AltME groups: search

Nice to know about if you really really need to figure something 
out admin wise ... for home use, su's crontab and utilities like 
monit can make life a little easier on the brain, but perhaps less 
secure.  Just don't let the scripts break during boot in superuser 
mode if you don't play the rc game.  :)

Just read a couple; this is a good intro.  http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/212


and I was just about to his ^S on this entry and then noticed the 
 :-)   :)  Oh, well

I've been looking at D-Bus. It looks useful, and easy to implement 
in REBOL in a cross-platform way.

Ooh, imagine a Konqueror browser pushing Vista around  :)   Tux Tux 
Tux!  Go Tux!

Love the KDE blue ... but to be honest, prefer a white background, 
black text and a CLI

White background, black text can strain your eyes after a while - 
I often prefer the opposite. I like the CLI though.

I grew up on Amber and Green screens.   Take that eyeballs.  :)  
 Especially when you have a couple of each colour (we had four or 
five tubes each ... windowing at it's finest).

REBOL is using a windows function for decimal to ascii conversion 
that wine implements incorrectly.

Hi guys, I've tested today latest REBOL View on a Eee PC with the 
default Xandros OS, it works flawlessly so far, except for the usual 
small glitches with some default fonts.

Gabriele .. thanks.  Anyone got a form function for decimals??

There's a Xubuntu distribution for the Eee.

I think there's also a printf somewhere

I'm relatively new to Linux in general, so this may be a simple question: 
When running REBOL in the terminal, how can I enable the <HOME>, 
<END>, and <DEL> keys? Right now they just print out "OH," "OF," 
and "[3~," respectively. I'm running Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper with Gnome.

Here under OS X, <Home> returns #"^A", so I can do this to use it:


view layout [key with [keycode: #"^A"] [alert "Home was pressed"]]

It's been reported ... people have suggested patches ...  no luck 
yet on ecvt.  fcvt got  a patch with 0.9.46 but afaik ecvt is still 
hurtin'

Thanks .. I'll give it a go.

It's geared towards Dutch money, with two decimal positions and a 
decimal comma, but that's easy to adapt

I've been using puppylinux recently.  I notice that from the desktop, 
if I click on console, nothing happens.  Also, if I do a print from 
an encapped application, no console appears.  Ideas?

If you start from a terminal session and use $ rebol    ( or whatever 
command)  and then hit the console, does the REBOL banner show up 
in the terminal?  That's where it should be.  No seperate "windows" 
console required for GNU/Linux.  If there is no banner, then puppylinux 
may be pooched.

Ahh.. it's a bug with Rebol 2.7.5

Wonder why RT hasn't released a fix yet.

Busyness?  :)   Afaik; a new release bundle is in the works.

I remember something about that... I think it was a "rebolism".

CALL has a bug in Linux (and other Unix), it just returns a random 
number...

That's a serious bug

View 2.7.5.4.2 worked for me out of the box on a freshly installed 
Ubuntu 7.10

If one wishes to run a View encapped application on a server distro 
of ubuntu, is this all one has to do http://softinnov.org/cheyenne/blog.cgi?view=0014
?

It looks like this ecvt bug is biting me again.  I got ODBC working 
under Wine, but when I insert a decimal value into a decimal field 
under ODBC, the value gets converted to what looks like a scientifc 
value without the exponent.

imho;  Ubuntu is the current up and comer.  Ubuntu ships with a defaut 
set of packages more tuned for running Gnome as the desktop.  Kubuntu 
ships with a default KDE setup.  The Ubuntu family is spin off of 
Debian ... Debian is my personal favourite.  The RHEL branches don't 
seem to do it for me quite as much.  Ubuntu is well supported with 
a growing community and a fairly well off benefactor.   Canonical 
is funded.  I'm pretty sure they still support the WeShipIt program 
where you can order CD's for free - shipping paid by Canonical.  
Pretty sweet.  But imho Debian is a little more solid; years between 
releases.  Canonical likes to stick to a 6 month updgrade schedule. 
 So you get new shiny every 6 months, but ... running a business 
on it, I prefer the soak time Debian affords.


GNU/Linux commands are fairly standard across the board.  It's the 
config, and helper apps that diverge the most.  (That alone causes 
a mess in GNU/Linux land but POSIX is POSIX).  Things don't really 
diverge low-level till you enter the other free unix clones like 
FreeBSD.  One thing to watch on the horizon is OpenSolaris.  If it 
rolls out as it should, it could well be the player to take in Linus. 
 And Ian Murdoch (the man beside Debra in Debian) works at Sun now, 
so ...


