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Wireless Access Points
by steveydoteu 20 Feb '09

20 Feb '09

ALUG, I am looking into a purchase, nothing to high end, just as a means of discarding a number of cables in my room. The problem arises when I have no experience or knowledge of using WAPs before. My current setup is as follows: BTHomeHub (2nd gen I believe) is connected into powerline adaptors one of which is used as an outlet in this room. I have then connected a LAN switch to the adaptor, which is then cabled to all machines that require access. With this in mind all current devices can actually be used via Wifi, if it was not for the HomeHub wifi being utter crap. So I am looking for advice or suggestions for a WAP that is around ~£50 that will cope with a main desktop, media server, and various consoles. Cheers, Steve www.stevey.eu

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Re: [ALUG] Netbook?
by Tim Green 19 Feb '09

19 Feb '09

2009/2/18 mbm <mbm(a)rlogin.net>: > Could you let us have your views on the HP please? I guess I'm not > alone in considering purchasing a netbook now and I'd like to know why > you chose the HP over one of the others (Eee, Aspire One etc). And of > course, if any others on the list have views or preferences I'd > appreciate hearing. One of my colleagues has an early Eee, and likes its simplicity. Runs Linux, not sure which distro. Another of my colleagues has just bought a Samsung NC10, and loves its long battery life. Runs XP. Hope that helps! Tim.

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Toppy software for netbook?
by Ruth Bygrave 18 Feb '09

18 Feb '09

The Toppy (Topfield TF5800) is a PVR roughly comparable to the Humax. It has a USB port that can be accessed by a PC or Mac. Have now got a netbook (HP Mini-Note 2133). Since this is slightly more portable than my main machine (it doesn't have a slew of wires and a USB hub connected to it) is there a way I can set it up to talk to the Toppy? Can make nothing of the descriptions on this webpage: http://toppy.org.uk/downloads/linux.php The netbook runs SUSE Enterprise Edition 10, or that's what it says on the sticky label. I have an entire series of Heroes that I haven't watched yet, for example, so if I could move it I could format it for iPod and save it on a DVD, which would allow me to get all that space back. Regards, Ruth

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Re: [ALUG] Odd networking issue; losing packets?
by lists＠glover.uk.net 18 Feb '09

18 Feb '09

> I have a Windows XP box and a Ubuntu 8.10 box plugged in to the same > router. > FWIW, it's a BT HomeHub 2 that I'm currently trialling. > > Both work, although for some reason the Ubuntu box has an odd tracert: > > $ sudo tracert 216.239.59.147 > traceroute to 216.239.59.147 (216.239.59.147), 30 hops max, 40 byte > packets > 1 BThomehub.home (192.168.1.254) 55.623 ms 55.417 ms 55.174 ms > 2 217.47.200.58 (217.47.200.58) 33.711 ms * * > 3 * * * > 4 * * * > 5 * * * > 6 * 217.41.170.65 (217.41.170.65) 41.333 ms * > 7 * 217.41.170.122 (217.41.170.122) 31.084 ms 33.988 ms > 8 * * * > 9 * * * > 10 * * * > 11 * * * > 12 * * 195.99.125.82 (195.99.125.82) 33.735 ms > 13 * * * > 14 * * * > 15 * * * > 16 * * * > 17 gv-in-f147.google.com (216.239.59.147) 45.999 ms * * > > Compare that with the Windows box; > C:\>tracert www.google.com > > Tracing route to www.l.google.com [216.239.59.147] > over a maximum of 30 hops: > > 1 43 ms 100 ms 99 ms BThomehub.home [192.168.1.254] > 2 476 ms 395 ms 435 ms 217.47.200.58 > 3 179 ms 184 ms 187 ms 217.47.250.161 > 4 191 ms 32 ms 62 ms 217.47.200.10 > 5 63 ms 63 ms 153 ms 217.41.170.21 > 6 82 ms 62 ms 97 ms 217.41.170.65 > 7 234 ms 215 ms 122 ms 217.41.170.122 > 8 206 ms 183 ms 183 ms 217.41.170.50 > 9 230 ms 244 ms 245 ms 217.47.200.241 > 10 470 ms 320 ms 307 ms > core1-pos0-0-0-5.ilford.ukcore.bt.net[194.72.20.113] > 11 370 ms 367 ms 369 ms > core1-pos14-1.telehouse.ukcore.bt.net[195.99.125.225] > 12 423 ms 490 ms 453 ms 195.99.125.82 > 13 422 ms 423 ms 409 ms 209.85.255.175 > 14 45 ms 67 ms 93 ms 209.85.250.216 > 15 101 ms 151 ms 123 ms 66.249.95.164 > 16 203 ms 184 ms 185 ms 216.239.49.114 > 17 249 ms 249 ms 242 ms gv-in-f147.google.com [216.239.59.147] > > Trace complete. > > It seems to me that the Linux box is losing lots of packets. Many get > through, but many do not. Or am I just worrying about nothing, given that > it > seems to work OK. On the bright side, those packets that do get through do > so a lot quicker than those on Windows, but that may be just because my > Linux box is less archaic. > > Any ideas? > > Thanks, > Hi Greg, Linux traceroute and WIndows traceroute work in different ways. Linux uses UDP packets, and WIndows uses ICMP. From your Linux machine try traceroute -I www.google.co.uk and then try without the -I. THe -I forces the Linux traceroute to behave like the Windows one. Some routers block excessive UDP traffic, as they see it as an attack. My Draytek router blocks UDP pings, I always have to use -I on traces. Hope that helps Chris

