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Linux Journal · by Franck Alcidi

/home/username/.kde
/net -hosts -soft,noac
AUTOFS=3D1, NFS_CLIENT=3D1, NFS_SERVER=3D1
pppd /dev/ttyS4 connect "chat -V " ATZ OK ATM0 OK ATDT1260 CONNECT" modem
defaultroute crtscts -detach

ATZ
OK
ATM0
OK
ATDT1260
CONNECTSerial connection established.
Using interface ppp0
Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/ttyS4
Serial line is looped back.
Connection terminated.

/dev/ttyS4
/dev/sm56
pppd /dev/ttyS4 connect "chat -V " ATZ OK ATM0 OK ATDT1260 CONNECT ogin
<yourlogin> assword <yourpassword>" modem defaultroute crtscts -detach

/data/cd.iso
/data/data_dir
/proc
/etc/adjtime
/etc/localtime
/usr/share/zoneinfo.
/etc/adjtime
/etc/adjtime
/etc/adjtime
/etc/adjtime
zaptime.pl.txt
/dev/hdc
/dev/hdc
/dev/hdd
/dev/hdc1
/dev/hdd5
/sbin
/etc/fs
/etc
/MOUNT_POINT/lost+found
/dev/hdc1
/etc/aliases:
listname:  member1@site.com, member2@site.com, member3@site.com

/etc/aliases.
/etc/aliases
wendy_in_hr: miz_wendy, wendy_hr@example.org
john_vp_eng: john, john_bossman@example.org
jobs: wendy_in_hr, john_vp_eng

/etc/aliases?
/
/dev
/usr/share/ssl/certs
  /usr/sbin/stunnel -d 995 -r 110
  /usr/sbin/stunnel -d 465 -r 25

/mnt/a
/etc/passwd;
comment = Testing Permissions
path = /usr/local/support
valid users = ibm, god
read list = ibm
write list = god
read only = No

[global]
   security = user

[joeBlow]
   comment = Joes smb share directory
   path = /usr/smbShares/jblow
   browseable = yes
   read only = yes
   create mode = 0770
   valid users = jblow
   write list = jblow
   public = no

/var/spool/mail/*
/etc/sendmail.cf.
/etc/mail/*
# mcopy a:MODULE.o /lib/modules/VERSION/SUBDIRECTORIES.../net
# modprobe MODULE               : Any error messages?
# cat /proc/modules             : Is it listed?
# ifconfig eth0 10.0.0.1        : Any error messages?
# ping -c 1 10.0.0.1            : Success?
# vi /etc/modules.conf          : Distribution-dependant, see below.
# vi /etc/modules               : If you want it always loaded.
# mcopy a:MODULE.o ~/Backups    : In case you need to reinstall it someday.

/etc/modules.conf
/etc/modutils/aliases
/etc/modules.conf.
/etc/modules
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
N^HNA^HAM^HME^HE
       thttpd - tiny/turbo/throttling HTTP server

S^HSY^HYN^HNO^HOP^HPS^HSI^HIS^HS
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

:.,%s/.^H//g

:	Enter command mode
.,%	Apply to every line from the current one to the end of the file
s/.^H	Grab all "Control-H"s and the character that precedes them...
//g	...and delete no matter how many times they occur on a line.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
NAME
       thttpd - tiny/turbo/throttling HTTP server

SYNOPSIS
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

/home/matthias/.exclude_from_backup
mpbackup.sh.txt
evaluate_file.sh.txt
/etc/keyfiles.conf
backpack.bash.txt
/usr/src/linux/kernel/timer.c
unsigned long volatile jiffies;

unsigned long volatile jiffies = 0x00010000;

Acquire
{
  http
  {
    Proxy "http://webproxy.example.com:3128/";
  }
}

block-nimda.sh.txt
/etc/X11/XF86Config:
   XkbOptions "ctrl:nocaps"

[hpdeskjet]
	path = /tmp
	printable = yes
	writeable = no
	create mask = 0700
	guest ok = yes
	printer name = lp

	print command = /bin/rm %f

chown nobody /shr/pdfdropbox
chmod u+rwx /shr/pdfdropbox

#!/bin/sh

# Simple script to convert a specified postscript file into a PDF document
# and place it in a location that is shared by the Samba server.
# 
# Arguments:
#   1st - The name of the spool file
#
# John Bright, 2001, jbright@winfordeng.com

# We will create the pdf into a temporary file based upon the current date and time.
# After we are finished, we'll rename it to a file with the same date, but ending
# in .pdf.  We do this because if a user tries to open a PDF that is still being written,
# they will get a message that it is corrupt, when it is actually just not done yet.

DATE=`date +%b%d-%H%M%S`

# Directory in which to place the output
# Be sure this directory exists and is writable by the user that Samba
# is running as (for example, the nobody user)
OUTDIR=/shr/pdfdropbox

ps2pdf $1 $OUTDIR/$DATE.temp
mv $OUTDIR/$DATE.temp $OUTDIR/$DATE.pdf
rm $1

[global]
   guest account = nobody
   invalid users = root

   ; Tighten security just a little: only allow local access
   interfaces = 127.0.0.1 eth0
   bind interfaces only = Yes
   ; This assumes you are on a local network with 192.168.x.x IP addresses
   hosts allow = 192.168.

   ; Share-level security is generally easier, although not as secure
   security=share

   workgroup=WORKGROUP

; Set up a public share, this will be used to retrieve PDFs
; The name of the share will be seen as "shr" by Windows users
[shr]
   path = /shr
   browseable = yes
   writeable = yes
   guest ok = yes
   force user = nobody

; Set up our PDF-creation print service
[pdf]
   path = /tmp
   printable = yes
   guest ok = yes
   print command = /usr/bin/printpdf %s

   ; There is no need to support listing or removing print jobs,
   ; since the server begins to process them as soon as they arrive.
   ; So, we set the lpq (list queued jobs) and lprm (remove jobs in queue)
   ; commands to be empty.
   lpq command =
   lprm command =

make_printerdef MSPRINT3.INF "HP LaserJet 5P/5MP PostScript" >> /etc/samba/printers.def

[global]
   guest account = nobody
   invalid users = root

   ; Tighten security just a little: only allow local access
   interfaces = 127.0.0.1 eth0
   bind interfaces only = Yes
   ; This assumes you are on a local network with 192.168.x.x IP addresses
   hosts allow = 192.168.

   ; Share-level security is generally easier, although not as secure
   security=share

   workgroup=WORKGROUP

   printer driver file = /etc/samba/printers.def

; Set up a public share, this will be used to retrieve PDFs
; The name of the share will be seen as "shr" by Windows users
[shr]
   path = /shr
   browseable = yes
   writeable = yes
   guest ok = yes
   force user = nobody

; Set up our PDF-creation print service
[pdf]
   path = /tmp
   printable = yes
   guest ok = yes
   print command = /usr/bin/printpdf %s

   ; There is no need to support listing or removing print jobs,
   ; since the server begins to process them as soon as they arrive.
   ; So, we set the lpq (list queued jobs) and lprm (remove jobs in queue)
   ; commands to be empty.
   lpq command =
   lprm command =

   ; We already defined the printer driver definition file above.
   ; Here we need to specify the entry in that file that should be used
   ; for this printer.
   printer driver = HP LaserJet 5P/5MP PostScript
   printer driver location = \\%h\printer$

; File share to allow clients to download printer drivers
[printer$]
   path = /etc/samba/printdrivers
   guest ok = yes
   read only = yes

#!/bin/sh
# This script is an input filter for printcap printing on a UNIX machine. It
# uses the smbclient program to print the file to the specified smb-based 
# server and service.
# For example you could have a printcap entry like this
#
# smb:lp=/dev/null:sd=/usr/spool/smb:sh:if=/usr/local/samba/smbprint
#
# which would create a UNIX printer called "smb" that will print via this 
# script. You will need to create the spool directory /usr/spool/smb with
# appropriate permissions and ownerships for your system.

# Set these to the server and service you wish to print to 
# In this example I have a Windows for Workgroups PC called "lapland" that has
# a printer exported called "printer" with no password.

#
# Script further altered by hamiltom@ecnz.co.nz (Michael Hamilton)
# so that the server, service, and password can be read from 
# a /usr/var/spool/lpd/PRINTNAME/.config file.
#
# In order for this to work the /etc/printcap entry must include an 
# accounting file (af=...):
#
#   cdcolour:\
#	:cm=CD IBM Colorjet on 6th:\
#	:sd=/var/spool/lpd/cdcolour:\
#	:af=/var/spool/lpd/cdcolour/acct:\
#	:if=/usr/local/etc/smbprint:\
#	:mx=0:\
#	:lp=/dev/null:
#
# The /usr/var/spool/lpd/PRINTNAME/.config file should contain:
#   share=PC_SERVER
#   user="user"
#   password="password"
#
# Please, do not modify the order in the file.
# Example:
#   share=\\server\deskjet
#   user="fred"
#   password=""

#
# The last parameter to the filter is the accounting file name.
#   Extract the directory name from the file name.
#   Concatenate this with /.config to get the config file.
#
eval acct_file=\$$#
spool_dir=`dirname $acct_file` 
config_file=$spool_dir/.config

# Should read the following variables set in the config file:
#   share
#   hostip
#   user
#   password

eval `cat $config_file`

share=`echo $share | sed "s/[\]/\//g"`

if [ "$user" != "" ]; then
   usercmd="-U"
else
   usercmd=""
fi

if [ "$workgroup" != "" ]; then
   workgroupcmd="-W"
else
   workgroupcmd=""
fi

if [ "$translate" = "yes" ]; then
 command="translate ; print -"
else
 command="print -"
fi
#echo $share $password $translate $x_command > /tmp/smbprint.log

cat | /usr/bin/smbclient "$share" "$password" -E ${hostip:+-I} \
     $hostip -N -P $usercmd "$user" $workgroupcmd "$workgroup" \
     -c "$command" 2>/dev/null

# PDF Service entry

lp|pdf|PDF Printer:\
        :lp=/dev/null:sh:\
        :sd=/var/spool/lpd/pdf:\
        :af=/var/spool/lpd/pdf/acct:\
        :mx#0:sh:\
        :if=/usr/bin/smbprint:

share=//yourserver/pdf
user=""
password=""

lpr -Ppdf file_to_print.ps

/sbin/mingetty
init
autologin
kdm
xdm
/etc/kde2/kdmrc
AutoLoginEnable=true
AutoLoginUser=fred

kdm
kdm
kdm
kdm
kdm
autologinfred.c
int main() {
   execlp( "login", "login", "-f", "fred", 0);
}

execlp
"login -f
fred"
login
-f argument.  Compile this tiny C program using the GNU
C-compiler:

$ gcc -o autologinfred autologinfred.c

Gain root privileges (using su) and copy the executable to a
public directory:

# cp autologinfred /usr/local/sbin/

Now take a look at /etc/inittab. This is the configuration
file is used by init, the very first process started when
Linux initialises. You should observe lines similar to the following:

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1
2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty2
3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty3

The exact contents of /etc/inittab differ from distribution
to distribution.  On Debian systems one sees:

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1
2:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty2
3:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty3

Edit the line beginning with "1:2345" so that it reads as
follows:

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty -n -l /usr/local/sbin/autologinfred 38400 tty1

The above will cause the user fred to be logged in
automatically on the first virtual console. On some GNU/Linux
distributions (like RedHat) /sbin/agetty must be used
instead.  The -l <alternative login> argument to
getty substitutes the default /sbin/login program
with the one we compiled earlier.  The -n tells
getty to not prompt for a user ID.

Initiating the desktop on login

If we reboot, the init process will automatically login the
user fred on the first virtual console and a command shell
will by started. User fred must still type in the
startx command to initiate the graphical desktop. Can
we automate this too?

If fred's login shell is /bin/bash, the first
commands to be executed will always be listed in the file,
~fred/.bash_profile.  We can add the startx command
here but this causes problems, since the .bash_profile will be
used in other situations such as when one is logging into a second
virtual console or when opening an xterm.  Instead we append the
following lines:

if [ -z "$DISPLAY" ] && [ $(tty) == /dev/tty1 ]; then
  startx
fi

Any new login shell started on the first virtual console will
automatically initiate a graphical desktop.  The surrounding if
statement ensures that login shells launched from the desktop, or
initiated in virtual consoles other than the first one, do not
immediately start up a new GUI desktop.  Users of /bin/sh
should append the above to ~fred/.profile, and tcsh
users need to convert the above to the equivalent csh script.

If there is already a GUI desktop running (via xdm,
gdm or kdm, etc) then invoke startx --
:1 instead.  This creates a second GUI desktop.  If one need
only have one desktop active, it would be better to disable any
existing Xserver instance by reducing the run level (RedHat)
or unlinking the /etc/rc?.d/S99?dm start up configuration
files (Debian).

Variations

Now whenever the machine boots, user fred is automatically
logged into the first virtual console, a bash login shell is
initiated, his ~/.bash_profile is sourced, and
startx is invoked -- all without any user interaction or
prompting for passwords. Neat, huh?

We can go further by making use of the ~/.xinitrc file to
initiate particular desktop applications.  (man startx
for details.)  Place your favourite game here and a Linux box can be
used like one of those arcade machines, minus the decorative case.
Launch an Ogg Vorbis player with visualisations and you can
have a dedicated music machine.

Unprompted logins can also be useful in a non-graphical context.  One
could arrange to login a special user who has /usr/bin/top as
her shell.  Now one virtual console will be devoted to an interactive
listing of active processes. The possibilities are limitless.

Conclusion

GNU/Linux, the multi-user operating system, is steadily becoming more
popular in single user settings.  In these situations one often can
dispense with the user login protocols.  This article illustrates that
its roots in the UNIX world do not detract from using Linux in these
dedicated areas.  With simple changes in configuration, and a small
touch of programming, one can automate the login process on most
GNU/Linux distributions and still preserve a significant measure of
flexibility.

