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Reliable friendly hosting companies
by Mark Rogers 09 Nov '10

09 Nov '10

We currently use MemSet for most of our hosting requirements. We run Ubuntu virtual servers and have very few problems caused either by us or Memset. However, Memset don't provide out-of-hours emergency support except with fully managed servers (£40/month overhead, on a virtual server which might only be costing £10/month itself). This has occasionally caused problems in the past, with an upgrade taking place late on a Friday evening leaving the server inaccessible until after 9am Monday. It means we can't risk a major update out-of-hours in case of problems, but equally don't want to schedule downtime in office hours either. We prefer to run multiple virtual servers rather than having one "big" one - spreading the load but more importantly meaning that one outage it less likely to hit all customers or all services at the same time (much easier to manage!). At £40/mo for multiple servers this means paying around £3-4k just to be able to contact emergency support typically once per year when we have a problem that requires it. So, what are the current suggestions for hosts that other people can recommend with 24/7 support availability for those rare disasters? I know this type of thread crops up fairly often but recommendations change and I haven't seen the specific issue of out-of-hours support cropping up. Other than this I have no reason to wish to move away from Memset, but we have reached the stage of migrating several sites to new virtual servers and that can either be at Memset or elsewhere, so I need to consider the alternatives. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Tools for laying out images and text on web pages - suggestions wanted
by Chris G 06 Nov '10

06 Nov '10

Are there any good tools/utilities for easily laying out pictures and text on a web page? I want an easy way to put some images and text on a page with text beside pictures and/or more than one picture across the page. I know that HTML is fundamentally not really designed to do such a thing (because it creates content rather than layout) but in the real world it's a rather fundamental thing to want to do. While CSS is 'the right answer' it doesn't really fill the bill because I want to layout 'this particular bit of text I have written' in a specific position relative to 'this particular image'. I'm not after a generic two column or three column layout into which I can drop my text and images, I'm after saying "put this text top left next to this image top right then this text across the page, then this image on the left with this text to the right of it ....." etc. I guess the WYSIWYG way of doing it would be draggable boxes with configurable constraints such that you could say "this one must be next to this one". (... and yes I know WYSIWYG doesn't really fit the web because of different sized screens etc. but this is mostly for me to use so it doesn't have to work for everyone's screen and browser) Any suggestions? -- Chris Green

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Does anyone else's Alt key do this - multiplier entry - can it be turned off?
by Chris G 05 Nov '10

05 Nov '10

While recently playing around with my keyboard and looking at ways to enter special characters I discovered that the Alt key (that's the one on the left, i.e. *not* the AltGr key) doesn't act as a modifier like the AltGr key but, in some cases, acts as a multiplier for the next character. I.e. if I enter Alt+<digit> the prompt changes to (arg: <digit>) and entering further Alt+<digit> keys adds to the value after arg:. Then on entering the next character it is repeated arg times. This is (for me anyway) a totally useless facility, I'd much rather the Alt key acts as a shift key (like the AltGr key) and gives special characters. I have some documentation that gives the standard/default characters generated by Alt and AltGr as follows (intermediate mail systems willing):- Unshifted Shifted Unshifted Shifted Key Alt AltGr Alt AltGr Key Alt AltGr Alt AltGr ` à | ¬ 1 ± ¹ ¡ ¡ A á æ Á Æ 2 ² ² ¢ S ó ß Ó § 3 ³ ³ £ £ D ä ð Ä Ð 4 ´ ¤ ¼ F æ Æ ª 5 µ ½ ¥ G ç Ç 6 ¶ ¾ Þ H è È 7 · ¦ J ê Ê 8 ¸ ª K ë Ë 9 ¹ ¨ ± L ì Ì 0 ° © ° ; » º - ß ¿ ' § À = ½ « # £ þ Q ñ Ñ \ Ü ü ¦ W ÷ × Z ú « Ú < E å Å X ø » Ø > R ò ¶ Ò ® C ã ¢ Ã © T ô Ô V ö Ö Y ù Ù ¥ B â Â U õ Õ N î n Î N I é É M í µ Í º O ï ø Ï Ø , ¬ ¼ × P ð þ Ð Þ . ® · ¾ ÷ [ Û û / ¯ ¿ ] Ý ý In all my terminal windows the above AltGr combinations work but none of the Alt ones do, I'd like the Alt ones as well. I could then type things like ¢ (cents) and ® (registered) without too much hassle. (The above ways of typing accented characters aren't so much use as they're not easy to remember and I use a Compose key to do them) -- Chris Green

