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Linux (Debian) boot problem
by Barry Samuels 30 Sep '14

30 Sep '14

I want to move my wife's operating system to another computer so that should involve a simple 'move the hard drive' operation shouldn't it? Wrong! I've not come across anything like this before. The drive boots happily in my wife's computer but if I move it to either of two other computers it starts to boot and then stops with various errors. mount: mounting /dev/root on /root failed: No such file of directory the same with sys and proc. Then there is a Busybox line and I end up in a shell prompt: '(initramfs) but the line before that says: /bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off and nothing appears when I type on the keyboard so I'm stuck. This is using Squeeze with a standard Debian linux-image package, 2.6.32-5-686, which includes an initrd image. My wife's current computer uses an Athlon XP CPU and the one I'm trying to move to uses a Core 2 Duo both of which are covered by the linux-image. Any ideas would be very welcome. -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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Sort of design/philosphy/way to do it sort of question about remotely gathering data and putting in a database
by Chris Green 30 Sep '14

30 Sep '14

I have a Beaglebone Black which gathers various bits of data on our boat in France. At present these comprise some temperatures and battery voltages and currents but there might be other things added. I want to store these in a sqlite database on my desktop machine here at home. The mechanics of doing this are easy enough, I store the data in a file named for the date and time on the Beaglebone Black and at intervals my desktop machine mounts the directory where these files are saved (using sshfs), reads the data, inserts it into the database and then deletes the file. This means that if the connection fails for a while then nothing is lost, it's probably not by any means perfect but it's good enough, my life doesn't depend on the data! :-) At the moment the receiving end just assumes there are ten values sent and that they are in a specific order. E.g. there's a file there at the moment whose name is "2014-09-29_15:05.od" and whose contents are:- '2014-09-29 15:05', 22.125, 22.75, 13.6285714286, 13.8876923077, 34.36875, 0.253125, 14.85, 8.803125, 8 I'm not really happy with this because it means that any changes I do have to be 'synchronised' at the two ends to keep their knowledge of which value is which in step. Is there a standard way of labelling values in this sort of situation? Should I send a file something like:- DateTime, '2014-09-29 15:05' InsideTemperature, 22.125 OutsideTemperature, 22.75 LeisureVolts, 13.6285714286 StarterVolts, 13.8876923077 LeisureAmps1, 34.36875 etc. Then the first column of this data is the database field name and the second column is the data. If a field name doesn't exist then the receiving program/script will create a new column. This rather depends on there always being a DateTime field so maybe the receiving script could reject files with no DateTime value. Does this seem a reasonable way to do it or are there better ways, or should I just stay with the existing set-up where the order is significant? -- Chris Green

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2600 meeting at 18:00 on Friday the 3rd October.
by Viperfang 30 Sep '14

30 Sep '14

Quick heads up about this months Norwich 2600 meeting, more info at http://www.norwich2600.co.uk

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Bash flaw - uh oh
by Bev Nicolson 29 Sep '14

29 Sep '14

What should we do? Here it's just me and my computer to worry about for example and I have a firewall and a virus checker installed. Is that enough? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-29361794 Bev

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Phone backups
by Chris Walker 28 Sep '14

28 Sep '14

Hello, I have a Jolla phone which runs linux. Unfortunately the speaker has stopped working which rather renders it useless as a phone so it has to go back to Finland for repair. Jolla have suggested I take a backup as they will reset it and wipe it. But their backup doesn't backup everything so can I copy everything off it perhaps from this machine? I easily ssh into the phone as a user and then switch to 'devel-su' mode but I don't appear to be able to ssh into it as root. I've tried to run scp from within the phone (using ssh) to a NAS drive but I can't make it connect. At this stage I'd rather not install loads of extra software on the phone just to do the backup so any ideas about copying everything off the phone before it goes back would be appreciated. -- __ __| |_ __ __ .----------------------------------------------. / _/ _` \ V V / | mailto:alug_cdw@the-walker-household.co.uk | \__\__,_|\_/\_/ |______________________________________________|

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device only (or caldav) calendar on android
by mick 24 Sep '14

24 Sep '14

Hi Guys I have just bought a new mobile (dual sim Moto G) to replace both my main 'phone and a backup. I am /not/ a huge fan of Google, but since I hate apple even more, the android device offers me the best functionality for the least inavsion of privacy (within limits). Before even transferring my personal data I locked the damned thing down to try to prevent as much google synchronisation as I could (but still, stupidly, managed to let the bloody thing send my contacts because I mssed one of the buried sync settings). That aside, I now really want to move my calendar data to the new device. Previous devices (from HTC, Sony and Samsung) have allowed me to set up a local, "device only" calendar. This new one won't and insists that I link in a google account before I can add /any/ data at all. So I'm looking for an alternative app. What I'd really like is a CalDav style application which allows local only storage on the 'phone, but will later allow me to sync to my own server (when I finally get around to setting up owncloud). Any and all advice (short of "throw the 'phone away") gratefully accepted. Most of the calaenadrs on the google play site appear to be little more than alternative skins to the underlying android calendar. Cheers Mick --------------------------------------------------------------------- Mick Morgan gpg fingerprint: FC23 3338 F664 5E66 876B 72C0 0A1F E60B 5BAD D312 http://baldric.net ---------------------------------------------------------------------

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Linux Job - Devops/Sytems Engineer - Cambourne/Cambridge. £35k-£45k
by Adam Bower 23 Sep '14

