June 2020 - Talk - lists.gtalug.org

Continuing Printer Woes
by Peter King 05 Jun '20

05 Jun '20

Eric S. Raymond was right about CUPS some fourteen years ago, in his essay "The Luxury of Ignorance" (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html) and things really haven't gotten any better. Here's an update since I last posted about six weeks ago. I had an HP LaserJet 1100a, which worked reasonably well until its internal memory went bad. These things happen. So I got a more recent HP Pro 1102w which is no end of trouble; I could print to it a bit, irregularly, but now not at all -- everything seems to be configured properly but CUPS reports "Waiting for printer to become available" and nothing I do, from writing udev rules to rebooting, makes it available. So I bought another printer, a Lexmark MS415dn, in part for its three-penguin rating [ = "works perfectly with Linux"] on openprinting.org, but it does not work perfectly, spitting out endless pages of gibberish when I sent it PDFs or PostScript files, to the point where it prints only once out of every two or three attempts. I won't go through all the details of what I've tried, but I have tried, and tried, and tried. More or less at my wit's end -- actually, I can see my wit's end receding in the distance in the rear-view mirror -- and proving that I cannot learn from experience, I'm considering buying something that should just work, that is, of getting a monochrome single-function laser printer with embedded PostScript to handle my needs, which, you'd think, would be a sufficiently humble set of requirements. You'd think. If anyone on this list can recommend such a beast, which can run reliably under Linux (specifically arch linux), I would be almost shamefully greatful. Nearly as good would be cautions about what to avoid. Thanks. -- Peter King peter.king(a)utoronto.ca Department of Philosophy 170 St. George Street #521 The University of Toronto (416)-946-3170 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

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BSDCan 2020 this week
by Christopher Browne 04 Jun '20

04 Jun '20

https://www.bsdcan.org/2020/ The BSD folk are holding their annual conference that is normally in Ottawa this week via video conferencing. Talks are on Friday and Saturday, tutorials on Wednesday and Thursday. Some of the sessions are mighty specific to particular flavours of BSD, but there is doubtless some material that will be of interest to us. Some highlights include... - There's a session on "homelabs" which is about the concept of building a stack of servers at home for running experiments. A lot of the hardware issues will be pretty platform independent. - Warner Losh is doing a piece on the History of Unix, which is likely quite interesting. - Toronto local Andrew Cagney is doing a talk on Libreswan which I am pretty sure has some developers on this list :-) And we have had well-received talks from Jim Mercer at GTALUG where he explained merits of some of the differing development practices on FreeBSD; there are definitely useful things to be learned from the BSD folk.

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Pen testing systems
by Terry Tanski 03 Jun '20

03 Jun '20

I have some Angular web applications that I would like a legitimate company to penetration test for me. Anyone on this list recommend anyone they have used in the past? Looking for good solid coverage, a findings report and then remediation suggestions if required. Thanks, Terry Tanski

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