Adrian J Chung
When not teaching undergraduate computing at the University of the West
Indies, Trinidad, Adrian is writing system level scripts to manage a network
of Linux boxes, and conducts experiments with interfacing various scripting
environments with home-brew computer graphics renderers and data visualization
libraries.

Copyright © 2001, Adrian J. Chung.

Copying license http://www.linuxgazette.com/copying.html

Published in Issue 72 of Linux Gazette, November 2001

"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

Battle for the Desktop: Why Linux Isn't Winning
By Dennis Field

  Linux has several advantages over Windows; it's more stable, 
cheaper (free, if you're able to download it), comes with tons of free 
software and will happily run on systems too small for Windows. So why 
isn't Linux being used on most of the PCs in the world?

  Some would say that the problem is that Linux is too clunky and
difficult to use. While command-line Linux is certainly not for everyone,
modern distributions include self-mounting CDs, drag & drop
functionality and other modern conveniences. There are still some rough
edges to be smoothed out, but for the average web surfer or office worker a
Gnome or KDE desktop is little different than Windows. So, again, why aren't
more people using Linux? Perhaps my experiences will help to explain. The
story you are about to read is true; only the names have been changed to
protect the inept.

  I work in a medium-sized bookstore (20 employees, 2.5+ million a 
year). We are currently using an old DOS based Point of Sale system, but 
there will be a web-based system out next year. Since this new system is 
calling for Windows XP capable PC's for every cash register, this is a 
considerable investment for us. However, I would estimate that we could 
save $300-$400 per terminal in both licenses and reduced hardware costs by 
using Linux instead. It also happens that I needed a portable workstation 
for my desk (I'm trying to develop an email newsletter for our store). So I 
decided to get a laptop to install Linux into, thinking that this would 
give an opportunity to both learn more Linux myself and show off Linux to 
everyone at work - trying to sell my manager on a non-Windows OS. Then, 
when  our new POS system gets up to the sales demonstration stage 
(i.ei; beta test), I'd already have a Linux workstation ready to hook up to
it.  Since it's supposed to be web-based, hopefully one or more of the web
browsers common to Linux should be able to interface with it correctly.
Whether our office server would work using the Apache web server is an
entirely different question, but the individual terminals throughout our
store are supposed to be, basically, web browsers.

  I began by researching different Linux distributions, quickly 
narrowing it down to one of the best known names in Linux, because they 
promised secure server/credit card processing support (which we would 
eventually need for our web-based cash registers) and were actively pushing 
a monthly service and  support contract. Our POS system literally runs our 
whole store, so we can't afford to just lock the doors and send everybody 
home whenever we have a technical problem. I'll call this distribution 
"Commercial Linux", because that's the market they  were clearly aiming for.

  Since I couldn't afford a new laptop, I started looking on eBay 
and finally found an old IBM Thinkpad for under $200 (the low price largely 
due to the lack of a CD-ROM drive). A quick search on Google revealed lots 
of people happily using various flavors of Linux on the exact model I was 
getting. I already knew that Linux can commonly be installed in half a 
dozen different ways - indeed, you can almost tie a wet string between two 
monitors and install it over that - but before bidding I checked with 
"Commercial Linux" and verified that a CD-ROM wasn't listed as a system 
requirement. I also purchased a PCMCIA Ethernet card, again after checking 
with "Commercial Linux's" Hardware Compatibility List and finding it listed 
as both "supported and easily installed".

  I installed "Commercial Linux" on my home desktop PC and was very
impressed with the software. Plug & Play nearly on a par with Microsoft,
a definitely improved desktop, etc. The printer setup would have gone more
smoothly with better instructions, but after a few tries I has able to get
Linux to print. I set up an ftp sever, copied the install files to it and
confidently tried to install "Commercial Linux" into my newly acquired
laptop.

  Plan A: I hooked both desktop & laptop into an Ethernet cable and 
inserted the PCMCIA boot disk into my laptop. I soon found out that my 3com 
PCMCIA card is supported by the Linux kernel, but not by the PCMCIA boot 
disk - not much use with a blank hard disk in my laptop. Neither the 
"Commercial Linux" web site nor their beautifully laid out and well 
illustrated installation manual contains a list of which network cards 
actually are supported by the PCMCIA boot disk.

  Plan B: The "Commercial Linux" on my desktop contains a PLIP 
server and their boot disk contains a PLIP driver. So I hooked up a 
parallel port, ie; laplink cable and tried to do a network install. Guess 
what? "Commercial Linux" doesn't provide any instructions on how to do a 
network install. Their web site doesn't show it, their printed installation 
guide doesn't explain it, and if you email them the question, you'll be 
told that your two months of customer support (for which I paid $80) 
doesn't cover network installs. So I spent a week trying every possible 
option and configuration I could think and never got any connection at all. 
It occurred to me early on that the "Commercial Linux" firewall, which 
their installation software set up by default, was probably cutting off the 
connection. Guess what? The "Commercial Linux" firewall program doesn't 
contain any detailed instructions on how to configure the firewall. I 
searched for "firewall" on "Commercial Linux's" web site. The most current 
listing they had was generic information from three software versions 
earlier. After wasting several more days trying to configure a firewall 
without instructions, I gave up and simply reinstalled my desktop Linux 
without a firewall. I again tried every possible option and configuration I 
could think of on the PLIP server (which - big surprise - also had no 
instructions) and still never got any network connection at all. In 
searching the Internet, I finally found a third party web site that 
mentioned that "Commercial Linux" no longer supports PLIP installs (a fact 
which I confirmed by phoning them, but have never found listed anywhere on 
"Commercial Linux's" own web site).

  Plan C: I could use my trusty Laplink cable to copy the 
installation files into my laptop and simply do a hard drive install. 
Sounds fairly straightforward, right? However, when I tried that, I found 
out several things: While most Linux distributions let you simply copy the 
directory structure onto the target hard drive, "Commercial Linux" makes 
you copy an ISO9660 image file of their entire installation CD onto the 
hard drive. To make matters worse, "Commercial Linux" put some of the 
required packages on their second CD. So you have to copy almost 1.4GB of 
installation files! (Windows 98SE requires less than 400MB, other Linux 
distributions require less than 100MB of installation files for a complete 
desktop system). In my case, my laptop, which exceeds the published system 
requirements, doesn't have enough room for both the "Commercial Linux" 
installation files and the Linux OS both at the same time. At the risk of 
being truly redundant, neither the necessary procedure, nor the list of 
required files, nor the actual disk space requirements were explained on 
"Commercial Linux's" web site or in their installation manual. And when I 
telephoned to ask them about it, their Customer Service people gave me the 
wrong information. Seeking to get some OS on my laptop, I tried Windows 
instead. I had never done a hard drive install of Windows, either, but I 
simply copied the cab files over, clicked "install" and Windows installed 
itself with nary a hiccup.

  Meanwhile, I played with "Commercial Linux" on my desktop. The 
factory CDs contained three different versions of StarOffice: not one of 
them installed correctly. There was no information on their web site as to 
any problem with StarOffice, much less how to fix the problem. A quick 
web search revealed several other irate "Commercial Linux" users who had 
already concluded that StarOffice simply wasn't compatible with the latest 
release of "Commercial Linux". I tried another word processor (again from 
the factory CD). This one installed correctly, but as soon as I launched 
it, it totally locked up my computer - keyboard and all. Warm booting my PC 
destroyed the file system so badly that Linux wouldn't even boot! By this 
point I was beginning to suspect that "Commercial Linux" never bothered to 
test the 3rd party software they ship to see if it even works on their own OS!

  All told, I have asked "Commercial Linux" five installation 
questions. I have received a total of three wrong answers, one flat refusal 
to even discuss my problem and one failure to return an email. And it's not 
just "Commercial Linux", either. I e-mailed four other Linux distributions,
asking each of them if they supported a hard drive install. Two of them never
responded at all, the third one emailed me back the next day saying that they
categorically refused to answer any questions unless I first gave them my
product registration number. Only one Linux distribution actually took the
time to answer my question. (guess which distribution I'm going to buy next
time?).

  In stark contrast, IBM has done a wonderful job of supporting 
their Thinkpad laptops. My 760E was built during the transition between 
Windows 3.x & 95. IBM's web site has a complete set of device drivers for 
both OS's (including software patches for 98), exhaustive documentation, 
installation notes, troubleshooting guides and a search engine that 
actually finds what you're looking for - all freely available for public 
search & download.

  In some respects, Linux already has better documentation than 
Windows ever thought about providing. There is an internal manual ("man 
pages") built into Linux. There are lots of external instructions 
("HOWTOs") written by experienced users, explaining "how to" do all kinds 
things with Linux. Any distribution that cared to could build upon these 
resources and provide expanded and customized help files (specific to their 
own distribution) to answer common questions regarding program operation, 
server set-up, etc. Apparently this idea has never occurred to anyone.

  Perhaps it is because Linux has traditionally been sold to, well, 
basically computer geeks. People who either enjoy tinkering with computers 
as a hobby, or who were already experienced UNIX administers. Consequently, 
I believe that many of the people who make Linux distributions have fallen 
into the practice of thinking: "Okay, we put the software on the CD for 
you. It's not our concern if the software actually works or whether you 
have the information you need to use it. We did our part.  Now send us the 
money". These same people then wonder why they are unsuccessful at selling 
Linux to either the general public or to the small business market.

  Earth calling Software Vendors! It doesn't do any good to 
distribute your software if it doesn't work or if your customers don't have 
the basic details needed to operate it. Here's a couple of really Wild & 
Radical ideas for Linux vendors: first, test the cotton-pickin' software 
before you release it! It may not be possible to test every video driver, 
but it certainly is possible to test if the software you're shipping 
installs into the correct directory and doesn't have any obvious 
incompatibly with the OS. I'm sure many venders try to do this, and
are no doubt caught between the conflicting demands of constant testing 
for reliability and trying to hurry out the latest and greatest software. But 
as a business user, I would far rather wait a few weeks longer for the 
software to be released and have everything  work. If smaller 
venders don't have the resources needed for comprehensive testing, 
then please A) note what software hasn't been tested, and B) maybe 
include general installation procedures, directory paths, etc. so users 
have some chance of fixing packages that don't install correctly. 

  Secondly, provide adequate documentation! Let me challenge the 
vendors to a simple test: Take a laptop down to your local community 
college. Go into the Computer Science building and select three or four 
students at random who do NOT know Linux. Offer to buy them all pizza if 
they will attempt to install and/or operate some software for you (based 
only on whatever documentation you provide to your users). If they can't at 
least begin to get a handle on it by the time the pizza is cooked, then YOU 
are not providing enough information! No, I am NOT talking about another 
"Guide to Linux". Linux itself is well documented. The individual 
distributions, however, provide barely enough information to let you 
install them - after that, you're on your own. And most Linux applications 
include a header file saying what the program is intended to do, but giving 
few, if any, clues as to how to get the program to do it. Almost all modern 
software templates include places for both general help files and context 
sensitive help. Few programmers use them. If several of the largest Linux 
vendors made it a policy to not accept 3rd party software unless it 
includes basic built-in documentation, then they could raise the bar for 
the whole Linux community.

  Oh, and my laptop? I downloaded a small distribution off the 
Internet, I'll call it "Mom&Pop Linux", which did know what a hard drive 
install is. Instead of an Installation Manual laid out by a graphic 
designer, they had a typical Linux "HOWTO";i.e., four text pages of friendly 
notes. Following the directions installed Linux flawlessly into my laptop. 
Well, almost flawlessly. It turns out the boot loader in "Mom&Pop Linux" 
doesn't work. It also turns out that they were apparently switching over 
from tarballs to RPMs and, perhaps as a result, I can't load any new 
programs into the laptop. Sigh. Being able to both boot the computer and 
install programs were two things I was really hoping for in an operating 
system. But I did at least prove that Linux can operate on my Thinkpad.

  By this time, I was now two months behind in my project at work. 
Searching through IBM's web site, I learned that the addition of a docking 
station would allow my laptop to have a (non-bootable) CD-ROM drive and a 
(bootable) floppy at the same time. A little more shopping at eBay and I 
found the necessary hardware. This put me 50% over budget, but at last I 
would have a functional Linux laptop!! I happily installed "Commercial 
Linux" from their CDs, already knowing the correct settings for the X 
window setup from my earlier install of "Mom&Pop" Linux. Guess what?? 
"Commercial Linux's" X server doesn't work in my laptop. They list the 
video chip as supported. I double checked all the settings, but all I get 
when I type "startx" is a page and a half of error listings. Based on my 
experience with "Commercial Linux" to date, I have little hope of finding 
the information needed to fix the problem on their web site. And their tech 
support won't even talk to me, because my 60 days of installation support
has expired.

  As far as our bookstore is concerned, I do not currently believe 
Linux to be a viable alternative for any small business. Even if I did, I 
doubt I could ever convince my manager that "Commercial Linux" is capable 
of supporting our office network, since they have already demonstrated that 
they are not capable of supporting an installation into an IBM Thinkpad!

 Oddly enough, I still believe that Linux is a good Operating System, 
and I am continuing my search for a functional distribution. But so far, 
the only OS that will actually operate in my Thinkpad is Windows. I would 
rather be running Linux (Indeed, once Windows XP becomes dominant, I will 
have to either run Linux in my laptop or else throw it away). I believe 
there are a lot of other business people who would like to run Linux as 
well. But it's not going to happen until some of the Linux vendors get 
their act together.

