Roundtable May 2005

roundtable@muug.ca

11 participants
13 discussions

Linux Summer Camp in Winnipeg for High Schoolers
by Stuart Williams 30 May '05

30 May '05

I'm running a Linux Summer Camp for high school students. I would love your help in two respects: 1. Help spread the word, to high school students who would be interested in learning more about Linux and computer programming, or to people such as high school teachers who could pass along the information. 2. Give me ideas or offers for field trips or guest speakers. Do any of you who have access to interesting computing installations (hardware or software) want to give a tour to 10 to 20 high schoolers who might be going into our field? Do any of you have a strong interest in doing some sort of demo during the camp? The tentative schedule for the week is full and includes one field-trip slot, but I'm still planning and I'm open to suggestions. I'll include a URL to the information page below, but here's some more background information in case you're curious. The camp is at Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg (in the old School for the Deaf at Grant Ave. and Shaftesbury Blvd.) where I teach Computer Science part-time (consulting the other part). It's open to students entering grades 10, 11 and 12. The University is Mennonite in the religious sense, but the camp is open to anyone, i.e. any or no religion is fine. Last summer I focussed on installing and configuring Linux and there were 8 campers. This summer will be more focussed on programming, but still on Linux and with a significant amount of Linux focus. The programming will be in Python -- the same language we use to teach first-year Computer Science students. Of last year's 8 attendees, 7 (so far) are planning to return, so I think the camp last summer was a success. This boosts my confidence that this summer will also be a satisfying experience for the students. It's an overnight camp including food and lodging and with planned evening activities. The URL for camp information is http://www.cmu.ca/computercamp and includes a short outline of tentative topics. Stuart Williams

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WRT54G kewlness
by Dan Keizer 26 May '05

26 May '05

Ramblings for the day ... I recall there being some discussions on the list about this device and looked into it a bit more and was quite impressed. It beat my old pc firewall and uses less power (and decibels) to boot (less power is good with my machines) ... Just picked up one of these babies (BestBuy $90 or some such) .. sweat deal ... Actually, it's a WRT54GS (speedy software thingy, ugh) .. but .. has twice the memory! So, starting to sniff around the net and find out more ... man, is there more ... http://openwrt.org/ .. main site of stuff ... http://www.wrt54g.com/ .. another site ... http://www.sveasoft.com/ ... Thinking that most asterisk guys are on this list too ... how to put asterisk on your WRT54G! http://lestblood.imagodirt.net/archives/106-Asterisk-on-OpenWRT-part-2.html Naturally, extending this into the asterisk world, and me being a ham radio operator, the thought crosses my mind about utilizing asterisk for repeater interoperation ... a quick google and it's already been done: http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Radio The kewl things you can do with this device just amazes me ... Just havin' fun ... Dan.

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Xen gotcha
by Bill Reid 20 May '05

20 May '05

I was playing with Xen and bumped into an issue which stumped me for a while. If you use the binary dstribution from the Xen site don't fall into the trap that I did. I was using the Quick Start guide on RedHat and they suggested the grub.conf should look like: (my /boot is hd0,0) title Xen 2.0 / XenLinux 2.6.10 root (hd0,0) kernel /xen.gz dom0_mem=128M ..... when in fact the xen.gz from the binary distribution does not support using M in the dom0_mem parameter. It complains that there is not enough space for the Guest OS. I should have used: title Xen 2.0 / XenLinux 2.6.10 root (hd0,0) kernel /xen.gz dom0_mem=131072 noreboot .... The noreboot is a good parameter to use for testing since without it the xen microkernel reboots after 10 seconds which is a pain when you are trying to read the error messages. :-( -- Bill

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re: [RndTbl] RF networks
by Daryl Fonseca-Holt 13 May '05

13 May '05

> At the meeting on Tuesday, there was a discussion from an individual (of > course I can't remember his name and I was 2 seats away) about the > troubles he was having with his RF-based internet provider. I can't > recall which provider he was using ... if you're here, drop me a line .. > or if anyone else recalls what rf provider was mentioned, let me know too.. > > thanks. > > Dan. Dan, It was me. The ISP is Rainyday Software Corp. at http://www.rainday.ca

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RF networks
by Dan & Michele 13 May '05

13 May '05

At the meeting on Tuesday, there was a discussion from an individual (of course I can't remember his name and I was 2 seats away) about the troubles he was having with his RF-based internet provider. I can't recall which provider he was using ... if you're here, drop me a line .. or if anyone else recalls what rf provider was mentioned, let me know too.. thanks. Dan.

