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Reminder: ALUG Meeting @ Syleham Villiage Hall 23rd Feb 2003
by John Woodard 21 Feb '03

21 Feb '03

Reminder: ALUG Meeting @ Syleham Villiage Hall 23rd Feb 2003 I've updated the wiki to confirm this. If you are coming please add your name to http://www.alug.org.uk/contrib/?23%20Feb . This ALUG meeting will be from 2pm until about 6pm in the normal place at http://www.alug.org.uk/venues/syleham.html the bar will be open. BJ will be there from about 1:00pm putting up tables etc. Cheers, BJ

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Re: [Alug] Wireless WANS (i.e. Norfolk)
by Ben Norcutt 20 Feb '03

20 Feb '03

I have just started playing with wireless stuff at work and it's great to be able to wander around with a laptop my boss loves it. I work at Framingham Earl High School As the Network Mangler and would love to help out if I can. We have a 2mbit DSL connection going unused during the evening. This would be fine for general web surfing but there are a number of restrictions that you need to be made aware of. If anyone wants to experiment let me know. Maybe we should have a wireless antennae building session etc... I have a couple of waps and pcmcia cards at work. Cheers, Ben

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how to assign capabilities to specific process/user
by atit_ldce 20 Feb '03

20 Feb '03

this is atit jariwala final semester student of be computer ldce ahd i want to assign specific capabilities to specific user or process i want this because i want my program that is using setsockopt call to run from other user then root and runnig of setscokopt requires CAP_NET_ADMIN assigned to the user and by default it is assigned to root user only and i want to assign this to specific user thanks _____________________________________________________________________ Get your internet connection from the fastest growing digital network. ICENET visit our site www.icenet.net

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Re: [Alug] IPChains
by Andrew Cartwright 19 Feb '03

19 Feb '03

Chris Walker wrote: > I have Mandrake 9 on my machine and can't look at the drives from another > machine. What puzzles me is that when I run ipchains, I get unknown command. > I thought that it installed and ran by default. Should it? > Chris, IME Mandrake uses iptables, its preferred firewall is shorewall which is configured from the control centre. Having said that you don't have to use shorewall, you can write your own script if you wish. Regards Andy

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Re: [Alug] IPChains
by Brett Parker 19 Feb '03

19 Feb '03

Chris Walker <linux(a)wymondham.demon.co.uk> wrote: > I have Mandrake 9 on my machine and can't look at the drives from another > machine. What puzzles me is that when I run ipchains, I get unknown command. > I thought that it installed and ran by default. Should it? Depends, what's Mandrake 9s default kernel? if its in the 2.4.x series then there is no spoon^Wipchains unless they're being very silly. iptables may be available. Certainly on debian systems unless you let it actually install stuff on the initial setup you have to install the ipchains/iptables packages, so, maybe you managed to do a minimal install of Mandrake... Anyways - just my thoughts at this silly time of night. Brett.

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Slashdot - FTP: Better Than HTTP, Or Obsolete?
by Keith Watson 18 Feb '03

18 Feb '03

> <http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/13/2132221> > > An anonymous coward asks "Looking to serve files for downloading > (typically 1MB-6MB), I'm confused about whether I should provide an FTP > server instead of / as well as HTTP. According to a rapid Google > search, the experts say 1) HTTP is slower and less reliable than FTP > and 2) HTTP is amateur and will make you look a wimp. But a) FTP is > full of security holes. and b) FTP is a crumbling legacy protocol and > will make you look a dinosaur. Surely some contradiction... Should I > make the effort to implement FTP or take desperate steps to avoid it?" > So what's the general opinion about FTP vs. HTTP in the GNU/Linux environment? Keith ____________ The Mind is the slayer of the Real The Voice of the Silence.

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Newbi problems
by ALISTAIR MACGREGOR 17 Feb '03

17 Feb '03

Hi I wonder if any of you gentlemen or ladies can help. I'm a new user and by new I mean new. I installed Mandrake 9 on Friday (14th Feb 2003), after weeks of having nothing but problems frow my Windows system. So far (Only two days I know) I've had no problems, except one. I seem unable to access my floppy disk or either of my two CDROM drives, I know their there, I formatted a floppy disk and saved some files there. On trying to retrieve them i was told I "Do not have permission to access the files" or something along those lines. On opening the Home directory and going through the files to arrive at the /mnt folder, I was again told that I had not the relevent permission to access my files, looking at the floppy properties, I saw the 'owner' and 'group' listed at "root" Logging in as root, giving the password I entered at install, I was told again .......well you get the idea. Any help would be greatly appreciated as I need to edit the file and do not wish to re type the whole thing. If it helps my system is a Packard Bell Club 600 with a Celeron 600hz CPU, 1 DVD/CDROM, 1 CD writer, 128mb ram, 13GB HHD, solely for Linux. On board graphica and sound. Alistair

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Two Technical Support Vacancies.
by Robert Tillyard 17 Feb '03

