Re: general broad question for help in setting up linux server and suggestions

[Miles Fidelman]

Semih Ozlem wrote:


I am thinking of setting up a server, both for local (at home use), (I 
have already set up say samba server or openssh server) to be used 
only under one modem. However due to lack of machines dedicated for 
that purpose the server is not continuing.


I would like to make a server I set up say at home available at the 
workplace as well so that I don't have to run back home while at work. 
If possible make the server accessible via a smart phone or some other 
computer.




Two comments:

1.  If you want to make the server available, via the net, you need to 
look at something like Dynamic DNS.  Broadband services tend to 
periodically reassign your IP address.


2.  If you have any expectation of providing any services - even 
something as basic as hosting an email list, you can easily swamp a 
desktop/laptop class machine.  You probably want to look at something 
Xeon based.


Personally, I've been looking rather longingly at the Intel NUC 9 Pro - 
which provides a huge amount of capability in a mini-pc chassis.  
Basically, a workstation class mini-pc.  Of course, it's hard to get 
one's hands on them these days, and a well-loaded system will easily set 
you back $2-3000.  You can get some comparable, Supermicro mini-itx 
boxes for a bit less.


Miles Fidelman





--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: Three unsolvable Problems

[Miles Fidelman]

Charles Curley wrote:

On Sun, 24 Jul 2022 10:40:14 +
Schwibinger Michael  wrote:


Three unsolvable Problems

I suggest you should make these three separate emails, as you have
three separate problems. I suspect this email thread is going to get
messy.


Maybe.  1. & 2. might be symptomatic of some kind of file system or o/s 
corruption, or flakey hardware somewhere.


I'd start by running a full set of hardware and disk diagnostics - 
preferably from a recovery disk/stick.


After that, I'd try:

1
We have about 20 USB Sticks.
Last 6 months five of them feel like being destroyed.
Reformatting & testing a bunch of those USB sticks - see if they work, 
when running from the recovery disk.

2
Printer is not working.

Printing, using the driver on the recovery disk.

If all works, then you probably need to reload your o/s.



This one is clearly a separate issue.

3
With the digicam we made MP4 files - videos.
Because the battery became empty the files are not finalized.
So vlc or avidemux cannot open them.

Can somebody help to repair them e.g. with FFmpeg?

Miles Fidelman

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: linux isn't robust enough to handle bad sector??

[Miles Fidelman]

On 9/19/20 10:37 PM, Long Wind wrote:


i'm creating FS on problem disk
though it has passed short and long tests by smart tool
i meet bad sector, mkfs complains forever
Ctrl+C can't kill it, what should i do NOW??

[ 2719.089156] ata4.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 
0x6 frozen

[ 2719.089171] ata4.00: failed command: WRITE DMA EXT
[ 2719.089185] ata4.00: cmd 35/00:00:18:68:e1/00:08:0c:00:00/e0 tag 0 
dma 1048576 out
    res 40/00:01:01:4f:c2/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 
0x4 (timeout)

[ 2719.089192] ata4.00: status: { DRDY }
[ 2719.089209] ata4: hard resetting link
[ 2719.404384] ata4: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310)
[ 2719.412162] ata4.00: configured for UDMA/33
[ 2719.412199] ata4: EH complete
[ 2749.813187] ata4.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 
0x6 frozen

[ 2749.813201] ata4.00: failed command: WRITE DMA EXT
[ 2749.813208] ata4.00: cmd 35/00:00:18:68:e1/00:08:0c:00:00/e0 tag 0 
dma 1048576 out
    res 40/00:01:01:4f:c2/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 
0x4 (timeout)

[ 2749.813212] ata4.00: status: { DRDY }


One thing to check is whether part of what's happening is driven by the 
onboard disk driver.  Consumer grade drives try very hard to read bad 
blocks, leading to very long timeouts that drag a machine to its knees.  
(Learned this the hard way, trying to figure out why a server, with 
raided disks, just kept going slower... and slower... and slower.)


By contrast, server-grade drives just give up after the first try - 
letting RAID do its thing.


You might want to check the specs on your drive, and run a deep set of 
diagnostics, starting with the more intrusive smart diagnostics.


Miles Fidelman



--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: linux isn't robust enough to handle bad sector??

[Miles Fidelman]

On 9/20/20 11:53 PM, David Christensen wrote:


On 2020-09-20 01:40, Reco wrote:

Hi.


Hello.  :-)



On Sun, Sep 20, 2020 at 01:32:47AM -0700, David Christensen wrote:

On 2020-09-20 00:49, Long Wind wrote:
  On Sunday, September 20, 2020, 2:15:21 PM GMT+8, David 
Christensen

First, backup your data.
Please run the following command and post your complete console 
session

-- prompt, command, output.  Substitute DISKID as appropriate:

      # smartctl -x /dev/disk/by-id/DISKID


Thank you for posting the smartctl report.  I don't see any obvious 
problems.


I do. First, drive does not have any bad sectors,

197 Current_Pending_Sector  -O--C-   100   100   000    -    0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   C-   100   100   000    -    0


Yes.


I'd also do a smartctl -A and look at the raw read errors. Depending on 
the disk manufacturer, that can be a good indicator that there's a 
failing sector, and the drive is doing lots of reads before it can 
actually access the data in a block or sector.



--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: GNU Guix

[Miles Fidelman]

On 9/29/20 1:04 PM, Nate Bargmann wrote:


I tried GNU Guix a few years back.  I did not find a compelling reason
other than package roll back to leave Debian for it.  Bullseye has the
nix-bin package available for those wanting to try it without leaving
Debian, I guess.

- Nate


I've been thinking the main reason that I'd adopt Guix is to avoid the 
systemd ecosystem.  The question for me, is whether Guix is mature & 
stable enough for production use - vis-a-vis say Gentoo, or building 
Linux-from-Scratch, or one of the BSDs (though SmartOS is starting to 
look pretty interesting).


Miles Fidelman


--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: Disk errors ...

[Miles Fidelman]

Dennis Wicks wrote:

Greetings;

I am getting very frequent disk errors and I can't figure out which 
drive they are occurring on. I get two messages:


[174384.704895] sata_sil :05:00.0: Event logged [IO_PAGE_FAULT 
domain=0x address=0xcf99c100 flags=0x]


[174384.705153] AMD-Vi: Event logged [IO_PAGE_FAULT device=05:00.0 
domain=0x address=0xdf853000 flags=0x]


Several of each of them occur at once, every few seconds.
Is there any way that I can figure out which drive is causing the 
problem?


1. Run diagnostics on each drive (say, the SMART long diagnostic) - that 
should get you the disk id
2. Run the diagnostics again, on just your failing drive, look for the 
drive with the flashing light
3. Depending on how old the drive is, your problem is probably a failing 
drive


Having said that, you might want to track down what those log entries 
actually mean.  Traditionally, a "page fault" indicates that a page is 
not found in memory, so the o/s is swapping the required page in from 
disk.  This might simply mean that you need more memory.  You might look 
at diagnostics that indicate memory usage and swapping.


Miles Fidelman


--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: Disk errors ...

[Miles Fidelman]

Michael Stone wrote:

On Thu, Jan 14, 2021 at 11:45:25AM -0500, Miles Fidelman wrote:

Dennis Wicks wrote:

Greetings;

I am getting very frequent disk errors and I can't figure out which 
drive they are occurring on. I get two messages:


[174384.704895] sata_sil :05:00.0: Event logged [IO_PAGE_FAULT 
domain=0x address=0xcf99c100 flags=0x]


[174384.705153] AMD-Vi: Event logged [IO_PAGE_FAULT device=05:00.0 
domain=0x address=0xdf853000 flags=0x]


Several of each of them occur at once, every few seconds.
Is there any way that I can figure out which drive is causing the 
problem?


1. Run diagnostics on each drive (say, the SMART long diagnostic) - 
that should get you the disk id
2. Run the diagnostics again, on just your failing drive, look for 
the drive with the flashing light
3. Depending on how old the drive is, your problem is probably a 
failing drive


Again, this is a PCI error, not a disk error. I think the OP never did 
specify the CPU & motherboard? There have been hard to track down AMD 
IOMMU issues with symptoms like this, I'd pursue that long before I'd 
run disk scans.
I agree - probably not a disk error - though it never hurts to check 
one's drives every once in a while.


What makes you think it's a PCI error?  A quick google shows that this 
particular error has been associated with various configuration issues & 
driver bugs - particularly related to NVIDIA cards. Perhaps a pointer to 
the documentation on the specific driver reporting the error?  
(Personally "page fault" could well just indicate normal swapping 
behavior under load.)







--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: What is agetty, and why can't it be stopped?

[Miles Fidelman]

agetty is "alternatative getty" - it's the terminal driver that listens 
on each terminal port


it's launched by init (or systemd), most likely in respawn mode - you'll 
need to find the init file (or systemd equivalent) that launches it, and 
change the config


do a "man getty" or "man agetty" and you should find what you need

Miles Fidelman

On 6/5/19 10:04 PM, Gene Heskett wrote:

Greetings all;

This machine has only one serial port, which I normally use a session of
minicom to connect as a terminal quit a bit dumber than a vt102, to a
TRS-80 Color Computer 3 in the basement. But my normal config for
minicom is /dev/ttyS0, but it claims the device is taken.

Sure enough, an lsof|grep ttyS0 shows an agetty attached to it.  And a
killall agetty as root only changes its pid until I've done the killall
as rapidly as I can uparrow and repeat it 6 or 7 times.

grepping thru  /etc does not seem to find any hits, so I've no clue whats
starting it.  So next I will do a search thru synaptic and remove it if
it will let me, or somehow disable it forever.

And the search for agetty in synaptic is also empty.
But as root, a locate agetty hits paydirt.

root@coyote:~$ locate agetty
/sbin/agetty
/usr/share/doc/util-linux/modems-with-agetty.txt
/usr/share/man/man8/agetty.8.gz

And the man 8 agetty page seems to indicate its a serial connection, I've
heard of as being available for troubleshooting even if its not fully
booted. Great, except I'm not sure I could go to the coco's keyboard and
run supercomm to see into linux, never tried it. In any event, the coco
is expecting a cr, and will respond by launching a shell bound to that
serial port on its end of the cable.

So what I'd like for it to do, is be totally silent during the rest of
this machines boot, and once a user, me, is logged in, go away just as
silently, freeing the only serial hardware port for my own use.

Next problem with minicom running as me is that it has no permissions to
save as its .dfl, the options it needs to Just Work as opposed to
messing around in its config screens finding a group of setting that
will work with the shells available on the coco, which of course is not
running its native rsdos, but a unix like system called nitros9 these
days.  Its os9 plus a few shots of unix testosterone.
   
What do I do next to get rid of this nearly invisible agetty gizmo once

this machine is booted?  It might be handy if this machine is truly
hung, but I can count those instances on one hand with fingers left over
in the 21 years I have been a linux only house.

Thanks all;

Cheers, Gene Heskett


--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: What is agetty, and why can't it be stopped?

[Miles Fidelman]

One minor nit...

On 6/6/19 3:22 AM, to...@tuxteam.de wrote:

Back then [TM], when we were young and handsome [1], a Unix
box had several terminals connected to it. Typically users
would show up at one of these terminals, perhaps hit ENTER,
and be presented with some greeting -- something like "Login:",
perhaps.

Entering user name and password gave the user an interactive
session, courtesy of a shell.


No longer so young, and never handsome, but still connecting to our 
servers via a terminal connection (SSH specifically).  Pretty common for 
servers - why bother with popping an X-window or other GUI for sys admin 
work.  Lots of getty instances running, sitting on network ports, just 
waiting for logins.


Miles Fidelman

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: What is agetty, and why can't it be stopped?

[Miles Fidelman]

On 6/5/19 11:15 PM, David Wright wrote:


On Wed 05 Jun 2019 at 22:43:53 (-0400), Felix Miata wrote:

Gene Heskett composed on 2019-06-05 22:04 (UTC-0400):


root@coyote:~$ locate agetty
/sbin/agetty

Maybe this will be a useful clue:

In Stretch, any gettys running on vtty[1-6] are actually agettys.
Files in /etc/systemd/system/getty.target.wants/ are symlinks to:
/lib/systemd/system/getty@service
# ps -A | grep get
  1021 tty3 00:00:00 agetty
  1022 tty4 00:00:00 agetty
  1023 tty2 00:00:00 agetty
  1451 tty1 00:00:00 agetty
  3932 tty6 00:00:00 agetty
12733 tty5 00:00:00 agetty

Why all this would tie up the serial port I don't know.


Depends on how the serial port is configured.  It's pretty standard for 
it to be set up as a console, by default, in which case an instance of 
getty would be running waiting for a user to login.


Miles Fidelman

Re: I support the founder of FreeSoftware

[Miles Fidelman]

On 9/19/19 2:29 PM, rhkra...@gmail.com wrote:


'

My overall points though, include:

* that we can judge some of the actions of any man one way, and other 
actions by the same man another way, and sometimes one can overshadow 
the other, and sometimes not.


* I don't wish to judge a man and, for example, excuse all his sins 
because of some good he has done, nor to forget the good a man may 
have done because of his sins. But that doesn't mean his sins should 
be forgiven if they are "factual".


"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, 
not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is 
oft interred with their bones;"


These days, it seems, we don't wait for them to die. We just kill them, 
professionally.


Miles Fidelman

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: Return a Debian system to a pristine state

[Miles Fidelman]

Of course, the real way to return ANY system to a pristine state is to 
do a re-install from scratch.


Which, one might add, is why we have things like Ansible.

