May 2008 - main - earth.li

Bash commands
by Bev Nicolson 29 May '08

29 May '08

Still on the nursery slopes as far as bash commands I'm afraid but have, once again, realised how very useful they can be. How do you learn what to type in in any given situation, though? (I'm asking generally, not for any specific problem I have now.) Bev. (Ubuntu user.) -- _______________________________________________ Surf the Web in a faster, safer and easier way: Download Opera 9 at http://www.opera.com Powered by Outblaze

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Export emails
by chestep 28 May '08

28 May '08

Hello Alug I made enquiries to the list some time ago about exporting emails from Firefox to a folder on a separate drive. I received several replies after which I downloaded an add-on and could export emails successfully. One responder was James (don't know any other details) who said he exported regularly from Firefox; I'm wondering if he (or anyone else) could comment on how well the Folder & Subfolder Structure copies, or the method they use. I find I often have to make separate folder on the target drive, then copy the emails into this, then it works well. Thanks

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Program to do pretty graphs of monthly network transfers
by Srdjan Todorovic 27 May '08

27 May '08

Hi all, I'm looking for suggestions for software that will draw some pretty graphs of the number of bytes transferred over an interface over the past day, week and month. MRTG (for eg.) only seems to do network speed monitoring. I'm looking into RRDTool, but I'm not sure yet if this is what I want. A very very quick look at ntop and iptraf suggests that it's for measuring transfer speeds, and not what I want. Basically I want something that's persistent across reboots and power-offs. Something that will tell me that in the past minute, I transferred 1MB, past 10mins: 10MB, past day: 12MB, past week: 1Gb, past month: 8GB. You get the point. Could be a command line tool, or ncurses interface. Nice pretty graphs would be a bonus (graphical toolkit on X11 or web-based solution). Has to run on Linux, and be at the very least, free as in beer. Anyone got any recommendations? Many thanks, Srdjan

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duff switch?
by mbm 27 May '08

27 May '08

This not strictly a Linux/OSS question (unless the fact that the router in question is running openwrt counts), but I ask because there are bound to be network experts here and I'm going crazy. I have an Asus WL500G wireless router connected to my DSL router. This lets me partition my network into two in a classic screened subnet architecture. Thusly: outside | [DSL]---------DMZ hosts------- | | | [ASUS] | | inside (both wired and wireless) DMZ net is 192.168.1.0, inside net is 192.168.10.0 As I said, the Asus is running x-wrt (a flavour of openwrt with a nice web interface on top). The Asus has 4 lan ports, 1 wan port and the wifi interface. I have the following situation: 1. No problem with wifi. Any and all wifi devices I configure can connect, they can see all relevant hosts (including my dnsmasq DNNS/DHCP server) and can reach the 'net. So all hunkydory. 2. No problem with any /single/ wired lan connection in any of the lan ports (i.e all is good to go as in the wifi connection). So again, all hunkydory (and it doesn't matter which lan port I use.) 3. But - as soon as I connect any second wired device to the Asus, I get connection failures (ICMP errors "Destination Host Unreachable"). Oddly, if I leave a device connected running a ping I get most traffic dropped (of the order of 90%) but intermittently I get connection responses. 4. Now the bit that really confuses me. If I now connect an external switch to any port on the Asus and then connect any new wired device through that switch, it all works fine. So - have I just got a duff switch in the Asus (and if so, why the hell does it work when I connect another switch)? Or should I be looking for something else? Mick --------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a Microsoft free zone. Please do not send me Microsoft Word Documents. For some reasons, see: www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html www.goldmark.org/netrants/no-word/attach.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------

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Any recommendations for a PCI Wifi card?
by Adam Reid 27 May '08

27 May '08

Greetings all. :) I'm currently engaged in building my new PC, but have hit a rather annoying hurdle when it comes to finding a linux-friendly PCI wifi card ... mostly due to the constant and unadvertised chipset changes they love to pull. Can anyone suggest a good current card - bonus points if it's in stock at ebuyer - that will work reliably and with minimal bloodshed? Many pre-emptive thanks, ~Adam

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Re: [ALUG] Kubuntu 7.04 updates make firefox crash
by James Freer 27 May '08

27 May '08

2008/5/24 Tim Green <timothy.j.green(a)gmail.com>: > On Sat, May 24, 2008 at 10:51 PM, James Freer <jessejazza(a)googlemail.com> wrote: >> All updates i follow the recommended System~>Administration~>Update manager >> The update database for apt-get, synaptic and aptitude are separate. >> Update with just apt-get update only does that database - the >> irritating update icon is from Update Manager (and continues to >> display until update manager is used, although could be disabled). >> Kubuntu has had quite a few problems i seem to recall with Adept. If i >> was using kubuntu i'd install synaptic (a different world to suse's >> Yast). > > Weird - one my Gnome Ubuntu system for at least the last 18 months the > Update Manager icon stayed in sync with manual usage of "apt-get > update && apt-get upgrade". While apt-get is running, the icon turns > grey, and when the upgrade is complete, it goes away. > > Tim. I checked with an update this morning - using ubuntu 7.10 [still waiting for my shipit 8.04! but doesn't matter as they still seem to be quite busy sorting out bugs!]. "apt-get update" seems to update apt-get, the update icon went grey and remained grey while i did some other work, i rebooted and the orange icon returns with the same new package to be updated. It seems update manager needs to run with all package managers exited. There may be a preferences somewhere that we have set differently. This was the same on 7.04 and 6.10 that i tried. james