In short, Ubuntu good.   :)   But, I prefer it's parent, Debian. 
 If you check the IRC channels on Freenode, #debian is ruthless, 
brooks no guff, with awesome technical support.  #ubuntu seems a 
little more people friendly and perhaps more likely to effectively 
help new users.  Umm, don't go asking Ubuntu questions on #debian. 
 They seem to have a little bit of jealousy toward the younger upstart 
with all the flash cash.  :)


distrowatch.com will tell you pretty much anything you want to know.

Oh, and if do have a spare hour or two, don't forget to test Syllable. 
 There is a group here for it.  Some of the principals of Syllable 
development are rebols at heart.  :)  The Desktop can be tested from 
a Live Boot.

Crappy.   I had Kubuntu 6 Live do that on a lot of the machines I 
tried, but that was X and the mouse duking it out.  Never had a Debian 
install fail, but I have had to boot single user to tweak X11 config, 
but that all went away with the transition to Xorg.  ... knocks on 
wooden brain ... so far.

If worse comes to worse, I'll have to store as int instead and recast 
using a trigger.

Paul;  yep, leave the Money Suck corporation behind ... send money 
to RT instead.  :)   And umm, it's ubuntu ... something about peace, 
live, share, "be human" in Zulu.   It's nice but it's not Debian. 
  Love the non-obvious pronunciation names.  REBOL, Debra and Ian 
for Deb-ian  and ooboontoo  or some such.  :)  And here I am stuck 
on a Win98 box and Carl just fixed CALL on the Linux side  :(

BTW thanks for telling me how to pronounce this ubuntu.  That was 
bugging me for a couple days.

I justed installed Kubuntu on this machine BUT the installed leaves 
a lot of room for improvement.If I had never installed a Linux distro 
before,Kubuntu for the normal Windows user would have them saying 
"f*** Linux. The install gui does not have a progress bar and when 
it is done installing, it does not let the user know the install 
is done and what to do next :( Mandriva on the other hand has an 
excellent install gui. If the major distros could work on a unified 
install gui it would be worth its weight in salt. I did see an effort 
to that end by 2 different ppl but they can not work together because 
of design/programming ideas :( Linux on the desktop works well once 
installed/configed but still it not made for joe six pack

yeah; one of the last frontiers; ease of use.  But it is progressing. 
 It's a little bit too sad that the y2k thing gutted IT money (not 
that the whole .com thing didn't need a good slap to the face) but 
there were some corporate players taking all their funny money and 
setting up OSS departments.  That died an untimely death imho, while 
corporate got mad about spending billions to protect against fudiciary 
responsibility around legacy code and then got nothing in return. 
 No more funny money for the IT department ... since?  So now we 
rely on one of "us" to get the itch and dig in.   Some do.  But it 
is time consuming and somewhat boring clicking through the same installer 
screen 1000 times to cover (some fraction of) all  the bases.  :)

I want to create a backup script that calls a backup utility, but 
I want to create the target file with today's date and time.

$ a=`date +%D`
$ echo $a
$ mv $backupfile $a
# use date --help to see the plethora of date format specs

Oh and no space  a=`  a = `  not the same

Faster to write, or faster to run? I recently had to move a bunch 
of data and used XXCopy, because I thought it would be faster than 
REBOL (couldn't get robocopy for the old W2K machine I needed it 
on). After it took 34 hours to copy the data, I'm pretty sure REBOL 
would have been just as fast, or faster.

cp -u /source/* /target/ 

is a lot shorter than writing it in REBOL.

Did anyone find a method to determine if a file is actually a symlink 
?

I'm trying to fix my recursive file searcher. My wine installation 
creates some symlinks which point up to a parent directory, creating 
an infinite loop.

submitted a Wish

It's just a panel. Right-click on a panel and choose Add to add applets 
to them

Isn't this a little inconsistent?

dir? %/root
== true
read %/root
== ""
read %/root/
== [ %.bashrc ..... etc ]

Any SSH / OpenVPN experts here? I have a little strange problem. 
I run my SSHD on port 443, so that I can connect to it via a HTTPS 
proxy. Than I use "dynamic portforwarding" to tunnel all kind of 
applications through the SSH connect.

The setup works but from time to time the port forwarding is stalling. 
The forwarded connection is initiated (I can't check if it's made 
successfully ) but that's it. It hangs. Than after some time (a couple 
of days) it's working without any problems.

