March 2002, Issue 76 Published by Linux Journal
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Editor: Michael Orr
Technical Editor: Heather Stern
Senior Contributing Editor: Jim Dennis
Contributing Editors: Ben Okopnik, Dan Wilder, Don Marti
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Send tech-support questions, Tips, answers and article ideas to The Answer Gang <linux-questions-only@ssc.com>. Other mail (including questions or comments about the Gazette itself) should go to <gazette@ssc.com>. All material sent to either of these addresses will be considered for publication in the next issue. Please send answers to the original querent too, so that s/he can get the answer without waiting for the next issue.
Unanswered questions might appear here. Questions with answers--or answers only--appear in The Answer Gang, 2-Cent Tips, or here, depending on their content. There is no guarantee that questions will ever be answered, especially if not related to Linux.
Before asking a question, please check the Linux Gazette FAQ (for questions about the Gazette) or The Answer Gang Knowledge Base (for questions about Linux) to see if it has been answered there.
LG 73, 2c Tips #12, USB Modems.I am writing reguarding the Alcatel Speed Touch USB modem, under Linux, particularly Mandrake Linux 8.1.
I have been trying to get this modem to work for about a month now. It seems I almost have it, at least compared to where I was a couple of weeks ago. I have been following the HowTo's, I've found on the internet. They seem to differ slightly from web page to web page, but I believe I finally got the kernel and the drivers set up to work, but I think I might have some setting messed up somewhere, or maybe a module not loaded or something. I was hoping you might be able to help me find where I'm having a problem. The message I get when I try to connect with br2684ctl -b -c 0 -a 0.0.35 is something like
RFC1483/2684 bridge : Created nas0 interface
(something like that)
RFC1483/2684 bridge : Connecting to ATM 0.0.35 Encapsulation LLC
(again it says something like this)
RFC1483/2684 bridge : fatal : failed to connect on socket
(here's the error message I get exactly as given to me)
Is there anything you might be able to tell me from the informatoin given, what I should be looking at to correct my problem? If you need anymore info please let me know what it is and I will get it right to you.
Thanks
Tom
xt (xtraceroute)There's a program in Debian unstable called xt (xtraceroute). It's supposed to plot the traceroute path on a picture of the earth. However, it doesn't seem to have enough location coordinates in its database to do anything. Has anybody used this program? Did you have to enter your own coordinates for all the hosts you traceroute from and to?
Euro symbol available?Hi guys, I don't know how much this will matter to the non-Europeans in the audience, but how am I going to get the Euro symbol to appear in my favourite applications? I have just installed Red Hat 7.2 on my laptop, and would like to indicate my preferred currency symbol in a spreadsheet or word processor document. The only mention I can find in previous issues of LG (wonderful publication - keep up the great work!), apart from a Debian Euro-HOWTO, is the usual "just my .02 Euro". Does anyone have any ideas?
Regards,
Donal.
DHCP & MAC Addresses questionHi,
I've read where DHCP can return a fixed IP for specified MAC hardware addresses. My question is can DHCP be limited to return either fixed or dynamic IP to only a list of MAC hardware addresses? This would be a security enhancement as only specified machines could get access to the server?
Dave Wulkan
ConvexHi Gang! Some time ago a friend of mine took me to a guy that - via some
strange ways - had gotten hold of some convex computers (2 refrigerator-sized
boxes). They were struggeling to get them to boot again (I think they called the
OS spp-ux os something similar) and maybe in the end getting them to boot linux
(hey, not totally OT). So, short question: does somebody of you know these
beasts? If yes, I can figure out more about'em, otherwise forget them (saw
something like a VAXbar some time ago, maybe that'll be their new purpose real
soon 
.
TIA
Robos
Boot problem on software raidI am running RedHat 7.2 and using ext3 file system with software raid, using 2 20gig drives. The raid drive(s) are my boot drive. The 2 drives are identical and are used something like this /dev/hda1 = ext3, /dev/hdb1 = ext3. I made everything between the 2 drives the same. The mirrored drive is /dev/hda1 and /dev/hda2 = /dev/md0. The system has been running very well.
I recently did a kernel upgrade. The upgrade went ok and will boot and run from a floppy drive with no problems. But if I attempt to boot from the hard drive(s) drive it will only boot the old kernel. I have updated the grub.conf and have even attempted to enter the commands for booting from the command line. The grub menu never shows the commands entered into the grub.conf file and I receive a error "Can't find files" if I attempt to enter the command line.
I have attempted to find what I need to change/fix but have not found the information needed to update grub while booting from a raid/ext3 file system.
Anyone have any ideas?
Thanks,
Joseph St.Clair
System crash on RH 7.2 - could be related to N.P.Strickland's
problemHi Gang,
I recently upgraded from RedHat 6.2 to 7.2. Since then I have experienced a number of incidents where the system simply froze up solid. It would not respond to keyboard input or mouse clicks. Screen was not being updated at all. The only way out was the Reset button. This sounds similar to the problems reported by N.P.Strickland (http://www.linuxdoc.org/LDP/LG/issue74/tag/9.html), but I can relate my incidents to some things which infer that the solutions suggested to that post will not resolve my situation.
Firstly, this has only started happening since I upgraded. I never experienced anything similar on RH 6.2 (or 5.2 fot that matter). The hardware is unchanged, so I believe it must be caused by software, not hardware.
Secondly, I am pretty confident that it is related somehow to sound. I can bring on a freeze by running a number of multimedia programs (e.g. XMMS, gtv). They appear to work fine for, say, 30 seconds, then Zap! the system freezes up solid.
Can anyone shed any more light?
Thanks
Ian Callahan
Windows Telnet Client for LinuxNot if you're at the only cybercafe in town and they don't let you install software there,
Educate, advocate.
The only reason I'd be in a cybercafe is if I'm in a strange town and there are no other Internet options. So I don't have much opportunity to find the most receptive staff members and spring a World Domination campaign on them.
There has to be at least one geek there...
You must have forgotten the smiley. That must be a joke,
because in most of the cybercafes I've been in, the staff know a lot about
espresso and chai, but very little about their own computers. The only two
exceptions were the Speakeasy in Seattle and CoffeeNet in San Francisco, neither
of which exist any more.
installing software from sourceBen,
Since I'm a relative linux newbie and software installation has been learning process, I appreciatee your article on installing from source. One question though. After downloading and uncompressing the source, installation seems to be pretty much a three step process.
./configure make make install
My question is this: should I become root in this process and if so at what stage? I'm thinking that I should become root after "make." and not before.
Anyway I appreciated the article especially the part about analyzing a failed install. It would have taken me a while to figure that out on my own.
Thanks,
Adam York
TAG membersBy the way, TAG now has thirty members, an increase of about eight from a couple months ago. Welcome, new Gang members, and thanks for your contributions.
If you haven't sent in your TAG bio yet or you need to revise it, send it to gazette@ssc.com. See
"Meet The Answer Gang" to read about your peers and see some example bios.
[28-Feb: Somehow it doubled in eight days. There are now sixty TAG members. -Iron.]
Confidential disclaimersIn the section on confidentiality disclaimers in the TAG faq, can we provide some examples of what we need the querent to say?
Provided, in "Ask The Gang" -- Heather
HOWTO subscribe to Linux GazetteWe've had a number of questions on this topic lately...
D Johnson
I always enjoy reading the Gazette offline (maybe even at the beach on my notebook). Have you ever considered providing it in pdf format. Would save me the trouble of converting it myself. Imagine lotsa others do too. Keep up the good work.
Thanks for the support. -- Mike
P Reddy
i am a student from india , i want to know wether there is a mailing news letter available, if yes how to subscribe. please reply at...
Martin Willem
I'm making the jump into the linux world. Do you offer the GAZETTE in hard copy form?
To all these people and everyone else out there wondering: ...
Paper?