  Let me offer an analogy: Suppose you were looking for a car, and 
you heard about this great new sports car that got 50MPG and only cost $5000!
But when you went to buy one, you were told it didn't have any tires, and
there was no alternator (so you had to figure out some other way to keep the
battery charged) and, oh also, don't drive it too fast because the brakes
don't work. And if this car ever breaks, then you'll need to find your own
spare parts and try to fix it yourself, because the dealer that sells the
cars refuses to work on them. Would you buy that car? More importantly, would
you recommend that car to somebody that needs reliable transportation to get
to work tomorrow? Does this sound far-fetched? Well, that's exactly what many
Linux vendors are telling the people who buy their software. Getting back to
my automotive analogy, these same vendors will then loudly complain that
Chevrolet is being unfair because they put radios in their cars as standard
equipment. Well, maybe people aren't buying Chevys because they have built-in
radios. Maybe people are buying Chevys because they have tires and the
dealers are willing to fix the cars if they don't work! Likewise, maybe
people are also buying Windows because it works out of the box (well, mostly
works, anyway), and Microsoft at least tries to offer support when it
doesn't work.

Dennis Field
My first encounter with a computer was when my high school got an
old IBM 1130 (which had a whopping 8k of main memory!), and I've been
playing with computers off and on since then. My first home computer was as
Amstrad, which ran C/PM and came complete with a revolutionary 3" floppy
disk drive (yes, you read that right<g>). Although I've had one college
course each in both C and Linux, I still consider myself a Linux newbie.
However, I am a fan of Linux, and would be delighted to see Linux start
providing some mainstream competition to Microsoft. But doing so will
require more than just technical achievement or even a user-friendly
interface. It will require somebody providing some real customer service
and support.

Copyright © 2001, Dennis Field.

Copying license http://www.linuxgazette.com/copying.html

Published in Issue 72 of Linux Gazette, November 2001

"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

Installing Linux on a Sun SPARC Ultra 5
By Bruce Forsberg

Click here for a screenshot of Linux on a Solaris desktop

Being an open-source software developer,
I naturally perform all my work on the Linux operating system. Anyone who
does development knows the advantage of having ALL the source code available.
As an example, I work on a project called the  
(Open Source Audio Library Project).  It is a C++ class library that contains
audio functionality. While doing development on my Linux laptop I was having
problems with some audio sample rates. At some sample rates the audio would
sound like Donald Duck and at others it would be normal. The same test would
work fine on my desktop Linux machine. After extensive investigation it was
determined that when I exited another operating system and booted into Linux
without powering down the laptop a register on the audio chip would not get
reset and would cause this problem. I found the driver in the audio code and
inserted the fix into the driver and it worked. I sent the patch to Alan Cox
who put it into the very next kernel release (2.2.17). If this was a problem
with a proprietary OS the likelihood of this ever being fixed would be slim. 

As part of my testing for my library I saw the need for three things, 1) to
be able to support more OS's, 2) to be able to support big-endian CPU's, 3)
and to support 64 bit computing platforms. After looking at other computers
available, I determined that a computer from Sun Microsystems would be
a good addition. Sun makes the most popular commercial UNIX computers and their
new models use the UltraSPARC CPU's which are big-endian and 64 bits. 

Sun has an entry-level computer available called the Ultra 5. A new computer
would cost $2000 - $3000. This was more than I wanted to pay. So I searched
Ebay and found a used Ultra 5. Used Ultra 5's now sell on Ebay for about
$500 - $700. A good deal for another workstation. I bought the Ultra 5
containing a 270 Mhz UltraSPARC II processor, 64MB of memory and a 4.3 GB
hard drive. If you are undecided about what kind of Sun workstation to get,
then check out the SPARC-HOWTO at www.linuxdoc.org. I also purchased Solaris
8 for $75 from Sun 
(www.sun.com/software/solaris/binaries/get.html) and
installed it. Installation went perfectly. I was able to port my software to
Solaris. But knowing that some people run Linux on SPARC's meant that I
needed to install Linux on the Ultra 5 as well, preferably in a dual boot
configuration with Solaris 8 and Linux. The following is my experience with
installing Linux on my Ultra 5.

Step 1 - Selecting the distribution

The first step was to determine which distribution to use. Having used Linux
for several years on Intel processors, I have used 
SuSE many times and liked
it. When I found that SuSE had a SPARC distribution I decided on this. So I
headed over to CheapBytes, and 3 days
later I had my CD's.  If you are undecided about what distribution to use
then check out the 
www.ultralinux.org web site. They have a list of currently
supported Linux distributions for Sun workstations. 

Step 2 - Planning the installation

The next step was to determine where to put the Linux distribution. I only had
a 4.3GB hard drive installed, hardly enough to contain both Solaris and Linux.
First I decided that since I had never installed Linux on SPARC I would remove
the existing 4.3 GB IDE hard drive and install an old 3GB IDE hard drive to use
as a test install drive. This drive came from an old Linux on Intel system. When
I did this I ran into nothing but problems. Using SuSE's installer called YaST2,
I was unable to partition this hard drive no matter what I did. YaST2 gives you
two options, an automatic option, and a custom manual option. When using the
automatic option and telling it to use the whole hard drive just returned errors
that it was unable to partition the drive. Everything that I tried with the
manual mode did not work either. Finally after a couple of days of trying, I
decided to install Solaris on the drive first thinking that maybe the drive
needs to be formatted in some way. This seemed to work. When I ran YaST2 after
this and using the custom manual partitioning menu I left the SunOS Swap
partition and then created a 16MB /boot partition, a 2GB / partition, and a
200MB Linux swap partition. After this the installation of the files went smooth.
I found out later by surfing the Internet that when one uses a non-Solaris
disk one needs to run the fdisk utility and create a Solaris disk label on
the disk. It also went on to say that this label is stored in the first
partition on that hard drive so the first partition can't be a Linux swap
partition since it will not reserve space for this label. 

Now I was ready to install the real thing. I decided to start over completely.
So I purchased a new 20 GB hard drive and installed it into the Ultra 5. Next I
powered up the Ultra 5 and during initialization pressed the Stop-A key sequence.
This takes you to the boot PROM on the Ultra 5. I placed the install Solaris 8
CD in the CD-ROM drive and entered "boot cdrom" and away went the Solaris
installation. When the install looked for the hard disk it could not find any
space. Since this is not the Solaris Gazette, suffice it to say that it put me
at a command prompt and I had to enter format and create a backup label on the
third partition (#2) and zero out all the others and label this to the hard
drive. After this I restarted the Solaris 8 install and it went fine.

For the Solaris install I created a root partition of 5GB with a 512 MB Solaris
swap partition and a 2GB /export/home partition. Now I started the Linux
install. I installed the first SuSE CD and rebooted the computer. When the
boot started I did the Stop-A thing and typed "boot cdrom". I let YaST2 run
and selected manual partition editing. I created a 512MB Linux swap partition,
a 16 MB /boot partition, and the rest of the drive as the Linux / partition. 

Step 3 - Installing the Linux software

The next step is to actually install the linux software. I selected the packages
I wanted and then was presented with the SILO configuration. I selected the custom
SILO configuration and verified that Install SILO on partition /boot was
selected. I did this rather the the MBR (Master Boot Record) since I will use
OpenBoot in the PROM to select whether to boot Linux or Solaris. More on this
later. By installing SILO in /boot I will be able to test different Linux
kernels and boot to them. I then created a user account and entered a password
for the root user. Then off went the installer installing the software, a
total of 1624 packages. Everything went fine with the install.

After the install finished, I used YaST to setup the rest of the stuff one does
after a Linux install. I selected the Sun Happy Meal 10/100base T interface for
the network. The rest of the network sets up just like a Linux on Intel system. I
then configured audio for the Ultra 5 by following the steps in the manual on the
first CD-ROM. I added the following two lines to the file in /etc/init.d/boot.local:

modprobe audio
modprobe cs4231

The only problem here is that the manual said the file was in /sbin not /etc. For
an experienced Linux installer this was an obvious mistake in the manual but a
novice might have some problem with this. I reported this to SuSE and they
responded promptly, thanking me for the correction. 

When I tried to run my audio application, the open call on the audio device
/dev/audio just hung and never returned. After some investigation I found that
KDE had an audio server running that was using the device. I went to the KDE
control panel and turned off this audio server and restarted KDE, and now I
have working audio on my Ultra 5.

Next I mounted the Solaris 8 disk partitions on Linux so that I could see
them. The partition type that Solaris uses is called ufs. I read notes also
that write capability is experimental. So I mounted both / and /home partitions
from Solaris in Linux by performing the following. I performed "fdisk /dev/hda"
to list the partitions that I have on my first hard drive. It turns out that I
have /dev/hda1 as / and /dev/hda8 as /home. First I created mount points. I like
points under /, so I did:
cd /
mkdir sun_root
mkdir sun_home
Next I added to /etc/fstab the following lines:
/dev/hda1  /sun_root  ufs  defaults,ro,ufstype=sun  1  0
/dev/hda8  /sun_home  ufs  defaults,ro,ufstype=sun  1  0

Now I mounted the mount points "mount /sun_root" and "mount /sun_home". Now
I can see my Solaris partitions from Linux.

Step 4 - Configuring Dual Boot

The next step is to set up booting  between the two operating systems on the
Ultra 5. Most of you are familiar with LILO on your Linux on Intel machine.
For Linux on Solaris you will find SILO. I use SILO to boot different Linux
kernels, but to boot between Solaris and Linux I use the boot PROM on the
Ultra 5 called OpenBoot. The following instructions will apply to the 3.x
version of OpenBoot, which should exist on all Ultra 5's. To get to the
OpenBoot prompt you need to press the Stop-A key sequence. Once you are at
this prompt you can type devalias, this will list all of the aliases that are
defined. You should see several disk entries like:

disk		/pci@1f,0/pci@1,1/ide@3/disk@0,0
disk3		/pci@1f,0/pci@1,1/ide@3/disk@3,0
disk2		/pci@1f,0/pci@1,1/ide@3/disk@2,0
disk1		/pci@1f,0/pci@1,1/ide@3/disk@1,0
disk0		/pci@1f,0/pci@1,1/ide@3/disk@0,0

All of the stuff on the right is a device entry. You can now create several
aliases of your own. I created two, linux and solaris:

linux		/pci@1f,0/pci@1,1/ide@3/disk@0,0:d
solaris		/pci@1f,0/pci@1,1/ide@3/disk@0,0:a

These are the device entries for disk0 which would be hard drive /dev/hda in
a Linux on Intel box. The :letter at the right of the device entry points to
the partition on that hard drive. So to boot the first partition it would be :a.
To boot the forth partition you would use :d at the end. To store these entries
in non-volatile ram you need to create the above entries with the nvalias
command in OpenBoot. Note that if there is an alias with the entry on the right
it will be replaced with the new alias.

There is another parameter that you can set in OpenBoot and it is:

setenv auto-boot? = false

This will make the computer stop at the ok prompt when powered on. This allows
one to then select which OS to boot, solaris or linux. All one has to type is
either "boot solaris" or "boot linux".

Step 5 - Miscellaneous Notes

The following are some miscellaneous notes I discovered dealing with Linux on SPARC.

1. If you see the following messages "Unimplemented SPARC system call 69/44"
from your kernel while booting then ignore them. System call 44 and system
call 69 are getuid32()/geteuid32() both are not necessary on UltraSPARC.
2. Apparently, from what I have read, for Linux on UltraSPARC, the
kernel is 64 bits but userland is still at 32 bits. I am not to sure what
this means, but I think it means that I will not be able to compile my application
as a 64 bit application.
3. The Stop-A key sequence is disabled on SuSE 7.1 and some others
distributions. In SuSE it can be enabled in YaST2 by going to the misc section.
I tried to enable it and when I did Stop-A the computer hung and I saw no boot
prompt. So, it is probably a good idea to leave it disabled when in Linux.

Conclusion

Except for the initial problem of partitioning the disk everything went very
smooth. The disk problem was frustrating though. SuSE is to be commended on
a fine Linux on SPARC distribution. It is good to see this. I have seen
messages in their mail list that they are working on a SuSE 7.3 version as well.
I would also like to thank all the open source Linux programmers who have worked
on Linux on SPARC software. You have done a great job! Thank you for your
efforts. For now I have a workable solution for running both Solaris 8 and SuSE
Linux 7.1 on my Sun Microsystems Ultra 5. It is not a fast machine, being only
64MB with a 270 Mhz processor, but it does the job it was intended for,
porting software.

Bruce Forsberg
Bruce is just an average guy having fun with Linux. He is the
founder of the 
Open Source Audio Library Project.
He got his start programming freeware on
windows 3.1. When he realized that all one had to do was to not
return from a message and it would hang the entire operating 
system, he knew there had to be a better way. Linux was the answer.

Copyright © 2001, Bruce Forsberg.

Copying license http://www.linuxgazette.com/copying.html

Published in Issue 72 of Linux Gazette, November 2001

"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

The Godfather of Computing - Charles Babbage
By G James Jones

Reprinted from System Toolbox's 
History section with permission

Original URL: http://www.systemtoolbox.com/article.php?articles_id=43

In the beginning...

Some of the most often used cliches about writing and telling
stories turn out to be good advice as well.  A writer is told to
"write what she knows" and a storyteller is to "begin at the
beginning."  And so, I hope to focus on "our" beginnings and the
things that "we" know; the beginnings of network and hardware
engineers, computer scientists, system administrators and others among
a host of geeks, hackers, and phreaks that exist in our world.

The original idea came out of an interchange between Chris Campbell
and I about an articled titled
Adventures
in Babysitting that he had written for
Binary Freedom.  The article
described Chris' foray among our would-be next generation at a local
2600 meeting and featured his utter disbelief at their lack of
interest or understanding of their technology history.  Names like
Admiral Grace Hopper and Ken Thompson didn't come close to ringing a
bell.  You can tell how disheartening an experience it was for him.
These people were his heroes after all (mine as well) and they should
be looked up to and seen as the mentors that they are.  In order to
showcase and explore them, I proposed this column.

So, to begin somewhere near the beginning, let's investigate the
Godfather of Computing, Charles Babbage.

A Beginning of Another Sort...

Charles Babbage is variously called the Father, Grandfather and
Patron Saint of Computing.  To many that care, he began it all. I
prefer to think of him as the Godfather of Computing and to see why is
all part of his story.

