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monitor traffic to usb port
by Peter Alcibiades 07 Feb '09

07 Feb '09

Hi, I've a couple of usb dataloggers on order, which are said to be incompatible with Linux. They record events, and then you plug them into the usb port to use a windows only software package to pull the accumulated records off them. Without really knowing how much of a task this might be, I'm wondering about using a usb logger to catch the messages. But which one? Any ideas or suggestions or experience? And then writing my own little hack to do the same from linux using some suitably noddy high level language of course. Has anyone ever done this, and is it going to be so forbiddingly difficult that it should not even be attempted? Or did you do it and it was a snap? Or somewhere in between? Peter

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Linux coping with mainboard, memory and graphics card replacement?
by samwise 06 Feb '09

06 Feb '09

Hi, My PC hardware is getting somewhat long in the tooth now, and is running Debian Testing AMD64. At some point, I'll probably end up inheriting or buying a new mainboard, RAM and graphics card. I've spent an awful lot of time getting my OS configured the way I like it, though, and am not really looking forward to having to rebuild it again. How well would Linux cope if I swapped out the guts of the PC like this? I appreciate I'd have to update X to use the correct drivers for the new graphics card, but I'm not sure about the on-board sound card. That was auto-recognised on install, so is it likely to be detected if the mainboard is changed? Perhaps also worth mentioning that I selected to encrypt my OS hard drive when I installed it. Thoughts on anyone who's tried it ... ? Peter.

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Are there any remote backup systems that don't require ssh access? Recommendations?
by Chris G 05 Feb '09

05 Feb '09

I backup our important data (e.g. /home and some other bits and pieces) to a couple of remote 'servers'. At present I'm using rdiff-backup which does what I want except for one issue - it needs passwordless access to the remote system if it is to run unattended. (At least I think it does, I'm willing to listen to anything that suggests it doesn't) Having passwordless ssh access to the backup machine means that a malicious attacker who gets into the backup client machine can destroy all the backups as well as the files being backed up. While this is a fairly remote possibility (a malicious attacker getting in) I'd like to protect against it if I can. So I'm looking for a backup/mirror/remote copy facility that will allow me to 'push' files from a client machine to the backup machine without needing passwordless access. It also needs to do either timed or incremental backups in some shape or form as otherwise, of course, destroying files on the backup client would probably also destroy them on the backup. Any ideas anyone? I'm toying of playing with rsync with an rsync server on the remote backup machine though I haven't investigated this enough to see if it will work as I hope. There are a number of backup utilities that use rsync and provide timed and/or incremental backups but I'm not sure if they'll use rsync server on the remote. -- Chris Green

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Importing a big mail hierarchy into Evolution - how?
by Chris G 03 Feb '09

03 Feb '09

I am moving my wife over to xubuntu from windows XP, the move has been precipitated by the disk drive on her XP system dying. Fortunately I was able to extract all the data before it expired completely - but that's another story. (I'll post about that in a minute) She was using Thunderbird and Firefox on XP so the initial transition to Linux has been fairly painless. I have got all of her Thunderbird mail on the Linux system now. However it would be better if I could move her to Evolution because that synchronizes "out of the box" with her Palm Treo - I have the synchronization working already. The trouble is I need to get all of her mail across from Thunderbird to Evolution. It's easy enough copying individual mailboxes across but she has an extensive, hierarchical, mail archive with hundreds of messages in a complex hierarchy of fifty or sixty folders. It would take forever to copy this folder by folder. So, can anyone suggest a way to export the folders from Thunderbird and import them into Evolution preserving the structure? I have found the ImportExportTools add-on for Thunderbird but Evolution doesn't seem to understand the format of what it exports. -- Chris Green

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"Cannot run druid if PDAs or devices already configured" - what's druid?
by Chris G 03 Feb '09

03 Feb '09

When I start up my wife's new machine it pops up an error box saying:- Cannot run druid if PDAs or devices already configured I assume this is something to do with the gpilot set up for her Palm hotsync but I'm not clear how to fix it. Even when there's no actual USB cradle plugged in it still gives the error. -- Chris Green

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Securing wireless on a dedicated laptop/netbook
by Mark Rogers 02 Feb '09

02 Feb '09

Suppose I have a "black box" (which is Ubuntu Server 8.10) running in a cupboard and accessible via a web interface from the local network. Suppose also that they want some kind of access in the event of the local network going down. One idea I had was to add a USB wireless dongle to the black box and supply a small laptop or netbook, and set up the laptop so that it can access the web interface on the box. However, I need to make sure that this access is reasonably "secure" in that only that laptop can access the box. I can set the laptop up using wireless security passwords/keys which are not disclosed to the end user, however the end user will of-course have access to the settings from the laptop which they could duplicate on another laptop should they choose to, and we've been asked to tie it to the laptop that's supplied as far as possible. Presumably: (a) I should be able to find a USB wireless dongle with suitable drivers to make the initial connection work on Ubuntu, in ad-hoc mode (I have very little experience of wireless under Linux having had little need for it), (b) I should be able to restrict connections to specific MAC addresses? Is there anything else I should be able to do that would make it hard to duplicate the connection to other hardware? Is there any reason why something like an EEE or any other Linux based netbook wouldn't be ideal for the laptop end? In case it's not obvious, keep in mind that the black box has no GUI installed. -- 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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".ece" file -- aka "The Lords Video"
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 31 Jan '09

