Re: WARNING! New Perl/Perl-base upgrade removes 141 Sid/Unstable packages

[Rick Thomas]

On Sep 28, 2016, at 12:55 PM, Andre Majorel  wrote:

> On 2016-09-28 10:46 -0500, John Hasler wrote:
>> Vincent Lefevre writes:
>>> Things like that should not happen. But this is not a bug in the perl
>>> packages. This is a misfeature of apt / aptitude, which want to remove
>>> packages instead of holding the new packages (well, AFAIK, aptitude
>>> has improved, but is still not perfect).
>> 
>> Aptitude can't read your mind.  When you tell it to install
>> something it assumes that you mean what you say and proposes
>> solutions to any conflicts based on various heuristics.
> 
> When there's some kind of conflict during a package installation
> or upgrade, the first solutions proposed by aptitude almost
> invariably involve large numbers of package removals. The
> simple solution that upgrades/installs what can be and leaves
> the rest alone is usually there but buried under at least three
> -- and sometimes tens of -- very disruptive ones.

In situations like this, I’ve found it very useful to use the “r” response when 
aptitude tells me “the following actions will resolve these conflicts” listing 
one or more deletions that I don’t like.  It allows me to “reject” a particular 
action.  After that, the rejected action will not appear in future presented 
solutions.

Does that help?
Rick

Re: Canon printer minor quibble

[Brian]

On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 00:39:35 -0500, David Wright wrote:

> On Fri 30 Sep 2016 at 22:48:38 (+0100), Brian wrote:
> > On Fri 30 Sep 2016 at 17:00:02 -0400, Greg Wooledge wrote:
> > 
> > > On Fri, Sep 30, 2016 at 03:49:23PM -0500, David Wright wrote:
> > > > "CUPS is the standards-based, open source printing system developed by
> > > > Apple Inc. for macOS® and other UNIX®-like operating systems."
> > > > 
> > > > which is stretching the truth IMHO, given the normal meaning of "for",
> > > > "and", and "other", written in that order. Calling it "Common UNIX
> > > > Printing System" would blow that out of the water.
> > > 
> > > Their use of "developed by" is rather jaw-dropping as well.  Perhaps
> > > they mean it in the sense of "maintained by", but I think most people
> > 
> > No, they mean "developed by...".
> > 
> > > would read it as "created by" which is blatantly untrue.
> > 
> > Most people have an understanding of language (which you appear to lack)
> > and would read it as "developed by...".
> 
> I think that was rude and uncalled for.

And crediting someone with indulging in doublespeak, being a lawyer and
deserving pity isn't?

> The clever thing about the web page is the careful omission of a comma
> after system, so that the sentence gets read as
> 
> C is the S   that is   developed by A
> 
> rather than
> 
> C is the S,   which was   developed by A.
> 
> My observation is that most computer software websites credit the
> original authors/creators/developers in a place easily found by
> casual visitors. I haven't found any mention of Sweet outside the
> blog, and only a mere two occurrences there.

CUPS 2.2.0 was released on 13 Sep 2016. It was developed by Apple. CUPS
2.2.x will be developed by Apple and released soonish. CUPS 1.6.x, CUPS
1.7.x and CUPS 2.0.x were developed by Apple. Apple is the only entity
developing CUPS. "C is the S that is developed by A" looks an accurate
reflection of the state of affairs.

-- 
Brian.

netcat udp to two IP addresses?

[Paul Duncan]

Hi All,

Not strictly speaking an OS dependent question, but I figured someone on
this list would probably have an answer :-)

I have a program generating output to standard out, which I am then piping
to netcat -u IP Port

This works fine, but I'm wondering what the best way is to send it to two
IP addresses?

Just as an aside the program reads data from a serial port, so I cannot
simply run a second instance of the program.

Thanks!

Paul.

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[mo]

First of all:
Thank you Liam for your help! :)
Thanks for the very nice and long explanation Mark! :)

I think i should elaborate a little more on my setup.. i guess i did not 
make that very clear in the first place, sorry about that.


My network is consisting of the following systems:

Main PC - 192.168.23.11  (Running Debian Jessie)
Server  - 192.168.23.200 (Running Debian Jessie)

The server is always online, the PC is only half of the day on.

What i want to do now is the following:

Sending mail from my Main PC to my Server and also the other way around, 
from the Server to my Main PC.
The Server should also be able to send mail to the "outside" (Meaning to 
other SMTP servers).
The second requirement is optional since i dont own a domain and all 
this is sitting locally at my home. The most important thing for me is 
to send and receive mail from both systems in my home network.

I hope this made my problem a little clearer :)

I'm a little ashamed to say that, but i could not totally follow your 
explanations Mark... I'm quite a newbie when it comes to SMTP.. sorry :(


Thanks again for all your help ;)

Greets

mo

Re: netcat udp to two IP addresses?

[Thomas Schmitt]

Hi,

Paul Duncan wrote:
> what the best way is to send it to two IP addresses?

If it must happen without much time to study the web, i'd use tee(1)
to feed a named pipe from the unnamed one. Then netcat can consume both.

  mknod ~/fifo p
  netcat -u PORT1 <~/fifo
  data_producer | tee -i ~/fifo |  netcat -u PORT2


Have a nice day :)

Thomas

Recommendation: Backup system

[mo]

Hi Debian users :)

Information:
Distributor ID: Debian
Description:Debian GNU/Linux 8.6 (jessie)
Release:8.6
Codename:   jessie

As the title say i'm in search for a backup application/system.
Currently i manage my backups with a little script that i wrote... but 
it does not really serve my needs anymore.
I want to be able to make backups on my main PC and also on my server, 
the backups i would then store on my NAS.


Make a long story short:
Have you guys a recommendation for me?
Is there a specific application you use for your backups guys?

Btw: I dont mind configuring or playing around with new applications, 
every recommendation is welcome ;)



Here is my current backup script (Which is run by cron daily):
#!/bin/bash

TO_BACKUP="/home /etc /var/log"
BACKUP_DIR="/var/backup"
BACKUP_ARCHIVE="backup-`date +%d_%m_%Y-%H:%M`.tar"
TAR_OPTIONS='-cpf'

delete_old_backup() {
if [ -f ${BACKUP_DIR}/backup*.tar ]; then
rm -rf $BACKUP_DIR/backup*
fi
}

create_new_backup() {
tar $TAR_OPTIONS ${BACKUP_DIR}/$BACKUP_ARCHIVE $TO_BACKUP
}

main() {
delete_old_backup
create_new_backup
}

main

Greets
mo

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[Brian]

On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 11:06:07 +0200, mo wrote:

> First of all:
> Thank you Liam for your help! :)
> Thanks for the very nice and long explanation Mark! :)
> 
> I think i should elaborate a little more on my setup.. i guess i did not
> make that very clear in the first place, sorry about that.
> 
> My network is consisting of the following systems:
> 
> Main PC - 192.168.23.11  (Running Debian Jessie)
> Server  - 192.168.23.200 (Running Debian Jessie)
> 
> The server is always online, the PC is only half of the day on.
> 
> What i want to do now is the following:
> 
> Sending mail from my Main PC to my Server and also the other way around,
> from the Server to my Main PC.
> The Server should also be able to send mail to the "outside" (Meaning to
> other SMTP servers).
> The second requirement is optional since i dont own a domain and all this is
> sitting locally at my home. The most important thing for me is to send and
> receive mail from both systems in my home network.
> I hope this made my problem a little clearer :)
> 
> I'm a little ashamed to say that, but i could not totally follow your
> explanations Mark... I'm quite a newbie when it comes to SMTP.. sorry :(

Assuming the server hostname is "server".

1. On Main PC use your editor to create /etc/exim4/hubbed_hosts. In it
   put

   server: 192.168.23.200

   in it and restart exim4.

2. Send mail to user@server.

3. You can replace 'server: 192.168.23.200' with 'server: server.local'
   if avahi-daemon is running on both machines.

-- 
Brian.

Re: Canon printer minor quibble

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 01 October 2016 01:39:35 David Wright wrote:

> On Fri 30 Sep 2016 at 22:48:38 (+0100), Brian wrote:
> > On Fri 30 Sep 2016 at 17:00:02 -0400, Greg Wooledge wrote:
> > > On Fri, Sep 30, 2016 at 03:49:23PM -0500, David Wright wrote:
> > > > "CUPS is the standards-based, open source printing system
> > > > developed by Apple Inc. for macOS® and other UNIX®-like
> > > > operating systems."
> > > >
> > > > which is stretching the truth IMHO, given the normal meaning of
> > > > "for", "and", and "other", written in that order. Calling it
> > > > "Common UNIX Printing System" would blow that out of the water.
> > >
> > > Their use of "developed by" is rather jaw-dropping as well. 
> > > Perhaps they mean it in the sense of "maintained by", but I think
> > > most people
> >
> > No, they mean "developed by...".
> >
> > > would read it as "created by" which is blatantly untrue.
> >
> > Most people have an understanding of language (which you appear to
> > lack) and would read it as "developed by...".
>
> I think that was rude and uncalled for.
>
> The clever thing about the web page is the careful omission of a comma
> after system, so that the sentence gets read as
>
> C is the S   that is   developed by A
>
> rather than
>
> C is the S,   which was   developed by A.
>
> My observation is that most computer software websites credit the
> original authors/creators/developers in a place easily found by
> casual visitors. I haven't found any mention of Sweet outside the
> blog, and only a mere two occurrences there.
>
> Going back to your point about the logo, it's very odd that although
> "CUPS, the CUPS logo, and macOS are trademarks of Apple Inc.",
> http://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/appletmlist
>.html makes no mention of CUPS or its logo, and I would appreciate
> anyone pointing out an example on the CUPS website. Its absence may be
> because Apple don't like putting it on the web as it has "UNIX"
> prominently displayed. The only legible occurrence I can see on my
> screen is the big one on the CUPS homepage. The logo that sits on
> every page appears to be deliberately fuzzy.
>
> As for the meaning of "develop", you seem to have been influenced by
> that fatuous sentence "Brexit means Brexit"! In the normal world,
> one of the meanings of "develop" is "create". For example,
>
> http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/develop
>
>  transitive verb
>
>  2 b : to create or produce especially by deliberate effort over time
> 
>
> Is this an unusual meaning in the context of computer software?
> Let's look at some great software creations and how they are reported:
>
> http://www.tex.ac.uk/FAQ-whatTeX.html
> "Knuth developed the first version of TeX in 1978 to deal with ..."
>
> https://www.fsf.org/news/richard-stallman-inducted-into-the-2013-inter
>net-hall-of-fame "Stallman developed a number of widely used software
> components of GNU ..."
>
> http://www.few.vu.nl/en/news-events/news-archive/2016/jan-mrt/30th-ann
>iversary-andrew-tanenbaums-minix.aspx "Emeritus professor Andrew
> Tanenbaum developed this operating system while ..."
>
> http://sunsite.uakom.sk/sunworldonline/swol-05-1998/swol-05-perl.html
> "Larry Wall developed Perl in 1987 to simplify administrative
> reporting ..."
>
> http://www.gocertify.com/articles/python-is-the-holy-grail-so-to-speak
>-of-programming-languages.html "Ultimately Rossum developed a language
> and interpreter that immediately ..."
>
> http://memim.com/lame.html
> "... Mike Cheng developed a patch for an example implementation of an
> MP3 encoder"
>
> Cheers,
> David.

Apple, unfortunately, seems bent on doing a microsoft to cups.

The most cogent post I can find on the cups blog states:
===
In February of 2007, Apple Inc. acquired ownership the CUPS source code 
and hired me (Michael R Sweet), the creator of CUPS.

CUPS will still be released under the existing GPL2/LGPL2 licensing 
terms, and I will continue to develop and support CUPS at Apple.

Answers to questions about the change of ownership can be found on the 
frequently asked questions page.
===
Mike has been stating that he is chair of that department in the mailing 
list messages, which have become rather far between.  The independent 
cups.org mailing list was shut down around a year later, effectively 
putting the apple beaurocracy between the user and Mike.

This is not a Good Thing IMO. For instance, debian wheezy is stuck on 
cups-1.53, well over 6 years old. It does however, work well. I can 
print to either of the printers sitting to the right of me from any of 
the other 4 machines currently up and running on my little home network, 
so I've no beef with printing here at the coyote.den other than my 
latest ink squirter is running at 5% of its advertised speed, and seems 
bent of making its starter ink cartridges last till the rapture.  Washed 
out prints seem to be the order of the day.  But it also can handle 
11x17" paper.

Chee

Re: Canon printer minor quibble

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 01 October 2016 04:32:31 Brian wrote:

> On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 00:39:35 -0500, David Wright wrote:
> > On Fri 30 Sep 2016 at 22:48:38 (+0100), Brian wrote:
> > > On Fri 30 Sep 2016 at 17:00:02 -0400, Greg Wooledge wrote:
> > > > On Fri, Sep 30, 2016 at 03:49:23PM -0500, David Wright wrote:
> > > > > "CUPS is the standards-based, open source printing system
> > > > > developed by Apple Inc. for macOS® and other UNIX®-like
> > > > > operating systems."
> > > > >
> > > > > which is stretching the truth IMHO, given the normal meaning
> > > > > of "for", "and", and "other", written in that order. Calling
> > > > > it "Common UNIX Printing System" would blow that out of the
> > > > > water.
> > > >
> > > > Their use of "developed by" is rather jaw-dropping as well. 
> > > > Perhaps they mean it in the sense of "maintained by", but I
> > > > think most people
> > >
> > > No, they mean "developed by...".
> > >
> > > > would read it as "created by" which is blatantly untrue.
> > >
> > > Most people have an understanding of language (which you appear to
> > > lack) and would read it as "developed by...".
> >
> > I think that was rude and uncalled for.
>
> And crediting someone with indulging in doublespeak, being a lawyer
> and deserving pity isn't?
>
> > The clever thing about the web page is the careful omission of a
> > comma after system, so that the sentence gets read as
> >
> > C is the S   that is   developed by A
> >
> > rather than
> >
> > C is the S,   which was   developed by A.
> >
> > My observation is that most computer software websites credit the
> > original authors/creators/developers in a place easily found by
> > casual visitors. I haven't found any mention of Sweet outside the
> > blog, and only a mere two occurrences there.
>
> CUPS 2.2.0 was released on 13 Sep 2016. It was developed by Apple.
> CUPS 2.2.x will be developed by Apple and released soonish. CUPS
> 1.6.x, CUPS 1.7.x and CUPS 2.0.x were developed by Apple. Apple is the
> only entity developing CUPS. "C is the S that is developed by A" looks
> an accurate reflection of the state of affairs.

The last msg I have from the c...@cups.org mailing list is in may of 
2016, and is signed by:
Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer

Its possible I am not getting that list since moving my mail server usage 
to shentel.net, I had to call their support and have ALL my mailing list 
subscriptions whitelisted, and I may have failed to specify 
c...@cups.org as a good address to allow through. Humm, its acting like 
a new subscription request. So we'll see if it works.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page 

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[mo]

Hi Brian :)



Assuming the server hostname is "server".

1. On Main PC use your editor to create /etc/exim4/hubbed_hosts. In it
   put

   server: 192.168.23.200

   in it and restart exim4.

2. Send mail to user@server.

3. You can replace 'server: 192.168.23.200' with 'server: server.local'
   if avahi-daemon is running on both machines.



It worked perfectly
...I just found out that "mail" does not support Maildir format, but 
mutt does fine
I can now send and receive mail from and to my server. Thank you very 
much for your help! (...And for the easy step by step guide )


Thanks again

Greets
mo

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[mo]

I'll assume you have a home network and are trying to connect to send
mails between machines on that network, and additionally be able to send
email to domains outside your network.


That is right ;)


I'm also assuming that you don't have specific domains for your own
machines, so that when you send mail outside you want to use an email
provider such as gmail, or hover, etc.


Also true ;)



I just figured out how to get this working myself a week or two back, so
it's fresh in my mind. The key trick is the use of "hubbed hosts".


Did you follow a specific book or guide?


Exim configuration has the concept of "routers" and "transports".
Routers basically decide what to do with a message, and transports do
it. One of the routers configured by default in the Debian exim
configuration is for "hubbed hosts". What this means, is machines
capable of sending and receiving email ("hosts" in exim speak) that are
on the same LAN as this machine (connected by a "hub"). Note that this
"hub" could be your local home network router, and for these purposes
machines on WiFi and machines on a wired LAN would be considered on the
same hub, even though that isn't strictly true. The point is that
network packets can be addressed directly between the machines, they
don't require a router in between.



As far as i do understand this is that only machines which are defined 
as hubbed hosts can be send mail in the local LAN? Or am i 
misunderstanding something here? :)



In Debian, this is achieved with Avahi. This is what allows you, if you
have MachineA and MachineB on your network, to do for example "ping
MachineA.local" from MachineB and expect MachineA.local to be resolved
into an IP address.



I'm not a friend of avahi to be honest, i much rather ignore it :D


In /etc/exim4, create a file owned by root called hubbed_hosts. In the
file, each line maps a "domain" (the part after the @ sign in an email
address) to a "host" (the name of a machine on your network, as it can
be reached from this machine). Put the domain first, then a tab
character (spaces may also be OK) and then the host. So for example I
have a machine on my network called affinity, and so in the hubbed_hosts
file on the machine I am sitting in front of now, I have two lines, one
saying "affinity.localaffinity.local", and the other saying
"affinityaffinity.local" (no quotes in the file). This tells the
local exim installation that any email address with @affinity.local as
the domain should be forwarded on to a machine called affinity.local,
and any mail with @affinity as the domain should be forwarded on to a
machine called affinity.local. Exim4 will then say "Connect to
affinity.local!" with no attempt to translate that into an IP address,
and Avahi daemon will answer "that is IP address WW.XX.YY.ZZ!" to which
exim will say "very well, connect to WW.XX.YY.ZZ!" and the exim4 on
affinity will wake up and co-operate to deliver the mail.


I just did that and now mailing works flawlessly :D
Just one questions: Why do i need hubbed_host entries? Should it not be 
fine alone to make a entry in /etc/hosts for the machines i want to send 
mail to (I do not operate a dedicated DNS server).

This is something i dont really understand...


If the target email domain is not present in hubbed_hosts, then a
default "smarthost" configuration will fall through the hubbed hosts
router and arrive at the smarthost router, which in my case then tries
to use my mail provider to send a mail to a local machine, which is
doomed to failure because the outside provider cannot see my individual
machines on my local network.

If you really should be using the "internet" configuration, you still
need hubbed_hosts for local mails because whereas the hubbed_hosts
option just leaves it to the local network to figure out what it is
talking about, an internet-configured exim will attempt to find and send
to the target machine. To do so, it will send out a DNS request to
resolve the ip address of the target host. Avahi won't catch this, and
unless you are running a DNS server locally on your network (most people
don't, and many home network routers don't include one) that request
will go out of your network to the DNS server provided by your ISP. That
DNS server, being outside your network, won't be able to resolve your
local machine names and so won't be able to give you back an IP address
to use, unless your target machines are publicly individually visible on
the Internet, which is unlikely if this is a home configuration we are
talking about here.

So the configuration you are after is local domains specified in
hubbed_hosts, and everything else falls through to either a smarthost or
a dns-based attempt to send outside your network.

Hope that helps, let us know if you need more help.


Your explanation helped a lot ;)


Mark




Greets

mo

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[Brian]

On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 12:36:10 +0200, mo wrote:

> >I just figured out how to get this working myself a week or two back, so
> >it's fresh in my mind. The key trick is the use of "hubbed hosts".
> 
> Did you follow a specific book or guide?

The manual for exim4-config_files is the first place to look.

