Roundtable May 2015

roundtable@muug.ca

9 participants
17 discussions

IBM "clicky" keyboards
by Adam Thompson 13 Oct '16

13 Oct '16

Enough people have wondered/asked/complained to me about this that I'm posting this now as a public service. IBM Model "M" keyboards are still available, *NEW*, today. They are expensive, but they are the original design that you can use as a melee weapon. The catch is that they don't say "IBM" or even "Lexmark" on them. They are available for purchase from the manufacturer, Unicomp, who can be found online at http://www.pckeyboard.com/. You can also find some vintage NIB units from time to time at http://www.clickykeyboards.com/. There are also a number of other manufacturers now making similar, but not quite as good, keyboards. - CVT Inc., the maker of the Avant Stellar (I own two of them), which is the direct descendant of the Northgate Omnikey, seems to have restructured and no trace of their keyboard manufacturing operation can be found online. However, Northgate keyboards are still available new-in-box from (this is a horrible site, beware) http://www.northgate-keyboard-repair.com/. - The Happy Hacking keyboard (now owned by Fujitsu, apparently) is equally comforting to some people despite having a totally different feel. They, and many others, can be had from http://www.elitekeyboards.com/ - Das Keyboard - Anything using Cherry MX Green, Blue, or White keyswitches. The "green" switches apparently are the closest anyone's come yet to emulating the IBM/Lexmark/Unicomp switches... and they can be had in MUCH cheaper keyboards, like the Rosewill RK-9000 (http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16823201040 and http://techreport.com/review/23405/rosewill-rk-9000-series-mechanical-ke yboards-reviewed). - And there are an increasing number (yes, again, after the big die-off ca. 2009) of speciality manufacturers of "ergonomic" keyboards that are making clicky keyswitches available as an option. One of the better ones is a tiny shop in Ontario, but I can't find the name right now. References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_M_keyboard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicomp http://deskthority.net/wiki/Cherry_MX -Adam Thompson athompso(a)athompso.net

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SpamAssassin false positives on DATE_IN_FUTURE_96_Q?
by Gilbert E. Detillieux 23 Feb '16

23 Feb '16

I mentioned this problem at the last round-table session, but didn't get a solution, so I thought I'd post it here, just in case anyone has any suggestions to offer. I'm still seeing a whole bunch of false positives in SpamAssassin, since an update was installed in mid-September on a CentOS 5.7 system, for a rule called DATE_IN_FUTURE_96_Q, which is only supposed to be triggered when the "Date:" header has a date that is 4 days to 4 month ahead of the date in the "Received" header that has the _smallest_ difference in date. Here are the headers from the latest e-mail I've received with this false-positive. (I've stripped out irrelevant headers, for the sake of clarity and simplicity.) From topfivestories(a)messagent.itworldcanada.com Mon Nov 14 07:50:13 2011 Received: from mail.messagent.itworldcanada.com (mail.messagent.itworldcanada.com [207.112.10.80]) by palladium.cs.umanitoba.ca (8.13.8/8.13.8) with SMTP id pAEDoAxV028594 for <gedetil(a)cs.umanitoba.ca>; Mon, 14 Nov 2011 07:50:12 -0600 Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2011 08:50:13 -0500 X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,DATE_IN_FUTURE_96_Q, HTML_MESSAGE,RP_MATCHES_RCVD autolearn=no version=3.3.1 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.3.1 (2010-03-16) on palladium.cs.umanitoba.ca Note that I'm calling spamd via the spamass-milter on a system running sendmail. Note also, that in the above example, the only "Received" header was the one generated by my own server. (I've had other false positives, however, with multiple "Received" headers, all of which were within seconds of the time in the "Date" header.) Any ideas? -- Gilbert E. Detillieux E-mail: <gedetil(a)muug.mb.ca> Manitoba UNIX User Group Web: http://www.muug.mb.ca/ PO Box 130 St-Boniface Phone: (204)474-8161 Winnipeg MB CANADA R2H 3B4 Fax: (204)474-7609

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big scanner
by Trevor Cordes 27 May '15

27 May '15

Does anyone have big (like tabloid or bigger) scanner they want to sell? Even an ancient SCSI or parallel one might be ok. I just want *big*. Do they even make scanners bigger than legal or tabloid?

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Book Apart order
by Trevor Cordes 25 May '15

25 May '15

I'm going to make an order for some (print) books from publisher A Book Apart (USA-based) and wondering if anyone wants to go in on the order with me. If I can get 3-5 more books in the order I can save more money (bigger discount) plus split the shipping/brokerage over more books. Win/win if someone else wanted one of these books in print. A Book Apart just joined O'Reilly for Safari/ebooks (but not print) and they seem to produce excellent products. They seem heavily slanted towards web design (i.e. less programming) yet look interesting/useful enough for a typical do-it-all web site programmer. Their schtick is to make books that are short and concise (100-150 pages usually). If I can reach the 10 book mark it's roughly $13.75(ca$) a print book (normally $18us), plus shipping (should be only a few bucks a book), plus USPS/CP duties/taxes (should be under $2 a book). So I'm guessing $17.50-ish a book (just a guess). You pay actual costs divided by the book count, no markup. Here's their catalog, with good writeups and a sample chapter for each: http://abookapart.com/products/ The ones that look most useful to me are Web Typography and Respnosible Web Design. It's extremely odd, but almost none of these books show up on Amazon/Indigo. I guess they are a really new company trying to break into the mainstream. (I'm in no way affiliated with them.) Reply to this email (click reply to sender only) if interested, leave the subject line intact. Thanks!

