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This month's answers created by:

[ Ben Okopnik, Kapil Hari Paranjape, René Pfeiffer, Neil Youngman, Rick Moen, Suramya Tomar, Thomas Adam ]
...and you, our readers!

Our Mailbag


Can you give your suggestion on this?

kathik kumar [karthikgiri1984 at gmail.com]


Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:26:18 +0530

Hi,

I have installed my ipsec tools in my linux-server. I am observing some issues while testing.

These are the steps, i done:

============================
 
   http://ipsec-tools.sourceforge.net http://ipsec-tools.sourceforge.net for
installation (tar file location)
 
   a. Copy the file *.tar.gz to your linux machine
   b. Untar the file tar xvzf *.tar.gz
   c. Then issue ./bootstrap
   d. Issue ./Configure
   e. Go to src directory. Setkey is installed
   f. Setkey is available in the /sbin directory. so i changed the name and
Copy the setkey directory to /sbin.
   g. Then created set-key file.
 
[root@linux scripts]$ cat set-key
#!/sbin/setkey -f
flush;
 
spdflush;
 
add 10.0.0.1 11.0.0.2 ah 500 -A hmac-md5 0xabcd1234abcd1234abcd1234abcd1234;
add 11.0.0.2 10.0.0.1 ah 600 -A hmac-md5 0xabcd1234abcd1234abcd1234abcd1234;
 
#add 10.0.0.1 11.0.0.2 ah 500 -A hmac-sha1
0xabcd1234abcd1234abcd1234abcd1234abcd1234;
#add 11.0.0.2 10.0.0.1 ah 600 -A hmac-sha1
0xabcd1234abcd1234abcd1234abcd1234abcd1234;
 
add 10.0.0.1 11.0.0.2 esp 500 -E 3des-cbc
0x1234abcd1234abcd1234abcd1234abcd1234abcd1234abcd -A hmac-md5
0x1234abcd1234abcd1234abcd1234abcd;
add 11.0.0.2 10.0.0.1 esp 600 -E 3des-cbc
0x1234abcd1234abcd1234abcd1234abcd1234abcd1234abcd -A hmac-md5
0x1234abcd1234abcd1234abcd1234abcd;
 
spdadd 10.0.0.1/32[any] 11.0.0.2/32[any] any -P out ipsec
ah/transport//require esp/transport//require;
spdadd 11.0.0.2/32[any] 10.0.0.1/32[any] any -P in ipsec
ah/transport//require esp/transport//require;
 
spdadd 10.0.0.1/32[any] 11.0.0.2/32[any] any -P out ipsec
ah/tunnel/10.0.0.1-11.0.0.2/require;
spdadd 11.0.0.2/32[any] 10.0.0.1/32[any] any -P in ipsec
ah/tunnel/11.0.0.2-10.0.0.1/require;
 
  h. The issue is, The file has full permission, but it says permission
denied.
 
-rwxrwxrwx  1 root     root 1054 Feb 26 04:44 set-key
[root@linux scripts]$ ./set-key
./set-key: Permission denied.  -------------->>>>>>>>>>ISSUE
[root@linux scripts]$

Could you please let me know about this issue?

Thanks -Karthik

[ Thread continues here (15 messages/15.52kB) ]


[Apertium-stuff] English->Esperanto language pair released

Jimmy O'Regan [joregan at gmail.com]


Wed, 4 Feb 2009 18:12:14 +0000

---------- Forwarded message ----------

From: Jacob Nordfalk <jacob.nordfalk@gmail.com>
Date: 2009/2/4
Subject: [Apertium-stuff] English->Esperanto language pair released
To: Apertium-stuff <apertium-stuff@lists.sourceforge.net>

(English below / pli sube en la angla)

Ni ĵus publikigis novan lingvoparon, de la angla al Esperanto, apertium-eo-en. Temas pri la 27a publikigita aŭtomata tradukilo evoluiigita surbaze de la liber-programara motoro kaj ilaro por maŝina tradukado Apertium, la 4a en la angla kaj la 3a en Esperanto.

Oni povas jam nun provi la paron ĉe: http://www.apertium.org/index.php?id=translatetext&lang=eo

La komencaj celoj por la eldono de tiu versio estis:

* Por nescianto de la angla, esti kapabla kompreni la enhavon de
novaĵo pri ĝenerala temo.
* Esti kapabla kompreni, ĉu la koncerna novaĵo estas sufiĉe interesa
por esti konvene tradukita.
* Mallongaj frazoj devus esti akcepteble tradukitaj.

