November 2016 - Talk - lists.gtalug.org

Deal on open source compatible router
by lsorense＠csclub.uwaterloo.ca 22 Nov '16

22 Nov '16

I see NCIX has the Linksys WRT1900ACS on sale today for $200 (down from the usual $300). I have the WRT1900ACv2 which is the same hardware as the ACS and am running LEDE (https://www.lede-project.org/) on it and it works great. Not bad for a router with dual Cortex-A9 1.6GHz CPU, 512MB ram, 128MB flash, USB3 and USB2 eSATAp. -- Len Sorensen

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Certificate Error On Chrome
by Michael Galea 17 Nov '16

17 Nov '16

I went to pay my cell providers bill via Chromium on Debian and it threw a "Site not secure" error at me. That was odd as I had paid at the same site many times before. I reported the problem to the cell provider's customer support line, not really expecting much. To my surprise they requested screenshots, and I provided them. The tech came back and replied, "I have seen this error before. Click on “ADVANCED” and you should then have an option to proceed to website and this should resolve the issue". :-) I replied that I would try paying by another means thanks, and that if I was seeing the site warning, others were likely to as well.. Google was reporting "Certificate Error : There are issues with the site's certificate chain net::ERR_CERTIFICATE_TRANSPARENCY_REQUIRED)." Apparently, Google started following a 2013 protocol that detects fraudulent certificates, and the cell providers certificate vendor does not support it. Has anyone else seen these sorts of certificate problems, and why now? -- Michael Galea

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Programmable LED badge
by Daniel Wayne Armstrong 17 Nov '16

17 Nov '16

I have this cheapie 44x11 programmable LED badge that I am trying to access under Linux. I *think* its the same as this device ... https://github.com/Caerbannog/led-mini-board ... but when I connect it to a USB port no /dev/ttyU* or /dev/ttyA* is created. Output of dmesg ... usb 2-5: new full-speed USB device number 21 using xhci_hcd usb 2-5: New USB device found, idVendor=0416, idProduct=5020 usb 2-5: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0 usb 2-5: Product: LS32 Custm HID usb 2-5: Manufacturer: LSicroelectronics hidraw: raw HID events driver (C) Jiri Kosina usbcore: registered new interface driver usbhid usbhid: USB HID core driver input: LSicroelectronics LS32 Custm HID as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00: 14.0/usb2/2-5/2-5:1.0/0003:0416:5020.0001/input/input14 hid-generic 0003:0416:5020.0001: input,hidraw0: USB HID v1.10 Device [LSicroelectronics LS32 Custm HID] on usb-0000:00:14.0-5/input0 ... and of lsusb ... Bus 002 Device 023: ID 0416:5020 Winbond Electronics Corp. Searching for details on this device returns lean pickings. I did come across this one comment in a discussion thread for a different device ... https://www.reddit.com/user/k2539/ ... with no response. Any advice about how go forward would be appreciated! Thanks. -- (o< .: Per curiositas ad astra .: http://www.circuidipity.com (/)_

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Internet testing
by o1bigtenor 14 Nov '16

14 Nov '16

Greetings I have been using www.testmy.net as a non-flash based (its html 5 IIUC) connection tester. My ISP on the other hand believes that only flash based tests like Ookla's are any good. Looking for thoughts and opinions on the differences between the two and which might actually be more accurate. Regards Dee

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OK, where are we having dinner, folks?
by David Collier-Brown 08 Nov '16

08 Nov '16

--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

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micro: better than nano, and written in Go
by Stewart C. Russell 08 Nov '16

08 Nov '16

I won't be able to go to the Go talk tomorrow, but a project written in Go has been working very well for me: micro, a basic but rather good text editor — https://micro-editor.github.io/ What I like about micro: · it uses standard CUA commands: Ctrl-S to save, Ctrl-Q to quit, Shift+movement to select, etc. · it's terminal only ·… but you can use the mouse to move the cursor and select stuff *even over ssh* · it's not bloody nano. It's definitely a lot easier to get beginners using micro, as it works the way you'd expect. cheers, Stewart

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Kelly Gotlieb
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 07 Nov '16

07 Nov '16

C. C. "Kelly" Gotlieb died on October 16 at age 95. Kelly was one of the zeroth generation of Canadian Computing. Probably the last I knew. (I don't remember ever calling him "Kelly" to his face. I never felt that I was a peer of his. At one point he and I had neigbouring offices in a backwater of the Sanford Flemming Building so I got to have a few unhurried chats with him.) <http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/kelly-gotlieb-was-the-father-o…> Nit picking the Globe article: - there was no reasonable way to send a gigabyte of data by teletype in the 1950s. The typical speed would be 10 characters per second (110 baud) or less. A gigabyte would take three years solid. And nothing could easily store it. - I don't think that Kelly had long talks with Turing. I asked Kelly about Turing and my recollection is that Turing was not very conversational with Kelly. Of course my recollection is not 100% reliable. - His PhD thesis my well still be classified -- Kelly liked to tell that story. But I don't think it was about "cybernetics". It came out of his work with the team that studied artillery shells with the new and secret "proximity fuse". This allied invention was perhaps as secret and important as the atomic bomb in World War II. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_fuze> <https://www.npa.org/public/interviews/careers_interview_331.cfm>

