- wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Upgrading from RHEL 2.1 to RHEL 3.0
by Oliver Jones 12 Apr '05

12 Apr '05

Has anyone upgraded a RHEL 2.1 system to RHEL3 via up2date before? If so any pot holes I should be watchful for? I'm just getting a little sick of how out of date this RHEL2.1 box I administer is. Regards -- Oliver Jones » Roving Code Warrior oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 » www.deeperdesign.com

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Re: Linux antivirus
by David 11 Apr '05

11 Apr '05

Hi Forgot the URL for the site. Had a bit of trouble finding the Linux section myself. So for those of you prepared to risk a trip to an unknown URL. :-) http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_for_linux.html David

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Time for a new PC to run Linux on?
by Craig Box 11 Apr '05

11 Apr '05

Hi everyone, We're looking at sourcing some second hand (ex lease) PCs to sell at the installfest. While what we have on the day depends on what the supplier has in stock, current prices put a Pentium 3 733 machine with 256mb RAM and 10GB of HDD (plus CD-ROM/sound/network etc) at around $250. We will of course look forward to taking these machines and helping you set Linux up on them. I would like to get an indication of how many people might be interested in taking up an offer like this, so we have an idea of how many PCs to have on hand during the day. Regards, Craig

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Linux antivirus
by David 11 Apr '05

11 Apr '05

Hi A mention of antivirus on Linux reminded me to take another look at the Avast web site. They had a beta version a year or two ago. It seems to have made the product line up. I haven't used the Linux version yet, but the Windows version works well, and is available free for home use. You have to register but they don't spam you! I have used it for a few years and put other people on to it. You can also try there beta programs and report back on them. Regards David

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ftp on wlug server
by John R. McPherson 10 Apr '05

10 Apr '05

Does anybody on this list use ftp to hoiho (the wlug server)? If not, we will probably disable the ftp server. John

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Patents
by Lindsay 10 Apr '05

10 Apr '05

Patents The only way to fight back against these software patent advocates is to think up idea's, get together with friends and supporters and patent all your idea's. That way, when these multinational rat-bags go to patent an idea - you've already done it. Its cheaper to patent things than it is to object to the patents. So why not. Get a good patent lawyer and hoe into it. Linz

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Ubuntu Warty CDs spare - linz
by Lindsay 10 Apr '05

10 Apr '05

I still have a couple of couples of Warty Ubuntu if anyone would like these. Reply and supply postal address. Linz

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PCI Hardware Database
by Perry Lorier 10 Apr '05

10 Apr '05

In preparation for the WLUG Installfest, I've written up a quick hack to help people identify hardware, what drivers they need, where they can get those drivers and any quirks that the hardware may have (eg, defaulting to the internal connector rather than the external one, needing firmware to be flash upgraded before use, limitations of the device that may not be apparent initially etc). For example: http://www.wlug.org.nz/~perry/pci/?id=0200:10ec:8139:10ec:8139 What I'd really like is for people on this list to run a small shell script that looks at the hardware in their machine, and produces links to the hardware database. After following those links you'll be presented with a web page with the information known about that device, and the ability to leave some notes about that piece of hardware. This is especially important for people with winmodems as being able to quickly detect and find drivers for winmodems at the Installfest is critical for a stress free day. I'd like people to download the shell script at http://www.wlug.org.nz/~perry/pci/pci.sh and run it, check your hardware and make sure it's known about in hardware database, and write down any notes that you may have about it (especially things like if you had to download 3rd party drivers from somewhere, or minimum required kernel versions). This script requires a 2.6 kernel, and for /sys to be mounted (this should be true of any recently release distribution) If you can't get the piece of hardware working under Linux please leave a note to that effect so we can research it before the Installfest so we can have an answer to your problems ready so we can spend the rest of the day making your machine shine :) If any hardware is not detected by the database please email me the information about your hardware with: ( lspci -v ; sort -u /lib/modules/*/modules.pcimap ) | mail perry(a)coders.net -s "PCI database" The script is a bit raw (ok, a lot raw) at the moment, I plan on tidying it up a lot, but I'm also keen on getting information about various bits of hardware as soon as possible so we can start researching it in preparation for the Installfest. If you have suggestions, comments or even mild thoughts please email me (perry(a)coders.net) with them and I'll try and incorporate them into the programs before the Installfest.