It's under an open license. Anybody has the right to publish it that way. We can't afford to do all that for free though.
If anybody chooses to convert it to paper form regularly ... and maintain that as a longterm service ... could you please let us know? We could add you to the Mirrors page
Other electronic formats? See http://www.linuxdoc.org/LDP/LG/faq.html#formats_no
You can be notified that the new one has been posted each month, by subscribing to the announce list (it does not contain the articles): http://www.ssc.com/mailman/listinfo/lg-announce
You might be able to use services (elsewhere!) which let you know websites have changed (by emailing you the changed page) to give you the table of contents ONLY, by telling them to keep an eye on: http://www.linuxdoc.org/LDP/LG/current/
One example of such an external service is Sitescooper - PDA users can get the document this way, as can others who install the Sitescooper scripts: http://scoops.sitescooper.org/
So much work to get it so I was hoping...
Our webzine is quite large so it's well worth your time to find an LG mirror site that's closer to your home in cyberspace: http://www.linuxdoc.org/LDP/LG/mirrors.html
You can also download the FTP files, or find it in the Debian distribution. Read more about all this at the Linux Gazette FAQ: http://www.linuxdoc.org/LDP/LG/faq.html
However Martin had more to ask so we answered that too
Do you offer recommendations on the most successful ways to jump from microsoft to LINUX? Any help that can save me pain would be greatly appreciated i.e. hardware, linux flavor, good books for the beginner to read before/during the move to lynux!
That's a very general question, so I can offer only a general answer. Look in The Answer Gang Knowledge Base: http://www.linuxdoc.org/LDP/LG/tag-kb.html especially under the sections "Linux Distributions", "Before you install Linux", "Installing Linux", etc. Also see the section "Linux tech support questions" question "How can I get help on Linux?", which has a list of books and a link to the Linux Documentation Project (LDP) (Linux Documentation Project), which should be your first stop.
-- Mike
All your wonderful tips...Hi Gang! Just had some time and took a look into the howto section at linuxdoc.org and found the Tips-HOWTO.
Nice thingies in there, although the last editing seems to be ages ago.
Soooo, since LG is already present in there and you have such wonderful ideas, scripts and perl-thingies (Ben?), after you have discussed them here in the list and optimized them one could post it to the maintainer of the Tips-HOWTO for inclusion.
What do you think? Thats a place a newbie finds rather easier than this mailing-list, don't you think? Just a suggestion.
CU Robos
<grin> Good idea, Robos. Instead of the Tips-HOWTO, however, the areas you're asking about are a subset of the LG Knowledge Base that Chris Gianakopoulos and I have been working on for the past month plus; see <http://www.linuxdoc.org/LDP/LG/kb-faq.html>;. Better yet, wait a week or so and see the new version - Chris has been doing a sterling job of adding the stuff from the previous issues of LG while I'm banging away on modifying the overall KB-FAQ, TAG-FAQ, etc. The difference between the last month and the one that's coming up is going to be a large one - there are many, many more articles/issues incorporated into it than there were the last time - and it's really turning into a great resource. -- Ben
Why we stay plain when we could look Really CoolHey!
Nice to see your online mag - content seems good!
...pity I was about as excited about the presentation of your "mag" as I am about brussel sprouts!
Check out http://www.onlamp.com/ for an example of what to make it look like - I know in essence its the same, but I'd love to see some Linux heads make something that actually looks good! (ie stop acting like text crazed command line geeks and get with us poxy graphical idiots, who have been web building with Macromedia products and the like)
Yes that means you will actually have to stop using Lynx and start using Mozilla to check the visual integrity of your code!
I'm not really bagging, just sick of not being excited when I hit a linux site.
cheers, L
Oh my. This resulted in a lively discussion defending Brussel sprouts, our decision process in making the webzine rather more plain than all-dancing-and-glitzy, some comments about the browsers we actually use, thoughts on Macromedia Flash, a certain amount of curmudgeonly eyebrow raising, cheerful thanks for the kudos that were present, and encouragement to take on the glitzy task himself. Pleasantly he took it all in good stride and will probably join the Answer Gang
Nice to see your online mag - content seems good!
Thanks, always happy to hear it. -- Heather
Thanks for writing in. If you like the content, well, that's our goal. -- Mike
...pity I was about as excited about the presentation of your "mag" as I am about brussel sprouts!
I like brussel sprouts, when prepared properly and covered with butter
I can force myself to eat brussel sprouts and broccoli. But I draw the line at cauliflower. -- Mike
I'll trade you: you can have my brussel sprouts, and I'll have the cauliflower. It's good to have friends.
...pity I was about as excited about the presentation of your "mag" as I am about brussel sprouts!
The Answer Guy, enjoying yet another Python book (in this case New Riders' "Python Web Programming" -- slow since it aims at non-programmers, but quite good nontheless) at a local coffee shop, was heard to mutter:
"Bon Apetit mon ami, enjoy your sprouts"
before taking another sip of his latte. -- Jim
Hey, nice layout on your e-mail!
...too bad the content had me yawning.
So you've got your MacroWhozits, ShockWhatsits, and RealWhatchamacallits running. Booo-ring. I can get more and better flash and glitter at the 99-cent store. Incidentally, I find the layout of the site that you've mentioned just as garbaged up as that of Slashdot - it requires a 21" screen just to see properly, and the "noisiness" of unrelated multi-column layout, with 2-3 words per column (hey, you've got to make room for all those ads - right?) is something that I find really unpleasant to read.
Look. Our strength is that we are accessible to _everyone._ Not everybody in the world has a cable modem, or even a fast phone connection; a number of our readers are still using 33.6 modems attached to their 486s, and a fair number of them are still paying for content "by the byte". I'm using a CDPD modem (I live on a sailboat) to connect, myself. Should we all be denied access, or should it be made more difficult or expensive because our layout doesn't reflect somebody's idea of the Latest And Greatest fashion in web pages? Please, let's not even go there. -- Ben
I'm not really bagging, just sick of not being excited when I hit a linux site.
<snort> I'll make you a deal: we'll tell you how to dress and how to present yourself in general (anybody here have some orange lipstick and a flourescent pink purse?), and you'll be welcome to present us with your idea of an "up-to-date" site that excites you. That sound good to you?
Thought so. -- Ben
Check out http://www.onlamp.com/ for an example of what to make it look like -
It looks nice. -- Mike
(For the readers: ONlamp is an O'Reilly Network site.)
Are you with O'Reilly? They are a big publishing house and hire people to maintain their websites. We are a batch of volunteers scattered all over the world. But we're flattered that you chose to compare us with them.
(it turns out, no, he's not; he just feels their site looks cool.)
To be fair, though, I tried to visit that site with Netscape. I only got an ad -- no content! Ouchie!
Luckily we only put these itty bitty graphics at the side and logos on top. Since we don't do animated banners you can't get hit with the won't-finish bug in some browsers either
I know in essence its the same, but I'd love to see some Linux heads make something that actually looks good!
Go to linux.com. Or better yet, put up your own demonstration site. Then send us a link to it and an announcement about what it contains, and we'll put an item for it in News Bytes. Maybe all that will encourage other Linux sites to get more pizzazz. -- Mike
(ie stop acting like text crazed command line geeks and get with us poxy graphical idiots, who have been web building with Macromedia products and the like)
Linux Gazette is slow to adopt new visual technology, kind of like the Amish. We prefer to wait a few years and see which technologies would actually be a long-term benefit to all our users. It's an unusual kind of zine; I don't know of any others like it. Most people read it from mirrors in 47 countries, through the Linux Documentation Project, download the FTP files, read it on a CD-ROM, download the articles to their palm pilot, etc. So anything dynamic is out because it would cut off a significant portion of the readership. We also don't want to impose any special software requirements on the mirrors. Two concessions to dynamism: the search engine and talkbacks on the main site.