BTW: The hanging happens even for connection to "localhost". But 
those connections are resolved via the machine name and a DNS lookup. 
The DNS server is operated by an external provider.

If I wish to upgrade/replace the binary I am currently running, and 
I am running it from a symlink, can I just overwrite the target file?

or do I need to use a shell script ?

If you know what the target file is, then you can overwrite it if 
you have the permissions. Finding out what the target file is may 
need a shell command though.

A test in which RM is used to delete itself.
$ which rm
/bin/rm
$ mkdir test
$ cp /bin/rm test/
$ cd test
$ ls -l
total 36
-rwxr-xr-x 1 anton anton 34600 2008-03-31 16:43 rm
$ ./rm rm
$ ls -l
total 0

So it looks quite possible for a binary to delete the file it came 
from.
I'm using Kubuntu.

yes, in most operating system you can unlink a file while it's being 
used. the file will disappear from the directory structure but will 
still be taking space on disk as long as it's being used. as soon 
as all the references to it go away, the disk space is freed.

My first solution is to use Monit to monitor a particular process 
and automatically take action when it uses too much memory etc.

We've had bugs with some applet using 100% CPU that people didn't 
notice for a long while because it didn't affect operation :-)

Kaj, that is a good feature.

But a user-oriented scheduler versus a server-oriented scheduler 
(as Kaj mentioned with Syllable already on the crest) will be the 
next wave in Desktop Linux, umm, I hope.

We've been hearing that and similar claims for a decade

Improving one segment of a chain, even if it's the weakest one, only 
exposes the next-weakest

A scheduler is not much use if the rest of the system doesn't present 
meaningful pieces to schedule

Major apps like Thunderbird and REBOL effectively locking the rest 
of the system means that the system is not meaningfully handling 
apps in a concurrent way, so I would venture to say that the scheduler 
has very little if any effect on this

In fact, Syllable used to have a very primitive scheduler and was 
already as responsive as now, except for some corner cases

Does mounting a filesystem change anything on the filesystem ?

I'm on Kubuntu and I've taken a new laptop's 80GB internal disk into 
an external drive enclosure and connected it via USB to my computer.
Kubuntu detected it and automounted the filesystem.

My task was to duplicate the disk, in the pursuit of which I've used 
various combinations of dd and gzip.

However, I can't get a straight 80GB image to compare equally (using 
cmp or diff) with a compressed image.

(I decompress the compressed image on the fly and pipe it into cmp.)

After many hours, it occurs to me that having the filesystem mounted 
might be changing it slightly over time... which would make my images 
different. (This would make my mission a failure, as I wanted a pristine 
image.)
So can anyone answer the above question ?

From the depths of my memory comes a blurry message from someone 
who did this exact thing... I think I should have made sure not to 
automount it, and only mount it read-only. :-/

Linux does track accesstime to files.  So, I'd wouldn't be surprised 
if mounting doesn't touch at least a few bits.

I'm a little bit confused;  I didn't read the dd and gzip part until 
just now.  You want a compressed mirror?  I don't think that will 
ever cmp true to the original.   dd will include partition table 
info that is normally "invisible to the naked eye".  Including that 
in the compressed file doesn't give dd the chance to dump the invisible 
bits back into invisible places.


Or am I more than just a little bit confused?  Maybe Kaj will come 
by shortly and fill us in with the technicals instead of the voodoo. 
 :)

if it's journaled, mounting it will probably change the journal. 
also, mounting it will surely change a flag in the filesystem. you 
need to mount it read only.

Unless I'm very mistaken, you don't have to mount a disk to dd it, 
as dd works on bare disk blocks

For backup purposes, be aware that dd-ing a partition mounted read-write 
is likely to result in a more or less inconsisten state of the backup, 
as data is changed on the partition at the same time, and dd has 
no knowledge of the file structure

Also, you would only be able to restore the dd backup to a disk of 
exactly the same size

Kaj, you're right. dd works at device level. After practising my 
mount skillz, I can automount it 'ro', so this is looking good. (There 
is only a HAL error to deal with now, during unmount.)

I have sshd running on my Kubuntu, and when I fish: across to it 
from another kubuntu box on the local network, it takes a long time 
to connect. Today I counted 45 seconds before authentication dialog 
popped up. I think I remember reading something about a delay for 
encryption etc. but I'm wondering if that's a "normal" length of 
time to wait.