Miles Fidelman

On 5/28/20 1:15 AM, Victor Sudakov wrote:

Dan Ritter wrote:

Victor Sudakov wrote:

A production system, especially a desktop system, tends to accumulate
unnecessary packages. Users install software for testing, then forget
about it, or it falls into disuse...

In FreeBSD, you can always run "pkg delete -a" and return to the
post-install state (well, almost). This command will remove all the
third-party packages added to the base system after installation
(modified files under /usr/local/ will remain).

What's the procedure for Debian?

There is no pristine state for Debian.

There should be, even if this "pristine state" is but a list of packages
at the moment of the first boot.


Choices made during
installation affect what the first boot experience looks like.

The first boot experience is what can be called a pristine state. If
something or someone saved that initial list of packages, it could be
called "the pristine state."

For the future, I'll always save the output of "dpkg -l" after the first
boot for later comparison, but I did not expect it was not being done
somewhere automatically already.

[dd]


/var/lib/apt/lists/* has package information; if you grep for
Priority: required  you will find packages that *must* be
installed. The ranking is:

  required > important > standard > optional > extra

This is interesting. This job of finding "extra" packages installed
since the first boot can probably be done by the user, but I expected
some ready solution to exist.


--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: Return a Debian system to a pristine state

[Miles Fidelman]

On 5/28/20 10:34 AM, Victor Sudakov wrote:


Greg Wooledge wrote:

On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 08:50:44PM +0700, Victor Sudakov wrote:

What is searched for in Debian is the ability to remove the bloatware
which was not present at the time of installation.

But... but... it's precisely DURING the installation that most of the
crappy "bloatware" GETS ONTO THE SYSTEM!

What?!


How meny people do you think install GNOME or KDE or XFCE separately
after the install, as opposed to ACCEPTING A DEFAULT during the install?

The way you put it, those GNOME or KDE or XFCE would be part of the
"pristine system" and I'm fine with it.

But *many* people do install productivity tools, office tools, games,
developer environments separately after the install, and then regret it
and wish to get rid of them cleanly.

And then there are those of us who run servers, don't want any of the 
desktop applications - but then we know enough not to install it in the 
first place.  We tend to be more worried about all the interdependcies 
installed/required by systemd - but that's another battle entirely.


Miles Fidelman

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: Return a Debian system to a pristine state

[Miles Fidelman]

On 5/29/20 10:32 AM, Victor Sudakov wrote:


John Hasler wrote:

Victor writes:

But *many* people do install productivity tools, office tools, games,
developer environments separately after the install, and then regret
it and wish to get rid of them cleanly.

What does

  apt remove --purge  ; apt autoremove

not do that you want done?

Unfortunately it does not know what packages are unwanted, nor
do I (the user) to tell it.

We are all familiar with the situation when after a long period of
usage, a system becomes full of software which we once installed for
some purpose and then abandoned or disused. A gentle hint on what is an
 would be very much appreciated at such moments.

Maybe the high-level package management software (aptitude?) is better
at that?

Of course, in any serious server environment, one is likely to have lots 
of software that was NOT installed through dpkg or apt - ranging from 
stuff installed directly from tarballs, to local configurations & scripts.


As far as I can tell, the only way to get to a "pristine" system, is to 
rebuild from scratch.


Miles Fidelman




--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: technical terms overhaul

[Miles Fidelman]

Edwin Land once said: "/Politeness is the slow poison of collaboration." 
/I've generally found that to be quite true.  (Then again, I'm a New 
York Jew - brusqueness and argumentativeness are my bywords.)


Re. whitelist/blacklist:  IMO, on the one hand the really direct tie 
between good/bad and white/black is kind of stark.  On the other hand, 
where does this end?  Stop using "whiteout" to describe blizzard 
conditions (and perhaps only use it to refer to correcting fluid)?  Stop 
using "blackout" power outages? Stop using "white" to denote the sum of 
all colors, and "black" to denote the absence (or vice versa, if we're 
talking paint)?


Seems like just another case where we can let arguments over politically 
correct word usage, get in the way of actual communication & getting 
work done.


Solve the problem of establishing a good set of gender-neutral pronouns, 
for English, (and maybe declarations in other languages) - then let's 
come back and debate colors.  Meanwhile, life's too short for this.


Miles Fidelman

On 6/20/20 3:25 AM, Weaver wrote:

On 20-06-2020 12:57, Dan Ritter wrote:

Weaver wrote:

I think it's possible to get too politically correct.

Try this phrase:

"I think it's possible to get too polite."

No, there's no value in twisting words.
The wrong connotation gets promoted.

  

I suppose that's true -- if your object is to insult someone.

No insult was intended or implied.
You prefer to see it way.

  

Why are we attaching a concept like skin colour to list names as a
serious proposition?

Exactly. Since it doesn't matter to you, why not be polite?


See how you've created a straw man to tear down by adjusting the
terminology?
Obviously it does or I wouldn't have posted.
I always ask questions and never impose my standards on others.
See the difference?


--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: technical terms overhaul

[Miles Fidelman]

On 6/21/20 2:55 PM, James H. H. Lampert wrote:

Personally, if I were a moderator on this List, I would order this 
thread terminated with extreme prejudice.


Agreed.

Speaking as someone who hosts a lot of email lists - it really gets 
annoying when discussions of offense & netiquette crowd out a 
substantive discussion.  I'm almost at the point where I'm willing to 
relax my strong "free speech" stance, to make calls for "moderation" or 
banning people the one and only grounds for immediate ejection from a list.


Cheers,

Miles Fidelman



--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: technical terms overhaul

[Miles Fidelman]

On 6/22/20 5:59 AM, Will Mengarini wrote:

* Miles Fidelman  [20-06/20=Sa 11:58 -0400]:

Solve the problem of establishing a good set of gender-neutral
pronouns, for English, (and maybe declarations in other
languages) - then let's come back and debate colors.

Here you go:
   cocos cos coselfco's
   she   her hersherself   she's
   hehis his himself   he's
   itits its itselfit's
See <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/co#English>.

The "co/cos/coself/co's" pronouns were first introduced in 1970 in
the U.S commune named "Twin Oaks", which was founded in 1967.  It was
modeled on the community described in B.F Skinner's /Walden Two/;
see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Oaks_Community,_Virginia>.

They're in both Wiktionary and Wikipedia:
   en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_third-person_singular_pronouns
   en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neutral_pronouns


It's only a good solution if people actually adopt and use them. 
They/them/their has caught on, but it's kind of hard to differentiate 
singular/plural when you use them to be gender neutral.


Miles


--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: Advice on hardware server to use for small a dedicated data center

[Miles Fidelman]

I've had good luck with Supermicro 1U servers - run two or more of them 
and it's easy to turn them into a high-available cluster. 
https://www.rackmountsetc.com/ has been pretty good to me when it comes 
to configuring & assembling Supermicro components (and suggesting 
specific configurations).  You might also look into Ganeti as a cluster 
management package (open source, originated at google for internal 
use).  Same horsepower & quality as a Dell or HP server, at a 
considerably lower price.


I've been running Debian this way, in a data center, for at least a 
decade. (Note:  I'm seriously considering migrating from Debian for our 
next refresh - I really don't like systemd - might go all the way to BSD 
or an OpenSolaris distro.)


One other alternative:   A lot of people seem to swear by Mac Minis as 
servers.  They're already BSD under the hood, and I've run all kinds of 
Linux distros on Macs, under virtualization.  You should be able to run 
Debian directly, though I've never tried it.


Miles Fidelman


On 6/26/2020 1:34 PM, echo test wrote:

Hello,

First of all, please don't ask me why I simply don't want to use aws 
or gcp.


Then, I want to build a small data center for my company for hosting 
a web app and a mail server. It's the first time I'm going to buy 
some hardware for this. I tried looking for it on the web in order to 
compare them but it seems that hardware vendors never want to talk 
about Debian on their websites.


Seriously, I prefer using my money for donating to the Debian 
foundation than having to pay for Ubuntu or Red Hat Enterprise 
because I love Debian and ...


So, I want to know if It's a good idea to try using Debian in an 
enterprise context, with hardwares like Dell EMC PowerEdge or Lenovo 
ThinkCenter which seems to never mention that they support Debian. 
What kind of issues can I encounter with such hardwares except simple 
cases like having to install missing drivers with some already 
available firmwares.


Can you give me some alternative hardwares in case this idea may take 
me to much time to solve ?


Note: I will need some RAID solution hard or soft.

Sorry if my English is bad, it's not my mother language

Thank you.


--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: Advice on hardware server to use for small a dedicated data center

[Miles Fidelman]

On 6/27/20 11:56 PM, Kenneth Parker wrote:



On Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 8:08 PM Fred <mailto:f...@blakemfg.com>> wrote:


On 6/27/20 1:04 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> I've had good luck with Supermicro 1U servers - run two or more
of them
> and it's easy to turn them into a high-available cluster.
> https://www.rackmountsetc.com/ has been pretty good to me when
it comes
> to configuring & assembling Supermicro components (and suggesting
> specific configurations).  You might also look into Ganeti as a
cluster
> management package (open source, originated at google for internal
> use).  Same horsepower & quality as a Dell or HP server, at a
> considerably lower price.
>
> I've been running Debian this way, in a data center, for at least a
> decade. (Note:  I'm seriously considering migrating from Debian
for our
> next refresh - I really don't like systemd - might go all the
way to BSD
> or an OpenSolaris distro.)
>
> One other alternative:   A lot of people seem to swear by Mac
Minis as
> servers.  They're already BSD under the hood, and I've run all
kinds of
> Linux distros on Macs, under virtualization.  You should be able
to run
> Debian directly, though I've never tried it.
>
> Miles Fidelman
>
>
> On 6/26/2020 1:34 PM, echo test wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> First of all, please don't ask me why I simply don't want to
use aws
>>> or gcp.
>>>
>>> Then, I want to build a small data center for my company for
hosting
>>> a web app and a mail server. It's the first time I'm going to buy
>>> some hardware for this. I tried looking for it on the web in
order to
>>> compare them but it seems that hardware vendors never want to
talk
>>> about Debian on their websites.
>>>
>>> Seriously, I prefer using my money for donating to the Debian
>>> foundation than having to pay for Ubuntu or Red Hat Enterprise
>>> because I love Debian and ...
>>>
>>> So, I want to know if It's a good idea to try using Debian in an
>>> enterprise context, with hardwares like Dell EMC PowerEdge or
Lenovo
>>> ThinkCenter which seems to never mention that they support
Debian.
>>> What kind of issues can I encounter with such hardwares except
simple
>>> cases like having to install missing drivers with some already
    >>> available firmwares.
>>>
>>> Can you give me some alternative hardwares in case this idea
may take
>>> me to much time to solve ?
>>>
>>> Note: I will need some RAID solution hard or soft.
>>>
>>> Sorry if my English is bad, it's not my mother language
>>>
>>> Thank you.
>
To Miles Fidelman:
Devuan Linux is Debian with all traces of systemd removed.


+1

I run, both Devuan and Debian, on my multiple systems in my Apartment, 
with the idea of being conversant on both Technologies.


Best regards,
Fred


Kenneth Parker


Yes... but what ARE those systems, and how do they apply to the original 
poster's question?


Miles



--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: Advice on hardware server to use for small a dedicated data center

[Miles Fidelman]

A few comments on the advice below

On 6/28/20 3:16 AM, David Christensen wrote:

On 2020-06-26 11:34, echo test wrote:


I view Debian as the dominant enthusiast Linux distribution in the 
USA. I use it on my SOHO laptops and desktops because it mostly works 
on most x86/x86_64 computers made in the last ~20 years. (But, it is 
common for the "stable" version not to work on recently designed 
hardware.)  I also have a Ubiquitti Networks Unifi Controller 
application stack running on a Debian VPS on the Internet ($5/month).  
I am the only user and it has never failed. Other people with far more 
knowledge, skills, and ambition do more with Debian, but the effort 
appears to be both heroic and lonely. I have yet to hear of an 
"enterprise" environment built on Debian, but you can tell us about 
yours when you build it. (URL's for examples of such are welcome.)


Also pretty dominant in enterprise settings - particularly 
universities.  Still built primarily for use on servers.  You find it 
all over cluster configurations.  Scratch a big data analysis cluster 
and you'll likely as not find Debian.





I view FreeBSD as the dominant free x86/x86_64 BSD/Unix server 
distribution.  I use it on my SOHO servers because the design is 
traditional, the feel is polished, software packages are recent, and 
there are good books available [1, 2].  FreeBSD has notable enterprise 
deployments and commercial derivatives [3].


Yup.  Lots of old-timers prefer BSD for servers.  I've been thinking of 
migrating myself (I just hate systemd).  Also a lot of OpenSolaris 
derivatives out there.


But... for servers, I'd guess that (open source) Ubuntu & CentOS are 
probably a lot more common.



with hardwares like Dell EMC PowerEdge or Lenovo ThinkCenter which
seems to never mention that they support Debian. What kind of issues 
can I

encounter with such hardwares except simple cases like having to install
missing drivers with some already available firmwares.


You're looking in the wrong place.  Look at the Debian site, for the 
list of supported hardware.  Look at the installation documents for 
driver installation (which is more an issue for peripheral support - is 
there a driver for every device that you plan to install?).





Note: I will need some RAID solution hard or soft.


"Enterprise" implies storage area networks.  This requires hardware 
(and support software).


No, it does not.  Particularly in these days of converged hardware.

RAID is easy - Debian supports a number of software RAID options, and 
most motherboards support some form of hardware RAID (as to many 
external drive enclosures).


Sharing across nodes is easy, too - NFS.

