February 2015 - WLUG - wlug.mailman3.com

word perfect
by donald vitkus 07 Nov '19

07 Nov '19

can not install word perfect 8.0 on united linux any ideas

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Charter Telephone reviews, boylston?
by John Stoffel 29 Sep '18

29 Sep '18

Hi, Anyone on here using Charter Telephone VOIP service? I've currently got Verizon, but the wife hates it because our phone lines get flaky all the time, esp when it rains. So I'm thinking to save money and combine all my stuff onto Charter. I've already got High Speed internet and regular old cable. Not wild about Digital Cable since I'm happy with Tivo and I don't want yet another set top box to have to deal with... So, any horror stories about Charter Phone VOIP quality and service? Thanks, John

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Linux kernel/driver contract in RI
by John Spencer 26 Feb '15

26 Feb '15

We have a client with a 6+ month contract opening for a Linux expert in RI, south of Providence. Linux internals Device Driver Development Extensive experience with Linux Kernel Architecture development and configuration including Linux OS System Kernel Programming Board Support Package experience Ability to configure, build and release cross platform Linux tool chains. Please contact me directly via email or phone (below) for more details. Regards, John Spencer Connected Systems Partners Office: (978) 455-5550 x208 Cell: (978) 621-9743 jspencer(a)connectedsp.com<mailto:jspencer@connectedsp.com> www.connectedsp.com<http://www.connectedsp.com/> GET CONNECTED! All information in this email, unless indicated otherwise in the body of the email, is considered confidential and intended for the view and use of the recipient(s) only.

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Speech recognition software
by Andy Stewart 21 Feb '15

21 Feb '15

HI everybody, Do any of you have experience or recommendations with any Free Software that does speech recognition? Thanks, Andy -- Andy Stewart (KB1OIQ) Founder: Worcester Linux Users' Group Founder: Chelmsford Linux Meetup Group President: PART of Westford, MA (WB1GOF)

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Pile o Hardware for sale (some free)
by Pete Wason 17 Feb '15

17 Feb '15

Hi, I have a pile of Dell desktops and servers for sale. And a bunch of other stuff. Some for free as it is either very old or misbehaving in some way. (6) Precision 690 workstations, some missing memory and/or drives, all functional. multi-RAID, multi-monitor. Giant 90lb. boxes, all metal. (4) PowerEdge R300 1U rackmount servers, some missing memory and/or (SAS) drives, all functional. (3) PowerEdge SC1420 tower servers, one has a RAID5 SCSI array, all functional. (2) XPS GEN 4/5 workstations (gaming boxes from early '00s), w/ RAID1. Working. A few Optiplex 740s, some working, some not. 2.9Ghz Athlon II 64 CPUs. Most need memory. PowerEdge SC600, needs new fan and PS. Pentiam 2.4Ghz. PowerEdge 2400, monster of a case, 8? SCSI drives in 2 arrays, dual PIII CPUs, makes an excellent bench+space heater. A few older Dell desktops like a Dim 4550, Dim 5100, Opti 280GX, etc. Working. Miscellaneous used HDs, D-Dock docking stations w/ removable HD modules, video cables, video cards, et al. Broken 6-tape DDS4 autochanger, some new 20/40GB tapes 4-5 monitors which may be fixable; Samsung 20" 4/3 Cavalier 2-bay external RAID box, working w/ (2) 500GB drives G-RAID 5-bay hot-swap enclosure, gutted, (was thinking about turning it into a mini-PC or a SCSI-tower for my Amiga :) Other stuff.. No warranties, obviously. Caveat emptor, blah blah blah blah, yada yada.. If interested I can send you specs directly. Nothing individually priced higher than $375. Volume (or tonnage) discounts are available. Please reply to: pwason(a)clarku.edu -- Pete Wason * Hy Noom Publications * 5088655414 * codevark(a)aim.com * codevark "Aborigine left speechless by steady disappearance of native dialects." -- The Onion

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Wireless mesh network question
by Andy Stewart 16 Feb '15

