Re: VT100 FreeBSD spreadsheet with data manipulation connections

On 7/4/09, Bill Campbell wrote: > On Fri, Jul 03, 2009, Kelly Jones wrote: >>I'm looking for a "command-line" (VT100) FreeBSD spreadsheet that has >>data manipulation connections. > > One that I have used off and on for years is ``sc''. It's >

VT100 FreeBSD spreadsheet with data manipulation connections

I'm looking for a "command-line" (VT100) FreeBSD spreadsheet that has data manipulation connections. That is: other applications can edit the spreadsheet (via some API), and the spreadsheet can run commands when cells are edited. My goal: create a VT100 spreadsheet-like interface to sqlite3 (and

Re: Using ctorrent or other program to seed a torrent

ilate technology. We feel that resistance to new ideas and technology is unwise and ultimately futile. On 6/28/09, Kelly Jones wrote: > I know how to use ctorrent to create a torrent file, but how do I > actually seed the resulting file so that others can get it, and how do > I 'regis

Using ctorrent or other program to seed a torrent

I know how to use ctorrent to create a torrent file, but how do I actually seed the resulting file so that others can get it, and how do I 'register' myself w/ a tracker so that others will know what IP address to connect to, etc? Can ctorrent seed torrents, or do I need another program for that?

Re: Need a filesystem with "unlimited" inodes

On 6/8/09, Kelly Jones wrote: > What UFS-like filesystem has unlimited inodes, but is a drop-in > replacement for ext3, and is fairly easy to configure? Thanks to everyone who replied. I'm using 100+ rented cloud servers to do stuff for me and rsync the results back to a server I own

Need a filesystem with "unlimited" inodes

What UFS-like filesystem has unlimited inodes, but is a drop-in replacement for ext3, and is fairly easy to configure? Is UFS2 no longer considered the "best" general-use filesystem? Reason I ask: I'm going to create many small (~1K) files on a 100G disk and thus need at least 100M inodes. "newf

Waiting for a process to die

How do I wait for a specific process to die? I want to do something like: waitpid 1234&&(echo "done!" | Mail -s "PROC DONE" kelly.terry.jo...@gmail.com) I'm sure this is trivial, but I can't find a way to do it. I wrote a Perl script that checks every second if /proc/pid exists, but that only wo

Re: Customize .vacation.msg to include subject, sender, etc?

Woops, that's not quite what I meant, sorry. I meant something like: From: some...@somewhere Subject: Re: {subject of message you sent} Dear {email address of person who sent message}, You recently sent an email to {to address of messages}... and so on. I realize the to address is often fixed,

Customize .vacation.msg to include subject, sender, etc?

I'm using 'vacation' as an autoresponder, but can't seem to customize .vacation.msg to include the subject, sender, recipient, etc. Is there a way to do this? If not, is there a better autoresponder I can use? I realize I could write one myself, but I'd prefer to use an existing solution. -- W

VM server sharing (OT)

Has anyone setup a VM server sharing arrangement, whereby I run some of their vmdk files on my VM server, and they run some of my vmdk files on their VM server? VM servers are great, but if the whole server (or its network) goes down, there's no redundancy. VM server sharing would allow people to

Formatted text conversion

I have e-books in several formats (DOC, LIT, PDF, RTF, HTML, TXT, etc). Is there a Unix command-line tool that converts between these formats? If not, is there at least a tool that converts these formats to TXT? My goal is to read these books on my Kindle, even if it means losing some formatting/

Setting up a cloud space server

I have a lot of disk space on one of my remote dedicated FreeBSD servers, and I'd like to resell it as cloud space. Is there a program that does something like this? Specifically: % Makes the disk space available through standard cloud protocols % Calculates how much space/bandwidth each user

Better version of ispell?

Is there a version/improvment of ispell that: % Lets you exclude certain sections of a file from spellchecking? Example: I often email sendmail logs with their random-character queue ids. I don't want ispell to check those cut/pasted logs. % Lets you declare correctly-spelled words as being i

What do ASCII codes 128-159 stand for?