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Why are these disks subtly different? Does it matter?
by Chris G 05 Nov '10

05 Nov '10

I have just added a second WD 1Tb disk to my desktop system for backups and such. It *looks* like the one that the system started with but it has some subtle differences and I wonder whether these are significant in any way. Firstly fdisk reports slightly different geometry:- Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0xf24a2de7 Disk /dev/sdc: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes 81 heads, 63 sectors/track, 382818 cylinders Units = cylinders of 5103 * 512 = 2612736 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x4e451e03 Secondly (and the one I have *slightly* more concern about) blkid reports as follows:- /dev/sdc1: UUID="c4ae6fbe-18b3-4af9-aed8-a442e0fb6893" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3" /dev/sdb1: UUID="6976542f-0471-411e-8c0d-97492c3f49b5" TYPE="ext3" What does that SEC_TYPE="ext2" mean? I used mkfs.ext3 to create the file system on the disk with no explicit option. Presumably the other disk (/dev/sdb1) was partitioned and formatted when I installed xubuntu. -- Chris Green

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Where is this pseudo-wifi network coming from?
by Chris G 05 Nov '10

05 Nov '10

Our Dell Vostro V13 laptop keeps telling us that there's a WiFi network called dcuc160 which it successfully connects to, unfortunately it doesn't actually work. This network appears wherever we are, even in Belgium on our boat and at home where there aren't any neighbours in wireless range so I don't think it's any sort of real network. How can we get rid of it as it's a right pain. I've searched for dcuc160 on Google and got just one hit for "Duelund Coherent Audio CAST inductors homepage", not relevant! -- Chris Green

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eSata disk on Linux, are they normally hot-pluggable?
by Chris G 05 Nov '10

05 Nov '10

I have an external eSata disk drive that I want to use on my desktop machine occasionally. I have powered it up and connected it and absolutely nothing seems to happen. I've done a bit of Google'ing and there doesn't seem to be a very consistent result, I've found everyting from "doesn't work at all" to "works perfectly, just pops up when plugged in". I've searched for it specifically with Ubuntu 10.04 as that's what I'm using. Has anyone here had success (or otherwise) with hot-plugging eSata disks? I have had the disk working on another system but I can't remember whether that was hot-plugged or present at power up. I will try rebooting the dekstop with the eSata powered and connected to see if it works then but I really want to be able to hot-plug it. -- Chris Green

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Re: [ALUG] weird problems
by Peter Alcibiades 05 Nov '10

05 Nov '10

Ha! Weird problem, undid the machine to take a look at the innards, and noticed a slight rattling sound. Odd, but get distracted and take a look a the hard drive. This has a yellow sticker on it bearing the legend Drive 1, and someone has written in marker across it Windows 7. Interesting. Think about this for a while. This is after all a new custom built machine. Then move the machine around to see where the rattle might be coming from. It seems to come from the fan, which is a stock Intel fan and heat sink. Odder and odder. Waggle it a bit, and it comes up easily on one side! In short, three of the four securing pins are not secured into the main board, so presumably the fit of the heat sink is, well, dodgy. Oh dear. This might be the solution. In the meantime my friend lost his sense of humour and trashed all the previous partitions, well, hard to blame him. So here we go again.... Peter

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weird problems
by Peter Alcibiades 04 Nov '10

04 Nov '10

How about this? Friend with a windows 7 installation. He tells me he was using skype and suddenly the system crashed after which Norton had vanished and several pictures went missing. System restore done by his current helper tried twice and failed to work. I told him to buy a new oem copy of windows (his last being of dubious provenance), have his helper partition the machine into two NTFS partitions and some free space for Linux, and reinstall. He did this, but was unable to reinstall, not sure why, so brought the machine over. I reinstalled Windows with no problem, and then proceeded to Debian. Well, there was a message about the fstab not being right because of an error involving the partition id. I didn't understand this, but proceeded. All goes well, we install grub, we reboot, and the windows install is nowhere to be found in the bootloader. After a long story, I put in PCLinux instead, and this goes in and works fine, grub picks up the windows install, we can boot from either linux or from windows, no problem. He goes home, sends me a couple emails showing windows at least works. I get this message: Email from Windows, printer driver, sound, flash player, microsoft security, Admin account for Windows, and it's all still working! This morning, sad message from another computer, he is down again. It will boot neither Linux nor Windows. Do you think this might be hardware? I wonder about trying memory diagnostics or hard drive verification program? I can restore the boot sector in windows, I can also take him to lilo, but will it last any better than the others? Or if not that, any other suggestions? Peter