Babbage was born into a wealthy, but undistinguished, family in
Devonshire, England, in 1791.  While still a young boy, Babbage was
concerned with questions of "how" over those of "why."  The expression
of this concern saw the boy dismantling his fair share of toys and
mechanical objects around his family's home.

A "Personality Disorder" Explored...

My father-in-law, an engineer, likes to say that engineering is the
expression of a personality disorder.  The way he sees it, all
engineers think and see the world such an odd, but similar, way that
it can only be attributed to some sort of mental disorder.  When they
see something new, they want to pull it apart.  When they hear of a
problem, whether in their realm of control or not, they will offer
"the most efficient" solution.  In general, the world is seen as a
broken puzzle that only some good solid, and sustained, engineering
will fix.  I can see his point.  Besides, breaking Aunt Edna's antique
clock just to see how it works can be considered rude at the very
least.  On top of which, "normal" social graces are generally thrown
out the window, placing the final nail in the coffin of diagnosis.

The funny thing is that the expression of this "disorder" can be
fingered early in life.  One can watch for the early warning signs.
Children that take apart watches or have a penchant for building
elaborate structures from blocks may just be engineers in their pupae
stage.  By all accounts, Babbage definitely was afflicted by the time
of his boyhood.  His tinkering with things, his dismantling of
gadgets, and his inquisitiveness as to how things worked are all sure
signs.  While the draw of engineering can be sublimated if caught
early and treated with care, Charles had no such luck.  His fate was
sealed when he stumbled upon a copy of the Young Mathematician's
Guide in the school library.  From that point on, Babbage devoted
himself to the pursuit of rational thought and scientific knowledge.

 After boarding school, Babbage headed to Cambridge to attend
Trinity College.  While at Trinity, the precocious student tended to
test the patience and abilities of his instructors, a manner that may
be familiar to a few among our readers.  One rebellious episode saw
Babbage and his Analytical Society taking on the very way math was
done in England.

At the time, most of England preferred to do complex mathematics
using Sir Isaac Newton's "dot notation."  The choice of notation was
more out of civic pride than actual utilitarianism.  Babbage
considered this an affront to the way things should be.  It went
against efficiency and clarity and was a general affront to Babbage's
rational senses. He favored instead the scientific notation perfected
by Leibniz and used throughout Europe.  The Analytical Society, which
Babbage helped found, championed the fight to switch to scientific
calculation by translating Lacroix's Examples to the Differential
and Analytical Calculus from its original French.  This
achievement is considered one of the main events that helped bring
modern mathematics to England.

The Beginnings of an Idea...

Though stories about the first notion of Babbage's calculating
machine vary, they all seem to focus on Babbage's unwillingness to
suffer inefficiency and undue complexity.  It seems that Babbage was
reviewing some of the many "look-up" tables that were used to aid in
calculating complex equations in his day.  The number of errors that
were contained therein quickly exasperated him and his partners.
Since the tables were generally copied by hand or transcribed to
plates for printing, it was inevitable that errors would get
introduced into the tables during the process.  Those errors then just
percolated through all the calculations that they were used to
perform.  One error made hundreds of years ago could potentially
misroute ships or hurt financial projections.

Babbage is said to have complained to his colleague that he wished
these calculations could be carried out by steam.  In that simple
complaint lies the beginning of the first programmable mechanical
calculator.  It would later see life as the Difference Engine and
still later as plans for the much more ambitious, and versatile,
Analytical Engine.  It was 1820.

Calculating Machines...

Babbage's first attempt at a calculating machine took the form of a
small six-wheeled model that took advantage of number differences to
aid in complex calculations.  The machine, dubbed the Difference
Engine, was powerful and elegant in its simplicity.

Babbage realized that any process that could be distilled into a
repeatable algorithm probably could be mechanized.  It's entirely
likely that he was inspired to this line of reasoning through his
fascination with automata at an early age.  Automata were mechanical
creations and figurines that imitated life in the form of animals,
ballerinas and musicians and such.  By following complex, but
repeatable, mechanical tricks, some automata were able to seem
extraordinarily lifelike.  It was this controlled, and nearly
invisible, complexity that interested Babbage.

Babbage's table problem was similar to that of the automata.  While
fixing the errors in copying tables was a complex problem, he realized
that embracing the complexity and wrapping it in elegant mechanics was
a likely solution.  Babbage decided that by using the method of
differences, he could create a calculating machine that would aid in
these complex calculations.  This is how it worked.

Method of Differences...

This is how the method of differences works.  First one takes a set
of consecutive numbers and then you perform a set function on
each. For sake of ease, let's use the squares of the starting
number's.  Then you begin to successively look at the differences
between the results until you arrive at a common number. It is then
possible to work the process in reverse using only addition (something
that machines can easily be engineered to do) to fill in the answer to
the function for successive beginning numbers in the table.  The only
requirement is that you begin with a certain amount starting of
"known" numbers that will, following the process, eventually come to a
form of stasis.

For our example we will use 1, 2, 3, and
4 as our starting points.  These numbers will form our x
column.  The function column, f(x), is then determined by
applying the function chosen, squaring in this case, to each number of
the x column.  This gives 1, 4, 9, and
16 in order.  For the next column, we find the differences
between each f(x), giving us 3, the difference between 1
and 4, 5, the difference between 4 and 9, and 7, the
difference between 9 and 16.  We line these numbers in a column,
delta 1, so that they are positioned vertically, for ease of
calculation, about halfway between the two numbers in the preceding
column.  Next we calculate the differences between the numbers in
delta 1.  The answers, placed in a fourth column, delta
2, are 2, the difference between 3 and 5, and 2, the
difference between 5 and 7.  We have now reached a stasis point where
the differences are the same.  Once we have reached this point we can
now work our way backwards and fill in the table.  But first, the
starting table looks something like this:

      x
      f(x)
      delta 1
      delta 2

      1
      1

      3

      2
      4

      2

      5

      3
      9

      2

      7

      4
      16

Now we just work our way backwards on the table to fill in the
values for the function of new values of x.  First we can check
our work.  Starting at the top value in the delta 2 column
(2), we can add it to the top value in the delta 1
column (3) and should get the next value in line in the
delta 1 column.  If you don't get 5, check your addition.  If
you do get the second value in delta 1, then you did your
calculations for those two rows correctly and you can move on (see,
it's self checking).  Now take the value at the top of delta 1
and add it to the top of f(x).  The result is the value for the
function applied to the next value of x in the table.  You can
carry this for any value of x as long as you know the values of
the function for a few numbers before x, and you only have to use
addition to fill in the table after that point.  Here is a table with
the values for x = 5, to show you how it works for "new" table
additions.

      x
      f(x)
      delta 1
      delta 2

      1
      1

      3

      2
      4

      2

      5

      3
      9

      2

      7

      4
      16

      2

      9

      5
      25

As you can see, it becomes very easy to add new values to the
table.  Working backwards from delta 2, two (2) plus delta
1's value of seven (7) yields nine (9) for delta 1, which
in turn yields twenty five (25) for the function of x, or
f(x).  Pretty straightforward.  So much so, in fact, that it
can be carried out mechanically.  Herein was Babbage's genius.  He
understood, perhaps innately, before any objective proof
existed, that complex calculations could be carried out by machine.
In order to avoid transcription errors when users of the machine copied
the results of the calculation, Babbage's goal was to create a printer
of sorts that would copy out the results by itself.  The methods that
Babbage devised would successfully skirt the sources of table errors
that so infuriated the inventive Babbage.  It was this understanding,
this internal realization of the "correctness" of his solution, that
would drive him in the pursuit of the ultimate manifestation of his
ideas until the day he died.

The Analytical Engine...

Babbage's early prototype of the Difference Engine was met with
great public excitement.  He became the hit of London's social circle
and it was often the mark of a party's success or failure as to
whether Babbage had accepted an invitation to attend.  This prototype
also brought him some initial funding, to the tune of 15,000 to
17,000 pounds (accounts vary), from the British government.  This
money was to be put into the development of a fully functional
Difference Engine and, later, a more complex calculating machine
dubbed the Analytical Engine.

Babbage had been able to prove his ideas and gained general
acceptance of his theories.  His major problem with creating a version
beyond his proof-of-concept prototype for the Difference Engine was
his constant learning and tinkering.  As Babbage worked on the project
he was constantly discovering more efficient ways to accomplish his
goals and overcome the problems with precision machining that hampered
his progress.  It is said that as soon as new plans had left his shop
for the machinists, he had already come up with a revision of the
previous idea.  This constant tinkering would be Babbage's undoing and
would defeat the progress of nearly every project he undertook.  It
was as if his mind were so active, that it couldn't slow down long
enough to take a snapshot of an idea from which he could work to
physical completion.

Babbage never completed a full Difference or Analytical Engine.  He
died in his London home to a cacophony of street musicians (a group
that Babbage sought to have abolished from the city's streets) who had
come from across the country to serenade him on his way outside his
window.  Let's just say that he didn't make many friends among that
group (lawsuits will do that).  But we still remember him.  Beyond the
idea that complex calculations could be carried out mechanically, an
idea that seems inevitable, what did he contribute?

The beauty of Babbage's ideas and their overall contribution to
computer science lies in their completeness.  Babbage envisioned a
system that was programmable through punch card inputs.  It could
carry out many varied types of calculations and was as versatile as
the instructions that it received; versatility through "software".
With his printing ideas, Babbage had basically pioneered the idea of
input/output (IO) via punch cards and printers.  Taking it a step
further, his conception of Analytical engine could store calculations
(by punching cards) and continue them later or use the results of
certain calculations to continue in different directions based on the
outcome; the stored program and programmatic logic respectively.

Unfortunately, Babbage never saw his most dramatic ideas reach
reality, though he maintained his vision going so far as to work with
Ada, the Countess of Lovelace (and mathematical wunderkind) to work
out the proper functioning and use of the machines.  It is due to
Ada's copious and annotated notes of some of Babbage's lectures,
that his ideas weren't lost as a footnote in history and that the
awesomeness of his, at least mental, achievement came to be
appreciated.  Her notes and Babbage's unearthed plans helped this
vindication even further when a working and more complex
Difference Engine No. 2, the precursor to the Analytical
Engine, was constructed by Science Museum in London in
1991. He should be appreciated for his persistence and
his ideas.  The world could have
been wildly different if only he had been moderately successful (read
The Difference Engine by Gibson and Sterling for one possible
outcome).  Babbage is the godfather of computing because he
beat everyone to the punch.  Using the technology that was available
to him, metalworking, engineering, and steam, he was able to
approximate the early "computers" of the electrical age.

He was a visionary before his time.  We should all hope to be as much.

-----------

© 2001 G. James Jones is a Microcomputer Network
Analyst for a mid-sized public university in the midwest.  He writes
on topics ranging from Open Source Software to privacy to the history
of technology and its social ramifications.  Verbatim copying and
redistribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium if
this notice is preserved.

Copying license as above

Published in Issue 72 of Linux Gazette, November 2001

"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

Standard Database Setup with Perl and PostgreSQL: Part 3
By Mark Nielsen

Introduction (way too long)
Standard Database Setup (SDS)
Perl script to setup my SDS environment with 
Perl and PostgreSQL
How the perl script is setup to work
Conclusion
References

Introduction
This article tries to accomplish the following:

 Given a database design, create all the tables, sequences, stored
  procedures, views, backup tables, timestamps, and unique ids. 

 For the Perl language, create all the modules and sample perl scripts
   for a web server. 

The database and webpages will assume there is user authentication. The
  users table, which will have a username and password for accounts, will be
  called "users". 

Create all the "stuff" inbetween the database design and the sample 
 webpages. Thus, it relieves you of creating the database information, perl
  modules, and even provides sample web script code about how to access
  the database using the perl modules. All you need to do is manipulate 
  the perl scripts and customize them. 

Remove the threat of the database administrators and non-programming
   web administrators strangling the life out of the programmers. Also,
   to make it possible for a novice programmer to setup the entire database, 
   perl modules, and sample perl scripts so that they can start
   to experiment and learn (this is going to be valuable at my advanced
   web/databases classes at eastmont.net).  

 To setup a Standard Database Setup, which I will use for all further
projects regardless of which database server and programming languages I use.

I have worked for many companies and many projects. Every one of them have
their own programming style and their own ways of doing things. Usually not
thought out very well because of pressure to get things out fast and
worry about the consequences later. Part 3 of Perl and PostgreSQL is dedicated
to me so that I will use a standard way of doing 
things with Perl and PostgreSQL
so that everything remains professional (a professional database structure, 
professional perl modules, and semi-professional sample perl scripts).

When everything is standardized with good code, everything becomes easy. 
Personally, I am not ever going to take on another project that doesn't use
a database system with standard stored procedures with 100% unique ids
in every table. I just won't take the job (I get enough job offers
as it is). I don't want to walk into an
unprofessional environment anymore (unless they agree to make it
professional). It wastes my time and their time. Bottom line. I am more
interested in business aspects of a company that requires programming
skills than to do the actual programming. 
I like to setup things up and do research
and development to improve things, but I want other people to do the dirty
work after I have done the R&D. 

One large company that I worked for had great database design, but the perl
programmers were at the mercy of the database administrators. One unwieldy
popular database server is a nightmare to handle. Although I respected the
database administrators, I feel as though a true programmer should be in
charge of the database and the database administrator should be a guide rather
than a god. Programmers might not know how to handle the database properly,
but that is where the database admin comes in, to approve things, but not
to prevent things from getting done. I find it extremely frustrating to
fight with database administrators when they are suppose to serve the 
programmers. Network admins serve the database admins, database admins
serve the programmers, programmers serve their boss, their boss serves
the secretaries, accountants, customers, salespeople, 
and other people inside and outside
of the corporation. In other words, the only justification for the people
at the bottom is if they are serving the people at the top to help them
get their work done. Lord knows I have seen many computer geeks who just
didn't have a clue about how to run a business. Computer people are only
valuable if they accomplish goals that other people can use in the company. 

