June 2002, Issue 79 Published by Linux Journal
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The Mailbag
Send tech-support questions, Tips, answers and article ideas to The Answer Gang <tag@lists.linuxgazette.net>. Other mail (including questions or comments about the Gazette itself) should go to <gazette@linuxgazette.net>. All material sent to either of these addresses will be considered for publication in the next issue. Please send answers to the original querent too, so that s/he can get the answer without waiting for the next issue.
Unanswered questions might appear here. Questions with answers--or answers only--appear in The Answer Gang, 2-Cent Tips, or here, depending on their content. There is no guarantee that questions will ever be answered, especially if not related to Linux.
Before asking a question, please check the Linux Gazette FAQ (for questions about the Gazette) or The Answer Gang Knowledge Base (for questions about Linux) to see if it has been answered there.
Is it possible to create customized Linux install cd?I've seen the Red Hat site dealing with genhdlist/genhddir,(http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/RedHat-CD-HOWTO-5.html) but is there a way to change the Red Hat installation gui to include a customized set of RPM's? (something other than custom/workstation/server)? I'd like to try and bundle my own Linux installation CD, but using programs that aren't included on the standard install cd's, and still utilizing the Red Hat base installation software. Any suggestions?
I confess that when I customize I go a bit more whole hog than this and tend to skip native distros' installer routines. Still, having the partition phase can be nice, and having your local staff able to tag Our_Local_Stuff might be nice too.
So, folks - send us articles on tweaking installers to do your bidding-- Heather
Playing CD Music Digital OutputI purchased an eMachine to run Linux on. It came with (sorry) XP which I used to check out the hardware. It plays music CD's fine but uses digital data over the IDE buss rather than a cable from the CD drive to the sound input.
Loaded Red Hat 7.3 and it plays sounds fine but it won't play music CD's...the player just runs and the CD spins along.
How do I configure the CD/sound system to pick up the digital sound data on the IDE buss to play the music?
Thank You,
Bill Parks
ps -ef problemHi
I am running Red Hat Linux 6.2 on an Intel server. The problem is I cannot access Linuxconf over the web and my SWAt configuration tool also does not run. The apache server is working fine. I have a proxy connection configured on my PC for Internet access.
How can I implement Acess Control Lists in Linux on the lines of Solaris? If possible where can i get more info and necessary s/w support?
Regards
Prosenjit
It's good when strangers cannot change the controls on your box - it's not so good when you can't. Articles on defending your web-driven admin tools from joyriding visitors would be appreciated by many readers.
Note that there are many flavors of Access Control Lists these days, but few easy-to-read articles about setting them up. That'd be cool too. -- Heather
What documentation is available for ramdisk and initrd fundamentals?What are Linux ramdisk fundamentals? This spawns various related questions below. I could use some information to fill the gaps in my understanding of the ramdisk processes related to Linux startup. I have successfully created several RAM based Linux systems built from scratch and using for reference the Slackware boot/root floppy disk layouts - that do not specify "initrd" to Lilo.
A mini-howto or full how-to may be useful as a guide for developers of embedded linux and small custom systems.
Lilo can pass parameters to the kernel and the init process. Does Lilo do the passing of parameters to "init" or does the kernel pass the parameters from Lilo onto the "init" process? When does Lilo (boot.b) get out of the way and allow things to happen?
I can find only scatterd documentation that explains how to use ramdisk and initrd, but nothing on how to control the side-effects of ramdisk usage between the kernel, lilo, and init.
initrd mkinitrd ramdisk pivot_root linuxrc init level changes (/etc/inittab)
What gets executed first (/linuxrc or the "init" process)? Or do they try to operate in parallel? ugh! (MS/Windows try to invoke many of the startup processes in parallel.)
When "initrd" is specified in "lilo.conf" and the Linux kernel is configured for ramdisk support, and the system is booted, what ramdisk image is loaded first or at all?
The "initrd" image or the kernel ramdisk image?
What programs are responsible for the loading the "initrd" and "ramdisk" root images (kernel or LILO boot.d).
Note that the Linux kernel does not need LILO in order to load a ramdisk from a second floppy using the same drive.
When is "pivot_root" an implicit process, and when must it be explicitly invoked?
What is the difference between a LILO specified "initrd" and the kernel specified ramdisk loaded as root?
Lilo can change and override some kernel default parameters.
Much of my experimenting is with "Linux From Scratch" (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org) as a basis to start from.
I have a fundamental problem understanding the relationships between an "initrd" image, ramdisk root image, and the use of /initrd, /linuxrc, and swap-root. I am essentially trying to create a memory-based portable Linux solution (without X) that is loadable on multiple i86 (PC) architectures from floppy. Each section, except for UTILDISK, I am wishing to have a minimal set of products to implement the desired functionality. This is for computers with many megabytes of memory, using no hard disk.
BOOTDISK a floppy containing kernel and LILO boot products
INITDISK a floppy containing loadable modules
ROOTDISK a floppy containing a compressed root filesystem
and a small set of utilities (i.e. busybox)
UTILDISK floppy disks containing useful utilities.
BootDisk Floppy: format "minix" mounted as "/fd" Created as a LILO boot disk
/fd/kernel.gz my kernel.gz (2.2.x, 2.4.x) /fd/boot/message general message /fd/boot/boot-text.b boot with "message" file /fd/boot/boot.b -> boot-text.b make default boot loader /fd/boot/chain.b chain boot loader /fd/boot/map lilo boot map /fd/etc/lilo.cmd backup of lilo command file /fd/dev/fd0 device for loading ramdisk /fd/dev/fd0u1440 device for loading ramdisk /fd/dev/null bitbucket device /fd/proc is/not required for Lilo boot?
I can successfully load a ramdisk as root using for sample the Slackware bootdisk and rootdisk floppies, and then try to create my own RAM resident Linux using Floppy Disks. But the Slackware distributions do not mention "initrc" in the "lilo.conf" files.
Kernel Flags (rdev) root = /dev/fd0 = root device (or secondary ramdisk) use ramdisk = true (load image into ramdisk) prompt for ramdisk = true (for ramdisk on second floppy) ramdisk offset = zero (not on disk shared by kernel)
See attached hathaway.lilo.conf.txt
Partial Ramdisk Directory for intermediate root system
/linuxrc Started by kernel after ramdisk loaded /dev/ ... All devices and/or MAKEDEV scripts /proc Kernel information structure /bin/ ... Support programs (i.e. busybox) /sbin/ ... System programs /lib/ ... Libraries for dynamic linked programs /lib/modules/ ... Kernel modules /etc/ ... Configuration files /etc/rc.d/... Files supporting /etc/inittab /etc/inittab Config file for sysvinit /etc/passwd /etc/shadow /etc/group /etc/securetty /etc/termcap /etc/hosts /etc/shells /etc/fstab /etc/nsswitch.conf /etc/resolv.conf /etc/issue /etc/motd /etc/ld.so.cache /etc/modules.conf /var/run /var/log /tmp /usr/share/terminfo/... /usr/share/zoneinfo/...
This document is prepared for public consumption with no copyright.
