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

Ditto. -- Iron

Is this a trolling of recursive flame bait? Just asking. -- Gary Lawrence Murphy

Re: The Answer Gang has moved

This 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

Quoted Printable email

As 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:

1. using QP when you don't need to, reduces your chance of winning the TAG lotto
2. 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

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: Question

I 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 problems

As 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:

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 you
• layout tip

it would be nice to see you

Hello 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 -- Heather

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 tip

just 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

This page edited and maintained by the Editors of Linux Gazette Copyright © 2002
Published in issue 79 of Linux Gazette June 2002

HTML script maintained by Heather Stern of Starshine Technical Services, http://www.starshine.org/

• [LG 78] help #5: ADSL with roaringpenguin
• Fancy printing in Vim
• Un-tarring files + Modification Dates
• Ghostscript fails after printer driver install
• Research Help
• Update Re: The Answer Gang 65
• SMC Wireless
• testing your procmail recipes
• Too many CC's? anti-spam procmail recipe
• Multiple email users on one public address
• reliable downloads
• "Unmapped" pixels.
• telnet

[LG 78] help #5: ADSL with roaringpenguin

Hugh-

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 Vim

Vim 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 install

I 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 Help

Howzit

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 65

http://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 Wireless

Has 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 Luckily for our readers, he felt inclined to share his success with us. -- Heather

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 recipe

Spammers 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 address

I 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 downloads

Have 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.

telnet

hi 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

This page edited and maintained by the Editors of Linux Gazette Copyright © 2002
Published in issue 79 of Linux Gazette June 2002

HTML script maintained by Heather Stern of Starshine Technical Services, http://www.starshine.org/

Contents:

¶: Greetings From Heather Stern

Exchange Client for Linux

How does LILO find the boot partition???

Greetings from Heather Stern

Hi 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 Linux

From "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

[Mike M] For full support I think you need ximian evolution ftp://ftp.ximian.com/pub

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

[Faber] Have you looked at Bynari (http://www.bynari.com)? They have a product called InsightClient that (supposedly) does what you want.

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

[John K] Probably best to run a native Linux app as suggested by others, but another alternative might be to run Outlook under Codeweaver's Crossover pkg. That way, at least you wouldn't have to switch your OS.

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???

[Ben Okopnik] Quite tasty, thanks. Also rather cute and cuddly, but not quite the kind of thing one takes home to mother, if you know what I mean.

[John Karns] Sorry, I'm on a bit of a hurry at the moment so am unable to write a detailed reply. But I can offer some hints.

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

[John Karns] With 3 hd's in the system, things can get a little complicated to explain, as there are so many ways to go about it. But for the time being, let's say that when you installed to sda the install properly set up everything on sda, and assumed that it was the only drive in the system. Then in order to boot from sda, you would have to make a change in your BIOS setup to tell the system to boot from SCSI. When there are both IDE and SCSI drives installed, the default is to boot from IDE. Most BIOSes I have seen in the past two years allow the option of booting from SCSI.

Oh, I thought it might be something in /etc/fstab, but to my feeble efforts, this proved to be a blind alley.

[Ben Okopnik] Nope, wouldn't be there. That comes _way down the road, dealing with which partitions should be mounted and where.

[John Karns] If you installed fresh to sda, then the fstab there should have the correct set up. However, if you copied the one from hdc, then you would have to change the partition references to point to sda.

I'm feeling a little lost, there doesn't seem to be anything in lilo.conf addressing this,

[Ben Okopnik] Here's a bit from my "/etc/lilo.conf" (though admittedly not all the distros comment theirs this well):

# 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!

[John Karns] You have to decide on what scheme you want to use to boot your system - i.e., whether you want to boot from lilo or use XP's boot mgr (lilo is easier to config for multi-boot IMO), and from which drive you want to boot. Gotta go.