Having said that rant about how I fight on a daily basis with database admins,
part 3 of Perl and PostgreSQL is also suppose to remove or severely
reduce the need of a database admin. My perl script deletes the tables, 
which if you have live data on a live server, can be a bad thing which you 
might need a database admin for. However, I backup all tables deleted
and I want to add the ability to repopulate data from one table to another
when columns get changed or added. With that, a database admin looses power to 
stranglehold a programmer from getting his work done, or more accurately,
if we can provide a professional system that a professional overpaid
database admin approves of, there will be less work for the overpaid
database admin and thus they become cheaper. With that said, overpaid
programmers can cause just as much problems as an overpaid database admin!
I just deal in a world where I install my operating system from scratch, 
I install Perl, Apache, Zope, Python, PostgreSQL, MySQL from scratch, 
and my end result is a pretty and/or functional webpage
that people can use. Anything below the webpage that causes me problems
to achieve my goal, whether it is the network admin, database admin, etc.
is an obstacle that needs to be removed. That is how I think. I have
great respect for all sorts of admins, but they serve the programmers, and
I can seen countless times how programmers get restricted and choked to know
when a company or department is in trouble. When network and database admins
make the programmers happy, everyone is happy (they also have to know how 
to prevent the programmers from running amok and put their foot down
when needed!). 

With standard exact stored procedures, views, sequences, unique ids, 
timestamps, active/inactive status for all tables, the database admin
should feel happy to let programmers design database tables as long as they
approve the final database result. Afterall, if my perl script sets up the
entire database, and the Perl modules to access the stored procedures
in the database, there is nothing for the database admin to do other than
approve database designs and make changes to the database design (because
the programmer probably 
doesn't know how to setup a good database). Also, the web
administrator can be a stranglehold if they are not a programmer. If the
web administrator limits the programmers to use the Perl modules
in accessing the database, then
a non-programming web administrator can feel comfortable to not strangle
the life out of a programmer. If everything is standardized, then the
immature novice programmer dot-com wannabe 
who doesn't know how to do good programming
and who knows nothing about installing operating systems or setting up
database and web servers, can at least have something to work with as
a standard so that they don't go off wild creating lots of interesting
uncommented archaic code just because there were "cool" ways of doing things. 

Bottom line, everybody involved can cause problems to get that Perl
script to work. This hopefully is a starting point to get things moving. 
There are a lot of things I want to add. I am happy with this being
called "Version 1". I am aiming for PHP, Python, and possibly JAVA
modules and webpages for Version 2, modifying tables (rather than deleting
them and recreating them) for lives systems for Version 3, 
and a GUI for Version 4 (though a GUI can be developed at the same time).   

Obviously, to get to get to version 4 is going to take a long time. 
It has taken me 4 months just to get this far. Most of my work is debating
with myself about what to do rather than actually doing work. In development,
you scrap lots of code because you figure out a better way of doing it, and
you also wish you can scrap more code. For now, I am consistently getting
rid of code I don't like and redoing it, which takes a little longer but yields
greater rewards, which is a completely different and refreshing mentality
compared to the dot-com boom where you had a non-programming manager over your
shoulder who just wanted to get things done no matter how horrible the code
and setup was. 

Standard Database Setup (SDS) 
SDS is my creation about how to handle database systems. I already
know there are lots of things to add on and clarifications that I need
to do, but I will call this version one. At some point, I will have a link
to www.tcu-inc.com about further 
updates to my database system. In addition, I am going to call
my Perl Script and related material MAPPS, which will be located at
www.tcu-inc.com by October. I plan
on letting people execute MAPPS to create their web application online at
my website. Not that I want them to use the application on my website, just
to create it, test it, and then download it. 
If just one person wants to join with me at
creating a class act database system useable for all database needs, then
I will put it in sourceforge, or wherever, so that people can collaborate.
This system is really immature, and I haven't tried to 
read any documentation about
anything else that is similar. My SDS system is based on all the mistakes
and headaches I have witnessed over the years from myself and others. I am 
developing SDS to be used for any application and to create a consistent
interface so that no matter what the project, if you know SDS, you can easily
understand and add to the project. This greatly reduces the need for an 
overpaid programmer because you won't need to hire a programming god to
figure out lots of messy code (hopefully). 

The two options, using a table TABLENAME_diff and select stored procedures
are not done in my scripts. The reason, I just downloaded the beta version
of PostgreSQL 7.2, and I haven't messed around with stored procedures returning
multiple variables (or cursors). I am still using stored procedures that
can return only one variable. When PostgreSQL 7.2 is out, 
I will be able to make really
cool stored procedures that return lots of information. 

SDS version 1.0 is the following:
Standard Database Setup (SDS) version 1.0. 
Copyright by Mark Nielsen, 9/2001. 

1. All tables must contain the following:
   a. A primary key equal to TABLENAME_id.
   b. Timestamps for the date of creation and modification, date_created
      and date_updated. 
   c. There will be a backup table named TABLENAME_backup. 
   d. All fields are lower case.
   e. An active field whose status of 0 is inactive and 1 is active. 
   f. All foreign keys must have the extension "_fk" except for fieldnames
      ending in "_id".
   g. All fieldnames with "_id" in the table definition will automatically
      get a foreign keys constraint. A fieldname of "TABLENAME_id" will
      have a foreign constraint to the table "TABLENAME" with its primary key
      "TABLENAME_id". 
   h. Views for active, inactive (deleted), and purged will be created. 
   i. Insert, Update, Delete, Copy, Change, Purge, Unpurge, PurgeOne, 
       and UnpurgeOne functions are too be used for all database 
       modifications where the functions will be 
       named "TABLENAME_FUNCTION_sql".     
   j. When stored procedures can return multiple variables, then all
      select statements will be executed through stored procedures as well. 
      All select stored procedures will end in "_select_sql".
      The two types of select stored procedures will be:
      1. Given a unique id number, the select statement will require
         all fields for that row. This stored procedures will be named
         "TABLENAME_select_sql". 
      2. All other select statements will be custom made. Select statements
         can get very complicated. It is mandatory that all custom select
         statements be created with custom stored procedures. 
   k. All modifications to any table will be recorded in "TABLENAME_backup".
      Modifications will occur through standard stored procedures and
      the stored procedures will handle recording of these modifications. 
      "backup_id" will the primary key of all backup tables.  
   l. All selects of tables will be recorded as an option using the table
      "TABLENAME_select" if it is desired when the table is created. 
      "TABLENAME_select" will have the fields select_id, date_created, 
      date_updated, TABLENAME_id, error_code, and misc.   
   m. An optional method for recording database inserts and changes
      with respect to differences may be used, but must follow the following
      standards. This will not be included by default in MAPPS. 
      1. The backup table must be named TABLENAME_diff.  
      2. "diff_id" will be the primary key for each table. 
      3. Each diff table will have exactly these fields.
         a. diff_id 
         b. date_updated : Timestamp the data was entered. 
         c. diff_data : This is the difference in data between this
            entry and the previous entry. 
         d. diff_method : This describes the difference method used.
             This is arbitrary and dependent upon the programmer. Here are
             a list of pre-defined methods:
            1. "diff" or "gnudiff" will correspond to GNU diff. The version
               must be supplied and recorded somewhere. 
            2. "subversion" in relation to subversion. 
            3. cvs will not be an option for a standard. "subversion" replaces
               cvs, and hence, by the time SDS is really solid, subversion
               from subversion.org will be ready. 
         e. diff_prev : This is the previous diff_id which the data is 
            being compared to. This is done so that if a diff_id gets
            deleted, you can state there is an error. 
         f. fieldname : This is the field of the row which the data
            belongs to.  
         g. primary : This is the primary key of the row we are looking at. 
         h. error_code : "start" means there is no diff_id previous
            to this one. "diff" means there is a previous entry to
            be compared to. "stop" means the primary key has been deleted. 
            Other error codes are possible. 
   n. An entry of 0 into a foreign key means null. All rows with a primary
      key of 0 should have empty space for text and 0 for numeric values
      or the default value (if supplied). 

2. The unique names which cannot be used are:
   a. "error_code", "backup_id", "date_created", "date_updated",
      , "diff_id" and "active" are reserved fields. 

3. Standard practices with Perl Modules and other programming languages. 
   a. All Perl Modules (or other programming languages) will create
      objects whose methods correspond to each stored procedure. The naming
      convention of each method shall be exactly the sql function name minus
      the tablename and "_sql". Thus, "TABLENAME_FUNCTION_sql" becomes
      "FUNCTION" in the Perl Module. There will be an exact one to one
      correspondence between all sql functions and perl methods, minus
      custom made sql functions or perl methods. 
    b. All custom made perl methods must use stored procedures for all
       changing of data, and selecting data (when stored procedures
       can return multiple variables). 

4. Standard practices of custom stored procedures.
   a. All custom stored procedures may only change data using one of the
      predefined stored procedures. Custom stored procedures may not
      use custom made stored procedures for changing/inserting data. 
   b. All select statements must use select stored procedures (when the
      stored procedures can return multiple values). 

5. Standard practices of webpages/perl scripts.
   a. All perl scripts or other programming languages will always
      use perl modules for all interactivity with database. All changing,
      inserting, or viewing data will occur through a module. 

Perl script to setup my SDS environment with Perl and PostgreSQL
Here is a link to the perl script and generic files I use, 
Files.tgz. You may also access the uncompressed
files by going to my Test directory. 
Download this file into an empty directory on your Linux system. 
Please have a running PostgreSQL 7.1 database running on your computer
which you have access to. Then, follow the instructions below. 

 Install PostgresSQL 7.1, the Apache webserver, setup the Apache
  webserver to use persistent databases connections, make the Apache
  webserver execute *.pl files as perl scripts,  
  install the Perl modules
  DBI, DBD::Pg, and BlowFish. If you have trouble with this, please look
  at the references section located in this article. 

 "cd" into the directory where you downloaded these two files
 and execute these commands. 
tar -zxvf Files.tgz
mv misc/nielsen/Test /tmp/
cd /tmp/Test/
mv Create_Functions.pl.txt Create_Functions.pl
chmod 755 Create_Functions.pl

 Now in theory, you are ready to go. I have provided a sample database
called "sample". You must change two Config.txt files. One located in 
the main
directory, and another located in the 
directory "sample". I have setup
certain web variables to point to /usr/local/apache which would be the 
standard installation of apache when you download and install it from 
scratch. If you are using apache that comes with your Linux distribution, 
please change the variables in those two files. 
In theory, all you have to do to get your database setup 
and use the webpages is to execute the one command 
/tmp/Test/Create_Functions.pl sample

and then go to the webpage

http://127.0.0.1/sample/sample/index.html on your computer.

Just in case you can't get the perl script to execute, here is the output
of the SQL commands, Perl modules, and web scripts. 

SQL commands
Perl Modules
HTML webpages

How the perl script is setup to work

Docs/SDS.txt This explains how the Standard 
Database Setup is designed. 
Config.txt This has two variables used for
the perl script. 
	Templates/Constants.pm

Templates/Set_Info.pm_header

Templates/Set_Info.pm_template

Templates/Email.pm_header        

Templates/Get_Info.pm_header

Templates/Misc.pm These are the modules to be
  used for all databases. 

	Templates/Custom.sql

Templates/Generic.fun These are the two files which
        are modified and then executed in the database.
         Generic.fun gets executed 
        for each table. 

	Templates/Custom_Html1.html

Templates/Custom_Lists.html These two webpages/perl
       scripts are used for every table. 

	Templates/Error_No_User.pl.txt

Templates/Error_No_User.pl

Templates/Password

Templates/htaccess These 4 files are for user
        authentication.

	Create_Functions.pl.txt This is the main file
       that gets executed and needs to be renamed "Create_Functions.pl".

sample/Custom/Sql/users.sql

sample/Custom/Sql/contact.sql

sample/Custom/Sql/class.sql

sample/Custom/Sql/students.sql
  These are the custom sql commands to be executed after
  the perl script creates the default database setup.
sample/Config.txt This is the configuration for this
   database. 
        sample/Tables.txt This is the text file that defines
    all the tables for our database.

Conclusions
At long last, I have finally achieved a system that uses all free software
and does 90% of the work for me when I give it a list of database tables. 
Also, my entire system is as systematic and tries to reuse code, thus it
is very easy for me to understand how to use the sql procedures, perl methods,
and perl scripts since they all use the same code and all are used the same
way. I find out that by taking a hard stance at making things systematic, 
things actually become very easy to do, easy to understand, easy to modify, 
and easy to add on to. The key is to find out what is being used more than 
once and then replicating that process. 

I am very happy with my system. I can now pump out webpages like crazy.
I no longer have to worry about what goes on in the middle, since it is
all taken care of. I know of tons of things I would like to get done, change,
add on, but I try to do the most important things first. Plus, it takes a while
to think through problems because I often ask myself "do I really want to do 
that?" which takes up time. 

I hope this lets you create webpages fast and relieves a lot of stress at
developing your web/database system. My goals in the future are to have
this Perl script create Php and Python code as well and to create a nice GUI
interface (either web-based or Xwindows independent) to handle creating
your database, checking for errors, generating reports, creating graphs, 
alter the database, etc. I see lots of systems out there that can do this,
but I don't want a GNOME or KDE dependent interface. In my opinion, a nice
Python/TK solution would be cool since you can compile Python and it will run
under any XWindows environment. I want it to be useable by all, not just those
who run GNOME or KDE. Plus, Python can output JAVA code, which may be useful. 
Also, I don't see other systems that try to force an implementation of
standard ways of doing things. My (or our) gui interface will enforce
the use of SDS or some other standard way of doing things. One thing I want to
reiterate is: I want future versions to create PHP and Python modules and
scripts. Why is this so important? It lets you change programming languages
rapidly which can be really useful if you want to use one language for all
needs (trust me, it is a headache to support multiple languages). If your
programmer is an idiot, and the next guy who you want to hire uses a different
programming language, guess what! No Problem! Again, my goal is to reduce
the cost of having database administrators, network administrators, and
programmers. Anything that is a bottleneck must go. If you don't advance your
own skills to meet new challenges, you deserve to fall behind. I want my 
system to push the good guys forward and leave the bad guys in the dust.  