Sincerely,
Steven J. Hathaway
Note: now that it is published here, it falls under the collective copyright of the Linux Gazette. You do not need to give up your copyrights to publish an article or thread here... you just need to allow us the ability to give it away worldwide or for corporate entities (such as RedHat, SuSE, etc) to sell it on their CD collections, and not provide any odd restrictions that conflict with that. -- HeatherActually, "no copyright" means it's public domain. Putting a license on public domain material is like putting a license on air. You can do it but everybody's free to ignore it. It's kind of misleading though, because people might think they have only the license's rights and not the public domain rights too. -- Iron
fvwm95 FvwmButtonsHej Answer Gang,
This is my third question in a short time. I hope you don,t get fed up. All previous "problems" asked for has been nicely solved.
Q: This question is about the fvwm95 WM handling. It is more of "cosmetic" than functional nature. Using Slakware 7.1 distribution with Linux kernel 2.2.16 for this set up. Introduced a button in the "Button bar" that fires up an executable. That works fine, but the "Button" in the bar then always shows "pressed in". Clicking, for example, Xterm defined in the same "Button bar" always returns the "button" as "not in". What controls this? Is it the return status from the fired up executable, or is it defined somewhere in the fvwm95rc script or something else ? Hoping for some nice advice, or any tip is welcome.
Best regard
Hans.
fvwm95 is a fvwm-family window manager which has been tweaked to give the maximum similarity to a stock Windows(tm) 95 interface. It's ancient, but many people like it because it's much more lightweight than the Desktops.
Notes about giving fvwm95 a tune-up, or tweaking the current revisions of Fvwm 2 to act more like fvwm95 (with a few less bugs), would be appreciated.
Some people may also experiment with qvwm (Japanese sound "kew" = 9, Roman numeral "V" = 5 --> 95 window manager). (http://www.qvwm.org) -- Heather
lpd/lpr problems with serial printerI am using Mandrake 8.2. I have recently installed a serial printer using a Digi Classic-8 ISA card. I have several terminals that use this card without any problems. I can print to this printer by using 'cat {filename} > /dev/ttyS11' and this works just fine, however I cannot get lpr to print to this printer. I think that my /etc/printcap file is ok(I hope). If anyone could point me in the right direction on this problem I would greatly appreciate it!
Thanks
Mark Gorat
This message was run through the laundry to wash out stray = signs and the HTML attachment was hung out to dry. -- Heather
[LG 77] wanted #1 private emailHallo Cheryl
I just want to know from you if you have solved your problem.
If you did will you point me in a direction on how to setup a Linux server, with internet access and e-mail serve, that are connected to two win98 machines. The Linux machine must dial on demand when one of the win98 machines want access to the internet.
Thanks
Christoff
Overall, this kind of question is rather a common one to The Answer Gang. It would be great for one of our readers who lives in both worlds to contribute an article about their dial-outbound-on-demand setup. My guess is that it could use masqdial.
Thanks Christoff, for expressing the question clearly! -- Heather
[LG 78] wanted #3 Lexmark Z22I would like to find out how he got the Lexmark Z22 to do even that...I have not been able to get mine to print more then 1 line before it locks up. I am using RH 7.2.
Thanks
Neil T.
Articles on using GDI printers or other winprinters would be appreciated. For that matter, any articles on really setting up your printing environment would be good. There's always the Linux Printing HOWTO (http://www.linuxprinting.org/howto) but personal experience and your tale of success might help a lot of people. -- Heather
[lug] MPAA and Senate...again (fwd)They just don't seem to be willing to take "no" for an answer from the public!
John Karns
Date: Fri, 24 May 2002 08:49:28 -0600
As quoted in the article, Cory Doctorow writes: "this is a much more sweeping (and less visible) power-grab than the Hollings Bill, and it's going forward virtually unopposed. ...the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group is bare weeks away from turning over a veto on new technologies to Hollywood."
There is a comments form available as well as Doctorow's article on "the analog hole" for EFF links in there.
caricaturesIsn't the RedFlag caricature just a little racist? Isn't it just a bit condescending to have the Chinese Linux user portrayed as a myopic pre-revolutionary peasant farmer with a cronic overbite? Maybe it's just me, but it doesn't seem like a great way to win new friends.
To offer a constructive alternative, in Chinese mythology, isn't there
some triad of great heros where one is a king, one is a soldier and
the other is a sombre scholar; I think these are the figures you see
in the shines at most Chinese restaurants -- the Scholar for the
RedFlag user seems a far more apropos choice than a rice-farmer
PS. I don't think the other caricatures are necessarily flattering either. I don't identify with the Debian geek, and Mandrake geeks aren't all babies. But the point is, it's one person's vision. That doesn't mean it's the only vision.
Perhaps Franck might be willing to spin his imagination and draw a few alternative designs of the different distro users. But that's his decision. -- Mike
I've been in contact with Franck, and I think you're right about the possibilities of future alternates...
... the artist replies ...
And of course as Mike pointed out, it is a "one mans vision". If I was to draw something else for someone else, isn't that the same thing once again? Am I not just drawing for someone else's own opinion?
I definitely don't identify myself as the RedHat geek, yet thats all I use at home. Look outside the square and think of the reasons why I chose the characters I did. Here are reasons for a couple:
- Mandrake:
- New Distro, easy to install and almost "childs" play to use which is why I chose the baby character.
- Debian:
- Hard core hacker, serious individual who tends to spend a lot of time in front of his pc tweaking his distro. The majority of Debian users I have spoken to tend to have pony tails and a goaty. Of course not all look like this
- RedFlag:
- Asian chap, and what do we associate asians with? Of course the Chinese Coolie hat and dark robe. Yes I could have used an Emperor or some famous fighting character, but Linux is the poor mans OS which is why I chose the rice paddy farmer character I did.
I can guarantee no matter what I draw I will never please everyone. What a boring life it would be if we all agreed
I'm sure this will start a great debate in the Mailbag column
Rgds
Franck Alcidi
And RedHat is the ComputerAssociates type. I wondered about SuSE though.
At least we'll find out how many people are listening!
[Ben] For myself, I find it hard to disagree with your arguments above, although I have little doubt that somebody somewhere will be offended by at least one (and possibly all) of them. There is a line at which humor becomes defamation, but it's a very difficult one to draw;
Good thing we have all these talented artists to try it. -- Heather.
[Ben] ... this is one of the reasons that the press in the US has as its limiting factor "absence of malice" rather than the laws of slander, etc. that apply to everyone else. <shrug> I also believe that Political Correctness has been carried way, way, WAY too far, and doesn't deserve much more than to be ignored on most occasions. A prickly type might have taken offense at much of the "Russian spy" banter that gets aimed at me, for example; for myself, I take it in the vein in which I believe it was intended,
Of course, I wouldn't have said it during the 1950s or 60s when there were actual concerns (or hysteria) about Russian spies. It's only because times have changed that it makes a good joke. -- Iron
[Ben] ...trust my friends here in the Gang to respond well to "did you mean what I thought you meant?" questions, and think myself more than fully capable of dealing with any actual offense that may come up.
Ditto. -- Iron
[Ben] Yes, that trust could be abused, but -
If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid.
-- Alister, in alt.sysadmin.recovery
I also note the Usenet truism that flame wars most often get started not by a person who is offended by something but by a third party taking the position that the material may offend someone else. To me, that's a sign of arrogance and a note of incipient trouble; a person who has actually been offended may accept an apology and make peace, but someone who only imagines an offense is not so easily mollified. It's the reason that that kind of "complaints" are considered to be "trolls" in a number of newsgroups.
