August 2023 - Talk - lists.gtalug.org

[GTALUG-Announce] Membership Dues
by Warren McPherson 13 Nov '23

13 Nov '23

With the agm coming up, now is a great time to renew membership and make a small twenty dollar contribution to the organization. For those looking forward to the chance to wind their way through the Interac E-Transfer process again here is my summary of how it works. (Actually I forget each time so the novelty never wears off -- luckily it is easy.) Log in to your bank and look for "Interac e-Transfers" you may need to go to the "Transfers" page and then you will see this option. Select "email method" and use the email address: membership(a)gtalug.org Putting your name in the message can be helpful as the notification I get can sometimes be a touch obtuse. Thank you to those who have already contributed! (I know who you are. Ha ha) Thank you, Warren --- GTALUG Announce mailing list announce(a)gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/announce

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GNOME automatically sleeps your computer
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 02 Sep '23

02 Sep '23

GNOME, at least on Fedora 38 and on debian 12, will put your computer to sleep if the mouse and keyboard haven't been used for 15 minutes. This makes the rather rash assumption that a computer running GNOME is only doing GNOME things, and only for a person active at the console. There are many things for which this assumption is wrong. Here are some for my desktop computer: - I have a HexChat IRC client running. I want messages captured, even if I am AFK (that's IRC-speak for Away From Keyboard) - I run an SMTP server and I want to receive email all the time. - I run an SSH server so that I can SSH-in, for example, to read my mail - sometimes I do large software builds that take more than 15 minutes. - on occasion I've done long running calculations - I have cron jobs (Window has a similar policy. I've left a computer to do Windows Update (which can take hours!) only to find it had gone to sleep without accomplishing its task.) This change showed up unannouced in Fedora 38 and has created a hubub. I don't see a similar upset in the debian community. <https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/gnome-suspends-after-15-minutes-of-u…> <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2190021> If I look at machines in my family, this policy works for our notebooks but generally does not work for desktops. I don't think that this should be a GNOME function since GNOME doesn't know everything about a machine. It seems like a better fit with systemd. To suppress sleep (but only when on AC power) on Fedora 38, create a file "/etc/dconf/db/site.d/do-not-suspend", owned by root, and put in it these two lines, not indented: [org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/power] sleep-inactive-ac-timeout=0 Superstition: you probably need to reboot for this to take effect. That doesn't work in debian. If I remember correctly, this does: Note, you need to do this for user "gdm", the login screen, too. Check setting for $USER that might login at the console: $ sudo -u $USER dbus-run-session gsettings get org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power sleep-inactive-ac-type 'suspend' Suppress sleep (while on AC power) for $USER: $ sudo -u $USER dbus-run-session gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power sleep-inactive-ac-type nothing

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Reboot and Reboot and Reboot
by Warren McPherson 31 Aug '23

31 Aug '23

Reboot and reboot and reboot Click on this broken link Parse the error to the last character recorded in syslog And all our analytics have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Down dim status code. Life's but a shell script, badly written. Furious recursive hash functions indexing. Then lost even to wayback. It is a tale, Told by an idiot, slipping into confusion and diffusion redirected to dev null.

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internet service speed test tip
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 26 Aug '23

26 Aug '23

Rogers and Bell have web sites for testing your internet speed. The advantage of using one should be that it is a pretty pure test of the ISP's infrastructure. TL;DR: run the test from a fast computer. When I used Bell's speed test on my own router (remember that it runs Fedora 38 and thus has FireFox and Chromium) the results were disappointing. Half or two-thirds of my promised speed. The problem turns out to be the web page itself. It burns a lot of processor power (javascript, surely). When I run it from behind my router, on a fast computer, the speed is as promised. When the client was a notebook with an i3-1005g1 processor, the result was also disappointing. I used a USB-c to 2.5G ethernet dongle. When the client was a notebook with a Ryzen 7 6800H, the result was good. I used the same dongle.

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my own router on Bell Fibe Fiber-To-The-Premises (FTTP)
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 24 Aug '23

24 Aug '23

I've used my router (a little PC running a Red Hat Linux) with Rogers for over 25 years. Now I've switched to Bell to get FTTP (AKA FTTH). Here are some quirks (AKA discoveries) Bell supplied a Giga Hub modem / router / access point / landline / ... There are several ethernet ports on it. - One goes directly to the TV set-top-box that Bell supplied. I don't know if I could put it behind my router. - three are 1G - one is 10G (I think) but I use as 2.5G with my router-PC. My promised speed is 1.5G down and 960M up, so 2.5G is sufficient There are two ways to use your own router with the GigaHub - the "Advanced DMZ" passes traffic directly to your router. You just need to tell the GH the MAC address of your router - the PPPoE passthrough method. The Advanced DMZ seems like a great idea BUT your router and the GigaHub share the same IP so their might be conflicts. For example, both will be doing NAT and thus might assign the same ports for conflicting purposes. I don't see how this can work (but failure would be rare and confusing). The PPPoE passthrough gives your router and the GH separate IP addresses! But it means your router needs to do PPPoE. Apparently many consumer routers cannot handle PPPoE at this speed. Good news: my little PC can. I can still use the GH's extra ethernet ports and WiFi AP, but they are outside my LAN (not behind my router). That has been useful for testing/diagnosis and for accessing the GH's control panel. I could probably add a route to my router to allow access to the GH's control panel, but I have not done so. My little PC is a TopTon Celeron N5105 box with four 2.5G ethernet ports <https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004360072281.html> There are newer alternatives. I run Fedora 38 as the OS. Other folks choose pfSense or OpnSense, but I haven't needed to learn about those. PPPoE nicks a few bytes from each packet. That should be fine: PMTU Discovery should handle it, but it doesn't. Some internet sites fail. Cure (at least empirically): add MSS clamping to the filewall. Here is the "policy object" that I added to firewalld as file /etc/firewalld/policies/policy_int_to_ext.xml: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <policy priority="100" target="ACCEPT"> <ingress-zone name="FedoraServer"/> <egress-zone name="external"/> <rule> <tcp-mss-clamp value="1452"/> </rule> </policy> I don't remember having to do this with my (ancient) VDSL connection to Vybe.net. Not sure why. Theory: Roaring Penguin PPPoE seems to do MSS Clamping itself. Other possible cure: there is an obsolete and never adopted RFC that specifies how to negotiate slightly-jumbo packets with PPPoE. There are rumours that Bell supports this. a (1500 + 8) MTU would eliminate this whole problem. I would think RP PPPoE would support it but I don't know how RP PPPoE fits into Fedora 38.