Now, if you want to get fancy, and talk about high-availability, 
failover and such, things get a bit more baroque - we're talking things 
like real-time replication (look at DRBD), and fancy file systems.  And 
things get really tough, if you have multiple sites.  Red Hat has some 
good solutions, out-of-the-box, and last time I looked, they were all 
based on open source components - you could integrate those with CentOS, 
and probably Debian - but it takes a lot of work.


Miles Fidelman

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: Advice on hardware server to use for small a dedicated data center

[Miles Fidelman]

On 6/28/20 6:37 AM, echo test wrote:



Hello,

Thank you for all your answers and sorry to be late for answering.
> I prefer ZFS but I find that lots of corps prefer mdadm. I really think that's simply > 
because ZFS came from Sun and they lack Solaris backgrounds. Now, in a 
low-> RAM environment with simpler disc needs, I would probably go 
with mdadm.
> Anything else I would choose ZFS. It's ability to take care of itself is surprisingly 
> strong. Less work for me after the set up and installation.


ZFS beeing a filesystem and mdadm an utility software, I think I'll go 
for mdadm. I didn't know that Debian was supporting ZFS I always used 
Ext4.


It's a stack.  You build up from disk, to block-level raid, to volume 
manager, to file system, to access protocol.


ZFS includes multiple levels of the stack.  And yes there are ZFS 
implementations for Debian, along with a dozen or more other file systems.




Sorry if I'm misunderstanding, are you saying that Debian  cannot 
scale in a bigger enterprise ?

Can you tell me what happened with hardware RAID solutions?

> small" could be anything from 10 to 1000 users. Mentioning some numbers
> could get you more useful recommendations.
> In any case, some interesting hardware not mentioned so far (don't
> forget about the power consumption).

Small here is for me about 2000 users all are restaurants that save 
their selling history locally on their own server then 2 or 3 times in 
the morning they will rsync their postgres data on my data center.
About the power consumption, any advice about some low power hardware 
are also welcome.


Something seems a little flakey about that architecture.  Rsyncng 
postgress data?  There are lots of better ways to merge data into a 
database.  Particularly in these days of cheap, continuous, broadband 
connectivity.  And if you can't get business broadband in all your 
locations, cellular modems are dirt cheap.  (I speak as someone who's 
designed more than a few mobile data collection systems - everything 
from tactical military systems to transit buses).






> Supermicro 1U servers - run two or more of them
> and it's easy to turn them into a high-available cluster
> ...
> Note: I'm seriously considering migrating from Debian for our
> next refresh - I really don't like systemd - might go all the way to BSD
>or an OpenSolaris distro.

Supermicro seems definitely to propose some great stuff I will take 
them in account. Why do you dislike systemd ? I heard many people 
saying the same thing and I don't really understand what are their 
motivation except initd is less invasive.


It's a spaghetti coded package of crap, that takes over your system and 
does things its way.  I prefer modularity, and control over my systems.




I don't really know how to answer to your question but let's try.  We 
are a startup and for the moment we have a production and a 
development, in fact the production is just like a test environment 
because we do continuous delivery, we push everyday in order to know 
more quickly  when something has been broken and our semi-automated 
tests didn't detect it. Personally, I'm a self learner, and probably 
many guys of my team are too. So some advices here are also welcome.
We want to be able to handle 2500+ rsync in the morning (probably 
distributing them in time in order to avoid a single big load acting 
as a ddos) and for each client of my clients (restaurants) a get and 
put profile request.
Note: client's profile are shared across restaurants and clients can 
find/filter restaurants on the website which is not yet built but we 
are working on it.


Rsync is just wrong for that kind of application.  What are you syncing, 
anyway.  2500 postgress instances, some raw data files for input to a 
single instance of postgress, something else?  And if the postgress 
instance is feeding live data to apps, you really need to focus first on 
your high-availability strategy - single points of failure will kill you.


Come to think of it, you're a poster child for doing everything in the 
cloud.  As a startup, you've got way too many other things to worry 
about than home brewing an IT environment - focus on your core 
product/service, whatever that is.  (Now, if you're setting up a service 
bureau, that's another story - in which case, hire some folks who 
actually know how to do this stuff.  Here, I'm speaking as someone who 
HAS homebrewed a small service bureau, with serious experience in 
computing & IT - back before any of this stuff was available off the 
shelf.  It's a royal PITA.  These days, I'm far more likely to set up a 
new domain, or app, on a hosting service, than on our cluster - unless & 
until I know that it needs to be around for a while.  Life's too short.)


Miles Fidelman




--
In theory

Re: Advice on hardware server to use for small a dedicated data center

[Miles Fidelman]

On 6/28/20 3:58 PM, D. R. Evans wrote:


Dan Ritter wrote on 6/26/20 1:41 PM:

echo test wrote:


Note: I will need some RAID solution hard or soft.

We are firmly of the opinion that mdadm or ZFS are the best
solutions here.


Absolutely.

Actually I'd go further and differentiate the two by suggesting that if you
use ECC memory (which you definitely should for a business server) then ZFS is
the way to go. If for some reason you can't use ECC memory, then mdadm is
arguably the thing to use (although there is certainly a valid position that
says that ZFS is /still/ the right one). At least, that's the way I have my
systems configured.


Just to be clear... mdadm is NOT raid - it's an admin program for 
managing linux raid (md) devices.  And then you need to worry about LVM 
(logical volume manager), and a network file system on top of them.


Miles




--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: Advice on hardware server to use for small a dedicated data center

[Miles Fidelman]

On 6/29/20 9:10 AM, Dan Ritter wrote:


Miles Fidelman wrote:

Just to be clear... mdadm is NOT raid - it's an admin program for managing
linux raid (md) devices.?? And then you need to worry about LVM (logical
volume manager), and a network file system on top of them.

Just to be clear, you are being pedantic bordering on wrong here. This
is like saying "a hamburger is not ground beef patties, and then you
need to worry about vegetables and condiments".

mdadm is the administrative interface program for the kernel's md
subsystem. It is used generically as a synonym for "the kernel's
md subsystem" because for most people encountering them, they
are inextricably intertwined.

The kernel's md subsystem manages RAID 0, 1, 4, 5, 6 and 10. It
also has a non-RAID linear mode, a container abstraction, and a
fault-simulation mode.


Now who's being pedantic?

And isn't this exactly what I said?  mdadm is an admin program, it 
doesn't perform the raid function.




LVM is completely independent of the md subsystem, and can be
used with or without it. Some people love it. Some avoid it like
the plague -- oops. Some avoid it like rational people avoid the
plague.

Various network file systems are also completely independent of
the md subsystem.
ZFS is an integrated data storage system that presents N
filesystem and partition-equivalent views to the kernel. It is
independent of and an alternative to md and lvm. It offers a
semi-integrated NFS and CIFS export facility. Underneath, it
offers storage options including error-detection, compression, mirroring,
striping, RAID-5 and -6 style parity, read caching and write
caching. Only the error detection is mandatory.

I'm pretty sure we all know this.  The point is that comparing mdadm to 
ZFS is an apples to oranges comparison.  You don't chose between mdadm 
and ZFS, you chose between ZFS and a stack of software that performs the 
same set of functions.


Miles Fidelman


--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: Advice on hardware server to use for small a dedicated data center

[Miles Fidelman]

Actually, he seems to be designing a central database to support 2000 
retail restaurants.


And based on most recent posts, seems to be pre-startup designing a product.

My sense is that what he really needs is somebody on the team who 
understands distributed enterprise architectures.


Miles


On 6/29/20 2:00 AM, Leslie Rhorer wrote:
Not necessarily, and in particular not given his needs, if I 
recall them correctly.  LVM is fine for many purposes, but it is not 
required, nor is a network file system.  My servers at home have no 
partitions and no LVM, and I have the RAID system for the data volume 
formatted as XFS.  I use separate partitioned SSDs for booting and swap.


On 6/28/2020 3:48 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote:

On 6/28/20 3:58 PM, D. R. Evans wrote:


Dan Ritter wrote on 6/26/20 1:41 PM:

echo test wrote:


Note: I will need some RAID solution hard or soft.

We are firmly of the opinion that mdadm or ZFS are the best
solutions here.


Absolutely.

Actually I'd go further and differentiate the two by suggesting that 
if you
use ECC memory (which you definitely should for a business server) 
then ZFS is
the way to go. If for some reason you can't use ECC memory, then 
mdadm is
arguably the thing to use (although there is certainly a valid 
position that
says that ZFS is /still/ the right one). At least, that's the way I 
have my

systems configured.


Just to be clear... mdadm is NOT raid - it's an admin program for 
managing linux raid (md) devices.  And then you need to worry about 
LVM (logical volume manager), and a network file system on top of them.


Miles




--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: Advice on hardware server to use for small a dedicated data center

[Miles Fidelman]

On 6/29/20 7:20 PM, Dan Ritter wrote:


Miles Fidelman wrote:

On 6/29/20 9:10 AM, Dan Ritter wrote:


Miles Fidelman wrote:

Now who's being pedantic?

Precisely.


And isn't this exactly what I said??? mdadm is an admin program, it doesn't
perform the raid function.

And it's OK to refer to the whole thing as an mdadm RAID.


No.. if you want to be pedantic, the proper terminology is "Linux Raid" 
or "md RAID."  mdadm is one of several admin programs available


saying "mdadm raid" is like saying "libvert hypervisor" - when what you 
really mean is Xen, or KVM, or ESXI - accessed through libvert


When you're building systems, details matter.

Miles Fidelman


--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: Advice on hardware server to use for small a dedicated data center

[Miles Fidelman]

On 7/1/20 7:04 AM, Reco wrote:


On Wed, Jul 01, 2020 at 08:49:09PM +1000, elvis wrote:

On 1/7/20 4:51 am, Dan Ritter wrote:

Miles Fidelman wrote:

On 6/29/20 7:20 PM, Dan Ritter wrote:


Miles Fidelman wrote:

On 6/29/20 9:10 AM, Dan Ritter wrote:


Miles Fidelman wrote:

Now who's being pedantic?

Precisely.


And isn't this exactly what I said??? mdadm is an admin program, it doesn't
perform the raid function.

And it's OK to refer to the whole thing as an mdadm RAID.

No.. if you want to be pedantic, the proper terminology is "Linux Raid" or
"md RAID."?? mdadm is one of several admin programs available

What are the others, please? (That will work on a modern system,
say, Debian stable or oldstable or unstable.)

I think there's precisely one -- libblockdev2.

lvm does its own raid now too...

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/9kkk3b/md_raid_lvm_vs_lvm_raid/

... and it's not the mdraid, but entirely different kernel subsystem.
Last time I've checked it, they did not even implemented incremental
RAID assembly in LVM, meaning that you won't be able to use such array
if a single drive from LVM-based RAID will fail.
They've solved this problem in mdraid like 15 years ago.


But staying on-topic, I'm too very interested to hear about alternative
interfaces to mdraid, which do not involve mdadm. libblockdev2 does not
count, it's merely a wrapper.


Sure looks like LVM raid make use of the same underlying md raid 
software as administered mdadm.


Which kind of just reiterates what I said earlier - mdadm, as an 
administrative interface, is distinct & separate from the various 
software components that create md raid devices.  In the past, there 
were several other admin programs, but mdadm seems to be the major, 
maintained tool.


The info that LVM now includes some direct raid setup tools (that also 
make use of the underlying mdraid system), is new, and possibly useful.


Which does raise an interesting question:  When the Debian installer 
gives the option to set up RAID volumes, does it use mdadm, or do it's 
own config, or use common libraries?  (Kind of arcane, but inquiring 
minds want to know.)


Miles Fidelman


--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

RAID stuff [was Re: Advice on hardware server to use for small a dedicated data center]

[Miles Fidelman]

On 7/1/20 8:15 AM, Miles Fidelman wrote:

On 7/1/20 7:04 AM, Reco wrote:


On Wed, Jul 01, 2020 at 08:49:09PM +1000, elvis wrote:

On 1/7/20 4:51 am, Dan Ritter wrote:

Miles Fidelman wrote:

On 6/29/20 7:20 PM, Dan Ritter wrote:


Miles Fidelman wrote:

On 6/29/20 9:10 AM, Dan Ritter wrote:


Miles Fidelman wrote:

Now who's being pedantic?

Precisely.

And isn't this exactly what I said??? mdadm is an admin program, 
it doesn't

perform the raid function.

And it's OK to refer to the whole thing as an mdadm RAID.
No.. if you want to be pedantic, the proper terminology is "Linux 
Raid" or

"md RAID."?? mdadm is one of several admin programs available

What are the others, please? (That will work on a modern system,
say, Debian stable or oldstable or unstable.)

I think there's precisely one -- libblockdev2.

lvm does its own raid now too...

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/9kkk3b/md_raid_lvm_vs_lvm_raid/ 


... and it's not the mdraid, but entirely different kernel subsystem.
Last time I've checked it, they did not even implemented incremental
RAID assembly in LVM, meaning that you won't be able to use such array
if a single drive from LVM-based RAID will fail.
They've solved this problem in mdraid like 15 years ago.


But staying on-topic, I'm too very interested to hear about alternative
interfaces to mdraid, which do not involve mdadm. libblockdev2 does not
count, it's merely a wrapper.


Sure looks like LVM raid make use of the same underlying md raid 
software as administered mdadm.


Which kind of just reiterates what I said earlier - mdadm, as an 
administrative interface, is distinct & separate from the various 
software components that create md raid devices.  In the past, there 
were several other admin programs, but mdadm seems to be the major, 
maintained tool.


