June 2006 - main - earth.li

Belkin switch dodgy?
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 02 Jul '06

02 Jul '06

Hi Folks, I recently bought a Belkin 10/100 5-port ethernet switch (product number F5D5131-5). It works for a few minutes (less than 5) and then the LEDs for the ports that cables are plugged into go out, after which it is useless. If I pull out the power supply plug, wait a few seconds, then plug it back, it starts up again OK, but again goes belly-up after a few minutes. Does anyone recognise this behaviour on the part of Belkin switches? (I'm not really looking for a cure, since I reckon the unit is duff, though if anyone has cured such a thing then it would be good to know; there's a possible overheating issue since despite being well aired it feels pretty warm when running). What I'm really concerned about is whether one can expect this sort of thing from a Belkin, since if so I shall be avoiding it when I replace it. (The fly in the ointment is that I bought it from PC World, but seem to have lost the b****y receipt!) With thanks, and best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 30-Jun-06 Time: 20:21:14 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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New wireless router problem
by Ian bell 27 Jun '06

27 Jun '06

I just upgraded my wireless router becuase the old one kept dropping the line now I have an ADSL MAX connection. Glad to say the new one holds up much better. However, it connects via wireless no problem to the two Windows PCs in the network but I have had a lot of trouble connecting my Slackware laptop to it. The laptop has a Cisco Aeronet PCMCIA wireless card theat is 802.11b - one of a pair I got off an ALUG member. It has worked fine until now. I am running Slackware current. During boot the PCMCIA module finds the card as usual and sets it off. However, as soon as hotplug strarts it gets turned off again. ifconfig does not show it but iwconfig does - presumably showing the PCMCIA setup. no amount of command line jiggerry pokery will get it going for n=anything more than a few seconds. So I disabled hotplug during boot and sure enough the card stays on but is not connected. A quick ifconfig eth0 up followed by dhcpcd eth0 gets it going. So as a temporary measure I can place these commands in rc.local - must do that as soon as I have sent this - but what I need to know is what is hotplug doing to upset things? The strange thing is that it all worked fine with the old modem. Any ideas? Ian

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Amarok Context Browser
by Wayne Stallwood 27 Jun '06

27 Jun '06

In previous versions of Amarok I had a pane in the context browser that offered tracks I might like to listen to based on whatever the current track was. I have a huge diverse collection and this feature was actually quite good at highlighting music I might like to play next (in fact the killer feature it was missing was the ability to feed the current playlist so that I got unattended non-stop but relevant music from my collection). In the version installed by Dapper (1.3.9) this feature seems to have vanished (or at least it is off by default and I can't work out how to turn it on) Anyone know if it can still be enabled ?

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ALUG annual dinner
by sfr 26 Jun '06

26 Jun '06

I know, it's a bit late for the Christmas dinner. St Peters' Brewery has bookings available on Fridays in July - 14th, 21st, 28th. Information is at http://www.stpetersbrewery.co.uk/hall/restaurant.htm. The menu is reckoned by locals to be absolutely fantastic. Volunteers to eat, please take one email forward. And state your preference for date. -- Elisabeth

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 26 Jun '06

26 Jun '06

This is the automated ALUG IRC meeting reminder sent to remind you that there is an IRC meeting tonight (Monday) at 8.00pm. Historically, these used to be the only time a lot of us would be about, now the channel has some usual faces that are there most of the time (except at silly o'clock, when we might be sleeping, or on the second thursday of the month, where we might be drinking in the Reindeer), so don't feel limited to visit during this time, come visit us when ever you feel like it! The meeting takes place on the irc server irc.alug.org.uk in the #alug channel. Most IRC clients should allow you to get there with the commands "/server irc.alug.org.uk" and "/join #alug". Popular IRC clients include xchat, irssi and EPIC on Unix, and Mirc under windows. Here are some links to help you get started with irc. Unix http://www.xchat.org/ http://www.irssi.org/ http://www.epicsol.org/ Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!)

