January 2019 - luv-main

moving partition
by Nic Baxter 03 Feb '19

03 Feb '19

Hi All I am moving a 1TB NTFS partition 200MB to the right using gparted and of course it is very slow. I don't understand why gparted is moving all of the data. Why not just move 200MB and add it to the end of the partition? My googling only tells me how to do it but not why. Cheers Nic

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openwrt recommendations
by Robin Humble 02 Feb '19

02 Feb '19

Hiya, my venerable linksys wrt54gs running openwrt is still going strong, but probably can't handle NBN 100 Mbit even on lobotomised HFC, so I guess it's time for a new router... any recommendations for a 2+ port gigabit and (I guess) AC WiFi that can hopefully run openwrt ok for the next decade? I don't need or want any USB or NAS or gaming. ATA for landline optional. I looked at newer linksys wrt32x but they're $450 from jb (prob $250 from amazon but they don't seem to ship to .au (again)) and also they're outliers running marvel chipsets. after that I just get confused in the maze of 100's of routers that could run openwrt vs. what you can buy today that's an ok price. I'm open to other options if they're interesting or cheaper/better - eg. little arm boards with a couple of gige ports and ac wifi as long as they run centos/fedora/openwrt or similar. thanks! cheers, robin

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GUI problem
by stripes theotoky 31 Jan '19

31 Jan '19

I had a perfectly good working Devuan system running testing .(beowulf /ceres) Ran some updates a few days ago and everything was working fine. Rebooted starts normally brings up slim, user name and password as normal then a black screen. Switching to a terminal Alt Ctrl F1 allows me to log in. startx and xinit fail Obviously the video card is good or I couldn't get to the log in screen or use the terminal. The system is using the nouveau video driver. It was I believe running the Nvidia driver before the updates Only error I notice on shutdown is that slim is not running which I presume is due to a failure to startx. Where do I start debugging this one? Beats me right now. Stripes. -- Stripes Theotoky -37 .713869 145.050562

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Contemplating a complex UEFI-based Linux installation
by Jason White 30 Jan '19

30 Jan '19

I have a Lenovo P51 laptop here (currently running Microsoft Windows 10) on which I'm contemplating installing Linux - probably Arch Linux, or perhaps Debian Testing - or another distribution that is kept fairly up to date. Arch is of interest in that the packages are kept fairly close to upstream, which could be useful for some of my purposes (e.g., reporting bugs on accessibility-related tools such as braille display software and screen readers, and compiling development versions thereof). I need to keep Microsoft Windows around for work purposes, due to compatibility issues. I'm contemplating a dual-boot configuration. I would rather not turn off Microsoft's virtualization-based security, which requires Secure Boot to be enabled; unfortunately, there are too many vulnerabilities and plenty of Windows malware is circulating. On the Windows side, I have enabled Device Guard and Credential Guard in local group policy, set to require "secure boot with UEFI lock". I don't know whether this will complicate Linux installation, or whether it will need to be disabled, even temporarily. At this point, neither an Arch ISO image (written to a USB drive with dd) nor a GRML64 image will boot. I suspect Secure Boot is responsible, unless of course this system cannot boot from these prepared ISO images. I've read documentation on the Arch wiki and elsewhere about UEFI and Secure Boot, most of which is not very clear or somewhat incomplete. There are several boot loaders from which to choose, for example, as well as complications with Secure Boot. I've installed Arch before (and Debian more than once), but only on BIOS-based systems and never with another operating system also present. Further, there are various reports of mixed success with Linux on this particular laptop model. It isn't clear what information is up to date. Also, I want to avoid corrupting the UEFI firmware or data in ways that would necessitate board replacement; I've had to deal with unrelated hardware issues recently and definitely don't want to have to go through the pain of that experience again, if I can avoid it. So, what would be my best source of advice at this point on how to proceed? Suggestions and links would be welcome. I'm also willing to discuss it with someone who knows UEFI well, if necessary.

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Re: postfix boot dependencies with systemd
by Craig Sanders 28 Jan '19

28 Jan '19

On Sat, Jan 26, 2019 at 10:13:10PM +1100, Russell Coker wrote: > It appears that the boot of my laptop is delayed by postfix depending on > network-online.target. How can I change this? Postfix is only listening on > 127.0.0.1 so there's no reason for it to wait until my laptop connects to > the Wifi network before continuing the boot. > > I ran "systemctl edit postfix@-" and "systemctl edit postfix@" and put the > below in which should make it not depend on network-online.target. But it > doesn't change anything. Any ideas? is there a loopback only target you can make it depend on rather than network-manager? other than that, my only idea is to dump network manager and manually configure your network with /etc/interfaces. I've always found that's best, anyway - NM is OK-ish for the simplest of network configs but a complete PITA for anything even slightly complex. craig -- craig sanders <cas(a)taz.net.au> BOFH excuse #44: bank holiday - system operating credits not recharged

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Waking up a USB scanner, other than reboot
by Mark Trickett 26 Jan '19

26 Jan '19

Hello All, I have an Agfa SnapScan 1236. If it is not used for a while, it goes to sleep and even turns itself off. I would like to be able to wake it up, without a reboot,without disconnecting power, without disconnecting the USB cable. Does anyone have ideas? Even when it is "misbehaving" running snapscan -L will find it, but using snapscan to actually scan a document fails to open the scanner. Even when used after a boot, I need to scan the first page I put in twice, it is a medical capable scanner with a lamp in the lid as well as underneath. I would like the first scan to not be in transparency mode. I was given it by a medical practice who have migrated from film X-Rays to digital ones. This will also help for when I do want to scan transparencies. Regards, Mark Trickett

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rsync and filesystem capabilities
by Russell Coker 21 Jan '19

21 Jan '19

I use rsync for most of my backups. For a restore I can rsync the files back and touch /.autorelabel to restore the SE Linux labels. That combination gets all setuid files etc, but doesn't get file capabilities. Below is an example. Is there a good way of preserving capabilities apart from running "getcap /bin/* /sbin/* /usr/bin/* /usr/sbin/*" and storing the output? Currently /bin/ping seems to be the only commonly used program using filesystem capability flags. Also is there a way of telling Debian to restore capabilities apart from "apt-get --reinstall install iputils-ping"? root@sevm:~# cp -a /bin/ping . root@sevm:~# rsync -va /bin/ping ping2 sending incremental file list ping sent 61,328 bytes received 35 bytes 122,726.00 bytes/sec total size is 61,240 speedup is 1.00 root@sevm:~# getcap ping ping2 ping = cap_net_raw+ep root@sevm:~# -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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Grub in text mode
by Russell Coker 12 Jan '19

12 Jan '19

Recently Grub has been changing to a high resolution mode. On some systems this is really slow, presumably due to having a crap BIOS. On kvm/qemu systems it doesn't work with -display curses. How do I get grub to stick to 80x25 text? -- Sent from my Huawei Mate 9 with K-9 Mail.

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scsi
by Andrew Greig 12 Jan '19

12 Jan '19

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Many to many VPN
by Russell Coker 11 Jan '19

11 Jan '19

If you have servers in multiple countries and people using those servers in multiple locations what's a good way of setting up a VPN? If you have a VPN server at each DC then performance will be great but users have to setup multiple instances of the VPN software which they will mess up and time will be wasted. If you have a VPN server at one DC then a user who connects to a server in a different DC gets longer ping times. Also an outage in one DC breaks everything. Any ideas? Support is required for Linux servers and Linux, Windows, and OS/X clients. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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