45 seconds seeems long.  My nodes usually (including Dev - old) in 
under 4.

One point; you set no root login in /etc/ssh/sshd_config ?  Otherwise 
brute force password attackers will try, and try, and try...  I'm 
not sure why ssh ships with root login enabled.  If an admin is remote 
configuring a bunch of nodes, let them configure it to allow; ti 
shouldn't be a default imho.

Thanks Brian, I will investigate further this delay.

I have a long password, so brute force attackers should be kept at 
bay.

I think that needs a port-forwarding rule and there isn't one enabled 
for ssh.

wouldn't it be better to disable password, use a key, move from port 
22 to some other port (just to reduce noise) , port knocking.. ?

Anton... You could use "FUSE" very easy quick sshFS mount...  works 
like a charm. no sftp scp or ssh needed to access the remote fs....http://fuse.sourceforge.net/sshfs.html

Yes; there are quite a few ways to secure Secure Shell ... but you 
do have to stay on your toes.  Just turning it on ... bad idea.  
;)  With most distros that is ... Cygwin included.  There are copies 
that default to lockdown and you have to work to open them up, but 
those are the exception still.   Assigning ports above 1024 is always 
smart, and the $40 firewall routers can easily be setup to forward 
port 22 or 80 etc, to a usermode port.  You might still get broken 
into, but at least not with root access.  And hey, iptables is fun 
stuff.  Light reading.  :)


And, just because I'm being gabby ... rsync is a wonderful tool if 
you have multiple nodes and want hot backups.  This article expalins 
how to set it up, and while doing so, explains setting up ssh keys 
and locking things down.
http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/rsync.htm

Will, I'm not sure what you mean about using a key instead of a password. 
Wouldn't I still need to login to my box ? Or does using a separate 
ssh key just mean that it's easier to revoke access (without having 
to change my root password) ?

Umm, read that link Anton.  You can set authorization keys for SSH. 
 It takes a liitle to setup, but handy dandy once set.  Then you 
can disallow password login.   And if you don't know the machine 
and have shared keys, no looky no touchy.  It's part of what I'd 
like to see with the REBOL ring of trust.  Digital signatures.

Norman, sshFS looks useful (but I'll keep that for a future project).

I'm quite familiar with rsync since last year, when I used it to 
transfer a whole bunch of files from WinXP to Kubuntu.

btiffin, ok, so using a key with ssh looks like a good thing to do 
then. It's on my list.... :)

sounds like a slashdot headline

That news has been hanging over ReiserFS for a long time now.  At 
least people know now.   Ext3 has always treated me ok.  My guess 
is, ReiserFS will lose to Ext3.   OR ... get a name change, quick 
fix to the politics.

Will rebol run on a 64 bit Linux box? or only 32 bit?

Hummm. I'm using AltMe on a 64 bit Linux box, so I guess that is 
my answer.

Have you tried starting rebol from a terminal program?

No, that is a good idea. I'll try.

I'm afraid not. You still have to be some kind of a hacker to get 
some things working under Linux.
Try:
./rebol

or put rebol in a location, where you path point to. E.g.: /usr/local/bin/

Ok, that works. Thanks!  I can see that I have a little bit of studying 
to do to learn the commands .

btiffin, Well, I've had many problems with XP, so I'm ready to move 
on. Most of the software I'm been using on XP was ported from Linus. 
Only a few are genuine XP programs. So, I'

Wine is your friend for most Windows needs under GNU/Linux.   It's 
just better, smarter, stronger.  But ... it does require learning 
a little bit about computing.  Something MS seems to want to keep 
to themselves for that whole, lock in mentality their stock price 
is based on.

My XP machine presently freezes up randomly. It may be caused by 
a virus, but Kapersky can't find it. Ghost will not boot up to restore 
my backup. So, I'm rather disgusted with XP at the moment. Actually, 
I don't even want to run it under Virtualbox.

Never tried Virtualbox.  Wine is great though.  WineHQ pumps out 
releases on a very regular basis.  It gets better everyday and they 
package it up for apt, rpm and most GNU/Linux binary package managers.

I just looked.  Yesterday they announced a freeze for Wine 1.0   
Woohoo.   Yes, there will be incompatibilities, but it seems the 
principals feel it's ready  for a 1.0 tag.  Great news.

Do any of you guys use Linux without a gui? I note that

If so, it seems to me that work would go a lot faster without the 
gui once the main Linux commands are learned. Am I right about this?