February 2016 - luv-main

own address as source address
by Russell Coker 01 Mar '16

01 Mar '16

> xenbr0: received packet on mb0 with own address as source address What's the best way of tracking down the cause of kernel messages like the above? As an aside it's a pity that the kernel doesn't log the source address in question and whether it's IPv4 or IPv6. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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meeting
by Tim Connors 29 Feb '16

29 Feb '16

No meeting tomorrow? -- Tim Connors

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more about server migration
by Russell Coker 26 Feb '16

26 Feb '16

As mentioned in a previous message (which many people on the list probably didn't get) I've just moved the LUV server to a VM in Germany courtesy of Paul Menzel who pays the rent on the physical hardware. We had a few problems along the way with DNS records not updating when I wanted them to and with the wrong IP address being used for outbound mail - which caused some servers to correctly reject mail on the basis of bad SPF. DNS is now correct and has been correct for long enough that I expect most systems won't have old addresses cached any more (Google DNS has had the new values for a while). Andrew has started the process of gaining control over the DNS (which is registered in the names of people who haven't been committee members for a long time). We need to get that done before VPAC turns things off. My current plan is to use 2 servers that I run for LUV DNS secondaries. I've been a LUV member for 20 years and both the servers in question have been running for that long (one of them hasn't even changed it's IP address). I think that will give some assurance that things will keep working. As an aside if anyone knows how to contact the people running russell.linux.org.au and the creativecontingencies.com DNS servers about changing the entries for LUV then please let me know off-list. When running at VPAC the watchdog table in the Drupal database took up 20G of disk space and as it was in the ibdata1 file there was no good option for freeing the space even after deleting most rows. As part of the migration to the new server I dumped all MySQL databases and imported them. That solved the disk space problem and as I now have MySQL configured for a file per InnoDB table I will always be able to OPTIMIZE TABLE if I have that happen again. echo "delete from watchdog where timestamp < unix_timestamp() - 604800;" | mysql luv_drupal The above command is in a cron job to delete the old entries from the watchdog table. It would be good if we could fix the Drupal problem that's causing those entries (but I don't know how to do it or have time to learn). It would also be good if we could configure Drupal to not store millions of rows in that table (it's supposed to automatically delete old rows but doesn't). Assistance from Drupal experts is welcome. One thing I want to do is to convert the server to BTRFS. BTRFS snapshots is the best way of backing things up. Going forward I want to have much better backups of the server. The fact that I can't visit the server room any more makes them much more important as does the fact that data is crossing jurisdictions. I will resend this message tomorrow to make sure everyone gets it. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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Amazon / Google + rsync for storage/backup
by Piers Rowan 24 Feb '16

24 Feb '16

Hi there, I am looking at options for backup storage. From reviewing prices storage is quite cheap but I get confused by the mix-'n-match nature of some of the cloud offerings. The alternative is to spin up a VM with out current providers but then cost per GB is large and there are some limits on the VM disk size. I have tried implementations (fuse I believe) of mounting a bucket and using rsync to copy data to is but it was slow and all files and whole files were transferred instead of the changes only - which killed the cost of the exercise because of bandwidth. From a cost / reliability POV I would like to go with a large provider and I would like to avoid spinning up a new VM if a direct rsync service is available. Any ideas? Thanks Piers

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Snipe-IT and IUS community repository for CentOS7
by Peter Ross 23 Feb '16

23 Feb '16

Hi all, I am about to install Snipe-IT as an asset management system. The install script would like to enable the IUS community repository. Do you have experience with it? I would like to know about the availability of security updates. How fast can you get an update? Snipe-IT wants to have PHP 5.6 and a few other things from it. I see 5.6.18 packages (the latest 5.6 version available) - so that's a good sign, I think. Using it seems to be the way of least resistance. Although the website states minimal requirements which are fulfilled without the IUS community repository, e.g. PHP 5.4. Any experience and recommendation? Thank you Peter

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Ndis wrapper
by Andrew Greig 19 Feb '16

19 Feb '16

I had no idea this would be necessary, but this morning I purchased an Epson MFP, an XP 432. I made this choice because I expected that Epson, which started strong with Linux would still be doing so. But .... no drivers. I searched the CD for a PPD. No luck! So in the back of my mind I heard a quiet memory echo, ndis wrapper. Is that still a viable process? And is it complex? How would I get it to work with the scanner? Gratefully and hopefully Andrew Greig

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macros in Apache
by Russell Coker 18 Feb '16

18 Feb '16

http://www.debian- administration.org/article/725/Simplifying_repetitive_Apache_configuration_… Inspired by the above blog post I used Apache macros to simplify the configuration of the LUV server. Please let me know if you notice any problems although I only expect improvements as some of the SSL stuff I have recently done was only implemented on one domain. The usual case when implementing macros/functions/etc is that you discover that you missed things when doing copy/paste work. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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Parted and a removable HDD (USB)
by Andrew Greig 16 Feb '16

16 Feb '16

Hi , I am trying to return a WD Elements HDD to a contiguous state, it had a Fat32 and an EXT2 partition, having deleted the 2 partitions to start again Here is what I have in parted: Model: WD 1600BEV External (scsi) Disk /dev/sdb: 160GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Disk Flags: This disk should be around 850Gb How do I overcome this difficulty, please? Andrew Greig

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removing all odd characters from a file
by zlinw＠mcmedia.com.au 14 Feb '16

14 Feb '16

I have some files with this structure, below is in hex. 00 6D 00 61 00 64 00 61 00 6D 00 65 00 3F 00 27 00 20 00 0A It is ascii characters each preceded by a blank, I would like some way to remove all the odd characters, ie all the 00. so in the above case it will end up.............. 6D 61 64 61 6D 65 3F 27 20 0A (madame?"sp""lf") Lindsay

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OpenSUSE upgrade screwed my computer
by Andrew Greig 14 Feb '16

14 Feb '16

Hi All, I believed the stuff on the OpenSUSE website, so I decided to run the Tumbleweed upgrade of my OpenSuse 13.1 distro. Followed the recommendations that it be fully updated prior to the upgrade, and then started. The process was incredibly long, but eventually I was presented with a highly coloured KDE screen. After I loaded the panel with necessary apps I tried to do some work, but something was wrong. Dolphin was a dog (or a hog) Create New>Folder took 45 seconds to present the dialogue box. Trying to close an app would take the same amount of time. I had read a good review of an RPMbased distro called ROSA, so I created a USB image to install it. The installation crashed at the "load software " stage with an error message quoting an rsync failure. My dreams of a fast KDE desktop evaporated. More work needed, so I dropped the OpenSUSE 13.2 DVD in the slot - where things were going well until the partitioning stage, where, because a GPT partition table had been built by the Russians(ROSA) I could\d do nothing with it. Dirty shut down, and then select the Rescue section of the install disk, and using parted I was able to remove the partitions by number. Parted picked up the problem with the GPT setup. I obviously answered the question correctly because on the next boot up with the Install disk everything was clean. 13.2 is installing now, so far so good. (Interval of 30 minutes) I now have a functioning system again. Maybe I will wait a little while before attempting Rosa again. Qusestion: Why would Rosa create a partition of One Kilobyte? Andrew Greig

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