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Links from tonights meeting
by Frank Sweetser Dec. 15, 2005

Dec. 15, 2005

Some of the links that were mentioned in tonights rambling meeting: isc.sans.org Internet Storm Center. A bunch of internet security professionals publishing a diary about major trends in online security. www.thedailywtf.com The Daily "What The F**k?" A programmer oriented blog of "Curious Perversions in Information Technology". -- Frank Sweetser fs at wpi.edu | For every problem, there is a solution that WPI Network Engineer | is simple, elegant, and wrong. - HL Mencken GPG fingerprint = 6174 1257 129E 0D21 D8D4 E8A3 8E39 29E3 E2E8 8CEC

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Reminder: Meeting Wed 14-dec-05 7:00 PM
by Andy Stewart Dec. 13, 2005

Dec. 13, 2005

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 HI Everybody, Our next meeting is coming up really soon - this Wednesday, Dec 14, at 7:00 PM in the Access Grid room at WPI (lower level of Morgan Hall). I don't have any defined topic for the meeting, so I'm open to any ideas you might have. I have some flyers from Addison-Wesley & Prentice Hall which are for a 40% (yes, forty percent) discount on books purchased online prior to January 10, 2006. They will be available at this meeting. Also, I'll bring the following books for the zero cost raffle: Linux, Debugging and Performance Tuning Author: Steve Best Prentice Hall Apache Derby - Off to the Races Includes Details of IBM Cloudscape Authors: Paul C. Zikopoulos, Dan Scott, George Baklarz IBM Press That's about it - I look forward to seeing you at the meeting! Andy - -- Andy Stewart, Founder Worcester Linux Users' Group Worcester, MA, USA http://www.wlug.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.5 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFDnkIzHl0iXDssISsRAiR8AJ9D/L0X/Iak0TLPTt0dnA6Hgg288ACeMYdn zWNMvvBXjO7C9Cq6zSuPNH0= =enyh -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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getting that cpu to sleep ...
by brad Dec. 13, 2005

Dec. 13, 2005

greetings, I have a question for those linux programmers out there. i'm writing a program on linux (kubuntu to be specific) that requires high-precision timing, somewhere on the order of 100 to 1000 micro seconds. I get very good timing out of a loop written such that a while() loop checks the system clock after every iteration and comparing that to the desired wait time, like so (pseudo_code): while(time_passed < wait_time) { time_passed = get_time() } ... The problem with this approach is that the process uses 99% of the CPU since it just spins the CPU until enough time has expired. My question: is there a way on linux (in C) to have the CPU sleep or send it a no-op such that it's not just eating up cycles until time expires? I have looked at nanosleep and usleep, however they appear to only have precision to 10ms which too latent for my needs. Thanks, --Brad

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Problem with gnome, Fedora core 3
by Ken Jones Dec. 10, 2005

Dec. 10, 2005

Gentlemen and ladies, My Fedora Core 3 - which has been yum'd up to date - behaves strangely when using GNOME as the windows manager. The right click on blank desktop space does not work. The right click on a panel to make a new panel does not work. The result is that I can not set up any launching icons on my desktop. There is no unused space on my one (bottom) panel. The panel-disappear icon is missing. Any ideas what controls this behavior and ow I can fix it? On a different machine I have a Core4 system running GNOME perfectly. Ken Jones

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Wanted: used laptop power supply
by Andy Stewart Dec. 10, 2005

Dec. 10, 2005

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 HI gang, I'm looking for a used (functioning) laptop power supply. I won't be using it for a laptop. Input: 120VAC 60Hz (standard wall socket) Output: anywhere from 12 VDC - 48 VDC at about 2 amps I need about 24 watts, so the current goes up as V goes down 48 VDC @ 0.5 A, 24 VDC @ 1.0 A, 12 VDC @ 2.0 A, etc the barrel connector will look like this neg ---C. ---pos that pic won't look right, but it is neg on outside pos on the inside Please send email if you have one, and we can negotiate a price, trade, or whatever you'd like. Ideally, you could bring it to the upcoming WLUG meeting on Wednesday, Dec 14th. Thanks! Andy - -- Andy Stewart, Founder Worcester Linux Users' Group Worcester, MA, USA http://www.wlug.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.5 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFDmm/vHl0iXDssISsRAkEPAJ9FapCV+aOZmtS1wUT2VJ4/C14fCQCeI//x 9H6CbNJklxMzQbepGvSBpa0= =1Gi+ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Grub problems after imaging drive
by Dick Goodman Dec. 9, 2005