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Search and replace(insert) - can anyone help?
by Govind Chandra 03 Nov '10

03 Nov '10

Hi Barry, I made a slightly bigger test file from your input for testing. ===================================================================== <table class="socialheader" width="100%" border="0"> <tr> <td width="85%" align="left" nowrap>The Three Sisters, Glen Coe</td> </tr> </table> <table class="sociheader" width="100%" border="0"> <tr> <td width="85%" align="left" nowrap>This cannot be used</td> </tr> </table> <table class="socialheader" width="100%" border="0"> <tr> <td width="85%" align="left" nowrap>This is different each time</td> </tr> </table> <table class="socialhear" width="100%" border="0"> <tr> <td width="85%" align="left" nowrap>This is not usable</td> </tr> </table> ========================================================================= I think the perl script below (or some modification thereof) will do what you want. ===================================================== #! /usr/bin/perl use strict; open(INFILE, "<$ARGV[0]"); my $social_flag = 0; while(<INFILE>) { my $line=$_; chomp($line); if($line=~m/\<table class\=\"socialheader\"/) { $social_flag = 1; print("$line\n"); next; } if($line=~m/align\=\"left\"/ and $line=~m/width\=\"85\%\"/ and $line=~m/nowrap/ ) { if($social_flag) { print("$line\n"); print("One new line here\n"); print("Another new line here\n"); $social_flag = 0; } else { print("$line\n"); } } else { print("$line\n"); } } close(INFILE); ============================================================== Hope this helps. Govind > Subject: [ALUG] Search and replace(insert) - can anyone help? > To: Alug <main(a)lists.alug.org.uk> > Message-ID: <1288625418.1815.0@dataman1> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii > > <table class="socialheader" width="100%" border="0"> > > <tr> > <td width="85%" align="left" nowrap>The Three Sisters, Glen Coe</td> > </tr> > > </table> > > I have over 2500 pages with the above HTML in ( the "Three Sisters, Glen > Coe" bit is different in every file) and I want to add two lines so: > > <table class="socialheader" width="100%" border="0"> > > <tr> > <td width="85%" align="left" nowrap>The Three Sisters, Glen Coe</td> > <One new line here> > <Another new line here> > </tr> > > </table> > > The pair of lines to be inserted is identical in each case but the only > unique identifier is the "class=socialheader". > > Is there any way I can do it with a script? > > -- > Barry Samuels > http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk > The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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Kerberos
by Richard Lewis 02 Nov '10

02 Nov '10

Hi ALUG, I've just tried to add a new user to a Debian unstable system I manage on a virtual server but have run up against some sort of authentication problem. As normal, I used adduser: $ sudo adduser interface Adding user `interface' ... Adding new group `interface' (1002) ... Adding new user `interface' (1002) with group `interface' ... Creating home directory `/home/interface' ... Copying files from `/etc/skel' ... But then it said this: Current Kerberos password: passwd: User not known to the underlying authentication module passwd: password unchanged Try again? [y/N] n Hitting n continued like this: Changing the user information for interface Enter the new value, or press ENTER for the default Full Name []: Interface2011 Room Number []: Work Phone []: Home Phone []: Other []: Is the information correct? [Y/n] y It seems I can't set a password for this user now: $ sudo su interface $ passwd Current Kerberos password: passwd: User not known to the underlying authentication module passwd: password unchanged I've heard of Kerberos and it all sounds great, but as far as I know, I don't "use it" (if that's the right expression) on this system. And I'd prefer just to use an ordinary UNIX password, because I just want it to work. I tried commenting out a line in /etc/pam.d/common-password: #password requisite pam_krb5.so minimum_uid=1000 password [success=1 default=ignore] pam_unix.so obscure use_authtok try_first_pass sha512 But I'm not whether: a) this has been effective; or b) would solve the problem anyway. Any ideas how to make it not try and use Kerberos? Best, Richard -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard Lewis ISMS, Computing Goldsmiths, University of London Tel: +44 (0)20 7078 5134 Skype: richardjlewis JID: ironchicken(a)jabber.earth.li http://www.richardlewis.me.uk/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

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