Ni kredas, ke ni atingis tiujn celojn sufiĉe akcepteble kaj ke la rezulto povas esti utila.

Entute, temas pri 'komunume' disvolvita pakaĵo, t.e. evoluigita per volontula laboro.

==Estonto==

La sekvaj paŝoj estos en diversajn direktojn:

'' - Plibonigi la aktualan version. - Labori pri la tradukilo de Esperanto en la anglan. - Evoluigi novajn ilojn surbaze de la tradukilo kaj la leksikonoj. ''

==Agnoskoj==

Koran dankon al ĉiuj evoluigintoj de la multaj malferma-fontaj iloj kaj liberaj lingvo-rimedoj, kiuj permesis starigi ĉi tiun novan tradukilon. Precipe dankon al ABC Enciklopedioj S.L., IULA of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra kaj Prompsit Language Engineering, S.L por la lingvoparoj Catalan->Esperanto kaj Spanish->Esperanto kiu donis la elirpunkto por tiu ĉi paro.

Koran dankon al Mike Leon (traduku.net), kiu liveris grandegan leksikonon kun 114 082 paroj da vortoj kaj idiomaĵoj.

Koran dankon al Francis Tyer, Prompsit Language Engineering, kaj Jimmy O'Reagan pro la konsiloj kaj pro la dizajno de la kerno de la sistemo de transdon-reguloj.

==Statistikoj==

;Leksiko:

'' Esperanto-vortaro: 22 462 lemoj English-vortaro: 13 733 lemoj Dulingva vortaro: 30 773 duopoj ''

;Reguloj:

'' 1a ŝtupo (chunk): 44 2a ŝtupo (inter-chunk): 8 3a ŝtupo (post-chunk): 6 ''

==Teknikaj notoj==

Vidu http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/English_and_Esperanto

We've just released a new language pair, for English to Esperanto, apertium-eo-en. It's the 27th released automatic translator developped with the open-source Apertium machine translator engine, the 4th from English and the 3rd to Esperanto.

The pair is already available at http://www.apertium.org/index.php?id=translatetext&lang=eo

The stated release goals for this version were:

[ ... ]

[ Thread continues here (1 message/6.11kB) ]


can we assume that 1 block = 1 kibibyte when implementing Linux quota?

Mulyadi Santosa [mulyadi.santosa at gmail.com]


Fri, 27 Feb 2009 15:13:23 +0700

Hi all

As the subject says, is that assumption true? I asked that because I am confused whether Linux quota refers to filesystem block or it is another kind of block?

thanks in advance...

regards,

Mulyadi.

[ Thread continues here (2 messages/0.91kB) ]


Financial Post Story

Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]


Sat, 28 Feb 2009 14:35:33 -0800

Quoting Serge G. (galabs2000@gmail.com):

>    IT IS NOT A SPAM, but if you received that message second and plus
>    time JUST CLICK DELETE button and have a nice day.

Uh-huh.

[Stuff about cloning, from a possibly mentally ill individual snipped, about which see: http://jeffvrabel.com/2008/11/24/scarlet[...]ly-troubled-e-mail-i-have-just-received/]

In the headers, one notes:

 Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]:48981 helo=linuxmafia.com)
          by linuxmafia.com with esmtp   (Exim 4.61 #1 (EximConfig 2.0))
          id 1LdUqI-00032b-NR   ; Sat, 28 Feb 2009 11:27:27 -0800
 Received: from sendmail.canada.com ([199.71.40.31]:32455)
         by linuxmafia.com with esmtp   (Exim 4.61 #1 (EximConfig 2.0))
         id 1LdUpa-00032O-1z
         for <tag@lists.linuxgazette.net>; Sat, 28 Feb 2009 11:27:08 -0800
 Received: from gmail.com ([10.146.8.73]) by Sendmail.Canada.Com with Microsoft
         SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.3959); Sat, 28 Feb 2009 14:27:51 -0500
 From: "Serge G." <galabs2000@gmail.com>

So, the headers claim that it came from a typical throwaway GMail account (though that might be a lie), but in any event the mail somehow ended up at Canada.com, which is a commerical outfit billed as "Canadian news, entertainment, television, newspapers, free email and more". So, in addition to blacklisting the (alleged) GMail sender, I attempted to contact "abuse@canada.com" and "postmaster@canada.com", both of which are RFC-required mail drops for any domain that does SMTP mail.

