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Weird freezes in Firefox
by Peter 11 Sep '23

11 Sep '23

Any ideas what this could be? Its happened a couple of times. I will be doing something perfectly ordinary in Firefox, like shopping on Amazon was the last one. All of a sudden the mouse cursor, as I move the mouse, turns into a broad black stream, which makes a trail a half inch or so wide, quite jagged. Stays in place as the mouse is moved on. In and out of the browser window. Its impossible to close the window. More clicking brings up partial truncated small windows. Right clicks have no effect. The only thing I could find to do to get out of it was reboot. This is Debian 11, fluxbox, using the Nvidia drivers for their card. Never happened with any other app, including not with any other browser. Doesn't happen often, maybe three or four times over several months. I shall be upgrading to Debian 12 fairly soon, so maybe that will make it go away. But what could it be? And what would you do, other than upgrading? Peter

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Nextcloud upload and share from commandline
by Mark Rogers 11 Aug '23

11 Aug '23

Any nextcloud users here who are familiar with the API? All i want to do is have a script which uploads a file to my nextcloud server, creates a read-only share link for it, and outputs that link. So when I have a file that's too big or otherwise unsuitable for email, I can simply push it to nextcloud and paste the supplied link into my email instead. This seems like a fairly obvious use case but my attempts at Googling a solution have thus far failed me. Uploading a file from a script is easy and there are plenty of examples out there but creating a share link from that point has me (and ChatGPT, and Google Bard) stumped. Mark -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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MPC playback or file converter
by BD 26 Jun '23

26 Jun '23

Hi So I have this headless Debian machine serving miniDLNA on my network. There's good few hundred GB files in its library but I have a problematic bunch too. A very old cache of mpc files that don't want to play. Does anyone have a way to either force miniDLNA to transcode the files on the fly or to convert those file in place (preferably retaining files structure). Cheers, Bart

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Viewing Quick Time videos on Linux?
by Bev Nicolson 24 Jun '23

24 Jun '23

I have two dvd's that use Quick Time. (Yes, they are rather old.) I wondered if there was any way of viewing them? Is there an alternative QT that could help here? Or would it depend solely of finding someone using Windows or Apple? Bev

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Dnsmasq appears to be setting 2 default routes
by Srdjan Todorovic 13 Jun '23

13 Jun '23

Hi all, I'm trying to get some dnsmaq stuff working on my desktop machine (Kubuntu). I've got a wifi interface that is my default (and only) route to the Internet. I've also got a wired ethernet interface that I want to use to: - provide DHCP service to a headless server - provide NAT to that headless server so that it can connect to the internet I've setup a dnsmasq config (using the defaults, but with some tweaks), but whilst it does actually serve DHCP to a laptop (for testing), it appears to set 2 default routes on my desktop, and I can no longer get onto the Internet. Routing table while dnsmasq was running: srdjan@serenity:~$ route Kernel IP routing table Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface default dsldevice.lan 0.0.0.0 UG 100 0 0 enp37s0 default dsldevice.lan 0.0.0.0 UG 600 0 0 wlp38s0 link-local 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 1000 0 0 docker0 172.17.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 docker0 192.168.1.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 600 0 0 wlp38s0 dsldevice.lan 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.255 UH 100 0 0 enp37s0 192.168.2.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 100 0 0 enp37s0 I'm not sure this is correct. Dhcp-option 3 and 6 were left as default, but I would have expected the impact of those to be felt on the client machine trying to get the IP address, and not the "server" (desktop). Perhaps option 3 might make sense to set to the same address as the wifi router? Once I tore down both enp37s0 and wlp38s0, and reconnected on wifi using the KDE network manager, did I manage to get back onto the internet. Of note, the default config uses: interface=enp37s0 port=0 dns-range that is on a different network to the usual wifi one Has anyone got any suggestions please on what plainly stupid thing I'm doing with my setup? Thanks, Srdjan

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Spam
by steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk 27 May '23

27 May '23

Hi y'all My mailserver has started getting a lot of spam in the last few days. Basically, people are sending emails with loads of random email addresses - approx 90+ per email. They're not getting through - they get rejected then blocked. I wondered if anyone else has noticed anything similar? I'm not entirely sure of what this gets them. The occasional spam getting through can't be worth it. Or are they trying a scattergun approach to try and find valid email addresses or accounts? Or are they trying to overwhelm mail servers to exploit bugs in them? Or something else? Anything I should do? I'm getting quite close to saying "ah to ${badplace} with it, lets use a commercial mail-server", but I'm quite attached to the features I have with mine. For my email accounts, I can have unlimited email suffixes on them e.g. example(a)mydomain.invalid example-mailinglist(a)mydomain.invalid example-somecompany(a)mydomain.invalid example-ALUG(a)mydomain.invalid etc - anything after the "-" can be specified. I use this so that I can work who spams email address, or leaks my email address to spammers, and for easy blockage. Does anyone provide a service like this for less than megabucks? Steve

