Linux Corner

[DG101]

Thanks Aero,

Having trawled this forum I subsequently downloaded SimplyMepis and I am running that from the CD - with mixed success. Flash is working - sorta. Video images move but the sound is terrible, to the point of being unintelligible. Will continue exploring what's available and make a decision on which flavour of OS will have the honour of driving me crazy.

[mad_jock]

I would try installing the fedora distro

I started first of all with fedora and have had so little grief of it i have zero reason to change my flavour of distro

[DG101]

Thanks, MJ.

Apologies for my prolonged absence, but Win7 arrived and just needed to be installed and tested. After all, I've been using it's ancestors all the way back to Win95 (and OS/2 before that).

What a disappointment - not only did it manage to render my newly installed Mepis system unreachable by peremptorily overwriting GRUB in the MBR, but it refuses to recognize my sound card! And I'm less than impressed by the UI. It may stay on the machine as option B - if I get really stuck, but it ain't my OS of choice.

I'll probably give Fedora a try when I stop "playing" with Mepis, which is so far ahead of Ubuntu that I've recycled the live CD as a beer mat.

Anyone want to buy a set of Win7 installation DVDs? One (fairly) careful owner, low mileage (been used once), not even registered with MS.

[N727NC]

Win 7 Disk

Yes, I'll buy your Win 7 disks - name a reasonable price.

[rans6andrew]

a friend has passed me a CD of Ubuntu 9.10 which I am trying to run in live mode, in a Dell laptop PC. The system boots up OK but I cannot persuade it to connect to our O2 wireless router. I have been through several Unix/Ubuntu websites and tried to follow the guidance on wireless setup but I don't really understand what the info presented is supposed to tell me. I am new to Unix, as an admin, but have used it as a user some 20 years ago. Please explain in words of one syllable what I should be doing.

Any ideas anyone?

So far, I understand that the wireless network hardware is 2200 and it is being seen by the software. It makes no attempt to connect or report any available networks. I can't cut and paste stuff to here as this is a different machine (win vista) so please don't ask me to put reams of stuff from the screen on the BB.

Thanks Andrew.

[batninth]

Rans6Andrew (excellent choice of aircraft if your name is reflective of that by the way )

I'm assuming you've seen the network manager icon at the top right of the window? If you've clicked on it, it will show you the wireless networks it can access. If network manager is doing it's job you shouldn't need to configure the wireless by hand.

If you have clicked on network manager & it tells you it can't find any networks then the wireless drivers aren't working correctly, but that would be unusual as Ubuntu 9.10 has a wide variety of wireless support.

Anyway, first question. Can Network Manager find the wireless connection at all?

[rans6andrew]

Batninth, thank you for your response. I was blinded by the science and failed to notice that the radio in the Dell was OFF when I typed iwconfig. doh!

Luckily the Fn + F2 key combination worked to enable the radio and then I started to see the available network icons......

It works.

Oh, and yes, I do have a Rans S6 503, have had since 2002, been all over in it. Took Er Indoors to France in it last September. Also built a Zodiac 601ul last year, the permit didn't come through in time for the French trip.

What do you fly?

Rans6....

[rans6andrew]

Now I have connectivity, what do I need to add to enable youtube videos to play?

Rans6...

[MG23]

Originally Posted by rans6andrew

Now I have connectivity, what do I need to add to enable youtube videos to play?

Flash. In Ubuntu you should be able to do something like 'sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer' to install it and automatically keep it up to date.

[batninth]

Flash. In Ubuntu you should be able to do something like 'sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer' to install it and automatically keep it up to date

I found the best way to enable flash content was to get the browser to ask & then let the package manager work it out. Package manager comes up with three options for playing flash, I'd suggest the real Adobe one is the better option although I've used the other open source alternatives & they work ok.

Ubuntu also goes and finds any required codecs, so the first time you go to a media file or media stream it'll take a few moments then will ask if you want it to go & get the media support. Again, I've not had any problems with this & haven't had to resort to command line since Ubuntu 7 to get media support working

BTW rans6andrew

What do you fly?

Rans S6 582

[MG23]

Yeah, I knew there was some way to install Flash from the GUI but couldn't remember what it was .

[FullOppositeRudder]

I've got a small ASUS EEE 700 loaded with Linux Xandros but I am not able to 'lock in' the c26 letter alphanumeric WPA code so I can log on painlessly without having to punch in all 26 digits each time
Anyone out there with a similar ASUS able to talk me through how to do it, preferably in the 'noddiest' of terms ?

Perhaps you have found a fix for this by now, but FWIW I have a somewhat similar combination of equipment here, and my 701 finds and logs on to the home wireless system by itself most of the time. However I use one of the shorter option WEP codes (10 characters) for another reason, and that may be a clue. It could be that trying a shorter code option for your wireless security may be more in line with the tiny machine's capability.

I hope you can find a fix - typing in all those characters each time is not a lot of fun on that smallish keyboard.