> >Exim configuration has the concept of "routers" and "transports".
> >Routers basically decide what to do with a message, and transports do
> >it. One of the routers configured by default in the Debian exim
> >configuration is for "hubbed hosts". What this means, is machines
> >capable of sending and receiving email ("hosts" in exim speak) that are
> >on the same LAN as this machine (connected by a "hub"). Note that this
> >"hub" could be your local home network router, and for these purposes
> >machines on WiFi and machines on a wired LAN would be considered on the
> >same hub, even though that isn't strictly true. The point is that
> >network packets can be addressed directly between the machines, they
> >don't require a router in between.
> >
> 
> As far as i do understand this is that only machines which are defined as
> hubbed hosts can be send mail in the local LAN? Or am i misunderstanding
> something here? :)

hubbed_hosts can send mail wherever you want. For example:

  example.com: smtp.example.com

would send mail to someone at example.com through smtp.example.com
(which could be a smarthost).

> >In Debian, this is achieved with Avahi. This is what allows you, if you
> >have MachineA and MachineB on your network, to do for example "ping
> >MachineA.local" from MachineB and expect MachineA.local to be resolved
> >into an IP address.
> >
> 
> I'm not a friend of avahi to be honest, i much rather ignore it :D

Let's hope your IP addresses do not change.

> >In /etc/exim4, create a file owned by root called hubbed_hosts. In the
> >file, each line maps a "domain" (the part after the @ sign in an email
> >address) to a "host" (the name of a machine on your network, as it can
> >be reached from this machine). Put the domain first, then a tab
> >character (spaces may also be OK) and then the host. So for example I
> >have a machine on my network called affinity, and so in the hubbed_hosts
> >file on the machine I am sitting in front of now, I have two lines, one
> >saying "affinity.localaffinity.local", and the other saying
> >"affinityaffinity.local" (no quotes in the file). This tells the
> >local exim installation that any email address with @affinity.local as
> >the domain should be forwarded on to a machine called affinity.local,
> >and any mail with @affinity as the domain should be forwarded on to a
> >machine called affinity.local. Exim4 will then say "Connect to
> >affinity.local!" with no attempt to translate that into an IP address,
> >and Avahi daemon will answer "that is IP address WW.XX.YY.ZZ!" to which
> >exim will say "very well, connect to WW.XX.YY.ZZ!" and the exim4 on
> >affinity will wake up and co-operate to deliver the mail.
> 
> I just did that and now mailing works flawlessly :D
> Just one questions: Why do i need hubbed_host entries? Should it not be fine
> alone to make a entry in /etc/hosts for the machines i want to send mail to
> (I do not operate a dedicated DNS server).
> This is something i dont really understand...

I'd suggest you try it and look at the logs.

-- 
Brian.

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[Mark Fletcher]

On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 11:06:07AM +0200, mo wrote:
> 
> I think i should elaborate a little more on my setup.. i guess i did not
> make that very clear in the first place, sorry about that.
> 
> My network is consisting of the following systems:
> 
> Main PC - 192.168.23.11  (Running Debian Jessie)
> Server  - 192.168.23.200 (Running Debian Jessie)
> 
> The server is always online, the PC is only half of the day on.
> 
> What i want to do now is the following:
> 
> Sending mail from my Main PC to my Server and also the other way around,
> from the Server to my Main PC.
> The Server should also be able to send mail to the "outside" (Meaning to
> other SMTP servers).
> The second requirement is optional since i dont own a domain and all this is
> sitting locally at my home. The most important thing for me is to send and
> receive mail from both systems in my home network.
> I hope this made my problem a little clearer :)
> 

Right. So you get mail going back and forth between your two machines, 
server and PC, by creating and populating the hubbed_hosts file I 
talked about in my previous mail, on both machines, pointing at each 
other of course.

If you want to ping the server from the client, you should be able to do 
"ping server.local" from your PC (obviously replace the actual name of 
your server, which you didn't include in your mail, where I put server). 
What is happening if you do that is your PC is saying "get me the 
address of server.local!" and the Avahi daemon on your PC either already 
knows that, or sends out a broadcast message to your network saying "is 
there a server.local in the house???". The Avahi daemon running on the 
server responds to that saying "yes, I'm here, and my IP address is 
192.168.23.200!". The Avahi daemon on your PC responds to whatever did 
the asking (ping in this case) with the required IP. Ping then requests 
that packets be sent to IP address quoted. By this mechanism computers 
on the same LAN can communicate with each other peer to peer without 
fannying around with full-blown DNS, which is what Avahi is for. That is 
installed by the Jessie installer by default as far as I can tell, so 
both your machines should have it. It doesn't require any configuration, 
so if you haven't touched it, it should work as I have described. 
Although obviously, you have to substitute the real names for your 
server and PC (but you *do* require the .local unless you have configured 
Avahi to use something else)

If you used the default config of exim4 the hubbed_hosts router is set 
up and waiting to be used. All you need to do to enable it is to 
populate the hubbed_hosts file as I described. The other thing you need 
to do is follow Liam's advice, except importantly what needs to be set 
there is the "domain" of the local PC (on the local PC) or the server 
(on the server) only. So the PC will accept mail for pc.local (or 
whatever your pc is called) and the server for server.local (or whatever 
the server is called). Then, you will be able to email yourself at the 
server from the PC by sending a mail to mo@server.local, where I am 
assuming your user name on the server is mo and the server's machine 
name is server. Obviously you would substitute real names. And to go the 
other way, from the server, you could send a mail to yourself on the PC 
by mailing mo@pc.local.

Let's take a moment to go through what happens if you send a mail from 
PC to server with everything set up as it should be.

On the PC you create a mail and address it to mo@server.local. Let's 
imagine you use mutt to create it. And let's assume mutt is using its 
default configuration to send the mail, which is to call sendmail. And, 
since you have installed exim4, exim has overridden sendmail to actually 
be calling exim4. So, when mutt sends a mail, exim4 running on your PC 
gets handed the mail.

The first thing it does, is say is this mail for this domain. Hmmm. I am 
pc.local. This mail is going to server.local. That ain't me. So not 
local delivery. OK, next I will try hubbed hosts. Do I have any 
hubbed_hosts? Let's look in the hubbed_hosts file. Yep, I do. Can i find 
the @server.local domain in the hubbed_hosts file? Yes, I can. Right, 
where do I send it then? Ah, I send it to a machine called server.local. 
OK... Oi! Network! Gimme the address for server.local... (this is 
where Avahi does its thing)...Thanks! Right, Connect to 192.168.23.200 
port 25!

At this point the exim4 running on your server gets a dig in the ribs, 
wakes up, and responds to the connection. The two exim4s talk to each 
other and the net result is the mail gets transferred from the exim4 
running on the PC to the exim4 running on the server.

Then the exim4 running on the server goes through the same rigmarole, 
except it finds that the mail IS addressed to a local address, so it 
goes into delivery mode and the mail finds its way into the right 
mailbox on that machine.

Now let's consider what would happen if you 

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[mo]

Am 01.10.2016 um 13:22 schrieb Brian:

On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 12:36:10 +0200, mo wrote:


I just figured out how to get this working myself a week or two back, so
it's fresh in my mind. The key trick is the use of "hubbed hosts".


Did you follow a specific book or guide?


The manual for exim4-config_files is the first place to look.



I will look into the manual.
I also found a book about exim from O'Reilly, it's quite old (2001) but 
i guess i can get some info out of it.



Exim configuration has the concept of "routers" and "transports".
Routers basically decide what to do with a message, and transports do
it. One of the routers configured by default in the Debian exim
configuration is for "hubbed hosts". What this means, is machines
capable of sending and receiving email ("hosts" in exim speak) that are
on the same LAN as this machine (connected by a "hub"). Note that this
"hub" could be your local home network router, and for these purposes
machines on WiFi and machines on a wired LAN would be considered on the
same hub, even though that isn't strictly true. The point is that
network packets can be addressed directly between the machines, they
don't require a router in between.



As far as i do understand this is that only machines which are defined as
hubbed hosts can be send mail in the local LAN? Or am i misunderstanding
something here? :)


hubbed_hosts can send mail wherever you want. For example:

  example.com: smtp.example.com

would send mail to someone at example.com through smtp.example.com
(which could be a smarthost).



Got it, thanks ;)


In Debian, this is achieved with Avahi. This is what allows you, if you
have MachineA and MachineB on your network, to do for example "ping
MachineA.local" from MachineB and expect MachineA.local to be resolved
into an IP address.



I'm not a friend of avahi to be honest, i much rather ignore it :D


Let's hope your IP addresses do not change.



No changes here, static network configuration, so that should not pose 
problems. (My network only has 4 machines, so DHCP is not needed, at 
least atm i don't need it :) )



In /etc/exim4, create a file owned by root called hubbed_hosts. In the
file, each line maps a "domain" (the part after the @ sign in an email
address) to a "host" (the name of a machine on your network, as it can
be reached from this machine). Put the domain first, then a tab
character (spaces may also be OK) and then the host. So for example I
have a machine on my network called affinity, and so in the hubbed_hosts
file on the machine I am sitting in front of now, I have two lines, one
saying "affinity.localaffinity.local", and the other saying
"affinityaffinity.local" (no quotes in the file). This tells the
local exim installation that any email address with @affinity.local as
the domain should be forwarded on to a machine called affinity.local,
and any mail with @affinity as the domain should be forwarded on to a
machine called affinity.local. Exim4 will then say "Connect to
affinity.local!" with no attempt to translate that into an IP address,
and Avahi daemon will answer "that is IP address WW.XX.YY.ZZ!" to which
exim will say "very well, connect to WW.XX.YY.ZZ!" and the exim4 on
affinity will wake up and co-operate to deliver the mail.


I just did that and now mailing works flawlessly :D
Just one questions: Why do i need hubbed_host entries? Should it not be fine
alone to make a entry in /etc/hosts for the machines i want to send mail to
(I do not operate a dedicated DNS server).
This is something i dont really understand...


I'd suggest you try it and look at the logs.



I will try that out, exim has a pretty nice logging format i think ;)

Greets

mo

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[Clive Menzies]

On 01/10/16 12:39, mo wrote:



Am 01.10.2016 um 13:22 schrieb Brian:

On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 12:36:10 +0200, mo wrote:

I just figured out how to get this working myself a week or two 
back, so

it's fresh in my mind. The key trick is the use of "hubbed hosts".


Did you follow a specific book or guide?


The manual for exim4-config_files is the first place to look.



I will look into the manual.
I also found a book about exim from O'Reilly, it's quite old (2001) 
but i guess i can get some info out of it.



Exim configuration has the concept of "routers" and "transports".
Routers basically decide what to do with a message, and transports do
it. One of the routers configured by default in the Debian exim
configuration is for "hubbed hosts". What this means, is machines
capable of sending and receiving email ("hosts" in exim speak) that 
are

on the same LAN as this machine (connected by a "hub"). Note that this
"hub" could be your local home network router, and for these purposes
machines on WiFi and machines on a wired LAN would be considered on 
the

same hub, even though that isn't strictly true. The point is that
network packets can be addressed directly between the machines, they
don't require a router in between.



As far as i do understand this is that only machines which are 
defined as
hubbed hosts can be send mail in the local LAN? Or am i 
misunderstanding

something here? :)


hubbed_hosts can send mail wherever you want. For example:

  example.com: smtp.example.com

would send mail to someone at example.com through smtp.example.com
(which could be a smarthost).



Got it, thanks ;)

In Debian, this is achieved with Avahi. This is what allows you, if 
you

have MachineA and MachineB on your network, to do for example "ping
MachineA.local" from MachineB and expect MachineA.local to be resolved
into an IP address.



I'm not a friend of avahi to be honest, i much rather ignore it :D


Let's hope your IP addresses do not change.



No changes here, static network configuration, so that should not pose 
problems. (My network only has 4 machines, so DHCP is not needed, at 
least atm i don't need it :) )



In /etc/exim4, create a file owned by root called hubbed_hosts. In the
file, each line maps a "domain" (the part after the @ sign in an email
address) to a "host" (the name of a machine on your network, as it can
be reached from this machine). Put the domain first, then a tab
character (spaces may also be OK) and then the host. So for example I
have a machine on my network called affinity, and so in the 
hubbed_hosts
file on the machine I am sitting in front of now, I have two lines, 
one

saying "affinity.localaffinity.local", and the other saying
"affinityaffinity.local" (no quotes in the file). This tells the
local exim installation that any email address with @affinity.local as
the domain should be forwarded on to a machine called affinity.local,
and any mail with @affinity as the domain should be forwarded on to a
machine called affinity.local. Exim4 will then say "Connect to
affinity.local!" with no attempt to translate that into an IP address,
and Avahi daemon will answer "that is IP address WW.XX.YY.ZZ!" to 
which

exim will say "very well, connect to WW.XX.YY.ZZ!" and the exim4 on
affinity will wake up and co-operate to deliver the mail.


I just did that and now mailing works flawlessly :D
Just one questions: Why do i need hubbed_host entries? Should it not 
be fine
alone to make a entry in /etc/hosts for the machines i want to send 
mail to

(I do not operate a dedicated DNS server).
This is something i dont really understand...


I'd suggest you try it and look at the logs.



I will try that out, exim has a pretty nice logging format i think ;)



Hi Mo

I tried to send this with a .pdf yesterday d'oh! Anyway, we've just 
reinstalled our servers with mail and automated backup and updated our 
notes. They're not finalised and hence not on the web yet but you can 
access them here:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63603283/InstallationNotes2016.9.24.pdf

Bit's of it may help.

Regards

Clive

--
Clive Menzies
http://freecriticalthinking.org

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[mo]

Am 01.10.2016 um 13:36 schrieb Mark Fletcher:

On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 11:06:07AM +0200, mo wrote:


I think i should elaborate a little more on my setup.. i guess i did not
make that very clear in the first place, sorry about that.

My network is consisting of the following systems:

Main PC - 192.168.23.11  (Running Debian Jessie)
Server  - 192.168.23.200 (Running Debian Jessie)

The server is always online, the PC is only half of the day on.

What i want to do now is the following:

Sending mail from my Main PC to my Server and also the other way around,
from the Server to my Main PC.
The Server should also be able to send mail to the "outside" (Meaning to
other SMTP servers).
The second requirement is optional since i dont own a domain and all this is
sitting locally at my home. The most important thing for me is to send and
receive mail from both systems in my home network.
I hope this made my problem a little clearer :)



Right. So you get mail going back and forth between your two machines,
server and PC, by creating and populating the hubbed_hosts file I
talked about in my previous mail, on both machines, pointing at each
other of course.


I created the hubbed_hosts file under /etc/exim4 and it now works fine, 
i can send mail from my server to my pc and vice versa :)



If you want to ping the server from the client, you should be able to do
"ping server.local" from your PC (obviously replace the actual name of
your server, which you didn't include in your mail, where I put server).
What is happening if you do that is your PC is saying "get me the
address of server.local!" and the Avahi daemon on your PC either already
knows that, or sends out a broadcast message to your network saying "is
there a server.local in the house???". The Avahi daemon running on the
server responds to that saying "yes, I'm here, and my IP address is
192.168.23.200!". The Avahi daemon on your PC responds to whatever did
the asking (ping in this case) with the required IP. Ping then requests
that packets be sent to IP address quoted. By this mechanism computers
on the same LAN can communicate with each other peer to peer without
fannying around with full-blown DNS, which is what Avahi is for. That is
installed by the Jessie installer by default as far as I can tell, so
both your machines should have it. It doesn't require any configuration,
so if you haven't touched it, it should work as I have described.
Although obviously, you have to substitute the real names for your
server and PC (but you *do* require the .local unless you have configured
Avahi to use something else)


I'm currently not using avahi as a matter of fact, but it works all fine 
without it ;)
(I have static entries in the /etc/hosts file for my server and for the 
pc - on each system of course)
I have never really worked with avahi... i kinda ask myself why do i 
need it if i can just use DNS or static entries in /etc/hosts. 
/etc/nsswitch.conf is also configured to lookup the /etc/hosts file first.
I know this question is OT, but since you mentioned avahi maybe i can 
ask you what kind of benefits avahi can offer me? :)

(I'm having a statically configured network with 4 machines)


If you used the default config of exim4 the hubbed_hosts router is set
up and waiting to be used. All you need to do to enable it is to
populate the hubbed_hosts file as I described. The other thing you need
to do is follow Liam's advice, except importantly what needs to be set
there is the "domain" of the local PC (on the local PC) or the server
(on the server) only. So the PC will accept mail for pc.local (or
whatever your pc is called) and the server for server.local (or whatever
the server is called). Then, you will be able to email yourself at the
server from the PC by sending a mail to mo@server.local, where I am
assuming your user name on the server is mo and the server's machine
name is server. Obviously you would substitute real names. And to go the
other way, from the server, you could send a mail to yourself on the PC
by mailing mo@pc.local.


I have asked that before i believe, sorry if this question shows up 
twice But why do i even need to set up hubbed_hosts?
I don't really understand why... Should exim not consider the /etc/hosts 
file to resolve the ip of my pc or server (Which i have entered there)
Also i have seen (before it worked) in the log that i get a "destination 
unreachable"... I just don't understand why exim needs to rely on the 
hubbed_hosts being set up?
(I hope you can understand what i mean, if not i will try my best to 
make it clearer :D )



Let's take a moment to go through what happens if you send a mail from
PC to server with everything set up as it should be.

On the PC you create a mail and address it to mo@server.local. Let's
imagine you use mutt to create it. And let's assume mutt is using its
default configuration to send the mail, which is to call sendmail. And,
since you have installed exim4, exim has overridden sendmail 

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[Mark Fletcher]

On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 01:39:47PM +0200, mo wrote:
> 
> 
> Am 01.10.2016 um 13:22 schrieb Brian:
> >On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 12:36:10 +0200, mo wrote:
> >
> >>
> >>I just did that and now mailing works flawlessly :D
> >>Just one questions: Why do i need hubbed_host entries? Should it not be fine
> >>alone to make a entry in /etc/hosts for the machines i want to send mail to
> >>(I do not operate a dedicated DNS server).
> >>This is something i dont really understand...
> >
> >I'd suggest you try it and look at the logs.

Watch out, you may piss off your ISP if you repeatedly send emails it 
can't deliver. They'll make their displeasure felt by not delivering 
_any_ mails for you for a while. My suggestion is get local delivery 
working first, then turn attention to mails outside.

Mark

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[Mark Fletcher]

On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 11:01:17AM +0100, Brian wrote:
> On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 11:06:07 +0200, mo wrote:
> 
> > First of all:
> > Thank you Liam for your help! :)
> > Thanks for the very nice and long explanation Mark! :)
> > 
> > I think i should elaborate a little more on my setup.. i guess i did not
> > make that very clear in the first place, sorry about that.
> > 
> > My network is consisting of the following systems:
> > 
> > Main PC - 192.168.23.11  (Running Debian Jessie)
> > Server  - 192.168.23.200 (Running Debian Jessie)
> > 
> > The server is always online, the PC is only half of the day on.
> > 
> > What i want to do now is the following:
> > 
> > Sending mail from my Main PC to my Server and also the other way around,
> > from the Server to my Main PC.
> > The Server should also be able to send mail to the "outside" (Meaning to
> > other SMTP servers).
> > The second requirement is optional since i dont own a domain and all this is
> > sitting locally at my home. The most important thing for me is to send and
> > receive mail from both systems in my home network.
> > I hope this made my problem a little clearer :)
> > 
> > I'm a little ashamed to say that, but i could not totally follow your
> > explanations Mark... I'm quite a newbie when it comes to SMTP.. sorry :(
> 
> Assuming the server hostname is "server".
> 
> 1. On Main PC use your editor to create /etc/exim4/hubbed_hosts. In it
>put
> 
>server: 192.168.23.200
> 
>in it and restart exim4.
> 
> 2. Send mail to user@server.
> 
> 3. You can replace 'server: 192.168.23.200' with 'server: server.local'
>if avahi-daemon is running on both machines.
> 

No colons as separators in hubbed_hosts, to my knowledge. Use spaces or tabs.

Mark

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[mo]

Hi Mo


Hi Clive :)


I tried to send this with a .pdf yesterday d'oh! Anyway, we've just
reinstalled our servers with mail and automated backup and updated our
notes. They're not finalised and hence not on the web yet but you can
access them here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63603283/InstallationNotes2016.9.24.pdf

Bit's of it may help.