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GMail plain text
by Richard Lewis 17 Feb '09

17 Feb '09

Hello ALUG, Just a note for GMail Web UI users: The GMail Web interface defaults to sending multipart HTML emails. The ALUG lists bawk on HTML emails and block them for manual moderation. In order to get your messages to the list straight away you need to make sure you're sending plain text emails. When composing a message, you can click the 'Plain text' option near the formatting options to switch to plain text editing. I'm sure you used to be able to configure the GMail Web interface to default to sending plain text email to certain contacts. I can't work out how to do this now, though. If anyone works it out then do let us know! 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.richard-lewis.me.uk/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- +-------------------------------------------------------+ |Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.| |http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html | +-------------------------------------------------------+

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Fwd: Are there any remote backup systems that don't require ssh access??Recommendations?
by James Taylor 17 Feb '09

17 Feb '09

Sorry, replied not replied-all. I don't do much email ok? ---------- Forwarded message ---------- On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 1:26 PM, Srdjan Todorovic <todorovic.s(a)googlemail.com > wrote: > Hi > > 2009/2/4 Chris G <cl(a)isbd.net>: > > I still don't think it addresses the problem, unless it's an > > incremental backup. If someone breaks into 'my' machine (the machine > > being backed up) then they can send rubbish data to overwrite the good > > backups can't they? This is the specific possibility I'm trying to > > protect myself against a bit. > This is the old replication argument - Replication produces hot backups for failure, not backups for bad data. (and also other benefits..) > > Now that I remember, there was an article in one of the Linux Format > issues where you could use Subversion to hold incremental, versioned, > logged home directories. > > Anyone tried it in general? Anyone tried it specifically for this kind > of backup setup? > (or anyone tried other version control software (git?) for this?) > Me, I used a combination of SVN and Tortoise on windows to do "backups" of all my files for quite a long time. The system is perfect for a "smallish number of files" - that is my entire OS has something like 50k files in it, I wouldnt want to commit the lot to SVN ;) The idea is perfect because if I got a virus, that destroyed some files, that would then get automatically backed up, I could just run back to a particular date. I'm not sure about the efficiency of this backup system though. If you have a program that makes large changes to "binary working files" then you would probably end up in troubles. > Interesting thought. One problem would be that it's not automated (you > would have to write a log)... > Not too difficult - I had a few shell scripts on cron and windows schedule that ran. > > You can do ssh+svn:// so there might be a possibility of using ssh > keys if you really wanted. > Which helps on the automatic scripting.

