May 2005 - wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Installfest
by Judy & Lindsay 09 May '05

09 May '05

Hello list, I'm interested to know how the install-fest went on Saturday. I was scheduled to be in Auckland at a convention for the weekend but was stricken with some illness and was left behind. Still I was able to install Ubuntu Hoary on my box. Some news would be welcome. Linz

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RE: [wlug] Internet Banking using Ubuntu and Firefox
by Justin Hyde 09 May '05

09 May '05

Thanks for all your help. I have installed the user agent switch and all seems to be working sweetly. I will contact the bank and advise them accordingly. Problem #1 solved. (how many am I allowed per day ;-) ?) -----Original Message----- From: Greig McGill [mailto:greig(a)hamiltron.net] Sent: Mon 09/05/05 14:23 To: Waikato Linux Users Group Cc: Subject: Re: [wlug] Internet Banking using Ubuntu and Firefox James Clark wrote: > On Mon, May 09, 2005 at 02:12:22PM +1200, Daniel Lawson wrote: > >>Yeah. No shit. > > I'm sure this was absolutely necessary. Away put your weapons! Dan: Less grump. James: Less zealous. ;) Anyway, on topic... I see that this is very frustrating. I was explaining to Justin on Saturday that we spend a lot of time chasing online suppliers that our clients deal with in order to get them to support firefox. They usually respond helpfully. HSBC seem to be an exception. I would suggest that the useragent workaround will get you going right now, and in the meantime, if you find that their site works flawlessly with the switch, then email them, and let them know this. It may at least convince them to opening up trials of other browsers, once they realise there may not be anything to fix. Regards, Greig. _______________________________________________ wlug mailing list | wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Unsubscribe: http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/wlug

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RE: [wlug] Internet Banking using Ubuntu and Firefox
by Justin Hyde 09 May '05

09 May '05

Looks like Firefox number is slightly different Ubuntu = Firefox/1.0 WinNT = Firefox/1.0.2 Browser string from Ubuntu = Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050405 Firefox/1.0 (Ubuntu package 1.0.2) -----Original Message----- From: Justin Hyde Sent: Mon 09/05/05 13:38 To: Waikato Linux Users Group Cc: Subject: RE: [wlug] Internet Banking using Ubuntu and Firefox yes, it should be https://www.ebank.hsbc.co.nz/ WINXP browser = Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050321 Firefox/1.0.2 Browser String from www.showmyip.com = Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050321 Firefox/1.0.2 Have to reboot to get Ubuntu version, post shortly -----Original Message----- From: mglb1-forwarding Sent: Mon 09/05/05 13:30 To: Waikato Linux Users Group Cc: Subject: Re: [wlug] Internet Banking using Ubuntu and Firefox On Mon, 2005-05-09 at 13:22 +1200, Justin Hyde wrote: > Hi > > After installing Ubuntu on the weekend at the install fest, I tried > accessing my internet banking service with HSBC. > > I got an error message saying that I should use IE or Netscape. I > contacted the bank this morning and received the reply below. > > Could someone using Ubuntu and Firefox check whether they can access > https://ebank.hsbc.co.nz to see if its just my computer or a general > problem. Assuming you meant https://www.ebank.hsbc.co.nz/ then yes, I too get an error message. > Could someone recommend a way of getting around the customer services > people at the bank and through to the IT guys? The only way I can think of is to ask the customer services people. I find email often works better than phone for these sort of problems. > As an aside, I could access this banking service using Firefox on my > WINXP setup. Now this is strange. What version or Firefox were you using under WinXP? They are most probably doing their browser detection using the UserAgent string that your browser supplies which I would have thought would have been fairly similar between Linux and Windows. Perhaps not... You could try going to http://www.showmyip.com/ in both Windows and Linux, and recording the Browser (UserAgent) string it reports, I'd be interested in seeing how they differ. Regards -- Matt Brown matt(a)mattb.net.nz Mob +64 275 611 544 www.mattb.net.nz _______________________________________________ wlug mailing list | wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Unsubscribe: http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/wlug

