exports; but to my 
understanding has moved to a SDK, in an 'Intuit Developers 
Network': http://developer.intuit.com/ -- I suspect my version 
is 'too early' per the supported version chart at: 
http://developer.intuit.com/QuickBooksSDK/Briefing/?id=110]

15:23 orc_orc Evolution: yes -- and a filter can solve that, 
Zathrus: there is a prefectly fine MICR font for latex, and 
with [LaTeX] miniboxes, one can control positioning just fine 
-- trick is to add a filter/interpreter and I have not done it 
or tasked a PFY -- thus the bounty offer

===

I was thinking then of the bounties which appear from time 
to time in the 'wine' project and Code Weavers CrossOver 
space: http://www.codeweavers.com/

The QuickBook series is largely supported; the laser print 
queue interceptor I use is _very_ Windows printer queue 
internals specific, and not listed
http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?letter=q;

I have no problem 'paying' for open source development; 
This question about a 'business ready' replacement or 
companion to QB has come up a couple times on this list;  the 
'downside risk' need to be able to 'export from QB' the 
accountant review copies {and the less difficult laser check 
printing MICR issue} are my stoppoints.

Perhaps this list can get a large enough mass of 'bounties' 
together?

http://www.gnucash.org/ is dead atm for me, although the 
domain is not expired, so I cannot cruise and see of there is 
a wider community of bounties may already be already present 
there.

-- Russ herrold
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Re: Presentations in Linux (live whiteboarding)

2007-09-09 Thread R P Herrold
On Thu, 6 Sep 2007, Ted Gould wrote:

 [1] http://xournal.sourceforge.net/

a lovely find ... packaged up into SRPM for for CentOS 4 and 5 
(and should work on the Fedora crowd's boxes too) at:

 ftp://ftp.owlriver.com/pub/local/ORC/xournal/

Thanks, Ted.
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