Why? Because I really don't like having to blacklist entire large mail concerns, just because one bad apple sneaked abusive mail through. Those mail drops are the canonical places to get a provider's attention to exactly such problems. So, what happened next?

  This message was created automatically by mail delivery software. 
 
  A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its 
  recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:
 
  postmaster@canada.com                                                         
     SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:<postmaster@canada.com>:
    host mx1.canada.vsi.net [64.22.133.10]: 550 Mailbox disabled for this recipient - <postmaster@canada.com>                                            
   abuse@canada.com
   SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:<abuse@canada.com>:        
    host mx1.canada.vsi.net [64.22.133.10]: 550 Account temporarily suspended   due to inactivity. User must login to reactivate mailbox.                      

So, wow! They've decided to disable postmaster, and to ignore the abuse mailbox to the point where the software automatically disabled delivery. Well, if they want to completely disregard key RFC requirements on all SMTP senders -- requirements so key that you need to go out of your way to disable them in commodity SMTP software -- then my server doesn't need to hear from them again.

[ ... ]

[ Thread continues here (2 messages/5.38kB) ]


How to make wget exclude a particular link when mirroring

Suramya Tomar [security at suramya.com]


Wed, 04 Feb 2009 18:36:50 +0530

Hey Everyone,

I am trying to mirror an Invision Powerboard forum locally on my system (With permission from the admin) using wget and I am having issues.

When I start downloading wget visits each and every link and makes a local copy (like its supposed to) but in this process it also visits the "Log out" link which logs me out from the site and then I am unable to download the remaining links.

So I need to figure out how to exclude the Logout link from the process. The logout link looks like: www.website.com/index.php?act=Login&CODE=03 So I tried the following:

wget -X "*CODE*" --mirror --load-cookies=/var/www/cookiefile.txt 
http://www.website.com

but it didn't work.

I can't exclude the index.php itself because all the links are based off the index.php with parameters.

I have tried searching the web but didn't find anything relevant.

Any ideas on how to do it?

Thanks,

Suramya

[ Thread continues here (30 messages/51.32kB) ]


Linux Groups?

Rex Backus [rabackus at sonic.net]


Sat, 28 Feb 2009 12:45:32 -0800

Hi Gang,

In SUSE Linux Unleashed (pub 2005) on p20, there is a listing for Groups of Linux Users Everywhere. The URL referenced is broken. Does this list still exist, and if so where?

[http://glue.linuxgazette.com/]

Thanks,

Rex Backus

[ Thread continues here (3 messages/2.56kB) ]


email post on LG

Ben Okopnik [ben at linuxgazette.net]


Mon, 23 Feb 2009 13:06:52 -0500

----- Forwarded message from Danny Holstein <dgholstein@embarqmail.com> -----

Date: Sun, 22 Feb 2009 12:12:56 -0500 (EST)
From: Danny Holstein <dgholstein@embarqmail.com>
To: ben@linuxgazette.net
Subject: email post on LG
Ben;

I read a post of yours on mass emailing on Linux Gazette -- I found the post since I was looking for information on mall emailing in Linux. Since we have a small gourmet foods shop in New Jersey and have compiled a customer list of nearly 1000 emails, we figured we'd use it to announce a sale and specials; nothing nefarious about our intentions. It turns out kmail and evolution aren't well-suited to the task, a significant proportion of emails have been changed (earthlink/mindspring -> embarqmail), mistyped into the database, or have simply been abandoned; we got about a 15% bounce rate.

I imagine a good mass mailer would have hooks for database import (MySQL on a LAMP server) and have a means for "fixing" the database based on bounces and "UNSUBSCRIBE" requests.

Regards;

Danny Holstein

----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *

[ Thread continues here (5 messages/6.63kB) ]


Hey James, Looking for a MySql DBA

Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]


Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:08:36 -0800

[[[ Original message elided from the thread. -- Kat ]]]

Quoting NeoHire (Jobs) (jobs@neohire.com):

> Hey James 
> 
> I am helping a company in Santa Barbara find a MySql DBA for their company.
> They are privately held and doing very well. 
> 
> Take a look @ the role, and let me know your thoughts. 