It sure does! I quickly scanned over the pdf and the mail part is quite 
interesting for me, thanks a lot! ;)


Btw: Nice setup you got there! :)



Regards

Clive



Greets

mo

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[mo]

Am 01.10.2016 um 14:00 schrieb Mark Fletcher:

On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 01:39:47PM +0200, mo wrote:



Am 01.10.2016 um 13:22 schrieb Brian:

On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 12:36:10 +0200, mo wrote:



I just did that and now mailing works flawlessly :D
Just one questions: Why do i need hubbed_host entries? Should it not be fine
alone to make a entry in /etc/hosts for the machines i want to send mail to
(I do not operate a dedicated DNS server).
This is something i dont really understand...


I'd suggest you try it and look at the logs.


Watch out, you may piss off your ISP if you repeatedly send emails it
can't deliver. They'll make their displeasure felt by not delivering
_any_ mails for you for a while. My suggestion is get local delivery
working first, then turn attention to mails outside.



Thanks for the hint Mark :)
So far i only tried it twice, i think i'm save for the moment. :D haha


Mark

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[mo]

Am 01.10.2016 um 14:02 schrieb Mark Fletcher:

On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 11:01:17AM +0100, Brian wrote:

On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 11:06:07 +0200, mo wrote:


First of all:
Thank you Liam for your help! :)
Thanks for the very nice and long explanation Mark! :)

I think i should elaborate a little more on my setup.. i guess i did not
make that very clear in the first place, sorry about that.

My network is consisting of the following systems:

Main PC - 192.168.23.11  (Running Debian Jessie)
Server  - 192.168.23.200 (Running Debian Jessie)

The server is always online, the PC is only half of the day on.

What i want to do now is the following:

Sending mail from my Main PC to my Server and also the other way around,
from the Server to my Main PC.
The Server should also be able to send mail to the "outside" (Meaning to
other SMTP servers).
The second requirement is optional since i dont own a domain and all this is
sitting locally at my home. The most important thing for me is to send and
receive mail from both systems in my home network.
I hope this made my problem a little clearer :)

I'm a little ashamed to say that, but i could not totally follow your
explanations Mark... I'm quite a newbie when it comes to SMTP.. sorry :(


Assuming the server hostname is "server".

1. On Main PC use your editor to create /etc/exim4/hubbed_hosts. In it
   put

   server: 192.168.23.200

   in it and restart exim4.

2. Send mail to user@server.

3. You can replace 'server: 192.168.23.200' with 'server: server.local'
   if avahi-daemon is running on both machines.



No colons as separators in hubbed_hosts, to my knowledge. Use spaces or tabs.


I have colones in the hubbed_hosts file... seems to work.
I just tested it: It works with or without the colon. Maybe this is 
interesting to know ;)



Mark

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[rhkramer]

On Saturday, October 01, 2016 05:06:07 AM mo wrote:
> My network is consisting of the following systems:
> 
> Main PC - 192.168.23.11  (Running Debian Jessie)
> Server  - 192.168.23.200 (Running Debian Jessie)
> 
> The server is always online, the PC is only half of the day on.
> 
> What i want to do now is the following:
> 
> Sending mail from my Main PC to my Server and also the other way around,
> from the Server to my Main PC.
> The Server should also be able to send mail to the "outside" (Meaning to
> other SMTP servers).
> The second requirement is optional since i dont own a domain and all
> this is sitting locally at my home. The most important thing for me is
> to send and receive mail from both systems in my home network.
> I hope this made my problem a little clearer :)
> 
> I'm a little ashamed to say that, but i could not totally follow your
> explanations Mark... I'm quite a newbie when it comes to SMTP.. sorry :(
> 
> Thanks again for all your help ;)

Here is how I do something similar (I don't need to get all emails to both 
systems), and some other alternatives:

What I do now:

   * On my main desktop (which I normally use to send and receive emails), I 
use kmail, which I consider a "Windows style" email client (because I don't 
know what else to call it--it sends email via SMTP and receives email via 
POP3--it (the PC) doesn't use anything like an MTA (e.g., postfix)) and is set 
to delete emails from the server).  

My email provider / server is Google (which I don't really like because of the 
insecurity, but I started using it a long time ago and haven't bothered to 
switch)--for really confidential emails I use encryption).  

On the other PC, which I use only rarely to receive or send emails, I use a 
browser to access my google mail account.  Even though I set kmail on the 
other PC to delete emails from the server, google keeps them in the "all mail" 
file for something like 30 days.  (Aside: I forget how emails sent from the 
second PC get to the first--I'll have to test that--they do seem to get there.)

Other alternatives:

   * Use, for example, kmail on both PCs, but use something like rsync to keep 
the mail folders in sync on both PCs.

   * 

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[Brian]

On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 14:09:19 +0200, mo wrote:

> Am 01.10.2016 um 14:02 schrieb Mark Fletcher:
> >
> >No colons as separators in hubbed_hosts, to my knowledge. Use spaces or tabs.
> 
> I have colones in the hubbed_hosts file... seems to work.
> I just tested it: It works with or without the colon. Maybe this is
> interesting to know ;)

Please see exim4-config_files(5).

-- 
Brian.

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[mo]

Am 01.10.2016 um 14:20 schrieb Brian:

On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 14:09:19 +0200, mo wrote:


Am 01.10.2016 um 14:02 schrieb Mark Fletcher:


No colons as separators in hubbed_hosts, to my knowledge. Use spaces or tabs.


I have colones in the hubbed_hosts file... seems to work.
I just tested it: It works with or without the colon. Maybe this is
interesting to know ;)


Please see exim4-config_files(5).



Just looked into the man page, indeed a colon is required there. ;)

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[Mark Fletcher]

On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 12:36:10PM +0200, mo wrote:
> 
> Did you follow a specific book or guide?

Google "debian exim4 configuration". And look at the upstream 
documentation in package exim4-doc-html.

> 
> >Exim configuration has the concept of "routers" and "transports".
> >Routers basically decide what to do with a message, and transports do
> >it. One of the routers configured by default in the Debian exim
> >configuration is for "hubbed hosts". What this means, is machines
> >capable of sending and receiving email ("hosts" in exim speak) that are
> >on the same LAN as this machine (connected by a "hub"). Note that this
> >"hub" could be your local home network router, and for these purposes
> >machines on WiFi and machines on a wired LAN would be considered on the
> >same hub, even though that isn't strictly true. The point is that
> >network packets can be addressed directly between the machines, they
> >don't require a router in between.
> >
> 
> As far as i do understand this is that only machines which are defined as
> hubbed hosts can be send mail in the local LAN? Or am i misunderstanding
> something here? :)
> 

In essence yes you are right, because a local configuration of exim4 
would determine that the addresses are not local and not in 
hubbed_hosts, and tell you to eff off, while a smarthost configuration 
would attempt to use the smarthost to send to the local machine, which 
is doomed to failure, and the internet configuration would attempt to 
use DNS to find the local machine, which is also doomed to failure. 
Being in hubbed_hosts prevents exim4 for going looking for an MX record 
for the receiving host, which is guaranteed to fail for a machine that 
isn't registered to the world at large as an email server.

> >In Debian, this is achieved with Avahi. This is what allows you, if you
> >have MachineA and MachineB on your network, to do for example "ping
> >MachineA.local" from MachineB and expect MachineA.local to be resolved
> >into an IP address.
> >
> 
> I'm not a friend of avahi to be honest, i much rather ignore it :D

All I can do here is echo Brian. But also, even if you aren't its 
friend, ignoring it is fine, because it comes already configured and 
will just do its job whether it gets any love from you or not. I just 
assumed you'd like to know what is going on under the hood.

> 
> >In /etc/exim4, create a file owned by root called hubbed_hosts. In the
> >file, each line maps a "domain" (the part after the @ sign in an email
> >address) to a "host" (the name of a machine on your network, as it can
> >be reached from this machine). Put the domain first, then a tab
> >character (spaces may also be OK) and then the host. So for example I
> >have a machine on my network called affinity, and so in the hubbed_hosts
> >file on the machine I am sitting in front of now, I have two lines, one
> >saying "affinity.localaffinity.local", and the other saying
> >"affinityaffinity.local" (no quotes in the file). This tells the
> >local exim installation that any email address with @affinity.local as
> >the domain should be forwarded on to a machine called affinity.local,
> >and any mail with @affinity as the domain should be forwarded on to a
> >machine called affinity.local. Exim4 will then say "Connect to
> >affinity.local!" with no attempt to translate that into an IP address,
> >and Avahi daemon will answer "that is IP address WW.XX.YY.ZZ!" to which
> >exim will say "very well, connect to WW.XX.YY.ZZ!" and the exim4 on
> >affinity will wake up and co-operate to deliver the mail.
> 
> I just did that and now mailing works flawlessly :D
> Just one questions: Why do i need hubbed_host entries? Should it not be fine
> alone to make a entry in /etc/hosts for the machines i want to send mail to
> (I do not operate a dedicated DNS server).
> This is something i dont really understand...

hubbed_host entries apply only to exim4. I also suspect, but am not 
sure, that they are a Debian extension to exim4 in the sense that the 
*DEBIAN* exim4 comes configured for them out of the box, while the 
upstream exim4 does not. IIRC there is no reference to hubbed_hosts in 
the upstream documentation, only in the Debian docs.

They work because the debian config contains a router to handle hubbed 
hosts. You can see what it is doing if you search 
/var/lib/exim4/config.autogenerated for the text hubbed_hosts.

If the file is not populated this router is skipped and then exim4 
requires either that the address is the local machine, or that there is 
a smarthost configured that it can delegate to, or that it can find an 
official MX entry for the target domain by doing a DNS lookup. All of 
which will fail for a local box that isn't registered to the world as a 
mail server.

Mark

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[mo]

Am 01.10.2016 um 14:23 schrieb Mark Fletcher:

On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 12:36:10PM +0200, mo wrote:


Did you follow a specific book or guide?


Google "debian exim4 configuration". And look at the upstream
documentation in package exim4-doc-html.



I will do so ;)




Exim configuration has the concept of "routers" and "transports".
Routers basically decide what to do with a message, and transports do
it. One of the routers configured by default in the Debian exim
configuration is for "hubbed hosts". What this means, is machines
capable of sending and receiving email ("hosts" in exim speak) that are
on the same LAN as this machine (connected by a "hub"). Note that this
"hub" could be your local home network router, and for these purposes
machines on WiFi and machines on a wired LAN would be considered on the
same hub, even though that isn't strictly true. The point is that
network packets can be addressed directly between the machines, they
don't require a router in between.



As far as i do understand this is that only machines which are defined as
hubbed hosts can be send mail in the local LAN? Or am i misunderstanding
something here? :)



In essence yes you are right, because a local configuration of exim4
would determine that the addresses are not local and not in
hubbed_hosts, and tell you to eff off, while a smarthost configuration
would attempt to use the smarthost to send to the local machine, which
is doomed to failure, and the internet configuration would attempt to
use DNS to find the local machine, which is also doomed to failure.
Being in hubbed_hosts prevents exim4 for going looking for an MX record
for the receiving host, which is guaranteed to fail for a machine that
isn't registered to the world at large as an email server.



Alright, i finally go it ;) Thanks for the explanation Mark! :)


In Debian, this is achieved with Avahi. This is what allows you, if you
have MachineA and MachineB on your network, to do for example "ping
MachineA.local" from MachineB and expect MachineA.local to be resolved
into an IP address.



I'm not a friend of avahi to be honest, i much rather ignore it :D


All I can do here is echo Brian. But also, even if you aren't its
friend, ignoring it is fine, because it comes already configured and
will just do its job whether it gets any love from you or not. I just
assumed you'd like to know what is going on under the hood.


I sure appreciate to know the inner workings of it all :)
Good to know how avahi is involved here, this paints me a clearer picture :)




In /etc/exim4, create a file owned by root called hubbed_hosts. In the
file, each line maps a "domain" (the part after the @ sign in an email
address) to a "host" (the name of a machine on your network, as it can
be reached from this machine). Put the domain first, then a tab
character (spaces may also be OK) and then the host. So for example I
have a machine on my network called affinity, and so in the hubbed_hosts
file on the machine I am sitting in front of now, I have two lines, one
saying "affinity.localaffinity.local", and the other saying
"affinityaffinity.local" (no quotes in the file). This tells the
local exim installation that any email address with @affinity.local as
the domain should be forwarded on to a machine called affinity.local,
and any mail with @affinity as the domain should be forwarded on to a
machine called affinity.local. Exim4 will then say "Connect to
affinity.local!" with no attempt to translate that into an IP address,
and Avahi daemon will answer "that is IP address WW.XX.YY.ZZ!" to which
exim will say "very well, connect to WW.XX.YY.ZZ!" and the exim4 on
affinity will wake up and co-operate to deliver the mail.


I just did that and now mailing works flawlessly :D
Just one questions: Why do i need hubbed_host entries? Should it not be fine
alone to make a entry in /etc/hosts for the machines i want to send mail to
(I do not operate a dedicated DNS server).
This is something i dont really understand...


hubbed_host entries apply only to exim4. I also suspect, but am not
sure, that they are a Debian extension to exim4 in the sense that the
*DEBIAN* exim4 comes configured for them out of the box, while the
upstream exim4 does not. IIRC there is no reference to hubbed_hosts in
the upstream documentation, only in the Debian docs.

They work because the debian config contains a router to handle hubbed
hosts. You can see what it is doing if you search
/var/lib/exim4/config.autogenerated for the text hubbed_hosts.


I will consult the Debian docs, currently reading over the wiki page of 
exim :)



If the file is not populated this router is skipped and then exim4
requires either that the address is the local machine, or that there is
a smarthost configured that it can delegate to, or that it can find an
official MX entry for the target domain by doing a DNS lookup. All of
which will fail for a local box that isn't registered to the world as a
mail server.


I see, thanks for t

Re: Recommendation: Backup system

[Mark Fletcher]

On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 11:37:31AM +0200, mo wrote:
> Hi Debian users :)
> 
> Information:
> Distributor ID:   Debian
> Description:  Debian GNU/Linux 8.6 (jessie)
> Release:  8.6
> Codename: jessie
> 
> As the title say i'm in search for a backup application/system.
> Currently i manage my backups with a little script that i wrote... but it
> does not really serve my needs anymore.
> I want to be able to make backups on my main PC and also on my server, the
> backups i would then store on my NAS.
> 
> Make a long story short:
> Have you guys a recommendation for me?
> Is there a specific application you use for your backups guys?

I know Gene is a fan of Amanda, I have it on my list to try it out 
myself based on positive remarks he has made about it in the past.

Mark

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[Mark Fletcher]

On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 02:33:27PM +0200, mo wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> I sure appreciate to know the inner workings of it all :)
> Good to know how avahi is involved here, this paints me a clearer picture :)
> 

I just want to correct one thing I said here, having read your other 
posts. In one of them you mentioned you have static routing mappings set 
up for your network machines in /etc/hosts. That is a perfectly valid 
setup, albeit it is not the default "Debian way" (by which I mean only 
that it is not how Debian comes configured out of the box, or more 
accurately out of the .iso) and not how I do it. What a pain if you buy 
a new computer to add to your network! But absolutely nothing invalid 
about it.

In this case, Avahi is probably *not* involved because exim4 gets an 
answer to the question of what IP the host name maps to, without having 
to consult it. But it *would be* involved if you did not have static 
mappings set up in /etc/hosts.

Mark

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[Mark Fletcher]

On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 02:24:16PM +0200, mo wrote:
> 
> 
> Am 01.10.2016 um 14:20 schrieb Brian:
> >On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 14:09:19 +0200, mo wrote:
> >
> >>Am 01.10.2016 um 14:02 schrieb Mark Fletcher:
> >>>
> >>>No colons as separators in hubbed_hosts, to my knowledge. Use spaces or 
> >>>tabs.
> >>
> >>I have colones in the hubbed_hosts file... seems to work.
> >>I just tested it: It works with or without the colon. Maybe this is
> >>interesting to know ;)
> >
> >Please see exim4-config_files(5).
> >
> 
> Just looked into the man page, indeed a colon is required there. ;)
> 

No, it isn't. I don't use colons in my hubbed_hosts file.

Mark

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[Brian]

On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 21:23:33 +0900, Mark Fletcher wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 12:36:10PM +0200, mo wrote:
> > 
> > I just did that and now mailing works flawlessly :D
> > Just one questions: Why do i need hubbed_host entries? Should it not be fine
> > alone to make a entry in /etc/hosts for the machines i want to send mail to
> > (I do not operate a dedicated DNS server).
> > This is something i dont really understand...
> 
> hubbed_host entries apply only to exim4. I also suspect, but am not 
> sure, that they are a Debian extension to exim4 in the sense that the 
> *DEBIAN* exim4 comes configured for them out of the box, while the 
> upstream exim4 does not. IIRC there is no reference to hubbed_hosts in 
> the upstream documentation, only in the Debian docs.

Correct. I'll add: the upstream documentation spec.txt.gz covers
hubbed_hosts in sections 20.3 to 20.7. It is not obligatory to read it.

> They work because the debian config contains a router to handle hubbed 
> hosts. You can see what it is doing if you search 
> /var/lib/exim4/config.autogenerated for the text hubbed_hosts.

Fine.

> If the file is not populated this router is skipped and then exim4 
> requires either that the address is the local machine, or that there is 
> a smarthost configured that it can delegate to, or that it can find an 
> official MX entry for the target domain by doing a DNS lookup. All of 
> which will fail for a local box that isn't registered to the world as a 
> mail server.

The thing for Mo to grasp is that exim *always* does an MX lookup, often
using the ISP's DNS server. user@server will fail (as has been found
out) because the domain "server" is not in the DNS.

/etc/hosts is not consulted when the lookup is done. exim can be made to
look at /etc/hosts but for such a simple setup it is not worth the
effort and would likely lead to a world of pain.

-- 
Brian.

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[mo]

Am 01.10.2016 um 14:51 schrieb Mark Fletcher:

On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 02:33:27PM +0200, mo wrote:




I sure appreciate to know the inner workings of it all :)
Good to know how avahi is involved here, this paints me a clearer picture :)



I just want to correct one thing I said here, having read your other
posts. In one of them you mentioned you have static routing mappings set
up for your network machines in /etc/hosts. That is a perfectly valid
setup, albeit it is not the default "Debian way" (by which I mean only
that it is not how Debian comes configured out of the box, or more
accurately out of the .iso) and not how I do it. What a pain if you buy
a new computer to add to your network! But absolutely nothing invalid
about it.


Well i'm using the static network config since quite some time, but i 
had planned to change over to DHCP... But for now it works ;)
(The work is not so hard, adding a machine to the network is done 
quickly with Debian ;) - My other machines use different Operating 
Systems, got FreeBSD and OpenBSD here to on the LAN, works like a charm :) )



In this case, Avahi is probably *not* involved because exim4 gets an
answer to the question of what IP the host name maps to, without having
to consult it. But it *would be* involved if you did not have static
mappings set up in /etc/hosts.


Good to know ;)


Mark



Thanks Mark ;)

Greets

mo

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[mo]

Am 01.10.2016 um 14:56 schrieb Brian:

On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 21:23:33 +0900, Mark Fletcher wrote:


On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 12:36:10PM +0200, mo wrote:


I just did that and now mailing works flawlessly :D
Just one questions: Why do i need hubbed_host entries? Should it not be fine
alone to make a entry in /etc/hosts for the machines i want to send mail to
(I do not operate a dedicated DNS server).
This is something i dont really understand...


hubbed_host entries apply only to exim4. I also suspect, but am not
sure, that they are a Debian extension to exim4 in the sense that the
*DEBIAN* exim4 comes configured for them out of the box, while the
upstream exim4 does not. IIRC there is no reference to hubbed_hosts in
the upstream documentation, only in the Debian docs.


Correct. I'll add: the upstream documentation spec.txt.gz covers
hubbed_hosts in sections 20.3 to 20.7. It is not obligatory to read it.


They work because the debian config contains a router to handle hubbed
hosts. You can see what it is doing if you search
/var/lib/exim4/config.autogenerated for the text hubbed_hosts.


Fine.