"man ascii" defines the ASCII codes from 0-127, and the various ISO-8859-x tables define the ASCII codes from 160-255 (depending on your character set), but are there standard representations for the ASCII codes between 128 and 159 inclusive? -- We're just a Bunch Of Regular Guys, a collective gr

Using rsync for versioned backups without --backup

I want to use rsync to backup a large file (say 1G) that changes a little each day (say 1M), but I also want the ability to re-create older versions of this file. I could use --backup, but that would create a 1G file each day, even though I only "really" need the 1M that's changed. How do I tell

ps says process has been running for 49710 days

I use "/bin/ps -www -ax -eo 'pid etime args'" to see how long a process has been running. This usually works fine, but I sometimes see things like: 17469 49710-06:28:15 /usr/bin/fly -q -i [...] indicating a process has been running for 49710+ days. I originally thought that was the time from the

Secure unsalted or fixed salt symmetric encryption?

Are there any secure openssl symmetric encryption routines that *don't* use a salt? Is it secure to use a random-but-fixed salt (openssl enc -S salt)? "man enc" says "This option [-salt] should ALWAYS be used [...]" Reason I ask: I was using this command to backup files using compression/encrypt

Blowfish encryption key length

I want to use a random Blowfish key to encrypt files, so I did this: dd if=/dev/random of=mykey.bf count=100 bs=100 to create a 10K byte mykey.bf file. I can now encrypt foo.txt by doing: openssl enc -bf -pass file:mykey.bf -in foo.txt > foo.txt.encrypted However, "man enc" says "Blowfish and R

Better version of diff?

I often need to compare two Perl files sans comments. This mostly works: egrep -v '^#' file1.pl > file1.tmp egrep -v '^#' file2.pl > file2.tmp diff -B file1.tmp file2.tmp (yes, it breaks for perldoc style comments, comments on lines w/ code, # characters inside HERE docs, and probably other cases

Windows mailing lists?

This question is OT by definition: are there any Windows mailing lists similar to this one? Ideally one for people who hate Windows, but have to deal w/ it (eg, Windows command-line and Cygwin users, not people who use it by choice). I know Cygwin has mailing lists, but it's not quite the same th

Backing up FreeBSD and other Unix systems securely

I tried using Mozy for backups because they offer unlimited space, but 1) they don't support FreeBSD, 2) they encrypt file contents, but NOT file names, and 3) they don't do true versioned backups. Easy workaround for 1): rsync to a Mac/Windows and backup from there, but 2) and 3) are more difficul

qmail.sh is broken symlink

I just installed qmail on my FreeBSD box out of /usr/ports/mail/qmail, and noticed this: # ls -l /usr/local/etc/rc.d/qmail.sh lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 13 May 15 18:43 /usr/local/etc/rc.d/qmail.sh@ -> /va\ r/qmail/rc # ls -l /var/mail/rc ls: /var/mail/rc: No such file or directory I read somewh

Emailing 100+ PDFs, one at a time, to a given address

I need to email 100s of PDFs, 1 per email, to a given address. What's the easiest way to do this? /usr/bin/Mail won't work, since PDFs are binary, so I must first BASE64 encode them. I could write a Perl script to BASE64 encode them and MIME-wrap them, but is there an existing tool for this? --

Reading warnings when installing multiple ports

I often use "make -DBATCH install" to install ports. Problem: many ports spew out a warning/todo message after you install them (eg, "you must manually create an x user" or something). Since ports install "recursively", I miss most of these messages. Can I tell ports to store these messages for

bzip2split

Can I split a large (4G+) bzip2 file into smaller bzip2 files? Notes: % Obviously, 'split' won't work for 2 reasons: % Each chunk won't have the BZIP2 header % 'split' will cut the file inside a bzip2 "block", rendering the first/last blocks of each file unreadable. -- We're just a Bunc

Re: Publishing information via DNS

On 12/17/08, Matthew Seaman wrote: > Kelly Jones wrote: >> Has anyone tried publishing non-DNS information via DNS? Advantages: >> >> % Automatic distributed caching on various nameservers. >> >> % UDP, so no TCP overhead >> >> I know SPF uses thi

Publishing information via DNS

Has anyone tried publishing non-DNS information via DNS? Advantages: % Automatic distributed caching on various nameservers. % UDP, so no TCP overhead I know SPF uses this, and clamav publishes their current version number this way, but has anyone done this on a large scale basis? -- We're j

Unix domain socket tunnel to TCP on other machine

For mimedefang/clamav purposes, I'm trying to setup a Unix domain socket that tunnels to a TCP port on another machine. For example, if I "telnet -u /var/spool/mysock" on machine X, I want it to be just like doing "telnet Y 25". I've poked around with stunnel and ssh's port forwarding/ControlMast

sniffit requires config file?