Is this a trolling of recursive flame bait? Just asking. -- Gary Lawrence Murphy
Re: The Answer Gang has movedThis message (below) was sent to the YellowDog linux general list. I cannot find your subscription to unsubscribe you. Please do so or turn off your bot. Thanks.
Christopher Murtagh (YDL-general list admin)
Christopher,
The message below was an auto-response from mail address <tag@lists.linuxgazette.net>, not a mailing list.
Somebody sent a message to <tag@lists.linuxgazette.net> also containing a "From:" mentioning the Yellowdog Linux general list, and the autoresponder replied with its information that <tag@lists.linuxgazette.net> has moved.
Possibly this email was an instance of the Klez.E worm, which produces forged "From:" taken from the infected system's address book. We've received several hundred such, ourselves. If this is the case, credit the security model of a certain large corporation.
In other words, there's no list membership to turn off. Credit whoever emailed <tag> mentioning you in the headers.
On the plus side, if they do it again in the near future, you won't see an autoresponse, as the "vacation" program which produces this response attempts not to respond to the same sender too frequently.
If the Yellow Dog Linux general mailing list happens to have <tag@lists.linuxgazette.net> subscribed, please remove that email address.
-- Dan WIlder, SSC sysadmin
Other list admins out there who have open posting are probably seeing a lot of the same worms. We hope that they get eaten by a fish fairly soon. Meanwhile, for our readers' amusement, the actual message from the bot -- Heather
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............... We have received a message which appears to originate from you containing a question for either <tag> or <answerguy> at ssc.com. These email addresses are no longer in service. However, read on. Unless you're a 'bot, that is. If you're a 'bot, please stop here, read no farther, and go stand in the rain until you rust. Jim Dennis is the "Answer Guy" of the Linux Gazette. Questions or Linux tips that you send to the Linux Gazette WILL BE PUBLISHED in our monthly webzine aimed at "Making Linux A Little More Fun!" There's so much Linux in the world that other readers were invited to help out, so we are now "The Answer Gang". The Linux Gazette Answer Guy has moved. He's now in The Answer Gang: linux-questions-only ...but still at the same domain, ssc.com. Your note has NOT been forwarded. If it's about Linux, please resend it to the new name. There is a FAQ about the Answer Gang: http://www.linuxgazette.com/tag-faq.html The FAQ in summary:
Help us help you, to Make Linux A Little More Fun! If you don't know what Linux is, you almost certainly came to the wrong place... we don't answer questions about any of the following:
...you get the idea
-- The Linux Gazette Answer Gang. ............... |
Quoted Printable emailAs regards the FAQ in respect of mail format - there is a definite case where quoted printable mail is actually better than ascii text.
This is for non-american english speakers - several characters appear as ascii 127 - 256 (extended ascii) which do not appear in pure ascii.
For example
£ (english pound)(156)
Could we add/amend the faq to take this into account (flame-retardent suit on)
It's a good thing we have that TAG discount for flame retardant suits, we certainly get plenty of 'em around here
If it isn't already in there it's supposed to be -- I have very clearly, multiple times, stated that if you need to defend the odd characters of your native language from being mangled during 7-bit mailing, I will support rather than oppose you using Quoted Printable.
The annoyance factor of using it when you shouldn't, is that mailers use QP equal signs everywhere instead of properly wrapping their lines. And they will wrap the words right in the middle sometimes, which is even worse as it means I have to decode the sucker.
The reason it needs to be in the FAQ is twofold:
- using QP when you don't need to, reduces your chance of winning the TAG lotto
- not using it when you do need it, makes life harder on our translators translating you, and ends up with me getting your name's diacriticals wrong during publication time, and stuff like that.
Yes, proper pound signs might count for that, too. If it's the only odd character though, I think I might figure out from context that it's not ... uh... whatever my current screen charset thinks that is, and might be a british moneysign.
For example, this was a british-pound in email, but came out a capital U-with-two-dots symbol in my normal console charset. After it passed through Ben's mailer, it was a Yen, which is still wrong, but at least is some sort of money.
And for one character whose context is obvious, I'd rather not deal with wordwrap hell. Even though I have Mike's little script to de-QP the silly thing. -- Heather
<sigh> A case of the nerves and assuming before reading, eh? From the FAQ (http://www.linuxgazette.net/tag/ask-the-gang.html) :
Yes, we are aware that MIME Quoted-Printable can be useful in preserving non-English character sets, but mail to TAG in a language other than English is very rare. Use it only if it's necessary.
Comments and corrections after reading and understanding, please. A single character not being correctly translated does not make QP "better" in any sense of the word; I'd far rather see one byte of "cyrillic" than three dozen "=20"s. -- Ben Okopnik
...Some arguments back and forth, ellided...
"The prefered type of mail is plain-text, however some characters will not appear in this format, for example the UK pound sign.
I believe that is a very poor example because it suggests that for the sake of only one character, QP is not only okay but desired. For a moneysign I think it's counter productive.
For example
2 (squiggle) tip: bla bla tweak annoy? tweak the bonk bonk and there you go!
To ensure that code snippets etc appear QP can be used."
Frankly I have not seen code snippets containing the foreign text that needed QP ... and I've been doing this a long while. -- Heather
But in fact, we don't get scripts [destroyed by QP] sent to TAG. Nor do we get more than a handful of non-English messages. It really only comes up in people's names, and they really should be ASCII-fying the name anyway becase that's the only way to guarantee it won't be mangled (at least until all mailers, editors and web browsers handle Unicode). German, fortunately, has well-established ae/oe/ue/ss to replace the non-ASCII characters. With other languages you have to wing it, but (1) ASCII-fication at the source saves the editors time because they don't have to manually convert each high-byte character to the appropriate HTML entity, and (2) those HTML entities don't show up right anyway on screens using a different charset than the author did. Some Latin-1 characters leak through into LG, especially in From: headers, because we don't have time to correct them all, but they will show up as who knows what on a Latin-2 or other system. -- Iron
Perhaps unclear is under which contexts we'd like to encourage rather than discourage QP usage. MikeM may think a pound-lucre is enough; I don't. ... He's at an unfair advantage 'cuz I'm the one with the email snippers, so I'll give him a fair shake by offering a replacement paragraph - though I do not think it expresses at all what he would have expressed.
Then Ben gets handed the scissors since he maintains the FAQ
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............... Send text-only content
To maximize your chance that the Gang will read your message, you should
send it in a form that doesn't force us to make any special efforts to
read your letter. For example, word processing attachments are right out
(Word docs and PDFs, among others). While a few mailers may read HTML or
automatically decode MIME text many people consider this "feature" a
problem instead and hit [delete] without a second glance - here are
instructions for turning them off. (Note that we do our own HTML
processing so it does not help us to use your HTML version.) If you need
to send us a program or an image - rare, we can usually figure things out
by description - make an arrangement to upload it to us; the list tosses
out binary attachments and we would never see your mail! Text attachments
are okay but inlines are better. Quoted Printable is a special case - if
you are writing us in a foreign character set, we want to see your words
as you meant them. (It helps translation immensely.) But if you have no
special letters to defend, we really appreciate not having to run your
letter through the laundry to wash out stray = signs.