If the file is not populated this router is skipped and then exim4
requires either that the address is the local machine, or that there is
a smarthost configured that it can delegate to, or that it can find an
official MX entry for the target domain by doing a DNS lookup. All of
which will fail for a local box that isn't registered to the world as a
mail server.


The thing for Mo to grasp is that exim *always* does an MX lookup, often
using the ISP's DNS server. user@server will fail (as has been found
out) because the domain "server" is not in the DNS.

/etc/hosts is not consulted when the lookup is done. exim can be made to
look at /etc/hosts but for such a simple setup it is not worth the
effort and would likely lead to a world of pain.


just out of curiosity:
What did i have to do to make exim honor the /etc/hosts file? :)
(I quite often find myself in the world of pain :D )

Greets

mo

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[mo]

Am 01.10.2016 um 14:52 schrieb Mark Fletcher:

On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 02:24:16PM +0200, mo wrote:



Am 01.10.2016 um 14:20 schrieb Brian:

On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 14:09:19 +0200, mo wrote:


Am 01.10.2016 um 14:02 schrieb Mark Fletcher:


No colons as separators in hubbed_hosts, to my knowledge. Use spaces or tabs.


I have colones in the hubbed_hosts file... seems to work.
I just tested it: It works with or without the colon. Maybe this is
interesting to know ;)


Please see exim4-config_files(5).



Just looked into the man page, indeed a colon is required there. ;)



No, it isn't. I don't use colons in my hubbed_hosts file.


Both works actually. I Just tried it. But the man pages uses colons.. 
seems like it works fine with or without ;)



Mark



Greets

mo

Re: Recommendation: Backup system

[mo]

Am 01.10.2016 um 14:40 schrieb Mark Fletcher:

On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 11:37:31AM +0200, mo wrote:

Hi Debian users :)

Information:
Distributor ID: Debian
Description:Debian GNU/Linux 8.6 (jessie)
Release:8.6
Codename:   jessie

As the title say i'm in search for a backup application/system.
Currently i manage my backups with a little script that i wrote... but it
does not really serve my needs anymore.
I want to be able to make backups on my main PC and also on my server, the
backups i would then store on my NAS.

Make a long story short:
Have you guys a recommendation for me?
Is there a specific application you use for your backups guys?


I know Gene is a fan of Amanda, I have it on my list to try it out
myself based on positive remarks he has made about it in the past.


Sounds good to me :) - I'll set that on the todo list myself to (Just 
checked the webpage of Amanda and it does sound pretty good!).


Gene, can you elaborate on Amanda? :) (If Gene does read this mail)


Mark



Greets

mo

Re: Canon printer minor quibble

[Brian]

On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 08:34:34 +0900, Mark Fletcher wrote:

> Libtiff4 is a little bit more interesting. "aptitude why" says that it 
> is installed because the Canon printer driver needs it (by the way 
> libjpeg8 did *not* say that the Canon printer driver needed it) and 
> nothing else. So I'm less sure about what it was doing on my system 
> before this. But, happily, it was there.

The Canon printer driver does not depend on libjpeg8. It is libtiff4
which does.

Regarding the darker colors with the Gutenprint driver: does setting
Color Model to CMYK make any difference?

-- 
Brian.

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[Mark Fletcher]

On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 01:56:40PM +0100, Brian wrote:

> The thing for Mo to grasp is that exim *always* does an MX lookup, often
> using the ISP's DNS server. user@server will fail (as has been found
> out) because the domain "server" is not in the DNS.
> 
> /etc/hosts is not consulted when the lookup is done. exim can be made to
> look at /etc/hosts but for such a simple setup it is not worth the
> effort and would likely lead to a world of pain.
> 

With great respect I think that confuses the issue. A DNS lookup will 
*not* explicitly get done by exim4 if the target domain is in 
hubbed_hosts, or if exim4 has been told it is the local domain. The 
point is one wishes to PREVENT a DNS lookup that is doomed to fail, and 
one does so for machines that are not the machine-local domain by 
putting them in hubbed_hosts, which will cause exim4 to throw out a 
connection request for the local network infrastructure (starting with 
the network infra on the local machine) to handle, without doing an 
explicit DNS lookup. That is handled by /etc/hosts if it is populated, 
and by Avahi if it is present and /etc/hosts is not populated, and no 
doubt by a few other alternatives I am not familiar with as well. If 
none of them succeed, the delivery will fail, because if I recall 
correctly hubbed_hosts router config ends with no_more which prevents 
other routers having a go.

However, for domains NOT listed in hubbed_hosts, if not in smarthost 
mode, yes exim4's next move will be an explicit DNS lookup on the 
domain. It is trying to find out what *machine* it should contact to 
make the delivery to that domain. If it is in smarthost mode, it throws 
its hands in the air and passes the problem to the smarthost to solve.

Mark

Re: exim4 some config error causing error how to pinpoint

[Harry Putnam]

Liam O'Toole  writes:

[...]

>> When I try to send a message from USER@HOST2 to USER@HOST1, instead of
>> just delivering to USER@HOST1 it appears to be sending that message on
>> to the gmail smtp server.
>>
>> The local lan is not a real FQDN so not suprising that the gmail
>> server cannot deliver it but how to prevent that local mail from
>> being sent to gmail server to start with?
>>
>>
>
> You need to tell exim4 on HOST1 that it is the 'final destination' for
> emails within your local network. If you go back through the debconf
> questions for exim4-config, you'll be asked about 'Other destinations
> for which mail is accepted'. In your case the answer should be
> '*.local.lan'. Then local emails will no longer be forwarded upstream.
> Obviously, you will need to ensure that the various local fully
> qualified domain names are resolvable, either by running your own DNS or
> maintaining /etc/host files correctly.

Thank you.  That fixed HOST1.  Still haven't worked out how to be able
to send mail from a user@HOST2 to a user@HOST1 (both inside home lan ).

With the setting you suggest above... mail from user@HOST2 to
user@HOST1 fails with smtp output:

  sending like this:
  mailx -v -s "TEST 161001_092048 d2" ha...@dv.local.lan < ~/txtmsg.txt
  LOG: MAIN
<= ha...@d2.local.lan U=harry P=local S=442
  delivering 1bqKDj-9o-AK
  R: smarthost for ha...@dv.local.lan
  T: remote_smtp_smarthost for ha...@dv.local.lan
  LOG: MAIN
** ha...@dv.local.lan R=smarthost T=remote_smtp_smarthost: retry time not 
reached for any host after a long failure period
  LOG: MAIN
<= <> R=1bqKDj-9o-AK U=Debian-exim P=local S=1680
  LOG: MAIN
Completed
  delivering 1bqKDj-9s-Hi
  R: system_aliases for ha...@d2.local.lan
  R: userforward for ha...@d2.local.lan
  R: procmail for ha...@d2.local.lan
  R: maildrop for ha...@d2.local.lan
  R: lowuid_aliases for ha...@d2.local.lan (UID 1000)
  R: local_user for ha...@d2.local.lan
  T: appendfile for ha...@d2.local.lan
  LOG: MAIN
=> harry  R=local_user T=mail_spool
  LOG: MAIN
Completed

And from /var/log/exim4/mainlog:

  2016-10-01 09:20:51 1bqKDj-9o-AK <= ha...@d2.local.lan U=harry P=local 
S=442
  2016-10-01 09:20:51 1bqKDj-9o-AK ** ha...@dv.local.lan R=smarthost 
T=remote_smtp_smarthost: retry time not reached for any host after a long 
failure period
  2016-10-01 09:20:51 1bqKDj-9s-Hi <= <> R=1bqKDj-9o-AK U=Debian-exim 
P=local S=1680
  2016-10-01 09:20:51 1bqKDj-9o-AK Completed
  2016-10-01 09:20:51 1bqKDj-9s-Hi => harry  
R=local_user T=mail_spool
  2016-10-01 09:20:51 1bqKDj-9s-Hi Completed

I think those ouputs mean that the local mail being sent from HOST2 to
HOST1 is still attempting to be sent to smtp.gmail.com (The smarthost
for HOST1)

I have HOST2 set like this in /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf:

  dc_eximconfig_configtype='smarthost'
  dc_other_hostnames=''
  dc_local_interfaces='127.0.0.1 ; ::1'
  dc_readhost='d2.local.lan'  # (HOST2)
  dc_relay_domains=''
  dc_minimaldns='false'
  dc_relay_nets=''
  dc_smarthost='dv.local.lan' # (HOST1)
  CFILEMODE='644'
  dc_use_split_config='false'
  dc_hide_mailname='false'
  dc_mailname_in_oh='true'
  dc_localdelivery='mail_spool'

Is this wrong?  Is setting HOST1 as smarthost for HOST2 a mistake?

Contents of /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf on HOST1

  dc_eximconfig_configtype='smarthost'
  dc_other_hostnames='*.local.lan' # NOTE: This was supposed to tell
   # HOST1 that mail from the local
   # lan is to be delivered to local
   # users... not sent to smarthost 

  dc_local_interfaces='127.0.0.1 ; ::1'
  dc_readhost=''
  dc_relay_domains=''
  dc_minimaldns='false'
  dc_relay_nets='192.168.1.0/24'
  dc_smarthost='smtp.gmail.com::587'
  CFILEMODE='644'
  dc_use_split_config='false'
  dc_hide_mailname='false'
  dc_mailname_in_oh='true'
  dc_localdelivery='mail_spool'
  smtp_accept_queue_per_connection=300 

The attempted send from HOST2 to HOST1 does not appear in the
/var/log/exim4/mainlog on HOST1 at all.

I'm sorry to be so confused about setting this up... but am pretty
confused at this point.

Tip: debian-handbook > Debian Administrator's Handbook

[Cindy-Sue Causey]

Preface: AFTER writing all this up, it occurred to me to perform an
in-house email search to see if this had already been recently
addressed. Only 26 references total in some ~3.5GB of emails so I'm
going ahead and posting this as its own special highlight.

KEY THOUGHTS: .deb package, online ebook, hard copy purchase.

~

Hi.. This is another hit-n-run topic that seemed selfish to keep
self-contained. While running an "apt-cache search" query, I recently
tripped over the "debian-handbook" (.deb archived) package among the
tens of thousands of software packages Debian offers to its users. If
you download that package and install it *successfully* (e.g. I used
"apt-get install debian-handbook"), you should then be able to point a
favored browser to:

/usr/share/doc/debian-handbook/html/

In my case, that's Chromium at this second in time. Chromium
redirects/points that to:

file:///usr/share/doc/debian-handbook/html/

That page displays a decent sized list of the various languages
currently available. For a quick test drive, I opened the "ja-JP"
version which worked very well (because that font was previously
installed).

en-US US English version starts here (via classic index.html homepage):

/usr/share/doc/debian-handbook/html/en-US/index.html

Is this large (22.8MB) .deb archive package download for me, you ask?
The handbook answers with "2. Who Is this Book For?":

+ + BEGIN QUOTE FROM DEBIAN ADMINISTRATOR'S HANDBOOK + +

We tried to make this book useful for many categories of readers.
First, systems administrators (both beginners and experienced) will
find explanations about the installation and deployment of Debian on
many computers. They will also get a glimpse of most of the services
available on Debian, along with matching configuration instructions
and a description of the specifics coming from the distribution.
Understanding the mechanisms involved in Debian's development will
enable them to deal with unforeseen problems, knowing that they can
always find help within the community.

Users of another Linux distribution, or of another Unix variant, will
discover the specifics of Debian, and should become operational very
quickly while benefiting fully from the unique advantages of this
distribution.

Finally, readers who already have some knowledge of Debian and want to
know more about the community behind it should see their expectations
fulfilled. This book should make them much closer to joining us as
contributors.

+ + END QUOTE FROM DEBIAN ADMINISTRATOR'S HANDBOOK + +

>From my Shoes in answer to the same "Is this book for me?",
appearances are that it certainly couldn't hurt since it's presented
by Debian via even its most basic of installs possible (debootstrap).

Alternatively, that debian-handbook package download also points us to:

https://debian-handbook.info/get/

THAT page offers a *_CHOICE_* between reading an online ebook or
retrieving it otherwise. Rightly or wrongly, my interpretation of that
is that the second option MIGHT be presenting the possibility of a
hard copy purchase via Lulu.com (but I'm not quite sure because that's
out of my realm of #Life experiences).

Personally, I remain a huge fan of a hard copy book in hand, primarily
because computers occasionally become completely inoperable and thus
so do any downloaded ebooks included within. Of note, though, is that
I've seen the debian-handbook package upgrade several times in recent
weeks which quickly outdates an in-hand hard copy. Yes/no, that's been
nothing new to tech users for decades, but still, it was worth noting.

DISCLAIMER: If I have oopsied on which package ultimately installed
those documents, my apologies in advance. If someone would please then
specify the ultimately correct package name, that would be awesome.

Happy Debian'ing!

Cindy :)

-- 
Cindy-Sue Causey
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA

* runs with duct tape *

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[Teemu Likonen]

mo [2016-10-01 12:36:10+02] wrote:

> I'm not a friend of avahi to be honest, i much rather ignore it :D

Avahi is great. My ethernet-connected printer uses DHCP to get IP
address and network configuration. The printer announces itself to the
network with .local name so a print server can use that
name to connect to it. CUPS print server also announces its printers by
names. No static IP address configuration needed anywhere. I think the
underlying technique is called multicast DNS.

-- 
/// Teemu Likonen   - .-..    //
// PGP: 4E10 55DC 84E9 DFF6 13D7 8557 719D 69D3 2453 9450 ///


signature.asc
Description: PGP signature

Re: exim4 some config error causing error how to pinpoint

[Mark Fletcher]

On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 09:37:34AM -0400, Harry Putnam wrote:
> Thank you.  That fixed HOST1.  Still haven't worked out how to be able
> With the setting you suggest above... mail from user@HOST2 to
> user@HOST1 fails with smtp output:
> 
> 
> I'm sorry to be so confused about setting this up... but am pretty
> confused at this point.
> 

I suggest you read through the thread that is live right now in this 
list, started by mo and replied to by Liam, myself and Brian (plus a 
couple of others) about getting exim set up to deliver mail around a 
local network and to external addresses. The big clue to getting it 
working is "hubbed hosts".

Mark

Re: Canon printer minor quibble

[Mark Fletcher]

On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 02:28:30PM +0100, Brian wrote:
> On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 08:34:34 +0900, Mark Fletcher wrote:
> 
> > Libtiff4 is a little bit more interesting. "aptitude why" says that it 
> > is installed because the Canon printer driver needs it (by the way 
> > libjpeg8 did *not* say that the Canon printer driver needed it) and 
> > nothing else. So I'm less sure about what it was doing on my system 
> > before this. But, happily, it was there.
> 
> The Canon printer driver does not depend on libjpeg8. It is libtiff4
> which does.

Right, I get that (although I see why my reply might imply I didn't), 
but "aptitude why" is not acknowledging that dependency, which 
interested me... I guess it omits dependencies from things that are 
themselves automatically installed, perhaps?

> 
> Regarding the darker colors with the Gutenprint driver: does setting
> Color Model to CMYK make any difference?
> 

Out of curiosity I tried that last night. Actually more accurately I 
tried CMY, not CMYK. It made no difference. What is the K of CMYK? Cyan, 
Magenta, Yellow, Kick-Ass??? Is there any reason I should expect CMYK to 
do better than CMY or RGB?

Mark

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[mo]

Am 01.10.2016 um 15:36 schrieb Mark Fletcher:

On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 01:56:40PM +0100, Brian wrote:


The thing for Mo to grasp is that exim *always* does an MX lookup, often
using the ISP's DNS server. user@server will fail (as has been found
out) because the domain "server" is not in the DNS.

/etc/hosts is not consulted when the lookup is done. exim can be made to
look at /etc/hosts but for such a simple setup it is not worth the
effort and would likely lead to a world of pain.



With great respect I think that confuses the issue. A DNS lookup will
*not* explicitly get done by exim4 if the target domain is in
hubbed_hosts, or if exim4 has been told it is the local domain. The
point is one wishes to PREVENT a DNS lookup that is doomed to fail, and
one does so for machines that are not the machine-local domain by
putting them in hubbed_hosts, which will cause exim4 to throw out a
connection request for the local network infrastructure (starting with
the network infra on the local machine) to handle, without doing an
explicit DNS lookup. That is handled by /etc/hosts if it is populated,
and by Avahi if it is present and /etc/hosts is not populated, and no
doubt by a few other alternatives I am not familiar with as well. If
none of them succeed, the delivery will fail, because if I recall
correctly hubbed_hosts router config ends with no_more which prevents
other routers having a go.

However, for domains NOT listed in hubbed_hosts, if not in smarthost
mode, yes exim4's next move will be an explicit DNS lookup on the
domain. It is trying to find out what *machine* it should contact to
make the delivery to that domain. If it is in smarthost mode, it throws
its hands in the air and passes the problem to the smarthost to solve.


Oh yes, i see. Indeed i can understand your point!
Thanks for the explanation ;)
My picture of exim is getting better and better :)


Mark



Greets

mo

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[mo]

Am 01.10.2016 um 15:57 schrieb Teemu Likonen:

mo [2016-10-01 12:36:10+02] wrote:


I'm not a friend of avahi to be honest, i much rather ignore it :D


Avahi is great. My ethernet-connected printer uses DHCP to get IP
address and network configuration. The printer announces itself to the
network with .local name so a print server can use that
name to connect to it. CUPS print server also announces its printers by
names. No static IP address configuration needed anywhere. I think the
underlying technique is called multicast DNS.



I guess i should be looking into avahi, never really did that, to be 
honest avahi so far did not really made much sense to me with my static 
network... But one can never learn enough ;)


Greets

mo

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[mo]

Am 01.10.2016 um 16:17 schrieb rhkra...@gmail.com:

On Saturday, October 01, 2016 08:23:10 AM mo wrote:

I use Icedove (Thunderbird) for all my personal mails and also to write
mail to the Debian users Mailing list ;)
I have never tried Kmail before, maybe i should, but Icedove fit's the
bill right :) (I'm normally a wm guy.. so i opt for lesser dependencies
when i install software... (Kmail pulls in a lot of KDE stuff that i
don't want) but atm i use Gnome.. well it works :D )
I will give Kmail a try on one of my vm's (Got Debian Jessie here in a
vm on which i have KDE installed)


AFAIK, Icedove is the same kind of email client as kmail, so there is no need
to try kmail.  (I happen to use (or, at least, used to use) a lot of other KDE
stuff, do using kmail was no burden for me.)  (I mean that Icedove uses (or at
least can use) pop3 to get emails and smtp to send emails--otoh, I have never
used Icedove, so I'm not absolutely sure.


Indeed, they are both MUA's with quite the same features (Of course the 
GUI is different - also another gui toolkit, qt - icedove uses gtk)

Yes, that is true, icedove can handle POP and IMAP


regards,
Randy Kramer



Greets

mo

Re: netcat udp to two IP addresses?

[Thomas Schmitt]

Hi,

i wrote:
> >     mknod ~/fifo p
> >     netcat -u PORT1 <~/fifo
> >     data_producer | tee -i ~/fifo |  netcat -u PORT2

Paul Duncan wrote:
> I shall give that a go

I forgot to mention that i ran my test mockup of the last two commands
concurrently in two shell terminals. (The fifo consumer waits until
tee(1) writes data to the fifo.)

I now tested that this works in a single bash or dash session, if the
middle command is started as background process so that the last line
can be performed, before the middle onec ends.
I.e.:

  netcat -u PORT1 <~/fifo &


Have a nice day :)

Thomas

Re: Canon printer minor quibble

[Brian]

On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 23:05:58 +0900, Mark Fletcher wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 02:28:30PM +0100, Brian wrote:
> > 
> > Regarding the darker colors with the Gutenprint driver: does setting
> > Color Model to CMYK make any difference?
> > 
> Out of curiosity I tried that last night. Actually more accurately I 
> tried CMY, not CMYK. It made no difference. What is the K of CMYK? Cyan, 
> Magenta, Yellow, Kick-Ass??? Is there any reason I should expect CMYK to 
> do better than CMY or RGB?