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Odd networking issue; losing packets?
by Greg Thomas 16 Feb '09

16 Feb '09

I have a Windows XP box and a Ubuntu 8.10 box plugged in to the same router. FWIW, it's a BT HomeHub 2 that I'm currently trialling. Both work, although for some reason the Ubuntu box has an odd tracert: $ sudo tracert 216.239.59.147 traceroute to 216.239.59.147 (216.239.59.147), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets 1 BThomehub.home (192.168.1.254) 55.623 ms 55.417 ms 55.174 ms 2 217.47.200.58 (217.47.200.58) 33.711 ms * * 3 * * * 4 * * * 5 * * * 6 * 217.41.170.65 (217.41.170.65) 41.333 ms * 7 * 217.41.170.122 (217.41.170.122) 31.084 ms 33.988 ms 8 * * * 9 * * * 10 * * * 11 * * * 12 * * 195.99.125.82 (195.99.125.82) 33.735 ms 13 * * * 14 * * * 15 * * * 16 * * * 17 gv-in-f147.google.com (216.239.59.147) 45.999 ms * * Compare that with the Windows box; C:\>tracert www.google.com Tracing route to www.l.google.com [216.239.59.147] over a maximum of 30 hops: 1 43 ms 100 ms 99 ms BThomehub.home [192.168.1.254] 2 476 ms 395 ms 435 ms 217.47.200.58 3 179 ms 184 ms 187 ms 217.47.250.161 4 191 ms 32 ms 62 ms 217.47.200.10 5 63 ms 63 ms 153 ms 217.41.170.21 6 82 ms 62 ms 97 ms 217.41.170.65 7 234 ms 215 ms 122 ms 217.41.170.122 8 206 ms 183 ms 183 ms 217.41.170.50 9 230 ms 244 ms 245 ms 217.47.200.241 10 470 ms 320 ms 307 ms core1-pos0-0-0-5.ilford.ukcore.bt.net[194.72.20.113] 11 370 ms 367 ms 369 ms core1-pos14-1.telehouse.ukcore.bt.net[195.99.125.225] 12 423 ms 490 ms 453 ms 195.99.125.82 13 422 ms 423 ms 409 ms 209.85.255.175 14 45 ms 67 ms 93 ms 209.85.250.216 15 101 ms 151 ms 123 ms 66.249.95.164 16 203 ms 184 ms 185 ms 216.239.49.114 17 249 ms 249 ms 242 ms gv-in-f147.google.com [216.239.59.147] Trace complete. It seems to me that the Linux box is losing lots of packets. Many get through, but many do not. Or am I just worrying about nothing, given that it seems to work OK. On the bright side, those packets that do get through do so a lot quicker than those on Windows, but that may be just because my Linux box is less archaic. Any ideas? Thanks, Greg

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[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : McGintys, Northgate Street
by samwise 16 Feb '09

16 Feb '09

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- The monthly "Third Monday" ALUG Ipswich Social Meeting is back tonight (Monday 16th February) at 20:00: P J McGinty & Sons 15 Northgate Street Ipswich Suffolk IP1 3BY Tel: 01473 251 515 Map/Directions URI: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=IP1+3BY WWW: http://pjmcginty.moonfruit.com/ McGintys pub is in the centre of Ipswich, not far from our old haunt - The Milestone. It's directly opposite the town's central library and has a reputation for good Irish beer. All are welcome, novices and experienced users. Feel free to ask for further information on the Main ALUG mailing list. We'll attempt to improve on last month's fiasco - I'll most certainly be there from 20:00. If anyone is planning on turning up late, please let me know by email or via the mobile, so I'll know to hang around, if the turnout is low! Hope to see you there, Peter. ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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Problems with Maxtor Basics 1TB USB Hard Disk
by Jan T. Kim 15 Feb '09