............... |
In this suggestion, I no longer mention vcards, and I no longer assume what foreign language might be used - it's just about characters - in fact, if someone from the norselands isn't using thorns and umlauts, I don't mind seeing their message stay 7 bit too. I demand plaintext but I also tell people why - which I hope will encourage them to meet the request. Finally, for QP the point is so we can understand them, and maybe this has a touch of humor, which is good too.
As for moneysigns I'm not afraid to go look up whether that squiggle was a euro or a pound. Although a two pence tip would still use a cent sign, no?
Fianlly - not about QP but for the FAQ - the ask-the-gang guidelines don't warn people to expect a sense of humor. Given the scorch marks from last month, it probably ought to get mentioned.
Re: QuestionI am completely new to Linux. Just bought SuSe 8.0 and I need lots of info!
Congratulations. I'll be installing SuSE 8 this afternoon too. -- Mike
It installed without any problem.
I still feel lost in Linux. Are there any books for people who are used to Windows/newbies to Linux that you can especially recommend ?
There are a few included in your SuSE pkg. If you installed the susehelp pkg, then you should have the Network Admin Guide (NAG), the LPG (Linux Programmer's Guide), and a few others from the Linux Documentation Project (LDP) (Linux Documentation Project). To view them, you will need a dvi viewer installed, such as kdvi or xdvi. Then run the viewer and point it to /usr/share/dic/Books/LDP and start reading. There may be others at the LDP web site, have a look there. Of course, the SuSE manuals are also quite good, if they came with your purchase.
Others I can think of at the moment are "Running Linux" by Matt Welsh, and "Linux A to Z", sorry can't remember the author's name.
-- John Karns
http://linuxgazette.net/issue74/tag/8.html
PS to Answer Gang: Where did that "How can I get help on Linux?" question from the old FAQ go where we listed all those books? Or has it all been incorporated into that message?
See the Answer Gang Knowledge Base for answers to other questions about Linux. http://www.linuxgazette.net/tag/kb.html -- Mike
If I understand it right, it's OK for me to dowmload back issues of the Linux Gazette for my own personal use?
Oh yes. Not only OK but encouraged. You may find that many back issues are already on your distro, if you installed the big documentation packages, since the _Gazette_ is part of the Linux Documentation Project. -- Heather
Yep, that's what it's there for. You can download it, read it, give it to your friends, print it out and sell it, whatever. The back issues are in the Debian distribution; I'm not sure about SuSE.
The fine print is at http://www.linuxgazette.net/copying.html
For downloading convenience, all the issues are packed up in FTP files. See http://www.linuxgazette.net/faq/#formats_yes -- Mike
LG78 some email related problemsAs a general point, anything which has two whole three letter extensions (.jpg.pdf, .mp3.scr, and so on) especially when the second is one that may be reasonable to auto-view, you should be immediately suspicious that it's probably a virus.
s/second/first/ ?
Neil
Nope, I meant it as I said it. If the one on the end (the second extension) is auto-viewable ... e.g. PIF, GIF, DOC ... then the other one may be what it really is, or made up, or just trying to see if it can be auto viewed as either one.
I'm afraid I still think that's the wrong way round. In the example to which I was responding humor.mp3.scr is not an mp3. The first type is MP3, which it would be reasonable to auto-view. I always thought the last (second in this case) extension was what it really was (or at least, on a win box determines how 'doze tries to launch it). This has the advantage for the virus writer that the last extension may also be hidden, so the real type isn't always seen by the viewer, e.g they may see "humor.mp3", which appears harmless.
Windows will launch the bits as they really are - thus the decision is not about "is it really an MP3" ... which would give the media player a chance to blow it off as a mangled sound ... but "shall I auto launch it"; if yes go see the registry about it; the trojan gets to play puppydog in your rose garden.
Note that if you told explorer to hide mp3 because you know what it is, and you see mp3 anyway, then there was a doubled extension and you're not seeing the one on the tail end. We'll have to beware of this ourselves as Konqueror, Evolution and other file-managers-on-steroids come to popularity in Linux.
Doubled extensions often hide the autolaunch decision and may give it two chances to autolaunch. I don't think anybody questions why I'm fond of Linux for email instead. While it's possible to configure Linux mailers to do all sorts of crazy things, we don't currently have the registry mucking with our concepts of what are and what aren't programs, or launchable. -- Heather
But with the kind exception of .tar.gz and .tar.bz2 nearly all other double-tail filenames have been junk that ever came to my box. And if the last is not a compression sort (zip, gz, bz2, Z, sit, arj one time) usually a trojan as well.
I agree totally with this bit.
Neil
What does mail relay mean?"Iron"
I take it you are responsible for http://linuxgazette.net/issue78/lg_backpage.html.
A link to that page was sent to a mailing list that I am on because of all of the good Klez.E info. I applicate that info, but the rest of the page seemed to be more or less random gibberish.
But that isn't why I am writing.
I am writing because it seems that you said:
|
............... I assume by "mail relay" you just mean you want Sendmail to work, so you can send mail from and to your computer. That's not a mail relay. A "mail relay" means that your Sendmail program accepts mail *from non-local senders to non-local recipients*. Normally, Sendmail accepts mail only if it's from a local user or to a local user. Otherwise, you open up your mail server for exploitation by spammers. ............... |
Mail relay means no such thing. You have described an /open/ mail relay. A relaying MTA is /any/ that accepts mail from non-local users and/or delivers to non-local users. Since we presently live in an age of smart clients connected by the internet this describes almost all mail servers.
For oodles of examples of "relay" being used correctly in context see http://www.sendmail.org/tips/relaying.html.
It is also not true that most mail servers only accept mail that is from or to a local user. My ISP relayed this message to you from my notebook over SMTP. It allows the relay because I am on the ISPs subnet, not because I have a local account on the mail server. This is typically what happens on a corporate mail server as well.
That page at www.sendmail.org gives several examples of how your final statement is untrue. That list is not exhaustive, for instance SMTP AUTH and POP-before-SMTP are both effective at stopping SPAMmers.
- -Peter Hutnick
/"\ ASCII Ribbon campaign against HTML e-mail \ / X Get my PGP key at http://hutnick.com/pgp / \ 6128 5651 6F23 EC17 6EBD 737D 960A 20E6 76CA 8A59
Normally I snip out the sigs but I have to say, I approve of this sentiment. HTML e-mails drive me nuts every month...
Also I'd like to note for the record that the correct spelling for those annoying unsolicited advertisers is spammer - SPAM is a registered trademark of Hormel Foods, and the only relation between them is the reference repeated-to-death in a Monty Python skit. In the skit, at least, it still meant some sort of canned meat. -- Heather
it would be nice to see youHello to everybody!
I was thinking that it would be nice if we - the readers of Linux Gazette - could see you. I have read the section "Meet the gang", and I'd like to see some pictures with you there.
Heather is preparing some cartoon caricatures. They won't be ready for this issue, but maybe the following month.
There are pics of me on my web site, http://iron.cx . -- Mike
Many, but not most, of the Gang have sent in some pictures of themselves for us to use. I'll be turning them into cute toons for next month.
With over 50 people in the Gang, we don't have nearly that many bios posted, either. Clearly, some of us are shy
Let me say that you do a great job, I really have a lot to learn from you, and I appreciate your work. I don't have a permanent connection to the Internet, so I prefer to download your gazette and read it off-line. I have all issues from no. 1 to 77 on my hard drive an on some CD's.