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RE: [wlug] Top posting
by David Nicholls 09 Apr '05

09 Apr '05

From: Bnonn [mailto:bnonn(a)orcon.net.nz] Sent: Friday, 8 April 2005 3:16 pm Subject: Re: [wlug] Top posting For what it's worth, I agree, but you will find that the acceptable use policy of the list has been updated to include no html email, and no top posting, so there you have it :) Help help! I'm being repressed! ------------ Interestingly enough, I was just doing some goooooooooooooooooogle research (cheers greig!), and came across a reasonably old netiqette article which seemed to indicate that both top *and* bottom posting were acceptable so long as it was clear what you were quoting and you - as someone else put it - didn't quote an entire email (just enough to get the idea/topic). And of course interspersed is fine too. Most of the stuff ive found seems to indicate this, even an RFC written by intel in '94. Mostly it seems to by left to the preference of the user and community you are communicating with. Cheers... david

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RE: [wlug] Top posting
by David Nicholls 08 Apr '05

08 Apr '05

From: David Nicholls Sent: Friday, 8 April 2005 4:05 pm Subject: RE: [wlug] Top posting Interestingly enough, I was just doing some goooooooooooooooooogle research (cheers greig!), and came across a reasonably old netiqette article which seemed to indicate that both top *and* bottom posting were acceptable so long as it was clear what you were quoting and you - as someone else put it - didn't quote an entire email (just enough to get the idea/topic). And of course interspersed is fine too. Most of the stuff ive found seems to indicate this, even an RFC written by intel in '94. Mostly it seems to by left to the preference of the user and community you are communicating with. Cheers... David ----------------- Oh I forgot to include this: An inforative & humourous guide to writing on the internet (posting to email lists/usenet) entitled how to write - rude words are included. http://www.digiserve.com/eescape/closet/silly/Write-Like-A-Wanker.html Cheers... david

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Stephen Pearce
by Oliver Jones 08 Apr '05

08 Apr '05

Could Stephen Pearce please contact me ASAP. Regards -- Oliver Jones » Roving Code Warrior oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 » www.deeperdesign.com

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Creating PDFs - was Significant Press Release
by Graham 08 Apr '05

08 Apr '05

> ------------------------------ > > Message: 3 > Date: Wed, 06 Apr 2005 18:42:50 +1200 > From: Oliver Jones <oliver(a)deeper.co.nz> > Subject: Re: [wlug] A significant Press Release > To: Waikato Linux Users Group <wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz> > Message-ID: <1112769770.10434.24.camel(a)localhost.localdomain> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 > > >> This is a department dependent issue. In CS as many staff and >> students use >> a selection of Linux, Windows and MacOS X so most staff encourage >> students >> to submit in .pdf, .html or plain text. If staff in a given department >> only have access to a windows PC and students are only provided a >> windows >> lab, then the school may well require submissions in an Office format. > > > > Then install PDF Creator (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/) > on those machines. It's a Open Source and very useful PDF generator > (acts as a Windows Printer). It is basically a thin-ish wrapper around > Ghostscript. > > >>> These are pet peeves of mine, as my missus can't drop IE/Windows >>> completely since she still needs them to do University work. >> > > > Regards > -- > Oliver Jones Â» Roving Code Warrior > oliver(a)deeperdesign.com Â» +64 (21) 41 2238 Â» www.deeperdesign.com A simple solution is to install OpenOffice.org. Then she can export to PDF or save in .doc for those that are still clinging to the sinking ship. My lecturers insist that assignments be presented in Word format. They may have some idea that it is all produced in OOo... Oh yes, they do, because I told them. ;) OpenOffice.org 2.0 will be out in a month or so or you can download the Beta from http://download.openoffice.org/2.0beta/index.html Cheers Yo Statement of Interest: There is some truth in the rumour that I am the New Zealand Marketing Contact for OpenOffice.org And yes I hope OpenOffice.org will be welcome at the installfest even if this writer runs his OOo 1.9.87 on SuSE 9.2 ;) (Though in my defense I will add that I have 1.1.2 running on a Warty Warthog box)