We're also mindful of bandwidth restraints: many readers and mirrors live in countries where they pay by the minute for Internet access, so I try to keep each issue down to less than a megabyte or two (compressed).
We also have to piece together the whole thing into an all-in-one version (the entire issue on one page), because that's how LG started and many readers prefer to print it that way. This rules out differing stylesheets per article, or anything special the article needs in the HTML header.
Most of the editors subscribe to the "good website design" philosophy, meaning content is king. If you can't say it in text, it isn't worth saying. Obviously we don't go all the way on that, because we have been publishing several cartoon series. But still, all decorations are evaluated in terms of how essential they are to the content. If readers like the text, they'll be back. if they won't read it unless it has bells and whistles all around it, well, we don't want them anyway. There are plenty of sites that are highly graphical (and can't be navigated unless you have Flash and Javascript enabled), and LG doesn't wish to compete in that department.
By the way, Your Editor has a strong adversion to "left column" and "right column" sidebars (tables), and will resist them as long as he can. Let the article text flow freely across the entire width of the browser, outside a table, and in the default font. Persumably, the reader has adjusted his default font to his preference. -- Mike
A-men to that! And a-women, too. I don't long for uniformity on the Web, but if more people paid attention to those basics, more information would be more easily accessible. Sing that song! -- Ben
Not to rag too hard back, but:
- Tell O'Reilly to get that wart zapped. The last time I saw this was LWN having some problems with an ad provider whose "pull through" would bomb out that way about 1 time in 10. I'm not sure if they fired the ad provider, or just made 'em fix it, but I know it's tricky to chase down problems that are hard to reproduce.
- We can't shoot at bugs without a target symbol over the varmint. In other words "it's ugly" isn't enough of a problem description. Try again.
Since we live in a world of choice, try a few of the following on for size: Dillo, Chimera, Amaya, Opera, Arachne, links (not the same as lynx), w3m, Browsex, ViewML, mnemonic, Zen, konqueror. If you find a copy of Grail let me know as its homesite died ages ago and I haven't found packages since. Maybe it was under a non-free license?? -- Heather
Grail (a Python web browser) is now at http://grail.sourceforge.net/ . The last version was April 1999. It died because its sponsoring organization (CNRI?) stopped putting developer resources into it. They did that because they realized its features and speed were never going to compete with recent versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer.
With Grail died the ability to run Python applets in a browser, but that's OK because there never were any Python applets except a few demos. But now there's Jython, which is an implementation of Python in Java, so you can do almost the same thing.
However, there was a good thing from the Grail legacy. The parts to build a browser, parse URLs, parse HTML files, etc, and everything else a browser needs to do, got put in the standard Python distribution as modules, so you can use them in other programs. -- Mike
Visit some students at your local blind school, ask them if their speech readers do our site alright... and have your local PDA pick up the current Linux Gazette packet from Sitescooper. I'm not going to suggest that you telnet to port 80 and handle your own client side of the HTTP connection, but you can do that if it makes you feel like a completist :D
We try not to change the templates too often
Variety may be the spice of life but aiming generic rather than in any one direction means less work to have readable results without heavy testing. (We do try to test for broken hotlinks, and sorta glance around for typos, but those sometimes escape us too.) As we're all unpaid volunteers, and not very many of us, making the best use of our time is important too.
We're modeled more after the community green sheet (e.g. Campbell Reporter gets a picture here and there, but mostly it's plain ink on rag paper) than a large city newspaper (with its Home and Garden section, coupons in the food section, comics section bigger than some articles, classified ads fatter than all other sections but the sports, etc) or a 90 page glossy magazine on clay-laden paper with dye sublimation ink. On the flip side we don't charge $7.95 on newsstands and have a two to three month lead time for articles, either.
There's a great little article at "This website optimized for --- arguing with customers" (http://www.htmlhelp.com/feature/art2.htm). Like it says, we're not going to tell people to get rid of whatever they already have just to read anything here. -- Heather
OnRamp gets brownie points for using the default font in the center column, but loses points for having the left sidebar. At least the center column isn't too narrow. And at least--thankfully--they don't split the articles into pages, unlike, say, Salon (http://salon.com/), where you have to wait for a download cycle between each page. -- Mike
Yes that means you will actually have to stop using Lynx and start using Mozilla to check the visual integrity of your code!
Actually, I do most of my work in Netscape 4. I occasionally use Konqueror 2.2.1 for comparision, but I get sick of the 3-5 seconds of extra overhead on every click. At home I use Galeon. For local documentation or when I'm going to a known-text page, I use links, or lynx if it requires https:. I don't know what the other editors use. -- Mike
Funny you should mention that, I was able to read your site with lynx when Netscape failed abysmally -- since noting yourself as a GUI fan, I figured to hit it with a graphical browser first...
My portion of the Gazette is always checked with both lynx (2.8.3dev9 with SSL patches, yeah I know it's ancient, but I'm happy with my color settings) and netscape (4.77 normally). They each correct for different varieties of HTML misbehavior, and that allows me to fix glitches generated by my preprocessing script, which tortures about 400 slices of mail into something resembling pieces of a webzine. I sometimes test with konqueror, NS6, or Browsex. We've been advised that Opera's rendering of the Front Page only (ironically, the only one where we tried to get fancy with layout) is a mite strange... of course, that's commercial software, and the effect doesn't really stop reading, but we dunno any way to convince it to do the table-heuristic we wanted. Oh well. -- Heather
That vertical black line is gone. It was a 1-pixel black .gif inside a table cell, which was supposed to expand into a vertical black bar. However, it used WIDTH="2%", which made it stretch wide on some browsers. So I changed it to a fixed width. However, Opera continued to expand it while the other browsers stopped. Now it's gone. Good riddance. -- Mike
What version of Mozilla are you using, what bug/wart did you encounter, and does it also afflict Netscape 6, Galeon, or other mozilla derivatives? -- Heather
Argh. Leon, could you send your stuff in plain text, and wrap it at less than 80 (preferably, around 72) columns? That's considered good e-mail manners. -- Ben
Argh indeed - I am forced by the hand of Bill Gates - my headers will inform you my work machine is a W2K with Outlook - I couldn't be polite with my text if I tried. As far as it's concerned I AM sending plain text!!!!!!!! I am moving jobs soon, but staying on the same campus - I will then rebel and use Linux for my desktop....AND BILL WILL WEEP!!!!!!!!!!!! (HeeHeeHeeee...)
Seems like there's a way to tell even Outlook to be civil, at least in this respect.
Unfortunately this way eludes me ... could somebody here more versed than I in the Dark Arts speak up? -- Dan
<laugh> Cool. Mike Orr, our editor here, has mentioned that we have the procedure for smacking Outlook down to decent behavior written down somewhere; -- Ben
Chris G here, from the Dark Arts group of people. I supplied detailed instructions on how to set up Outlook Express to send in plain text mode when sending email. In it was included the fact that the MUA should not reply in the same format as the original message. That was in issue 65, "Setup of Microsoft Outlook Express 5 for Sending of Clear Text": http://www.linuxdoc.org/LDP/LG/issue65/tag/8.html
Hopefully, that will work for Leon. -- Chris G
A friend of mine sent me the following step-by-step guide (he works in a mixed environment, and needs to twiddle his settings back and forth):
|
............... How to send plain text email using Outlook in 3 clicks or less By Samuel Kopel This will work in Outlook(not sure about express) Start a new message On the menu bar select 'Format/Plain Text' Click [YES] to the message "Warning: Changing the formatting of this message from HTML to plain text requires removing all the current formatting, including any pictures you may have included. Are you sure you want to do this?" If you want to change your default to text (recommended if the majority of your email does not go to other Outlook users) you need to change the options settings. From the menu: 'Tools/Options' Select the [Mail Format] tab and change to "plain text" ............... |
Macromedia Flash, Javascript and fancy graphics would be possible since they are self-contained (i.e., don't require particular software on the web server). However, they would have problems on non-major browsers, and LG readers have a wide variety of browsers, and are more likely than the general public to run experimental browsers on principle. Also, some readers have older computers, and buying a new computer would cost several months' salary. Last year I got a letter from a reader in Africa asking if there is an e-mail version of LG (there isn't), because his school cannot afford to read it on the web. --Mike
Macromedia Shockwave isn't readable on Linux (unless something new has happened that I don't know about). Flash is ok but broken in some contexts, unusable entirely in others, and we don't want the site unusable to anyone. There are so many versions of Javascript nee' ECMAscript I stopped counting -- and Java is getting there. People read us worldwide including on PDAs and in libaries and coffee shops. (ok, the coffee shops probably can handle the cool stuff. We've gotten lots of questions about coffee shops running Linux.) Also on "that slow old thing" and a cheap dialup link while preparing the spiffy new box to run Linux. (Even though they can render the graphics, maybe it's so bad they even turn off image loading in the GUI.) Etc. -- Heather
I forgot to mention. If you have a small Flash movie on a Linux theme, we may be able to put it in as an article. Or if you'd like to write an article about building Flash movies on Linux or something like that, we could also publish it. -- Mike
I'm not really bagging, just sick of not being excited when I hit a linux site.