Whenever I use sniffit on a new machine, I have to create this conf file: select both mhosts 0 select both mhosts 1 select both mhosts 2 select both mhosts 3 select both mhosts 4 select both mhosts 5 select both mhosts 6 select both mhosts 7 select both mhosts 8 select both mhosts 9 Not a huge de

Basic Tulip questions

I just installed Tulip on my FreeBSD server. The server has X11 installed, but isn't running it. I asked the questions below to the Tulip list ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) earlier, but got no reply, so I was hoping someone here was familiar w/ it and could help me. Does Tulip have a command-line mode? Can

wdfs vs sshfs vs the perfect fs

I recently installed wdfs and sshfs on my FreeBSD server + mounted a filesystem under each. "df -k" and "tail -r" work great under sshfs. "df -k" doesn't work under wdfs (always shows 100% usage) and "tail -r" just hangs. sshfs also seems a little faster. Is all this normal? I figured webdav wo

Unix program that sends email directly using MX record

What Unix program sends email directly, using the MX record of the recipient, instead of using sendmail or an installed MTA? I realize I could tweak sendmail.cf/etc to do this, but that's not working in my (fairly unusual) special situation. I also realize that sending email directly is normally

sudo multiple commands at once without shell script

How do I run multiple sudo commands at once? This fails because the semicolon ends the whole sudo command: > sudo whoami; whoami root user This confuses tcsh: monica:~> sudo ( whoami ; whoami ) Badly placed ()'s. I could obviously write a shell script or something or do: > sudo whoami; sudo wh

Can tcsh report 'command had no output'?

Can I force tcsh to say "previous command returned empty stdout" or something? I often cut and paste shell output for my cow-orkers, and it's crucial to note when a command returns nothing. Currently, I insert the information manually: > ls | fgrep 'phrase' [no results] but it'd be nice if tcsh

newsyslog naming scheme could be improved?

newsyslog rotates logfiles so that messages.0.gz is yesterday's file, messages.1.gz is the day before's, etc. This is ugly. If I tell my fellow sysadmins that I ran this command: zfgrep 'bad thing' /var/log/messages.4.gz and found stuff, they may run it the next day and get different results bec

Installing multiple ports quietly and efficiently

Here's one way to install multiple FreeBSD ports "unattended" on a machine: cd /usr/port/foo/prog1; make install; cd/usr/ports/foo/prog2; make install and so on (perhaps even in a shell script). Two problems: % It's ugly. I'd prefer "cd /usr/ports; make foo/prog1 foo/prog2 ..." % "make instal

Unix command-line tools to edit SharePoint site?

I begrudgingly use a Windows SharePoint server at a customer's request. I'd like to automate (command-line) updating and creating documents, lists, etc. Is there a Unix tool that does this? I know SharePoint has an "API", which basically spoofs the GET/POST calls that your browser would make(?).

[EMAIL PROTECTED] - does free distributed computing exist?

There are several projects (like [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], etc) that let you donate spare CPU power to a specific cause. Is there a project that lets you donate spare CPU power to anyone who needs it? That is, a pool of CPU power that anyone can tap into for free to

Snapshotting a system before fixing it

When a critical service on a system goes down, fixing it is top priority. Unfortunately, this makes doing a post-mortem analysis more difficult-- after you've fixed the problem, doing "ps", "mailq", or whatever isn't that helpful. Question: has anyone written a script that quickly snapshots (save

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Telnet has a line-by-line mode that's really useful on a slow connection: you can type in an entire line of text and hit return instead of having to type one character at a time. Is there anything similar for ssh? I tried tunelling port 23 on my machine to port 22 on the remote machine and then d

Recovering data from a newfs filesystem

Months ago, I got a new USB drive for my Mac OS X, did "newfs /dev/disk1" on it, and it's been working fine. I then foolishly did "disklabel -create /dev/disk1", which broke it. How can I recover my data? I've tried fsck w/ alternate superblocks to no avail. "less -f /dev/disk1" shows me the disk