K is black. It stands for "key". The three other colours are keyed
to it.

You shouldn't expect anything but CMYK sometimes produces an improvement.

-- 
Brian.

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[Brian]

On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 22:36:09 +0900, Mark Fletcher wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 01:56:40PM +0100, Brian wrote:
> 
> > The thing for Mo to grasp is that exim *always* does an MX lookup, often
> > using the ISP's DNS server. user@server will fail (as has been found
> > out) because the domain "server" is not in the DNS.
> > 
> > /etc/hosts is not consulted when the lookup is done. exim can be made to
> > look at /etc/hosts but for such a simple setup it is not worth the
> > effort and would likely lead to a world of pain.
> > 

I hope we are not talking at cross-purposes. I was explicitly addressing
the issue of why an entry in /etc/hosts for machines on the network will
not replace a hubbed_hosts file.

> With great respect I think that confuses the issue. A DNS lookup will 
> *not* explicitly get done by exim4 if the target domain is in 
> hubbed_hosts, or if exim4 has been told it is the local domain. The 

A hubbed_hosts file is for overriding or augmenting MX information from
the DNS (exim4-config_files). If you had

  lists.debian.org: 91.221.168.152

the DNS would not be used and any mail to debian-user@lists.debian.org
would go to 91.221.168.152. MX information would be overriden.

With

  server: 192.168.5.100 or server: server.local

MX information is augmented.

> point is one wishes to PREVENT a DNS lookup that is doomed to fail, and 

No. The point is you want to override or augment MX information. Ok, a
DNS lookup is prevented but it is not because it is one which is doomed
to fail. A lookup on lists.debian.org would succeed but for some reason
the user wants the mail to go to 91.221.168.152.

> one does so for machines that are not the machine-local domain by 
> putting them in hubbed_hosts, which will cause exim4 to throw out a 
> connection request for the local network infrastructure (starting with 
> the network infra on the local machine) to handle, without doing an 
> explicit DNS lookup. That is handled by /etc/hosts if it is populated, 
> and by Avahi if it is present and /etc/hosts is not populated, and no 
> doubt by a few other alternatives I am not familiar with as well. If 
> none of them succeed, the delivery will fail, because if I recall 
> correctly hubbed_hosts router config ends with no_more which prevents 
> other routers having a go.

exim does not use /etc/hosts; user@server will fail with '192.168.7.88
server' in it. user@server,local succeeds because server.local is in the
DNS.

-- 
Brian.

Re: Recommendation: Backup system

[Bob Weber]

I use backuppc.  It is web browser based setup and usage.  It takes incremental
and full backups that can remain as long as you want or have space for.  It can
browse files by name or in a version mode where you can see the date where a
file changed and restore an earlier version if you want (or to a separate 
download directory).  It compresses files for space and only keeps one copy of a
file's data if it is located in different directories or servers (using hard
links as needed).  It can even backup user data for windows users (samba).  I
use the rsync transfer for Linux machines and even with windows running Cygwin.

I currently backup 8 computers going back almost 1 year.  I even backup a vm at
digital ocean.  Backuppc reports this:

144 full backups of total size 8951.56GB (prior to pooling and compression),
57 incr backups of total size 57.13GB (prior to pooling and compression).
Pool is 358.94GB comprising 1903010 files and 4369 directories (as of 10/1 
01:09).

So 8951GB is compressed or pooled into just 358 GB! 

*...Bob*
On 10/01/2016 05:37 AM, mo wrote:
> Hi Debian users :)
>
> Information:
> Distributor ID:Debian
> Description:Debian GNU/Linux 8.6 (jessie)
> Release:8.6
> Codename:jessie
>
> As the title say i'm in search for a backup application/system.
> Currently i manage my backups with a little script that i wrote... but it does
> not really serve my needs anymore.
> I want to be able to make backups on my main PC and also on my server, the
> backups i would then store on my NAS.
>
> Make a long story short:
> Have you guys a recommendation for me?
> Is there a specific application you use for your backups guys?
>
> Btw: I dont mind configuring or playing around with new applications, every
> recommendation is welcome ;)
>
>
> Here is my current backup script (Which is run by cron daily):
> #!/bin/bash
>
> TO_BACKUP="/home /etc /var/log"
> BACKUP_DIR="/var/backup"
> BACKUP_ARCHIVE="backup-`date +%d_%m_%Y-%H:%M`.tar"
> TAR_OPTIONS='-cpf'
>
> delete_old_backup() {
> if [ -f ${BACKUP_DIR}/backup*.tar ]; then
> rm -rf $BACKUP_DIR/backup*
> fi
> }
>
> create_new_backup() {
> tar $TAR_OPTIONS ${BACKUP_DIR}/$BACKUP_ARCHIVE $TO_BACKUP
> }
>
> main() {
> delete_old_backup
> create_new_backup
> }
>
> main
>
> Greets
> mo
>
>

Re: Recommendation: Backup system

[mo]

Am 01.10.2016 um 16:46 schrieb Bob Weber:

I use backuppc.  It is web browser based setup and usage.  It takes
incremental and full backups that can remain as long as you want or have
space for.  It can browse files by name or in a version mode where you
can see the date where a file changed and restore an earlier version if
you want (or to a separate  download directory).  It compresses files
for space and only keeps one copy of a file's data if it is located in
different directories or servers (using hard links as needed).  It can
even backup user data for windows users (samba).  I use the rsync
transfer for Linux machines and even with windows running Cygwin.


I like the web interface part i have to say (Just browsed their website :) )
I will look into it ;)
(I have currently no windows machines here, but that might change in the 
future since i plan to deplay Windows Server 2012 R2)


Thanks for the hint ;)


I currently backup 8 computers going back almost 1 year.  I even backup
a vm at digital ocean.  Backuppc reports this:

144 full backups of total size 8951.56GB (prior to pooling and compression),
57 incr backups of total size 57.13GB (prior to pooling and compression).
Pool is 358.94GB comprising 1903010 files and 4369 directories (as of
10/1 01:09).

So 8951GB is compressed or pooled into just 358 GB!


The compression is quite nice, i might have at least 100GB to backup 
here. (Maybe a little more depending on what i want to save)



*...Bob*


Greets

mo

Re: Recommendation: Backup system

[mo]

Has someone experience with Bacula?
I heard good things about it, although i never looked into it... maybe 
someone has and can give me his report on it :)

Re: Recommendation: Backup system

[Mark Fletcher]

On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 10:46:07AM -0400, Bob Weber wrote:
> I use backuppc.  It is web browser based setup and usage.  It takes 
> incremental
> and full backups that can remain as long as you want or have space for.  It 
> can
> browse files by name or in a version mode where you can see the date where a
> file changed and restore an earlier version if you want (or to a separate 
> download directory).  It compresses files for space and only keeps one copy 
> of a
> file's data if it is located in different directories or servers (using hard
> links as needed).  It can even backup user data for windows users (samba).  I
> use the rsync transfer for Linux machines and even with windows running 
> Cygwin.
> 
> I currently backup 8 computers going back almost 1 year.  I even backup a vm 
> at
> digital ocean.  Backuppc reports this:
> 
> 144 full backups of total size 8951.56GB (prior to pooling and compression),
> 57 incr backups of total size 57.13GB (prior to pooling and compression).
> Pool is 358.94GB comprising 1903010 files and 4369 directories (as of 10/1 
> 01:09).
> 
> So 8951GB is compressed or pooled into just 358 GB! 

Wow, that is impressive!

Mark

Re: Tip: debian-handbook > Debian Administrator's Handbook

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 09:45:04AM -0400, Cindy-Sue Causey wrote:
> Preface: AFTER writing all this up, it occurred to me to perform an
> in-house email search to see if this had already been recently
> addressed. Only 26 references total in some ~3.5GB of emails so I'm
> going ahead and posting this as its own special highlight.
> 
> KEY THOUGHTS: .deb package, online ebook, hard copy purchase.
> 
> ~
> 

Four or five of those were probably from me. I can't recommend this book 
highly enough - this is really really good documentation.

[And with a free licence and redistrubutable]
> 
> >From my Shoes in answer to the same "Is this book for me?",
> appearances are that it certainly couldn't hurt since it's presented
> by Debian via even its most basic of installs possible (debootstrap).
> 
> Alternatively, that debian-handbook package download also points us to:
> 
> https://debian-handbook.info/get/
> 
> THAT page offers a *_CHOICE_* between reading an online ebook or
> retrieving it otherwise. Rightly or wrongly, my interpretation of that
> is that the second option MIGHT be presenting the possibility of a
> hard copy purchase via Lulu.com (but I'm not quite sure because that's
> out of my realm of #Life experiences).
> 
> Personally, I remain a huge fan of a hard copy book in hand, primarily
> because computers occasionally become completely inoperable and thus
> so do any downloaded ebooks included within. Of note, though, is that
> I've seen the debian-handbook package upgrade several times in recent
> weeks which quickly outdates an in-hand hard copy. Yes/no, that's been
> nothing new to tech users for decades, but still, it was worth noting.
> 

debian-handbook is the correct package. There is a hard copy book
available through Lulu.com by clicking through the link on Raph's site.

It seems incredibly expensive - but it's very worth it in that it is 
well produced and very well bound. My copy was on loan to a workshop for a while
- I installed the .deb package on every workstation that was there.

> DISCLAIMER: If I have oopsied on which package ultimately installed
> those documents, my apologies in advance. If someone would please then
> specify the ultimately correct package name, that would be awesome.
> 
> Happy Debian'ing!
> 
> Cindy :)
> 
> -- 
> Cindy-Sue Causey
> Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
> 
> * runs with duct tape *

Re: Recommendation: Backup system

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 01 October 2016 08:40:35 Mark Fletcher wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 11:37:31AM +0200, mo wrote:
> > Hi Debian users :)
> >
> > Information:
> > Distributor ID: Debian
> > Description:Debian GNU/Linux 8.6 (jessie)
> > Release:8.6
> > Codename:   jessie
> >
> > As the title say i'm in search for a backup application/system.
> > Currently i manage my backups with a little script that i wrote...
> > but it does not really serve my needs anymore.
> > I want to be able to make backups on my main PC and also on my
> > server, the backups i would then store on my NAS.
> >
> > Make a long story short:
> > Have you guys a recommendation for me?
> > Is there a specific application you use for your backups guys?
>
> I know Gene is a fan of Amanda, I have it on my list to try it out
> myself based on positive remarks he has made about it in the past.
>
> Mark

Yeppers! It runs in the wee hours of the night here, for an hour or so. 
Currently backing up this machine, and 3 more on my little home network 
here, using its own unique, distribute the nightly load to equalize as 
much a it can given its list of what to back up with nightly backups 
totaling 11 to 14 Gb per night.

When I first started using it, I had a DDS2 changer, but it wasn't very 
dependable, and at only 4Gb per tape, limited what I could do.  About 
the time 500Gb Hd's came out, amanda had worked out a way to use virtual 
tapes on a hard drive, so I converted. That has the advantage that 
should I need to recover something, its random access instead of 
sequential, so I can get back anything I need in just a few minutes, 
most of which is spent studying the recovery docs because I've forgotten 
how to do it. ;-)

With tapes, I could easily be a half a day recovering the same file 
because each level of a backup has to be read from the start of the tape 
until its found.  If I need something whose last good backup was a level 
3, it would have to back up and find the level0, which is the last full 
backup, then find the level 1 and merge any changes, wash, rinse, and 
repeat.  A hard drive based system can do all that in seconds.

And HD's have become much more dependable than tape, along with the 
methods of warning the user that the drive is failing, and that alone 
beats tape all the way into the trash bin.

I was rather worried about the drive I use for amanda's v-tapes when I 
saw almost 3 years ago that smartctl said it had 25 Reallocated sectors.  
It still says 25 10 seconds ago.  That drive, now a 1Tb drive 
as /dev/sdc, now has 58357 Power up hours on it. I don't care what you 
may have paid for a tape library, it cannot survive that long, when this 
HD has done that for a $100 bill at the time I bought it.  And I can put 
this HD in a shirt pocket.  The tape library would need a refrigerator 
rated 2 wheel dolly to move it, and a similar second dolly to move its 
tapes.

Whats not to like?

I've had far more trouble dealing with tar changes as its been updated 
over the years than I've had with amanda itself. All have been fixable 
in a day or two once you can post the breakage on the tar list. amanda 
uses tar to do the bare metal work.  A wrapper for tar in that sense, 
and I then wrap amanda with a bash script that fixes the always a day 
late record keeping that you can add to the v-tape image by making a 
copy of amanda's database and writing it to the V-tape amanda just used, 
so I can lose the main drive and have to start with a new install on a 
fresh drive. With amanda I would install from the repo's on the new 
drive. Its 2 or 3 steps, but in an hours time I can have this working 
wheezy system with all its dross, put back on a new drive.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page 

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[Liam O'Toole]

On 2016-10-01, mo  wrote:
> First of all:
> Thank you Liam for your help! :)
> Thanks for the very nice and long explanation Mark! :)
>
> I think i should elaborate a little more on my setup.. i guess i did not 
> make that very clear in the first place, sorry about that.
>
> My network is consisting of the following systems:
>
> Main PC - 192.168.23.11  (Running Debian Jessie)
> Server  - 192.168.23.200 (Running Debian Jessie)
>
> The server is always online, the PC is only half of the day on.
>
> What i want to do now is the following:
>
> Sending mail from my Main PC to my Server and also the other way around, 
> from the Server to my Main PC.
> The Server should also be able to send mail to the "outside" (Meaning to 
> other SMTP servers).
> The second requirement is optional since i dont own a domain and all 
> this is sitting locally at my home. The most important thing for me is 
> to send and receive mail from both systems in my home network.
> I hope this made my problem a little clearer :)
>
> I'm a little ashamed to say that, but i could not totally follow your 
> explanations Mark... I'm quite a newbie when it comes to SMTP.. sorry :(
>
> Thanks again for all your help ;)
>
> Greets
>
> mo
>
>

I should have been a little clearer myself. You don't need to register a
domain name. Just invent your own domain name for local purposes. Let's
say you choose the domain name "monet", and that you have already given
the hostnames "desktop" and "server" to your two machines. Then you
would edit the file /etc/hosts on both machines to contain the following
lines:

192.168.23.11 desktop.monet desktop
192.168.23.200 server.monet server

Now you only need to tell exim4 on the server that it is the final
destination for emails to *.monet, again using the debconf wizard. You
will then be able to send emails to local addresses, while emails to all
other domains will go through your ISP's smarthost.

Incidently, you can also tell exim4 on the desktop to use the server as
its smarthost.

I realise that you're getting lots of (sometimes contradictory)
information from various sources. The barebones configuration I have
described above has served me well for several years.

If you add more machines to your network later on you should consider
setting up local DHCP and DNS instead of manually updating /etc/hosts
files. But we'll leave that for another day. :)

-- 

Liam

Re: Recommendation: Backup system

[Clive Menzies]

On 01/10/16 17:22, Gene Heskett wrote

Yeppers! It runs in the wee hours of the night here, for an hour or so.
Currently backing up this machine, and 3 more on my little home network
here, using its own unique, distribute the nightly load to equalize as
much a it can given its list of what to back up with nightly backups
totaling 11 to 14 Gb per night.


Hi Gene

Quick question. Are your backups incremental or complete every night?

Regards

Clive

--
Clive Menzies
http://freecriticalthinking.org

Re: Recommendation: Backup system

[Dan Purgert]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

mo wrote:
> As the title say i'm in search for a backup application/system.
> Currently i manage my backups with a little script that i wrote... but 
> it does not really serve my needs anymore.
> I want to be able to make backups on my main PC and also on my server, 
> the backups i would then store on my NAS.

There's always rsync from the hosts to the NAS box.

Only thing that I see "wrong" with your script is that:
 - you're deleting the backups (what happens when you delete something,
   and don't catch it til after the next backup run?)
 - you're backing up everything, even if it hasn't changed.



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-- 
|_|O|_| Registered Linux user #585947
|_|_|O| Github: https://github.com/dpurgert
|O|O|O| PGP: 05CA 9A50 3F2E 1335 4DC5  4AEE 8E11 DDF3 1279 A281

Re: Recommendation: Backup system

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 01 October 2016 12:39:58 Clive Menzies wrote:

> On 01/10/16 17:22, Gene Heskett wrote
>
> > Yeppers! It runs in the wee hours of the night here, for an hour or
> > so. Currently backing up this machine, and 3 more on my little home
> > network here, using its own unique, distribute the nightly load to
> > equalize as much a it can given its list of what to back up with
> > nightly backups totaling 11 to 14 Gb per night.
>
> Hi Gene
>
> Quick question. Are your backups incremental or complete every night?
>
> Regards
>
> Clive

This is probably better explained in the manpages. Amanda has the concept 
of doing a full backup of everything in its disklist according to the 
days you give it. Amanda will then shuffle the schedule such that those 
full backups are done at random in that cycle, with an eye toward 
equalizing, as much as possible, the amount of data saved during each 
run. It does this by advanceing the the level 0's as it will not let a 
given file go beyond that cycle before a full copy is made again.
Level 0 is a full copy of a file, level 1 is whats been changed in that 
file since the last level 0. Level 2 is whats been changed since level 
1, ad infinitum but most useage never gets past level 2.  I have the 
drive I use for amanda setup as 30 virtual tapes, using one a day, then 
recycle. With 4 machines feeding amanda, that 1Tb drive stays at around 
46% used:

gene@coyote:~$ df /amandatapes
Filesystem 1K-blocks  Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdc2  960798056 410555684 501429932  46% /amandatapes

I stayed on the devel branch of amanda, playing the part of the canary in 
the coal mine for years while it was being heavily developed, but 
apparently that grant ran out so not a lot has changed in around 5 
years. So while I have a self made, slightly newer version on this 
machine as master, v3.3.7p1, the slaves are all running 3.3.1 clients 
from the wheezy repo.  And it Just Works(TM).

I would be the first to point out that my way is NOT for archival storage 
due to this 30 day and recycle setup. I could extend it to 60 days on 
this drive I suppose, but this is not a business.

For a business, I would include the price of the drive as a CODB, fill it 
up and put it on the shelf at a remote location so it doesn't all go up 
in smoke when the place burns, thereby giving me the ability to recover 
something 5+ years old, or for however long one has had that setup 
running.

That $100 or less a month for a new commodity drive is far less of a CODB 
than the archival storage of tapes would be over a 10 year period. And 
you would have to add in that the tape drive(s) would be out of service 
for about a month each annually while they spend the holidays in 
Oklahoma City getting fresh heads and rubber at about a kilobuck each 
for the rebuild.  Thats been the track record here in my usage of tapes.  
The hard drives all have been 10x (or) more dependable.

And all it takes is getting rid of the idea that one must do a full 
backup on Friday nights. Yes, amanda can do that, but do it as a 
separate configuration else you will drive the poor girl out of her mind 
when she finds out all her carefully worked out plans have all gone 
aglay.

And don't forget that in ones long term business plans, the technology 
changes with time and there will come a time when you will have nothing 
in the house that can read todays 1Tb sata hard drive.  So having a 
storage location to save the old tech that can read those drives should 
be part of that long term plan also.  And be damned hard headed about 
it.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page 

Re: Recommendation: Backup system

[Clive Menzies]

On 01/10/16 18:40, Gene Heskett wrote:

On Saturday 01 October 2016 12:39:58 Clive Menzies wrote:


Quick question. Are your backups incremental or complete every night?

This is probably better explained in the manpages. Amanda has the concept
of doing a full backup of everything in its disklist according to the
days you give it. Amanda will then shuffle the schedule such that those
full backups are done at random in that cycle, with an eye toward
equalizing, as much as possible, the amount of data saved during each
run. It does this by advanceing the the level 0's as it will not let a
given file go beyond that cycle before a full copy is made again.
Level 0 is a full copy of a file, level 1 is whats been changed in that
file since the last level 0. Level 2 is whats been changed since level
1, ad infinitum but most useage never gets past level 2.  I have the
drive I use for amanda setup as 30 virtual tapes, using one a day, then
recycle. With 4 machines feeding amanda, that 1Tb drive stays at around
46% used:

gene@coyote:~$ df /amandatapes
Filesystem 1K-blocks  Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdc2  960798056 410555684 501429932  46% /amandatapes

I stayed on the devel branch of amanda, playing the part of the canary in
the coal mine for years while it was being heavily developed, but
apparently that grant ran out so not a lot has changed in around 5
years. So while I have a self made, slightly newer version on this
machine as master, v3.3.7p1, the slaves are all running 3.3.1 clients
from the wheezy repo.  And it Just Works(TM).