The stuff I do here should be really easy to use with Mason, ASP, or other
cool ways of making webpages. 
In ASP and Mason, you don't want to use the CGI module, so you can replace
it with their own query handling methods. One thing I stress again, is the
use of creating objects and concepts. Since I put all the good code into
perl modules, they become useable to Mason, ASP, or whatever method you use
to make webpages. By trying to create code that can be used under all
circumstances, I hope to be able to use this stuff no matter where I go. 
I am thinking about my career and trying to reduce obstacles. I hope this
makes sense! Enjoy! 

P.S. I got heat for claiming the database administrators serve the programmers.
I still claim it is true. The database administrator has no final product. 
The final product occurs with the programmer, who needs a web server (managed
by the web admin), a database (managed by the database admin), and
a network (managed by the network admin). In turn, that final product is given
to the programmers boss, which is given to the customers or employees. Bottom
line, there is a chain of support, and I view customers and employees at the
top, and the computer geeks at the bottom. Anybody that you need to get your
product done is a facilitator and is below you, even if they have more
authority and they get paid more than you. Granted though, they must set
reasonable guidelines and prevent the programmer from doing stupid things.

References

Part 2: PostgreSQL: Perl procedures with PL/pgSQL

Part 1: PostgreSQL: Perl procedures with PL/pgSQL.

Branden Williams articles on PostgreSQL. 

http://techdocs.postgresql.org/oresources.php

http://techdocs.postgresql.org/
 Some links which have nothing to do with this article, but I am
 considering for future articles.

http://authpg.sourceforge.net/. 

http://www.digitalstratum.com/pglogd/

http://www.giuseppetanzilli.it/mod_auth_pgsql/

http://www.zort.ca/postgresql/ -- very nice and I will use this. I tried
 it, and it grouped all my tables together, so I had to ungroup it
 and separate out the tables. 

http://www.brasileiro.net/postgres/cookbook/

If this article
changes, it will be available here

http://www.gnujobs.com/Articles/24/PP3.html

Mark Nielsen
Mark works as an independent consultant donating time to causes like
GNUJobs.com, writing articles, writing free software, and working
as a volunteer at eastmont.net.

Copyright © 2001, Mark Nielsen.

Copying license http://www.linuxgazette.com/copying.html

Published in Issue 72 of Linux Gazette, November 2001

"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

The Foolish Things We Do With Our Computers
By Mike "Iron" Orr

Wow!  Last month's
Foolish Things article seems to have struck a chord.  After reading about the
foolish things various Answer Gang members did, six readers wrote in with their
own anecdotes.  Let's see what they have to say....

An Imsai story

By Kenneth Scharf 

 When I was in college, I worked for a small computer store in NYC.
This had been a one-man shop (I was #2), and he built Imsai computers for
customers who didn't want a kit.  He also fixed broken memory boards.
One day I came in to find the shop computer broken.  He had been testing a
memory board (the case of the computer was ALWAYS open with an extender card
plugged in).
He told me he had just fried the whole computer and it was hopeless.

 He had reached for a pair of needle-nosed pliers, and
the end of the pliers had become impaled in a steel wool pad that he used
for cleaning the tip of his soldering iron.  The steel wool pad became airborne
and landed in the backplane of the Imsai, setting off a fireworks display.

 I pushed him aside and grabbed his logic probe (I passed on the
oscilloscope) and started probing the front panel and CPU board.  After about
an hour I found a dead 7400 on the front panel.  Believe it or not, that was
the ONLY part that had gotten fried!  A $0.25 part replaced and the Imsai was
back online.

The computer That Was Afraid of the Dark

Another story by Kenneth Scharf 

 A friend of mine used to work for one of the companies that made pinball
machines (I think Balley).  Their
first computerized game used a z80 micro.  The code was burned onto 2708's
(1k x 8 EPROMs).  Seems
like they had gotten a good deal on these eproms, because they were a little
slower than spec.
Well the pin game logic checked out just fine in the lab but as soon as one
of the machines was
put together and buttoned up it wouldn't work.  In fact none of the did.  So
they opened the game up
(exposing the CPU board to the light) and it worked fine.  Well, it seems
they didn't cover the
glass windows on the 2708's and when exposed to light those eproms got a
little faster and
decreased the access time to what the z80 wanted to see.  So the fix was to
put a light bulb
inside the pin game.  I wonder about those service calls when the bulb
burned out.

The Little Computer Who Could

By Jeff Avallone 

 A year ago I was building a new system for myself, a PIII 450 (which 
was replacing my old P166). So, this is the first time I've dealt with a 
  Slot type processor. Anyway, I put the system together, plug 
everything in, and while the thing is lying on it's side on the floor, I 
turn it on for the first time.  It goes into BIOS POST and then 
starts booting Linux...in short it works. 

 So, I power it down, put the 
cover on the case and set it upright in its final resting place, then 
turn it on to make sure everything works right...and nothing happens, no 
beeps, no video init, no BIOS POST, nothing. 

 So I figure I knocked 
something loose while I was putting the cover on. I pull it out, lie it 
on its side, remove the cover, check everything and then power it on (w/o 
the cover again) and it works. So now I'm confused. I figure now it's 
running, maybe the cover of the case is doing something, so I put the 
cover on...and it still runs. Then I set it upright and move it into 
place...and it locks up. I pull it down again, this time completely 
confounded, and remove the cover. It starts running again. 

 I later find 
out that I didn't seat the processor completely and by standing the case 
up the processor half fell out of the connector and did a fast system 
lobotomy. When it was lying on it's side, the processor was seated enough 
that it worked.

Sparks!

By Terry Porter 

 Hi :)

 About a week before I had a stroke (that's my excuse anyway), I had to
make up a power extension cord for a PC on our office network.  The network
consisted of about nine PCs connected via coaxial cable.

 I was working as a Computer Service Engineer at the time, and one PC
had to be moved to a location where the power cord was about two meters too
short.

 While making up the extension cord, I unwittingly transposed *active* and 
*earth*, <always triple check!> and then stupidly just plugged the PC
into the new power extension cord!

 There were cries of shock throughout the office, as the mains current raced
around the coaxial cable, from one PC to the next resulting in melted NIC
connectors and sparks. A co-worker later described as them as "an angle grinder
throwing sparks behind my PC".

 We were all shocked at how easy this was to do, and fortunately for me
I managed to repair 8/9 NIC cards, and no PCs were damaged due to the
isolation at the NIC connector.

	[And no animals were harmed in the testing of this cable. :)  -Mike.]

Strange Things in Computers

By Tony Dearson 

 Many years ago--about 2years BIPC (Before IBM PC)--I bought a kit 
Z80 single board called Nascom.

 As expected, on completion it didn't work. I traced everything on the 
board and found two tracks that "didn't make it". Scrape the 
varnish off the board, and two lengths of hair thin poly-coated wire ,
and the tracks were fixed.

 I found that it only worked for about 30 seconds. The guess was 
the Z80 -- so I ran it for a week with a tobacco tin into which I 
popped an ice cube.
I imagine that with today's processors, the ice cube would sublime 
instantly using the coefficient of fusion and the coefficient of 
vaporization in one go.

--

Sitting on the fence is not always a good strategy

Look what happened to Humpty Dumpty.

A warped story

By Harry Drummond 

 I wouldn't classify this as foolish - just warped but practical. In the
very early days of home computing, the first machines on the British market
to be cheap and (very basically) usable were produced by Sinclair. Initial
models had about 16k of RAM. But you could buy an upgrade to 48k. One snag
with the upgrade: the computer ran too hot and began misbehaving. 

 Someone realised that putting something cool on the right area of the case
(I'm talking ice here, not music) would keep the temperature under control.
The "something cool" he had to hand was a pint of milk in a cardboard
carton straight out of the fridge. He must have written this up somewhere,
because it soon became the standard fix for hot Sinclairs!

 For economy, the carton went back into the fridge to cool down for the
next session. It was a very good idea to mark which carton you were using,
of course...!

Read carefully

By Wes Parish 

 My foolish thing was misreading the little book that came with my
motherboard and inadvertently overclocking the CPU when I was putting
the wretched thing together.

 I wish I knew precisely what happened.  Anyway, that CPU - and probably
that motherboard - is headed for the rubbish bin as soon as I can afford
a decent replacement for it.

My Youthful Stupidity

By Brett 

 One day I was trying to figure out what this strange scratching sound
coming from my computer was, and I eventually narrowed it down to the hard
drive                                            (no-name brand
Pentuim3 with too much stuff in it)
So being the young know-it-all that I was I decided to see if I could
fix it.
I started by removing the top cover of the hard drive, and found inside
that one of the read/write heads was slightly stuffed and the majority
of screws were loose.
(They just have to use those silly triangle shaped screws
so no one can have an easy time, don't they!)
From that point I decided to replace the read/write heads and
tighten all the screws, and so i did.
Eventually it looked sort of normal again, so i closed it up and took it
for a test drive.

 I was successful, and it is still working with Linux Mandrake today.
From 2000 - 2001,   only 3 crashes so far.  Fingers crossed!
I now know that HDDs are made in laboratory conditions but I also know
you can fix em and still have them be just as reliable.
p.s:  Ice is a really good idea except for it melts!
Try Gel packs for sports injuries.  They are in super-strong double lined
plastic.  You put em in the freezer for a couple of hours and they stay
cold for about six hours.
Just throw it on yer motherboard and your heating problems are solved.
Sold at chemists.

Conclusion

 That's it for this month.  The need for cooling seems to be a strong
theme.  Perhaps I should call this series "The Foolish Ways We Cool Our
Computers".

 If you would like to tell us about the most foolish thing you've done
with your computer, maybe we'll publish it.  
gazette@ssc.com

Mike Orr
Mike ("Iron") is the Editor of Linux Gazette.  You can read what he
has to say in the Back Page column in this issue.  He has been a Linux
enthusiast since 1991 and a Debian user since 1995.  He is SSC's web technical
coordinator, which means he gets to write a lot of Python scripts.
Non-computer interests include Ska/Oi! music and the international language
Esperanto.  The nickname Iron was given to him in college--short for Iron Orr,
hahaha.

Copyright © 2001, Mike "Iron" Orr.

Copying license http://www.linuxgazette.com/copying.html

Published in Issue 72 of Linux Gazette, November 2001

"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

Qubism
By Jon "Sir Flakey" Harsem

Jon "SirFlakey" Harsem
Jon is the and creator of the Qubism cartoon strip and current
Editor-in-Chief of the 
CORE News Site.  
Somewhere along the early stages of
his life he picked up a pencil and started drawing on the wallpaper.  Now
his cartoons appear 5 days a week on-line, go figure. He confesses to
owning a Mac but swears it is for "personal use".

Copying license http://www.linuxgazette.com/copying.html

Published in Issue 72 of Linux Gazette, November 2001

"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

A Quick and Easy Way to Set Up a Mailing List
By Lawrence Teo

1. Why do you need a mailing list?

Picture this:

You've just started working with your colleagues on a new project. After the
first meeting, everyone agrees that sending e-mails about each other's progress
to all the members in the group periodically is the way to go. Everybody leaves
the table, and you send out your first message to your colleagues' e-mail
addresses. Everything goes well for awhile... until somebody new joins the
group. Now everybody has to update their long list of addresses in the "To:"
field, some people forget, and the new person didn't receive all the e-mails
and starts complaining. Gradually, things start turning into a mess.

As things become more haphazard, you say to yourself, "Now, if only I can send
all my e-mails to a single address, and that e-mail will propagate out to
everybody else." Well, that is possible. What you need is a mailing list.

Most of us aren't strangers to mailing lists, especially if you're
an active or long-time participant in the Linux community. But trust me, there
are people out there who aren't familiar with mailing lists and how convenient
they can be.

Now, let's say you agree that you need a mailing list. But you don't
have time to set up one. If you have been a participant in a public and busy
mailing list such as Bugtraq, you'll notice that they run a mailing list
management program such as Majordomo or ezmlm. If you want a simple
mailing list, and you need it quick, you don't need to play around with those.
Plus, you don't really need the more complex features they offer. A standard
Linux system is sufficient for setting up a simple mailing list for a workgroup.

In this article, I'll discuss how to set up such a simple mailing list using
the standard Mail Transfer Agents (MTAs) that come with a standard Linux
distribution, such as sendmail, Postfix or exim. Remember, though, the keyword
is simple. That means that our mailing list will not have the fancy
features offered by the heavy duty mailing list management programs.

As an added bonus, I've written another article in this same Linux Gazette
issue that discusses how to set up a simple web-based archive of this mailing
list (it's entitled "Setting Up a Web-based Archive for a
Mailing List"). But if a mailing list is all you need, and/or you don't
have time, this article is all you need to read.

2. Setting up the mailing list

Setting up the mailing list is pretty straightforward. I'll first talk about
what you need, and then proceed to the actual instructions on setting it up.

2.1 What you need

First, here's what you need to set up the mailing list:

   A Linux system that is permanently connected to the Internet with
  a static IP address, or your office internal network. This is
  pretty obvious, but I'm putting it here just in case! ;-) Additionally, this
  system should be running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, or at least during
  the times of
  the day when your workgroup will be mailing each other.

 A Mail Transfer Agent such as sendmail, Postfix or exim. Most
       Linux distributions should come with one of these by default.

Once you've got all the requirements,
the very first thing you need to do is to check that your MTA is actually
running. I usually check this by running netstat as follows:

lteo@mybox:~$ netstat -a | grep smtp
tcp        0      0 *:smtp                  *:*                     LISTEN

If the system responds with that line, it usually means that your MTA is
up and running. If it is not running, you need to activate it. The actual way
to do that depends on the system.  For example, on Debian run
"/etc/init.d/sendmail start".  On Red Hat, run "/etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail
start".  (Your system may have the script in a different location.)  To make it
permanent, do a "chmod +x /etc/init.d/sendmail" (or wherever). On Slackware,
you'll have to uncomment the lines that activate sendmail in /etc/rc.d/rc.M,
and either restart the system, or run it manually for now using the command in
that file.