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Internet Banking using Ubuntu and Firefox
by Justin Hyde 09 May '05

09 May '05

Hi After installing Ubuntu on the weekend at the install fest, I tried accessing my internet banking service with HSBC. I got an error message saying that I should use IE or Netscape. I contacted the bank this morning and received the reply below. Could someone using Ubuntu and Firefox check whether they can access https://ebank.hsbc.co.nz to see if its just my computer or a general problem. Could someone recommend a way of getting around the customer services people at the bank and through to the IT guys? As an aside, I could access this banking service using Firefox on my WINXP setup. Cheers Justin Hyde Dear Andrew, RE: HSBC Internet Access We thank you for your email. Please be advised to access the HSBC Internet Banking you will need to use one of the following: Web Browser Version PC's Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6.0 Netscape Navigator 7.0 MAC's Internet Explorer 5.1.7 for Mac OS 8.1.9.x Internet Explorer 5.2.3 for Mac OS X We apologise for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience. If you require further assistance please call our Direct Service Centre 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on 0800802380 (within New Zealand) or 09 3660366 (from overseas). Kind regards, Tatiana Mendoza Customer Service Consultant Direct Service Centre www.hsbc.co.nz --Original Message-- I have a new computer at home that has the Ubuntu version of linux as its operating system and Firefox as its web browser. When I tried accessing HSBC internet banking I was not allowed by HSBC to log on saying that I needed to Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. I believe that Friefox and Linux are widely accepted in the IT community, so I am puzzled as to why HSBC is not allowing access through these systems. I had to log into my old computer that has Windows XP so I could send this message from HSBC internet banking. Cheers

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Installfest roundup
by Craig Box 08 May '05

08 May '05

Hi everyone, Thanks to everyone who made the WLUG Installfest for 2005 a huge success. We had around 60 people attend, with about 40 maximum at any one time; slightly more than last year. Thanks to our sponsors: * CrawshawSchool, for the venue * DSE, for donating CDs, power cables and Cat5 patch cables * AlliedTelesyn, for the loan of network equipment * O'Reilly, for giveaway and new library books. Thanks also to all the committee members and helpers who gave a lot of time and energy into getting Linux going. Twelve people took advantage of our half price membership at the installfest offer and joined WLUG. We hope you're really pleased with Ubuntu as a distribution; I'm really pleased that we got it running perfectly on nearly all PCs, including two that were having serious problems with Mandrake and SUSE. [1] The network was really great. We had no major problems on the day, and we cached all the updates beforehand so that people didn't have to wait around. We did about 2gb of traffic, but about 80% of that came out of the cache, so we only actually downloaded 400mb of data (most of which will be the updates for the two AMD64 machines that we didn't have updates cached for). If anyone has any feedback (especially new people who are on the list now) please feel free to post it here. Photo galleries are linked from the http://www.wlug.org.nz/InstallFest.2005-05-07 page. Craig [1] To my knowledge, there were only two PCs that didn't leave with Ubuntu correctly set up on them. One was a very new tablet PC that couldn't boot off an external CD-ROM drive. We got the Ubuntu netinstaller and made it boot that, but the hard drive resizing facility in the installer didn't want to resize the hard drive. The other machine was a very old laptop that had a hardware fault of some sort.