I would be the first to point out that my way is NOT for archival storage
due to this 30 day and recycle setup. I could extend it to 60 days on
this drive I suppose, but this is not a business.

For a business, I would include the price of the drive as a CODB, fill it
up and put it on the shelf at a remote location so it doesn't all go up
in smoke when the place burns, thereby giving me the ability to recover
something 5+ years old, or for however long one has had that setup
running.

That $100 or less a month for a new commodity drive is far less of a CODB
than the archival storage of tapes would be over a 10 year period. And
you would have to add in that the tape drive(s) would be out of service
for about a month each annually while they spend the holidays in
Oklahoma City getting fresh heads and rubber at about a kilobuck each
for the rebuild.  Thats been the track record here in my usage of tapes.
The hard drives all have been 10x (or) more dependable.

And all it takes is getting rid of the idea that one must do a full
backup on Friday nights. Yes, amanda can do that, but do it as a
separate configuration else you will drive the poor girl out of her mind
when she finds out all her carefully worked out plans have all gone
aglay.

And don't forget that in ones long term business plans, the technology
changes with time and there will come a time when you will have nothing
in the house that can read todays 1Tb sata hard drive.  So having a
storage location to save the old tech that can read those drives should
be part of that long term plan also.  And be damned hard headed about
it.


Thanks Gene

A dozen years ago, we found a couple posts on incremental backups using 
rsync and adapted it to provide 6 months of rolling incremental backups. 
We've been running this setup ever since - automated nightly, 
incremental backups. I posted our notes on the installation earlier in 
this thread.


All important stuff is kept on the servers but it would be good to 
backup the laptops/workstations too and maybe Amanda is the answer :-) 
We don't install GUIs on our servers; can this be managed from 
individual workstations?


Regards

Clive

--
Clive Menzies
http://freecriticalthinking.org

Re: WARNING! New Perl/Perl-base upgrade removes 141 Sid/Unstable packages

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Fri, 30 Sep 2016, Andre Majorel wrote:
> And that getting some people to acknowledge that there even is a
> problem, let alone fix it, should be so difficult.

This is a well-known limitation of aptitude (at least among DDs), and
given the number of threads about it in d-user, it should be well-known
around here as well.

But the resolver is just one part of the aptitude design.  You won't
find a consensus that the resolver is the most important part of
aptitude, either: since it is an interactive tool and the most powerful
one available at that -- as long as you do take the time to learn its
powerful features -- it typically allows you to override any of its bad
decisions, you will get people like me defending aptitude's design while
freely acknowledging that its resolver could do better.

Were we talking about apt-get, it would be a different matter.  There,
the resolver is by far the most important component.

Anyway, this is no excuse for the aptitude resolver behavior (just an
explanation why a lot of DDs are never going to jump into the "aptitude
is broken/crap/bad" bandwagon), but fixing it is non-trivial.

While one does have enough tunables for aptitude's resolver that code
changes might not be needed to address this specific issue at all (i.e.
its first resolution choice being rather remove-happy), finding the "one
solution that fits all" has been elusive.

Besides, to push changes to aptitude's default resolver behavior, you
have to *test* their effects, which actually means you need to reproduce
a decent number of upgrade / downgrade / broken global package and
archive states.

Volunteers to tack that problem are welcome.

On that note, I wonder if it would be easier to give aptitude some
"resolver profiles" that are selectable on the UI and behave more like
dist-upgrade, safe-upgrade, and the "should work for everything, but
might offer rather bad deals as the first choice" we currently have.

-- 
  Henrique Holschuh

Old gpg password when using gpg-agent

[Markus Grunwald]

Hello,

After I have changed the password for my gpg key, there is something
very strange:

When I try to sign my mail, the new password is rejected, while the
old one is still valid. Even after I killed the gpg-agent, rebooted my
machine or sacrificed a cpu to the gods of linux...

When I sign a file from commandline, it works just fine:

 % gpg --sign test.txt

 You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
 user: "Markus Grunwald "
 4096-bit RSA key, ID 79D7E890, created 2012-05-31

This is somehow scary, because it means my mail program has some
copy/cache/whatever which seems to be my key, but can be unlocked with
the wrong password...

My mail program is sylpheed-claws:

 % dpkg -l claws-mail | egrep '^ii'
 ii  claws-mail 3.14.0-1+b1  amd64Fast, lightweight and
 user-friendly GTK+2 based email client


I even configured claws to use the key 79D7E890 manually, but still
the old password is valid.



I hope you have a hint what could be wrong...
--
Markus Grunwald

Fragen zur Mail? http://www.the-grue.de/mail_und_co
http://www.the-grue.de/~markus/markus_grunwald.gpg

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[Brian]

On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 17:25:46 +0100, Liam O'Toole wrote:

> On 2016-10-01, mo  wrote:
> > First of all:
> > Thank you Liam for your help! :)
> > Thanks for the very nice and long explanation Mark! :)
> >
> > I think i should elaborate a little more on my setup.. i guess i did not 
> > make that very clear in the first place, sorry about that.
> >
> > My network is consisting of the following systems:
> >
> > Main PC - 192.168.23.11  (Running Debian Jessie)
> > Server  - 192.168.23.200 (Running Debian Jessie)
> >
> > The server is always online, the PC is only half of the day on.
> >
> > What i want to do now is the following:
> >
> > Sending mail from my Main PC to my Server and also the other way around, 
> > from the Server to my Main PC.
> > The Server should also be able to send mail to the "outside" (Meaning to 
> > other SMTP servers).
> > The second requirement is optional since i dont own a domain and all 
> > this is sitting locally at my home. The most important thing for me is 
> > to send and receive mail from both systems in my home network.
> > I hope this made my problem a little clearer :)
> >
> > I'm a little ashamed to say that, but i could not totally follow your 
> > explanations Mark... I'm quite a newbie when it comes to SMTP.. sorry :(
> >
> > Thanks again for all your help ;)
> >
> > Greets
> >
> > mo
> >
> >
> 
> I should have been a little clearer myself. You don't need to register a
> domain name. Just invent your own domain name for local purposes. Let's
> say you choose the domain name "monet", and that you have already given
> the hostnames "desktop" and "server" to your two machines. Then you
> would edit the file /etc/hosts on both machines to contain the following
> lines:
> 
>   192.168.23.11 desktop.monet desktop
>   192.168.23.200 server.monet server

I did that on gnome and desktop with appropriate changes:

192.168.7.20 desktop.monet desktop
192.168.7.67 gnome.monet gnome

> Now you only need to tell exim4 on the server that it is the final
> destination for emails to *.monet, again using the debconf wizard. You
> will then be able to send emails to local addresses, while emails to all
> other domains will go through your ISP's smarthost.

I did that on gnome and desktop.

> Incidently, you can also tell exim4 on the desktop to use the server as
> its smarthost.
> 
> I realise that you're getting lots of (sometimes contradictory)
> information from various sources. The barebones configuration I have
> described above has served me well for several years.

All commands are issued from gnome.

  brian@gnome:~# ping -c3 desktop
  PING desktop.monet (192.168.7.20) 56(84) bytes of data.
  64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.267 ms
  64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.255 ms
  64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.269 ms

  --- desktop.monet ping statistics ---
  3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2001ms
  rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.255/0.263/0.269/0.019 ms

  brian@gnome:~# ping -c3 desktop.monet
  PING desktop.monet (192.168.7.20) 56(84) bytes of data.
  64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.264 ms
  64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.255 ms
  64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.255 ms

  --- desktop.monet ping statistics ---
  3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2002ms
  rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.255/0.258/0.264/0.004 ms

We expect that result because ping uses files in /etc/nsswitch.

  root@gnome:~# exim -bt brian@desktop
  R: dnslookup for brian@desktop
  brian@desktop is undeliverable: Unrouteable address

  root@gnome:~# exim -bt brian@desktop.monet
  R: dnslookup for brian@desktop.monet
  brian@desktop.monet is undeliverable: Unrouteable address

Am I the only one who gets this? No capability to deliver mail to
desktop. What am I doing wrong?

-- 
Brian.

Re: Canon printer minor quibble

[Brian]

On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 06:03:08 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:

> Apple, unfortunately, seems bent on doing a microsoft to cups.

You are being provocative, aren't you? Quite unlike your usual self. :)

  * CUPS has not changed from being GPL.

  * Upstream CUPS is very responsive.

  * Upstream CUPS responds quickly and positively to bug reports.

  * Upstream CUPS takes notice of its Linux consumers.

  * Upstream CUPS co-operates with Linux printing system developers.

Three particulars on that last point.

  1. CUPS has incorporated systemd support into its source code.

  2. CUPS has supported interworking with Avahi.

  3. CUPS has catered for the Linux ecosystem.

All you (and I) have to do is sit back and enjoy it. Enjoy.

-- 
Brian.

veeger is infected ...startx again

[Ric Moore]

--
My father, Victor Moore (Vic) used to say:
"There are two Great Sins in the world...
..the Sin of Ignorance, and the Sin of Stupidity.
Only the former may be overcome." R.I.P. Dad.
http://linuxcounter.net/user/44256.html

Re: Canon printer minor quibble

[Brian]

On Fri 30 Sep 2016 at 23:42:17 +0100, Lisi Reisz wrote:

> On Friday 30 September 2016 19:25:52 Brian wrote:
> > Maintaining that CUPS is an official acronym for "Common Unix Printing
> > System" has, so far, not been substantiated.
> 
> Brian, do drop it.  No-one, but no-one, has claimed it is the *official*name. 
>  
> It can't be because of the trademark problem.  There is often a large gap 
> between something's name and its official name.

You mean we have spent all this time arguing about nothing when we could
have been doing something useful?

Dropped.

> No-one who has actually seen the bottle could doubt that HP stands for Houses 
> of Parliament.  I have only just checked that, but what else could it be with 
> that picture?  And it was NEVER called Houses of Parliament, but always HP.

"Please pass the Houses of Parliament sauce" *is* a bit of a mouthful.
Thank goodness for acronyms.

-- 
Brian.

veeger is infected ...startx again

[Ric Moore]

... humans are infecting Veeger. I figured I'd fix the display manager 
problem with a clean install.  Here's the fun part that gives me the 
giggles: I downloaded the testing DVD to install clean from, whilst 
thinking it would be stretch or sid. Best laid plans of mice.


I rebooted upon completion and it went smoothly. I installed my Nvidia 
drivers and that went smooth. It was all s stupidly smooth that I 
suspected something was wrong. Surprise, my sources list reflected 
Jessie, not Stretch or Sid. I  FIXED that. Figuring baby 
steps I'd go for Stretch. Long story short. I'm back to the black screen 
with itty bitty mouse cursor where I should be logging in.  Synaptic is 
also acting up again  with the drop down menus refusing to drop down.


I'm fulla pain killers (legitimately prescribed!) so I figure a much 
younger, and more agile, mind with figure this out. I'll even buy my 
newly found favorite cube-monkey a pizza, as long as the order doesn't 
require truffles.



--
My father, Victor Moore (Vic) used to say:
"There are two Great Sins in the world...
..the Sin of Ignorance, and the Sin of Stupidity.
Only the former may be overcome." R.I.P. Dad.
http://linuxcounter.net/user/44256.html

--
My father, Victor Moore (Vic) used to say:
"There are two Great Sins in the world...
..the Sin of Ignorance, and the Sin of Stupidity.
Only the former may be overcome." R.I.P. Dad.
http://linuxcounter.net/user/44256.html

Re: veeger is infected ...startx again

[Erwan David]

Le 01/10/2016 à 21:49, Ric Moore a écrit :
> ... humans are infecting Veeger. I figured I'd fix the display manager
> problem with a clean install.  Here's the fun part that gives me the
> giggles: I downloaded the testing DVD to install clean from, whilst
> thinking it would be stretch or sid. Best laid plans of mice.
>
> I rebooted upon completion and it went smoothly. I installed my Nvidia
> drivers and that went smooth. It was all s stupidly smooth that I
> suspected something was wrong. Surprise, my sources list reflected
> Jessie, not Stretch or Sid. I  FIXED that. Figuring baby
> steps I'd go for Stretch. Long story short. I'm back to the black
> screen with itty bitty mouse cursor where I should be logging in. 
> Synaptic is also acting up again  with the drop down menus refusing to
> drop down.
>
> I'm fulla pain killers (legitimately prescribed!) so I figure a much
> younger, and more agile, mind with figure this out. I'll even buy my
> newly found favorite cube-monkey a pizza, as long as the order doesn't
> require truffles.
>
>

You'd better explain what you call "veeger" nobody will understand your
problem.

Re: Recommendation: Backup system

[Glenn English]

> On Oct 1, 2016, at 10:22 AM, Gene Heskett  wrote:
> 
> On Saturday 01 October 2016 08:40:35 Mark Fletcher wrote:
> 
>> I know Gene is a fan of Amanda, I have it on my list to try it out
>> myself based on positive remarks he has made about it in the past.

Yeah. Amanda's a good solution. I use it with tape.

There are a couple advantages to this:

Amanda's been around for a very long time (in computer years). So, like Debian 
stable, the bugs tend to have been worked out.

Amanda does its backups using plain old standard *nix software, dump or tar. So 
if you have a really nasty data loss, you can restore from a backup without 
dealing with data in a format built by the backup program. It's not a trivial 
job, I'm told, but if you're really stuck...

The tapes aren't disks, and every backup is done to a different and simple 
storage device with few moving parts. (The reliability of a disk RAID1 reduces 
this advantage significantly.)

OK, there are disadvantages too: Amanda's not easy to configure, and tapes and 
tape drives are very expensive and very slow. 

But I like the advantages more than the disadvantages. It does a really good 
and reliable job.

-- 
Glenn English

Re: Recommendation: Backup system

[Glenn English]

> On Oct 1, 2016, at 11:54 AM, Clive Menzies  wrote:
> 
> We don't install GUIs on our servers; can this be managed from individual 
> workstations?

I'm not sure, but I think Amanda was written before GUIs existed :-)

-- 
Glenn English

Re: Recommendation: Backup system

[mo]

Am 01.10.2016 um 18:22 schrieb Gene Heskett:

On Saturday 01 October 2016 08:40:35 Mark Fletcher wrote:


On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 11:37:31AM +0200, mo wrote:

Hi Debian users :)

Information:
Distributor ID: Debian
Description:Debian GNU/Linux 8.6 (jessie)
Release:8.6
Codename:   jessie

As the title say i'm in search for a backup application/system.
Currently i manage my backups with a little script that i wrote...
but it does not really serve my needs anymore.
I want to be able to make backups on my main PC and also on my
server, the backups i would then store on my NAS.

Make a long story short:
Have you guys a recommendation for me?
Is there a specific application you use for your backups guys?


I know Gene is a fan of Amanda, I have it on my list to try it out
myself based on positive remarks he has made about it in the past.

Mark


Yeppers! It runs in the wee hours of the night here, for an hour or so.
Currently backing up this machine, and 3 more on my little home network
here, using its own unique, distribute the nightly load to equalize as
much a it can given its list of what to back up with nightly backups
totaling 11 to 14 Gb per night.

When I first started using it, I had a DDS2 changer, but it wasn't very
dependable, and at only 4Gb per tape, limited what I could do.  About
the time 500Gb Hd's came out, amanda had worked out a way to use virtual
tapes on a hard drive, so I converted. That has the advantage that
should I need to recover something, its random access instead of
sequential, so I can get back anything I need in just a few minutes,
most of which is spent studying the recovery docs because I've forgotten
how to do it. ;-)

With tapes, I could easily be a half a day recovering the same file
because each level of a backup has to be read from the start of the tape
until its found.  If I need something whose last good backup was a level
3, it would have to back up and find the level0, which is the last full
backup, then find the level 1 and merge any changes, wash, rinse, and
repeat.  A hard drive based system can do all that in seconds.


I guess i'm too young for tapes... or let's put it that way: I've never 
used them. (Why would you need tapes at home anyway :D )



And HD's have become much more dependable than tape, along with the
methods of warning the user that the drive is failing, and that alone
beats tape all the way into the trash bin.


True, the oldest HDD here (which is a 500GB drive) is running since 7 
years straight without a problem.



I was rather worried about the drive I use for amanda's v-tapes when I
saw almost 3 years ago that smartctl said it had 25 Reallocated sectors.
It still says 25 10 seconds ago.  That drive, now a 1Tb drive
as /dev/sdc, now has 58357 Power up hours on it. I don't care what you
may have paid for a tape library, it cannot survive that long, when this
HD has done that for a $100 bill at the time I bought it.  And I can put
this HD in a shirt pocket.  The tape library would need a refrigerator
rated 2 wheel dolly to move it, and a similar second dolly to move its
tapes.

Whats not to like?

I've had far more trouble dealing with tar changes as its been updated
over the years than I've had with amanda itself. All have been fixable
in a day or two once you can post the breakage on the tar list. amanda
uses tar to do the bare metal work.  A wrapper for tar in that sense,
and I then wrap amanda with a bash script that fixes the always a day
late record keeping that you can add to the v-tape image by making a
copy of amanda's database and writing it to the V-tape amanda just used,
so I can lose the main drive and have to start with a new install on a
fresh drive. With amanda I would install from the repo's on the new
drive. Its 2 or 3 steps, but in an hours time I can have this working
wheezy system with all its dross, put back on a new drive.

Cheers, Gene Heskett



Thanks for the info Gene ;)

Re: Recommendation: Backup system

[mo]

Am 01.10.2016 um 14:20 schrieb Dan Purgert:

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

mo wrote:

As the title say i'm in search for a backup application/system.
Currently i manage my backups with a little script that i wrote... but
it does not really serve my needs anymore.
I want to be able to make backups on my main PC and also on my server,
the backups i would then store on my NAS.


There's always rsync from the hosts to the NAS box.


rsync is quite handy for that, indeed ;)
(I actually do that atm - i transfer the data over via rsync to my NAS)


Only thing that I see "wrong" with your script is that:
 - you're deleting the backups (what happens when you delete something,
   and don't catch it til after the next backup run?)


I forgot to mention that i have a script which transfers the current 
backup over if the given backup is not yet saved, sorry, i kind left 
that out. :P



 - you're backing up everything, even if it hasn't changed.


That's indeed a problem atm... That's mainly why i'm on the search for a 
more professional approach so to speak. Honestly, i have not yet planned 
a specific strategy...





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Thanks Dan ;)

Greets

mo

Re: Recommendation: Backup system

[mo]

Maybe this is a little OT, but what kind of backup strategy would you 
guys recommend? (Any advice Gene? :) )

Re: Recommendation: Backup system

[mo]

Am 01.10.2016 um 21:37 schrieb Glenn English:



On Oct 1, 2016, at 10:22 AM, Gene Heskett  wrote:

On Saturday 01 October 2016 08:40:35 Mark Fletcher wrote:


I know Gene is a fan of Amanda, I have it on my list to try it out
myself based on positive remarks he has made about it in the past.


Yeah. Amanda's a good solution. I use it with tape.

There are a couple advantages to this:

Amanda's been around for a very long time (in computer years). So, like Debian 
stable, the bugs tend to have been worked out.

Amanda does its backups using plain old standard *nix software, dump or tar. So 
if you have a really nasty data loss, you can restore from a backup without 
dealing with data in a format built by the backup program. It's not a trivial 
job, I'm told, but if you're really stuck...

The tapes aren't disks, and every backup is done to a different and simple 
storage device with few moving parts. (The reliability of a disk RAID1 reduces 
this advantage significantly.)

OK, there are disadvantages too: Amanda's not easy to configure, and tapes and 
tape drives are very expensive and very slow.