16 Feb '15

HI guys, I am planning to setup a wireless mesh network at a ham radio event in June. Each mesh node will consist of two Linksys WRT54GLs, much like the demo I showed at a recent WLUG meeting. One of the WRT54GLs will be on channel 6 and carry mesh network traffic. The other one will be on channel 1 and allow generic wifi devices access to the mesh network. It seems like there would be an interference problem if every node allowed wifi access on channel 1. Should this be 4 different wifi channels? It is possible for a user to be within radio range of multiple of them simultaneously. Thoughts? I've never setup a wireless network before and could use your advice. These mesh nodes will be placed outside in weatherproof enclosures with battery power. Thanks! Andy -- Andy Stewart (KB1OIQ) Founder: Worcester Linux Users' Group Founder: Chelmsford Linux Meetup Group President: PART of Westford, MA (WB1GOF)

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Reminder! Meeting tomorrow! Feb. 12th 2015 at 7pm (Mid-Century Room) rm 331!
by Tim Keller 11 Feb '15

11 Feb '15

Hey Everybody, This is just a quick reminder that we're having a meeting tomorrow at 7pm in the Mid-Century Room (rm 331) in the student center. Andy is going to be giving a talk about mesh networking! Afterwards we'll do pizza at Tech! Refreshments will be provided at the meeting as well. Later, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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sshd_config MaxStartups
by Jamie Guinan 11 Feb '15

11 Feb '15

Hi Group! I'm seeking opinions about an sshd feature. I was doing some work on a remote system (I did not set it up) that seemed to be refusing ssh and scp connections randomly. I looked into it, and finally stumbled across this from sshd_config(5), MaxStartups Specifies the maximum number of concurrent unauthenticated connections to the SSH daemon. Additional connections will be dropped until authentication succeeds or the LoginGraceTime expires for a connection. The default is 10. Alternatively, random early drop can be enabled by specifying the three colon separated val‐ ues “start:rate:full” (e.g. "10:30:60"). sshd(8) will refuse connection attempts with a probability of “rate/100” (30%) if there are currently “start” (10) unauthenticated connec‐ tions. The probability increases linearly and all connection attempts are refused if the number of unauthenticated connections reaches “full” (60). Indeed, the server had this setting, MaxStartups 10:50:20 This just seems like a terrible option. You can DOS their server just by making 20 connections and leaving them hanging. And it breaks any automated scripts relying on ssh or scp (unless you wrap them in a loop until they succeed, ugh). My guess is that the reasoning behind this feature that it will filter out a number of automated attacks. That seems no better than security-by-obscurity, and I know how some of you feel about that. :) Can you think of any sane reason to enable this feature, or for it to even exist at all? Best regards, -Jamie

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linux networking question (reformatted for readability)
by Brad 08 Feb '15

08 Feb '15

(i appologize for the previous message that i completely unreadable.) Dear W-LUGgers, I had some strange network related behavior that left me baffled and i wanted to hear some theories from more experienced network admins. The network layout is the following. The network is pretty simple, external traffic passes through a bridged-firewall (OpenBSD, my choice) into an OS X server (not my choice) which handles NAT/DHCP/DNS et al., and all the office computers are dhcp clients to the OS X server. The trouble machines are linux (ubuntu) desktop clients. The scenario is the following. I was doing work on the bridged firewall (OpenBSD) and somehow caused it to kernel panic, oopsie! So the bridged-firewall went down thus no-one had internet access, Dou! i quickly bounced the machine. It came back on-line and clients were able to access the internet, huzzah! But, the strange behavior was in two linux machines within the network that were not able to access some external IPs. My linux desktop could not access 8.8.8.8, when pinging, i could see an arp who-has request originating from my machine, i could see the packet come into the OS X server. But the request always went unanswered. The same behavior happened to another linux desktop but with 192.48.178.134 (sgi.com) My desktop could ping sgi.com. So each linux desktop had *different* unreachable IPs. The rest of the internet was reachable. I tried clearing the arp-cache on the OS X server, then clearing the NAT state tables, then I rebooted the OS X server, none solved the problem. I finally renewed the dhcp lease on my linux desktop machine and that allowed the ping to complete. What would case this behavior? Could it be stale arp-cache on the linux machine? ( I *should* have tried to clear the arp-cache on the linux machine before i renewed the dhcp lease, but i didn’t think of that until after the fact.) The linux machine was sending out arp who-has requests so would a stale cache even matter? Why would no one answer the arp requests? I am not an expert network admin (its just a side job since the company is only 15 people). I don’t expect to get a resolution but i’m interested to hear any theories. Thanks and cheers, — brad PS. As a worcester transplant to boston, i am really jealous i don’t live closer to attend meetings. The topics of late sound outstanding.

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linux networking question.
by Brad 07 Feb '15

07 Feb '15

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