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Hardware Issues (Display / X11 and Mouse)
by Jan T. Kim 26 May '08

26 May '08

Hi All, I've got two issues mainly concerning hardware: (1) I've recently bought an Asus W202S display (1680x1050) and connected that to my laptop (Asus X51, ATI Radeon Xpress 200M graphics, running the closed-source ATI X server). Things basically work, but it takes some sort of "warm-up time" before the picture stably settles in -- initially, areas with a checkerboard raster (e.g. scroll bars of xterm and other Athena GUI applications, also the default meshwork pattern shown by X11 upon startup) are quite blurred. I can fix this by adjusting the "Phase" setting in the display's on-screen menu system, but the phase will drift, resulting in gradual build-up of blur, and it stabilises only after 20 minutes or so. I wonder whether there might be some Modeline hack or similar to generate a video signal that the display can lock on to reliably, regardless of some drift. In text (console) mode the display doesn't work ideally either, the display "sees" 1024 x 768 while the laptop's display shows 1280 x 800 (and presumably also sends that through the external monitor interface), so some amount of stuff is cut away from the margins. I've tried everything with the on-screen menus of the display (there isn't very much), to no avail -- so is there anything on the Linux side of this that I could try? (2) On a completely different topic, I have an optical mouse which seems to have a sensor problem, the mouse pointer is jumping and dancing wildly, with some trend (towards the lower left, I think). Some mice I had used to do something similar when slightly lifted from the surface. Is there any more or less known fix for such malfunctions? Best regards & thanks in advance for any comments, Jan -- +- Jan T. Kim -------------------------------------------------------+ | email: jtk(a)cmp.uea.ac.uk | | WWW: http://www.cmp.uea.ac.uk/people/jtk | *-----=< hierarchical systems are for files, not for humans >=-----*

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Kubuntu 7.04 updates make firefox crash
by Srdjan Todorovic 24 May '08

24 May '08

Hi, Got this annoying issue. If I do any kind of updates on this Kubuntu 7.04 box, using Adept Manager, and then start firefox, it crashes with a segfault. The dump isn't very informative, the only reference seems to be something to do with a syscall AFAIR. I put a bugreport on launchpad ages ago about it but it has been closed [in part due to my stupidness]. Essentially the advice was "reboot computer after an update". This seems silly and very Windows-y. Firefox segfaults even on updates that would have nothing to do with any component firefox uses or depends on. Firefox crashes invariably after any adept update. Have not tried using plain apt-get on command line. This machine ran memtest for 15 hours, no problems. CPU model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 4300 @ 1.80GHz RAM: 2GB lspci: 00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. P4M890 Host Bridge 00:00.1 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. P4M890 Host Bridge 00:00.2 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. P4M890 Host Bridge 00:00.3 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. P4M890 Host Bridge 00:00.4 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. P4M890 Host Bridge 00:00.5 PIC: VIA Technologies, Inc. P4M890 I/O APIC Interrupt Controller 00:00.6 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. P4M890 Security Device 00:00.7 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. P4M890 Host Bridge 00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 PCI Bridge 00:02.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. P4M890 PCI to PCI Bridge Controller 00:03.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. P4M890 PCI to PCI Bridge Controller 00:0f.0 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237A SATA 2-Port Controller (rev 80) 00:0f.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 07) 00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev a0) 00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev a0) 00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev a0) 00:10.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev a0) 00:10.4 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 86) 00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237A PCI to ISA Bridge 00:11.7 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8251 Ultra VLINK Controller 00:13.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237A Host Bridge 00:13.1 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237A PCI to PCI Bridge 02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G70 [GeForce 7600 GT] (rev a1) 04:05.0 Ethernet controller: ADMtek NC100 Network Everywhere Fast Ethernet 10/100 (rev 11) 04:07.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8169SC Gigabit Ethernet (rev 10) 80:01.0 Audio device: VIA Technologies, Inc. VIA High Definition Audio Controller (rev 10) Linux ubuntu 2.6.20-16-generic #2 SMP Tue Feb 12 05:41:34 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux Any suggestions? Thanks, -Srdjan

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Server to server backups
by Mark Rogers 24 May '08

24 May '08

If I have two (virtual) servers online (ie out in the real world, not on my LAN or behind ADSL connections) and I want one to be used to backup the other, what method would anyone suggest? I'm thinking of data backups rather than disk images. I'd like (a) to have rolling backups so I can roll back to before any specific **** up, (b) to have a sensible way to backup MySQL databases I can't think of any other specific requirements. Bandwidth between the two servers isn't a major issue but not something I want to ignore completely. Similarly disk space isn't a problem, but wasting it by having multiple copies of unchanged files would still be a bit silly. On the other hand, both servers will have public IPs and therefore I need to consider the security implications of opening up the live server so that the backup server can access it, and (to a lesser extent) vice versa. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Cheap server machine spotted
by Chris G 23 May '08

23 May '08

If anyone is looking for a cheap server machine to stick in a cupboard somewhere the HP ProLiant ML115 is being offered at knock down prices at the moment for some reason. The cheapest I could find with a quick search is:- http://www.kikatek.com/product_info.php?products_id=40254&source=froogle £105 for a machine with 1Gb memory, 160Gb hard disk, gigabit ethernet and space for expansion seems pretty good to me. -- Chris Green

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