But I like the advantages more than the disadvantages. It does a really good 
and reliable job.



Amanda is beginning to be more and more interesting to me :)

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[mo]

Am 01.10.2016 um 18:25 schrieb Liam O'Toole:

On 2016-10-01, mo  wrote:

First of all:
Thank you Liam for your help! :)
Thanks for the very nice and long explanation Mark! :)

I think i should elaborate a little more on my setup.. i guess i did not
make that very clear in the first place, sorry about that.

My network is consisting of the following systems:

Main PC - 192.168.23.11  (Running Debian Jessie)
Server  - 192.168.23.200 (Running Debian Jessie)

The server is always online, the PC is only half of the day on.

What i want to do now is the following:

Sending mail from my Main PC to my Server and also the other way around,
from the Server to my Main PC.
The Server should also be able to send mail to the "outside" (Meaning to
other SMTP servers).
The second requirement is optional since i dont own a domain and all
this is sitting locally at my home. The most important thing for me is
to send and receive mail from both systems in my home network.
I hope this made my problem a little clearer :)

I'm a little ashamed to say that, but i could not totally follow your
explanations Mark... I'm quite a newbie when it comes to SMTP.. sorry :(

Thanks again for all your help ;)

Greets

mo




I should have been a little clearer myself. You don't need to register a
domain name. Just invent your own domain name for local purposes. Let's
say you choose the domain name "monet", and that you have already given
the hostnames "desktop" and "server" to your two machines. Then you
would edit the file /etc/hosts on both machines to contain the following
lines:

192.168.23.11 desktop.monet desktop
192.168.23.200 server.monet server

Now you only need to tell exim4 on the server that it is the final
destination for emails to *.monet, again using the debconf wizard. You
will then be able to send emails to local addresses, while emails to all
other domains will go through your ISP's smarthost.

Incidently, you can also tell exim4 on the desktop to use the server as
its smarthost.

I realise that you're getting lots of (sometimes contradictory)
information from various sources. The barebones configuration I have
described above has served me well for several years.


Thanks for the clarification Liam :)


If you add more machines to your network later on you should consider
setting up local DHCP and DNS instead of manually updating /etc/hosts
files. But we'll leave that for another day. :)


I think that day will soon come for me :) (I cant live without some 
playing and fuzzing around :^) )

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[mo]

Am 01.10.2016 um 20:17 schrieb Brian:

On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 17:25:46 +0100, Liam O'Toole wrote:


On 2016-10-01, mo  wrote:

First of all:
Thank you Liam for your help! :)
Thanks for the very nice and long explanation Mark! :)

I think i should elaborate a little more on my setup.. i guess i did not
make that very clear in the first place, sorry about that.

My network is consisting of the following systems:

Main PC - 192.168.23.11  (Running Debian Jessie)
Server  - 192.168.23.200 (Running Debian Jessie)

The server is always online, the PC is only half of the day on.

What i want to do now is the following:

Sending mail from my Main PC to my Server and also the other way around,
from the Server to my Main PC.
The Server should also be able to send mail to the "outside" (Meaning to
other SMTP servers).
The second requirement is optional since i dont own a domain and all
this is sitting locally at my home. The most important thing for me is
to send and receive mail from both systems in my home network.
I hope this made my problem a little clearer :)

I'm a little ashamed to say that, but i could not totally follow your
explanations Mark... I'm quite a newbie when it comes to SMTP.. sorry :(

Thanks again for all your help ;)

Greets

mo




I should have been a little clearer myself. You don't need to register a
domain name. Just invent your own domain name for local purposes. Let's
say you choose the domain name "monet", and that you have already given
the hostnames "desktop" and "server" to your two machines. Then you
would edit the file /etc/hosts on both machines to contain the following
lines:

192.168.23.11 desktop.monet desktop
192.168.23.200 server.monet server


I did that on gnome and desktop with appropriate changes:

192.168.7.20 desktop.monet desktop
192.168.7.67 gnome.monet gnome


Now you only need to tell exim4 on the server that it is the final
destination for emails to *.monet, again using the debconf wizard. You
will then be able to send emails to local addresses, while emails to all
other domains will go through your ISP's smarthost.


I did that on gnome and desktop.


Incidently, you can also tell exim4 on the desktop to use the server as
its smarthost.

I realise that you're getting lots of (sometimes contradictory)
information from various sources. The barebones configuration I have
described above has served me well for several years.


All commands are issued from gnome.

  brian@gnome:~# ping -c3 desktop
  PING desktop.monet (192.168.7.20) 56(84) bytes of data.
  64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.267 ms
  64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.255 ms
  64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.269 ms

  --- desktop.monet ping statistics ---
  3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2001ms
  rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.255/0.263/0.269/0.019 ms

  brian@gnome:~# ping -c3 desktop.monet
  PING desktop.monet (192.168.7.20) 56(84) bytes of data.
  64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.264 ms
  64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.255 ms
  64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.255 ms

  --- desktop.monet ping statistics ---
  3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2002ms
  rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.255/0.258/0.264/0.004 ms

We expect that result because ping uses files in /etc/nsswitch.

  root@gnome:~# exim -bt brian@desktop
  R: dnslookup for brian@desktop
  brian@desktop is undeliverable: Unrouteable address

  root@gnome:~# exim -bt brian@desktop.monet
  R: dnslookup for brian@desktop.monet
  brian@desktop.monet is undeliverable: Unrouteable address

Am I the only one who gets this? No capability to deliver mail to
desktop. What am I doing wrong?



I think this is the problem with exim calling DNS on the given 
hostname... which is doomed to fail. To get it working you need to 
create the hubbed_hosts file and set your aliases in there, for example:

192.168.7.20: desktop

Then it should work fine, at least for me it did.

Hope this helps :)

Re: Recommendation: Backup system

[Bob Weber]

Like I said backuppc uses incremental and full backups.  The web interface lets
you browse any backup (inc or full) and you see all the files backed up.  I set
the incremental for each day up to a week.  So I have up to 7 of them.  The full
can kept for for however long you want.  I currently keep 12 weekly, 8 bi-weekly
and 4 monthly full backups so that covers almost a year.

There is another solution you might like called rsnapshot.  I use it to backup
just my root directory on my desktop before I do updates.  That way if something
goes wrong I can boot into a rescue cd and restore the system to the state
before the update.  I just can't afford to have my desktop to break.  rsnapshot
uses rsync so it can backup any computer that has rsync.  It uses hard links so
duplicate files are only stored once.  You specify how many backups you want to
keep and rsnapshot deletes older ones over that max before adding the new one. 
That way you always have backups (assuming you set the count greater that 1)
that will be there even if there is a transfer error.  This is similar to your
script but is very versatile.


*...Bob*
On 10/01/2016 04:42 PM, mo wrote:
> Maybe this is a little OT, but what kind of backup strategy would you guys
> recommend? (Any advice Gene? :) )
>
>

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[Liam O'Toole]

On 2016-10-01, Brian  wrote:
> On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 17:25:46 +0100, Liam O'Toole wrote:
>
>> On 2016-10-01, mo  wrote:
>> > First of all:
>> > Thank you Liam for your help! :)
>> > Thanks for the very nice and long explanation Mark! :)
>> >
>> > I think i should elaborate a little more on my setup.. i guess i did not 
>> > make that very clear in the first place, sorry about that.
>> >
>> > My network is consisting of the following systems:
>> >
>> > Main PC - 192.168.23.11  (Running Debian Jessie)
>> > Server  - 192.168.23.200 (Running Debian Jessie)
>> >
>> > The server is always online, the PC is only half of the day on.
>> >
>> > What i want to do now is the following:
>> >
>> > Sending mail from my Main PC to my Server and also the other way around, 
>> > from the Server to my Main PC.
>> > The Server should also be able to send mail to the "outside" (Meaning to 
>> > other SMTP servers).
>> > The second requirement is optional since i dont own a domain and all 
>> > this is sitting locally at my home. The most important thing for me is 
>> > to send and receive mail from both systems in my home network.
>> > I hope this made my problem a little clearer :)
>> >
>> > I'm a little ashamed to say that, but i could not totally follow your 
>> > explanations Mark... I'm quite a newbie when it comes to SMTP.. sorry :(
>> >
>> > Thanks again for all your help ;)
>> >
>> > Greets
>> >
>> > mo
>> >
>> >
>> 
>> I should have been a little clearer myself. You don't need to register a
>> domain name. Just invent your own domain name for local purposes. Let's
>> say you choose the domain name "monet", and that you have already given
>> the hostnames "desktop" and "server" to your two machines. Then you
>> would edit the file /etc/hosts on both machines to contain the following
>> lines:
>> 
>>  192.168.23.11 desktop.monet desktop
>>  192.168.23.200 server.monet server
>
> I did that on gnome and desktop with appropriate changes:
>
> 192.168.7.20 desktop.monet desktop
> 192.168.7.67 gnome.monet gnome
>
>> Now you only need to tell exim4 on the server that it is the final
>> destination for emails to *.monet, again using the debconf wizard. You
>> will then be able to send emails to local addresses, while emails to all
>> other domains will go through your ISP's smarthost.
>
> I did that on gnome and desktop.
>
>> Incidently, you can also tell exim4 on the desktop to use the server as
>> its smarthost.
>> 
>> I realise that you're getting lots of (sometimes contradictory)
>> information from various sources. The barebones configuration I have
>> described above has served me well for several years.
>
> All commands are issued from gnome.
>
>   brian@gnome:~# ping -c3 desktop
>   PING desktop.monet (192.168.7.20) 56(84) bytes of data.
>   64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.267 ms
>   64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.255 ms
>   64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.269 ms
>
>   --- desktop.monet ping statistics ---
>   3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2001ms
>   rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.255/0.263/0.269/0.019 ms
>
>   brian@gnome:~# ping -c3 desktop.monet
>   PING desktop.monet (192.168.7.20) 56(84) bytes of data.
>   64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.264 ms
>   64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.255 ms
>   64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.255 ms
>
>   --- desktop.monet ping statistics ---
>   3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2002ms
>   rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.255/0.258/0.264/0.004 ms
>
> We expect that result because ping uses files in /etc/nsswitch.
>
>   root@gnome:~# exim -bt brian@desktop
>   R: dnslookup for brian@desktop
>   brian@desktop is undeliverable: Unrouteable address
>
>   root@gnome:~# exim -bt brian@desktop.monet
>   R: dnslookup for brian@desktop.monet
>   brian@desktop.monet is undeliverable: Unrouteable address
>
> Am I the only one who gets this? No capability to deliver mail to
> desktop. What am I doing wrong?
>

exim seems to be trying to resolve desktop.monet via DNS, thus ignoring
/etc/nsswitch. (I have no idea whether that is the default behaviour.) Do
you have a local DNS capable of resolving the address?

You might try the mail command from the mailutils or bsd-mailx packages
for comparison.

-- 

Liam

Problem with chroot

[Zdzislaw Kaleta]

I have problem with debian server. After upgrade it not start and end with info

/sbin/init �餿: QRU�4���̀]ZY� :

So I start the box with Live Debian Jessie CD and try to chroot.

I mount hard disk in /mnt and proc sys and dev in proper places as
instructed on net.

After chroot /mnt /bin/bash command system not created chroot but gave me:

/bin/bash: �餿: QRU�4���̀]ZY� : : Error 18446744072492026114

How to solve it. Propblem is very seriouse for me becouse I has all my
mail on this server and they are important. I have searche on net for
such error but nothing was found.

Than for advance.

sanskryt

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[Brian]

On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 22:47:27 +0200, mo wrote:

> Am 01.10.2016 um 20:17 schrieb Brian:
> >On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 17:25:46 +0100, Liam O'Toole wrote:
> >
> >>On 2016-10-01, mo  wrote:
> >>>First of all:
> >>>Thank you Liam for your help! :)
> >>>Thanks for the very nice and long explanation Mark! :)
> >>>
> >>>I think i should elaborate a little more on my setup.. i guess i did not
> >>>make that very clear in the first place, sorry about that.
> >>>
> >>>My network is consisting of the following systems:
> >>>
> >>>Main PC - 192.168.23.11  (Running Debian Jessie)
> >>>Server  - 192.168.23.200 (Running Debian Jessie)
> >>>
> >>>The server is always online, the PC is only half of the day on.
> >>>
> >>>What i want to do now is the following:
> >>>
> >>>Sending mail from my Main PC to my Server and also the other way around,
> >>>from the Server to my Main PC.
> >>>The Server should also be able to send mail to the "outside" (Meaning to
> >>>other SMTP servers).
> >>>The second requirement is optional since i dont own a domain and all
> >>>this is sitting locally at my home. The most important thing for me is
> >>>to send and receive mail from both systems in my home network.
> >>>I hope this made my problem a little clearer :)
> >>>
> >>>I'm a little ashamed to say that, but i could not totally follow your
> >>>explanations Mark... I'm quite a newbie when it comes to SMTP.. sorry :(
> >>>
> >>>Thanks again for all your help ;)
> >>>
> >>>Greets
> >>>
> >>>mo
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >>I should have been a little clearer myself. You don't need to register a
> >>domain name. Just invent your own domain name for local purposes. Let's
> >>say you choose the domain name "monet", and that you have already given
> >>the hostnames "desktop" and "server" to your two machines. Then you
> >>would edit the file /etc/hosts on both machines to contain the following
> >>lines:
> >>
> >>192.168.23.11 desktop.monet desktop
> >>192.168.23.200 server.monet server
> >
> >I did that on gnome and desktop with appropriate changes:
> >
> >192.168.7.20 desktop.monet desktop
> >192.168.7.67 gnome.monet gnome
> >
> >>Now you only need to tell exim4 on the server that it is the final
> >>destination for emails to *.monet, again using the debconf wizard. You
> >>will then be able to send emails to local addresses, while emails to all
> >>other domains will go through your ISP's smarthost.
> >
> >I did that on gnome and desktop.
> >
> >>Incidently, you can also tell exim4 on the desktop to use the server as
> >>its smarthost.
> >>
> >>I realise that you're getting lots of (sometimes contradictory)
> >>information from various sources. The barebones configuration I have
> >>described above has served me well for several years.
> >
> >All commands are issued from gnome.
> >
> >  brian@gnome:~# ping -c3 desktop
> >  PING desktop.monet (192.168.7.20) 56(84) bytes of data.
> >  64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.267 ms
> >  64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.255 ms
> >  64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.269 ms
> >
> >  --- desktop.monet ping statistics ---
> >  3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2001ms
> >  rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.255/0.263/0.269/0.019 ms
> >
> >  brian@gnome:~# ping -c3 desktop.monet
> >  PING desktop.monet (192.168.7.20) 56(84) bytes of data.
> >  64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.264 ms
> >  64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.255 ms
> >  64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.255 ms
> >
> >  --- desktop.monet ping statistics ---
> >  3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2002ms
> >  rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.255/0.258/0.264/0.004 ms
> >
> >We expect that result because ping uses files in /etc/nsswitch.
> >
> >  root@gnome:~# exim -bt brian@desktop
> >  R: dnslookup for brian@desktop
> >  brian@desktop is undeliverable: Unrouteable address
> >
> >  root@gnome:~# exim -bt brian@desktop.monet
> >  R: dnslookup for brian@desktop.monet
> >  brian@desktop.monet is undeliverable: Unrouteable address
> >
> >Am I the only one who gets this? No capability to deliver mail to
> >desktop. What am I doing wrong?
> >
> 
> I think this is the problem with exim calling DNS on the given hostname...
> which is doomed to fail. To get it working you need to create the
> hubbed_hosts file and set your aliases in there, for example:
> 192.168.7.20: desktop
> 
> Then it should work fine, at least for me it did.
> 
> Hope this helps :)

Not really, I'm afraid.

We all know a hubbed_hosts file works. Mark Fletcher has written
extensively about it and I have said a thing or too also. What I want to
know is why following the advice from Liam O'Toole doesn't work for me,
even though I have followed the instructions exactly.

BTW: It would be 'desktop: 192.168.7.20' and 'desktop.monet:192.168.7.20

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[Brian]

On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 21:52:53 +0100, Liam O'Toole wrote:

> On 2016-10-01, Brian  wrote:
> > On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 17:25:46 +0100, Liam O'Toole wrote:
> >
> >> On 2016-10-01, mo  wrote:
> >> > First of all:
> >> > Thank you Liam for your help! :)
> >> > Thanks for the very nice and long explanation Mark! :)
> >> >
> >> > I think i should elaborate a little more on my setup.. i guess i did not 
> >> > make that very clear in the first place, sorry about that.
> >> >
> >> > My network is consisting of the following systems:
> >> >
> >> > Main PC - 192.168.23.11  (Running Debian Jessie)
> >> > Server  - 192.168.23.200 (Running Debian Jessie)
> >> >
> >> > The server is always online, the PC is only half of the day on.
> >> >
> >> > What i want to do now is the following:
> >> >
> >> > Sending mail from my Main PC to my Server and also the other way around, 
> >> > from the Server to my Main PC.
> >> > The Server should also be able to send mail to the "outside" (Meaning to 
> >> > other SMTP servers).
> >> > The second requirement is optional since i dont own a domain and all 
> >> > this is sitting locally at my home. The most important thing for me is 
> >> > to send and receive mail from both systems in my home network.
> >> > I hope this made my problem a little clearer :)
> >> >
> >> > I'm a little ashamed to say that, but i could not totally follow your 
> >> > explanations Mark... I'm quite a newbie when it comes to SMTP.. sorry :(
> >> >
> >> > Thanks again for all your help ;)
> >> >
> >> > Greets
> >> >
> >> > mo
> >> >
> >> >
> >> 
> >> I should have been a little clearer myself. You don't need to register a
> >> domain name. Just invent your own domain name for local purposes. Let's
> >> say you choose the domain name "monet", and that you have already given
> >> the hostnames "desktop" and "server" to your two machines. Then you
> >> would edit the file /etc/hosts on both machines to contain the following
> >> lines:
> >> 
> >>192.168.23.11 desktop.monet desktop
> >>192.168.23.200 server.monet server
> >
> > I did that on gnome and desktop with appropriate changes:
> >
> > 192.168.7.20 desktop.monet desktop
> > 192.168.7.67 gnome.monet gnome
> >
> >> Now you only need to tell exim4 on the server that it is the final
> >> destination for emails to *.monet, again using the debconf wizard. You
> >> will then be able to send emails to local addresses, while emails to all
> >> other domains will go through your ISP's smarthost.
> >
> > I did that on gnome and desktop.
> >
> >> Incidently, you can also tell exim4 on the desktop to use the server as
> >> its smarthost.
> >> 
> >> I realise that you're getting lots of (sometimes contradictory)
> >> information from various sources. The barebones configuration I have
> >> described above has served me well for several years.
> >
> > All commands are issued from gnome.
> >
> >   brian@gnome:~# ping -c3 desktop
> >   PING desktop.monet (192.168.7.20) 56(84) bytes of data.
> >   64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.267 
> > ms
> >   64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.255 
> > ms
> >   64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.269 
> > ms
> >
> >   --- desktop.monet ping statistics ---
> >   3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2001ms
> >   rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.255/0.263/0.269/0.019 ms
> >
> >   brian@gnome:~# ping -c3 desktop.monet
> >   PING desktop.monet (192.168.7.20) 56(84) bytes of data.
> >   64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.264 
> > ms
> >   64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.255 
> > ms
> >   64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.255 
> > ms
> >
> >   --- desktop.monet ping statistics ---
> >   3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2002ms
> >   rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.255/0.258/0.264/0.004 ms
> >
> > We expect that result because ping uses files in /etc/nsswitch.
> >
> >   root@gnome:~# exim -bt brian@desktop
> >   R: dnslookup for brian@desktop
> >   brian@desktop is undeliverable: Unrouteable address
> >
> >   root@gnome:~# exim -bt brian@desktop.monet
> >   R: dnslookup for brian@desktop.monet
> >   brian@desktop.monet is undeliverable: Unrouteable address
> >
> > Am I the only one who gets this? No capability to deliver mail to
> > desktop. What am I doing wrong?
> >
> 
> exim seems to be trying to resolve desktop.monet via DNS, thus ignoring
> /etc/nsswitch. (I have no idea whether that is the default behaviour.) Do
> you have a local DNS capable of resolving the address?

