Roundtable November 2006

roundtable@muug.ca

19 participants
21 discussions

WiFi in Winnipeg
by Montana Quiring 30 Nov '06

30 Nov '06

Does anyone know of a restaurant in Winnipeg (central preferred) that has free WiFi? If not then has anyone tried one of the pay services, like at Starbucks, and what was your experience? Thanks. -Montana

2 1

Shaw & dhclient
by Trevor Cordes 27 Nov '06

27 Nov '06

For a few weeks I've been seeing strange behaviour with dhclient/dhcp and Shaw. Wondering if anyone else has seen this: Once a week or so, usually on Sun or Mon, my FC5 box firewall/router will lose its connection to Shaw. ifconfing will show eth0 up with an IP address, but no traffic will come in or out. Normally, that's a "Shaw is down" symptom. But if I ifdown eth0; ifup eth0, then instantly everything is ok again. And my IP address stays the same. It's almost like dhclient isn't keeping Shaw's DHCP server happy and they're cutting me off until I say, "hey, I'm still here" with a ifup kick. Any ideas?

2 1

Flickr like package
by Shawn Wallbridge 27 Nov '06

27 Nov '06

Does anyone know of a package that has similar features to Flickr? We have a need for something like Flickr (basically image tagging and searching), but since it's reference for our projects, we can't really use Flickr. thanks shawn

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Re: [RndTbl] Shaw & dhclient
by Sean Cody 27 Nov '06

27 Nov '06

> From: Trevor Cordes <trevor(a)tecnopolis.ca> > Date: November 27, 2006 12:43:54 PM CST (CA) > To: roundtable(a)muug.mb.ca > Subject: [RndTbl] Shaw & dhclient > > For a few weeks I've been seeing strange behaviour with dhclient/ > dhcp and > Shaw. Wondering if anyone else has seen this: > > Once a week or so, usually on Sun or Mon, my FC5 box firewall/ > router will > lose its connection to Shaw. ifconfing will show eth0 up with an IP > address, but no traffic will come in or out. Normally, that's a > "Shaw is > down" symptom. But if I ifdown eth0; ifup eth0, then instantly > everything > is ok again. And my IP address stays the same. > > It's almost like dhclient isn't keeping Shaw's DHCP server happy and > they're cutting me off until I say, "hey, I'm still here" with a ifup > kick. I've been seeing this for MONTHS. Tried calling support a few times on this with only response of 'that's weird'. There was/is signal issues to my apartment complex but that has nothing to do with this issue. There are other people in my office with the exact same issue to which the only non-annoying fix was to renew the DHCP lease. To me it looks like the DHCP lease expires before the expiry date and the timing is random though proportional to use. Mild use, the link drops once every few hours. Heavy use in an interval and it can drop every 5 - 15 minutes. Either a heartbeat isn't working or the DHCP server is not expiring leases properly. I know (well as much as someone outside the black box can know) it is DHCP as once you renew the leases, TCP sessions restore without hang up or close states (ie. ssh sessions, ftp transfers). I see no other corruption other than the recently 'standard' latency being inversely proportional to upstream throughput. Since shaw is using 'semi-static' ip leasing this seems the simplest and most logical explanation. You can override in /etc/dhclient.conf but I have no clue if that will work. interface sis0 { send dhcp-lease-time 300; } What has annoyed me the least was backgrounding the following: #!/bin/sh while true; do dhclient sis0; sleep 300; done You shouldn't have to do either but it has 'fixed' the issue for me. -- Sean P.S. My kingdom for a decent low latency 5Mb full-duplex line at home without the telco line premiums.

1 0

RBuilder
by John Lange 27 Nov '06

27 Nov '06

Someone with some time on their hands might be interested in playing with this: http://www.rpath.com/rbuilder/ Perhaps it could even be the subject of a MUUG meeting demo? My understanding is the tool lets you build your own custom Linux distro (called a project) which you can then distribute as a complete appliance or whatever you like. If my assumptions are correct then it seems like a really cool idea. I stumbled on it because it appears to be what Digium is using to build their new Asterisk appliance. I didn't have time to look into it beyond that. John