[Ben Okopnik] My recommendation to you is to take a good read of "/usr/share/doc/lilo/Manual.txt.gz", or wherever RedHat keeps its doc files (if I recall, it's that or something fairly close to it.) It's a well-written document that describes the boot process and LILO's place in it, as well as all about boot records and where they can be stored and how they can be accessed. Quite an education, all in one file (about 125kB, but, hey, it's a complete manual.)

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!

[Ben Okopnik] It was fine, just plain text. Seems like Hotmail does the Right Thing in that regard.

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

[Ben Okopnik] It all sounds very reasonable to me, at least according to The Holy Writ, erm, I mean /usr/share/doc/lilo/Manual.txt.gz. Sounds like you've read the docs and understood them - well done!

This page edited and maintained by the Editors of Linux Gazette Copyright © 2002
Published in issue 79 of Linux Gazette June 2002

HTML script maintained by Heather Stern of Starshine Technical Services, http://www.starshine.org/

"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

Contents: Legislation and More Legislation Linux Links Conferences and Events News in General Distro News Software and Product News

Selected and formatted by Michael Conry

Submitters, send your News Bytes items in PLAIN TEXT format. Other formats may be rejected without reading. You have been warned! A one- or two-paragraph summary plus URL gets you a better announcement than an entire press release. Submit items to gazette@linuxgazette.net

June 2002 Linux Journal

All articles through December 2001 are available for public reading at http://www.linuxjournal.com/magazine.php. Recent articles are available on-line for subscribers only at http://interactive.linuxjournal.com/.

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:

1. That the DMCA is unconstitutionally vague as applied to Elcomsoft, violating the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment (i.e. it is too vague for people to know how not to violate it).
2. That the DMCA violates the First Amendment in various ways: it is an indiscriminate content-based restriction on speech, insufficiently tailored to qualify as serving a compelling government interest; it infringes upon the First Amendment rights of third parties to engage in fair use; it is too vague in describing what speech it prohibits and thereby chills free expression.

...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.

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:

• How easy is internet banking and Linux?
• Microsoft explains how switching from Linux to Windows brings benefits in terms of "business value, choice and reliability".
• Also on Microsoft theme LWN notes that MS VP Jim Allchin has testified that revealing Windows' technical details "could damage national security and even threaten the US war effort in Afghanistan."

Some links featured on Linux Today over the past month:

• LinuxSecurity.com have a case study of a server break-in via FTP.
• MIS article on the economic imperatives behind switching to Linux.
• CrossNodes have an article describing how to build a router with no more than a 386 and a floppy disk.
• ZDNet Australia have put together their top 5 Linux lessons for windows admins.
• Eric S. Raymond departs VA Software board of directors.
• HNS have an introduction to securing Linux systems.

Some stories from NewsForge which might interest you:

• The outlook for Linux in Russia.
• A look at the antivirus solutions available for Linux servers to help keep viruses from infecting Windows clients.
• Sun grants unlimited copies of StarOffice 6.0 to Chinese schools.
• Microsoft licence audits causes schools to consider open source alternatives.
• Gummi bears defeat fingerprint sensors.
• The story of IBM and Linux.
• In defence of Larry Lessig.

Some interesting articles from the O'Reilly network:

• Using a ksh batch job to add new user IDs in bulk.
• An examination of some network monitoring tools and guidelines for ethical use.
• Port forwarding as a method of allowing SSH through a firewall.
• Andy Oram with some observations from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference.
• Poor Sysadmin's Guide to Remote Linux Administration, by Kendall Clark. First of a two part article covering clever and cheap hacks for the remote sysadmin.

A few Linux Journal web articles:

• Four DVD playing programs for Linux reviewed.
• Linux in the third world.
• Introduction to some Linux system administration tools (Linuxconf, Webmin, YaST2 and COAS).

Some links from The Register

• MS shared source licence looks a lot like the GPL.
• Is it illegal to remove Windows from your PC? Microsoft would like you to think so, though they have recanted a little. In Europe it appears that you have a legal right to sell any OEM software you get with your PC.
• Report says Linux networks much cheaper than Windows.
• Compulsory Windows : for Macs, and people without PCs?
• Gartner says that an open source review