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debian: adduser doen't add user to many useful groups
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 14 Aug '23

14 Aug '23

I'm just setting up a debian system for the first time in a long while. (I'm typing this on my new debian system.) The initial user that I created is automatically in many important groups: cdrom floppy sudo audio dip video plugdev netdev bluetooth lpadmin scanner silly <== the user gets its own group When I do an adduser for "hugh", I get only two groups: users hugh Why was "silly" not put into group "users"? Why was "hugh" not put into all these empowering groups? Is there a magic shortcut to getting hugh added to all these groups? It seems that console users would want most or all of these groups. Is there a nice guide to which groups allow what actions? What's the normal way of adding users? I read debian documentation saying useradd(8) is low-level and that adduser(8) should be used instead. I don't see a way of telling adduser that the normal desktop user should be enrolled in the appropriate groups. I know how to add a user to a group, one at a time: adduser user group That seem tedious.

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Interesting new chapter in the RH/CentOS saga.
by Evan Leibovitch 12 Aug '23

12 Aug '23

Looks like SUSE, Oracle and CIQ (parent company of Rocky Linux) are joining forces to address the recent policy changes at Red Hat that affected CentOS. https://openela.org/news/hello_world/ This will be interesting to follow. Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch / @el56

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use Window to access SSH server with obsolete ciphers
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 11 Aug '23

11 Aug '23

Recent Fedora systems' SSH client won't access CentOS 6 servers. Unable to negotiate with x.y.z.w port 22: no matching host key type found. Their offer: ssh-rsa,ssh-dss (One should not still be running CentOS 6!) All my workstations run recent Fedora systems. How could I access this server? It turns out the Windows has an SSH client these days and it isn't as picky about ciphers as Fedora. It could well be that other Linux distros support older ciphers too. This isn't generally a good thing: those ciphers were retired due to security concerns.

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transcript of chat at tonights meeting
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 11 Aug '23

11 Aug '23

Darn. The capture only got the last N message. Sorry. Bonus link: servethehome.ca They have reviews of interesting hardware, including little PC designed to be routers and 8 x 2.5G switches. ================ Mark 9:07 PM Umm, they're more transparent.... OPNSEnse started with a drama with Netgate.. the company behind pfSense ma Mark 9:10 PM Do you have a link for your new box? Or the vendor from aliexpress? ma Mark 9:11 PM yes, it is a good form factor ma Mark Alrightly. I sent an email to join the mailing list. Once I'm on, I'll explore that topic soon. ma Mark 9:22 PM thanks, Hugh. ma Mark 9:24 PM those were my two things. Suse & in-person question. Thanks, everyone ma Mark 9:24 PM great first meeting for me. ma Mark 9:25 PM that's okay. I'll give it a shot ahead of next meeting. Thanks! Mark is typing (Merged) GTALUG | Hugh

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[u-u] Unix Unanimous meeting - Wednesday 9 August 2023
by Unix Unanimous Webmaster 07 Aug '23

07 Aug '23

The next meeting of Unix Unanimous will be held at 6:45 pm on Wednesday 9 August 2023 via Zoom. Unix Unanimous is an informal gathering of people interested in Unix and related topics. There are no fees or membership requirements, and the meeting is open to all. Participants typically include Unix professionals, students, and hobbyists. This message will be repeated on the Monday before the meeting. If there are any items for the agenda, please email www-uu(a)unixunanimous.org before then. The meeting is always held on the second Wednesday of each month. Scheduled Zoom meeting details: Please download and import the following iCalendar (.ics) files to your calendar system. Monthly: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/upQqceqqqT8ojRSfJJLgB24H2eY4VdhSvA/ics?icsT… Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/707632742?pwd=dUFObzVlaEdPZ2FhRFRvZ0NZWGNMQT09 Meeting ID: 707 632 742 Passcode: 642160 One tap mobile +16475580588,,707632742#,,,,*642160# Canada +17789072071,,707632742#,,,,*642160# Canada Dial by your location: +1 647 558 0588 Canada +1 778 907 2071 Canada +1 204 272 7920 Canada +1 438 809 7799 Canada +1 587 328 1099 Canada +1 647 374 4685 Canada +1 646 558 8656 US (New York) +1 669 900 9128 US (San Jose) +1 253 215 8782 US (Tacoma) +1 301 715 8592 US (Washington DC) +1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago) +1 346 248 7799 US (Houston) Meeting ID: 707 632 742 Passcode: 642160 Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kMwdyjYc Special Announcements: A very big thank you to Colin McGregor for hosting the Zoom meetings. _______________________________________________ u-u mailing list u-u(a)mail-ml.infra-service.ca http://www2.infra-service.ca/mailman/listinfo/u-u

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