October 2014 - Talk - lists.gtalug.org

FSOSS early bird price extended until Oct 10th
by Tim Tisdall 09 Oct '14

09 Oct '14

http://fsoss.senecac.on.ca/2014/reginfo Is anyone from GTALUG going to this? -Tim

5 4

war story: the end of an old computer.
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 09 Oct '14

09 Oct '14

| From: D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh(a)mimosa.com> | Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2011 01:54:39 -0400 (EDT) | Subject: war story (spoiler: dying power supply takes disk drive with it) Another war story. | I replaced the power supply with a CoolerMaster RP-650-PCAR that I | happened to have in inventory. | | Still no joy. When I turned power on, the CPU fan would jiggle once but | there was no other sign of life. | | When I unplugged all the peripherals, power seemed to work. I have a similar symptom in another computer. I narrowed it down to the motherboard: when everything was removed from the MB (all connections) and it was placed on a non-conductive table, with a new power supply, I got the same behaviour. Since the computer is about 8 years old, it isn't worth putting a lot of time into fixing the motherboard. So I stopped diagnosing at this point. The reason I mention it is to hightlight that the symptom (when power supply plugged in, the fans start up but shut down after a second or less; case fan spins slowly) seems to be non-specific. When I first encountered the symptom today, I went back in my TLUG archives because I vaguely remembered having posted something with this symptom. Too bad that the old posting turned out not to be useful. For the curious, here is more of the old posting: | A process of elimination showed that the problem came up only when I | connected one of my Seagate 7200.11 drives. | | It seems that the power supply death agony caused the 12V TVS | (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transient_voltage_suppression_diode>) to | blow. | | I was able to get the disk working again (and the data recovered) by | removing the dead TVS. See | <http://forum.hddguru.com/help-with-disconnecting-tvs-from-seagate-barracuda…> | | To get at the TVS, I needed to remove the drive's PC board. That | required a TORX T6 tool which is moderately hard to find. I got one | at Lowes. | | I measured the resistance (DVM on 200 ohm scale) across each TVS and | found it to be close to 0 on the 12V TVS. | | I poked at the 12V TVS with a fingernail and it came off. I guess that that | means that the circuit board was slightly fried there. But the drive | now works. | | I don't know if the TVS ever protects without sacrificing itself. I | imagine that it does. So I should probably rescue the data and treat | the drive as junk / unreliable. | | Since the power supply warranty is only 3 years, I probably cannot get | anything from Antec. Since the power supply killed the disk drive | (and I did an operation on the drive), I don't see the drive being | covered by the Seagate warranty (the drive was purchased on the last | week that Seagate offered 5 year warranties on OEM drives). | | But I'm mad. I think that Antec should have recalled the power supply | when they knew of the bad capacitor problem. (I haven't broken the | PS's seal so I'm not sure that this is a bad cap problem.) Time for a | class action suit. But I'm lazy. | | Anybody had experience with hidden warranties from Antec?

1 0

Xrandr problem
by Peter King 08 Oct '14

08 Oct '14

I have an annoying problem. I run a two-monitor setup with xrandr, one monitor in portrait and the other in landscape mode. I set xrandr in the .xinitrc file, and it works well. The only problem is that when I quit the window manager (in this case goomwwm), the screen goes to black and I'm pretty sure I never return to the console (blind typing produces no results). The computer itself keeps running; I can ssh in. Any advice or suggestions? I can't quite figure how to turn xrandr *off* once it's been set in .xinitrc. Oh, and if I boot without xrandr, I go straight back to the console when I quit X (as it should). -- Peter King peter.king(a)utoronto.ca Department of Philosophy 170 St. George Street #521 The University of Toronto (416)-978-4951 ofc Toronto, ON M5R 2M8 CANADA http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/ ========================================================================= GPG keyID 0x7587EC42 (2B14 A355 46BC 2A16 D0BC 36F5 1FE6 D32A 7587 EC42) gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 7587EC42

5 19

flash instead of beep in zsh?
by Matt Price 07 Oct '14

07 Oct '14

Hi folks, I am trying to switch to zsh from bash. Haven't really gotten many of the benefits yet as I need to learn the advanced globbing syntax, but it seems nice so far. However, the beep is driving my crazy. for ages I've had my bash beep set to a flash, which is far less annoying. in zsh this is apparently accomplished with the ZBEEP shell parameter, but I can't make it work. does anyone have ZBEEP set to a value that actually works for them? I should say, I am using GNOME and gnome-terminal, which, unlike konsole, does not have an option for changing the bell to a flash, so I think this would have to be accomplished in the shell itself. Thanks, Matt

4 4

Moint just sent a DMCA to a competing OSS
by Myles Braithwaite 06 Oct '14

06 Oct '14

Moint (an open source utility for monitoring running processes) issued a DMCA to GitHub against a competing package, Inspeqtor, written in Go because they use "the same configuration language that is used in Monit". Moint says that Inspeqtor implementation in Go is far from a "clean-room" and is asking that Mike Perham (the author of Inspeqtor) "adhere to the GNU Affero General Public License which Monit is licensed under". <https://github.com/github/dmca/commit/e8e7a27dd17ad6fe8d53fbb8f6084b560b2d3…>

1 0

The geekiest tech jokes on the internet - TechRepublic
by James Knott 04 Oct '14

04 Oct '14

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-geekiest-tech-jokes-on-the-internet…

3 2

Re: [GTALUG] The geekiest tech jokes on the internet - TechRepublic
by Abby Bassie-Cripps 04 Oct '14

04 Oct '14

1 0

Linux hosting
by Tim Tisdall 02 Oct '14

02 Oct '14

I just wondering what people's current experiences are with cheap Linux web hosting. Right now I'm using vps.net and while they're cheap it's not uncommon to have a 10hr downtime (which I'm in the middle of this morning). They don't seem to have any sort of basic monitoring of their nodes to automatically be notified when a system is down (at least not on an individual node level), they rely on me contacting them. Has anyone had experience with digitalocean or linode for fairly long term hosting? I've only used digitalocean for occasional VPN use but have had no issues. -Tim

5 8

Electronics Repair Shop
by Mike 01 Oct '14

01 Oct '14

Hey everyone, It's not entirely a Linux thing, but it's certainly a Toronto thing. Anyone know a repair shop which will do Viewsonic Projectors? I'm under extended third party warranty. Viewsonic recommended somebody up in Northern Scarborough. They have a $50 inspection fee (credited to your repair) which is... okay, but I hope I could find something more downtown, but equally reputable and affordable. If there were no warranty, I would crack it open and look for capacitors :-) If the estimate exceeds the value, I pay the $50, but I send the paperwork off to the insurance company and collect the purchase price. So reputable means they'll get the estimate close, they've done viewsonic warranty work, have nice looking paper and accept credit cards. Thanks, -Mike

1 0

Firechat -- a mesh app for android, etc
by David Collier-Brown 01 Oct '14

01 Oct '14

Courtesy of slashdot, http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/09/30/2043244/hong-kong-protesters-use-me… This looks useful for more than just protests (;-)) --dave -- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest davecb(a)spamcop.net | -- Mark Twain

2 1