eds's Blog

Re: Leap from DSL to BB

There's a lot to be said for the message in a bottle method, as long as you follow two simple rules.

1.  It must be a single malt bottle.
2.  You get to empty the bottle.

Re: Leap from DSL to BB

Can only speak for the UK interpretation, but it kinda went like this.

Dial-up far ages.
Cable - which became know colloquially as "broadband"
ADSL - which initially was typically 5 to 10 times faster than dial-up, but a good deal slower than cable.
Eventually ADSL cuaght up speed-wise to cable and also became "broadband".
Now we have optical options and so on, but ...

Broadband kinda becomes the one that is a broader bandwidth than the one that was the quick thing previously - really speaking any sensible meaning of "broadband" is lost and is just anything other than dial-up or pen and paper.

Re: What to post when you run out of questions or ideas.

Woman goes to a gym and says to the instructor "I want a part in a play - I'm a pretty good dancer, but they do the can-can - I need to be able to do the splits real fast - how many lessons to teach me how to do the splits?"

"Well," says the instructor "that really depends on how flexible you are at the moment"

"I can't do tuesday mornings or thursday afternoons ..."

Re: New feature.

There's talk that they're going to introduce a version that you can use indefinitely.
Nuclear sub.

Re: Poll: How often do you change your desktop?

Ditto

Re: Should this Forum keep going?

Should the forum keep going?

Well, people like to drop by.
Nice surroundings (chairs could do with a few new cushions maybe).
It is another option to the "main" (and imho rather stuffy) official forum - and lets be fair choice is a good thing, even if the choice has a minority following.
The irc channel is a good place to be - hell you can just drop by for a mindless chat.

Should the forum keep going?
Be a bloody sad day if it didn't!

Re: Ink Extortion

I played this game just recently.
I don't have an inkjet printer, I use a laser - way more sensible - but my kid occasionally uses an inkjet for homework - and spiderman and batman, and Star Wars - and probably porn too, but probably best I don't inquire too much - but I digress.
He had a Lexmark POS - after a bit of hunting around, I could only find two retailers that sold the cartridges for it, both genuine new ones - wanted nearly £50 for a three colour and a black.
Kodak have recently been pushing a TV campaign about the price of ink being too much, so (although with a good deal of "yeah, Right" attitude on my part) had a look at the priice difference.
Long story short (well slightly shorter than if I ramble all night) - bought a kodak 5-colour + black printer scanner with a full set of inks (not a splash-and-dash set like a lot of companys seem to do) for only £10 more than the lexmark inks would have cost.
Replacement cartridges are less than £15 for the whole set.

Well done kodak.

Re: You say tomatoe and I say...

lih (as in li-ttle) nucks (as in tux).

As pronounced by Mr Torvalds himself - and lets face it - if anyone knows, the guy who named it should.

http://www.jx90.com/download/torvalds-says-linux.mp3

Re: Voyages of SUSEUnbound Lug CCN-911

Apparently an old grey haired bloke in a brown cloak was seen screwing around with the scrolling text generator - maintenance are going to get on to it as soon as they figured out if there was supposed to be a grill specified for some exhaust port or other ....

Re: Voyages of SUSEUnbound Lug CCN-911

Shouldn't worry about it - welan will jump ship as soon as you get to the Ice Planet Hoth in a really dodgy cross-over episode.

EPISODE IV.5 ... A mysterious starship drops out of warp above Hoth
  spooking that thingy from the Yeti-sports games.  Tripping over
        backwards it falls onto Puke Skylarder's woolly kangaroo
               killing it instantly.  In a fit of regret, the creature
                   tries to warm up Puke's feet by embedding
                     them in the cosy ice of it's cave's ceiling.
                        Upon waking,  Puke shows no regard
                          for the creatures decor and hacks
                              a lump out of it's lampshade.

                                 Meanwhile, high above, 
                                     ensign welan gets
                                         thrown in the
                                          brig  getting
                                              so badly  
                                                 lost ...

Re: What I learned today.

Most KVM switches I ever had (or still have) have an alternative keystroke to CTRL - usually ESC.

So if the documentation says <ctrl>-<ctrl>-<home> then usually something like <esc>-<esc>-<home> will work equally well ... another common one - <scroll lock>-<scroll lock>-<ctrl> will work with <scroll lock>-<scroll lock>-<esc>.