Linux is a do-it-yourself thing. Go forth and build the ultimate Linux web site. -- Mike
Feel free to actually do a cool new layout and have that be the format for your new mirror of us. We'd happily list you in our mirrors database, and publish the script you use to tweak it if you like, so other mirrors can do things your way too. Sharing resources is good.
That's the beauty of stuff under free licenses ... you can tweak your copy and you aren't breaking any laws whatsoever.
If you have good tricks for having your GUI cake and eating text too, it'd make an excellent article for the Gazette (a linux focus in it would put it on topic), and Mike Orr (gazette@ssc.com) would be glad to accept your submission. If that excites you about us, read our author guidelines in the Linux Gazette FAQ, and we look forward to seeing it! -- Heather
cheers, L
Have a good weekend, hope your Linux is being more fun than our layout for ya. -- Heather
Ben,
Don't take it so personal - the Editor explained everything very nicely, I'm sorry if I offended - I am a graphical ponse, it's not my fault I was born that way!!!!!!!
L
<grin> No worries, Leon - you didn't offend me. I got a little grumpy at you telling us how we've got to do something without knowing our requirements, but that's all; no offense involved.
For myself, I like graphical stuff when done in appropriate amounts relevant to the material at hand. Today, there are way too many web pages that use graphics gratuitously, without any sense behind them - and I must say that the page you pointed to does not fit that category, although it has other problems (at least from my perspective.)
So, here's an idea for you; an opportunity to possibly convert a few folks into "graphical ponses", if you will. Go with what Mike suggested: write an article about Web page design; include some links to demonstrate each of your points. Who knows?... it might become a graphical ponse revolution.
Heather,
You write too much - I can't even type that fast and you want me to read all that!????
As I said I like the content - I'm sold an that - I also said I'm new to Linux, thus may only be bagging what I don't understand....yet!
All points on bandwidth, mirroring etc etc are taken - OK!!!!!
I still hate Brussel sprouts with butter - I'd rather eat the tub of butter.
Geez, I know not now to stir whith what ain't broken....
Oh and to clarify - I Certainly Don't Work For O'Reilly!! (And I'm not such a fan of Flash myself - but don't tell my boss!)
I am glad to have stimulated some conversation though
Mike,
Thanks for an in depth reply : This shows me your commitment to uphold all that is good and right in the computing world, and your reasons for doing it. Good on ya! - I can take much of what you have said about the web and put it into practice - thanks - all points noted.
I am pleased that you did in fact reply - you would be surprised how many people would take a comment like my and ignore it - so thanks again.
I am what your world would call a Linux Newbie so your feedback and explanations are essential to my development, and I suspect yours. I am looking forward to building new sites, I do have some commercial Intranets on the build, and in use, none of which I can advertise - interestingly enough, I am using mySQL, PHP on guess what: Red Hat Linux 7.2. They work a dream, and are - FULL of lovely graphics, but tied to 100Mbps LANs, so I can afford the bandwidth! Call me a cheat!
Oh and thanks for the cauliflower laugh.
You want some more cauliflower?
Keep up the good work, I will be a regular visitor for the CONTENT!
cheers, L
Leon, given your responsiveness (most important), verbosity and funny comebacks, have you ever considered a career in The Answer Gang? Would you feel comfortable answering questions about Linux?
If so, see The Answer Gang FAQ, http://www.linuxdoc.org/LDP/LG/tag-faq.html -- Mike
I gave it some thought Mike - I dont know if I can match up to the class of company - I have little Linux experience (love the 'Iron Orr' bit) When I move jobs next week, (and desktop machines! yay to the end of W2K) I'll have to set up some Linux servers, with RAID and big network transfer speeds for up to 20 Mac OSX clients running video editing software - Utilising the network drives as a data bank, so clients can log onto any machine to edit and be presented with up to 10GB of storage space for the hungry video stuff.
Only 10GB? What are they editing; news packages? -- jra
After that I'll be in a position to answer some questions on Linux!
(If anyone has some pointers on the above problem please jump in - or even if it is possible! specially Mac OSX Vs Linux issues.)
'till then Ciao!
Leon Czechowicz
The problem is sustained throughput. TTBOMK, nothing is fast enough at the network filer level at the moment to do anything much faster than DV (3.5MB/s). To beat that, you need, I think, to go to NAS, or something similar: shared drives, rather than shared filesystems.
Perhaps things have speeded up a bit... but be prepared to go to either 100Mbs Ether with dedicated adapters, or Gigabit shared... and something more towards token than ether is not out of line.
Either that, or nasty buffering on the mount client.
Investigate Cinelerra, too.
Cheers, -- jra
More
2¢ Tips!
quesFri, 1 Feb 2002 11:32:44 -0800
Dan Wilder (The
Answer Gang)
asked by piyush moghe
respected sir
i have a problem with linux instalation on 20Gb or
more capacity disks,i had installed on p3,20gb hd,64 mb ram.i make 2 1Gb
partition as linux native & one 200 mb as swap the instalation goes on
smoothly but at the end it gives error that first partition not lies in 1024
cylinders what i can do to solve this problem
Actually we're several guys, and one or more gals. If you respect us, that's nice, but not essential.
Upgrade to current LILO. Most new distributions should contain a LILO able to overcome the 1024 cylinder limit, and so a newer distribution might be the easiest way to do it.
Or, re-partition the disk so that its first partition, about 16Mb, is mounted at /boot, second partition is swap, and the third partition containing the remainder of the disk is mounted as /, the root partition. The installation scripts on the distribution will probably give you an opportunity to specify how you want the hard drive partitioned, and that's where you do this.
Make sure your kernel boot image (usuall vmlinuz) is located in /boot, and is referenced from /etc/lilo.conf as such. You may have to move things around and rerun lilo after the installation stuff completes.
Let us know how you are doing.
File cache...Thu, 14 Feb 2002 22:25:24 -0800
Dan Wilder (dan
from ssc.com)
asked by Matthew Koundakjian
Is there a way to control in a 2.4.x kernel how large the file cache can grow?
File cache always seems to take as much as it can and we really would prefer to keep it low.
The main user is routinely running tasks upwards of 1.5GB at time and there are times when the system thrashes and thrashes.
3:55pm up 2 days, 23:36, 19 users, load average: 0.60, 0.72, 0.75 162 processes: 160 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped CPU0 states: 76.0% user, 0.0% system, 0.0% nice, 23.0% idle CPU1 states: 31.0% user, 13.0% system, 0.0% nice, 55.0% idle Mem: 2059412K av, 2053732K used, 5680K free, 0K shrd, 41576K buff Swap: 3072112K av, 703596K used, 2368516K free 1236900K cached
Big file cache is not necessarily A Bad Thing. As long as it unloads fast when demand grows.