15 Feb '09

Dear All, I continue to have problems with a 1TB "Maxtor Basics" USB hard disk, after returning one disk of this kind and getting it exchanged on warranty this is now the second one that's developing problems so I wonder whether I'm doing something wrong. The disk came with an NTFS partition which I scrapped and replaced with an ext3 partition using gparted. That seemed to work ok, although I recall that I wondered a bit about the noises it made already at that time. After putting a bunch of files (movies from a Topfield PVR) onto the disk, the file system developed problems that weren't fixable with fsck. I therefore partitioned and formatted the disk again. First I tried fsck -c option to check for bad blocks. After running a whole night, fsck had gone to (about) 1200000 out of 200000000 blocks, and the hard disk made a rhythmic, clicking noise. It had obviously slowed down during the night (it was at about 1000000 blocks when I checked before going to sleep), so I stopped that. Now I've done things from scratch the traditional way with fdisk and mkfs (without -c). The disk made a lot of weird noises while mkfs was running, but eventually mkfs completed. I then mounted the file system and exercised it by repeatedly copying a Linux kernel source tree onto it. This worked ok for a few times, then I decided to have a look with du at the growing amount of stuff on the disk. Upon that, the copying process started to fail with messages like cp: writing `/media/mnt/dummy0008/include/net/ieee80211.h': Read-only file system cp: cannot create regular file `/media/mnt/dummy0008/include/net/checksum.h': Read-only file system and ``tail -f /var/log/messages'' at this time showed multiple repetitions of Feb 15 14:01:31 paxarchia kernel: [ 8431.175590] Info fld=0x0 Feb 15 14:01:31 paxarchia kernel: [ 8431.175590] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Add. Sense: Internal target failure Feb 15 14:01:32 paxarchia kernel: [ 8431.280559] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE,SUGGEST_OK Feb 15 14:01:32 paxarchia kernel: [ 8431.280559] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Sense Key : Hardware Error [current] The hard disk made a constant, whirring sound and its green LED was blinking at 1Hz (approx). When I umounted the file system, the whirring continued for several minutes and the umount command hang. After several minutes, though, the hard disk made a few clicks and stopped whirring, and umount completed. Can any of you make sense out of all this? Best regards & thanks in advance, Jan -- +- Jan T. Kim -------------------------------------------------------+ | email: j.kim@.uea.ac.uk | | WWW: http://www.cmp.uea.ac.uk/people/jtk | *-----=< hierarchical systems are for files, not for humans >=-----*

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Acer Aspire One Wireless
by Richard Lewis 15 Feb '09

15 Feb '09

Hello ALUG, How's anyone else's experience with wireless on their Acer Aspire One? I'm running Debian unstable on mine and wireless is quite dodgey. It's the stock 2.6.26 kernel from unstable along with the madwifi drivers (0.9.4) installed via m-a. Initially, if I do $ sudo iwlist scanning it says: wifi0 Interface doesn't support scanning. ath0 Interface doesn't support scanning : Network is down it's only after I've done: $ sudo ifup ath0 that it'll actually search for networks. This doesn't seem right. This aside, once I've added a suitable configuration to my /etc/network/interfaces it's very reluctant to connect to it. Normally when I do $ sudo ifup ath0 the little wifi LED doesn't flash, it waits for 20 seconds or so while it does DHCPDISCOVER a few times and then gives up. After this iwlist returns no results: wifi0 Interface doesn't support scanning. ath0 No scan results Then occasionally it connects. The LED flashes as normal, it connects almost immediately and reconnects without problems after suspend to RAM or shutdowns. Usually I go all day Saturday without it working and then it starts working on Sunday. (During the week I use ordinary ethernet.) But this weekend the wifi elves seem to have forgotten to visit my computer. I wondered whether being on AC power vs. battery may make a difference but it doesn't seem to. (Thankfully. It'd pretty useless if it needed to be plugged in to connect to a wifi network.) I also tried installing the 2.6.28 kernel from sidux which has the ath5k drivers in it but that doesn't seem to make any difference either. Is anyone else finding their's bad? Or is it just me? Best, Richard PS. resending after some SMTP error. Apologies if it comes twice! -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard Lewis ISMS, Computing Goldsmiths, University of London Tel: +44 (0)20 7078 5134 Skype: richardjlewis JID: ironchicken(a)jabber.earth.li http://www.richard-lewis.me.uk/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- +-------------------------------------------------------+ |Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.| |http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html | +-------------------------------------------------------+

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