The info that LVM now includes some direct raid setup tools (that also 
make use of the underlying mdraid system), is new, and possibly useful.


Which does raise an interesting question:  When the Debian installer 
gives the option to set up RAID volumes, does it use mdadm, or do it's 
own config, or use common libraries?  (Kind of arcane, but inquiring 
minds want to know.)


Miles Fidelman


Answered my own question.  The older set of tools were packaged as md 
tools and raid tools.  Meanwhile, configuration of RAID partitions is 
done by partman.




--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: FOSS equivalents of *OLD* database and spreadsheet tools?

[Miles Fidelman]

On Sat, Jul 25, 2020 at 12:38:10PM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:

Back in 70's/80's I wrote programs as part of routine job duties.
   {8080/8085 assembler, dBase and Paradox}
Neither I, nor my employers, classed me as a "programmer".
I was "Senior Engineering Tech" or "Junior Engineer".
IOW, I was not in abject *AWE* of computers. *ROFL*

Right now I'm working on a personal project.
INPUT:  How much of what did I eat?
OUTPUT: How much [cal/protein/fiber] did I eat?

SQL {and variants} seen to dominate all else.
IIRC, dBase was simpler.

What current FOSS system might I be comfortable with?


You might try googling "open source alternatives to dbase" - there seems 
to be quite a list.  Or you could go with a NoSQL database like CouchDB.


But... isn't the tool the least of your problems?  The big one being, 
where are you going to get your nutritional database. (Seems to me that 
most of what Weight Watchers and Noom do is collect data on millions of 
products.)


Good Eating,

Miles Fidelman

Re: FOSS equivalents of *OLD* database and spreadsheet tools?

[Miles Fidelman]

On 7/27/20 11:16 AM, Michael Stone wrote:


On Mon, Jul 27, 2020 at 08:09:36AM -0400, Greg Wooledge wrote:

For a project of this size and scope, a Tcl application with an sqlite3
database in a local file seems well suited.


Only on the internet can someone ask a simple question and get tcl as 
the answer. :-/


Well...

1. Where else would you ask the question, if not "the internet?"

2. tcl is still pretty cool - some great things are written in it, like 
fossil-scm (the DCVS used for sqlite, built on sqlite, in tcl, by the 
author of sqlite)


Seems like a great idea.




--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: FOSS equivalents of *OLD* database and spreadsheet tools?

[Miles Fidelman]

On 7/27/20 9:59 PM, rhkra...@gmail.com wrote:


Somebody wrote:



But... isn't the tool the least of your problems?  The big one being,
where are you going to get your nutritional database. (Seems to me that
most of what Weight Watchers and Noom do is collect data on millions of
products.)

 From my records in my free format database (which would not be suitable for
your program (at least not in its present condition), some notes on available
databases.

 From "USDA databases" Thu Sep 08 06:57:41 2016
Date: 09/08/16 06:57 am
Subject: USDA databases




What a great list of databases!  Thanks for posting this.  Who knew?

Miles Fidelman

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: [Interim Solution] Re: FOSS equivalents of *OLD* database and spreadsheet tools?

[Miles Fidelman]

On 7/30/20 5:21 AM, Eric S Fraga wrote:


On Wednesday, 29 Jul 2020 at 04:40, Richard Owlett wrote:

On 07/27/2020 10:13 AM, Eric S Fraga wrote:

You may wish to have a look at recutils:

A database is over-kill for some personal preferences.

I had mentioned spreadsheets in original post as I had visualized a

I am confused. You also mentioned databases and specifically SQL for
querying databases.


Yes, indeed - it sure seems like SQL will be necessary for either querying,
or importing from, databases of nutritional content.  Building the app around
and SQL engine - say SQL Lite - would seem to make a lot of sense.

Anything else, and some kind of converter will be needed.

Miles Fidelman


--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: mailing list vs "the futur"

[Miles Fidelman]

On 8/12/18 8:10 AM, Zenaan Harkness wrote:


On Thu, Aug 09, 2018 at 07:03:29PM -0400, Rich Kulawiec wrote:

... mighty fine list you've got there - mailing lists are even better
than I thought they were.


19. Mailing lists interoperate.  I can easily forward a message from this
list to another one.  Or to a person.  I can send a message to multiple
lists.  I can forward a message from a person to this list.  And so on.
Try doing this with web forum software A on host B with destinations
web forum software X and Y on hosts X1 and Y1.  Good luck with that.

Oh come on - this one's a no-brainer on the web - you click the Like
button on the website, which takes you to a "Share with friend", and
if it doesn't then see if there's a "Tweet" button and click that.


And then there's LinkedIn - which makes it nearly impossible to share 
things with anything other than another LinkedIn user (except by using 
one's browser to mail the item or a link).


Nope.  Forwarding by email is about the only universal way to share 
stuff, or to move it from some service or another to one's personal 
storage (I can't tell you how often I email stuff to myself).


Miles Fidelman

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Re: [OT] Best (o better than yahoo) mail provider for malinglists

[Miles Fidelman]

I would suggest looking for somebody who runs Sympa.

Open source, well supported, more "industrial strength" than Mailman 
(designed for universities, supporting lots of lists).


I've been running it on our servers, for at least a decade (who's 
counting) - it's rock solid, well supported by both a core team (at 
Renater - the French Research & Education Network), and a larger 
community.  (For example, a patch for DMARC came out almost 
immediately.  It took a lot longer for a mailman patch to show up, and 
even longer for it to make into the standard release).  Also, Sympa is 
built around a database, mailman isn't - makes a difference for folks 
running multiple lists.  Lots more things that can be customized.


There's a list of hosting providers at 
https://www.sympa.org/users/custom - but they're mostly in France.  You 
might have to do a little hunting - or post on the sympa users list.


There's also Groupserver (http://groupserver.org) - a rather interesting 
package that does a good job of melding traditional lists, with a 
web-based forum interface.  It's open source, with hosting available - 
from a small group in New Zealand.  It has a bit of traction in the 
"electronic democracy" community.


Miles Fidelman


On 8/28/18 12:25 PM, Mark Rousell wrote:

On 28/08/2018 17:12, Francesco Porro wrote:

Ciao,

As a member of this mailing list, I have a little (OT) question for you:
which is the best free email service around to receive mailing lists?


I cannot personally recommend any free, proprietary email service 
providers.


Instead I'd say that running your own mail server would be best for 
this, assuming you have some kind of always-on connection with a 
static IP you can utilise.


Although incoming spam is a potential problem the real difficulties 
with running your own mail server in my opinion are (a) maintaining 
deliverability of outgoing mail and (b) making sure you're not 
relaying spam. Keeping software and configuration up to date is 
important. However, in the sort of scenario you describe, you might 
not need to use your mail server for outgoing mail which could 
simplify things. Ideally you could use your ISP's or domain provider's 
mail server for outgoing mail whilst directing incoming mail for your 
domain to your own server. (I should add that using your own domain is 
always wise, rather than relying on service providers' email addresses).


Learning how to do all this could involve a learning curve but it's 
entirely feasible.


--
Mark Rousell
  
  
  


--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Re: mailing list vs "the futur"

[Miles Fidelman]

On 8/28/18 1:48 PM, Michael Stone wrote:


On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 05:02:08PM +0100, Mark Rousell wrote:
Lots of people download files from FTP servers but that's a wholly 
different
culture and use case than Usenet provided for in practice. And who 
said that
binaries (whether legal or illegal) was not a big part of Usenet at 
its height?


Anyone who argues that NNTP is the most efficient thing around? I 
guarantee that for large files FTP is more efficient, and that when 
one person is sending a file to a small number of other peopl, FTP is 
dramatically more efficient. I guess NNTP binary distribution is more 
efficient in some theoretical world where exactly the right 
subscriptions are distributed to exactly the right people via local 
transit servers, with no reposts. We can probably just write the 
volume of such transfers off as noise in the real world.


NNTP is exceptionally efficient for large scale message distribution - 
when compared to, say, a mailing list server that sends a message per 
subscriber.


For binary files, something like bit torrent is clearly more efficient.  
Though, a while back, somebody implemented a rather efficient mechanism 
that used NNTP for distributing header information, and a distributed 
hash table for the files themselves. Saved a lot of bandwidth.


Miles Fidelman


--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Re: mailing list vs "the futur"

[Miles Fidelman]

On 8/28/18 1:44 PM, Michael Stone wrote:

On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 04:50:27PM +0100, Mark Rousell wrote:
Additionally, both FTP and HTTP were not and are not federated, 
one-to-many

services or systems in the way that Usenet was


I guess this is where I say "But why would you expect it to be?" and 
ignore the rest of the argument.


But one might want it to be - as compared to something centralized, like 
a list server or forum.


Miles Fidelman


--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Re: mailing list vs "the futur"

[Miles Fidelman]

On 8/28/18 5:24 PM, Mark Rousell wrote:

I was going to say that you and I have started going round in circles 
and should just agree to disagree about certain things but this is a 
different strand of the discussion that still seems to be advancing.


On 28/08/2018 20:01, Michael Stone wrote:

On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 04:46:15PM +0100, Mark Rousell wrote:
web forums, app-based, IM-style, etc.) but none of that, to my mind, 
lessens
NNTP's ideal applicability to getting private discussion group 
messages from

place to place (the front end UI/UX being a different thing again).


Ignoring the changes to user requirements for UI/UX is at least part 
of why NNTP is no longer a major factor in internet usage.


Last time I looked, Thunderbird & Exchange both support news - a 
newsgroup looks just like another email account.


Miles Fidelman

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Re: mailing list vs "the futur"

[Miles Fidelman]

On 8/29/18 11:29 AM, John Hasler wrote:


Michael Stone wrote:

FWIW, I think SMTP (and IMAP) is on its way out as well. I expect
that in 20 years HTTP will still be going strong [...]

tomás writes:

Rather some Google/Amazon/Facebook/Microsoft backed abominable
mutation of that. One that (in subtle ways) gives a competitive
advantage to centralized services.

I think that SMTP will still be going strong but "consumers" will all
use Webmail and all but the largest organizations will either use
Webmail as well or contract for email service.  You'll be free to run
your own server (but not from home: ISPs will block it) but no one will
talk to you.


You miss the point.  SMTP is for transit between servers.  Maybe 
"consumers" prefer gmail, or yahoo, or some form of webmail - but we're 
never going to see a world where all mail goes through gmail - certainly 
not all business mail.


Chances are, that most mail - at least business mail - will originate in 
Outlook, go through an Exchange server, and from there, travel over SMTP.


Miles Fidelman



--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Re: Advice on mailing list software -- special requirements

[Miles Fidelman]

Speaking from experience:  Running your own server is a bit of a pain - 
to setup, and to administer, and it's best done on a server with a 
static IP address, not on a desktop behind a NAT router. (Sympa is what 
I recommend for those who want to run their own, by the way.)


For simple things, I hate to recommend it, but google groups is about as 
free & easy as it gets.


Otherwise, I expect somebody in your membership might have a corporate 
machine they'd host you on.


Miles Fidelman


On 10/23/18 9:53 AM, rhkra...@gmail.com wrote:

(Aside to Jeff: Just sending you a copy of this for your information.)

Background: I am working with a Linux SIG that used to be part of a more
general computer group.  We plan to change the name to mention "LUG" (GLVLUG
-- Greater Lehigh Valley Linux User Group).

I want to establish a mailing list for the group.

I want to find either:

* a "service" that would host a mailing list for the group for free

* or, put a (simple) mailing list application on one of my machines, behind
a firewall (well, NAT) and not require the use of anything that (in my mind)
takes a lot of work or more knowledge than I have atm to setup -- for example,
I don't want it to depend on (or be) an MTA, Apache (or any other web server),
or even a windows email client that I'm not using (I currently use kmail, and
plan to stick with it).

I know I could do something in kmail by adding a mail list such that I could
send out emails to a reasonable number of people, but that doesn't solve the
problem of other people posting to the list.

I'd prefer that, whatever I find, receive / retrieve posts via POP3 (via my
ISP) and send posts via SMTP (again, via my ISP), and I'd prefer that emails
be stored in mbox files (but, I could live with maildir).

One of my machines is running Debian 7.11 (Wheezy), and the other is running
Debian 8.11 (Jessie) -- I'd probably install whatever I find on the 8.11
machine.

I looked at packages available that might meet my needs (just by searching for
mailing list in apper and then looking at the dependencies) -- I found the
following that might meet my needs -- I'll start by investigating courier (the
pop version).

* courier-pop
* enemies-of-carlotta
* mimmj
* quickml
* schleuder
* smartlist

I'd appreciate any advice anyone can offer.


--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Re: Advice on mailing list software -- special requirements

[Miles Fidelman]

On 10/23/18 8:16 PM, rhkra...@gmail.com wrote:


On Tuesday, October 23, 2018 11:04:52 AM Miles Fidelman wrote:

Speaking from experience:  Running your own server is a bit of a pain -
to setup, and to administer,

Must be my day to reply to email messages ;-)  Yes, I've tried that before.


and it's best done on a server with a
static IP address, not on a desktop behind a NAT router.

My desktop has a static IP address, behind a NAT router.  (But it is an
address in one of the private ranges (192.168.n.n)


Yes, but you really need a PUBLIC static IP address, or things tend to 
get hairy.  Dynamic DNS will help, but only to a point.  And, a lot of 
ISPs really don't like it if you run servers at the edge.  If you really 
want to run a server on your desktop, you need an ISP that will sell you 
both a business grade line and a static IP address.



(Sympa is what
I recommend for those who want to run their own, by the way.)