I always enjoy hearing from a fan. -- Heather
I am a (young) romanian programmer who wants to live in the
wonderful un*x universe, but I have still in front
of me a long way on which I have to learn walking and on this
road you assisted me at my first steps (well, second steps; the first
steps was assisted by Linux Documentation Project (LDP) books; well, in fact it is about the third
steps, because the second steps was assisted by manual pages and
howto's, but the number is not so important for me). Maybe with this phrase I should start my message
. Sorry. My name is Constantin A.
Dumitrescu.
In the hope I will see the gang,
Best regards,
C.A.Dumitrescu
Perhaps someday when you are more confident in your Linux knowledge we will see you among their number, too! -- Heather
P.S.: Please, it it is the case - probably it is, excuse my (sort of) clumsy english - it is not my first language, and I am especialy not well prepared in the english grammar.
As the Australians might say, no worries. Thanks for writing in. -- Heather
layout tipjust my two cents worth on the matter of a new layout...
i suggest that you DONT use flashy plugins like java or flash. too often i have seen online mags think they can look better by using these tools. i have yet to see it work. for people still stuck on the slow dialup connection, the plugins can be hell to download aswell...
stylesheets and plain old html work fine, in my opinion.
thanks.
Thomi Richards
http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/ddmodd
want to get involved?? we're looking for artists!
Thanks for your input. We won't be using Java or Flash because that would cut off a significant part of our readership.
The new look will be... someday. Not this month it looks like. I always come across other things to do instead (you know how that goes...) My latest project has been the Cheetah template developers' guide (http://www.cheetahtemplate.org/learn.html). -- Mike
I can assure you that my sections of the Gazette will be lynx clean. I use lynx in preference to the handful of GUI browsers I also use, and could hardly stand to have my biggest project look its worst in my favorite browser, or be unreadable there. -- Heather
More 2¢ Tips!
[LG 78] help #5: ADSL with roaringpenguinHugh-
You say: "I am using the roaringpenguin client." The way I got this to work was run:
/usr/sbin/adsl-setup
and answer the questions (as best you can), to configure the client. Once it is working, you can start, stop and query the link status with:
/usr/sbin/adsl-start
/usr/sbin/adsl-stop
/usr/sbin/adsl-status
HTH. Bob L.
Fancy printing in VimVim has many wonderful features; unfortunately, printing - especially printing that retains all the fancy colorizing stuff that Vim enables you to do via the various syntax files - is not one of them, at least not automatically. However, here's something you can add to your "~/.vimrc" that will set it up, including previewing:
See attached fancyprint.vimrc.txt
Once you have this, simply use the ":ha" command; the output will be displayed by "gv" (which, obviously, is required) which will also allow you to print it.
Un-tarring files + Modification Dates[ My first 2-cent (2-pence) tip ]
If you have a computer like mine, where the CMOS battery is shafted for whatever reason, you might find that when you go to untar a tarball, you get a series of messages like:
file.abc has modification time in the future.
Now although this isn't too much of a problem usually, it can be if the tarball contains source-code that you are going to compile, since "make" will usually after trying, sit back and laugh at you saying:
make ** error 1 ** clock scew
To circumvent this problem, you can append the "m" switch when you are untarring your tarball. For example:
tar mxzf ./my_file.tar
Hope It's Useful
-- Thomas Adam
Ghostscript fails after printer driver installI am attempting to connect my new Samsung ML-1210 printer to my quite old Linux server. The server is running Slackware 7.1. The server has no X libraries [I never loaded them] and, after I updated ghostscript with the RPM supplied on Samsung's install disk, ghostscript started failing with the following message.
gs: error in loading shared libraries: libXt.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.
I am assuming that this library comes with X.
You're correct; "Xt" is one of the core X libraries.
While I could just find it somewhere and try to figure out where to put it, I don't know what other errors are hidden behind that one. [How many other libraries are also missing?]
Well, if you had an executable program that came with your RPM, you could do "ldd <program>" to learn about its library dependencies; however, I have no idea what Samsung's RPM contains (it may be a program to which GS delegates the output, or another library, or...)
I am willing to send anyone who is interested the RPM from the Samsung install disk. I didn't include it here to save bandwidth.
Why did applying this RPM make GS start failing?
To be precise, GS itself isn't failing (at least so far as I can tell) - the added "stuff" from the RPM is making a call to the non-existent library, and that's what's failing.
Could the RPM be changed to still drive the printer without needing X libraries?
Only if a) you're a programmer, b) know how to write drivers, and c) have Samsung's (presumably proprietary) printer and software engine protocols. In other words, no.
Is there a working version of GS that comes with the Samsung ML-1210 driver out of the box? If so, where can I get it?
It doesn't have anything to do with versions of GS. Winprinters, such as the one you have, are missing a large chunk of circuitry which must be emulated by a software "engine" (this is another Micr*s*ft attempt to make the world proprietary - like winmodems.) Buying one is a bad idea in the first place, although I'd imagine you didn't realize that - you're paying for a real printer and getting a brainless shell that sucks up a chunk of your CPU processing power for no good reason at all.
The 'gdi' driver is some well-meaning programmer's attempt to make these things work under Linux. I'm sure it works for some people - but it obviously requires at least the Xt library.
My suggestion, just in case you have this option open to you, is to return this gadget to the vendor and demand a real printer - which is, after all, what you've paid for. Failing that, you need to load whatever libraries 'gdi' requires, and - you're absolutely right - there's nothing that guarantees that it won't need other ones after Xt.
Research HelpHowzit
Que?
Well i would like to know what the future of Linux will be in the next 3 to 5 years as i am doing a project on it and would appreciate your help.
Linux may
take over the world.
It may not.
It may
disappear.
It may not.
It may fragment into
so many distributions
that no one distribution is run by more than 10 people.
It may not.
It may be rewritten from scratch in
ADA.
It may not.
It may be
taken over by Microsoft.
It may not.
It may become the main operating system controlling the world's
refrigerators and kettles.
It may not.
It may
do your homework
for you
It may not.
Neil
Update Re: The Answer Gang 65http://linuxgazette.net/issue65/tag/5.html
"although it only appears to be available for Debian"
FYI symlink program is standard part of Redhat Linux in both RH6.2 and RH7.3.
Regards,
Rob
Issue 65 is well over a year old; glad to hear they caught on to that tool during the 6.x series. -- Heather
SMC WirelessHas anyone had any success in getting the SMC wireless pcmcia card to work?
I'm running RH7.2 on a compaq presario laptop
Ahh, but he beat us to the punch - in about 7 hours he figured it out himself. I guess Monday wasn't the best day for us to answer him
OK got it.. I had to recompile the kernel and used the wavelan driver
For those interested I have the SMC2632W EZ Wireless PC card and the SMC 2655W 11mb Access Point.
I did have to play with the routes to hosts on my firewall
Going to have a beer and sit on my porch while I code...
-Mike
testing your procmail recipes
When you initially set up your ".procmailrc", you're going to be
tweaking it for a while; getting rid of the first 99% of spam is easy,
the next .9% is somewhat tricky, and the next .09% is a fine art.