I'd look to other problems first.
- Are you running 2.4.17 or something older and buggier? If not 2.4.17, upgrade now.
- Are you running an AMD Duron or Athlon + AGP video? If so, you'll need a kernel boot parameter to cut cache page size, there's an interference between the way the kernel handles DMA and the way AMD handles AGP, leading to sporadic random cache corruption.
- You're 700M into swap. That's never a Good Idea. Unless what's swapped out is more or less permanently swapped out. If so why are you running it? If possible, get another gig of memory. The slowest memory is much faster than the fastest hard drive.
Hello Dan...
Thanks so much. Yes, we're running an older kernel ... mostly, 2.4.6 ... I'll fix that.
As far as the swap, originally, we had no swap, but because the file cache is so "hungry", I threw in swap as a brute force means because processes were dying from lack of memory...
As it is, we run a computational fluid dynamics code that periodically dies with no more than "broken pipe" as the error diagnostic, which, if I had to make a W.A.G., I would assume a process died. Before, it was a LOT worse... It was ugly when something like portmap would croak. So, lacking any coherent solution and having unhappy users, I threw some swap in and it seemed to help with stability tremendously.
But most recently, with one user process running, allocating about 1.7G, the system was apparently thrashing horribly... very unresponsive and with a system load on the order of 10.
As far as the swap versus file cache, it would seem to be silly to have a file cache that's so large that swap starts coming into play.
Bye,
Matt
Answer for "getting volume label from CD".Thu, 24 Jan 2002 16:09:19 -0700
Sean Reifschneider (jafo
from tummy.com)
The URL:
http://www.linuxdoc.org/LDP/LG/issue72/tag/2.html
asks the question "How do I get the volume label from a data CD", and then the three guys go on to not provide a very good answer...
If you would like to add the following, it may be useful to other readers.
There are two problems in identifying CDs -- one is identifying a data CD, the other is identifying an audio CD. Mr. Bray is asking specifically about data, but it's also possible to determine a fairly unique ID for audio CDs as well.
Data CDs are easy -- a 32-byte string is written in the ISO at offset 32808. Some systems have a program called "volname" (part of the eject package), which can pull this data out. Otherwise, "dd" can be used:
dd if=/dev/cdrom bs=1 skip=32808 count=32
This is the volume label specified via the "-V" argument to "mkisofs" when creating the CD image.
For audio CDs, it's (unfortunately) not as easy. The CD Digital Audio standard does not include a location for storing CD or track identification information. The answer for this that I've heard is that they felt it was too hard a problem to solve initially.
While it may seem easy to add a few strings on the CD, it becomes harder when you have to deal with an international market -- how do you make it so that Japanese tracks can be identified, for example. Remember, this was back in the <gasp> '80s, when Unicode wasn't common.
So, the way people go about identifying audio CDs is by generating a signature. This signature consists of information about the length of tracks, number of tracks, and various other information. You can then condense this information down into a single value.
This value can then be used to submit and request more specific data about a disc or track.
Thanks to the LinuxDoc CDROM-HOWTO for the dd command to pull this data off the CD.
Sean
Compiling from sourceFri, 1 Feb 2002 09:03:21 -0800
John Davies (johnny5_tc
from yahoo.co.uk)
Hi, I've just read your informative article on installing from source in this months Linux Gazette.
You mention that it would be good if make files has and uninstall target and that most don't. Well, if you have a look at Checkinstall (http://asic-linux.com.mx/~izto/checkinstall-en.html) it allows you to uninstall programs built from source.
What it does is to replace the "make install" command with checkinstall. It makes a note of which files were installed and allows you to uninstall the program using the package management tools on your machine (in my case dpkg). It also creates a .deb (or .rpm) so you can install it on another machine.
I've played with it for a few days now and it is extremely useful.
Regards John
John,
Thanks for that tip. I'm a moderately long-time member of The Answer Gang, and had not heard of checkinstall before. I often build from source, and had until now resorted to clumsy and time-consuming expedients to manage uninstalls.
"checkinstall" is just what we need here at SSC, host of The Answer Gang's mailing list server and The Linux Gazette's web site.
This is pretty much the reason that I forwarded this to TAG. I've had seven or eight e-mails telling me me about "buildpkg", "rpm", etc.; under Debian, I'm familiar with "alien" - but none of these deal with the real issue of "remembering" what the "make" did. They just convert the tarball (which often cannot be done due to layout, etc.) into RPMs or DEBs, etc. This tool - although I have not yet had the time to check it out - sounds like a very nice possibility, and I'm going to be looking into it. -- Ben
Well thanks, Ben, for forwarding it.
It sounds like this tool does something like what I've been doing by hand. After building a package, I often
su root script make install ^D
(that's "CTRL-D", an EOT character, to log out of script) then edit the resulting "typescript" file to build a roster of what was installed, which I then save in an "ssc" subdirectory of the build directory, against a day when I wish to know what was installed.
You're absolutely right about alien et al. They work from a tarball, .deb, .rpm, etc.
However, most stock GNU packages don't even build an install tarball. They just install directly, leaving a cryptic trail of what they installed in the output from the "make install". Without analyzing that output you don't even get a tarball to "alien".
There are exceptions. Debian-modified source trees build the .deb packages directly, which can then be installed. Slackware-modified source trees build a tarball directly. No doubt Red Hat et al has something similar ... brainfade prevents me from saying at the moment ...
All too often I find I must go directly to the original release of some package, rather than using the distribution's source, either because the package is not available under the appropriate distribution, or because the distribution's package doesn't do it for us. Wrong or broken version, etc etc etc.
If this checkinstall does what it looks like it might do, it solves that problem of "what do you do if you've only the original source code". -- Dan
Automate dialing?Wed, 20 Feb 2002 18:26:42 -0500
Ben Okopnik (The
Answer Gang)
asked by gagandgupta
I want to write a program that on getting some sort of trigger will automatically connect to the internet by dialling the ISP's telephone number. After it has established connection it should store the IP address assigned to it by the ISP in a file.
Two major hints that, together, should give you the solution:
That's it. There's no deep science to it.
Redhat 7.2 Linux firewall-HowtoTue, 5 Feb 2002 22:01:56 -0800
Dan Wilder (The
Answer Gang)
asked by Franco Fernandes
Hi!
Can anyone tell me from where can i get the Redhat 7.2 Linux firewall-Howto download
Thanks & Regards
Franco.F
I don't know about a Redhat 7.2 firewall howto ... if there is such, I'd expect to find it by searching www.redhat.com.
A generic Linux howto, now ...
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Firewall-HOWTO.html
There's a lot of other great stuff in that same directory. -- Dan
Not the question you were asking - but if you want to get a basic iptables firewall in place you could want to look at firestarter or something similar -- Mike E
File System problem
i require help fixing my linux hard drive, it is a ext2 file
system and during startup it fails to pass the file system check, it says
"Directory inode 38381, block 0, offset 0: directorty corrupted" how do i fix
it, can it be fixed?
You can do the following.....
where "/dev/hdaxx" is the device file which points to the root of your Linux partition (i.e. mounted "/") (or change "linux" to the name of the stanza within "/etc/lilo.conf" that will load Linux).linux init=/bin/bash root=/dev/hdxx ro
and this should fix any errors on the drive.fsck -f /
If you need any help, let me (us) know.