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pdf printer issues
by Trevor Cordes 19 May '15

19 May '15

I'm trying to print a 2-page tax-form-like file to a (fairly) modern Lexmark E360 printer, using modern CUPS on Linux. If I print it from evince or xournal PDF viewers, it prints some of page one, then prints a printer error (probably a PS error) on page 2. If I print it from lpr on the command line, it prints out fine! The GUI viewers have no problems printing out other PDFs from what I've tested so far. This setup has no problems printing emails from Thunderbird nor documents from oowriter. This is the first issue I've run into since setting it up a year ago. What could the GUI viewers be doing differently compared to lpr? They both are using cups, after all. Should I try more GUI viewers? I need a working GUI option since the user is not command line savvy. I already checked I had the newest firmware for the printer. I can't recall how I originally got the CUPS driver for it, but I can probably check that for newness as well. Thanks!

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Re: [RndTbl] $29 dedicated server?
by Paul Sierks 15 May '15

15 May '15

Cheaper / crazier yet... Kimsufi.com & soyoustart.com Regards, Paul Trevor Cordes <trevor(a)tecnopolis.ca> wrote: >https://www.serverpronto.com/accounts/cart2.php?gid=1&pid=446 > >How are these guys doing $29/mo "dedicated server"? What's the catch? >They say it's a Xeon 3040 1.9GHz, so that's older/slower, but say I don't >need speed. RAM 2G is anemic but doable if I don't need much RAM. >Doesn't say ECC or not, so that's one possible catch (but usually >Xeon==ECC). No RAID, that sucks, maybe it can be added as a cheap >upgrade? Network looks very good. > >Anyhow, that's 10-20X less than Rackspace wants for ded server. How are >they doing this? Is there some VM or blade-ish thing going on here? Is >it really a 1U box (or possibly even smaller form) somewhere just for me? >_______________________________________________ >Roundtable mailing list >Roundtable(a)muug.mb.ca >http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable

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$29 dedicated server?
by Trevor Cordes 15 May '15

15 May '15

https://www.serverpronto.com/accounts/cart2.php?gid=1&pid=446 How are these guys doing $29/mo "dedicated server"? What's the catch? They say it's a Xeon 3040 1.9GHz, so that's older/slower, but say I don't need speed. RAM 2G is anemic but doable if I don't need much RAM. Doesn't say ECC or not, so that's one possible catch (but usually Xeon==ECC). No RAID, that sucks, maybe it can be added as a cheap upgrade? Network looks very good. Anyhow, that's 10-20X less than Rackspace wants for ded server. How are they doing this? Is there some VM or blade-ish thing going on here? Is it really a 1U box (or possibly even smaller form) somewhere just for me?

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another systemd gotcha
by Adam Thompson 15 May '15

15 May '15

sooo... don't remove /bin/plymouth (say, by uninstalling the "plymouth" package) and still expect your system to boot. Oh yeah, there's no warning when you removed the plymouth package a week or two ago. And there's nothing on screen to indicate what the problem might be, you *must* have a root password set (sorry, Debian and Ubuntu users who didn't do that) in order to log into safe mode, run "journalctl -xb" and see the error where being unable to execute /bin/plymouth is a FATAL error. Yup, this systemd thing sure makes booting my systems a lot faster... *&^%$#@! (And if anyone noticed that the new MUUG mirror server was down for a while tonight, systemd is the culprit. It also doesn't like filesystems that take more than a few seconds to mount and/or fsck. Which would not include a 40TB XFS LVM volume. *&^%$#@! again.) -- -Adam Thompson athompso(a)athompso.net +1 (204) 291-7950 - cell +1 (204) 489-6515 - fax

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GoAccess
by Gilbert E. Detillieux 13 May '15

13 May '15

Wyatt, Thanks for your mini-presentation on GoAccess last night. I found the program useful enough that I've now installed it on the various EL6 systems on which I maintain a web server. I also decided to install it on both the old and the new MUUG servers. (There was a Debian package available for it too.) The EPEL5 repository didn't have it, so I grabbed the source RPM from EPEL6, and with 2 trivial changes to the .spec file, I was able to build a binary for EL5. Since it's tiny, I've attached the patch, in case it's useful to any of you still running EL5. -- Gilbert E. Detillieux E-mail: <gedetil(a)muug.mb.ca> Manitoba UNIX User Group Web: http://www.muug.mb.ca/ PO Box 130 St-Boniface Phone: (204)474-8161 Winnipeg MB CANADA R2H 3B4 Fax: (204)474-7609

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RHEL/CentOS 7 rpm -e
by Trevor Cordes 13 May '15

13 May '15

To follow on Gilbert's RHEL7 firewalld, chrony, etc, questions. I also, on every new Fedora box (except basic single-user laptops, etc), ditch NetworkManager, and change MTA back to sendmail. That last one is tricky as the supported way is a bit weird (but easy when you know the trick): alternatives --config mta Make sure you have sendmail rpm's installed first. After you switch to sendmail you can rpm -e the postfix stuff. Yes, my boxes are all pretty much Redhat 9.0 (*pre-RHEL*!!!) plus systemd. Just the way I like it! The things that are supposed to make our lives "simpler" or "better" just get in the way, slow me down, introduce new bugs, make me learn a whole new set of quirks, and force me to forget the old. All pain, and no gain. Change for change's sake. Windows anyone?

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Roundtable May 2015