Bizarrely though, although without exception every keystroke type kvm has had an alternative, never once have I seen it documented in the supplied manual. (Manual usually = small slip of paper about the size of a postage stamp with Korean or mandarin Chinese which has been translated by a baboon).

I gave up on keystroke KVM's a while back in favour of manual switch types which are a little less convenient, but don't cause any of the issues of inadvertantly switching screens while holding down a CTRL key using GiMP for example, and have the kvm start to cycle - jeez, that's annoying.

Re: KDE4 and RealVNC

Good to know - keeps things simpler - thanks for the info bd.

KDE4 and RealVNC

May or may not be useful for SuSers cos I solved this on Fedora, but hey, if it helps at all then great.

KDE4 and VNC just don't like to play nice.

Solution - well, its only a partial solution cos I haven't got the java web service working yet, but Vncviewer is better than nothing. Maybe something to do with running 64-bit.

Anyhoo - install :
kdebase3
kdebase3-libs
kdelibs3

These weren't on Fedora's official repos, so I'm guessing you'll be looking in packman repos for those now for suse rpms.

No doubt there'll be a shedload of dependancies.

Example files -

vncservers  (/etc/sysconfig/vncservers on fedora - maybe elsewhere on suse)

VNCSERVERS="2:mylinuxusername"
VNCSERVERARGS[2]="-geometry 1024x768 -depth 16"

xstartup (/home/~user/.vnc/xstartup on fedora same on suse iirc.  File MUST be executable)

[ -x /etc/vnc/xstartup ] && exec /etc/vnc/xstartup
[ -r $HOME/.Xresources ] && xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
xsetroot -solid grey
vncconfig -iconic &
startkde &

#############

give yourself a password using

vncpassword

type and verify the password, you'll see the password file appear in your /home/~user/.vnc/ directory.

Start vnc as a service and Bob's yer uncle, kde 4 on vnc.

As I say, no luck with java through a web browser, but using my example files VNCviewer with "server:5902" should work okay.

If anyone solves the java thing, feel free to chip in

Eds

Re: Poll: June: What is your opinion on having a Signature.

A bit of a double-edged sword that one.

Without a signature, your just another faceless grunt.

Apply that line of though to, saaay, ooooh, Mattb4 for example and, if you've ever seen his face - firstly there's the initial shock - then the days of drifting in and out of conciousness - the rehabilitation - the lost income from time taken off work - and no matter how many sessions you have with your shrink, that image is just burned on your mind like the retinal flash when you glance at the sun.

Any number of good and decent people who aren't faceless can't obscure the obscene horror unleashed when something like MattB4 is exposed to the world.

Ban signatures now.

Re: Where did that drive mount?

Technical accuracy be damned.

A mounted partition is quite correctly refered to as a "drive" "partition" or "device".

Where would all them winders users be without their C: drives?

A "Hard Disk Drive" is hardware - both "drive" or "partition" are equally acceptable when making reference to a partition on a hard disk drive (fedora's system screen identifies mounted partitions as devices).

An unmounted or unformatted partition is just that, a partition, since it aint much good for storage purposes in that state.

Here's a thought - should many RAIDs (Random Array of Inexpensive Disks) be Called RAIPs (Random Array of Inexpensive Partitions)? - that'd raise a few eyebrows wouldn't it?

A bit less of the being picky about semantics and a little more passing information that people who aren't anally retentive technocrats can figure out at a glance is the way to go imho.

Just my tuppenceworth,

:)

Eds

Re: Font size is it just me?

Looks to me like FM has manually selected a gruddy serif font in the sans field - either that or the selected sans font isn't in the path and the fallback is a little - erm - yucky.

Re: What to post when you run out of questions or ideas.

Welan walks into a bar.
Welan: "Got any kippers?"
Barman: "no"
Welan: "Got any sardines?"
Barman: "no"
Welan: "Got any kippers?"
Barman: "no"
Welan: "Got any sardines?"
Barman: "no"
Welan: "Got any kippers?"
Barman: "no"
Welan: "Got any sardines?"
Barman: "no, we haven't got any kippers, no, we don't have any sardines, we don't have ANY fish - ask again and I'll nail your head to the bar!"
Welan: "Got any nails?"
Barman: "NO!!!"
Welan: "Got any kippers?"

Re: What to post when you run out of questions or ideas.

What do you get if you cross an agnostic with a dyslexic and an insomniac?
Someone who lies awake all night wondering if there really is a dog.