Kind Regards,
Thomas Adam
Quick C function lookupThu, 24 Jan 2002 22:24:21 -0500
Ben Okopnik (The
Answer Gang)
In your ".bashrc" file, add the following line:
alias chlp="info --file libc.info.gz --node \"Function Index\" --index-search $1"
The next time you log in (or even open another xterm or console), you'll have this as an alias. Call it this way:
chlp setuid
to have it drill down to where the "setuid" function is defined in the documentation. For those of you that use "vi", you can also redefine your "man page lookup" key:
set kp=chlp
Put your cursor on a function name and press 'K'; Magic Will Happen.
GNUThu, 21 Feb 2002 18:25:10 -0500
Jay R. Ashworth, Chris Gianakopoulos (The
Answer Gang)
asked by Rafel Burrial
What in the hell does GNU mean?
It's this uncommon African animal, also called a white bearded wildebeest. -- Jay
In hell, it's the ... -- Ben
I really think Ben needs to stop talking about dark things like that... Poor Chris, who specializes in our cross-MSwin questions, got bit by a nasty mailerdevil for that one. Just in case, I didn't print it
I think if you go to (D'oh!) http://www.gnu.org/, and look at the first page -- and I might point out that this is the first hit on Google for 'gnu' and the answer is in the frigging page title -- you'll probably find the answer to your question. -- Jay
GNU's not Unix like Unix is not Multics!!!!! !! Ho! Ho! Ho! <laugh from down there in h*ll>
A day late, because I've had no mail for the last 24 hours!! -- Chris
Is there a way to check if a dial up ppp connection is REALLY
up?Tue, 29 Jan 2002 08:54:08 -0500
Chuck & Crystal Shepherd (cc_shep
from yahoo.com)
with points from Ben and John K. of The Answer Gang
I have a linux box (RH 7.1) set up to serve as mail and internet server for my two other home computers.
It is set up to dial on demand. Therefore ifconfig shows ppp0 up and running all the time (when it is working properly)
I would like to be able to check the status of the modem without lifting the telephone from it's cradle.
I have checked into using the lock file which can be written by pppd but this is not very reliable when if pppd goes down unexpectantly it does not always clean up after itself.
I haven't done anything with "diald" in a couple of years, but doesn't it use SLIP to do its dirty work (i.e., the PPP link you request is actually to a local VT; "diald" feeds your PPP daemon lots of baloney and sweet talk while it actually makes the connection behind its back)? If so, then you could always check if the 'sl0' interface is up without tripping off the dial-up. -- Ben
The querent doesn't specifically mention 'diald', which does use the slip interface as part of its mechanism. The newer versions of pppd also support dial on demand, and uses a different type of mechanism. Unfortunately, I can't be too specific, as I've never set it up. I would guess that you could simply check to see if ppp0 (assuming only one dial-up connection active at a time) is up, much the same way as was suggested for diald. Actually IIRC, in the case of diald, (which AFAIK, is no longer actively supported) the slip interface goes away when the ppp link gets established; so simply checking for a ppp interface would work for diald as well. -- John Karns
I am a big LG fan. Thanks for all the tips and advise.
<smile> We do what we can. Good luck - let us know how it goes! -- Ben
Thanks for your response.
I think I have got my solution by using lsof /dev/ttyS1
(ttyS1 is my serial port)
It does not seem to initiate a connection and does not seem to interrupt an existing connection.
Thanks for your help!
Chuck
large file support detectionMon, 21 Jan 2002 22:37:22 -0500
Robos (robos
from geekmail.de)
and Ben from The Answer Gang
On Tue, Jan 22, 2002 at 01:35:56AM +0100, Robos wrote:
Hi Gang! Maybe I already told you about my little program to copy
dvd's to harddisk, called vobcopy (look on freshmeat). In the next release I
want to incorporate large file support (lfs - no, not linux from scratch . I found
Jim Dennis' answer in the 67 issue and read around various places (info libc,
the suse-page, the large file summit papers) but I am still unable to
detect if the usersystem has support for large files. We (another
person joined me and did most of the lfs stuff) found out about the
-D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE (the last one
being redundant if not even close to being wrong in my opinion) and off_t. But
we are not sure if this works correctly on both systems (supporting/not
supporting). I would think its better to know if the users system has support or
not and compile accordingly. My approach would be somthing along the lines of
look whats defined in <linux/*file.h> and what the file system is the file
gets written to. But kinda ugly and probably wrong. Does one of you happen to
know how to figure it out?
Check for the presence of "ftello64" (declared in <stdio.h> . From
"info libc -> I/O on streams -> File Positioning":
|
............... - Function: off64_t ftello64 (FILE *STREAM) This function is similar to `ftello' with the only difference that the return value is of type `off64_t'. This also requires that the stream STREAM was opened using either `fopen64', `freopen64', or `tmpfile64' since otherwise the underlying file operations to position the file pointer beyond the 2^31 bytes limit might fail. If the sources are compiled with `_FILE_OFFSET_BITS == 64' on a 32 bits machine this function is available under the name `ftello' and so transparently replaces the old interface. ............... |
"ftello" is the 'fixed' version of "ftell", but can be found on systems with or without LFS. From the above, it looks like "ftello64" would only exist on systems with LFS, where "ftello" would be an alias for it. I've got to hand it to the GNU folks: cute trick.
Re: [LG 75] 2c Tips #5 Linux with win2000Fri, 22 Feb 2002 15:26:13 +0530
sanjay sharma (sanjayjisuno
from hotmail.com)
this related with redhat linux
press enterfdisk /dev/hda
press entermount -t vfat /dev/hda(windows partition no.) /hdd
press enterdd if=/dev/hda(linux partition no.) of=/hdd/bootlin bs=512 count=1
1 record in 1 record out
save it and you are donec:\bootlin=3D"Redhat Linux "
Basic Newbie QuestionThu, 21 Feb 2002 22:11:03 -0500
Faber Fedor (The
Answer Gang)
asked by Steven Bruce
I've just installed RH 7.2 on a sony vaio, and was quite surprised by the ease with which it went on (Far cry from RH5.5). Anyway, I created the suggested user so that I wouldn't be logging in as Root all the time, however, the user I created can not create, delete, copy, etc, files in ROOT, or USR, or even HOME.
Of course you can't! This isn't That Other Operating System.
I am assuming I have to login as ROOT and join the user to the administrators group, or some such group which will allow the user the appropriate permissions, but I am not sure. Is thre something I am missing or something I should be doing different?
You're missing something. In Linux (and unix in
general) users don't have the right to willy-nilly create files and run
any old program. Would you like it if user jane had the rights to delete files
in you home directory? Of course not!
Linux has rather strict rules about what you, a normal user can do. The root user, OTOH, can do anything. This is a very dangerous thing if you're not careful. Let's say you wanted to delete all the files in your home directory (you're allowed to do that, they're your files). That would be done with the command
rm -rf /home/steve
If you accidentally typed it as
rm -rf / home/steve
You would get some error about not having permissions, etc. And depending where you were in the directory, ypou might or might not wipe out your home directory.
However, if you were logged in as root and type the accidental line, you would, literally, wipe out every file on the hard drive.
You might want to add the normal user to various groups, but you should proabbly read up on Linux and permissions and all that. Start by reading the Dos/Windows User to Linux User HOWTO ( http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/DOS-Win-to-Linux-HOWTO-4.html ) to get an idea on what's going on.
Reading the HOWTOs in general is a good idea (maybe not all at once, mind you). You can find all of them and more at www.linuxdoc.org
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
A little appreciation is just fine, thank you.
Regards,
Faber
Re: [LG 75] 2c Tips #15 postersThu, 31 Jan 2002 15:22:52 -0500
Boyer, Charles (Charles.Boyer
from tycoelectronics.com)
Probably old news...but just in case:
http://linux.oreilly.com/news/linuxanatomy_0101.html
backPosters are available free with a $50 purchase at the following O'Reilly conferences and tradeshows:
O'Reilly Conferences:
Tradeshows:
Cheers.
printingThu, 31 Jan 2002 22:11:58 -0600
Jack Berger (jhb
from mapp.org)
You mention that you are having problems w/your epson printer.