Exim's default behaviour, as has been mentioned a couple of times in
this thread, is to use DNS; nsswitch is not involved. This is a default
exim install; no files in conf.d altered. How about you?

> You might try the mail command from the mailutils or bsd-mailx packages
> for comparison.

mail uses exim as the MTA. It 

Re: Canon printer minor quibble

[Lisi Reisz]

On Saturday 01 October 2016 20:45:52 Brian wrote:
> "Please pass the Houses of Parliament sauce" *is* a bit of a mouthful.
> Thank goodness for acronyms.

:-))

Lisi

Re: veeger is infected ...startx again

[Sven Hartge]

Erwan David  wrote:

> You'd better explain what you call "veeger" nobody will understand
> your problem.

I think he means "V'ger", which would be a reference to the first Star
Trek Movie.

S!

-- 
Sigmentation fault. Core dumped.

Re: veeger is infected ...startx again

[Bob Bernstein]

On Sat, 1 Oct 2016, Ric Moore wrote:

Surprise, my sources list reflected Jessie, not Stretch or 
Sid. I  FIXED that.


Did you run an 'apt-get dist-upgrade' after making changes to 
sources.list?


Hang in there.

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Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[Liam O'Toole]

On 2016-10-01, Brian  wrote:
> On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 21:52:53 +0100, Liam O'Toole wrote:
>
>> On 2016-10-01, Brian  wrote:
>> > On Sat 01 Oct 2016 at 17:25:46 +0100, Liam O'Toole wrote:
>> >
>> >> On 2016-10-01, mo  wrote:
>> >> > First of all:
>> >> > Thank you Liam for your help! :)
>> >> > Thanks for the very nice and long explanation Mark! :)
>> >> >
>> >> > I think i should elaborate a little more on my setup.. i guess i did 
>> >> > not 
>> >> > make that very clear in the first place, sorry about that.
>> >> >
>> >> > My network is consisting of the following systems:
>> >> >
>> >> > Main PC - 192.168.23.11  (Running Debian Jessie)
>> >> > Server  - 192.168.23.200 (Running Debian Jessie)
>> >> >
>> >> > The server is always online, the PC is only half of the day on.
>> >> >
>> >> > What i want to do now is the following:
>> >> >
>> >> > Sending mail from my Main PC to my Server and also the other way 
>> >> > around, 
>> >> > from the Server to my Main PC.
>> >> > The Server should also be able to send mail to the "outside" (Meaning 
>> >> > to 
>> >> > other SMTP servers).
>> >> > The second requirement is optional since i dont own a domain and all 
>> >> > this is sitting locally at my home. The most important thing for me is 
>> >> > to send and receive mail from both systems in my home network.
>> >> > I hope this made my problem a little clearer :)
>> >> >
>> >> > I'm a little ashamed to say that, but i could not totally follow your 
>> >> > explanations Mark... I'm quite a newbie when it comes to SMTP.. sorry :(
>> >> >
>> >> > Thanks again for all your help ;)
>> >> >
>> >> > Greets
>> >> >
>> >> > mo
>> >> >
>> >> >
>> >> 
>> >> I should have been a little clearer myself. You don't need to register a
>> >> domain name. Just invent your own domain name for local purposes. Let's
>> >> say you choose the domain name "monet", and that you have already given
>> >> the hostnames "desktop" and "server" to your two machines. Then you
>> >> would edit the file /etc/hosts on both machines to contain the following
>> >> lines:
>> >> 
>> >>   192.168.23.11 desktop.monet desktop
>> >>   192.168.23.200 server.monet server
>> >
>> > I did that on gnome and desktop with appropriate changes:
>> >
>> > 192.168.7.20 desktop.monet desktop
>> > 192.168.7.67 gnome.monet gnome
>> >
>> >> Now you only need to tell exim4 on the server that it is the final
>> >> destination for emails to *.monet, again using the debconf wizard. You
>> >> will then be able to send emails to local addresses, while emails to all
>> >> other domains will go through your ISP's smarthost.
>> >
>> > I did that on gnome and desktop.
>> >
>> >> Incidently, you can also tell exim4 on the desktop to use the server as
>> >> its smarthost.
>> >> 
>> >> I realise that you're getting lots of (sometimes contradictory)
>> >> information from various sources. The barebones configuration I have
>> >> described above has served me well for several years.
>> >
>> > All commands are issued from gnome.
>> >
>> >   brian@gnome:~# ping -c3 desktop
>> >   PING desktop.monet (192.168.7.20) 56(84) bytes of data.
>> >   64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.267 
>> > ms
>> >   64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.255 
>> > ms
>> >   64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.269 
>> > ms
>> >
>> >   --- desktop.monet ping statistics ---
>> >   3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2001ms
>> >   rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.255/0.263/0.269/0.019 ms
>> >
>> >   brian@gnome:~# ping -c3 desktop.monet
>> >   PING desktop.monet (192.168.7.20) 56(84) bytes of data.
>> >   64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.264 
>> > ms
>> >   64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.255 
>> > ms
>> >   64 bytes from desktop.monet (192.168.7.20): icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.255 
>> > ms
>> >
>> >   --- desktop.monet ping statistics ---
>> >   3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2002ms
>> >   rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.255/0.258/0.264/0.004 ms
>> >
>> > We expect that result because ping uses files in /etc/nsswitch.
>> >
>> >   root@gnome:~# exim -bt brian@desktop
>> >   R: dnslookup for brian@desktop
>> >   brian@desktop is undeliverable: Unrouteable address
>> >
>> >   root@gnome:~# exim -bt brian@desktop.monet
>> >   R: dnslookup for brian@desktop.monet
>> >   brian@desktop.monet is undeliverable: Unrouteable address
>> >
>> > Am I the only one who gets this? No capability to deliver mail to
>> > desktop. What am I doing wrong?
>> >
>> 
>> exim seems to be trying to resolve desktop.monet via DNS, thus ignoring
>> /etc/nsswitch. (I have no idea whether that is the default behaviour.) Do
>> you have a local DNS capable of resolving the address?
>
> Exim's default behaviour, as has been mentioned a couple of times in
> this thread, is to use DNS; nsswitch is not involved.

Doing an strace on the

Re: veeger is infected ...startx again

[Liam O'Toole]

On 2016-10-02, Bob Bernstein  wrote:
> On Sat, 1 Oct 2016, Ric Moore wrote:
>
>> Surprise, my sources list reflected Jessie, not Stretch or 
>> Sid. I  FIXED that.
>
> Did you run an 'apt-get dist-upgrade' after making changes to 
> sources.list?
>
> Hang in there.
>

At the risk of stating the obvious ... an 'apt-get update' is required
first.

-- 

Liam

Re: Configuring Exim for mail delivery

[Mark Fletcher]

On Sat, Oct 01, 2016 at 11:22:06PM +0100, Brian wrote:
> 
> We all know a hubbed_hosts file works. Mark Fletcher has written
> extensively about it and I have said a thing or too also. What I want to
> know is why following the advice from Liam O'Toole doesn't work for me,
> even though I have followed the instructions exactly.
> 

I think Liam is describing a situation where the only mail-capable 
machine is the server, in your example gnome.monet. He configured it to 
be the end-point for *.monet. But for mo's original use-case, gnome 
should only be the end-point for gnome.monet and desktop should be the 
end-point for desktop.monet. Then, if gnome.monet gets handed a mail for 
desktop.monet, it doesn't try to deliver it, but instead tries to pass 
it on, and that's when you need hubbed_hosts populated so it can find 
desktop.monet to pass it on to.

So Liam has consistently been describing a solution that, while 
perfectly valid, is the solution to a slightly different problem than 
the one mo originally asked about.

Mark

Re: Recommendation: Backup system

[Dan Purgert]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

mo wrote:
> Maybe this is a little OT, but what kind of backup strategy would you 
> guys recommend? (Any advice Gene? :) )

If it *must* survive, 3-2-1 is the way to go.

3 copies (Original, Backup, and Backup of the Backup)
2 different media types (such as HDD(Orig) + HDD(Bk1) + Optical(Bk2))
1 stored offsite

That being said, most of my stuff isn't of the "absolutely must survive"
nature, so I just have it on external HDDs.  If something is
particularly important, it's on HDDs and also somewhere like google
drive / dropbox (although, encrypted when at those places).

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0XplxY/GkkrEpIeMFrqKy2hc3u++PoEHEBkQut46x6QAw/85ieKs2tsbmfeyUuF7
y5gFbGlowcy3NtSdGIMR6qzn67I+DaO2veTMV3Z+/aR+fAegZtvv/t3CCi1dsmRW
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-- 
|_|O|_| Registered Linux user #585947
|_|_|O| Github: https://github.com/dpurgert
|O|O|O| PGP: 05CA 9A50 3F2E 1335 4DC5  4AEE 8E11 DDF3 1279 A281

Re: veeger is infected ...startx again

[Bob Bernstein]

On Sun, 2 Oct 2016, Liam O'Toole wrote:

At the risk of stating the obvious ... an 'apt-get update' is 
required first.


Stating the obvious is a dirty job, but someone has to do it. 
I'm trying to make a Pat 'n Mike joke out of this, but the thing 
eludes me.


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IMPORTANT: This email is intended for the use of the individual
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Re: veeger is infected ...startx again

[Jimmy Johnson]

On 10/01/2016 12:49 PM, Ric Moore wrote:

... humans are infecting Veeger. I figured I'd fix the display manager
problem with a clean install.  Here's the fun part that gives me the
giggles: I downloaded the testing DVD to install clean from, whilst
thinking it would be stretch or sid. Best laid plans of mice.

I rebooted upon completion and it went smoothly. I installed my Nvidia
drivers and that went smooth. It was all s stupidly smooth that I
suspected something was wrong. Surprise, my sources list reflected
Jessie, not Stretch or Sid. I  FIXED that. Figuring baby
steps I'd go for Stretch. Long story short. I'm back to the black screen
with itty bitty mouse cursor where I should be logging in.  Synaptic is
also acting up again  with the drop down menus refusing to drop down.


Add the Sid/unstable sources and 'aptitude update' and 'aptitude 
safe-upgrade' and you'll be okay ;). Maybe when the Stretch freeze 
starts that will be the time to remove Sid to get the next stable system.



I'm fulla pain killers (legitimately prescribed!) so I figure a much
younger, and more agile, mind with figure this out. I'll even buy my
newly found favorite cube-monkey a pizza, as long as the order doesn't
require truffles.


Good luck!
--
Jimmy Johnson

Kali GNU/Linux Rolling  - EXT4 - AMD64 at sda17
Registered Linux User #380263

faailure to use repportbug to submit following problem :(

[Timothy Danielson]

Hello,
I have patiently submitted, resubmitted and submitted again. This bug is 
DEFINITELY a security issue. Also, it seems quite odd that a 'stable' release 
has such an easy to find bug in the basic operation of the OS. I am NOT a 
software developer by any means. Also, this is not a 'criticism', rather, it is 
a statement of my surprise. The following is the bug report I wrote the second 
time, as the fist one did not include my answers in it and I didn't know where 
it was to be found. I have seen a similar report to this on line, I certainly 
hope that you will find the information useful.
Here it is:
Subject: tech-ctte: failure to suspend session or lock computer
Package: tech-ctte
Justification: must
Severity: serious
Tags: security

Dear Maintainer,

   * Q: What led up to the situation? A: attempt to lock, suspend or hibernate 
the sytemt to NOT shut down entirely.
   * Q: What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
 ineffective)? A: I attempted the three mentioned options.
   * Q: What was the outcome of this action? A: forced restart in all cases, 
resulting on fallback to journaled entries.
   * Q: What outcome did you expect instead? I expected those functions to... 
function.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 8.5
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/6 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

the page I listed my issue on line is:
lock screen & session suspension in Debian Jessie

  
|  
|   
|   
|   ||

   |

  |
|  
|   |  
lock screen & session suspension in Debian Jessie
 I just read of an issue that seemed similar to mine, and as I cannot comment 
yet and my problem is different I w...  |   |

  |

  |

 

Re: Recommendation: Backup system

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 01 October 2016 13:54:29 Clive Menzies wrote:

> On 01/10/16 18:40, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > On Saturday 01 October 2016 12:39:58 Clive Menzies wrote:
> >> Quick question. Are your backups incremental or complete every
> >> night?
> >
> > This is probably better explained in the manpages. Amanda has the
> > concept of doing a full backup of everything in its disklist
> > according to the days you give it. Amanda will then shuffle the
> > schedule such that those full backups are done at random in that
> > cycle, with an eye toward equalizing, as much as possible, the
> > amount of data saved during each run. It does this by advanceing the
> > the level 0's as it will not let a given file go beyond that cycle
> > before a full copy is made again. Level 0 is a full copy of a file,
> > level 1 is whats been changed in that file since the last level 0.
> > Level 2 is whats been changed since level 1, ad infinitum but most
> > useage never gets past level 2.  I have the drive I use for amanda
> > setup as 30 virtual tapes, using one a day, then recycle. With 4
> > machines feeding amanda, that 1Tb drive stays at around 46% used:
> >
> > gene@coyote:~$ df /amandatapes
> > Filesystem 1K-blocks  Used Available Use% Mounted on
> > /dev/sdc2  960798056 410555684 501429932  46% /amandatapes
> >
> > I stayed on the devel branch of amanda, playing the part of the
> > canary in the coal mine for years while it was being heavily
> > developed, but apparently that grant ran out so not a lot has
> > changed in around 5 years. So while I have a self made, slightly
> > newer version on this machine as master, v3.3.7p1, the slaves are
> > all running 3.3.1 clients from the wheezy repo.  And it Just
> > Works(TM).
> >
> > I would be the first to point out that my way is NOT for archival
> > storage due to this 30 day and recycle setup. I could extend it to
> > 60 days on this drive I suppose, but this is not a business.
> >
> > For a business, I would include the price of the drive as a CODB,
> > fill it up and put it on the shelf at a remote location so it
> > doesn't all go up in smoke when the place burns, thereby giving me
> > the ability to recover something 5+ years old, or for however long
> > one has had that setup running.
> >
> > That $100 or less a month for a new commodity drive is far less of a
> > CODB than the archival storage of tapes would be over a 10 year
> > period. And you would have to add in that the tape drive(s) would be
> > out of service for about a month each annually while they spend the
> > holidays in Oklahoma City getting fresh heads and rubber at about a
> > kilobuck each for the rebuild.  Thats been the track record here in
> > my usage of tapes. The hard drives all have been 10x (or) more
> > dependable.
> >
> > And all it takes is getting rid of the idea that one must do a full
> > backup on Friday nights. Yes, amanda can do that, but do it as a
> > separate configuration else you will drive the poor girl out of her
> > mind when she finds out all her carefully worked out plans have all
> > gone aglay.
> >
> > And don't forget that in ones long term business plans, the
> > technology changes with time and there will come a time when you
> > will have nothing in the house that can read todays 1Tb sata hard
> > drive.  So having a storage location to save the old tech that can
> > read those drives should be part of that long term plan also.  And
> > be damned hard headed about it.
>
> Thanks Gene
>
> A dozen years ago, we found a couple posts on incremental backups
> using rsync and adapted it to provide 6 months of rolling incremental
> backups. We've been running this setup ever since - automated nightly,
> incremental backups. I posted our notes on the installation earlier in
> this thread.
>
> All important stuff is kept on the servers but it would be good to
> backup the laptops/workstations too and maybe Amanda is the answer :-)
> We don't install GUIs on our servers; can this be managed from
> individual workstations?
>
> Regards
>
> Clive

The closest you'll get to a gui is using your fav text editor to 
configure it. If building your own, the example directory has copies of 
all that, very liberally commented.  That may also be in the server deb, 
but if I looked, I've forgotten what I found. Heck most of the time I 
can't remember if I had breakfast this morning...  Synaptic, once the 
amanda server has been installed, will be more than happy to show you 
what is available, and where it was put.  There is also a mailing list, 
at amanda.org with very knowledgable people to explain the fine details. 

As for the other machines here that I backup every night, I only worry 
about the directories that contain linuxcnc or rtapi stuff, all the rest 
of it is no farther away than the install dvd from 
www.linuxcnc.org/downloads if I can't find the written dvd.  The amount 
of data from each of those machines is maybe 25 megabytes each worst 
case per nightly run, typ

Re: [Q] hostname change: i tried for 83 days. But failed. HELP ME PLEASE !!!

[Fabrizio Carrai]

The is no "hostname" service to start

Please, try:

sudo hostname "alex.chromebook"

and verify with

hostname

Else, reports here the content of /etc/resolv.conf/ and /etc/hosts

Ciao
F.

2016-10-02 8:22 GMT+02:00 Byung-Hee HWANG (황병희, 黃炳熙) :

> "Byung-Hee HWANG "(황병희, 黃炳熙)""  께서 쓰시길,
>  《記事 全文  에서》:
>
> > Hello, Debian people!
> >
> > I love my Chromebook. Via Crouton, i did install Ubuntu ( the internal
> > is Debian Wheezy, i guess).
> >
> > (precise)soyeomul@localhost:/etc$ cat os-release
> > NAME="Ubuntu"
> > VERSION="12.04.5 LTS, Precise Pangolin"
> > ID=ubuntu
> > ID_LIKE=debian
> > PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu precise (12.04.5 LTS)"
> > VERSION_ID="12.04"
> >
> > (precise)soyeomul@localhost:/etc$ cat debian_version
> > wheezy/sid
> > (precise)soyeomul@localhost:/etc$
> >
> > By the way i cannot change hostname, i tried with followed link
> > [http://askubuntu.com/questions/9540/how-do-i-change-the-computer-name].
> >
> > By sudo command, i edited /etc/hostname to "alex.chromebook". And i did
> > reboot[`/sbin/reboot']. But there is no change. Always the hostname is
> > "localhost".
> >
> > Any comments Welcome!!! because i am going to be crazy T.T
> >
> > I Want To "alex.chromebook" as hostname.
>
> Also, i tried another way.
>
> (precise)soyeomul@localhost:~$ cat /etc/hostname
> alex.chromebook
> (precise)soyeomul@localhost:~$ sudo service hostname restart
> stop: Unknown job: hostname
> start: Unknown job: hostname
> (precise)soyeomul@localhost:~$
>
> But failed.
>
> --
> ^고맙습니다 _地平天成_ 감사합니다_^))//
>
>


-- 
*Fabrizio*

Re: [Q] hostname change: i tried for 83 days. But failed. HELP ME PLEASE !!!

[Felix Miata]

Byung-Hee HWANG (황병희, 黃炳熙) composed on 2016-10-02 15:06 (UTC+0900):


Hello, Debian people!



I love my Chromebook. Via Crouton, i did install Ubuntu ( the internal
is Debian Wheezy, i guess).



(precise)soyeomul@localhost:/etc$ cat os-release
NAME="Ubuntu"
VERSION="12.04.5 LTS, Precise Pangolin"
ID=ubuntu
ID_LIKE=debian
PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu precise (12.04.5 LTS)"
VERSION_ID="12.04"



(precise)soyeomul@localhost:/etc$ cat debian_version
wheezy/sid
(precise)soyeomul@localhost:/etc$



By the way i cannot change hostname, i tried with followed link
[http://askubuntu.com/questions/9540/how-do-i-change-the-computer-name].



By sudo command, i edited /etc/hostname to "alex.chromebook". And i did
reboot[`/sbin/reboot']. But there is no change. Always the hostname is
"localhost".



Any comments Welcome!!! because i am going to be crazy T.T



I Want To "alex.chromebook" as hostname.


That's illegal. From http://www.rfc-base.org/txt/rfc-952.txt :

   1. A "name" (Net, Host, Gateway, or Domain name) is a text string up
   to 24 characters drawn from the alphabet (A-Z), digits (0-9), minus
   sign (-), and period (.).  Note that periods are only allowed when
   they serve to delimit components of "domain style names".
--
"The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/