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List weirdness
by Wayne Stallwood 25 Jun '06

25 Jun '06

Just got a bounce from the main list. But the subject it mentions I haven't sent an email with since the end of May and that message did show on the list...I did cause a bounce on the Amarok message because I accidentally sent it from the wrong account at 1.51PM..I got the bounce for that and resent it from the right account. But this bounce turned up at 5:06 PM today. Can one of the list admins tell me what happened ? Your mail to 'main' with the subject Bletchley Park Is being held until the list moderator can review it for approval. The reason it is being held: Message has a suspicious header Either the message will get posted to the list, or you will receive notification of the moderator's decision. If you would like to cancel this posting, please visit the following URL:

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Laptops, desktops, and UPS
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 23 Jun '06

23 Jun '06

Hi Folks, I thought I'd push out for comment a thoguht which I've been pondering from time to time. A laptop is pretty nearly immune to mains supply failure, since its battery provides a backup and modern laptops can shutdown on low battery. Desktops, on the other hand, need an external UPS to guard it against mains failure; and of course a UPS can be configured to signal the computer to shut down if the power cut lasts more than a certain time. But it has occurred to me that there's no obvious reason why a desktop can't have its own internal battery like a laptop, and I'm wonderign why they don't. Of course, laptop batteries are notorious for not having a very long useful life -- you can be lucky, in some cases, if you get 5 years out of one. And they're even more notorious for being horrendously expensive to replace, if indeed you can still find one by the time yours fails. But I'd have thought that the space available in a desktop would offer scope for a more robust and cheaper solution. (In passing -- I have an ancient laptop whose battery has been shot for years, which however works well if you plug 12v DC into its PS socket; so I've happily been using it in "away from the mains" situations by attaching it to a motorcycle battery which weighs less than 4 pounds -- 1.7kgm -- so is within my definition of "portable"). So a robust lead-acid battery of the appropriate voltage could be installed into a desktop, if the appropriate circuitry were present in the box's PSU, and would presumably last longer, be easier to replace if necessary, and cost much less. Does anyone know of desktop boxes which do this? Thanks, and best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 23-Jun-06 Time: 15:18:44 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Crazy question
by Peter 23 Jun '06

23 Jun '06

In a shop run by a friend, and he said his machine was behaving oddly. To his surprise, he had a 120G drive, but from the windows disk utility, there was only 30 in a partion, Drive C, and the rest as unallocated space. He did not know how this had happened or when, but was fairly sure it had not been bought set up like this. He is also getting notices on the screen that memory dumps are happening. He is firewalled and anti virused and updated. But he doesn't have specific anti spyware. Question: have you ever heard of anything like this happening as the result of an infection? Is it a reasonable investigative first step to boot from a live Linux CD and find out if it shows up as unallocated space in that too? And what would you then advise using to see if the space really is unallocated and with nothing in it? I have system rescue CD, and could get any of the other security oriented distros, but this isn't really my area.... Peter

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How to check for packet loss over a long[ish] period?
by chrisisbd＠leary.csoft.net 22 Jun '06

22 Jun '06

I want to run some checks on my ADSL connection to see what sort of level (if any) of packet loss I am getting. In particular I want to run some checks in the small hours of the morning because I'm getting some rsync errors which might be due to packet loss. What tools are available for checking packet loss? Is there anything better than 'ping' and/or what is a civilised repeat rate to use with ping to avoid it being seen as a DoS attack? The system I'm rsync'ing with does respond to 'ping' so that's a start. -- Chris Green (chrisisbd(a)leary.csoft.net)

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Strange hardware problem
by Wayne Stallwood 22 Jun '06

22 Jun '06

We have a server at a clients that has been showing random signs of instability (random reboots and a couple of panics) Suspecting hardware problems I brought it down and ran memtest86 on it. Then something odd happened. Memtest shows plenty of memory errors, spreading over pretty much the whole of the installed 512MB. When I stopped the tests halfway through the first pass there were two pages, the lowest error was at about 50MB the highest was at circa 430 But the really strange thing is that the error bits are 00000000 i.e the test data and "bad" data match perfectly. There is no ECC on this machine so how can the data I put in the memory and the data I take out be the same yet there be a memory error. Memtest clearly shows the "good" and "bad" column with matching data but still flags these as errors. I have ordered replacement RAM anyway, but I was just interested in what other type of memory error I am seeing here ?

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