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Isolating a smart TV
by Peter 11 May '23

11 May '23

I just got a smart TV (android based), and going through the install process discovered that if you connect it to Internet it transmits a truly astonishing amount of data to a company based in Ireland, which is in turn a subsidiary of another company in Turkey. Neither of which I have previously heard of. I didn't particularly want the smarts, but there don't seem to be any dumb ones available any more, and our old one had expired in its sleep so we had to get something. There is basically nothing you do on this box that is not logged, if you have connected it. Heaven knows what they do with it when they have it. You watch Eurovision, and turn to another channel after 15 minutes, its logged to your particular box and IP address and hardware. Probably every commercial where you turn the sound down is logged (that's just my guess, I don't know it for sure). So I haven't connected it to our router and am using it like a dumb TV. But my question is, is it possible to put this device and only this device through something like pi-hole and so isolate it from the LAN, and also block it from sending data to these companies? Because I would quite like to be able to watch youtube music on it, but not at the price of sending my musical tastes to Turkey in real time! I see on Amazon that you can get fanless industrial mini-pcs for about 70.00. Or there are NUCs on ebay for around 50.00. The industrial ones have two network ports. Would it be possible to get one of the industrial ones, connect one of the ports to the TV, the other to our router, and install pi-hole so as to put the TV into a LAN zone of its own, and also to use pi-hole to block any transmissions to the company? I'm not clear how this would (or would not) work. Essentially, can you have the pi-hole box sit between the TV and the LAN so that the rest of the LAN is unreachable from it and it blocks unwanted calling hime? How should one handle addressing in this case? If you think it would work, that would be enough to encourage me to have a go and try and stumble through it. Any hints most welcome! Or suggestions for how to get the same result in some other way. Peter

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Re: KVM/QEMU
by Phil Ashby 03 May '23

03 May '23

On 03/05/2023 12:00, Mark Rogers <mark(a)more-solutions.co.uk> said: > > What do I need to do to achieve something simple like creating a new > VM, booting it from a Windows ISO and installing Windows 10 on it? > > I need to do it all from the command line or via a web interface - > preferably having both options open to me. The server is headless so > a traditional GUI is no use to me. Hi Mark, For a number of years now I've used QEMU/KVM, via libvirt and associated clients: virt-manager (Gnome GUI), and the CLI tools in libvirt-clients package (in particular virsh). There's this available from RedHat on using virsh for remote admin that provides a good intro: https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/virsh-subcommands ..and this walk through of creating a VM from an ISO.. https://adamtheautomator.com/virsh/ your chosen web search engine and 'virsh tutorials' is your friend as usual ;) HTH, Phlash.

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Boot to a web browser (nothing else available)
by Mark Rogers 03 May '23

03 May '23

I need to set up an Ubuntu 22.04 box so that on startup it enters a graphical environment with a web browser showing a specified page. No access to other applications. (I'd call this a "kiosk" configuration but having spent some time with Google that phrase can mean different things so I wanted to be clear). There's going to be quite a lot of other stuff going on behind the scenes in support of the web interface but I have all that working. It's just the boot-to-browser bit that's an issue. It's not public facing and I don't care if the boot sequence is visible, provided that as long as the box is left alone for a couple of minutes it will eventually end up at a web browser directed to localhost. I've done stuff like this before but Ubunti 22.04 uses snaps rather than .deb packages and that changes the way the applications interact with the O/S - previously I've had systemd start lightdm start a bash script which starts Chromium or Firefox in kiosk mode, but it doesn't seem possible that way any more. But the reality is that I don't need a minimal install so I may well have overthought things in the past. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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KVM/QEMU
by Mark Rogers 02 May '23

02 May '23

I've used VirtualBox for years, most recently either as a desktop tool (eg on a laptop) for testing things out (managed by the VBox GUI), or as a server tool hosting multiple VMs (managed via a combination of CLI and the web-based phpVirtualBox tool which mimics the VBox GUI via a web interface). For a long time I've thought I should use KVM instead so today I had a crack as installing it on my home Linux server (Ubuntu) but I've gone around in circles and got nowhere useful. What do I need to do to achieve something simple like creating a new VM, booting it from a Windows ISO and installing Windows 10 on it? I need to do it all from the command line or via a web interface - preferably having both options open to me. The server is headless so a traditional GUI is no use to me. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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