October 2013 - luv-main

Linux Friendly Equipment Vendors.
by Robert Shelton 27 Dec '13

27 Dec '13

Hello, I'm curious if anyone could recommend Linux friendly hardware suppliers in Melbourne? We're a small/medium business, and I often get the feeling that server, network and storage vendors want to push non-FOSS platforms and are unable to advise on integration with existing FOSS systems. Would make a nice change to have a vendor who understood the merits of Linux KVM, DRBD, Amanda backup, etc. Cheers, Rob.

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Recommendations for good Linux Haswell laptops?
by Chris Samuel 27 Dec '13

27 Dec '13

Hi folks, Anyone got any recommendations or experiences with Haswell laptops running Linux yet? Thinking that it might be time to refresh my work laptop and a Haswell Ultrabook could be quite enticing.. cheers! Chris -- Chris Samuel : http://www.csamuel.org/ : Melbourne, VIC

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iptables-save output using dotted quad netmask rather than CIDR
by Tim Connors 13 Dec '13

13 Dec '13

iptables-save on rhel5 outputs: -A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -s 12.3.4.5/255.255.0.0 -p tcp -m tcp -j ACCEPT whereas rhel6 outputs -A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -s 12.3.4.5/16 -p tcp -m tcp -j ACCEPT Wanting to normalise iptables-save to one form or the other (preferably using the dotted quad netmask), the best I can come up with is a line by line grep (for optimisation perhaps, since a match wont happen often) for /<number> and then extract the number, pass to cidr2mask, and replace /<number> in that line (this is part of a self contained shell script that will be executed on the fly on another host, so I'd rather not rely on anything that isn't already in RHEL, ie no writing a perl sript myself unless it's a one liner perl -e thing). What flag to iptables-save am I missing where it does this for me? -- Tim Connors

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Hibernate and Suspend
by Andrew Greig 10 Nov '13

10 Nov '13

Hi all. Things with Suse 12.2 were fine as far as suspend and shutdown were concerned on both my desktop and notebook computers. The arrival of 12.3 heralded a less than satisfactory behaviour. I have put up with this for some time, but enough! is enough! I have done some reading and discover that suspend writes everything to Ram and then keeps the ram powered up to retain it all, a meagre power demand. Hibernate writes everything open to the swap partition and then on reboot should resume very quickly. Hibernate works for me for 5 minutes but not 8 hours, suspend is also flaky in that the recovery tends to hang with no display. Shutdown hangs on exit unless the previous command was suspend in which case it works as expected. Is this a case of ACPI not being consistent with the BIOS? Should I add "no_acpi" to the grub file? A new release of Suse is only 18 days away, should I see what the upgrade brings? I would be grateful for advice in this, Many thanks Andrew Greig

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Postfix log analysis
by Russell Coker 05 Nov '13

05 Nov '13

Does anyone know of a good Postfix log file analysis program to find problems with particular users? In this instance I'm not interested in general statistics or anything. I just want to do searches such as "all attempts for @gmail.com accounts to send mail to user(a)example.com" where example.com is a local domain. The native Postfix logging has one line with a sender address and queue ID and later lines with the queue ID and the recipient(s) which may contain delivery errors. So I can't just grep for the data I want. My problem is when I get complains like "user(a)example.com can't receive mail from friend(a)gmail.com". In many cases it's trivial problems that can be difficult to diagnose, such as friend(a)gmail.com sending mail to user2(a)example.com where user2 has just added the sender to the spam list and not told anyone. So all parts of the server are working correctly but the users aren't getting what they want. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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re: LUV Main November (Wednesday): MMORPGs + Parsing/Perl
by Toby Corkindale 31 Oct '13

31 Oct '13

I think you have Jacinta's surname wrong in the announcement below.. unless by a huge coincidence there are two Jacinta's doing Perl training in Melbourne. On 30/10/13 11:29, Les Kitchen wrote: > Start: Nov 6 2013 19:00 *Wednesday* > End: Nov 6 2013 21:00 > Location: > The Buzzard Lecture Theatre. Evan Burge Building, Trinity > College, Melbourne University Main Campus, Parkville. > Link: http://luv.asn.au/meetings/map > > Lev Lafayette: MMORPGs and Linux > > Jacinta Richards: Don't repeat yourself. Fun with parsing > > NOTE: Because of Cup day, we meet this month on *Wednesday*. > > Lev Lafayette: MMORPGs and Linux > > Lev will talk about Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing > Games and Linux. Lev is currently LUV President. > > Jacinta Richards: Don't repeat yourself. Fun with parsing > > The problem: your client gives you a document covering the > specification of some weird message format they want you to > handle. It's tab delimited, and pure ASCII, but actually some > fields are multi-part and include tabs, and nothing is > quoted. Oh, and actually there's multiple different kinds of > messages you will need to parse. > > The solution: Using Perl 5.10+ and named capture groups we'll > create a data definition. Over the rest of the talk we'll be > taking advantage of a host of tactics (including re-parsing a > regular expression) to see how we can take an interesting > problem and make it fun again. Although Perl will be used in > this talk, and code will be shown, hopefully you won't actually > need to know any Perl at all to understand the ideas I run > through. > > Jacinta says: I speak for a living. I run Perl training courses, > I speak at Perl monger meetings, user groups and numerous > conferences across the world.