2 1

Hiring
by Shawn Wallbridge 24 Nov '06

24 Nov '06

Frantic is hiring people for both Systems and Helpdesk type jobs. If anyone is interested or knows someone that is, please have them send their resume to shawn(a)franticfilms.com We run Windows on the desktop (with the odd Mac) and FreeBSD/OpenBSD/ Solaris/Linux on the back-end. thanks shawn

1 0

Network Neutrality
by Bill Reid 23 Nov '06

23 Nov '06

A very good video on Network Neutrality: http://isen.com/blog/archives/2006_11_01_archive.html

1 0

MYSQL DB uploaded via PHP
by Montana Quiring 22 Nov '06

22 Nov '06

Hello, My wife has been working on a Drupal website offline using MAMP. I would like to upload the website and import the MYSQL database. Uploading the data is no biggie but the godaddy phpmyadmin interface does not support importing (only supports exporting) mysql files. I've googled a bit but can't find a decent PHP tool that will let me upload an exported MYSQL DB file to a MYSQL server. Any suggestions or links to some code? (and before someone says it, yes godaddy is not perfect) ;)

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RE: Roundtable Digest, Vol 23, Issue 14
by Kevin D Scott 21 Nov '06

21 Nov '06

My upload speed being restricted so much is what annoys me the most from internet providers. Fiber lines are symmetric, so why aren't our internet connections? What is Shaw/MTS doing with all of the un-allotted upload speeds? MTS I kind of understand, their DSL modems, max out at 8Mbps down, 800Kbps up, Shaw's max out at 38Mbps down, 30Mbps up. And yes, I know the newest modems MTS is giving out are ADSL2, so they're faster... Their new "Nitro" plan, 25Mbps down, but the same speed upload as the Extreme. Anybody thinking of it, should consider 2 Extreme account instead, a little cheaper, combined you would get 2Mbps and 4 IP addresses, and pretty close to the same download speed... A dual-wan router would divide your traffic evenly, and a download manager would enable full speed... for anybody considering it... Does anybody know what the Internet providers are 'saving' this leftover bandwidth for? Thanks for your time, Kevin

2 1

Grey-listing in effect on MUUG server
by gedetil＠cs.umanitoba.ca 21 Nov '06

21 Nov '06

Howdy folks! I mentioned this at Tuesday's meeting, but for the benefit of those of you who weren't there, but are active on the MUUG roundtable mailing list, I thought I should repeat it here. As of Tuesday afternoon (November 14th), I've installed a package called milter-greylist (http://hcpnet.free.fr/milter-greylist/) on the MUUG server, to help in our ongoing battle against spam. So far, it's been remarkably effective (in combination with SpamAssassin and spamass-milter, which had been previously installed) at reducing our incoming spam. Since we've configured it to greylist all external addresses by default, this may impact some of you when you post to the list via e-mail. The first time it comes across the combination of your (or your ISP's) SMTP server IP address, your return e-mail address, and the destination e-mail address, it will temporarily reject the message, asking the SMTP server to retry again after some time (I've set that delay to 14 minutes). After that, that combination stays cached in the greylist for some amount of time (which is set by default to 5 days), during which time the same combination of addresses will be accepted without delay. The net result of this is that you may occasionally see a delay between when you send e-mail to the list and when it actually gets received, especially if you post infrequently. Rest assured, however, that your message should get through without too much extra delay. If for some reason you find yourself unable to send at all, you can contact me at me e-mail address below (and not the muug.mb.ca address). We're also running the same milter-greylist software on that server, but with a less aggressive policy, which does default white-listing in most cases. Preferably, contact me from exactly the same address you try to use for posting to the mailing list, so I can check e-mail headers to determine SMTP server address information, etc. I will then, if necessary, add the appropriate whitelist override for your address on the MUUG server. For those of you running your own sendmail servers on the Internet, I highly recommend milter-greylist. It's very small, doesn't use up much CPU or memory (much, much less than SpamAssassin in both cases), and seems to work very well. (Make sure you put it first in your InputMailFilters list, so the other milters don't have to do as much work.) If you're not running sendmail, but some other SMTP server, you should look for a similar grey-listing solution for your mail server. -- Gilbert E. Detillieux E-mail: <gedetil(a)cs.umanitoba.ca> Dept. of Computer Science Web: http://www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~gedetil/ University of Manitoba Phone: (204)474-8161 Winnipeg MB CANADA R3T 2N2 Fax: (204)474-7609

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Roundtable November 2006