October 2018 - luv-main

LAN-only chat?
by Craig Sanders 03 Nov '18

03 Nov '18

Anyone know of a decent local-LAN chat program? I've tried the Bonjour (i.e. avahi) module for pidin but it's just unreliable. I don't know whether it's pidgin that's the problem or whether it's because avahi is more half-arsed Poettering garbage, but I've spent hours fucking around with it on multiple occasions, think i've got it working OK, and then the next time either I or my partner try to use it to send notes to each other, it just doesn't fucking work. I suspect, but am not sure, that either pidgin or avahi gets confused because all machines on my LAN have multiple addresses on different subnets - this is too useful for VMs and docker images and other stuff to even consider changing just for a chat program. If I had to, I could set up an irc or xmpp server or something but that seems like overkill for this. So, can anyone recommend a no-frills, no-fuss LAN chat that just works? Even tips on making pidgin + bonjour work reliably would be great. Preferably something better than the ancient ytalk. craig -- craig sanders <cas(a)taz.net.au>

6 7

IBM Acquires Red Hat
by Lev Lafayette 30 Oct '18

30 Oct '18

This is fairly big deal.. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/28/ibm-is-reportedly-nearing-deal-to-acquire-r… Prior to the acquisition, Red Hat's market capitalization stood at approximately $20.5 billion. The acquisition is by far IBM's largest deal ever, and the third-biggest in the history of U.S. tech. -- Lev Lafayette, BA (Hons), GradCertTerAdEd (Murdoch), GradCertPM, MBA (Tech Mngmnt) (Chifley) mobile: 0432 255 208 RFC 1855 Netiquette Guidelines http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt

3 2

Dropbox and zfs
by stripes theotoky 28 Oct '18

28 Oct '18

As of November Dropbox are dropping support for Linux file systems other than ext4, as I run zfs this is less than helpful. I am wondering as a temporary measure until I move to Pcloud if it would be possible to format a 64GB SD card as ext4, copy the contents of my Dropbox folder to it and then mount it at /home/<username>/Dropbox. Assuming this works it would leave the system drive as zfs and Dropbox in its own ext4 flashcard. Are there better ways to do this and if so how? What will happen with the zfs snapshots that the box takes every minute? What is the life expectancy of an SD card used like this? Thanks in advance Stripes -- Stripes Theotoky -37 .713869 145.050562

4 3

Symmetric Key Management and Distribution
by Usman Saeed 28 Oct '18

28 Oct '18

Hi, I am working on a project involving distributed radio nodes connected over a wireless network. We are using symmetric key cryptography for ciphering (AES-256). The radio nodes are running Linux on a 250MHz processor. I need a solution to manage the symmetric keys in this network of nodes, written in C/C++. The solution should be able to manage the life cycle of the keys. It should be able to auto-generate a new key (upon expiry or when manually instructed by the user) and securely disseminate it in the network and archive the old key after activation of the new key. I have looked at Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP). It provides all of these features but sadly there is no open-source implementation available in C. Does anyone know a solution for symmetric key management that can provide these features and implemented in the open-source domain? Thanks, Usman

5 6

noobish help with Virtualisation (virtual box)
by h 23 Oct '18

23 Oct '18

I am a hobbyist, running a desktop, latest version, open-suse (15.0) system. I have recently changed to an AMD processor having used intel for a long time. I generally format and do a clean install on /, but have a /home partition which has been around for many years and may contain entries related to the intel processor rather than the amd one. I am trying to install and run virtual box. On starting a virtual machine I get a message: AMD-V is disabled in the BIOS (or by the host OS) (VERR_SVM_DISABLED). My BIOS says that "Secure Virtual Machine" is enabled. cat cpuinfo |grep svm shows that svm is on each core. dmidecode does NOT list the svm flag Further system info: Base Board Information Manufacturer: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. Product Name: B350M PRO-VDH (MS-7A38) Version: 2.0 Processor Information Socket Designation: AM4 Type: Central Processor Family: Zen Manufacturer: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Signature: Family 23, Model 1, Stepping 1 Thinking there may be detritus in my /home partition, I have created a new user, but experienced the same problem when starting the virtual machine. Any help on 'how to make virtual box work' would be appreciated, also any info on why cpuinfo says svm is available, but dmidecode does not? I am on and off line at the moment, so may take time to respond. Thank you in advance! H

2 2

strange date issue
by Russell Coker 14 Oct '18

14 Oct '18

I'm running kvm with the -rtc option to try and test a bug related to the start of daylight savings time. Anyway when the VM boots up it gets the acutal time rather than the hwclock time: root@stretch:/etc# hwclock 2018-10-05 10:39:30.993531+1000 root@stretch:/etc# date Sun 14 Oct 13:17:23 AEDT 2018 root@stretch:/etc# cat /etc/systemd/timesyncd.conf # This file is part of systemd. # # systemd is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it # under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by # the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or # (at your option) any later version. # # Entries in this file show the compile time defaults. # You can change settings by editing this file. # Defaults can be restored by simply deleting this file. # # See timesyncd.conf(5) for details. [Time] #NTP= #FallbackNTP=0.debian.pool.ntp.org 1.debian.pool.ntp.org 2.debian.pool.ntp.org 3.debian.pool.ntp.org root@stretch:/etc# dpkg -l "*ntp*"|grep ^ii Any ideas for where this might be set? It's a fairly standard Debian/Stretch system with systemd. When I boot with "init=/bin/bash" it has the correct time, so something after going multi-user sets the time via NTP (presumably). -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

2 2

strange swaks error
by Russell Coker 14 Oct '18

14 Oct '18

Received: from othello.dycom.com.au (othello [203.15.121.80]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) (Authenticated sender: ***(a)coker.com.au) by smtp.sws.net.au (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 02BDEEC07 for <***(a)coker.com.au>; Sun, 7 Oct 2018 10:31:14 +1100 (AEDT) Date: Sun, 07 Oct 2018 10:31:10 +1000 Above are partial headers from a test message sent by swaks. Seems that the VM receiving mail had the right daylight savings configuration while the system running swaks had the right date but gave the wrong timezone (thus triggering an alert for mail taking an hour to deliver). Any ideas for why swaks would do this? I'm setting up a VM to test swaks as mentioned in my previous message. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

1 0

apcupsd / system reboot
by Brian May 13 Oct '18

13 Oct '18

Hello, For a while now I have had this problem that apcupsd doesn't restart properly on system boot - e.g. after power failure. The log appears fine: 2018-10-11 16:43:44 +1100 apcupsd 3.14.14 (31 May 2016) debian startup succeeded I can't remember for sure if the process is running or not. I think it might be, just to confuse matters more. However there is no connection been establed to the device (using SNMP over IP) and "apcaccess" reports dummy values. Furthermore it doesn't do anything on a power failure. If I manually restart it it starts working fine: /etc/init.d/apcupsd restart The logs appear as before: 2018-10-11 18:48:15 +1100 apcupsd exiting, signal 15 2018-10-11 18:48:15 +1100 apcupsd shutdown succeeded 2018-10-11 18:48:15 +1100 apcupsd 3.14.14 (31 May 2016) debian startup succeeded But now "apcaccess" returns correct values. Any ideas? I thought maybe the problem was using the hostname in /etc/apcupsd/apcupsd.conf and putting the lookup in /etc/hosts - should work but was wondering if it was trying to use DNS regardless and DNS is provided by a VM on the box that is still booting. So I now put the IP address in /etc/apcupsd/apcupsd.conf, but it is still failing. Regards -- Brian May <brian(a)linuxpenguins.xyz> https://linuxpenguins.xyz/brian/

1 0