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CentOS 5 change from IDE to RAID after cloning
by Tony White 30 Oct '13

30 Oct '13

Hello all, I am hoping someone has done this before as I am unable to locate anything on the web to help me. I have a drive that has been cloned to a RAID controller but when it boots it only gets to to "Kernel Panic". The only reason I can see is the RAID driver is not loading. Can someone tell me how/where I can make this change without having to do a full reinstall please? TIA -- best wishes Tony White

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kpartx for netbsd
by James Harper 30 Oct '13

30 Oct '13

This is kind of OT, but I'm hoping someone here is familiar with both Linux and BSD. Is there a BSD equivalent of kpartx, or is kpartx available for BSD? I'm exchanging emails with someone who is using BSD and trying to assist in solving a problem, but I know nothing about BSD. Thanks James

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C library for parsing email addresses
by Russell Coker 24 Oct '13

24 Oct '13

Does anyone know of a good free library for parsing email addresses? Preferrably something that's already packaged for Debian. I want to have a library sort out the local part, the domain, and the comment of an email address. I've just discovered a bug in a program which does this. The fact that the program in question has been running for many years (last update was over a year ago and the code in question wasn't changed for some time before that) and processed probably hundreds of thousands of messages without the bug being noticed demonstrates that it's not so easy to get this right. It seems likely that there may be other bugs after I fix this one. So I'd rather use a library to ensure that it's had wider testing before I use it. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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NVidia closed src drivers crashing after startup
by zlinw＠mcmedia.com.au 22 Oct '13

22 Oct '13

I am just trying to install the NVidia closed src drivers on Debian 7.1 AMD64 and the X server is crashing imediatly after start up below is the final part of the Xorg.log, [ 464.993] (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105" [ 464.993] (**) Option "xkb_layout" "us" [ 464.994] (II) config/udev: Adding input device PC Speaker (/dev/input/event1) [ 464.994] (II) No input driver specified, ignoring this device. [ 464.994] (II) This device may have been added with another device file. [ 465.044] [ 465.044] Backtrace: [ 465.044] 0: /usr/bin/X (xorg_backtrace+0x36) [0x7f2f4ebe5d06] [ 465.044] 1: /usr/bin/X (0x7f2f4ea67000+0x182859) [0x7f2f4ebe9859] [ 465.044] 2: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0 (0x7f2f4dd8f000+0xf030) [0x7f2f4dd9e030] [ 465.044] 3: /usr/lib/libXfont.so.1 (FontFileListNextFontWithInfo+0x29) [0x7f2f4d8da5b9] [ 465.044] 4: /usr/bin/X (doListFontsWithInfo+0x163) [0x7f2f4eaba473] [ 465.044] 5: /usr/bin/X (ProcessWorkQueue+0x21) [0x7f2f4eabe0b1] [ 465.044] 6: /usr/bin/X (WaitForSomething+0x62) [0x7f2f4ebe3012] [ 465.044] 7: /usr/bin/X (0x7f2f4ea67000+0x52bb1) [0x7f2f4eab9bb1] [ 465.044] 8: /usr/bin/X (0x7f2f4ea67000+0x41ec5) [0x7f2f4eaa8ec5] [ 465.044] 9: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (__libc_start_main+0xfd) [0x7f2f4cab6ead] [ 465.044] 10: /usr/bin/X (0x7f2f4ea67000+0x4219d) [0x7f2f4eaa919d] [ 465.044] [ 465.044] Segmentation fault at address (nil) [ 465.044] Fatal server error: [ 465.044] Caught signal 11 (Segmentation fault). Server aborting [ 465.044] [ 465.044] Please consult the The X.Org Foundation support at http://wiki.x.org for help. [ 465.044] Please also check the log file at "/var/log/Xorg.0.log" for additional information. [ 465.044] [ 465.088] (II) evdev: Logitech USB Optical Mouse: Close [ 465.088] (II) UnloadModule: "evdev" [ 465.088] (II) evdev: AT Translated Set 2 keyboard: Close [ 465.088] (II) UnloadModule: "evdev" [ 465.251] Server terminated with error (1). Closing log file. Under a normal start the lines at 464.994 are the last ones in the log after startup. So the driver appears to be starting up OK. I use a custom kernel current version is 3.9.11, NOUVEAU being blacklisted for the closed src driver. A search on the net produce no usefull information. The NOUVEAU runs perfectly except the 3D accelartion is slow and has some texture mapping problems. For normal operations I prefer the OS driver, its no good though for OpenGL development. Lindsay

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