2.2 Let's set it up!

The first thing you need to do is to think of a name for your mailing list.
For example, if the Linux box you're using is called mybox.example.com, you
can call your mailing list address "theproject@mybox.example.com".
Any e-mails sent to theproject@mybox.example.com will then be propagated to
all e-mail addresses registered to it. For the purpose of this article, let's
say we want the mails
that reach that address to go out to linus@mybox.example.com,
alan@example.net, and esr@example.org.

The next thing you need to do is to set up the MTA's aliases file. The
aliases file is usually stored as /etc/aliases or /etc/mail/aliases
depending on your Linux distribution. Once you locate it, fire up your
favorite text editor and edit it. You may see some default lines in that
file, such as "webmaster: root", "postmaster:root", and so on. Just ignore
those lines and scroll to the end of the file. Now add the following lines:

# The Project mailing list
theproject:
  linus,
  alan@example.net,
  esr@example.org

You can now save and exit from your editor.

As you can see, we can just use the string "linus" for
"linus@mybox.example.com" since our machine is
mybox.example.com and linus is a user on the machine. You can
write comments by placing them after the # symbol. The # symbol must be the
first character in the line.

Important! Now here comes the extremely important step!
Depending on which MTA you
are using, you may need to run a command for your changes to the aliases
file for it to take effect. If you don't, the mailing list will not work!
The following table shows what command you need
to run after editing the aliases file.

		MTA Command

		sendmail newaliases

		Postfix postaliases /etc/aliases

		exim [No command needed.]

Congratulations! You should now have a working mailing list. To test it,
just send an e-mail to theproject@mybox.example.com, and see if
linus@mybox.example.com, alan@example.net, and esr@example.org get it.
Personally, I test my mailing lists using free webmail accounts just to see
if it really works.

 [Note: example.com, example.net and example.org are domain names 
reserved for testing per 
RFC 2606, and will
never be assigned to real sites.  So watch the spambots harvest the addresses
above and send spam to nonexistent sites.  Whee!    -Iron]

Adding and removing e-mail addresses is straightforward. Just use your
text editor and add or remove those e-mail addresses from the aliases file.
Again, remember to run that all-important command after editing the aliases
file to inform the MTA that you've made changes.

There is one thing you need to know about this mailing list, though. Unlike
the full-blown mailing lists run by majordomo or ezmlm, a third
party can send e-mails
to our mailing list address and it'll still be sent to our registered
recipients' e-mail addresses. Therefore, there may be a security issue here.
That's why I stressed so much that this mailing list is meant to be
simple.
But if you're using it within a small trusted workgroup, it should be fine.
Also, you may want to avoid revealing your mailing list address to the public,
both for security and privacy reasons, and also to avoid getting spammed.

2.3 Summary

That's about it regarding setting up the mailing list. Simple, isn't it? Just
to make sure you don't miss out anything, here's a short summary of our
previous discussion on setting up a mailing list:

	 Make sure that your MTA is up and running. You can use the command
	"netstat -a | grep smtp" to check this.

 Choose a name for your mailing list, e.g.
	theproject@mybox.example.com.

 Add the mailing list addresses and register the e-mail addresses
	in the aliases file (either /etc/mail/aliases or /etc/aliases depending
	on your distribution).

 If you're using sendmail or postfix, run "newaliases" or
	"postaliases /etc/aliases" respectively. If you're using exim, you
	don't need to run anything.

 Test your mailing list by sending a test mail to
	theproject@mybox.example.com.

3. Parting notes

That's it! I hope you find your brand new mailing list useful. I've used
this method of setting up mailing lists many times for my workgroups, friends,
and whenever there's a need for a simple mailing list. Of course, this is
just one way of setting up such a mailing list. If you've found this
method useful, or if you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to
write to me about them. I would really like to hear from you.

Remember, if you want to know how to set up a web-based archive of this list,
you can read "Setting Up a Web-based Archive for a Mailing
List", also in this issue of Linux Gazette.

Till then, have fun!

Lawrence Teo
Lawrence Teo is a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina at
Charlotte. He researches on intrusion detection
and critical infrastructure protection technologies with his
research unit, the Laboratory of Information Integration, Security, and
Privacy (LIISP). Lawrence has previously worked as a contract software
engineer at Lycos, Singapore and as a research assistant at DSTC in Melbourne,
Australia. He holds an Honors Degree in Bachelor of Computing from Monash
University in Melbourne, Australia. You can send him e-mail at
lawrenceteo<SPAM>@lycos.com.

Copyright © 2001, Lawrence Teo.

Copying license http://www.linuxgazette.com/copying.html

Published in Issue 72 of Linux Gazette, November 2001

"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

Setting Up a Web-based Archive for a Mailing List
By Lawrence Teo

1. Introduction

In this article, I'll describe how to set up a web-based archive for
a mailing list. This article picks up from where I left off in my previous
article, "A Quick and Easy Way to Set Up a Mailing List",
also in this issue
of Linux Gazette. If you haven't already done so, I highly recommend that
you read that article first before reading this one. A lot of the context and
content in here are derived from the methods described in that article.

1.1 The mailing list setup

First, I'll briefly describe the mailing list setup that we'll be using in
this article. If you have read the previous article, this setup will be
familiar to you.

Let's say that we have a mailing list called theproject@mybox.example.com,
running on a Linux system called mybox.example.com. The e-mail addresses
subscribed to this list are linus@mybox.example.com, alan@example.net, and
esr@example.org. We set this up using our Mail Transfer Agent's aliases file
(usually /etc/mail/aliases or /etc/aliases, depending on your distribution).
Our mailing list has been set up like this in the aliases file:

theproject:
  linus,
  alan@example.net,
  esr@example.org

So when e-mails are sent to theproject@mybox.example.com, those e-mails will
be automatically propagated to linus@mybox.example.com, alan@example.net,
and esr@example.org.

2. Setting up the web-based archive

Before we get started with the instructions for setting up the web-based
archive, I'll first explain what we plan to achieve. What we want to do is
allow your workgroup members to access a website that will host your mailing
list archive. For example, you can host your mailing list archive on
http://mybox.example.com/theproject/ and make it accessible to all your
workgroup members.

Having a web-based archive makes it easier and more
convenient to check out what has been discussed. Also, it can act as a central
location to store documents and other attachments. You can also use it as
a backup in the unfortunate event that you lose your e-mails (which I hope
will never happen!). 

If you want to set up a web-based archive for your mailing list, you'll need:

	 The Apache webserver. Of course, you can use some other
	webserver. However, Apache is the most common webserver installed by
	default on almost all Linux distributions (to my knowledge), and it's
	also the one that I'm most familiar with. In this article, I'll use
	Apache 1.3.20 as the example.

 Hypermail. Hypermail is a nifty program that you can use
	to generate web-based mail archives from a UNIX mailbox file. You can
	grab it from
	http://www.hypermail.org/.
	I'll use hypermail 2.1.2 for the purposes of this article.

 cron. cron is a program that you can use to run tasks
	at scheduled times. It should be installed by default in all
	Linux distributions (I'll be shocked if I find a distribution that
	doesn't include cron!). In this article, we'll use cron to update
	our web-based archive periodically.

You'll first need to check if the webserver is running. Again, you can
use the netstat command to do this:

lteo@mybox:~$ netstat -a | grep www
tcp        0      0 *:www                   *:*                     LISTEN

If the system responds with that line, it is likely that your webserver is
already running. If it is not, you can start it by issuing the command
"/etc/init.d/apache start" on Debian, the same or "/etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd
start" on Red Hat, etc. In Slackware, issue the command "/etc/rc.d/rc.httpd
start".

2.1 Installing hypermail

After you've downloaded hypermail, proceed to install it using the instructions
in its README file. The installation steps should be pretty standard. If
you're in a hurry, the following commands should work for you (they're
meant for hypermail 2.1.2; substitute the version number for the hypermail
version you downloaded):

root@mybox:~# tar zxf hypermail-2.1.2.tgz
root@mybox:~# cd hypermail-2.1.2
root@mybox:~/hypermail-2.1.2# ./configure
root@mybox:~/hypermail-2.1.2# make
root@mybox:~/hypermail-2.1.2# make install

2.2 Creating a dummy account

The next thing you need to do is to set up a dummy user account on your
system. We will register this account on the mailing list, and use it
exclusively for collecting all mails sent to the mailing list. We will then
generate the mailing list archive using this dummy user account's mailbox.

Let's call our dummy account "projarc". You can create it in the same way
you create a normal user account on your Linux distribution. I personally use 
the adduser command on my Debian GNU/Linux system:

root@mybox:~# adduser
Enter a username to add: projarc
Adding user projarc...
Adding new group projarc (1004).
Adding new user projarc (1004) with group projarc.
Creating home directory /home/projarc.
Copying files from /etc/skel
Enter new UNIX password: <password>
Retype new UNIX password: <password>
passwd: password updated successfully
Changing the user information for projarc
Enter the new value, or press return for the default
        Full Name []: Dummy user
        Room Number []:
        Work Phone []:
        Home Phone []:
        Other []:
Is the information correct? [y/n] y

You will need to add this user to your the aliases file (/etc/mail/aliases
or /etc/aliases) to get it registered as a member of the mailing list. To do
this, just edit the file and add the username to the list. The section that
describes your mailing list members in the aliases file should look like
this:

# The Project mailing list
theproject:
  projarc,
  linus,
  alan@example.net,
  esr@example.org

Remember to run that command to inform your MTA about the changes after
you've done this.

We will be using projarc's public webspace to host our mailing list archive.
To do that, create a public_html directory in the projarc's home directory:

lteo@mybox:~$ su - projarc
Password: <password>
projarc@mybox:~$ mkdir public_html

Note that the user's public webspace may be represented by another name instead
of public_html. It depends on your webserver setup. You also need to ensure
that your webserver allows users to host public webspaces in this manner.
I'll explain how to enable this in the next section.

2.3 Setting up Apache

The next step is to set up Apache so that it allows users on the machine to
have their own public web directories. The Apache configuration file you
need to edit is /etc/apache/httpd.conf. Again, this may differ depending
on your distribution. If it's not there, issue the command "locate httpd.conf"
or "find / -name httpd.conf" to find it. Once you've found it, open it up
with your text editor and make sure that the following lines are uncommented
(meaning they don't have the # symbol in front of them):

<IfModule mod_userdir.c>
    UserDir public_html
</IfModule>

It is likely that your UserDir value is not public_html, and may be something
else like www. You can use whatever directory name you wish to represent
the user's webspace.

Now if you want your workgroup members to access your archive using an
address such as http://mybox.example.com/theproject/ you'll need to set up a 
symbolic link from your Apache's root webspace to point to projarc's webspace.
To find out what your Apache's root webspace is, check out the DocumentRoot
value in /etc/apache/httpd.conf:

root@mybox:~# grep ^DocumentRoot /etc/apache/httpd.conf
DocumentRoot /var/www

In the above example, Apache's root webspace is at /var/www. To create a
symbolic link to point to projarc's public webspace, issue the following
commands:

root@mybox:~# cd /var/www
root@mybox:/var/www# ln -s /home/projarc/public_html theproject

2.4 Testing hypermail

When a user receives e-mails, the e-mails will be stored in a file called
/var/mail/username. So in the case of projarc, the file will be called
/var/mail/projarc (Note: in some distributions, this would be
/var/spool/mail/projarc).

We can use hypermail to read that mail file to generate the
web-based archive. However, when the projarc account is newly created, that
file won't exist yet. So you'll need to send an e-mail to
theproject@mybox.example.com first just to get that file created.

After sending out that test mail, run the following command as projarc:

projarc@mybox:~$ hypermail -m /var/mail/projarc -l "The Project" -d /home/projarc/public_html

Now open up http://mybox.example.com/theproject/ in your web browser and
you should see your mailing list archive there. It should look something like
this:

	The Project
By Thread

		Most recent messages

		1 messages sorted by:

			[ author ]
			[ date ]
			[ subject ]
			[ attachment ]

Starting: Sat Oct 20 2001 - 01:45:23 EDT

Ending: Sat Oct 20 2001 - 01:45:23 EDT

	This is the first message Lawrence Teo (Sat Oct 20 2001 - 01:45:23 EDT)

Last message date: Sat Oct 20 2001 - 01:45:23 EDT

Archived on: Sun Oct 21 2001 - 01:50:56 EDT

		1 messages sorted by:

			[ author ]
			[ date ]
			[ subject ]
			[ attachment ]

It would be more convenient to use a hypermail configuration file to run
hypermail instead of typing in all those command-line parameters all the time.
To do this, create a file called /home/projarc/projarc-hmrc and fill it with
the following lines:

mbox = /var/mail/projarc
label = The Project
dir = /home/projarc/public_html

You can now generate the mailing archive by running the following command:

projarc@mybox:~$ hypermail -c /home/projarc/projarc-hmrc

2.5 Setting up cron

Now, we would definitely want our mailing list archive to be automatically
updated whenever somebody sends mail to the mailing list. We will use cron
to do this. It won't be updated in real time, but we can set cron to run
hypermail every 5 minutes, which should be frequent enough for a simple
mailing list. Of course, you can always use a shorter interval such as
2 minutes; it's entirely up to you. Just remember that the shorter the interval,
the more load the machine will have to handle. That may not be good if you
have mail files that are really big with a lot of attachments, and you're
hosting several mailing lists on a slow machine.

So, let's set up cron. Issue the following command to edit your cron table:

projarc@mybox:~$ crontab -e

You should now be in an editor with your crontab file open. If you want
hypermail to run every 5 minutes, enter the following lines:

# Update The Project mailing list archive every 5 minutes
*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/hypermail -c /home/projarc/projarc-hmrc

When you're done, just save and exit. To test it, just wait for five minutes
and refresh the http://mybox.example.com/theproject/ web page on your
browser. You should see the updated "Archived on" timestamp after hypermail
runs.

