- luv-main - luv.asn.au

Diomidis Spinellis: Shell scripting for personal productivity
by Rodney Brown 26 Mar '20

26 Mar '20

https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20200323/ ie csvawk, that I should use csvawk Run awk with the specified program argument on a CSV (comma separated values file); e.g. |csvawk '{print $2 - $3}' list.csv|. |#!/bin/sh prog="$1" shift awk 'BEGIN {FPAT = "([^,]+)|(\"[^\"]+\")"}'"$prog" "$@" |

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Are you interested in helping?
by Andrew Pam 24 Mar '20

24 Mar '20

The FAIRshare Distribution System The proposal: A number of years ago around the time of the Queensland floods, I suggested the need for software that could be used to fairly apportion resources during a disaster. Now we are seeing what happens when people and companies are left to themselves under extreme conditions. Right now I am again suggesting that we need a software project that can ensure fair distribution of goods and services, thereby curbing people’s panic and ensuring we are all safe. Stan Cox wrote a fascinating book called "Anyway You Slice It". One important point he makes is that currently our society is rationing by price point. If there aren’t enough bananas to go around, for instance, the price of bananas goes up so that only those who can afford them get to eat bananas. Price point rationing is not sustainable during an emergency. We live in a complex interconnected society and losing segments of that society to starvation endangers us all. Simply having people too poor to seek medical help guarantees a society will not be resilient enough to properly handle a pandemic, as we are already beginning to experience. What I have in mind: the open source community has done an amazing job in the past of creating and supporting important pieces of software. If we pulled together a team of bright and concerned programmers, I’m sure we could develop something that could at least help local communities to manage their resources. We would need to think about recording resources, calculating how much is available over what period of time. We would also need to think about: how to fairly distribute things; how to take into consideration children, elderly, and people with illnesses, disorders, allergies, disabilities, and more; how to let people redirect resources they may not need, and perhaps be the recipients of resources others don’t need; how a community can choose to allocate a certain amount of their resources to a bigger project from which everyone will benefit; how people can vote on resource allocation in a completely fair manner (rather than simply first past the post); and finally, how to make all of this reliable and transparent. Giving people money when they are no longer allowed to work is helpful. However when critical supplies and services run low for various reasons, we need a system people feel they can trust in order to access what they need. K Phelps, BA (Hons), MFA, PhD 0411 359 598 admin(a)friends-institute.org

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Reminder: Spinellis edX course March 17: Unix Tools: Data, Software and Production Engineering
by Rodney Brown 16 Mar '20

16 Mar '20

The edX course "Unix Tools: Data, Software and Production Engineering" linked starts on 17 March https://www.edx.org/course/unix-tools-data-software-and-production-engineer…

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meetings
by Russell Coker 14 Mar '20

14 Mar '20

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019 Coronavirus is spreading exponentially as diseases do. People can be infected for as long as 14 days without showing symptoms, according to Wikipedia 5 days is the average time for symptoms to develop. This means that we won't know when it gets really bad until at least 6 days after it has got really bad. The only responsible course of action is to significantly scale back public meetings now to reduce the risk. I have raised this matter for discussion on the committee list but with no reply. So I now publicly propose that all LUV in-person meetings be cancelled from now until the stage where we know the disease is under control. I can't imagine that being before July. As fun as LUV meetings are, it's not something that's worth risking lives over. I have some plans for online education which could be run at the times we usually have LUV meetings, follow up here if you want to discuss that. Please use luv-talk if you want to discuss details of the disease. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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Need to tweak Postfix to use SMTPS on port 465, outgoing.
by dvalin＠internode.on.net 07 Mar '20