A piece of tarmac walks into a bar.
Tarmac: "pint of beer please"
Barman: "we don't serve your sort in here, clear off"
Tarmac: "don't mess with me, I'm hard"
Barman: "yeah, you might think your hard, but I'll have you out on your ear in a heartbeat, now clear off"
A piece of red tarmac walks into the bar.
Red tarmac: "Pint of beer please"
Barman: "certainly sir, anything else I can get for you"
Red tarmac: "Just the beer and hurry up about it"
Barman: "certainly sir"
Tarmac: "Hey, how come he gets served?"
Barman: "You might think you're hard, but he's a f****g cycle path"

Piece of string walks into a bar.
String: "Pint of beer please"
Barman: "You're a piece of string, aren't you?"
String: "weeell, yes, I guess"
String goes outside and explains to his friends what happened.
2nd string goes into bar.
2nd string: "Pint of beer please"
Barman: "You're a piece of string, aren't you?"
2nd string: "weeell, yes, I guess"
Barman: "I just told your mate, and I'll tell you the same, we don't serve your type - clear off"
2nd string goes outside and explains to his friends what happened.
3rd piece of string ties himself up and frizzes his ends a bit, then heads to the bar.
3rd string: "Pint of beer please"
Barman: "You're a piece of string, aren't you?"
3rd string: "No, I'm a frayed knot"

Re: FTP server chroot doesn't follow symlinks outside jail.

NOTE TYPO ON ORIGINAL POST

switch is
--bind
not
--binb

I've given my keyboard a sound telling off already.

the use of a working chroot is a feature, not a bug

-hcvv

FTP server chroot doesn't follow symlinks outside jail.

A little tip since I spent an age doing all sorts of peculiar messing around til I found the "easy" way.

Scenario - users log in to ftp using a local username and password which directs them to their own home directory jail.

Problem - you want to give one or more users access to a folder outside of their own jail, common enough for company templates where the administrator only want to need to keep track of one master copy rather than a bunch of the things, one for every user.

Solution - create a symlink in the users directory to the shared folder.

Problem - ftp won't follow a symlink outside the user jail.

Solution - spend hours modifying each user on a very "hit or miss" basis to try to force the ftp server to not do the right thing and allow users access to files outside of their jail.

Elegant solution - create an empty directory in the ftp users jail and use mount to mount an already existing folder onto the folder in the user jail.  Since the mountpoint is inside the user's jail, it doesn't cause a load of grief with the ftp server thinking that it is looking outside of "safe space" for that user.

Example:

FTP users Fred Norman and John each have a linux home for ftp, but they need common access to a folder administered by Rod called /home/rod/Templates

Create a folder called Templates in each of the three users homes, so ...

mkdir /home/fred/Templates
mkdir /home/norman/Templates
mkdir /home/john/Templates

then

mount --binb /home/rod/Templates /home/fred/Templates
mount --binb /home/rod/Templates /home/norman/Templates 
mount --binb /home/rod/Templates /home/john/Templates

... of course you need root permissions to use mount, and you need to be sure the permissions on the files in the directory allow the user to access them.

Mounts can be done from a shell, from fstab, from a script called from the ftp start control file etc.

To unmount a share, unmount the secondary users directory, so to revoke permissions for John ...

umount /home/john/Templates

Will show John an empty folder while Fred and Norman will still see the contents of /home/rod/Templates in theirs.

The same method will work in any other similar scenario, although things like samba don't have the same jail issues as ftp typically does with symlinks, so maybe better sticking with that for those cases.

Re: Welcome crow187

Some people here really do know a thing or two about Suse. You can pay attention to them.

-bozo

You might want to share some of that inside information with the rest of us?

Re: Welcome crow187

What a piece of luck - I just broke my very last Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän and here's another one.

Welcome crow187.

Re: Poll: March: How many Hard drives do you run?

Well back to the Poll. Hard drives and numerology.

-mattb4

Re: Poll: March: How many Hard drives do you run?

hehe - figured it out - it's removing the last letter from each line before the carriage return <enter> character.

Repeating the last character "solves it".

for example, the last two lines had two full stops (periods), but this one only has (had) one of them

See.

Re: Poll: March: How many Hard drives do you run?

Support is working on the Editor issue. Earlier today they made a effort to fix several posting bugs. I am sorry for the problem.

-mattb4

From Microsoft software developer jargon dictionary

Fix:  Completely screwed "It was kinda working, so we messed with it and now we're really in a fix"