For simple things, I hate to recommend it, but google groups is about as
free & easy as it gets.

I don't know why I didn't really think of that, but I guess the times I've
been involved with groups that used it, there were things I didn't like about
it, but I may look again.
  

Otherwise, I expect somebody in your membership might have a corporate
machine they'd host you on.

No, we're a small group, mostly retirees at this point (I think).  When I
asked at the last meeting, nobody had anything to offer.


Bummer.  But maybe another, larger, Linux user group might help you 
out?  I expect there might be somebody on this list who might volunteer 
(hint, hint).  Maybe somebody at a nearby university - I believe you 
have a few of those in the Lehigh Valley :-)


Best,

Miles

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Re: Advice on mailing list software -- special requirements

[Miles Fidelman]

On 10/24/18 6:45 AM, rhkra...@gmail.com wrote:


On Wednesday, October 24, 2018 12:32:15 AM Miles Fidelman wrote:

> Yes, but you really need a PUBLIC static IP address, or things tend to

> get hairy.  Dynamic DNS will help, but only to a point.  And, a lot of

> ISPs really don't like it if you run servers at the edge.

We are currently such a small group, I don't think it will be an issue 
-- if that changes, we can change.




Which - DynDNS or ISP objections?

The thing about dynamic DNS is that people cache DNS records - mail sent 
to the list WILL go to the wrong place on occasion.


Re. ISP objections - those objections sometimes take the form of active 
measures that block various kinds of traffic.



> Bummer.  But maybe another, larger, Linux user group might help you

> out?  I expect there might be somebody on this list who might volunteer

> (hint, hint).  Maybe somebody at a nearby university - I believe you

> have a few of those in the Lehigh Valley :-)

We've had somebody make such an offer, and we'll probably take them up 
on it -- I sort of wanted to try to set up a small mail list on one of 
my computers, as long as I didn't have to run a web server or a *nix 
style MTA


Now that is kind of hard to do.  All the mailing list servers that I've 
worked with require a rather intimate interconnection with the MTA that 
processes mail.  And that's before you "wire in" anti-spam and 
anti-virus filters.  And, you'll need a webserver for access to various 
administrative functions, and archive access.  Depending on the list 
server, you might also require a dbms.  Setting up list services can be 
an entertaining and educational exercise (also frustrating), but it's 
not simple.  (Actually, the simplest approach is using an MTA and 
managing lists in the alias file.)


Miles Fidelman

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Re: Advice on mailing list software -- special requirements

[Miles Fidelman]

On 10/24/18 12:56 PM, mick crane wrote:

On 2018-10-24 17:47, Miles Fidelman wrote:

We've had somebody make such an offer, and we'll probably take them 
up on it -- I sort of wanted to try to set up a small mail list on 
one of my computers, as long as I didn't have to run a web server or 
a *nix style MTA



Now that is kind of hard to do.  All the mailing list servers that
I've worked with require a rather intimate interconnection with the
MTA that processes mail.  And that's before you "wire in" anti-spam
and anti-virus filters.  And, you'll need a webserver for access to
various administrative functions, and archive access.  Depending on
the list server, you might also require a dbms.  Setting up list
services can be an entertaining and educational exercise (also
frustrating), but it's not simple.  (Actually, the simplest approach
is using an MTA and managing lists in the alias file.)



It's not very PC but disqus seems to work


Ummm... Disqus is
- not a mailing list server, it's a forum
- it's a hosted service, not something one can set up on one's own 
server, much less a desktop




--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Re: Advice on mailing list software -- special requirements

[Miles Fidelman]

On 10/24/18 2:30 PM, rhkra...@gmail.com wrote:


Ahh, a useful clue -- so the mail lists that list procmail as a dependency
(and no MTA) might meet my desires of being able to run a mail list without
setting up an MTA on my own machine.



No.

Procmail is primarily a LOCAL delivery agent - generally attached to a 
local MTA.  Mail for local addresses is handed to procmail, which can do 
things like sort mail into folders, return vacation messages, and so 
forth.  You might be able to coble together some basic list services, 
but only if you have an MTA to hand outgoing mail to.




--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Re: Advice on mailing list software -- special requirements

[Miles Fidelman]

On 10/24/18 2:05 PM, Joe wrote:


On Wed, 24 Oct 2018 12:47:10 -0400
Miles Fidelman  wrote:


On 10/24/18 6:45 AM, rhkra...@gmail.com wrote:


On Wednesday, October 24, 2018 12:32:15 AM Miles Fidelman wrote:
  

Yes, but you really need a PUBLIC static IP address, or things
tend to
  

get hairy.  Dynamic DNS will help, but only to a point.  And, a
lot of
  

ISPs really don't like it if you run servers at the edge.

We are currently such a small group, I don't think it will be an
issue -- if that changes, we can change.
  

Which - DynDNS or ISP objections?

The thing about dynamic DNS is that people cache DNS records - mail
sent to the list WILL go to the wrong place on occasion.

Re. ISP objections - those objections sometimes take the form of
active measures that block various kinds of traffic.

Then they're not a proper ISP. I pay for an *Internet* connection, not
just the forwarding of a few ports that are convenient for the provider.


You can argue what constitutes proper or not, if you want a connection 
with any level of bandwidth, you're talking a major carrier - and they 
deliver the service that they want to.





Bummer.  But maybe another, larger, Linux user group might help
you
  

out?  I expect there might be somebody on this list who might
volunteer
  

(hint, hint).  Maybe somebody at a nearby university - I believe
you
  

have a few of those in the Lehigh Valley :-)

We've had somebody make such an offer, and we'll probably take them
up on it -- I sort of wanted to try to set up a small mail list on
one of my computers, as long as I didn't have to run a web server
or a *nix style MTA
  

Now that is kind of hard to do.  All the mailing list servers that
I've worked with require a rather intimate interconnection with the
MTA that processes mail.  And that's before you "wire in" anti-spam
and anti-virus filters.  And, you'll need a webserver for access to
various administrative functions, and archive access.  Depending on
the list server, you might also require a dbms.  Setting up list
services can be an entertaining and educational exercise (also
frustrating), but it's not simple.  (Actually, the simplest approach
is using an MTA and managing lists in the alias file.)

There's no technical problem to using a local MTA and your ISP's SMTP
server as a proxy.


You still need a local MTA - which the OP doesn't seem to want to run.

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Re: MacOS VM on Debian: is it reasonably possible?

[Miles Fidelman]

Has anyone been able to run a recent version of MacOS as a VM?

Which, while it might not stop anyone doing what they like in the privacy of 
their own home, should be ample reason not to take it to a public mailing list. 
Postings just as the OP reflect badly not only upon themselves but on others 
and the project at large.

Haven't tried it recently.  It used to  be possible.  But it's a LOT 
easier to run Debian (and other, including MacOS) VMs on a Mac. Works 
just great under Parallels - and, in the past, I've done it using 
Virtual Box & VMware.


Going the other way leads into both licensing issues, and boot issues.

Miles Fidelman (typing on a Mac, which is BSD Unix underneath, sending 
via a server running Debian in a VM over Xen, with Dom0 also being 
Debian - meanwhile, there are several Windows & Linux VMs on this Mac - 
not running at the moment, but they run native speed when they are).


--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: MacOS VM on Debian: is it reasonably possible?

[Miles Fidelman]

Well... that would basically be MacOS, or a GUI that looks like MacOS 
running on another BSD.




Mario Marietto wrote:
How difficult will it be to create a BSD system with the look and feel 
of the MacOSX ? I mean,not only based on aesthetics,but more 
structural,but not so much structural to incite the apple's lawyers.


Il giorno mar 22 nov 2022 alle ore 17:41 Jeffrey Walton 
mailto:noloa...@gmail.com>> ha scritto:


On Tue, Nov 22, 2022 at 11:10 AM Mario Marietto
mailto:marietto2...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> How much FreeBSD code is inside the MacOSX code today ?

That's a good question. The Darwin kernel is XNU. But a lot of
userland code is BSD. In fact, a lot of Apple's man pages say (or used
to say) they are for BSD. See attached for the codesign man page.

I remember around the time that Apple adopted the Mach kernel. They
finally got a memory manager! No more "It's not my fault" and error
code 8 (iirc). I am kind of surprised I can't find a YouTube video
with an old Mac saying it...

Also

https://www.reddit.com/r/BSD/comments/1mix5h/id_like_the_differences_in_darwin_and_freebsd/
and see https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu .

Jeff



--
Mario.



--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: Who pays Debian developement

[Miles Fidelman]

rhkra...@gmail.com wrote:

On Tuesday, January 31, 2023 05:34:49 AM Pierre-Elliott Bécue wrote:

There are also individuals making such donations.

That being said, these donations can't be used to pay a Developer for
its work in the project.


That being said, there are certainly developers out there, who are 
working on company time, to make contributions to Debian (and other) 
open source software.  And folks at places that host the work - like the 
OSU OSL - are certainly drawing salaries from their parent 
institutions.  I expect a lot of that work is grant funded.


Miles Fidelman


--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: You removed Weboob package over pollitical reasons?Whole Internet laughs at you

[Miles Fidelman]

Not for nothing... but I'd never heard of weboob before.  Looks like a 
rather powerful set of functions.  All the controversy has probably 
provided some much needed visibility.


Personally, I don't care about the packaging - I tend to find that 
packagers tend to just muck things up.  For anything except the most 
common stuff, I'll always stick with >make;make install


Miles Fidelman

On 12/24/18 5:25 AM, Ivan Ivanov wrote:

500 comments at Slashdot, >200 at Phoronix and >1000 at linux org ru! See now?

When a technical project starts making their decisions over pollitical reasons
rather than technical, it is doomed. Good time to switch to a similar distro
with mentally sane leadership, like Devuan. Also what's good about Devuan :

Devuan does not use System8==D as its' init system! SystemD contains >1 million
lines of bloated code and lots of vulnerabilities have been found there and
countless haven't, also the SystemD creators are arrogant and refuse to fix many
discovered security vulnerabilities, to a point where they've been awarded a
" Pwnie award " for refusing to fix a critical vuln.

That is why I prefer the distros which are using something else as init system:
either good old SysV, or something more modern like OpenRC (at Artix Linux) or
runit (at Void Linux) , just not systemd! There are only a few such distros left
because of Redhat pressure, and luckily Devuan is one of them.
If you found Debian as useful before it went nuts then maybe you'd like Devuan,
or even some other distros that I mentioned: Artix Linux =Arch with a human face
(has GUI + everything configured by default, nice GUI package manager and
convenient to use even for the beginners), and Void Linux -amazingly fast distro
really suitable for old PCs, but lacks some packages so you'd need to compile
the things from source once in a while, in comparison Artix has almost the same
set of packages as Arch. Both Artix and Void are very stable despite their
packages are really new and they are among the first to get new Linux kernels
with fresh drivers.

Or maybe MX Linux, one of the top popularity distros nowadays which is
also "no systemd" and somehow only recently I learned about it

Best regards,
Ivan Ivanov,
open source firmware developer


--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Re: Fwd: You removed Weboob package over pollitical reasons?Whole Internet laughs at you

[Miles Fidelman]

On 12/24/18 6:43 PM, Mark Fletcher wrote:
On Tue, Dec 25, 2018 at 7:56 Miles Fidelman 
mailto:mfidel...@meetinghouse.net>> wrote:


Not for nothing... 



Please don’t top post.


Yeah, whatever.  Grammar nazi.




but I'd never heard of weboob before.  Looks like a
rather powerful set of functions.  All the controversy has probably
provided some much needed visibility.

Personally, I don't care about the packaging - I tend to find that
packagers tend to just muck things up.  For anything except the most
common stuff, I'll always stick with >make;make install


In that case, why use Debian? The packaging (and the policies to 
support and govern it) are what makes Debian, Debian. Might as well 
use LFS if you’re going to make ; make install everything anyway.


Apt is well and good, and makes it easy enough to install all the basic 
packages on a new server.  After that, I've found that serious things, 
like databases, list managers - are generally well behind, and often 
don't build right.


Frankly, ever since systemd, I've been planning on migrating our 
production servers to BSD - just not a high enough priority. Debian has 
basically turned to garbage.





(Not that make ; make install is in any way evil; it’s great when it’s 
needed, it’s just not needed very much by users in Debian)


In your opinion.  Not in my experience.




With apologies to Miles for previously accidentally replying to him 
directly instead of replying only on-list...


Accepted.

Miles

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Re: Why choose Debian on server

[Miles Fidelman]

On 1/2/19 2:51 AM, Alessandro Baggi wrote:

Hi list,
I'm new to this list and I'm choosing the right distribution for 
server needs. I hope that I'm not OT and don't want start a flame. 
I'm evaluating the possibility to switch on debian so I hope you will 
give your experiences about this topic.


At the moment I'm using CentOS 7 on server and workstation but very 
old software, add third repos for get some software, use unmaintained 
software where patchs are released by dev distro team, big changes 
between a current release and next release, big corporation piloted 
distro, waiting that rh release a security patches and then 
recompiled on centos, problem on new hardware, unable to install new 
software from source due to old libs get me bored, and frustated in 
the last year. I like flexibility and I noticed that centos chains my 
knowledge.


Today seems that RH Family is the standard and rh is more supported 
by software vendors. Considering 10 years of support, Selinux working 
out of the box, stability, enteprise class and free distro..user 
choose Centos with the perception that things work better because all 
is "followed" by a corporation. With this assumption users feel more 
secure and unfailing.




Traditionally, Red Hat (CentOS) and Debian  aimed primarily at servers - 
dating back to a time when server were the only place one ran Linux (if 
you were running Unix on a desktop, you probably had a Sun 
Workstation).  Graphical desktops came in with newer distros.  Suse also 
falls in this category.