07 Mar '20

Internode has recently stopped accepting outgoing email on port 25, with a switch to SMTPS on port 465. (Found out after outgoing mail was blocked by their mail sevrer, and their helpdesk sent a link to related info.) Though I'd prefer proper postconf commands, the only related postfix config info I've found on the intertubes is a direct edit of /etc/postfix/master.cf to uncomment the SMTPS lines: #smtps inet n - - - - smtpd # -o syslog_name=postfix/smtps # -o smtpd_tls_wrappermode=yes # -o smtpd_sasl_auth_enable=yes # -o smtpd_client_restrictions=permit_sasl_authenticated,reject # -o milter_macro_daemon_name=ORIGINATING A quick check of /etc/services shows we already have: ssmtp 465/tcp smtps # SMTP over SSL So after a "postfix reload", outgoing mail was ... still rejected by mail.internode.on.net Hmmm, a "postconf | more" showed: default_transport = smtp so I commented out the SMTP line in /etc/postfix/master.cf : smtp inet n - - - - smtpd Another "postfix reload", and outgoing mail is ... still rejected by mail.internode.on.net The question now is what am I missing? (I'm most reluctant to blow postfix away and start figuring out how to make mutt talk SMTPS by itself At least I have a history of good experiences with postfix MTA.) Erik (Using webmail for the first time. Why does it paste at mouse, not at text cursor?? That's awful.)

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IRC based self education
by Russell Coker 05 Mar '20

05 Mar '20

One thing I've been thinking of doing for a while is IRC based self education. The idea is that a group of people who are interested in a topic arrange to go on IRC at a set time to learn about it. When you get stuck on something you ask the channel and probably someone else will be working on it and be able to help you. One thing I've been thinking of doing is try running some BSD variants in VMs. Anyone interested in doing this? I've got some spare capacity on one of my servers so I could set it up to allow people to run some VMs there. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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No luv-announce email again
by Duncan Roe 05 Mar '20

05 Mar '20

Hi, https://luv.asn.au/ shows there is a meeting tomorrow night but I haven't seen the usual(?) luv-announce email for it. I did get the email sent Feb 6 for the workshop Cheers ... Duncan.

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pipelines: Diomidis Spinellis blog: Was Knuth Really Framed by Jon Bentley?
by Rodney Brown 01 Mar '20

01 Mar '20

https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20200225/ Recently, the formal methods specialist Hillel Wayne <https://www.hillelwayne.com/about/> posted an interesting article <https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/donald-knuth-was-framed/> discussing whether Donald Knuth was actually framed when Jon Bentley asked him to demonstrate literate programming <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming#Critique>. (Knuth came up with an 8-page long monolithic listing, whereas in a critique Doug McIlroy provided a six line shell script.) .... worth reading.

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SpamAssassin questions
by Russell Coker 21 Feb '20

21 Feb '20

Does anyone know of a good Australian whitelist of domains that are totally legit but trigger SA checks? For example seek.com.au triggers checks about lots of money but I want a job paying lots of money. Is there a way of configuring SA to have a per-user Bayes path for virtual mailboxes? EG mail is stored under /mail/$DOMAIN/$USER and I want Bayes under /bayes/$DOMAIN/$USER but there is no entry in /etc/passwd for the user. Why does the command "spamc -d 127.0.0.1 -c -u russell(a)coker.com.au < msg.txt" give a spam score way different from that which was generated when the mail was received? Seems that running spamc from the command-line gives different checks than when it's run by spamass-milter. https://wiki.debian.org/DebianSpamAssassin What's the pros and cons of SA as a Postfix content_filter vs spamass-milter? Prior to reading the above page I never realised that there was any way other than spamass-milter (which seems to work ok for me). What's up with the files like /etc/spamassassin/v340.pre /etc/spamassassin/ v341.pre /etc/spamassassin/v342.pre on Debian? Why are config items split out by SA version? -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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log analysis
by Russell Coker 15 Feb '20

15 Feb '20

Whats a good FOSS log analysis system? I'm after something that will aggregate the logs of multiple systems and give results on demand through a web interface and allow alerts to be propagated to a monitoring system. Also what's a good FOSS system for graphing all the metrics of a system (network use, disk IO, CPU use, and arbitrary other metrics? Ideally I'd like something like what Datadog does with a web interface that shows multiple graphs and allows easy comparing of the values from multiple graphs at the same point in time. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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