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RE: [wlug] Official announcement of 2005 Installfest
by David Nicholls 07 Apr '05

07 Apr '05

Hey, has anyone thought of inviting DSE to this? I was thinking cheap linux boxes, demosystems, and those cheap/free cds they do with oss software on them (great for those unsure about "switching") ;) Cheers... david -----Original Message----- Sent: Thursday, 7 April 2005 2:51 pm Subject: [wlug] Official announcement of 2005 Installfest Hi everyone, The Waikato Linux Users Group are proud to announce their second annual Linux installfest, to be held at the Crawshaw School Hall on Crawshaw Drive, Hamilton, from 10am on Saturday 7th May.

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Real world requirements
by James Clark 07 Apr '05

07 Apr '05

>>User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 (Windows/20041206) >> >>I'm guess this has something to do with a draconian employer? >> >>James. > >No, it has to do with the real world requirements of my job. > >G. Such as? I'm actually interested by this. The last three years of my working career I've used primarily Linux. For a while (at my previous job) I had to KVM to a windows box periodically to use OutLook and some legacy customer management software. Now it's only Linux. Cheers, James.

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Installfest poster available
by Craig Box 07 Apr '05

07 Apr '05

If you'd like a printable installfest poster that you can put up around the place, check this out; thanks to Phil Murray: http://www.wlug.org.nz/archive/installfest/installfest-poster-2005.pdf Craig

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FW: [usg_list] Firefox JavaScript Engine Flaw Flagged
by Jodi Thomson 07 Apr '05

07 Apr '05

FYI ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------- Jodi W. Anderson, Mr (BA, A+, MCP) - Computer Systems Consultant Waikato University Library - Computing Operations Group Ph: +64 7 838 4323 email: jodi(a)waikato.ac.nz "Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before." > should keep an eye on this one if your using or supporting > Firefox/Mozilla.... > > from: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1782332,00.asp > > A moderately critical security flaw in the Mozilla > Foundation's Firefox Web browser could put users at risk of > information disclosure attacks, according to an advisory from > security research outfit Secunia. > > The vulnerability has been confirmed in Firefox 1.0.1 and > 1.0.2, the two latest browser releases from the open-source > foundation. It also affects the Mozilla suite, Secunia warned. > > Secunia has released an online test to allow Firefox and > Mozilla users to determine if they are affected by the bug. > > As a temporary workaround, Secunia suggests that JavaScript > support be disabled. >

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Patent grabbing could harm the Internet
by David 06 Apr '05

