- Roundtable - muug.ca

/tmp longevity
by Kevin McGregor 15 Aug '24

15 Aug '24

Back in the day(?) I thought that the entire contents of /tmp would be wiped on every reboot. It sorta seems like it for Ubuntu 18.04, but with 22.04 that doesn't seem to be the case at all, with conf files in /etc/tmpfiles.d and elsewhere which describe what gets deleted. Can anyone shed any light on this, at least for Debian/Ubuntu? When did this change?

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Beautiful shell script example
by Adam Thompson 29 Jul '24

29 Jul '24

https://hackaday.com/2024/07/29/getting-linux-process-list-without-forking-… I wish I could hire the author of the script. -Adam Get Outlook for Android<https://aka.ms/AAb9ysg>

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Subdomain wildcard in Bind-style DNS editing
by Hartmut W Sager 24 Jul '24

24 Jul '24

I have a question about subdomain wildcards in Bind-style DNS editing, so that I can more conveniently edit DNS zone files to implement Fastmail's support of MX records specifying "*.mydomain.com." for e-mail at subdomains. (Yes, Fastmail's documentation states their support for this.) Now, in Bind-style DNS, we have valid short notations for full FQDN in the name field (the left side) as follows: "@" = "mydomain.com." "abc" = "abc.mydomain.com." So my question is, might the following also be valid? "*" = "*.mydomain.com." "*.@" = "*.mydomain.com." Hartmut

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RHEL latest package?
by Trevor Cordes 20 Jul '24

20 Jul '24

I finally gained access to the documentation for RHEL for a dedicated-hosting RHEL server I work on. But I find it hard to figure out where to go in there to find much of anything. And google doesn't seem to index what it is I need, maybe because of the paywall? I'm trying to figure out 2 things: 1. How can I tell what is the latest rpm/version RH has put out for httpd? I'm talking stock RHEL-supplied, not IUS/EPEL or whatever 3rd party. I know in Fedora this would be simple with bodhi/koji and/or simple rpmfind. 2. How can I tell if my RHEL box is setup to receive updates? Dnf works to install packages, but no updates seem to be coming across? I'm a bit worried because of the recent not-so-great apache/httpd bugs. I know RH has all this subscription stuff I normally don't have to mess with with Fedora, and I like to think the dedicated hoster set this all up properly, but I'm not sure how to tell. Thanks!

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dialog(1) shell fd acrobatics question
by Adam Thompson 08 Jul '24

08 Jul '24

I’m trying to debug a shell script that uses dialog(1), which has the unfortunate habit of overwriting the debug output I wanted to see. After quite some time banging my head against the wall, I grabbed the source to dialog to look at their examples. Their examples follow a pattern I have NOT been following; I’m now looking at this trying to understand WTF it does: 1 exec 3>&1 2 returntext=`$DIALOG --title "RANGE BOX" --rangebox "Please set the volume..." 0 60 0 123 5 2>&1 1>&3` 3 returncode=$? 4 exec 3>&- so… ok. Line 1 duplicates FD 1 (stdout) into FD 3. That’s usually so we can mess with FD 1 later on and still have a handle to stdout. Good so far. Line 2 runs /usr/bin/dialog in a subshell, the options to dialog(1) are irrelevant here. I’m looking at the redirects. “2>&1” duplicates FD 1 into FD 2, effectively throwing away the handle to the inherited /dev/stderr and forcing stderr output onto stdout. That’s a good thing because dialog(1) reports its results onto stderr by default to avoid messing with curses(3) output. “1>&3” however, throws away stdout (FD 1), replacing it with FD 3 which is… already a copy of FD 1 ??? Line 3 is obvious. Line 4 closes FD 3. Not sure that we need to bother, but OK, cleaning up behind ourselves is usually a good thing. I get the need for swapping stdin/stderr, as dialog(1) – well, really curses(3) - uses stdout to paint the screen, so dialog(1) spits its results out on stderr to avoid conflicting. If we’re in a subshell trying to capture that output, we need to grab it just as dialog(1) exits – and $() assignment only captures stdout. But what’s the point of having FD 3 in this setup, if all we do is assign it to stdin inside the subshell and then forget about it? Can anyone see what I’m missing here? -Adam