What that involves is adding recipes that block as broad of a selection
of spam as possible, without affecting your regular traffic; often, you
quickly cobble one up while looking at the spam itself - and that's the
right time to test it.
Using another xterm window, another console, or a shell escape (often '!', as in Mutt, or perhaps a 'Ctrl-z' to suspend the current program), create a file in your home directory - I actually keep a template called "proc" there just for this - and enter the following:
See attached proc.procmail-recipe.txt
Note that the "mailbox" for a match here is "/dev/null"; in your actual ".procmailrc", you'd probably want to change that to your "spam" mailbox
- at least for a while - to make sure you're not tossing good mail.
Now, from your mail client, pipe the spam ('|' in Mutt) to the following expression:
procmail proc
where "proc" is the name of the file you've just created. If you've matched it correctly, you should not get any output. Now, try the same thing on one of your valid emails - and you should see it in its entirety. Once satisfied, add the new recipe to your ".procmailrc".
Too many CC's? anti-spam procmail recipeSpammers often send or Cc: to a large list, and these are usually from an archive of "confirmed" addresses - arranged in some order (usually by host or username.) So, if you get an e-mail that's been sent to or has a "Cc:" list with 5 identical users or hosts, that's pretty certainly a bingo (I still send it to my "spam" box rather than bit-bucketing it, just to make sure.)
See attached spammers-cc-too-many.procmail-recipe.txt
For those who are curious about the code: "formail" separates out the specified headers' contents. Perl reads them in, ignoring newlines; gets rid of everything except the addresses; creates a "frequency list" of the usernames and hosts; sorts the list in numerical order and prints out the highest count, which is tested against "greater than or equal to 5".
Please note that this is just a refinement to an existing ".procmailrc". If you do not have "procmail" set up in the first place, I suggest reading my "No More Spam!" article in LG#62:
http://linuxgazette.net/issue62/okopnik.html
Note also that this may not work very well for you if you are on some sort of an in-company Cc-list (rather than a list-manager type of setup), unless you have a "whitelist" of the sort that I describe in my article.
Multiple email users on one public addressI recently switched ISPs and lost the multiple email addresses that the old ISP provided; now, my wife and I are restricted to sharing a single public email address. With fetchmail, I can retrieve our email from my ISP's POP3 server and store it in my lan server for on-demand "offline" reading, but with one email address, either my wife and I have to read each other's mail, or one of us gets no mail at all.
I fixed this little problem with the judicious use of a procmail recipe that uses a feature of email addresses to seperate mail destined for my wife from mail destined for me. You see, although email addresses are usually expressed in the form of
userid@host.domain
there is an alternate form that's a bit more readable:
John Q Public <userid@host.domain>
The leading plaintext name (called a 'nickname') is ignored by the mail agents, but is treated as part of the email address for the purposes of data entry and display.
This means that
Wifes Name <lpitcher@sympatico.ca>
and
Husbands Name <lpitcher@sympatico.ca>
are delivered to the same email address (lpitcher@sympatico.ca), but carry slightly different (and testable) values in the email To: field.
This difference permits me to write a procmail recipe that will detect a difference in the nickname and redirect any mail to "Wifes Name" into my wife's local mail spool, while directing mail to "Husbands Name" into my local mail spool. Additionally, mail addressed to "Husband and Wife" or "Wife and Husband" can be duplicated into each of our mail spools.
The procmail recipe that does all this looks like...
See attached sharing-account.procmail-recipe.txt
Of course, you can add as many users as you want nicknames to this, and each user will (ultimately) only get the email addressed to them.
-- Lew Pitcher
Excellent tip, Lew! Well done. As a relevant additional tip, try the '+' address hack: I haven't used it all that much, but it worked fine for the few times when I did. Mail sent to "user+string@host" will be delivered to "user@host", and the part after the '+' can be pretty much anything you like (obviously, excluding whitespace and the '@' character.) A friend of mine uses this as part of his spam reduction policy: when he posts in a Net forum or newsgroup, he'll do something like
joe+forum_name@hostname.com
He can then route everything from there to a specific mailbox, and can tell exactly where his address got harvested. When a given alias gets too heavily spammed, he blocks it and uses another one.
reliable downloadsHave you ever started a long download, left the computer to do its thing, and come back to a message that says "Download timed out" - at just a tiny fraction of the file size? Even with the "resume" feature of "htget", "wget", etc., you've still got the whole thing to do over. How can we get something to 'watch' our downloads, and restart them if they fail?
In Linux, that capability is actually built right in. When programs exit, they return an 'exit code' which indicates success or failure, with most programmers using a sensible definition (i.e., "no, the program didn't crash, but it didn't finish the download") for failure. Given that, all we have to have is a tiny "wrapper" script that checks the exit code, and restarts out process when we're done.
See attached persist.bash.txt
If I want to, for example, install "gimp" on my system, I know that the download will take all night (I have a very slow wireless modem.) Since I use Debian, I would normally type "apt-get install gimp"; instead, I'm going to do
persist apt-get install gimp
and walk away knowing that I'll have it by morning.
Be sure to check for immediate errors (such as "file not found", etc.)
though, or you'll be cycling errors all night long.
-- Ben
There is also an X binary which helps with sort of thing, although I've never used it. I have tried one or two similar apps under the "other OS" though (DL'd StarOffice 5.0 with it), and it is definitely a nice way to go. The SuSE pkg description is:
Name : nt
Version : 1.28
Summary : Downloader for X
Description : Downloader for X is a tool for downloading files from the
Internet via both HTTP and FTP. It supports reconnecting on connection
timeouts, has a download queue for multiple files as well as support for
simultaneous downloads.
Authors:
--------
Koshelev Maxim <chuchelo@krasu.ru>
-- John Karns
"Unmapped" pixels.Hej Answer Gang,
I recently forwarded a problem to you that was very nicely solved. I am very thankful and I also learned a lot. That problem was probably not of much interest to the general reader of the Gazette, but that is not up to me tu to judge. Gazette is a very nice forum, and I like it a lot. Especially I like the "More 2 -Cent Tips" and "The Answer Gang".
Thank you all.
In the name of all probably: no probs
Well, disregarding the text above, I have a question that may be of more general interest. (Have checked FAQ's and your index search, but not found any obvious answers).
Have made my own icons (.xpm). No problem to make a X*Y one with a defined background. Many Linux .xpm icons,however, have the nice feature to "assert" the wanted pixels only, leaving the background (what ever it is) untouched. How to create or filter a X*Y .xpm file to achieve this feature ? All tips welcome.
Well, I think you mean transparent, meaning the background shining
through, right? There is a special color defined. If you use this
color not that color is shown but rather none. Dunno what that color
is in hex, take a look at an icon that does it with an hex-editor,
that should do it
Robos
Hi,
Thank you for putting me on the right track. I actually found out that the .xpm files are ASCII coded. I always thought they were binaries.
Setting, for example, the background to white it would come out in the .xpm file's color definition as (for 24 bits):
" c #FFFFFFFFFFFF"
Editing this line to:
" s None c None"
will do it. Perhaps not the most straight forward method, but it works.