I'm not too familiar w/printer defs in things like ghostscript or gimp, but my printing w/an hp 970 improved by orders of magnitude for all applications when I installed turbo print. Colors come out good, speed is improved. Just works nice.
-jhb-
Linux rocks!Today, the curiosity bug bit me again, so I poked my nose into the Linux Visor USB mailing list, and - lo and behold - there it was. Seems that the new version of "coldsync", at least the beta, now handles the m125! I downloaded it, configured it, compiled it, made a config file - and... ta-daa! Palm USB synchronization, under Linux.
Life is good.
Setting up telnet in a Linux server.Thu, 24 Jan 2002 18:43:04 -0800
Dan Wilder (The
Answer Gang)
asked by Subroto Sengupta
Hello Sir,
I would like to know how to set up a Linux 7.1 server and configure it properly to be able to telnet into it from a Windows client machine.
A reply would be greatly appreciated.
Sincerely,
Subroto.
Well, that's a whole lot of questions.
There's no "Linux 7.1". The Linux kernel's current versions are 2.5.2 (pretty wild), 2.4.17 (conditionally stable), and 2.2.20 (quite stable). (labels mine).
Linux is distributed by several vendors, who label their own distribution with a version number. You may be thinking about Red Hat Linux 7.1. Don't. Get Red Hat Linux 7.2 or 6.2. Other vendors (Debian, Mandrake, Slackware, SuSE, Caldera, to name just a few) each use their own numbering schemes, which have not much to do with those of the others.
How to set up a server? Best advice I can give is "follow the vendor's directions, and ask questions here when you get lost".
Telnet? Only on a protected network, I hope! Telnet exchanges a password in the clear, OK if just your immediate family is watching the 'net, not so good if the password traverses six ISPs and a few chunks of the backbone.
That said, during install, select the telnet package. Sometimes that's part of some other package, sometimes not. Consult the vendor documentation and help.
On exposed networks, use the ssh (secure shell) package on Linux, and get "putty" secure shell client for Windows. It's much better than windows telnet, and it'll even telnet, if you must.
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
or search google.com for "putty.exe".
-- Dan Wilder
Linux Journal's Weekly News Notes Tech Tips
ssh -nUse ssh -n to run an X program from one computer on another. For example,
ssh -n frodo gimp &
will run the GIMP on the host frodo, but display locally.
Using ssh for this is much easier and more secure than setting it up in X manually.
The -n option means prevent reading of stdin. Many times you don't need this, but if your application hangs waiting for input or does something else strange, try it.
The simplest way to process a web formYou can put a simple form on your web site even if you don't have CGI privileges. Just use <form method=GET action="result.html"> where result.html is a "thank you for filling out the form" page.
You can then get the values people filled in from the web server access log.
How to switch between several network profiles on your
laptopUse the scheme option to cardctl to manage multiple network schemes on one laptop. The scheme is passed in as the first part of the device address in the PCMCIA wireless.opts script. Make two entries in wireless.opts:
ssc,*,*,*)
INFO="SSC WiFi Net"
ESSID="wifi.ssc.com"
;;
dana,*,*,*)
INFO="live.com network at Dana St. Roasting Co."
ESSID="LIVE.COM"
;;
To switch between them, do
sudo cardctl scheme ssc
or
sudo cardctl scheme dana
For more info, see the PCMCIA HOWTO. You can change all the settings, including WEP key, mode and other options. For more information on free wireless access and coffee in Mountain View, California, see Dana Street: http://www.live.com/danastreet, a LIVE.COM Neighborhood Network.
Rob Flickenger explains how to set up shell scripts to switch schemes with less typing in his new book, Building Wireless Community Networks (O'Reilly, 2002).
Speeding up commands like "route" and "netstat"If "route" takes a long time to run because you have no route to your nameserver, do "route -n" to skip the DNS lookup and use IP addresses only.
This works with "netstat", "ping" and "traceroute" too.
Very important topic: keeping your "fortune" file indexedYou can keep your fortune file indexed and up-to-date on multiple servers with make. Here's an example Makefile to handle common fortune-related tasks:
# List all the fortune files you maintain here. (I just have them
# all in one big file)
FORTUNES = dmarti
# For every fortune file, the datfile is the same name but with .dat
# on the end
DATFILES = $(FORTUNES:=.dat)
# Make a copy of the fortunes file to the zork.net collection
# (http://zork.net/fortunes/) Since it's the first target, this
# target and its dependencies will run if you just type "make"
tozork : $(DATFILES)
scp $(FORTUNES) $(DATFILES) zork.net:/usr/local/etc/fortunes
touch tozork
# This target makes each .dat file from the appropriate fortune
# file, if it has changed.
%.dat : %
strfile $<
# Get rid of all the .dat files (not really needed, but it's traditional
# to have "make clean" do _something_)
clean :
rm -f $(DATFILES)
# There is no file named "clean", but always build this target.
.PHONY : clean
For more information, see "man strfile" and "info make". Now that you know how to manage fortunes by editing only one file and typing make, why not put your favorite sayings on your web site as a fortune file others can also use? (The old fortunes that come with most distributions have come up way too often for us.)
Limiting the files "locate" shows"locate" is a wonderful command for quickly finding files on your system. Unfortunately, sometimes it produces so many hits that it takes too long to find the forest among the trees. Distributions and programs often have lots of files, making locate seem useless. To refine your search, type:
loc () {
locate "$1" | egrep -v 'bmp|html|whatever'
}
or put it in your .bashrc, and you won't receive any entries that contain
The Answer Gang 
We
send their spam to the Luxury Bitbucket
Setup
of ipchains when using ftp
Can't
get all my True Type fonts to get recognized
USB
mouse goes missing
booting multiple linux distributions
ext3
filesystemcheck?
Soyo
Shutdown
How do I
use a 250 zip with linux mandrake 7.2 --or--
socket
doubt --or--
Hard
Disk: BadCRC errors from dma_intr on bootup...
FTP
Server
setting nameservers from the command line 
Greetings from Heather SternHey everybody and welcome once more to The Answer Gang. It's gotten a little crowded in our little weekender pub here -- one querent offered us some cake though, and I'm sure we'll enjoy it...
The statistics: We now have 60 members in The Gang. Less than 10 people received no answer whatsoever (and this can be attributed to things like no subject, or no clear problem description). Spam is down immensely since Dan went and made some of the dead trout into a Rube Goldberg machine, reducing the mails that flew by me to somewhere around 500.
The dumb thing of the month: Some mailers not only turn stuff into HTML, but they smush all the spaces out of it themselves, and then put the results in quoted-printable. Glork. Much to my amazement that person got some answers though I can't tell if they helped him. But it certainly didn't get pubbed; I couldn't read it to tell if it was juicy...
But the real Rant Of The Month has to go to The GNU Project for making it sexy to stop shipping man pages !?! Sadly this isn't news. But definitely sadly, there are so many different places around that helpful data might be ... and probably isn't, since many packages pick one and don't have the others ... that we're gonna need a "wtfm" command. An rtfm command that works would have to depend on it.
That stands for "Where's The Friendly Manual?"
Particularly egregious since distros now have to figure out their own way to cook up replacesments, so when some cheerful soul pipes in "Oh just check the man pages" ... the user can actually find one ... sigh ... Debian has a standard undocumented.7 man page, which can be summarized:
Yes, we know there's no man page. It's already been filed as a bug, thus you see this. If you'd like to write one for this app and submit it we sure would appreciate it.
Don't even get me started about distros that tell you that you can't get any help at all unless your webserver is working.
Phooey! I'm not going to let it ruin my weekend. I'm going to a filk
conference, as I do a couple of times a year. This particular one is Consonance in the Silicon Valley area.