06 Apr '05

Just a little article I came across in the Bangkok Post I.T. Database today. The article can be found at http://www.bangkokpost.com/Database/06Apr2005_datacol57.php Wanda Sloan (Sloan Ranger) has also done a review on Netscape 8 in late beta stage which has an IE rendering engine for sites that don't render properly in the Mozilla engine, which can be found here. http://www.bangkokpost.com/Database/06Apr2005_datacol59.php Regards David Bowen COMPUTER CURRENTS Patent grabbing could harm the Internet The US Patent Office seems to be granting patents for just about anything these days James Hein It was discovered recently by the Public Patent Foundation (Pubpat) that Microsoft had filed a patent application for something very similar to IPv6, which is to be the next generation of the Internet Protocol. This kind of patent grabbing can only damage the Internet as a whole. Over the past few years some companies have been trying to get as many patents as they could registered by the US Patent Office, which seems to have been going through a period where they granted everything. They probably won't ever assert the patent, especially since they forgot to mention any of the work done by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) on the process, but like SCO's efforts it could keep a few companies in line who might be worried about Microsoft ever trying to. Pubpat at http://www.pubpat.org is a group that works to protect the public from damage caused by poor implementation of the patent system. Patent number 6101499, "Method and computer program product for automatically generating an Internet Protocol (IP) address," was issued to Microsoft in 2000. By granting these types of patents the Patent Office is essentially supporting the monopolistic nature of a company like Microsoft and at the same time reducing the chances that the next generation of standards will be good ones. In this case the MS employees listed as the inventors were on the IPv6 committee of the IETF, the real inventors of the system. Ironically, in other recent news Microsoft has demanded reform of the US patent system to improve patent quality.

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A significant Press Release
by wayne.luxton 06 Apr '05

06 Apr '05

Something just released - it will be interesting to see what the press does. www.greens.org.nz/searchdocs/PR8077.html Wayne

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Deleting a page on Wiki
by Ian McDonald 06 Apr '05

06 Apr '05

Hi there, How do we delete pages on the Wiki or do only certain people possess this power to stop most plebs trashing our site? I was just looking at tidying up bits and pieces and can't find this info. I did RTFM and did look at the FAQ: http://www.wlug.org.nz/WikiFaq and found nothing (I will edit FAQ after I get an answer). Ian

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RE: [wlug] Mailing list etiquette (was Re: Sudo)
by Gund Wehsling 05 Apr '05

05 Apr '05

I will be removing my self from this mailing list today. The amount of junk has now exceeded the amount of value. Regards Gund ________________________________ From: Daniel Lawson [mailto:daniel(a)meta.net.nz] Sent: Tue 5/04/2005 11:58 To: Waikato Linux Users Group Subject: Re: [wlug] Mailing list etiquette (was Re: Sudo) >>Also, many people read mailing lists in digest form. HTML (and other >>formats) tend to break in digest mode. > > > I hope you won't take offense, but this seems like the only good reason > to me. Surely, in the year 2005, when the HTML 4 spec has been around > for eight years and has been commonly used to style emails for not much > less time than that, it is reasonable to assume that any mail reader can > parse it? No, it's not reasonable at all. Especially not for a mailing list which will have a high rate of people using command line only mail clients, or perhaps self-written mail clients. And people using telnet to read mail. It will happen, if only because it's *this* group of people. > From a purist point of view, I agree that emails should be in plain > text. The reason I style them is because I like them to look pretty for So do it? > less computer-savvy types who I regularly email, who don't know how to > style things on their end. Additionally, there are some things that > plain text simply won't do, and which I do occasionally use (lists being > one). I can do lists very easily in plain text: * This is an example of a list * This is a second entry in a list, which has a longer line which I format approrpriately. * And here we have a third entry in a list * Look, I can do sublists too! > I'm not meaning to stir or be a pest; I just don't understand why any > mail client in use today would not support HTML; or why people would > turn it off? Surely, unless you're using OE, security isn't a problem. > People seem to manage browsing the web without issues, and that's a far > less controlled and predictable environment than email. Just because *you* use a mail client that supports HTML emails, does not mean every one *else* does. As I've said, this is mitigated by configuring your client to send an HTML block and a plain text block, however your client was not originally configured to do this, which is *probably* what prompted the "fix your client" thing anyway. > So, as I asked before with my sudo question, what am I missing? Are > people just pig-headed snobs who like to feel wronged and stand out as > martyrs for the Old School? HTML emails are horrible, plain and simple. All it takes is getting mail from someone using Incredimail for you to see the truth in this statement. _______________________________________________ wlug mailing list | wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Unsubscribe: http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/wlug

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Re: [wlug] SMB question
by Michael Honeyfield 05 Apr '05