Best regards
Hans.
telnethi i am kinda new to linux. i am setting up a redhat 7.1 box and i can not telnet into the box. i can ping it. i can telnet out from the box. when i try it says connecting ( IP ADD) cannot open connection to host. it won't even telnet to its self. i seen alot of help for 6.2 but not for 7.1 in 6.2 there is a file inet.d i think that it that you have to modify but 7.1 i can't find it.? thanx brian
In RH 7.x, they switched over to using xinetd instead of the old inetd. You will now find a directory called /etc/xinetd.d. In there you will find a file called "telnet" (and "ftp" and ...). Open the file with your favorite editor and change the line that reads "disable = no" to "disable=yes". Then restart xinetd with a "/sbin/service xinetd restart" as the root user.
Actually you probably don't even have the telnet server daemon installed. Red Hat (Good Distributor! pat pat) doesn't install it by default anymore. Try
rpm -q telnet-server
to see if you've got it. If not, install the package and follow Faber's instructions above. -- Breen
However, you shouldn't be using telnet. telent transmits passwords in the clear (not encrypted) so people can find out what your password is by "sniffing the wire". Use ssh instead (assuming, of course, that you installed the ssh server). -- Faber
Absolutely true. ssh is far superior. -- Breen
The Answer Gang
Greetings from Heather SternHi Dad! (yep, we've got another holiday for parents coming up.) Everybody wave a big "Hi!" to him, since it's all his fault that I'm into computers so much
Hello folks and welcome once more to the marvelous world of The Answer Gang. I'm sorry if things seem a mite slim this month -- I had a little fun with the email monster (and we're pubbing half a day earlier than usual). It seems if your mail server is down for long enough on a really busy mailing list (gosh I wonder what list that would be!) you fall off. Eventually I clued in and re-subscribed, but meanwhile I've got a few goodies from the past few months.
After all we really do answer a lot more people than get published nowadays.
So, what lessons can you, gentle readers, learn from my trevails this month? Let's start taking inventory:
- Do have a regular backup plan, and do occasionally check that it works. I do, it does, and when that 10 year old itty bitty hard disk kinda mostly gave up the ghost, I knew I still had something to work with.
Although I admit that I'm glad it wasn't so bad that I had to reload from scratch. New installs can take a few hours if you're picky about your system settings.
- I've learned to use mutt's "save hooks" even more than last month. This is a very good thing. It means that a lot of my mail can be refiled perfectly with only two keystrokes each, or less if I do bulk tagging on boring threads.
- I'm also now a big fan of l (for limit) ~L (either originated or rec'd by) and one of my favorite list sites. e.g. ssc or debian. I don't have to type the whole thing. Yum!
Of course I mentioned Baycon last month but for me it was only last weekend. If you'll be in the Silicon Valley next year around Memorial Day next year, get your membership now while it's still cheap -- this year was the 20th anniversary and we had a real blast. Between my Star Trek crew (hey, we're the 24th century's user group, we can beam a few folks down to a convention) and the local Linuxdojo group we did just fine. It seems my friend Tim is part of a big effort to stop software piracy... by the rather completist tactic of moving away from software that thinks it can be stolen at all. If you want to know more about that, check out http://stay-legal.org and see what you can do for it too. So he had a good chance to play with some desktop layouts he had in mind.
- I'm pleased to say that Hancom Office works so well hardly anybody noticed that it might have been different than other word processors they were already used to. Speaks RTF without even a hiccup, too.
- floppies are still a bit of a pain though. Thank goodness for mtools.
- K desktop works okay on Celeron 300s and PIII 400s, but I wouldn't exactly call them speed demons. And there's still no such thing as a really good icon for "just wanna surf the web". Much less for 4 different browsers, just in case what's the best javascript-baby for eBay isn't too hot for Yahoo mail. Oh well!
But he's got me started on a good track. I've often said, but hardly made any chance to implement, that people simply don't care so much about whether all these apps think they match, as whether they just work when launched. It's a trickier puzzle to solve for the lesser machines, and since my own stock in trade is people tuning up older systems (which can only go so far before you may as well buy a new one) and laptops (which don't allow luxuries like swapping out video for a card that behaves itself) -- Tim and I can put our heads together on a reasonable layout for these beasties.
I'm pleased to say that my "new" workstation works very nicely now. I've got sound - so I use at jobs to poke me that I have to do something. (Imagine quiet bedoop noises at the wee hours, "talking computers" midday. My current favorite noise? "We're Starfleet officers. Weird is part of the job.")
I'm so happy, my color printer works! I'm still working on having both printers available to the household at the same time. (Yes I'm slow. The color printer is still working just as well as last month, so at least I haven't broken it yet.) I've given up on the idea of them living at the same computer; old betel deals with the laser quite happily and I suppose my new one can be taught to serve the color printer. But I'll be a bit annoyed if nobody else in the house can remote-print into it. It really shouldn't be so tough, one would think. Except that the rest of the household still speaks lpd and the color beastie is happy on CUPS
I've got my Wacom Graphire USB tablet and boy am I a happy camper with that! Although it's wierd...
- It actually behaves better as a "generic PS/2 mouse" attached to /dev/input/mice than it does when I try to use options more specific to Wacom tablets. Go figure. Too bad the pen only has one button. The mouse pointer is a wheelmouse, but I haven't tested whether it behaves. It does 3 buttons so I'm happy enough to work day-to-day.
Of course I immediately set up my color tricks for consoles, and I compose the TAG column from under a dedicated user, just as I have other users for other projects, and a few chroot kits for development.
In the next couple of weeks I look forward to visiting the USENIX Annual Technical conference (http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix02) and hanging out with a bunch of my sysadmin colleagues. By then maybe I'll have more of my own tweaked LNX-BBC variant finished. Maybe I'll even have it finished enough to hand some out rather than merely show off, but I'm not holding my breath. It seems like every time I start a new small project like that my regular client work increases. Which I can hardly complain about, given the current economy
And my internet-lounge-on-wheels continues apace. Later in the year (around Labor Day) I'll be in charge of that again, but this time for a much bigger gathering, the World Science Fiction Convention. (http://www.conjose.org) If you're a fan and planning to attend, I can still use volunteers on my crew. Use the link for me at the bottom of this page instead of bugging the Gang, if you're interested.
With that, I've babbled quite enough, I think. On to the threads!
Exchange Client for LinuxFrom "Bill"
Answered By Mike Martin, Faber Fedor, John Karns
[Heather] William has requested anonymity in accordance with our ask-the-gang guidelines.
My employer recently migrated to the Micrsoft Exchange Server. The problem is that many of us use linux and would prefer to not have to use Microsoft Outlook. This is further complicated in that the company make heavy use of the Exchange Calendaring features, so the answer is not a simple as to have the Exchange administrator configure the server to vend the mail via pop as we still need access to the calendars.
Anyone know of a linux client to Exchange that supports Calendaring?
William
and unfortunately the ximian exchange connector (which is 70 pound a pop)
This should work exactly like outlook
If your exchange server is configured to use ldap you may not need the connector
If you decide to use it, would you be willing to post information on how well it works? I'd love to hear about it.
Regards, Faber
How does LILO find the boot partition???From Super Simian
Answered By John Karns, Ben Okopnik
Greetings Answer Gang,
I've found the info you've given to others very useful in the not-so-distant past, and I like the Gazette in general, and I thought I might ask you a question to which I have looked for the answer to myself, and very recently plagued and tormented me:
How does LILO find the boot partition???