2.6 Summary

Here's a summary of the steps we used to set up our web-based mailing list
archive:

	 Make sure that your Apache webserver is up and running. You
	can use the command "netstat -a | grep www" to check this.

 Install hypermail on your system.

 Create a dummy account to host your mailing list archive, e.g.
	projarc.

 Add the dummy account's username to the aliases file (/etc/aliases
	or /etc/mail/aliases). Run the "newaliases" (for sendmail) or
	"postalias /etc/aliases" (for Postfix) command to inform the MTA about
	the changes. You don't need to run any command for exim.

 Make the public webspace directory for the projarc user, e.g.
	"mkdir public_html"

 Set up Apache to allow public webspaces for users in the
	/etc/apache/httpd.conf file.

 Set up a symbolic link to point to projarc's webspace, e.g.
	"ln -s /home/projarc/public_html theproject"

 Test hypermail by running a command such as 'hypermail -m
	/var/mail/projarc -l "The Project" -d /home/projarc/public_html'. Then
	check "http://mybox.example.com/theproject/" to see if your mailing
	list archive is there.

 Set up cron to run hypermail every 5 minutes (or at any interval
	you wish).

I hope that you'll find the web-based mailing list archive to be as useful as
I have. If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to drop me
some e-mail.

Lawrence Teo
Lawrence Teo is a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina at
Charlotte. He researches on intrusion detection
and critical infrastructure protection technologies with his
research unit, the Laboratory of Information Integration, Security, and
Privacy (LIISP). Lawrence has previously worked as a contract software
engineer at Lycos, Singapore and as a research assistant at DSTC in Melbourne,
Australia. He holds an Honors Degree in Bachelor of Computing from Monash
University in Melbourne, Australia. You can send him e-mail at
lawrenceteo<SPAM>@lycos.com.

Copyright © 2001, Lawrence Teo.

Copying license http://www.linuxgazette.com/copying.html

Published in Issue 72 of Linux Gazette, November 2001

"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more SCARY!"

The Back Page

Not The Answer Gang
Not News Bytes

Not The Answer Gang

Cracking Slackware Linux

Answered By Iron

Sir,
    I have just read your articles. It is really
interesting and that's why i dare to send you this
email. Sir, can you tell me any way to enter(hack)
into slackware linux (through any program or
shellscript whatever).
Sir, I am eagerly waiting for your reply. Please send
me the reply as quick as possible.

 [Iron]

 Choose your favorite reply.

 Push the 'Hack' button on your keyboard.

 Sir, are you stoned or were you always this way?

 Real hackers wouldn't have to ask.

 Start by cracking something simple, like DOS 3.0.

 The square pegs go into the square holes, and the round pegs go into
the round holes.

Hi, you've reached the Linux Gazette Answer Gang....
   Linux ::::::::: a modern operating system not much like any of:
               --- DOS -- Windows -- Solaris -- MacOS -- alien starships ---
               ... except occasionally, an ability to run on the same hardware.
   Gazette ::::::: published more regularly than "almanac."  In our case:
               --- a monthly web-based magazine, home: www.linuxgazette.com
   Answer Gang ::: Not the "lazy college student's UNstudy group"
               --- nor the "hey d00dz help me cRaK my neighBoorZ klub"

Small sharp tools vs Bloatware

Answered By John Karns, Iron, Ben Okopnik

 [John]

 On several occasions I've read mention of the unix philosophy where each
program concentrates on doing a few things and doing them well.  Thus
MTA's don't generally handle POP'ing, etc.  The example given of Eudora,
Netscape and Outlook are phenomena of a different OS.  In the case of
Netscape, its roots were closely tied to unix, but most of the development
was targeted for users of the other OS - and its unfortunate that some of
the ISP's are designing their configurations assuming that virtuall all
subscribers will be using that platform.

 [Iron]

 And don't forget how much Netscape Mail changed the landscape.  Prior to
Netscape, most Unix people read mail from shell accounts, and the local
machine had its own sendmail.  Windows users depended on mail gateways
between Internet and their Novell/Windows/Vines/whatever network, so they
as users never had to configure anything.  Of course, there were a few 
POP users here and there, but relatively few.  Then Netscape Mail 
appeared, and suddenly ISPs and LANs were faced with large numbers of
e-mailing users on Windows boxen that didn't have their own mail transport
agent, so they had to rely on an upstream POP/SMTP server.  Nowadays, it's
just assumed that most users will connect this way.  (Well, *most* users
use Hotmail or one of the other webmail services....)

 There's a fascinating book Digitopia that talks about how
computerization has changed our society a lot more than people realize, because
of the human mind's tendency to adapt to new situations and forget how things
used to be.  The author points out that each time a new Playstation or software
update comes out, people get excited and then bored, but they forget that the
new version is causing the same about of excitement and boredom as the previous
version did.  We think about Netscape 2 now and wonder how people could have
been excited about such a crappy application, but that's because we're
forgetting what the situation was like then.

AOL knights

Answered By Iron, John Karns, Ben Okopnik

 [Iron]

 AOL became the biggest [ISP in the US]
through a massive marketing campaign, sending millions of "try me out"
CDs.

 [John]

 .. and before those, floppies.  I used to receive at least one of those in
the mail every week.  I remember a humor piece circulating on the 'net
along the lines of "Creative uses for AOL floppy disks", which was quite
funny.

 [Ben]

 Heh. A FoF has made a suit of armor out of the CDs. There's also some
fascinating stuff you can do with them after microwaving... Very useful,
that AOL. <grin>

The two sides of a VPN

Answered By Jim Dennis

Do both sides of a VPN [Virtual Private Network] need special hardware to make
a secure connection or can one side have nothing but an internet connection and
the other side handle all the VPN stuff?

 [Jim]

 I know this is going to come across as a flame; but I have
to observe that this question is so clueless that I'm truly
befuddled as to what sort of muddled thought process could
lead to this question.

 The basic question, "do both sides of a VPN need special hardware?",
is flawed.  Neither side of a VPN needs special *hardware*.  
Both sides of a VPN connection need "special" (and interoperable)
hardware *or* software.

 The remainder of the question is the muddled part: "... can one
side have nothing but an internet connection".

 That's almost like asking,  "Do both ends of a phone conversation
need to have phones, or can one end do all the phone stuff and
on the other end have nothing but a wire?"

Bad Boy

Answered By Thomas Adam, Iron, Ben Okopnik

 [Thomas]

 Damn,

 This e-mail was sent as in-line HTML. 

 Hey Heather....don't look at me like that. There's no
need to shoot the "message-forwarder/replier" 

 [Iron]

 Ben's the one who usually looks at people menanicingly.
He's our honorary "bad boy" because he's a KGB spy.

 [Note to US FBI: Hi there!  I see you're monitoring our
e-mail.  That Carnivore program sure is something, hey?
That comment about Ben being a spy was a joke.  Later doodz.]

 [Thomas]

 Surely "linux-questions-only" means just that? So
where does psychology enter into it??

 [Iron]

 Obviously the address was harvested by a program and no human
ever saw it.  The most outrageous pieces of spam, off-topic
questions or homework questions we ridicule on linux-questions-only
or tag-admin, and then I publish them anonymously in Not The Answer
Gang on the Back Page.

 [Ben]

 </me lowers KGB-issue shades>

<glares at Mike menacingly>

# Special Carnivore-disabling code. Does a DoS on the government's
# computers which expend all their cycles trying to break the code...

ISTHAY ISWAY OTNAY ETHAY ESSAGEMAY YOUAY'ERAY OOKINGLAY ORFAY

Streaming

Answered By Iron, Ben Okopnik

Hi Ben!

P.S.: You don't happen to stream the courses you give, do you ? Would
be really interesting... 

-Robos

 [Iron]

 A stream-of-consciousness rendering of Ben's mind?  Now, that's scary.

 Maybe in a thousand years somebody will be channeling that Ben Okopnik
wisdom....

 [Ben]

 You have discovered my secret plan!

 Damn. *Another* good idea down the drain. Back to the CAD program...

Ambassador

Answered By Ben Okopnik, Iron

 [Ben]

 ... head is still spinning from Heather's explanation of how DNS works (I
think I've got it, though!) which she was gracious enough to give me while I
was out there on the Left Coast, 

 [Iron]

 We've got quite the little network going.  I met Heather and Jim last
March.  Now you've met Heather.  When I get back to England next
year, maybe I'll meet some other TAG ppl.

 [Ben]

 Hey, what with me travelling all over the country for work (mostly
California, lately, but I just got a class in Atlanta and one in North
Carolina), I could be the LG ambassador. 

Life on a boat

Answered By Ben Okopnik

 [Ben]

 It didn't help that Ricochet went down,
and that my boat was hauled out in an area of Maryland where the hoot owls
trod the chickens and TCP/IP packet routing is done by snails in their
spare time. I've got a Merlin PCMCIA card now (<gag> 19200bps, when
Ricochet was up to 128k...), and this gives me at least some
connectivity.  Certainly e-mail access, which is what's needed.

Not News Bytes

Football

(Or as Irving Welsh would say, "Fitba".)

 The Register
pokes fun
at an 
article 
in the Washington Post,
which tongue-in-cheekly says Baltimore Ravens' coach Brian Billick
blames his team loss October 14 on "the Linux operating system".

 Happy Linuxing!

 Mike ("Iron") Orr

Editor, Linux Gazette, gazette@ssc.com

Copying license http://www.linuxgazette.com/copying.html

Published in Issue 72 of Linux Gazette, November 2001


5th Annual Linux Showcase & Conference	November 6-10, 2001 Oakland, CA http://www.linuxshowcase.org/

Strictly e-Business Solutions Expo	November 7-8, 2001 Houston, TX http://www.strictlyebusinessexpo.com

LINUX Business Expo Co-located with COMDEX	November 12-16, 2001 Las Vegas, NV http://www.linuxbusinessexpo.com

15th Systems Administration Conference/LISA 2001	December 2-7, 2001 San Diego, CA http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa2001

x	f(x)	delta 1	delta 2
1	1
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2	4		2
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x	f(x)	delta 1	delta 2
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2	4		2
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Docs/SDS.txt	This explains how the Standard Database Setup is designed.
Config.txt	This has two variables used for the perl script.
Templates/Constants.pm Templates/Set_Info.pm_header Templates/Set_Info.pm_template Templates/Email.pm_header Templates/Get_Info.pm_header Templates/Misc.pm	These are the modules to be used for all databases.
Templates/Custom.sql Templates/Generic.fun	These are the two files which are modified and then executed in the database. Generic.fun gets executed for each table.
Templates/Custom_Html1.html Templates/Custom_Lists.html	These two webpages/perl scripts are used for every table.
Templates/Error_No_User.pl.txt Templates/Error_No_User.pl Templates/Password Templates/htaccess	These 4 files are for user authentication.
Create_Functions.pl.txt	This is the main file that gets executed and needs to be renamed "Create_Functions.pl".
sample/Custom/Sql/users.sql sample/Custom/Sql/contact.sql sample/Custom/Sql/class.sql sample/Custom/Sql/students.sql	These are the custom sql commands to be executed after the perl script creates the default database setup.
sample/Config.txt	This is the configuration for this database.
sample/Tables.txt	This is the text file that defines all the tables for our database.

MTA	Command
sendmail	`newaliases`
Postfix	`postaliases /etc/aliases`
exim	[No command needed.]

November 2001, Issue 72 Published by Linux Journal

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Table of Contents:

Linux Gazette Staff and The Answer Gang

Copyright © 1996-2001 Specialized Systems Consultants, Inc.

The Mailbag

HELP WANTED : Article Ideas

LWN links

Linux support call handling

DSL Drivers

university engineering team

Deleting items in KDE 2.1.1 "Run Command"

GUI and CMOS clock (2 Questions)

poster

How to configure AutoFS to automount NFS exported volumes

Net bios code

does anyone know how one can set quotas in linux for a directory rather than home

GENERAL MAIL

suggestion for "A need for Documentation" article

Whiptail vs Dialog

Linux in Africa

Sklyarov case mischaracterized

GAZETTE MATTERS

PDA user request

LG Mirrors page renovation

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"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

Contents:

November 2001 Linux Journal

November/December 2001 Embedded Linux Journal

Legislation and More Legislation

Alan Cox Censors Kernel Changelog In Response To DMCA

An Irish Perspective

Anti-Terrorism Bills Compared

James Love on Lobbying and Hague Conventions

RIAA mischief

But Didn't the Hijackers Already Present Valid ID?

SSSCA update

Linux Links

Upcoming conferences and events

News in General

W3C and Patents

LWN in Difficulties

Kernel Vulnerability

Linux Making Inroads

Linux NetworX Cluster Aids BioCryst in Medical Development

ALS for free: Oakland November 5th-10th

SAIR Linux and GNU

Distro News

Debian

Red Hat

SuSE

Software and Product News

Gnect

Loki

MOSIXVIEW Cluster Management Software

webMathematica Brings Computation to the Web

PHP Black Book, new from Coriolis

Micro Sharp Technology and Astaro Firewall Partnership

IMA Internet Exchange Messaging Server 5.1

Copyright © 2001, Michael Conry and the Editors of Linux Gazette. Copying license http://www.linuxgazette.com/copying.html Published in Issue 72 of Linux Gazette, November 2001

The Answer Gang

By Jim Dennis, Ben Okopnik, Dan Wilder, Breen, Chris, and the Gang, the Editors of Linux Gazette... and You! Send questions (or interesting answers) to linux-questions-only@ssc.com

Contents:

Greetings from Heather Stern

pppd problem

getting volume label for CD

clock problem

Please need help !!! ext2 problem !!!

determining screen resolution

question on IP forwarding.

Hi Gazette

SCSI

RH7.1 onThinkPad 560X cannot find ttyS00

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