23 Sep '14

Hi all, I currently work for http://www.swiftserve.com and we're recruiting for at least one and possibly 2 Linux systems/devops engineer positions. I've attached the job description below, sorry about the formatting. Currently we're based in Cambourne but we're moving to Milton in January. This is a permanent position and we're wanting people to start as soon as possible. Salary is in a range from £35k-£45k, possibly a bit more for exceptional candidates. If you want to send an application or have questions then please send a CV/email to my work email address: abower(a)swiftserve.com Description: We are looking for a Dev Ops engineer with strong Linux skills to work on automation, deployment, monitoring, integration and investigating complex issues. Responsibilities: The successful candidate will have overall help work closely with our Engineering and Operations teams to help improve our automation, packaging, continuous integration and monitoring across our PaaS offerings. Will help work with our field engineers and support teams to investigate complex issues and design and architect customer solutions to meet customers needs. Investigate complicated issues, debugging distributed systems involving multiple components to isolate problems. As part of investigation it is expected that this person will be able to reference the source code to understand what is going on, and perform investigations involving packet dumps, log files and monitoring data from multiple systems. Work with engineering and product leads to provide feedback on to the product into areas where it can be improved and enhanced. This role will involve some out-of-hours work on deployments and/or on-call rotas. Experience/Skillset Required: Excellent Linux skills - solid background in systems administration, knowledge/experience of investigating issues and bottlenecks. Strong understanding of Internet networking covering IP networks, Internet protocols and technologies, packet dumps. Good basic programming experience, able to write and understand programs in a variety of languages with experience of Python (or at least Python-like languages such as Ruby or Perl) and Javascript. Experience of using Unix tools to help analyse log files (e.g. use of tools like ‘awk’, ‘grep’, ‘uniq’) Experience of using automation tools for deployment (e.g. Puppet or Chef) and monitoring tools. Experience of using/building network monitoring and alerting systems. Experience of Linux software packaging (e.g. building RPMs or DEBs) Pragmatic and flexible attitude, and a desire to solve the customer requirement. Fluent English speaker with good written and verbal communication skills. Able to work in the UK (EU citizen or existing work permit), and able to work predominantly in our Cambourne office. Useful Knowledge of video-related technologies covering encoding (transcoding), protection (DRM) and delivery protocols (HLS, HDS, Smooth, RTMP) Basic understanding of C, C++ and Java. The Company We are a self-funded and established start-up employing about 35 people around the world. We are tackling the challenges around the delivery of large volumes of data (e.g. video) over the Internet. As such we provide content delivery services to some of the largest networks in the world and are responsible for service provision with extremely high uptime requirements. Thanks Adam

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How to change ssh destination depending on connected LAN?
by Chris Green 23 Sep '14

23 Sep '14

As I move around from home to various other places different systems that I connect to from my laptop become 'local'. Being a lazy person I really don't want to type in long complicated ssh commands when I'm connecting remotely. Thus I have in the ~/.ssh/config file the following:- Host cheddar HostName cheddar.halon.org.uk Host halon HostName cheddar.halon.org.uk Host chris ProxyCommand ssh cheddar nc -q0 zbmc.eu 22 Host odin ProxyCommand ssh cheddar nc -q0 localhost 51234 This means I can simply type 'ssh chris' or 'ssh odin' and ssh with the above config file does all the hard work for me. However it means that when I'm at home for example (where 'chris' is my desktop on the LAN) if I type 'ssh chris' I get connected to my desktop machine via the internet which is rather ridiculous. Can anyone come up with an easy way to change how 'ssh chris' acts according to whether I'm on the LAN where 'chris' is or not. Similarly I want the same to happen when I'm on the LAN where 'odin' is (which is not the same LAN). -- Chris Green

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Re: [ALUG] How to change ssh destination depending on connected LAN?
by Chris Green 22 Sep '14

22 Sep '14

On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 01:58:00PM +0100, Laurie Brown wrote: > On 22/09/14 13:49, Chris Green wrote: > > [SNIP] > > > As I have pointed out in a previous reply this doesn't work because of > > the ProxyAddress stuff I have in my ~/.ssh/config file. I need some > > way to switch the ProxyCommand off when I'm on the LAN. > > Why not have two such files, each specific to a particular location, and > write a bash script with a parameter to copy over your ~/.ssh/config > file whichever version you need? I really don't understand the problem here. > Fine, it's just the sort of thing I was thinking of doing. My question was really how to automate the switch over by (somehow) detecting whether I'm connected to the LAN or not. -- Chris Green

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Re: [ALUG] How to change ssh destination depending on connected LAN?
by Chris Green 22 Sep '14

22 Sep '14

On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 10:38:42AM +0100, mick wrote: > On Mon, 22 Sep 2014 08:52:26 +0100 > Chris Green <cl(a)isbd.net> allegedly wrote: > > > On Sun, Sep 21, 2014 at 11:25:23PM +0100, steve-ALUG(a)hst.me.uk wrote: > > > On 20/09/14 13:19, Chris Green wrote: > > > >As I move around from home to various other places different > > > >systems that I connect to from my laptop become 'local'. Being a > > > >lazy person I really don't want to type in long complicated ssh > > > >commands when I'm connecting remotely. Thus I have in the > > > >~/.ssh/config file the following:- > > Sigh. > > Chris > > Why do you keep asking variants of the same question? Lots of different > people have taken the time and effort to answer those questions for > you at various times in the past, yet you ignore the answers and come > back with yet another variant of the "how do I do this when connecting > to/from my boat"? > Please read the question! :-) It's very much *not* the same question as I've asked before. The specific issue is because of my use of ProxyCommand in my ~/.ssh/config file. It's *not* "how do I get local names to work". -- Chris Green

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