17 Feb '03

Not sure if it's OK to do this but... We have two vacancies for Technical Support staff, this would be for our main UNIX application (SCO UNIX) and client mail/ web gateways (Redhat). These were apparently in the Easy Anglian on Wendesday, a while ago two ALUG members asked me to let them know when we next had vacancies but I don't remember who they were. I can get details if anyone is interested. Regards, Rob. -- Robert Tillyard, Head of Programming. A.T. Veterinary Systems Ltd. Elmtree Business Park, Elmswell, Suffolk, IP30 9HR. Tel: 01359 243400 Fax: 01359 242921 http://www.vetsystems.com/ http://www.visionline.co.uk/

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Re: Slashdot - FTP: Better Than HTTP, Or Obsolete?
by David Cartwright 17 Feb '03

17 Feb '03

> > An anonymous coward asks "Looking to serve files for downloading > > (typically 1MB-6MB), I'm confused about whether I should provide an FTP > > server instead of / as well as HTTP. According to a rapid Google > > search, the experts say 1) HTTP is slower and less reliable than FTP > > and 2) HTTP is amateur and will make you look a wimp. But a) FTP is > > full of security holes. and b) FTP is a crumbling legacy protocol and > > will make you look a dinosaur. Surely some contradiction... Should I > > make the effort to implement FTP or take desperate steps to avoid it?" Not often I post to the list, but what the heck? FTP vs. HTTP is your classic "Horses for courses" discussion - one is better than t'other for some situations, and not as good for others. For example, HTTP is great if: 1. You want to let people download single files via hyperlinks on a Web page. An HTTP link is just a link to a file, which when clicked will make the browser download it. 2. You want the client browser to open the file (e.g. a PDF or Word doc) either via a plug-in or an external application. HTTP stamps each file (or each section within a multipart download) with a MIME type, which the browser can use intelligently. So if my Internet Explorer or Netscape spots that it's a PDF document from the MIME type, it launches the Adobe Acrobat Reader plug-in. If it sees a Bloggit document and doesn't have a Bloggit plug-in, it simply launches the application under Windows and passes the filename to it for opening. This is much harder to do with FTP - it basically depends on the client machine being able to use the file extension (e.g. .PDF, .DOC) to map it to an application. 3. You have a Web server and you don't want to muck about setting up FTP. Many machines come with HTTP set up out of the box but not FTP. And if you want to set up anonymous FTP you have to be dead careful you don't open all manner of security holes. 4. People using your site have firewalls that have a hard time with FTP connections. Most of us understand that sometimes you have to switch your FTP client to Passive mode if you're behind a firewall, but many people I speak to (i.e. who say "I can't FTP this file") don't realise this, which can be a pain. FTP is great if: 1. You want to download multiple files. There's nothing quite like an "mget *" to make life easy when you're downloading (say) the 15 patches for your kernel that have come out since you last patched it. 2. You want to allow people to upload files. You can use HTTP's PUT command, but it's nothing like as easy to work with as an FTP PUT. 3. You want to enforce access control depending on user ID & password. Although you can do access control with an HTTP server, it's far from elegant in most cases, particularly if you want it to integrate with the user database (or global directory service) on the server computer. FTP servers, on the other hand, tend to be easier to fly in this respect, and generally integrate much more tightly to the OS's user database than would be the case with an HTTP server. I'm not saying you can't do it with HTTP, just that it's not as elegant in the average case. 4. Your clients have intelligent FTP clients. Ever tried FTPing from (say) a Red Hat 7.2 box to another Red Hat 7.2 box? Do an "mget *" and the server will tar and gzip all the files into a single compressed archive, then send over that single archive; the FTP client will unbundle everything and leave you with a file structure like the one it started with at the other end, but with a far more efficient transfer in the middle than would have been the case with numerous files (particularly if the files were small). At the end of the day, there's not a lot you can' t do with FTP that you can't emulate with HTTP, and vice versa. For most of what we all do, I suspect that HTTP will outnumber FTP in the majority of cases, because we don't do anything particularly complex in most of our sites. The only situation where I use FTP on my servers, for instance, is where people rent space on my server for their home pages, and they use FTP to upload the pages. Everywhere else I use HTTP, mainly because MIME typing lets the client browser be clever about what it does with documents. D.

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Neill Newman 17 Feb '03

17 Feb '03

This is the automated ALUG IRC meeting reminder sent to remind you that there is an IRC meeting tonight (Monday) at 8.00pm. The meeting takes place on the irc server irc.alug.org.uk in the #alug channel. Most IRC clients should allow you to get there with the commands "/server irc.alug.org.uk" and "/join #alug". Popular IRC clients include tkirc, bitchx, xchat and EPIC on Unix, and Mirc under windows. Here are some links to help you get started with irc. Unix http://www.xchat.org/ http://freshmeat.net/ http://www.epicsol.org/ Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!)

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