There will be bunches of computer songs there and I plan to be up late singing a
few of them. Regular readers already know about my autobiographical
filk song but I've written one about my laptop, and a couple about
Linux'ing, too. I'm not the really prolific one though. My friend Steve Savitsky
has enough to fill at least a couple of CDs... and heck, that's just his
computer songs
Have a great month everyone. I know I will!
We send their spam to the Luxury BitbucketBy Dan Wilder
I've been filtering more agressively. This month's spam bouncing features a 450 to "From: " addresses with domains the MTA can't find in the DNS.
Since lots of spammers use unrepliable "From:" this knocks those guys off. We use a 450 instead of a 550 because a 450 is retryable. If it's just a DNS glitch, the retry goes through.
So the real slimebags use a nonexistant user at a host that exists but for some reason does not accept SMTP connections. That way they pass the "does this host exist" test.
Lots of their mail goes to 10000000 VERIFIED EMAIL ADDRESSES, meaning people like mlr@ssc.com who don't work here any more, or Qr457.1121212???@ssc.com who never did. These bounce, but our MTA can't raise a connection from the putative source, so they just park on the queue for a week or so.
Every couple of days I go look for new stuff on the queue from MAILER-DAEMON with "Connection refused" errors. Then I add them to a reject file, and henceforth mail claiming to be from anybody at the "From:" domain gets
550 You refuse our connections so we refuse yours
Non-retryable. I figure we don't knock off too many legit domains, since these usually don't keep refusing connections for very long, and MAILER-DAEMON doesn't have much traffic for legit domains anyway.
Each morning I get mailed the list of 100 or so mails that were so refused, and I vette for stuff that might be legit. Mostly it's the same bogus "From:" hammering ten or twenty users at SSC, more than half of whom never existed.
Setup of ipchains when using ftpFrom Chris Gianakopolous
Answered By Jim Dennis, John Karns, Heather Stern, Ben Okopnik, Mike Orr
Hello Gang,
I have a network of machines which use Linux and Windows95. This is not a Windows95 question!
Here's what I have.
1. The network address, of the ethernet LAN, is 192.93.16.0 (a Motorola block).
2. I use a dialup connection, using a modem, to access my ISP, and I use wvdial to dial things up. The Linux machine is the one connected to the Internet. It is my router.
3. I use the SuSE 6.4 Linux distribution (with the 2.2.14 kernel).
4. I use ipchains to set up my rules. The commands are listed below. It's in a shell script.
See attached ipchains-masq.sh.txt
I can browse the Web (from my Windows machine) with no problem. When I use the ftp client, on the Windows machine, I can log in to the ftp site (ftp.cdrom.com, for example), and I can get the prompt. When I type "ls" or "dir", I get the indication that the PORT command is successful, and nothing else happens. Things appear to stall.
[Mike] There's a special kernel module (ip_masq_ftp) to allow FTP to pass through an IP-masqueraded gateway. See the Networking section in the kernel configuration.
I have seen a posting on the SuSE site about this very problem, but, I
have not yet found an answer.
I will continue troubleshooting this problem on my own, but if anybody else (probably everybody) has seen the behavior of ipchains and ftp clients on other machines, it would be cool if you let me know.
I suspect that this is a simple configuration problem. I looked at the IP-CHAINS HOWTO, and I looked at the IP-MASQUERADING HOWTO, but, I have not found anything yet. I will look at them again, just to see if I missed anything. I will also search the Linux Gazette site again. I may just have a mental block.
Thanks Mike. I wound up figuring that out, ultimately...
Why my ftp client, on my Windows95 machine, did not appear to work using my Linux machine with IP masquerading was --
I had to type the following command on my Linux machine that was doing the masquerading:
insmod ip_masq_ftp
I found this information at the URL,
http://netfilter.samba.org/ipchains/HOWTO-7.html
Yea, Ben. I saw all of the various ip_masq_* modules at some other
URL. Thanks for the reply.
The broader issue is that the normal automatic kernel loading mechanism (kmod) wasn't working. You probably want to run depmod (build your kernel module dependency tree file) and try running modprobe (which attempts to find and load modules including their dependents). If the modprobe command doesn't work by hand, then the kmod (kernel module loader) won't either --- since kmod spawns off kernel threads to execute modprobe commands.
I think that I did that depmod stuff when I rebuilt the kernel (to add
enhanced support for my hard disk controller), but I will take this advice into
account. Maybe I THINK that I did the required stuff. It was more than 8 months
ago (an eternity in my world).
It's also possible that something might be wrong with your /etc/modules.conf file which aliases certain kernel symbols (drivers, protocol families, filesystem types, etc) with the modules specific to your system.
I'm also running masquerading with a 2.2.x (2.2.20), and I just put the modules in the ipchain script to have them loaded. I don't see that SuSE had set up modutils for the masq modules.
Hey John,
Which script are you talking about? I just put everything in a bash script. Is that what you are talking about? I would look at the man page for ipchains, but I am on a system that I am just installing Linux, thus, ipchains (and its man page) are not installed. I just got the ppp link, sendmail, and mutt configured on this machine.
While it can be argued that the loose parts make it easier to keep things organized, I'll note that with or without, it's a mess pretty quickly when you like to toggle amid a handful of kernel versions. Luckily modules that don't exist merely issue a harmless warning.
I will double check that. Okay, I just double checked my
/etc/modules.conf file. It has all of the cool stuff for setting up
sound....., but nothing is mentioned (in the file) for my ftp masquerading
module. This is the file that I manually have to set up with the SuSE 6.4
distribution. Oh well, I'll read more about this stuff.
kmod works by intercepting attempts to use device drivers, networking protocols, filesystem types and other resources that might be provided through kernel modules, suspending the process that requested those resources, mapping the requested resource to some provider module and attempting to modprobe that provider. As I've said, modprobe attempts to recursively load each of the modules on which its target depends.
I see.
So, your use of ftp should, normally, have automatically loaded the ip_masq_ftp.o for you.
At least my original suprise is sort of justified. Of course,
knowledge reduces stress and surprise. Thanks for the info, Jim. I will do some
more reading (heeding your advice, of course), and start my experiments.
Can't get all my True Type fonts to get recognizedFrom leo
Answered By Heather Stern, Ben Okopnik, Jay R. Ashworth, Thorsten Mürell, Jim Dennis, Matthias
[Leo] Hey Gang - First off... absolutely stellar job. Linux is a
little bit more fun as a result of all of you.
[Leo] Anyhow, I can't seem to get all my TrueType fonts to get
recognized by ttmkfdir.
I've followed the True Type HOWTO exactly, and have been told to look at the resulting fonts.dir and fonts.scale, and alas, only half the TrueType fonts in that directory show up.
swiss911.ttf: MS-Windows true type
font .ttf
[Leo] I downloaded some TrueType fonts off the web (http://www.fontalicious.com/)... is it
possible that these fonts don't adhere to some kind of standard that's out
there, and that's why ttmkfdir isn't working for them? If not, any ideas as to
what I can do to get this working?
Thanks for the quick response Heather... So here's where I am now:
After I went and got the file utility from rpmfind.net, I ran it
and got this:
[silver] ~/fonts/>file sushi.ttf
sushi.ttf: raw
G3 data, byte-padded
The thing is, though, when I run file on say arial.ttf, I get this:
[silver] ~/fonts/file arial.ttf
arial.ttf: raw G3 data,
byte-padded
This isn't obvious because it doesn't insist on it; there's a call to make if you want to ask if a library is around to use, after you load. The better gtk and Gnome apps sometimes use it, so that they can use plain xlibs if the glitzier things aren't around.
(on my box it says it can't find Freetype, right before it fails to display the font, on fonts which otherwise work just fine. GIMP sees 'em all because of xfstt. Maybe my own "X 4 won't honor truetype" problem is that it doesn't find the lib, and my xfstt does, or is static. Hmm.)