April 2014 - Roundtable

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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Linux distro for Pentium III
by Robert Dyck 01 Jun '14

01 Jun '14

I have a customer who wants a laptop with Linux. My impression is he wants to learn Linux. I have refurbished laptops: IBM ThinkPad A21m, with Pentium III processor @ 750 MHz, 512MB RAM, and I can upgrade the hard drive to 40GB. Which distro of Linux would you recommend? I would ask Mike Pfaiffer, but he passed away earlier this year. Thanks, Rob Dyck

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Re: [RndTbl] Router / NASA
by Robert Keizer 30 Apr '14

30 Apr '14

I run arch and zfs on my laptop. I haven't had any issues really.. assuming your not trying to saturate a few gbit sustained, I imagine the performance won't come into play. If you absolutely require encryption on disk as well, I would go with FreeBSD; Little bit more bare bones when compared with freenas. On 2014-04-21 1:06 PM, "Paul Sierks" <psierks(a)sierkstech.net> wrote: > Weird subject, I know. But this is only for personal residential use. I've > been running Arch on a system with a number of disks in raid for all my > shared storage needs. This system also doubles as a router / firewall with > Wifi, and other little things such as pxe booting. We'll recently I've been > wanting to use ZFS with it more and more. So I figured I'd get opinions. > Arch does have packages for ZFS, which would provide most features, just > not encryption. So would I be better to use pfSense or the like off a USB > and add what I need for ZFS, nfs, etc to it, or to just use FreeBSD? or is > there some other suggestions. > > Thanks, > Paul > _______________________________________________ > Roundtable mailing list > Roundtable(a)muug.mb.ca > http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable >

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Odd shell differences
by Robert Keizer 25 Apr '14

25 Apr '14

I ran into this earlier today and thought I'd share. Shell fails. sh-4.2$ pwd /tmp/a sh-4.2$ mv /tmp/a /tmp/b sh-4.2$ pwd /tmp/b sh-4.2$ bash robert.keizer@qubit:/tmp/b$ mv /tmp/b /tmp/c robert.keizer@qubit:/tmp/b$ pwd /tmp/b robert.keizer@qubit:/tmp/b$ ls -alh /tmp/ | grep ^d.*c$ drwxr-xr-x 2 robert.keizer robert.keizer 4.0K Apr 16 16:09 c robert.keizer@qubit:/tmp/b$ ls -alh /tmp/ | grep ^d.*b$ robert.keizer@qubit:/tmp/b$ exit sh-4.2$ pwd /tmp/c sh-4.2$

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keeping /home contents with another distro install
by Kat 25 Apr '14

25 Apr '14

Why does Ubuntu recommend you keep the account names you already had? Is this just a convenience thing for re-attaching the home directories, or is there something else going on? https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Partitioning/Home/Moving No drives or partitions are encrypted. Basically, my install of Ubuntu has problems all over the place (including not playing nice with my ATI Radeon HD 3450 after an upgrade), and I want to start from scratch with Mint when I re-install anyway. When I installed last time around, I made several partitions and I put my /boot, /, and, /home (which is ext4 on sdb4), all on different partitions. (I have another install on another drive too, but that's a whole other ball of wax I don't care about at the moment. GRUB looks pretty messy.) The obvious thing to me is to make sure you don't select "format" when you set up your partitions in the installer (!), but I'm feeling paranoid about "I don't know what I don't know..." before I commit... Should I create a new /home on my install drive and change it to sdb4 later, or should I just let it get attached during the install process? -- ------------------------------------------------------------ Katherine Scrupa Network Technology CCNA, Hons.

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reliable way of counting real CPUs under Linux?
by Grigory Shamov 22 Apr '14

22 Apr '14

Hi All, What would be the subj? Suppose you have a PC. It can have Intel or AMD CPUs. It can have HyperThreading on, and even enabled. And it can have one or two, or several sockets. Would there be a universal method to count real physical cores? Say, passing /proc/cpuinfo through a magic filter, and not failing on AMD Opterons too? -- Grigory Shamov HPC Analyst, Westgrid/Compute Canada E2-588 EITC Building, University of Manitoba (204) 474-9625

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Router / NAS
by Paul Sierks 21 Apr '14

21 Apr '14

Weird subject, I know. But this is only for personal residential use. I've been running Arch on a system with a number of disks in raid for all my shared storage needs. This system also doubles as a router / firewall with Wifi, and other little things such as pxe booting. We'll recently I've been wanting to use ZFS with it more and more. So I figured I'd get opinions. Arch does have packages for ZFS, which would provide most features, just not encryption. So would I be better to use pfSense or the like off a USB and add what I need for ZFS, nfs, etc to it, or to just use FreeBSD? or is there some other suggestions. Thanks, Paul

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OpenSSL: patch it now!
by Trevor Cordes 10 Apr '14

10 Apr '14

Most people have probably heard about this already, but if not, *patch your OpenSSL now!* and restart your daemons. CVE-2014-0160 http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/04/critical-crypto-bug-in-openssl-open… For some reason you (sometimes) have to reload that page a few times before it actually loads. This is the worst bug I've seen in like 10 years, insofar as you may have been compromised already, but you don't (can't!) know it and they may be sitting there with your keys, waiting to actually make use of them at a later date. >From how I read it, the only way to be safe & sure is to make a new CSR and buy a new SSL cert? Or are the cert vendors going to offer a "redo" for free?

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