Allowing noschg in multi-user mode on Mac OS X

Most FreeBSD kernels let you set a flag(?) to decide whether "chflags noschg" will work in multi-user mode. How do I do this w/ Mac OS X? Here's what happens when I do "chflags noschg" in multi-user mode: # chflags noschg test.txt chflags: test.txt: Operation not permitted The opposite, "chflag

Using LD_PRELOAD to make date return a specific date

I recently discovered LD_PRELOAD, a cool environment variable that lets a library "intercept" system calls. For example, setting LD_PRELOAD to /usr/lib/libtsocks.so lets tsocks intercept socket connections and redirect them to a SOCKS proxy. My question: how can I write a library that intercepts

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Here's a Makefile that converts 3 GIFs to JPGs in a given directory: 1.jpg: 1.gif /usr/local/bin/convert 1.gif 1.jpg 2.jpg: 2.gif /usr/local/bin/convert 2.gif 2.jpg 3.jpg: 3.gif /usr/local/bin/convert 3.gif 3.jpg How do I generalize this to apply to ALL the GIFs in a given dire

Using weekly backup disk to store partial full backup as well?

I currently backup important files to DVD weekly. These files are 2G in size total, so I "waste" ~2.7G on each DVD (these are DVD-Rs, so I can't wipe/re-use them). How can I use this wasted space to do a complete backup? Example: first week, backup the "first" 2.7G of my HD; second week, backup t

Tool for validating sender address as spam-fighting technique?

To fight spam, I want to validate the address (not necessarily in real-time) of the a given email sender. Is there a Unix tool that does this? The basics are simple: to validate "[EMAIL PROTECTED]", I connect to the MX record of wnonline.net and go as far as "RCPT TO" as follows: host -t mx wno

FreeBSD equivalents of hwclock and adjtimex?

What are the FreeBSD equivalents of hwclock (view/set the BIOS hardware clock) and adjtimex (adjust clock speed)? I couldn't find these two well-known Linux commands in ports? -- We're just a Bunch Of Regular Guys, a collective group that's trying to understand and assimilate technology. We feel

Effectively detaching 'less' from a pipe

I often run commands piped to 'less', to make sure the command is working OK by looking at the first few lines of output. Once I'm convinced, though, I'd like to "get rid" of less, and just have the rest of stdout spewed to the terminal (and/or /dev/null and/or to a file I specify). In other wor

Re: Low-cost dedicated FreeBSD server or non-jail VPS?

Thanks, Derek. I'm not looking to run this machine from home or to co-locate an existing box (though I suppose I could do that). As Jay mentions, I'm looking for something like: http://tektonic.net/unmanaged.html http://www.leeware.com/vps100.html http://rosehosting.com/virtserv.html (all bad e

Low-cost dedicated FreeBSD server or non-jail VPS?

I'm looking to rent a low-cost FreeBSD dedicated server or VPS with root access. For a VPS, I realize this is really psuedo-root access. I once rented a VPS on a FreeBSD box that was split into virtual boxes using "jail", but wasn't happy with it. So, if it's not a dedicated box, I'm looking for

Single command that outputs "system status"?

It's easy to write a shell script that dumps/mails the output of several "status" commands (eg, "df -k", "crontab -l", "ps -aux -www", "top -n -d 1 infinity", "w -d", "mailq -v", "netstat -a", "vmstat", etc) every hour, but I'm wondering if I'm re-inventing the wheel. Is there a FreeBSD command t

Signing a document with my SSH key, not a PGP key?

I want to sign a document with ~/.ssh/id_dsa so that people who have my public SSH key (~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub) can confirm that it's from me. I don't want to encrypt the document, just sign it. How can I do this? Is it a good idea? Does ssh-keysign (which is disabled by default) play into it? I know

Unix/sh/bash/tcsh command to limit clock time for program?

Is there a Unix or shell command that runs a given program for n seconds and then terminates it (unless the program takes less than n seconds to run, obviously)? I know ulimit can limit a program's CPU time and sh's TIMEOUT variable can limit idle time at the shell prompt, but how to limit a prog

Command-line iridium flare prediction software for Unix/Mac OS X?

I've seen lots of iridium flare prediction software that's graphics-based, but is there any that can be run from the command line? I want to run the predictor as a cron job and pipe the output to a Perl script, for example. I'm running Mac OS X, but if I can get the source of anything that runs