Category: computing

Update: This post is a bit redundant now. Please read this post for more information.

I’ve been installing Ubuntu Linux on most of my computers (one to go). One thing that gives the shits about Debian-based distros is Java support (or the lack thereof). To get a java runtime installed, add this line to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/java-linux/debian unstable main non-free

Other mirrors can be found here.

And then apt-get install j2re1.4. Too easy! This gives you Blackdown Java for Linux.

Today I was setting up centralised syslogging at work to some plain old syslogd server. I’ve only really setup up centralised syslogging with syslog-ng before.

Anyway, in the syslogd man page, is said to send the syslogs of a server to both the central syslog server and locally, with entries like this in /etc/syslog.conf:

*.info;mail.none;authpriv.none;cron.none /var/log/messages,@hostname

For some reason that didn’t work at all. Depending on how I did it, it either only went to the central syslog server, or it just wouldn’t log at all. I ended up having to do it like this:

*.info;mail.none;authpriv.none;cron.none /var/log/messages
*.info;mail.none;authpriv.none;cron.none @hostname

I managed to find that piece of information on the LinuxSA mailing list.

This sounds interesting, Stateless Linux.

the goal: a uniform framework to cover all common ways of instantiating a centralized OS install read-only on multiple physical or virtual computers

This could be great for some of the server environments we have here at work. The IBM blade servers come to mind immediately for me, but I guess it doesn’t need to be just for that. Anyway, here’s the fedora-devel-list announcement, a proposal PDF document, a How To and some rpm packages.

I’ve been occasionally making RPM packages, but I’ve only really followed the method of packaging stuff that came from a tar-ball that needed compiling. Yesterday at work I needed to package a static-binary for some hardware infomation gathering program we use here, and for the life of me I couldn’t find any documentation on how to do it easily for such files. All the howto’s (and even the bloody book I spent all my cash on) didn’t seem to be dispensing much wisdom on it.

After digging through some of Dag Wieers .spec files, I managed to find that using install to install the files from $RPM_BUILD_DIR to $RPM_BUILD_ROOT in the %install stanza of the spec file seems to be the goods (well atleast on my laptop running FC1).

I finally got around to setting up Hylafax on my server at home the other day so that we don’t keep wasting paper with all these darn fax mailing lists that Dad’s fax number seems to be stuck on. I couldn’t figure out why the bloody thing wasn’t answering, so I decided to RTFM. Looks like faxgetty wasn’t running. Once I spawned that, I needed to add it in /etc/inittab like this:

t2:23:respawn:/usr/local/sbin/faxgetty ttyS1

ttyS1 is the second serial port.

A great summary of the Fedora Project over its first year.

For some reason (well I guess its only version 0.5), but in Mozilla Thunderbird under Linux, there’s currently no simple way of setting your default browser. To set it, you have to update your user.js file with this setting:


user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.http", "/path/to/browser");
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.https", "/path/to/browser");
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.ftp", "/path/to/browser");


This information is also referenced here.

Not to be outdone by BJ with all his fancy schmacy Mac OS X program Etherpeg, I figured there just had to be a Linux equivalent. Well, luckily there was in the form of Driftnet. Easy to install with it only requiring libpcap, libjpeg, libungif and GTK to get build. Oh, and a root password to let the adapter doing the sniffing to drop into promiscuous mode, but you already had that right? 😉

Here’s an example of it running on my laptop:

Unfortunately since we’re running on a switched network here at work, I can’t sniff anyone else except myself. Perhaps I’ll have to try it out over wireless in the cafeteria here at work. 8)