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Last call for RSVP for MUUG BBQ
by Trevor Cordes 06 Jul '24

06 Jul '24

For those not subscribed to the newsletter, here's a final reminder that, if you haven't done so already, you need to RSVP for the MUUG BBQ coming up on July 9, 6:30pm. Please RSVP by July 7. More details can be found in the uber-rare Super Special Edition MUUGLines newsletter: https://muug.ca/pub/muuglines/pdf/muug2407.pdf Thanks! P.S. So far rain is forecasted, but we'll see as we get closer. If it's badly rained out, we'll reschedule if we can; see the newsletter for details! Subscribe to muug-announce to hear the latest. http://www.muug.ca/mailman/listinfo/muug-announce

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Llama.ttf is AI, in a Font
by Adam Thompson 26 Jun '24

26 Jun '24

https://hackaday.com/2024/06/26/llama-ttf-is-ai-in-a-font/ Anyone remember how many years it's been since I started complaining about fonts being Turing-complete being a bad thing? -Adam Get Outlook for Android<https://aka.ms/AAb9ysg>

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MWL's State of Email talk, as promised
by Adam Thompson 26 Jun '24

26 Jun '24

https://youtu.be/HT3N8YWaGsg As I promised 😊. -Adam

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For the font geeks...
by Adam Thompson 22 Jun '24

22 Jun '24

https://www.tiktok.com/@wisdm8/video/7382287766064745759 -Adam

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I'm back!
by Brian Lowe 16 Jun '24

16 Jun '24

Hi everyone, TL;DR: My email was down for a week while I migrated to a new provider. I've been using valuehost.ca to host groupbcl.ca's mail for over a decade now. On June 3 they sent me an invoice for service renewal just 3 days before expiration. The only payment option was credit card via PayPal. When I attempted to pay, PayPal demanded a mobile phone number in addition to billing address information, which in my opinion is unnecessary for a simple credit card transaction. As far as I'm concerned, a mobile number is the 2020s version of the SIN/SSN: a unique identifier that can be used to link disparate accounts together. I simply do not trust PayPal to use that information solely for the purposes of this one transaction. I opened a support ticket on June 6 requesting alternate payment methods. There was no response for over 40 hours, despite a follow-up I posted nearly 34 hours later. On June 8 my account was suspended for non-payment, despite a ticket being open on this matter with their billing department for a day and a half. (The only thing to Valuehost's credit in this entire affair was they waited two days past the invoice due date before suspending my account.) That cut off my groupbcl.ca email address, which I've been using for over 20 years for most of my email correspondence. I updated the ticket 7 hours after my follow-up, requesting to be billed only for the domain renewal and not the hosting package. They replied 2 hours later stating that my domain is not registered with then (which was true) and had marked my hosting as cancelled. This was the only time they made any sort of comment on the ticket. Seven hours later I replied to the ticket, noting my email was now down and requesting options to get it going again. They never responded to that note. Late in the day on June 10 I sent a letter of complaint to the only other contact Valuehost has on their site, hoping that would get someone's attention. They never replied; not even a pro forma message indicating they received my email. By the evening of June 12 I had given up on Valuehost and signed up for mail hosting with HostPapa, who accepted my credit card without any problems. I had to provide them with a phone number, but because they're in Canada they're subject to PIPEDA. After updating my MX record, I spent a fair bit of time getting the HostPapa account to show test messages I sent them from my ISP's email. I had problems getting KMail talking to HostPapa. Their documentation for Thunderbird says to use port 995 (pop3s) with TLS for receiving and 465 (smtps) for sending, but when I duplicated the settings in KMail it failed on both. Eventually I configured KMail to connect to port 25 using STARTTLS for receiving and to localhost for sending, both of which worked. I then configured my postfix server to relay outbound mail via HostPapa's mail server. On June 13 I updated the ticket at Valuehost to say I had migrated to a different provider, and closed it. Unsurprisingly, I'm very disappointed in Valuehost's almost complete lack of action to my ticket and will no longer do business with them. Brian

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