June 2014 - luv-main

Debian 7.5 netinst - no kernel installed
by Colin Fee 09 Jun '14

09 Jun '14

I was rebuilding my home print server (a re-purposed ASUS eepc netbook) yesterday and was trying Debian 7.5 netinst from a USB stick. All was going well until partway through it complained about not having an installable kernel available to intstall. I continued on through the process and sure enough at the end the reboot stalled at grub due to no kernel entries. More of a curiosity really as I resolved it using the Live-DVD downloaded onto the USB stick. I was a) trying it out and b) looking for a minimal installation. So has anyone else seen anything similar? I'd have thought that at the appropriate moment in the install process it would pull down a kernel to install. -- Colin Fee tfeccles(a)gmail.com

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Cheap Android device recommendations
by Avi Miller 06 Jun '14

06 Jun '14

Hi guys, We are currently building new mobile applications for the community radio station at which I volunteer. In order to test the Android application, I need an Android device (obviously), so I’m looking for recommendations for a cheap device that will only really be used for development purposes. I’m not looking to replace my existing phone, so an Android tablet would be adequate. Ok? Go! :) Thanks, Avi

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Network Problems - Clients in Christchurch affected
by Piers Rowan 06 Jun '14

06 Jun '14

Hi there, We are running a LAMP stack and we have multiple clients in CHCH and a handful other parts of the world who have time out issues. We have done traceroutes from CHCH, QLD, and other places back to the data centre in Adelaide and the results is that there are no problems in CHCH. There are two clients in CHCH with a few branches and both claim to have issues. They are both hitting the same server (with many others) but only they are reporting problems. We have given the "talk to your ISP" response but I would like to: 1) remove all doubt it is our end 2) Provide any investigative support to our clients as possible. Can some network guru or packet sniffing blood hound give me some ideas of where else to explore in the digital underworld? Cheers P

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Suggestions for best approach/language for this scenario
by Avi Miller 05 Jun '14

05 Jun '14

Hey LUV’rs and LA'rs, I volunteer for a community/NFP radio station here in Melbourne. We’re currently deploying a new radio automation system, as well as replacing our existing online streaming services. The radio automation system that has a TCP service running on a particular port. Whenever a play event fires in the studio, the automation system sends out the data to anything listening on that port. I have control over what the automation system sends. What I need to do is write an intermediate daemon that connects to the upstream automation system looking for song events (which has an associated duration field) and presents a similar interface to the stream publisher. This is because we don’t use the automation system for every show, so after the event duration expires I want my intermediate system to send currently airing show information instead. This way, the client-side streaming apps will either see information about the song currently being played, or if automation is not active, information about the show currently on air. As an added bonus, I’d like the intermediate daemon to also submit RESTful API requests to a web service online. So, it looks vaguely like this: [Stream publisher] ==> [Intermediate daemon] ==> [Automation system] ==REST=> [web service] I suspect I’ll need a multi-threaded application, with one thread to listen for events from the automation system and two more to send events to the stream publisher and the RESTful service. Given that the majority of my programming experience is in PHP, I’m going to have to learn something new for this. So, I’m looking for suggestions on the programming language and/or tools that would be well-suited for this task. Alternatively, if there is already something that could do this (or be munged to do this), I’m all ears. Thanks, Avi

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Re: Diagnosing System Crashes
by zlinw＠mcmedia.com.au 04 Jun '14

04 Jun '14

Dave Hellewell <dave.hellewell(a)gmail.com> said, >> Power supply is next easiest thing to test if you can find a spare. >> Do the input voltages seem okay? Even if they do it's possible it >> could still be the power supply. >My sensors output is pretty wacky (haven't gotten around to a proper >config), but the BIOS reports numbers that look OK. I have another PSU >here and I'll give that a spin as a last resort before submitting to the >shop. Neither the bios or any software voltage monitoring are any good in diagnosing PSU problems as neither reads voltage continiously. For the same reason most digital voltmeters are no good. What can happen (I have had it twice) is the PSU voltages can spike down very quickly and cause the system untold problems. Such a spike will NOT be picked up by most voltmeters. I have successfully used analog meters to check this though (An AVO). All voltages need to be checked including the 12 Volt line. In both my cases the system lockups were caused by the 12V line droping low (11.2 volts) for only around half a second, causing the hardisks to shutdown. This caused an unrecoverable error from the kernel. The symptoms in my case was an almost complete hardlock up but with the mouse pointer still working. Lindsay

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CPL's "Skymaster" dual ether PCI-E?
by Douglas Ray 03 Jun '14

03 Jun '14

CPL stock a cheap PCI-Express dual UTP gigabit ether card: http://www.cplonline.com.au/skymaster-pci-express-dual-gigabit-ethernet-con… Anyone tried using them in OpenBSD? Can anyone advise chipset, or what manufacturer/model id's it reports, or any dmesg diagnostic? (I currently have some Intel Pro/1000 MT cards, but one has decided to intermittently fail 1GB sync) Thanks, Douglas Ray

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Pre-meeting Korean food?
by Chris Samuel 03 Jun '14

03 Jun '14

Hi folks, If anyone is interested I plan to have dinner at Big Mama's Korean Restaurant on Swanston St. http://www.urbanspoon.com/r/71/1524991/restaurant/CBD/Big-Mama-Melbourne I should be there at 5:45pm. Please let me know if you plan on coming along! cheers, Chris -- Chris Samuel : http://www.csamuel.org/ : Melbourne, VIC

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Re: Cheap Android device recommendations
by Toby Corkindale 03 Jun '14

03 Jun '14

On 3 June 2014 09:17, Davor Balder <dbalder(a)ozemail.com.au> wrote: > I got one betterŠ come to Coles and they have PendoPad which runs Android. > Not sure how much, it used to be under $100. ($150 tops) If you want a budget device, you'll be able to get something super cheap direct from China. BUT: I do recommend reading some reviews around about cheap Android devices. They are usually absolutely *awful* and trying to use one will make you regret saving $100, a hundred times over. But the main reason for concern is that they aren't actually appropriate for use a testing stuff on Android, because these dodgy cheap-arse tablets and phones aren't even properly compliant with the "proper" Android experience. ie. If something works on the tablet, you have no idea if it'll work similarly on real-world Android devices. And if something doesn't work (more likely) you won't know if it's just your tablet, or if it's a problem in your app. -Toby

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iptables rules cannot be loaded at boot time when domain names are used in iptables rules
by Wenjian Bill Yang 03 Jun '14

03 Jun '14

Hi, I have the following rule in my iptables, and all chains are empty when the server is booted. -A INPUT -s yahoo.com -j DROP Or -A INPUT -s yahoo.com -p tcp --dport 21 -j DROP if I manually run /etc/init.d/iptables start, all iptables rules can be loaded. Also if an IP address is used as follows, iptables can be loaded at boot time. -A INPUT -s 66.33.210.0/24 -j DROP I have checked a few books and websites, they all show that domain names can be used in iptables rules. Thanks.

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Re: Cheap Android device recommendations
by Avi Miller 03 Jun '14

03 Jun '14

Hey, On 3 Jun 2014, at 9:17 am, Davor Balder <dbalder(a)ozemail.com.au> wrote: > I got one betterŠ come to Coles and they have PendoPad which runs Android. Nifty, thanks for the tip. Cheers, Avi

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