05 Apr '05

> > Have you considered using pscp from > > http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ > > I have found the putty suite to be very useful under windows and doing > > an scp transfer should get around any possible issues with samba and > > at least narrow down the possible cause of the problem if it still > > fails. > > On a side note, pscp is god awful slow - feels like half the speed of Linux > scp, and of course these are both slower than smb due to the encryption > overhead. Useful, sure, but very slow. WinSCP is no better as it uses > PuTTY's encryption code. > Still FTP (vsftpd is nice) is an option and one I use on my samba server for big transfers... dunno why, but samba is slow to transfer anything over 1GB is a single file or a collection of smaller files. Mike

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SMB question
by Raymond Burgess 05 Apr '05

05 Apr '05

I am running a machine with RH 7.1, samba-2.0.10 I moving some large files from a Windows XP machine to the large amount of diskspace that is available ont he Linux machine. Files that are larger than 4GB fail to copy. Once the progress reaches 4GB windows prompts you if you wish to overright the exisiting file. I am already planning on installing a newer release on the linux box, probably Fedora Code 3 (or 4, as It will probably be out by the time I get around to it). I would like to know if any of you have successfully copied files larger than 4GB from a Windows machine to a recent build on samba. I'm not sure if it's Samba, Windows XP or the SMB protocol that is limited at 4GB. I realy don't care either, but I would like to know if this will work, it might motivate me to upgrade a little faster ;-) Anyone with FC3 able to confirm that this has worked. Raymond

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Parliamentary Questions
by Greig McGill 05 Apr '05

05 Apr '05

Hi all, After Rodney Hide spoke to us last year, he suggested that our most effective tool for advocacy would be to formulate a list of parliamentary questions. A good explanation of the usefulness of these can be found here: http://www.act.org.nz/question.jsp Mr. Hide has offered to put our questions forward, but at the moment they are a tad incoherent. Could we have some keen volunteers to edit http://www.wlug.org.nz/ParliamentaryQuestions? Be brutal. Don't worry about retaining comments - they are retained in the wiki's revision history. I'd really like to submit these in "ready to ask" form to Mr. Hide by the end of this month. Please note: The WLUG has no political affiliation with ACT or any other political party, but we know a useful tool when we see one. :) Please don't submit these questions yourself, as we would like them to all be submitted together from a single point of contact to maximise their efficiency. Thanks, Greig McGill El Presidente.

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Sudo
by Bnonn 05 Apr '05

05 Apr '05

Hi everyone. I'm wondering if someone can explain the rationale behind sudo. Ubuntu uses sudo by default, rather than having normal root access, although you can use root access if you wish. This is supposedly done with security in mind, but I don't see how it makes things more secure. It seems to me that allowing a user to execute commands which require root privileges, without having the root password, is really dangerous. For example, logged in as bnonn I can execute: $ sudo passwd root And change the root password. This doesn't seem secure to me! What am I missing? Regards Bnonn

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Re: [wlug] SMB question
by Michael Honeyfield 05 Apr '05

05 Apr '05

> I am running a machine with RH 7.1, samba-2.0.10 > > I moving some large files from a Windows XP machine to the large amount > of diskspace that is available ont he Linux machine. > > Files that are larger than 4GB fail to copy. Once the progress reaches > 4GB windows prompts you if you wish to overright the exisiting file. > > I am already planning on installing a newer release on the linux box, > probably Fedora Code 3 (or 4, as It will probably be out by the time I > get around to it). > > I would like to know if any of you have successfully copied files larger > than 4GB from a Windows machine to a recent build on samba. I'm not > sure if it's Samba, Windows XP or the SMB protocol that is limited at > 4GB. I realy don't care either, but I would like to know if this will > work, it might motivate me to upgrade a little faster ;-) > > Anyone with FC3 able to confirm that this has worked. > Possible some sort of file size limit.. not sure. Is it possible to setup a ftp server and copy them off? Mike

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