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Recommendation for a Good VPN and a PGP on Email Tutorial.
by Brad Fonseca 06 Nov '16

06 Nov '16

Hello, I was hoping someone on this list might be able to help me out with some advice and/or point me to a previous thread or to a good current resource. I have decided (belatedly) that it would be good to start using a VPN service to connect to the Internet. There are a large number of choices out there and I was wondering if anyone on GTALUG uses and recommends any. Also, if someone could point me to a good tutorial for PGP on email that would also be helpful. I assume the only way to use PGP with Gmail is through a client like Thunderbird (which is what I use for my consulting email address). Thanks so much for your help in advance. This list has always been very interesting to read for me, even if I don't feel I have the technical expertise to contribute much. :P Regards, Brad -- Brad Fonseca Mobile: 416-876-2191

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sysadmining is full of stupid details
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 03 Nov '16

03 Nov '16

Context: I had a working system that was stable for a decade (mail server, DNS, VPN, etc.). But that was insane. Regular updates are needed but old systems fall off the map. So rebasing is needed. And the longer you put it off, the worse it gets So I'm redoing everything, based on CentOS 7. What a sea of shallow lore is needed. By "shallow", I mean that each thing is easy. What makes the problem hard is that there is so much of this crud to get right. Today's example: spamassassin's log file shows a lot of messages to do with not being able to access the DNS server via 127.0.0.1. Eg: Nov 03 12:12:09 redeye spamd[1455]: dns: sendto() to [::1]:53 failed: Connection refused, failing over to [127.0.0.1]:53 Nov 03 12:12:09 redeye spamd[1455]: dns: sendto() to [127.0.0.1]:53 failed: Connection refused, failing over to [::1]:53 Nov 03 12:12:09 redeye spamd[1455]: dns: bad dns reply: Connection refused Why doesn't it use the server specified by /etc/resolv.conf? Apparently the spamassassin folk think that you'd be better off not sharing a DNS server since a lot of RBL servers limit the amount of traffic that a particular client DNS server is allowed to generate. So they force you to run a local DNS server on the same machine as spamassassin. This happens to be a lose for my system. My spamassassin host was using a DNS shared by my LAN. This was not shared with any other spamassassin, so I had no problem that that limitation solved. But it created a problem. And the diagnostic wasn't rubbed in my face, and the diagnostic does not point at the problem unless you know more than you should have to. I, of course, tried to find where this is explained and failed. I did see suggestions for running a local DNS server, but the reason did not apply. Simple fix: yum install unbound systemctl start unbound systemctl enable unbound I hope that the default settings are reasonable. What a waste of my time. Irony: once I fixed this, spamassassin spams syslog with a half dozen lines per mail message processed. And this is just one of a million trivial impediments. Notice that that systemd (and the previous init systems) needed separate commands for starting a service now (start) and starting one on boot (enable). Surely the most common case is to do both. Firewalld's GUI has this same problem. It is more confusing because you click away at tick boxes, the ones you have changed are not distinguished. You cannot see the "now" settings at the same time as the "on boot" settings. Looking at the log (to discover the original problem) is arcane in itself. The systemd command to look at logs is journalctl(1) (I'm surprised it is in section 1). The flag -b limits the output to things since the most recent boot. To look at a particular service, use _SYSTEMD_UNIT=spamassassin.service. How awful. It can be shortened to "-u spamassassin", but that's hardly mentioned in the enormous journalctl(1).

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Need help with DNS Nameservers
by David Mason 03 Nov '16

03 Nov '16

I have a domain for my family email (and other things) mason-rose.ca The DNS is on a machine that is currently unstable (meaning I can't physically access it for 2 weeks, I can't ssh in, and it can't be blown away). Foolishly, both of the required DNS namesevers point to the same machine. Postfix on that machine was forwarding all our family email to various gmail accounts, and this is currently not working... mail is being dropped on the floor... partner is *NOT*HAPPY* (nor am I, but...). The Postfix was essentially forwarding dmason(a)mason-rose.ca to my gmail, my-partner(a)mason-rose.ca to her gmail, and everything-else(a)mason-rose.ca to both of us. This wasn't working perfectly, as email from gmail routed through this would take a very long time, or fail (because gmail didn't trust it coming sort-of from gmail and back to gmail). I was trying to set up mailgun.com to forward my email, which requires DNS records to be set up while continuing to use the postfix setup. So I would like to set up alternate nameservers, to get my mail flowing again. But with the postfix server dead, I don't know if mailgun will do all I want. So, first and foremost, I need DNS Servers that can host the DNS records. Any insight/help appreciated. Thanks ../Dave

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