These days, Red Hat has strong support, precisely because it's a 
commercial, supported product, and the primary distro used by large 
government & corporate users (outside of IBM and Oracle customers, who 
have their own distros).  If you're running Linux on a production 
server, it's probably Red Hat. CentOS is the free version.  Debian has 
been popular with those of us who don't like Red Hat's way of doing things.


Today, as I face some upgrade issues of my own, I'm really not so sure.  
All of the debacle around systemd, and some of the recent politics, has 
made me far less comfortable that Debian will remain a stable platform - 
and I'm seriously considering migrating to either Gentoo or a BSD platform.


Miles Fidelman


--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Re: Why choose Debian on server

[Miles Fidelman]

On 1/2/19 1:41 PM, deloptes wrote:


Joe wrote:


Indeed. I'm currently working on getting Debian onto a small Acer
laptop, which is not trivial. I've run it on a netbook for several
years. But laptops and servers are solutions to different problems, and
don't generally need the same hardware and software. I wouldn't run
Gimp on a server, nor a RADIUS server on a laptop.

before start using the Fujitsu PC I used the same on a Dell E5440, I just
took the hard drive and put it into the Fujitsu PC. It started without a
problem.

The server is just a more powerful PC and the PC from today is the server
from 10y ago.



Not really true.  Servers tend to be configured very differently than 
desktop machines:  Multiple network ports, support for storage area 
networks, remote management, redundancy, different disks, not to mention 
headless.  One tends to run more specialized stuff, as well - 
hypervisors, storage management, failover stuff, back-end stuff 
(databases, mail servers, list servers).  One tends to run different 
drivers, and tune things differently.




I don't see a problem running Gimp on a server or RADIUS on a laptop ...
well, depends on the laptop and radius configuration.

I'm not sure how well GIMP would run on across a network, particularly 
if one wants to use a pen.  It's really designed to run on a machine 
with a head.


Miles Fidelman


--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Re: Why choose Debian on server

[Miles Fidelman]

On 1/2/19 5:16 PM, deloptes wrote:


Miles Fidelman wrote:


I'm not sure how well GIMP would run on across a network, particularly
if one wants to use a pen.  It's really designed to run on a machine
with a head.

so you are saying you can not ssh -X to the server and run your gimp if that
is what you want? I bet you can and I bet you can configure the server the
way you like - it is just another PC ;-) regardless hypervisors and
underlaying stuff.


No, but:

X11 is one of those things that one doesn't always install on servers.

If one wants GPU acceleration, one commonly does not install GPUs on 
servers.


Behavior over a network might be a bit problematic.  I expect network 
jitter might interfere with things like fine drawing with a wacom tablet.


Now, if one works in a graphics shop, with a serious rendering cluster 
in the same room – then maybe running GIMP on the server might make some 
sense.


Miles Fidelman





--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Re: Why choose Debian on server

[Miles Fidelman]

On 1/3/19 5:55 AM, Reco wrote:


Hi.

On Wed, Jan 02, 2019 at 02:56:41PM -0500, Miles Fidelman wrote:

some of the recent politics, has made me far less comfortable that Debian will 
remain a stable platform - and I'm seriously considering migrating to either 
Gentoo or a BSD platform.

LOL, you've made my day, sir. It's hardly wise to consider FreeBSD as a
shelter from 'political issues' - [1], [2], and that's the only alive
BSD these days.


Except for NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD, and, of course, OSX.

As to the political issues - looks like a reasonable, and detailed 
policy AND PROCEDURES to me - not like the kangaroo court in the Debian 
world.  And then there was all the bullshit about how systemd was 
handled - including resignations of core developers over it.



--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Re: disk going bad? or fuser related issues? . . .

[Miles Fidelman]

On 10/4/19 10:45 AM, Albretch Mueller wrote:


  I use ntfs as a data transfer file system between Mac OS, *nix and
Windows (I code primarily in java). Even though while using that
partition through fuser it is noticeable slower, afaik, it is the only
viable option there is.

  Lately I have been noticing the NTFS partition being slower than
usual: telling me I am not allowed to open that partition and/or the
OS doing it itself but taking its time (like 5 seconds). The other
partitions mount just fine, so it doesn't seem to be a hardware issue.

  Is that disk partition somehow going bad or there might be something
else going on?

  Also, the disk seems to be somewhat noiser now or I am not sure if I
have started noticing it to be so because it is failing.

The best thing to do is run some tests on the disk, like the long SMART 
test.


If you see lots of disk errors - there's a good chance you're having 
hardware or media issues, backup as quickly as you can and replace the 
drive.


Also just check the total hours-in-service against the rated life for 
your drive.


The thing to watch out for (learned the hardware):

- server-grade disks fail quickly, relying on RAID to take over

- commercial-grade disks, on the other hand, will keep trying to read a 
sector - trying as hard as they can to retrieve data - even if it takes 
100s of attempts, and tens of seconds


It can be really confusing to find that one's machine is getting slower, 
and slower, and slower, for no apparent reason.


Miles Fidelman

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: cannot bring up phpmyadmin in browser, cannot link to mysql

[Miles Fidelman]

On 10/5/19 11:51 AM, Dave wrote:

On our old server we used to access phpmyadmin via 
"oursite.com/phpmyadmin"


on the new server we have installed phpmyadmin / php / and sql-server ...

we cannot access phpmyadmin.

also we have not been able to link other programs like wordpress to sql
or phpmyadmin to sql.

DEBIAN 9.04

please advise


Well, for starters, work through the install & configuration steps, line 
by line.  Make sure you got it right.  (Also, go back and review your 
detailed notes from the installation on your old server - you did make & 
keep notes, right?)


Other piece of advice:  I've found that complex software works better 
when installed from a source tarball, with ./config; make install.  For 
all the basic stuff, packages & apt work just fine.  For more complex 
stuff, I always install from the most current stable upstream source.  
It's saved me no end of trouble.


Miles Fidelman


--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: Serial port software

[Miles Fidelman]

On 11/27/19 7:38 PM, John Hasler wrote:


Paul Sutton wrote:

We have need, at the South Devon Tech Jam to gain access to a switch
that has a serial port, but using the serial port, (having issues using
the switch ip address).

I have a netbook running debian along with a usb -> 9 pin serial
connector cable. and have been asked to install software to allow serial
connection.

"Something that gives as close to a proper RS232 serial port operation
as possible."

As there seems to be a wide range of options presented by 'apt search
serial' I decided to ask here for recommendations please.

Use Minicom, or Xminicom to provide a bit of comfort to text-mode
phobics.  How close you can get to "proper RS232 serial port operation"
will probably be limited by the USB <-> serial chip in that cable.


You might want to review https://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Serial-HOWTO.html


Section 14 has a good list of software.





--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

Re: REALLY OT: News Flash

[Miles Fidelman]

Paul Johnson wrote:

Roberto C. Sanchez wrote:
  

On Sat, Feb 24, 2007 at 03:48:56PM -0800, Paul Johnson wrote:


I'm not really convinced that's the case.  Glasnost allowed the average
Soviet to find out the full horror of their regime's history.  The
collective shock, awe and outrage of the Soviet population easily and
singlehandedly caused the implosion of the Soviet Union.  Star Wars was a
comical waste of resources.
  

Of course, it can also be viewed as big research project, in which case
there were some successes.



I'll grant you that much, as a research project it was moderately
successful.  Though I think you'd have a hard time arguing that it's
primary motivation was research.
  
There's probably a good argument to make that that Star Wars' primary 
motivation was sending money to people who did research projects 
(defense contractors, universities, think tanks, etc.).


Miles


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Re: How to make mailing list,,,

[Miles Fidelman]

Andi Mappesona wrote:

dear all

I have a task to make a framework/engine mailing list,,,like 
yahoogroups etc,,, but i don't know to start from where i have 
search tutorials at google but i didn't find anything,,,

maybe someone can help me,,,? give me a clue,,etc
it's not clear - do you need to set up a mailing list, or build a 
mailing list engine


if the former - take a look at mailman and sympa - very solid, open 
source email engines - be warned, you'll need to be fairly knowledgeable 
about how your local mailer daemon works and is configured


if you're trying to build a mailing list engine - lot's of luck - not a 
task for the faint of heart or a beginner


Miles


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anybody familiar with php4-curl?

[Miles Fidelman]

Hi Folks,

I'm trying to install a package that requires curl support, and it's 
installer tells me that curl isn't enabled.


I'm running Debian Sarge, Apache2, PHP-4, and I thought I had installed 
php4-curl when I did my initial installs (apt-get install php4-curl) 
tells me that it's up to date.


The documentation on the PHP site tells me that curl requires that PHP 
be compiled with --with-curl, but phpinfo tells me it wasn't.


Which leads to three questions:

1. do I have to do something during my install to get PHP and cURL 
working right (like a manual compile) (I would think that the package 
installer would take care of that)?


2. if all is installed properly, is there a config. line I need to set 
somewhere to enable cURL


3. is there a better place to ask this question?

Thanks very much,

Miles


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Re: Weird apache2 issue

[Miles Fidelman]

Justin Hartman wrote:

On 3/21/07, Thomas Jollans <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> In setting up apache 2.2.3 with virtual hosts I have experienced
> something very strange which has never happened before.
name-based or IP-based virtual hosts ?



It's all IP-based
one obvious step: look at your access log - see what requests it's 
seeing and how it's dispatching them - that might give you some ideas



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2nd try: anybody familiar with php4-curl?

[Miles Fidelman]

[Sent this a week or so back - never received a single reply... so, one 
more try...  Thanks... Miles]


Hi Folks,

I'm trying to install a package that requires curl support, and it's 
installer tells me that curl isn't enabled.


I'm running Debian Sarge, Apache2, PHP-4, and I thought I had installed 
php4-curl when I did my initial installs (apt-get install php4-curl) 
tells me that it's up to date.


The documentation on the PHP site tells me that curl requires that PHP 
be compiled with --with-curl, but phpinfo tells me it wasn't.


Which leads to three questions:

1. do I have to do something during my install to get PHP and cURL 
working right (like a manual compile) (I would think that the package 
installer would take care of that)?


2. if all is installed properly, is there a config. line I need to set 
somewhere to enable cURL


3. is there a better place to ask this question?

Thanks very much,

Miles





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Re: 2nd try: anybody familiar with php4-curl? - SOLVED

[Miles Fidelman]

That did it.  Thanks Roberto!

Miles

Roberto C. Sánchez wrote:

On Sat, Mar 24, 2007 at 05:19:11PM -0400, Miles Fidelman wrote:
  
[Sent this a week or so back - never received a single reply... so, one 
more try...  Thanks... Miles]




Hmm.  I missed it the first time.

  

Hi Folks,

I'm trying to install a package that requires curl support, and it's 
installer tells me that curl isn't enabled.


I'm running Debian Sarge, Apache2, PHP-4, and I thought I had installed 
php4-curl when I did my initial installs (apt-get install php4-curl) 
tells me that it's up to date.


The documentation on the PHP site tells me that curl requires that PHP 
be compiled with --with-curl, but phpinfo tells me it wasn't.





Have you tried adding the line 'extension=curl.so' to the php4 config
file: /etc/php4/apache2/php.ini

Generally, when you install a php4-foo package, you need to add the
'extension=foo.so' to the php configuration and then restart apache.

Regards,

-Roberto

  



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Re: 2nd try: anybody familiar with php4-curl?

[Miles Fidelman]

Kevin Mark wrote:

Generally, when you install a php4-foo package, you need to add the
'extension=foo.so' to the php configuration and then restart apache.


Would it make sense to add a wishlist bug to phpX-foo to 'detect
apacheX' and then either ask or automatically add this line to
/etc/phpX/apacheX/php.ini?
(I expect it to be documented in the README.debian,iirc, although I dont
use any of these to know)

  

Good points!

I checked the README.debian and other files that ship with php4-curl (at 
least in stable) and there's no explicit statement I can find about 
adding the extension=curl.so to php.ini - sort of surprising, actually.  
Don't know if that's been changed for versions beyond stable.


I think I'll go file a wishlist request.

Miles


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Re: 2nd try: anybody familiar with php4-curl?

[Miles Fidelman]

Celejar wrote:

Miles Fidelman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
  
I'm trying to install a package that requires curl support, and it's 
installer tells me that curl isn't enabled.

well, the problem has been solved (see previous posting to debian-user) 
but, to answer your questions ...


Which package?
  

zencart
I'm running Debian Sarge, Apache2, PHP-4, and I thought I had installed 
php4-curl when I did my initial installs (apt-get install php4-curl) 
tells me that it's up to date.



Are we talking about a PHP package? curl is a standalone application as
well as a part of lots of others and libraries. Can you be more
specific about what you're trying to install and what sort of curl it
requires?
  
php4-curl is a debian package with all the glue for accessing curl from 
php4, and apt-get will

install all the curl libraries


You need to be clearer about what exactly you're trying to do. [Not a
flame; just a request for more info.]

well, I thought I had - php was telling me that php-curl was not installed
even though I had installed the php4-curl package and all its dependencies

and I asked if there was anything I needed to do to complete installation

As previously answered by somebody on the list (thanks again!), the answer was:

add the line:
extension=curl.so
to /etc/php4/apache2/php.ini
and restart apache

Works like a charm.