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Modem Problem
by Ron Dean 08 May '05

08 May '05

Modem times out when connecting to ihug with Ubuntu but connects fine win98 below is the connection log --> WvDial: Internet dialer version 1.54.0 -> Initializing modem. -> Sending: ATZ -> Sending: ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0 -> Modem initialized. -> Sending: ATM1L1DT087300777 -> Waiting for carrier.L1DT087300777 -> Timed out while dialing. Trying again. -> Sending: ATM1L1DT087300777 -> Waiting for carrier.CARRIERL1DT087300777 -> No Carrier! Trying again. -> Sending: ATM1L1DT087300777 -> Waiting for carrier.CARRIERL1DT087300777 -> No Carrier! Trying again. -> Maximum Attempts Exceeded..Aborting!! -> Disconnecting at Sat May 7 22:38:38 2005

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Hey ;)
by B M 05 May '05

05 May '05

B M has invited you to join hi5. By joining hi5, you will be connected to B and all of B's friends. hi5 is the place where friends meet. You can use hi5 for the following purposes: * Find old friends * Meet new people * Browse photos Join B, meet B's friends, and meet people that share your interests now! Click here: http://www.hi5.com/register/LX27G?inviteId=Y3DQI1ROI520125001w0 This invitation was sent to wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz on behalf of B M (bluemaru(a)hotmail.com) If you do not wish to receive invitations from hi5 members, click on the link below: http://www.hi5.com/friend/displayBlockInvite.do?inviteId=Y3DQI1ROI520125001…

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Sarge is frozen
by James Clark 04 May '05

04 May '05

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/05/msg00001.html Choice! James.

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got hardware/machines for sale?
by John R. McPherson 04 May '05

04 May '05

Hi everyone, we're considering setting a table or two aside at the installfest[1] this Saturday for the sale of machines and hardware. We'd like to have a couple of reasonable low-end/mid-range machines for sale that are suitable for a linux desktop in case anyone wants to buy a machine and get help with installation at the installfest. If you are interested in selling anything, please let me know (off-list!) so we have some idea of how much stuff we need to accommodate. Note that you'll have to be responsible for bringing it along, looking after it, and taking it away if it is unsold. [1] http://www.wlug.org.nz/InstallFest John McPherson

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Debian, Shorewall and dial-up
by Glenn Ramsey 02 May '05

02 May '05

Recently I changed the NAT/firewall setup scripts on my Debian box to Shorewall from ipmasp, because I couldn't figure out how to configure DNAT using ipmasq. There is problem with the Shorewall setup that I cannot find any references to, neither in the docs nor googling. This box does NAT/firewall for my small office LAN through a dial-up connection[1]. On boot as Shorewall tries to start I get messages saying: "modprobe: modprobe: can't locate module ppp0", until the script times out after 180s. After that, however it seems to work fine. The issue is that this extends the startup time by 3 minutes. I think this is because, following the "two interface setup" in the docs, I have set wait_interface="ppp0" in /etc/default/shorewall and this causes /usr/share/shorewall/wait4ifup to be executed. Since it's a dialup connection it can't find ppp0 at boot time, hence the problem. Removing the wait_interface causes the startup of Shorewall to fail. Seems like this would be a common issue and since I can't find any references to it this makes me think I have missed something fundamental in the setup. Apart from this issue the rest of the setup works fine. Ipmasq handles this situation by setting up LAN stuff at boot and then having a /etc/ppp/ip-up script to setup the external interface stuff. What is the right way to resolve this issue? The solution I'm after is the "standard, out of the box" one. This is because if I put in customised stuff I will inevitably forget about it and then wonder why it's broken next time I uprade something[2]. For now I have disabled shorewall at startup and added a script that contains only "/sbin/shorewall restart" to /etc/ppp/ip-up.d. This works but also involves customisation beyond what is described in the docs and is additional to the configuration provided by the package. Ie if I remove the shorewall package my script will not be deleted. I could just set the timeout in wait4ifup to be a smaller value, like 1sec, which would solve the problem but that seems like a hack that I shouldn't need, but it's more likely to be removed if I remove/purge the package. Glenn [1] in case you were wondering, DSL is not available where I live. [2] and it's frustrating enough dealing with the stuff that breaks all by itself when you upgrade something -- Glenn Ramsey <glenn(a)componic.co.nz> 07 8627077 http://www.componic.co.nz

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