"tag@lists.linuxgazette.net" has never been the address of Jim Dennis. It's always been the address of The Answer Gang, a public mailing list associated with _Linux Gazette_ magazine. Jim Dennis was for a very long time a member of that mailing list, but hasn't been subscribed for some years.

You might have gotten a clue about it being a mailing list from the word "list" as the hostname, by the way.

Please make sure you excise "tag@lists.linuxgazette.net" from all of your records as a means of reaching Jim: I simply never was that, and isn't now.

What you just did is the Internet equivalent of walking into a crowded cinema during a movie and yelling out "Hi, I heard Jim Dennis might be here. I want to talk to him about a job opening."

You really don't want to be known for that sort of thing. You really don't.


Disk Errors causing machine to freeze

Ben Whyte [ben at whyte-systems.co.uk]


Sat, 07 Feb 2009 11:55:03 +0000

Hi

When I am writing to my disk every now and again, the machine stops responding for a period. When I look in syslog I see messages like this

Feb  7 11:18:02 thor kernel: [ 1515.415879] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0
SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
Feb  7 11:18:02 thor kernel: [ 1515.415896] ata1.00: cmd
35/00:e0:57:5c:8e/00:03:08:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 507904 out
Feb  7 11:18:02 thor kernel: [ 1515.415899]          res
40/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
Feb  7 11:18:02 thor kernel: [ 1515.415905] ata1.00: status: { DRDY }
Feb  7 11:18:02 thor kernel: [ 1515.415923] ata1: soft resetting link
Feb  7 11:18:03 thor kernel: [ 1515.964911] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133
Feb  7 11:18:03 thor kernel: [ 1515.964911] ata1: EH complete
Feb  7 11:18:03 thor kernel: [ 1515.964911] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 1953523055
512-byte hardware sectors (1000204 MB)
Feb  7 11:18:03 thor kernel: [ 1515.964911] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write
Protect is off
Feb  7 11:18:03 thor kernel: [ 1515.964911] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode
Sense: 00 3a 00 00
Feb  7 11:18:03 thor kernel: [ 1515.964911] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write
cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
Feb  7 11:21:07 thor kernel: [ 1709.741765] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0
SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
Feb  7 11:21:07 thor kernel: [ 1709.741780] ata1.00: cmd
35/00:e8:4f:76:ad/00:01:0a:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 249856 out
Feb  7 11:21:07 thor kernel: [ 1709.741782]          res
40/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
Feb  7 11:21:07 thor kernel: [ 1709.741785] ata1.00: status: { DRDY }
Feb  7 11:21:07 thor kernel: [ 1709.741799] ata1: soft resetting link
Feb  7 11:21:08 thor kernel: [ 1710.444091] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133
Feb  7 11:21:08 thor kernel: [ 1710.444091] ata1: EH complete
Feb  7 11:21:08 thor kernel: [ 1710.444091] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 1953523055
512-byte hardware sectors (1000204 MB)
Feb  7 11:21:08 thor kernel: [ 1710.444091] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write
Protect is off
Feb  7 11:21:08 thor kernel: [ 1710.444091] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode
Sense: 00 3a 00 00
Feb  7 11:21:08 thor kernel: [ 1710.459700] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write
cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA

So far this appears to cause the hard drive to collect errors and eventually for filesystem corruption to occur.

Has anyone seen this sort of thing before and are you able to shed any light on what might be happening.

This has been on going for a while now, and I have tried different drives and different cables.

Although it may not be immediately obvious its using SATA

Thanks

Ben

[ Thread continues here (6 messages/6.64kB) ]


GUI for idesk ??

J.Bakshi [j.bakshi at icmail.net]


Fri, 27 Feb 2009 22:32:22 +0530

Hello All,

Hope you all are well.

Is anyone of you using idesk presently ?

I have no idea about its present status. Is there any GUI available to configure the .lnk file and .ideskrc ? In my debian lenny apt shows only the idesk itself.

I would by happy if there is any GUI ( preferably .deb ) which can configure idesk.

Thanks Kindly CC to me

[ Thread continues here (4 messages/3.83kB) ]


free patent resource

[james at ryley.com]


Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:42:56 -0500

Hi,

I saw that you had some trademark info at http://www.lg.ps.pl/issue97/TWDT.html. I don't know if you also have any interest in patents, but if so I wanted to suggest that you check out http://www.freepatentsonline.com and http://www.sumobrain.com

They are by far the best free patent searches on the web, and trademark data will shortly be added to them as well.