Miles



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Re: RAID vs Multiple Drives

[Miles Fidelman]

Adrian Hall wrote:



Put RAID 5 into Google and you should be able to find out plenty
more information - it's been a while since I had to deal with RAID
so my descriptions are a little vague.
Someone else on this list will likely give a better description.


last time I looked, wikipedia had a pretty good background article on RAID


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Re: xquery

[Miles Fidelman]

There are some links to various java implementation from Wikipedia's 
xquery page.


http://www.gnu.org/software/qexo/ looks interesting

Hendrik Boom wrote:

On Sat, 18 Aug 2007 14:27:18 -0500, Ron Johnson wrote:

  

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

On 08/18/07 13:08, Hendrik Boom wrote:


Is there an xquery implementation for Linux?  Or is it time to implement
one? Or is someone already doing it?
  

What does Googling for "xquery linux" say?




A lot of entries that seem to have only tengential relevance to my
wuestion, some discussions about how usefully xquery can be extended for
various applications, and how various (proprietary-looking) applications
can be extended to do Xquery-like things.  Very little
information identifying specific implementatinos of Xquery that could be
installed and tried out in isolation by someone just gaining familiarity
with the concepts.

Oh... I did find an optimistic description of a project that was looking
forward to the new standards proposals to be released soon in 2002 so
that they could implement it.  Are they still waiting after five years, or
is the project dead?

On retrying the query after your reply, I found GCX, which seems to offer
significant linguistic restrictions.  It seems to have be implemented
primarily to accomplish academic research on storage management.  This was
the most promising lead I found.

I was hoping to hear from someone that had some experience with the stuff,
who might be able to advise me what actually worked.

-- hendrik


  



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Re: GPL X-rays

[Miles Fidelman]

John Hasler wrote:

David Baron writes:
  

just maybe I could get jpegs out of this thing ...



No one would use lossy compression on medical x-rays.
  
As I recall, there were some juicy lawsuits a while back - before people 
figured out they shouldn't use lossy compression on medical x-rays.


Miles


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Re: webbased SSH server/client

[Miles Fidelman]

Mark wrote:

Hi List,

I'm looking for a ssh client that runs on a webserver. Something I can 
connect to using a regular web browser and then connect to a ssh 
server from that server (Instead of the connection originating from 
the client)


Trying to circumvent a firewall that only let's out port 80 and 443 
AND proxied.


I've browsed sourceforge and googled on it, but i'm only able to find 
java based clients, but they all start the ssh connection straight 
from the client instead of the server.

try googling on "ssh proxy" - you'll start finding things like:
http://www.mtu.net/~engstrom/ssh-proxy.php
http://www.agroman.net/corkscrew/
http://www.nocrew.org/software/httptunnel.html


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Re: Thinking about devoting a serious part of my life to linux...

[Miles Fidelman]

Kent West wrote:

Ron Johnson wrote:

Blatant disregard of reality is a bright, shiny shibboleth that you
are a student.


Don't believe I've ever heard the term used that way before. I rather 
like it. But I suspect few today would know the etymology.


But just doing a google, I find it's not an uncommon use of the word. 
Bummer; that just means I'm less literate than I thought.


the word had an important place in a "West Wing" episode a few years ago 
- otherwise, I'd still think of it just as a single sign-on system :-)


Miles


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Re: Thinking about devoting a serious part of my life to linux...

[Miles Fidelman]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

For a pure learning experience there is gentoo (vaguely debian-like)
or Linux From Scratch. If you fight your way through one of those
installs you will know a lot of the tearful side of Linux. They don't
hide the details, they glory in the low level nuts and bolts.
  
I'll echo that.  Learned a LOT working through Linux from Scratch.  Less 
enamored of Gentoo, if I'm going to build from source I find it a lot 
easier just downloading whatever program I'm interested in and running 
the makefile - without putting a build system in the middle.


For production, I've found Debian to be the most stable environment, and 
apt-get is excellent for dealing with dependencies.  Though I find there 
are an awful lot of packages I use that I need to build from source.  
Not looking forward to migrating my production boxes from Sarge to Etch, 
though.


Miles


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Re: why sarge is so noisy

[Miles Fidelman]

Serena Cantor wrote:

Thanks! Could you give me a list of programs that start automatically? Do you 
mean that there's
nothing I can do about it?

My sarge is intended to be server, hopefully, most of server-related work I add 
can be done in
memory.
  

Do you run a mail server on it?  Send/receive much traffic?

Miles


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[OT] Re: why sarge is so noisy

[Miles Fidelman]

Ron Johnson wrote:

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

On 09/07/07 01:45, Serena Cantor wrote:
  

I have sarge, I use it all the time (it's server) The machine is



Sarge?  Isn't that slightly Jurassic?
  
I don't know, I'm still running it on a couple of production servers.  I 
figure anything less than a year old (i.e., Etch) isn't stable enough 
for production - particularly given that a variety of the programs I run 
haven't been updated to Etch yet (though I haven't looked really recently).


Miles


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Re: Netinst Fails to Recognize SATA Components

[Miles Fidelman]

Thomas H. George wrote:
I purchased an HP desktop with a SATA hard drive and a SATA 
dvdrom/cdrw and added a second SATA hard drive on which I want to 
install Debian Etch.



Clearly the SATA components are not recognized  by either programs.

I had that problem with a couple of servers a while back.  I just 
checked my logbook on how I fixed it, and the note said: "go into BIOS, 
set SATA mode to IDE."  That did it for me.



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Re: [OT] File Storage Server

[Miles Fidelman]

Martin Marcher wrote:

In essence all I would like would be a standard server where I can
hotplug a lot of disks and be done with it (RAID resizing etc could be
done from debian then). Something like 2GB RAM a decent CPU (not too
much since it'll be dedicated to file services and RAID) and the
option to add disks. Any hints on what to get? (open to suggestions
apart from dell but I need the option of a service contract in case of
hardware failure...
  
I've had really good luck with a couple of boxes I purchased from 
Rackmounts, Etc. - a lot more horsepower and gigabytes per dollar than 
the Dell stuff.  They come with a 3-year warranty.



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Re: I Hate the Debian Mailing List!!!!

[Miles Fidelman]

Kamaraju S Kusumanchi wrote:

I can't get one single email to come through, so I might get help.  I have


have you checked your SMTP server against the various spam databases - 
there's a great tool on www.dnsstuff.com that will run a test against 
all the major databases (note: you need to scroll down the page to get 
to the tool)


for that matter, since your return address is on bluebottle.com - which 
advertises itself as providing a "spam-free  email" service - are you 
sure the problem isn't on your end - either outgoing or incoming?



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Re: I Hate the Debian Mailing List!!!!

[Miles Fidelman]

Kamaraju S Kusumanchi wrote:



Jason Zaphyr wrote:

  

I can't get one single email to come through, so I might get help.  I have


well there's at least one thing that might be causing you a problem:

if you're using mail.bluebottle.com as your smtp server, it has not PTR 
record listed for it's IP address (206.188.24.42) - some mail systems 
don't accept mail from systems that don't have a proper PTR record in 
place - not sure if that applies to lists.debian.org or not



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Re: Tool for document management

[Miles Fidelman]

Folks,

I share some of the original writers interest in finding a good document 
management tool.


It was sort of disappointing to see a discussion that has focused 
primarily on version control tools, and a little on TeX vs. Word vs. 
Open Office issues.


There are a huge number of document and content management systems 
around - aimed at managing text documents, rather than code, and many of 
them open source (try googling "document management" along with "open 
source").  I was hoping to see somebody with some experience with one or 
more of them comment.  Apparently there's no such experience on debian-user.


So... just as a suggestion to the original writer: cast a wider net.  
And... if you happen to come across a good email list focused on 
document/content management - let me know!


Miles Fidelman


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Re: Math Package to Solve Linear Equations?

[Miles Fidelman]

Kamaraju S Kusumanchi wrote:

Thomas H. George wrote:
  

I'm feeling stupid.  I used to have a math package which inverted
matrices to solve systems of linear equations - i.e. enter the matrix
and the y values and the program inverts the matrix and reports the x
values.  I know how to do it manually but it is laborious for large
matrices.  Perhaps Openoffice.calc/solver does this but it is not clear
to me how to enter data for solver to do this.  apt-cache search matrix
|grep inversion doesn't turn up anything.

Would someone please beat me over the head and point me to a simple
package to do this job?




Software suites:

Matlab - proprietary, comes with a good GUI, lots of routines to plot
graphs, contours etc., contains lot of sparse solvers.

Octave - Use versions > 2.9.12 for better experience. Older versions are
incompatible with newer versions. Does not have a GUI provided by the
  
there's also an open source version of Macsyma floating around at 
maxima.sourceforge.net - might do what you're looking for



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Re: booting from DVD?

[Miles Fidelman]

steve wrote:

good question - my other main machine is a PowerPC Mac, so that's no
help; just tried it on the kids' Windows box - same symptom - seems to
try to read the DVD, then boots from the hard drive (into Windows)

I guess I must be missing something about making the DVDs bootable

Thoughts?

Miles




I would re burn the iso trying like I said.  find the .iso in your file
browser, right click on it, and select "write to disc".  gnome will burn
it as an .iso, should be able to boot from it ok then.  let me know.

  
after a little research, I'm starting to conclude that either I need to 
update the firmware in my cd/dvd drive, or figure out how to burn the 
dvds with book-type set to dvd+r (the default burning software seems to 
burn with book-type dvd-rom - which I'm discovering some drives have a 
hard time processing)


Miles


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utilities for liteon dvd drive?

[Miles Fidelman]

apropos my earlier query regarding not being able to boot from a DVD, 
it's been suggested to me that I might need a firmware update to my 
DVD/RW drive


unfortunately, all the manufacturer doesn't directly support anything 
except windows


so.. can anybody suggest utilities I can use, under Debian, to interact 
with a Liteon SHM-16 CD/DVD drive - to check/set config settings, check 
firmware version, flash firmware, etc.?


thanks much,

Miles


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booting from DVD?

[Miles Fidelman]

Hi Folks,

I've been trying to get my system to boot from a DVD, and it's not 
working.  I wonder if I'm doing something wrong (or more likely, stupid).


The system:
- Foxconn motherboard (681 something)
- Phoenix BIOS
- E-IDE CDROM/DVD+RW drive
- boot order set to CD, HDD

If I stick in a bootable CDROM (e.g., a LiveCD) it boots just fine off 
the CD


But... if I stick in what I think is a bootable DVD, the BIOS appears to 
spend some time accessing the drive (the light goes on, flashes a bit, 
...), but then continues to boot off the hard disk.  I've tried this 
with both DVDs burned from iso images of xploraknoppix (Debian 
derivative live DVD) and the Opensolaris Community Edition (motivation 
is really to get solaris running to play with various combinations of 
solaris, zfs, xen, debian).


So I'm wondering if:
a. I have to change a setting somewhere, or,
b. there's something I'm missing about burning the DVDs so that they're 
bootable, or,

c. I'm missing some other step

Thanks for any help.

Miles


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Re: booting from DVD?

[Miles Fidelman]

steve wrote:

ill assume you are using gnome, all I do is right click on the iso file,
then choose write to disc.  has always worked fine for me.
  

yup

did you burn the dvd on the pc your trying to boot from, and is the file
actually an .iso ?

  
yes, and looks like it - at least it mounts and the fstab lists it as 
udf, iso9660 (exactly the same way a bootable CD looks)

does the dvd boot on another computer?

  
good question - my other main machine is a PowerPC Mac, so that's no 
help; just tried it on the kids' Windows box - same symptom - seems to 
try to read the DVD, then boots from the hard drive (into Windows)


I guess I must be missing something about making the DVDs bootable

Thoughts?

Miles


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Re: booting from DVD?

[Miles Fidelman]

Wayne Topa wrote:


If you have k3b installed you could try usig it to create a bootable
dvd.

  

just tried k3b, and it wasn't bootable either

I've tried burning several images that purport to be bootable, but I'm 
guessing there are some parameters I have to set as well.  When I burn 
CDs, they just work - but the DVDs don't (readable, but not bootable) - 
so I'm not sure what's going on.



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Re: booting from DVD?

[Miles Fidelman]

Wayne Topa wrote:

If you tried using the prior udf dvd then I would think it wouldn't
work.  Did you try formating that dvd before you tried burning to it?

I always use a cd/dvd R/W to check the iso out before I burn to a cd/dvd R,
just in case.
  
now THAT's a great idea - guess I'll have to go out and buy a couple of 
r/w dvds
I've tried burning several images that purport to be bootable, but I'm 
guessing there are some parameters I have to set as well.  When I burn CDs, 
they just work - but the DVDs don't (readable, but not bootable) - so I'm 
not sure what's going on.



When you select the iso file, does k3b show it is reading it?  Does it
show an Md5 checksum?

  

yup - the checksum verifies and the disk verifies after being written

I just tried, as a user & as root, on an amd64 box and a K7 box.  K3b
v1.0.3-2 on the amd64 box and k3b v0.12.17-9 on the k7 box and they
both created a bootable DVD.  I just selected "Burn DVD ISO Image"
after if formated the DVD R/Wg.  Both boxes are running testin and kernel 
2.6.21-2.
  

hmm.. no special settings - this is beginning to sound like my drive


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Re: booting from DVD? SOLVED

[Miles Fidelman]

Miles Fidelman wrote:

Wayne Topa wrote:


If you have k3b installed you could try usig it to create a bootable
dvd.

  

just tried k3b, and it wasn't bootable either

I've tried burning several images that purport to be bootable, but I'm 
guessing there are some parameters I have to set as well.  When I burn 
CDs, they just work - but the DVDs don't (readable, but not bootable) 
- so I'm not sure what's going on.




turns out my drive needed a firmware update

updating the firmware fixed the problem - turns out I was burning DVDs 
just fine, but the drive wasn't recognizing them


pulled the drive, stuck it in my kids' windows machine, ran the flash 
utility, put the drive back in my tower - and now it boots just fine


thanks all

Miles


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Re: which mailing list manager...