Regards,

FO Rudder

[The late XV105]

Scheduling jobs without crontab?

A question further to my post about reading SMART temperature values from a remote Linux box (in my case a Western Digital MyBook World Edition II NAS - White lights not Blue light model).

Thanks to some great help I received I now have a nice script that outputs this to a semi colon delimited log file along with timestamp, a disk identifier (there are two in the NAS) and the average load for the past fifteen minutes.

16/03/2010;22:48;A;41;0.13
16/03/2010;22:48;B;41;0.13

Having for reasons of time constraints tried to avoid a science project and wanted a plug and play solution this time round, it's actually been a lot of fun learning some basic Linux.

What I now have is perfect for me to write an Excel macro to chart against, so now I want to automatically run the job every six hours. Unfortunately though WD have stripped the MyBook's BusyBox compilation to the bone and it doesn't have crontab. Of course I can install crontab, but before I do is there another easy way of scheduling my script to run on an un-expiring six hourly cycle, please?

[mad_jock]

You can just have it running permently so to speak. But then you get into the realms of counter hangups and stalls and possible issues reasources getting locked.

Crontab is by far the best way of doing it. Its what it is designed to do. And its been doing it without much change since Unix was invented.

[The late XV105]

Thanks, mad_jock. Pretty much what I expected, even though I hoped there was a similar function I'd missed. Crontab it needs to be. Cheers.

[The late XV105]

Scheduled jobs

An update to share how I got on in case any other PPRuNer needs to tread the same path.

First of all I ran the script found here to install both Optware and a bunch of useful features on my WD "White Lights" NAS. Included in these features wasn't just Cron itself but also a nice folder structure to allow any required executable job to be dropped in the appropriate one for the frequency required (/etc/cron.min, /etc/cron.5mins, /etc/cron.15mins, /etc/cron.30mins, /etc/cron.hourly, and so on)

I consequently have my temperature and load logging script sitting in /etc/cron.hourly and producing a new log entry every four hours thanks to a time-checking "IF" statement that I placed in the script.

Another feature included in the download was mini_sendmail so I have written another script that runs every 15 minutes and which checks if either of the two HDDS in the NAS are approaching their maximum design temperature of 55 deg C. If they are, the script connects the NAS to the mail.btinternet.com server to send me an e-mail (which I will receive wherever I am on my Blackberry).

If either of the HDD temperatures continues to climb and exceeds 55 deg C I will be sent a second mail, and if no cooling action is then taken within five minutes that results in the temperature dropping back to 55 deg C or below, the NAS will shut down.

On a scale of zero to hero I'm only just off the starting blocks but considering that a week or so ago I knew nothing about Linux other than that the NAS used a stripped down BusyBox flavour of it, I'm pleased with these practical tweaks.

BTW - I highly recommend WinSCP for connecting to a remote Linux device. It is an open source free SFTP and FTP client for Windows that also supports the legacy SCP protocol and that allows safe and simple copying of files between a local and a remote computer. It saved me MASSES of time compared to navigating around in an SSH command console.

[mixture]

XV105, you still messing around with that hack box ?

I'm very impressed by all your progress .....ready for your next project ?

It involves a copy of MRTG (also free & open source) and you having pretty little graphs of your HDD temperatures etc.

MRTG - Tobi Oetiker's MRTG - The Multi Router Traffic Grapher

[NRU74]

FORudder
Sorry for belated response, but have cracked it and the laptop connects automatically now.Having wasted much time trawling ASUS sites on the web without success I eventually dug out the manual and followed the instructions.Doh.
Regards NRU

[The late XV105]

Restricting FTP folder access on Linux NAS

Cool, thanks mixture!
I will take the bait!

Before then I have a little niggle to solve though; I run Memeo Backup on each PC and laptop on the home network, each backup being written to its own folder on the NAS. Works a treat.

This evening though I installed vsftpd as a small practical project to allow me to share chosen files in a secure way and noticed that the backups were all visible to the User created for secure ftp login. Of course the reason is that the backups are all marked "public" even though they are not explicitly sub folders of the public folder.

My problem is that as soon as I remove the "public" flag, Memeo Backup of course reports "destination not found". Unfortunately it doesn't have a "username and password" option for access to the now secure folder so I can't use one of the Userids that exists on the NAS.

Suggestions for how to achieve a "internally public" and "externally public" structure on the NAS?

For info /etc/vsftpd.conf already has chroot_local_user=YES which I thought was supposed to restrict the User I have created only to the directory I want them to see.

TVM!

BTW - vsftp installed easily, needed only minor "my NAS specific" setup doing, and works a treat.

[The late XV105]

Solved!

I just learned about chroot jail and now have my FTP user securely locked inside!

/etc vsftpd.conf now contains chroot_list_enable=YES and I then created a file called /etc/vsftpd.chroot_list in which I put the Userid in question.