If you have a spot, a link would be great.

Sincerely, James

[ Thread continues here (2 messages/2.18kB) ]


Problems booting into Ubuntu 8.10

Deividson Okopnik [deivid.okop at gmail.com]


Thu, 12 Feb 2009 19:21:20 -0300

Hello everyone!

A student here brough to me a problem i couldnt solve, so i'm forwarding it to tag.

After an hibernation, his laptop froze and he had to do a hard-shutdown on it, and after that ubuntu stopped booting, giving him this kernel panic message:

[ 2.222518] Kernel panic - not sycing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on
unknown-block(0,0)

After a few trys, he noticed that he can boot into other kernels he's got on his machine, but they don't work properly (weird beeps, auto-mount doesnt work, compiz - that kind of stuff)

Heres some messages:

Mounting something without su:
DBus error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Did not receive a reply.
Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply,
the message bus security policy blocked the reply,
the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.
 
Starting compiz:
root@ricardo-laptop:~/a# compiz
Checking for Xgl: not present.
Detected PCI ID for VGA:
Checking for texture_from_pixmap: not present.
Trying again with indirect rendering:
Checking for texture_from_pixmap: present.
Checking for non power of two support: present.
Checking for Composite extension: present.
Comparing resolution (1280x800) to maximum 3D texture size (2048): Passed.
Checking for Software Rasterizer: present.
Software rasterizer detected, abortingaborting and using fallback:
/usr/bin/metacity

--- Then several of the above errors ---

I checked his menu.lst, and heres the entry for the problematic kernel:

title		Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-11-generic
uuid		1ac63e0f-dff7-48f8-9506-ce783a5dd383
kernel		/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-11-generic
root=UUID=1ac63e0f-dff7-48f8-9506-ce783a5dd383 ro locale=pt_BR quiet
splash
initrd		/boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-11-generic
quiet

I noticed that weird root=UUID= on kernel, and changed it to root=/dev/sda2 UUID=**** but it didnt work

Well, this is all for now - thanks for reading Deividson

[ Thread continues here (12 messages/21.16kB) ]


Need for a 'viral' marketing campaign to introduce Linux (especially Ubuntu) but it doesn't matter which to Windows sufferers

Charles Norrie [cbnorrie at hotmail.com]


Mon, 2 Feb 2009 07:54:56 +0000

I am concerned that despite the Conficker affair, the message about using Ubuntu isn't getting through especially to industry commentators. So I wrote to Mark Shuttleworth.

Dear Mark Shuttleworth,

Marketing Ubuntu

I am still delighted with Ubuntu, and believe me after using computers for 40 years, it's quite the best OS/package I've ever come across.

But the message isn't getting out there. I became aware how bad it was when I did a single word Google News search for 'Conficker'.

You and I know that if only we could get people to put Linux on their pcs their malware problems would vanish. But that message is not getting through.

Here are the results:

[ ... ]

[ Thread continues here (3 messages/16.93kB) ]


Device driver program

Maneesh M P [maneesh.poyil at gmail.com]


Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:55:35 +0530

[[[ How surprising that this was sent in .html, eh? -- Kat, rolling her eyes in irony. ]]]

Hello,

I have read the article of yours from http://linuxgazette.net/136/anonymous.html . Sounds interesting and it was very informative too. Thanks for sharing it.

I have a requirement, i need a device driver program which reads ctrl +k, this key sequence will send a SIGUSR1 signal to another application program which will just do a multiplication or sort of few numbers once its recieve the SIGUSR1 signal.

We have written the application program, which is pretty easy though. Now in need of a device driver program which reads ctrl + m and send SIGUSR1 signal.

I will be really thankful if you could help me in this.

- Regards, Maneesh(=E0=B4=AE=E0=B4=A8=E0=B5=80=E0=B4=B7=E0=B5=8D )

[ Thread continues here (9 messages/10.48kB) ]



Talkback: Discuss this article with The Answer Gang

Copyright © 2009, . Released under the Open Publication License unless otherwise noted in the body of the article. Linux Gazette is not produced, sponsored, or endorsed by its prior host, SSC, Inc.

Published in Issue 160 of Linux Gazette, March 2009

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