31 Jan '09

Hi Folks, Having read, a couple of days ago on timesonline, that: Exclusive: Peers for cash investigation - new undercover footage The Sunday Times has released secret video and audio in which Lord Truscott offers to help reporters 'facilitate' a bill amendment I clicked on the link [see below]. Where the video should have been was a blank space with a box which said: THE VIDEO YOU ARE TRYING TO WATCH IS CURRENLY UNAVAILABLE. PLEASE CHECK BACK SOON. After checking back a few times over the next couple of days, with the same result, I thought: "Either the lawyers have put this in a locked box, or else I'm supposed to be using WIndows". So, just now, I went to the same URL using Internet Explorer, and enjoyed a nice little video. Just the job if your self-righteousness needs a boost. Then went back to Linux (just in case), but with the same negative result as before. The URL is: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5618786.ece A bit of browsing on "ece file" linux threw up: http://www.fileinfo.net/extension/ece .ECE File Extension File Type Escenic Dynamic Web Page Category Web Files Common? No File Description Web page dynamically generated by the Escenic Content Engine, an advanced platform for Web publishing and content management; typically contains server-side code that is parsed by the Web server, which generates HTML for the Web page. The ECE file extension is used for news article pages on the independent.co.uk and timesonline.co.uk websites. (which was my experience). I have no trouble with "ordinary" web pages in timesonline or independent, but this one is a show-stopper. Any suggestions for viewing such stuff on Linux? My web-browsing didn't throw up anything that looks useful. With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 31-Jan-09 Time: 13:05:00 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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aptitude
by James Freer 29 Jan '09

29 Jan '09

"aptitude is a terminal-based package managemer with a number of useful features, including: a mutt-like syntax for matching packages in a flexible manner, dselect-like persistence of user actions, the ability to retrieve and display the Debian changelog of most packages, and a command-line mode similar to that of apt-get. aptitude is also Y2K-compliant, non-fattening, naturally cleansing, and housebroken." Using ubuntu 8.04 LTS. I was a bit surprised to find in synaptic the above - is this someone poking fun, if so it doesn't seem very professional to me. I read that Aptitude was the Debian preferred package manager and i use to use it with versions 6.10 ,7.04. In 7.10 i found that it didn't seem to close and was listed in launchpad. Since then i haven't used it and the fault doesn't seem to have been rectified. Has anyone else found this. james

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Getting a message when something remote stops - how to do easily?
by Chris G 29 Jan '09

29 Jan '09

I want something that will tell me when something on a remote system has stopped working. I.e. I want silence (no E-Mail) when it's working and I want to receive an E-Mail when it stops working. For local tasks cron does this quite nicely, as long as the job produces no output (no errors), cron is silent but as soon as there's an error that produces output you get an E-Mail message. The task I want to keep tabs on is a cron job on a remote system, it's OK as long as the remote system is up and running and connected. The cron job will work similarly to a local cron job and will send me an E-Mail if anything goes wrong (well, most things). However if the system dies completely or if one can't connect to it then I'll never know. I suppose all I need to have is a silent test to see if I can connect to the remote system which becomes non-silent if one can't connect. I can then run this from cron. As long as I can connect to the remote system its cron will tell me if the job I'm interested in has worked. Can anyone suggest such a test? I guess a script using ping could do it but is there a more elegant and/or ready made utility to do it? -- Chris Green

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A complement to Asus for a BIOS fix
by Chris G 28 Jan '09

28 Jan '09

Ever since I built my latest box I've had *very* occasional total crashes. By "very occasional" I mean once a week or even less, they only ever occurred when I was actively using the system, it runs all the time as a disk server for our home LAN and never died in the middle of the night or while we were away. Just recently (like yesterday and the day before) it crashed more frequently, like twice or three times, and I decided to try and work out what the problem was. A quick Google showed that I was getting kernel panics as when the system froze the Caps Lock and Scroll Lock lights flashed which apparently indicates a kernel panic. There was absolutely no clue in the logs anywhere, not a murmur of anything wrong before the burst of messages for the reboot. A while ago (when I first built the system) it seemed as if it might be an Intel video driver issue but there have been a few updates since then and I decided to see if there might be a hardware problem. First I looked at the temperatures, nothing untoward there, CPU was 32 degrees, motherboard was 20 degrees. Then I tried running the memtest you can get to from the Grub menu, aha! Test 5 produced some errors (it's the block copy test). I tried moving the DIMMs around to see if that helped, it just moved the errors around but didn't fix them so it seemed there was a real error. Then I looked at the Asus web site (and my motherboard manual) to see if there were any clues there. The latest BIOS upgrade says "1. Improve the compatibility with some memory.", hmm, I wonder if that means me? So a BIOS upgrade seemed a good idea, first looks suggested that it might be a bit difficult because I don't have a floppy disk drive in the system. However I was pleasantly surprised to find that the BIOS upgrade utility built into the system BIOS which you get to by hitting ALT/F2 at boot can read the BIOS file from CD and USB as well as from a floppy (this wasn't very well documented anywhere) so I needed neither a floppy disk nor an MS operating system. I just wrote the updated BIOS file to a CD and the system did the rest. .... and now I appear to have error free memory according to memtest! :-) It remains to be seen whether it *was* the memory problem causing my kernel panics but it does seem likely. So, thank you Asus for finding the bug and fixing it and for providing utilities etc. that will work on Linux. They also have Linux drivers on their web site (not that I needed them, ubuntu detected everything without problems). -- Chris Green

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