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Intrusion detection
by John Lange 12 May '05

12 May '05

What tools are available to automatically firewall a given IP address if it fails to login via SSH a given number of times or any other activity which seems suspicious? Google didn't seem to turn up much on this topic. -- John Lange President OpenIT ltd. www.Open-IT.ca (204) 885 0872 VoIP, Web services, Linux Consulting, Server Co-Location

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WRT54G Wireless Router firmware
by Bill Reid 12 May '05

12 May '05

Here is a company that is trying to make money at producing the firmware: http://www.sveasoft.com/ The group who first started modding the firmware and encourages community wireless nodes: http://www.seattlewireless.net/

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Remote X on Fedora Core 3 via SSH
by John Lange 12 May '05

12 May '05

Further to the question about remote X on Fedora. I was able to get my remote X working via an SSH tunnel simply by logging in with ssh as follows: ssh -X <userid>@fedoramachine.com Once logged in you can invoke any X command and it just works. The -X option sets up everything for you automatically and note that "X11Forwarding yes" is still the FC3 default in /etc/ssh/sshd_config. Perhaps everyone but me knew about this already? -- John Lange President OpenIT ltd. www.Open-IT.ca (204) 885 0872 VoIP, Web services, Linux Consulting, Server Co-Location

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Enabling Linux failover routing
by John Lange 11 May '05

11 May '05

Ok, here is how to enable failover routing in Linux in 3 lines. http://enterprise.linux.com/enterprise/05/04/10/2132252.shtml?tid=129&tid=1… ----------- Enabling failover routing After you have configured your network, the next step is to enable failover routing on your Linux box, so that if the first route dies the router will automatically switch over to the next route. To do so, you'll need to add the default gateway routes provided to you by your ISPs for both your network cards: # route add default gw 61.16.130.97 dev eth0 # route add default gw 200.15.110.90 dev eth1 Finally, modify the /proc/sys/net/ipv4/route/gc_timeout file. This file contains a numerical value that denotes the time in seconds after which the kernel declares a route to be inactive and automatically switches to the other route if available. Change its default value of 300 to some smaller value, say 10 or 15. Save the changes and exit. # echo "10" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/route/gc_timeout Now your Linux machine is ready to serve as a failover router, automatically and quickly switching to the secondary route every time the primary route fails. -------- -- John Lange President OpenIT ltd. www.Open-IT.ca (204) 885 0872 VoIP, Web services, Linux Consulting, Server Co-Location

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NetBSD on a Mac 8500
by Mike Pfaiffer 11 May '05

11 May '05

Good presentation by Kevin last night BTW. Now for the question. I want to set up NetBSD on a Mac 8500 (PPC 603) with accelerator card. I have two, two gigabyte harddrives. Some large amount of RAM above what is required. I want to put NetBSD on the machine just to say I have done it and to have it act as a low volume server (mostly so I can experiment with the differences between BSD and Linux). The instructions I found on the NetBSD page explain how to make a dual boot system. I'm not interested in dual booting. I want this machine to boot only into NetBSD. Before the meeting last night we were discussing how to install NetBSD on this machine without the dual boot option. I thought it might be useful to ask how this can be done simply. If this works, I may be able to pass along this knowledge to three other people who are considering this for their older Macs. Best start from step one. I haven't downloaded it yet. Later Mike -- +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Call-A.P.P.L.E. and the Digital Civilization http://www.callapple.org | | http://members.shaw.ca/pfaiffer = Mike Pfaiffer (B.A., B.Sc.) | +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ ----- BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK ----- Version: 3.12 GCS/G/IT/PA/SS d s+:- a? C++ UL L++ W++ N++ o+ K- w(---) O+@ M++@ V PS+ PE !PGP t+ 5+ X R tv b+ DI+++ D++ G e++* h! r-- !y-- UF++ ------ END GEEK CODE BLOCK ------

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Roundtable May 2005