Wait, first, here's what I'm running:
PIII dual proc
RedHat 7.2
2 IDE disks, hda and hdc,
1 SCSI disk, sda
Suppose that's all that's relevant to this question...
OK, so the scsi disk is a pretty new addition to the setup, and I already had a pretty good linux install on hdc, so I decided to move over to the scsi as my main disk. After a bit of fooling around, I decided that the easiest way was just to do a new install onto the scsi, and copy over some choice config files and all my data. This went smoothly, no problem.
Oh, I should probably mention at this point, I had LILO in the MBR of hda, and my boot partition was on hdc1...
So, about a week later, I still had my old linux installation on hdc2, as I was waiting to see if I had forgotten any vital info before I commited it to the abyss. Well, my roommate wanted to reinstall and format (WinXP, as it happens...) and he needed about 6 gigs of backup space, so I deleted my old linux installation on hdc2, and rewrote the LILO on the MBR without it, just to make sure everything was still cool, and it was. We moved the data to my system, he reinstalled, and we moved the data back.
So, then, I decided it was time for a little housekeeping, and repartitioned hdc as one ext3, and went to reboot, and... OH CRAP! My boot partition was on that drive!!!
So, I poped in my bootable "Super Rescue" cdrom, and decided to poke around a bit and see if I could get my system to boot again. I ran LILO again, no dice. I poked around for a while, and noticed I still had all of the data in /boot on sda1, and tried to figure out how to inform LILO about this, but I had no luck. I even recreated the boot partition on hdc1 and copied all the same info back onto it, and reran LILO, still no luck. After looking through some man pages and browsing through liniuxdoc.org, I still had no clue as to how to get things working again, so I made a new linux install on hdc, using the same boot partition (hdc1) and installing LILO to the MBR of hda again, modified lilo.conf in this new install to also boot the sda copy of RedHat, and everything worked.
So, my question to you, is how do I make LILO aware of the location of the
boot partition or directory? How do I prevent this from happening again
(aside form not deleting my boot partition
Oh, I thought it might be something in /etc/fstab, but to my feeble efforts,
this proved to be a blind alley.
I'm feeling a little lost, there doesn't seem to be anything in lilo.conf
addressing this,
# Specifies the boot device. This is where Lilo installs its boot # block. It can be either a partition, or the raw device, in which # case it installs in the MBR, and will overwrite the current MBR. # boot=/dev/hda
and I thought maybe fstab might help, as LILO should be
able to find this file, as the / directory IS specified in lilo.conf, but
please, help!
Eagerly awaiting your replies,
--Super Simian
PS-I hope this email doesn't contain any html, I know you people don't like that, but it's hotmail and it might, and I can't find anywhere to turn it off!
Thanks again!
Hello again,
OK, after reviewing the documentation under /usr/share/doc/lilo, I think I understand exactly what happened. Lilo was starting the boot process, but only got as far as "LI" because it couldn't find the files in /boot, which originally was a separate partition, hdc1. Even after recreating this partition, and copying the same data back to it, it still couldn't find /boot/boot.b because the info Lilo stores in the MBR points to the physical location on disk of boot.b, instead of using partition numbers and directories to locate it. That's why I couldn't find anywhere to specify the location of the boot partition, because Lilo gets this info from your filesystem when you execute /sbin/lilo to write a new MBR. So if you have, say, your root on hdc5, and hdc1 is mounted under /boot, then it actually stores the location of the files on disk (by sector, or some such), and if you remove hdc1 from your filesystem and just copy the files to /boot under hdc5, Lilo will still look for the info on hdc1.
Then, when I reran Lilo to try to get it to use the /boot directory on sda1, it still couldn't find /boot/boot.b because it was on a SCSI disk which was not addressable by BIOS during the early portion of booting, as I had my SCSI BIOS turned off to speed booting. I mistakenly thought that the stuff in the MBR was enough to get the computer into protected-mode.
So, thank you very much for pointing out that document, it has proved to be an excellent repository of informative Lilo goodness!
Oh, and do you see any flaws in my thinking? I'm fairly sure that the above is what was going on...
Thank you
|
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June 2002 Linux Journal
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Elcomsoft DMCA Case
A recent attempt to prevent the Elcomsoft case (archive: Sklyarov/Elcomsoft DMCA case) going to court has failed. The challenge was based on two constitutional arguments:
...to the extent that the DMCA targets computer code, Congress sought to ban the code not because of what the code says, but rather because of what the code does.And since he judged the regulation to "further a substantial government interest", the free speech argument was lost. With regard to fair use, the judge ruled that no fair use was prohibited or eliminated by the DMCA. Some uses might be more difficult than they would be without the DMCA, but they were still legal and possible. There were several other points dealt with in the 33 page ruling, including restriction of access to public-domain works, each of which was rejected by the judge.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation have released a press release giving information on the ruling. Additionally, this story has been covered on Wired.
More DMCA
Maybe we should call this section "DMCA and More DMCA". In another DMCA setback, a federal appeals court rejected the latest 2600 Magazine challenge to the DMCA. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals denied 2600 Magazine's request for review of a November 2001 appeals court decision upholding an injunction made against the web publisher by the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America). The injunction bars 2600 Magazine from publishing or linking to DeCSS software that decodes DVDs. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and 2600 must now decide whether to attempt an appeal of the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In a related case, EFF and the First Amendment Project have asked the California Supreme Court to uphold a lower court decision to permit publication of DeCSS source code. The DVD CCA (Copy Control Association) are attempting to get the court to overturn the decision and block publication of the code.
EFF have a large amount of information on these and related cases.
Intriguingly, NewsForge ran a story that Reuters, Yahoo.com, CNN.com, and dozens of other publications could now be guilty of DMCA violations. What all of these publications have in common is that they have described the process whereby Sony's "copy-proof" protection for CDs can be defeated with a magic marker. I won't hold my breath waiting for the court cases to start, but it does show how easy it is to run foul of this law.
Cox Speaks Out
Another Cox. Also on Slashdot is a report that film maker Alex Cox (writer/director of Repo Man and Sid And Nancy) has written in The Guardian that the movie industry's real pirates are the Hollywood studios and the MPAA who have forced out independents.
Open Source for Peru
A set of links on this story (including links to original Spanish versions) are available at pimientolinux.com/peru2ms/, including an interview with Dr. Villanueva by Linux Today.
Plugging the "Analog Hole"
EFF have issued an advisory analysing some noises coming from the MPAA on the topic of content protection. It would appear, that the MPAA plans to totally rewrite the rule book with regards to technology. Their report calls for no less than the regulation of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), an incredibly generic and commonplace electronic component found in a wide range of scientific, medical and entertainment devices. The MPAA proposes that every ADC be controlled by a "cop-chip" that will shut down the device if it is asked to assist in converting copyrighted material, thus "plugging the analog hole." The EFF report on this subject has more details on this mind-bending story.
Karlheinz Langguth has written a detailed description on how to use Linux as a server for small office solutions.
LinuxDevices survey of cool embedded Linux systems.
Some tips on Secure Programming in PHP at Zend.
A couple of links from Linux Weekly News:
Some links featured on Linux Today over the past month:
Some stories from NewsForge which might interest you:
Some interesting articles from the O'Reilly network:
A few Linux Journal web articles:
Some links from The Register