[Miles Fidelman]

Attila Horvath wrote:

Any opinions about which mailing list manager is better?

My personal favorite is sympa (www.sympa.org)


Needed are...

- 'relative' customization ease
- self administering (as most are)
- archiving and retrieval
- spam filtering [optional] - I'm running spamassassin
- reliability & security


yes to all, plus:

- database driven
- web interface
- very customizeable
- well supported (open source, but driven by a funded team supporting a 
consortium of French universities


Re. spam filtering: Sympa can route to antispam and antivirus engines, 
but it's probably better to just integrate spamassassin and clamav 
directly with your MTA.








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Re: which mailing list manager...

[Miles Fidelman]

Chris Bannister wrote:

Having to go to a web page to change details on what is just really an
email service is a bad thing IMO, so:

  Pros...
  easily administered via an email interface.

It is a RPITA to have to go online - fire up a web browser - go to a
special site - enter password details etc - ...

   compared to

Compose email offline - go online - send email.

  

Leaving aside differences of opinion on this...

FYI: sympa - the list manager I recommended earlier -  provides for 
access to most of its functions via email commands, as well as its web 
interface. 


Miles Fidelman


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webalizer question

[Miles Fidelman]

To anybody out there using the stable version of webalizer:

Is there a way to turn on hostname resolution through the config file, 
or does that require recompiling the source package? (Or is there a 
better place to ask this question?).


Thanks very much,

Miles Fidelman


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Re: webalizer question - solved

[Miles Fidelman]

Greg Folkert wrote:

On Tue, 2007-01-30 at 06:42 -0500, Miles Fidelman wrote:
  

To anybody out there using the stable version of webalizer:

Is there a way to turn on hostname resolution through the config file, 
or does that require recompiling the source package? (Or is there a 
better place to ask this question?).



"man webasolver"

Will get you your answer. It is a 2 step process.
  

Thanks!


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Re: Patch for Daylight Savings Time (DST))

[Miles Fidelman]

Oleg Verych wrote:

30-01-2007, Oleg Verych <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> пишет:
  

30-01-2007, Ron Johnson:


On 01/30/07 13:58, William Chipman wrote:
  

Has there been a patch to adjust the start / end date changes for daylight
savings time in the US?


Which branch are you running?
  
So... does anybody have an answer to the original question?  Personally, 
I'm running Sarge, and am also interested in whether such a patch exists.


Thanks,

Miles


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Re: Boot logs ?

[Miles Fidelman]

Frank McCormick wrote:

   Does Debian (Sarge testing) save COMPLETE boot logs anywhere? Dmsg |
less only gives me a "cleaned up" boot log - but when my system boots I
can see there are some hotplug problems that aren't in the log.

  

Ahhh the recurrent question.

A lot of what Sarge generates during boot never makes it to disk - 
because the disk hasn't been mounted yet.  The only way to see all the 
boot messages is to capture them on your console.  Personally, I tend to 
set my boxes to use a serial port for the console, and plug in a laptop 
setup as a terminal emulator.  Makes it really easy to capture every 
gory detail.


Miles


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Re: News Flash

[Miles Fidelman]

Mike McCarty wrote:

BTW, where in the Constitution of these USA does it state that Copyright
must be limited?

Well, this is getting WAY off topic, but...

Article I, Section 8.

The actual language in the constitution states that "The Congress shall 
have the power to ...  promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, 
by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive 
Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"


Note the word "limited." 

Also note that arguably, if the "exclusive Right" doesn't "promote the 
Progress of Science and useful Arts" then Congress might not actually 
have the right to grant a copyright or patent (e.g., when someone uses 
ownership of a patent to prevent release of new technology, that sure 
doesn't promote progress).



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[Fwd: Re: Writer Processor (was Re: Ubuntu vs. Debian ...)]

[Miles Fidelman]

Ron Johnson wrote:


What do you need in a WP?  Academic features (formal citations,
embedded graphics, TOC, index, etc), movie/theater formating,
something I haven't thought of?

  
Just to add another voice.   Some of us have to exchange documents with 
people who use Word - particularly in work settings, and features like 
change tracking, integrating data from excel, and such are important.  
Yes, you can do a lot of that in Open Office, but it never works that 
cleanly. (I just left a company where half the company uses Word, the 
other half uses OO, and pulling documents together always turns out to 
be incredibly painful).




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Re: Writer Processor (was Re: Ubuntu vs. Debian ...)

[Miles Fidelman]

Ron Johnson wrote:

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

On 02/11/07 14:03, Joe Hart wrote:
  

Hal Vaughan wrote:


[snip]
  
I am a writer, and I used Word to write my books.  Personally I 
don't like OO Writer.  It, just like MS Word is overblown.  I 
still haven't found the Perfect Word Processor, but now at least



What do you need in a WP?  Academic features (formal citations,
embedded graphics, TOC, index, etc), movie/theater formating,
something I haven't thought of?

I guess what I'm asking is, "Why can't you use a full-featured
*text* editor?"  gvim or gedit, maybe, with a postprocessing tool to
reformat output to typewriter (double-spaced, with 1 inch margins &
headers) format?

Such editors are definitely light-weight and ASCII files are small
and totally portable.

  
I can get the source code to one that I think is good, and if I 
can understand the code, I might even be able to make it my 
Perfect Word (Pun intended).



Only greybeards will understand that pun.

-BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFFz3vJS9HxQb37XmcRAo3hAJwPdMvXz42nXD7Vwf7fgN9llLJPDgCgz2jg
2KTh2+xE+fljJuqMU37vfQ0=
=zbw2
-END PGP SIGNATURE-


  



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Re: [Fwd: Re: Writer Processor (was Re: Ubuntu vs. Debian ...)]

[Miles Fidelman]

Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:

On Sun, Feb 11, 2007 at 03:39:51PM -0500, Miles Fidelman wrote:
  

Ron Johnson wrote:

 >  
  
Just to add another voice.   Some of us have to exchange documents with 
people who use Word - particularly in work settings, and features like 
change tracking, integrating data from excel, and such are important.  
Yes, you can do a lot of that in Open Office, but it never works that 
cleanly. (I just left a company where half the company uses Word, the 
other half uses OO, and pulling documents together always turns out to 
be incredibly painful).





Have you tried the programs that transpose to/from doc to (La)Tex? I'm
just starting out with LaTex and have only read that they are available.
  
No.  And why would I bother?  I think my point is that some of us simply 
want to get the work done, in the least time.  Using the tools that are 
already in place in an organization is the easiest way to do so.



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Re: [Fwd: Re: Writer Processor (was Re: Ubuntu vs. Debian ...)]

[Miles Fidelman]

Greg Folkert wrote:

On Sun, 2007-02-11 at 15:39 -0500, Miles Fidelman wrote:
  
Just to add another voice.   Some of us have to exchange documents with 
people who use Word - particularly in work settings, and features like 
change tracking,



Change tracking in word is a horrible feature. It makes the documents
about 170% larger after each set of changes. You ever seen a 3 page
specification document 90MB+ in size? I have. It was horrible. Someone
could easily turn off revision control and you would lose eveyrthing
except the current revision when saved.

Change tracking should be done by a proper revision control program.

  
yeah - right - take something that's easy to do, and everybody I work 
with knows how to do, and make it complicated - disk space is dirt 
cheap, time is expensive



Important, only to those that do not know better. Data Integration is
simple in OO.o, taking Calc into Writer is easy. Doing change
control/tracking, a word processor *IS NOT* the tool to use for this.
Never will be, and for those that DO use it for that... someday soon,
they ARE going to get bitten horribly. Legally Word's change
control/tracking is not binding. Which means it will bite one side or
the other in a contract/legal dispute.
  
let's see - 4 people collaborate on a proposal, I send out a draft, 
people comment, I accept some comments, reject others - lather, rinse, 
repeat - send out the final document on paper and/or as PDF -- it's 
easy, it works, it ain't broke, and there's no reason to fix it


There are lots of reasons to dislike Word - for example, the excreble 
HTML it generates when people insist on using it to prepare web pages - 
but for run-of-the-mill document preparation in a corporate setting, 
it's a pretty good tool.  Practicality sometimes trumps religion.




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Re: [Fwd: Re: Writer Processor (was Re: Ubuntu vs. Debian ...)]

[Miles Fidelman]

Greg Folkert wrote:
There are lots of reasons to dislike Word - for example, the excreble 
HTML it generates when people insist on using it to prepare web pages - 
but for run-of-the-mill document preparation in a corporate setting, 
it's a pretty good tool.  Practicality sometimes trumps religion.



Practically all zealots claim this, so I see you are a zealot, just like
me. I am not saying it is the BEST solution. Just that once Microsoft
finally decides to fully and properly support the ODF, this crap will go
away.
  
Let's see, my primary machine is a Mac, I run a bunch of Linux servers, 
99% of the software I run is open source - but I use MS Office for 
compatibility with my customers, and that makes me a zealot?


I think it's time to call "Hitler" on this thread.


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Re: [Fwd: Re: Writer Processor (was Re: Ubuntu vs. Debian ...)]

[Miles Fidelman]

Russell L. Harris wrote:

* Miles Fidelman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [070211 19:07]:
  
There are lots of reasons to dislike Word - for example, the excreble 
HTML it generates when people insist on using it to prepare web pages - 
but for run-of-the-mill document preparation in a corporate setting, 
it's a pretty good tool.  Practicality sometimes trumps religion.




While you speak of "practicality", you appear to be penny-wise but
pound-foolish.  The best reason to dislike Word is the experience and
expense of losing the "source code" of documents composed over a
period of years because of proprietary data format.

This happened to me, back at the turn of the century.  For the
documents which were most important to me, I was able to recover the
text, but character-level formatting -- italic, boldface, smallcaps,
underline -- could not be recovered by automated means.  It was
necessary to manually add all character-level formatting to the
recovered documents.  Moreover, the amount of manual labour required
for recovery of the text (without formatting) precluded recovery of
many of the documents.  

That experience led me to Emacs and to GNU/Linux.  


May a pox be upon the implementors of proprietary data encoding
schemes!  Fools they be, who knowingly entrust their fortune to such
evil men. 
  
I don't know - I have stuff on my disk that dates back to 1982 or so - 
in all kinds of weird formats - along with all the tools needed to 
access them.  Takes some forethought, but such is life.  Now folks who 
entrust their data to 3rd parties - like leaving the mail on Google - 
that bespeaks true foolishness.



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Re: yet another newbie tutorial

[Miles Fidelman]

Clive Menzies wrote:

On (12/02/07 15:02), Rakotomandimby (R12y) Mihamina wrote:
  

Hi,
I wrote a "for dummies" tutorial on how to install Xen on sid.
http://www.asso-polyvalente.fr/workspaces/members/mihamina/public/xen-3-debiansid



Thanks for this, although the file seems to be corrupt; can you post it
as plain text?
  

looks like a corrupted open office file


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Re: Ubuntu vs. Debian (was Re: Introduction)

[Miles Fidelman]

Johannes Wiedersich wrote:

Outside of high academia & the publishing industry, most people don't
care how ugly their printed documents look. 
I think there are an awful lot of us in business, non-profits, and 
government who'd contest this.

Not to mention those in the advertising and marketing arena.

Larger organizations typically have fairly detailed standards for what 
documents have to look like,

along with design departments, document templates, and so forth.

Smaller organizations - at least smart ones - spend a lot of time on 
making documents look good,

because image and presentation make a big difference.


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Re: Ubuntu vs. Debian (was Re: Introduction)

[Miles Fidelman]

Johannes Wiedersich wrote:

Miles Fidelman wrote:
  

Johannes Wiedersich wrote:


Outside of high academia & the publishing industry, most people don't
care how ugly their printed documents look. 
  

I think there are an awful lot of us in business, non-profits, and
government who'd contest this.
Not to mention those in the advertising and marketing arena.



To take this further, one would have to argue about what is ugly. There
is a continuous scale from very ugly to very beautiful. Products like M$
Word cover the range from very ugly to somewhere in between. The very
beautiful end is accessible to professional typesetting systems only,
ie. TeX based systems like LaTeX or Adobe's InDesign.

Point taken.

I think what typically happens is that individuals who care about really 
beautiful design will migrate to
either a commercial product or  a Tex based system, depending on what 
they're more comfortable
with.  Corporate design departments (or university, or other large 
organization) are likely to
pick a tool for reasons having to do support, or what their vendors 
(printers, ad agencies, etc.)

use.

These remarks are not intended to start a flame
Likewise.  Just commenting on personal experience in various work 
environments.


I'm personally in the camp of time and data exchange being more 
important than beauty - Word is
good enough, it's what most of the people I exchange documents use, and 
we have internal
templates to start from.  (And I'm not sure my eye or taste are good 
enough to do much better).


When I need really fancy design work, I hand a Word document to someone 
else (like my wife, a former mechanical
artist from the old pre-computer days, who went on to work at Bitstream 
for a while) and let them use their prefered tools.


FYI: Just for perspective, I'm also old enough to remember designing 
control logic for film processors used for in preparing print the 
old-fashioned way (you know, half-tone separations, prepared with 
screens and cameras) - and, for that matter, laying out the PC boards 
with black tape on acetate.  Never used TeX or LaTeX, but used enough 
runoff and troff (remember those :-) to prefer WYSIWIG editors for short 
documents.


Cheers,

Miles


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