Dec. 9, 2005

I recently configured a RedHat 9 system with OpenVPN . The original configuration was done on an old junk box. This is a single boot w/grub system As of last week I knew nothing about grub; I now know marginally more. As it was working successfully, it was decided to build a new box for it. The hard drive was imaged with Ghost Corporate 8.x and restored onto the new drive. There are some known issues with 8.x and grub The grub screen comes up on booting the new box, but when selecting the (one) entry for RH9, after a short pause it comes back to the grub screen. I read the grub manual, and from the grub screen did c-command, then root (hd0,0) setup (hd0) quit The messages after setup did not look like error messages. The behavior is the same, although I see a message about stage 1.5 flicker by. I figured out how to look at the hard drive with Knoppix 3.8.2 Live CD and the partitions and contents look "ok", so it appears to just be a boot issue. How do I resolve this? What additional information do you need? Is there a better way to clone Linux drive -> Linux drive? Dick

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ftp in bash script
by Gregory Avedissian Dec. 7, 2005

Dec. 7, 2005

I'm writing a bash script to download a logfile from a site, archive it, then upload the archive to the site. I want the script to stop if the file doesn't download correctly, and I think I've accomplished this. (i.e. it works right when I set it up to download a non-existent file.) Question: will ftp always return an error if the file is downloaded incorrectly or incompletely? This is important, because the last part of the script will replace the file on the ftp server with a blank file of the same name. I don't want to wipe out the original logfile if I don't have it all. (secondary question: Is there a way to pass the "delete" argument without using the interactive shell?) Here's what the first section of the script looks like. Third question: If I set this up to run as a cron job, what happens to my echo messages? Will they appear in /var/log/messages? #download logfile if ftp ftp://user:password@ftp.site.net/logfile.log; then echo echo "File has been downloaded" echo else echo "Download failed" exit fi Thanks, Greg

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SSH without passwords
by Mike Leo Dec. 1, 2005

Dec. 1, 2005

I remember someone talking about sharing keys between systems so you can ssh around at will without needing the password.... we are trying to do this, but are having a hard time. Anyone have a good doc (or willing to write one) about how to do this? Basically we are ssh-keygen -t (dsa/rsa) the keys, copy them to the "remote" servers ~/.ssh/ There are conflicting doc's at this point...some say you need an ssh-agent, some don't mention it. Some use passphrases, some don't. But if i have to enter an ssh passphrase everytime, why not just use the account password? Any advise would be helpful... thanks as always.. Mike

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SAMBA My Documents Redirection and Offile Available with out Roaming Profiles
by Matt Higgins Nov. 28, 2005

Nov. 28, 2005

Here is some back ground before the question: I'm currently running a SAMBA PDC 3.0.10 on FC3. Samba is backed by an LDAP server for account information ldapsam. User accounts were created with smb-ldap tools from IDEALX. I have fixed these scripts up a bit so they also add ldap attributes for OpenExchange. The PDC has a netlogon share with a nice Default Profile for users. Roaming profiles is turned on and all profile data is replicated to the server. All the clients are windows XP Pro. The problem is the profiles are quite large and we don't have the space to support many more users. We also have quite a few remote sites were replicating an entire profile is not practical. I have found that the most important data is in My Documents. Mail is stored on the IMAP server and contact and calendar in OpenExchange. I have read many howtos including nearly the entire Official Samba Howto. All of these documents describe folder redirection with respect to roaming profiles. I have also not found any documents that address the issue of making a redirected folder available off line such as the My Documents folder. I have looked at excluding Folders from the Roaming Profile so only the Personal folder a.k.a My Documents is "roamed" but that looks like a hack. Is it possible to disable roaming profiles and still distribute my nice Default User profile from netlogon? I am fairly sure this is possible just have not tried. Is it possible to disable roaming profiles and then redirect the My Documents folder to a share and make it available off line? This is common behavior for a win2k3 server. Is anyone doing this in production and can give me some pointers or point me to some documentation? Could these settings be made with .pol file or with a bat script running at logon? My I deal scenario is this. User logs in for the 1st time the Default User profile is loaded from the PDC, the My Documents folder is redirected to a share on the server, say there home dir, and that folder is available off line. -Matt

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Allowing users to start or stop a service
by Mike Leo Nov. 27, 2005

Nov. 27, 2005

Greetings and happy thanksgiving to all! Now, down to business... We have a set of users who need the power to stop/start their own particular service/daemon. I've tried granting user rights directly to the init script, but that doesn't work. I am looking into sudo, but am not sure it can be specific to only 1 service, and not all of them? let me know what ya'll think and THANKS!

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