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GTALUG meeting Tuesday 7:30 PM: Rocky Linux
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 11 Sep '23

11 Sep '23

When: Tuesday September 12, 2023 at 7:30 PM Where: online <https://blue.lpi.org/b/eva-zjc-gjy-kgl> Speakers from Rocky Linux will talk about the distribution's evolution away from CentOS. We may also hear about the association between Rocky, SUSE and Oracle. Context: <https://rockylinux.org/> <https://www.centos.org/> <https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enterprise-linux> CentOS was a very popular open source and free rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This was very useful to many of us since RHEL releases are very stable, have very long life cycles, great engineering, and were adopted by many corporations. Since Red Hat effectively killed it, there has been a struggle for a consensus on a successor. Rocky Linux is one of the clear leaders to take on this role. It's not easy since Red Hat is trying to impede clones. Oracle (which has had its own clone for some time) and SuSE (which has long had its own commercial distro with a significant engineering team) are somehow working with Rocky.

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GTALUG Meeting Reminder
by Alan Heighway 11 Sep '23

11 Sep '23

Rocky Linux and its evolution from CentOS. <https://gtalug.org/meeting/2023-11/> with The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation <https://gtalug.org/> 12 September, 2023 at 07:30 PM More details to come soon. We're going to use Big BLue Button for this meeting: https://blue.lpi.org/b/eva-zjc-gjy-kgl *Time:* September 12, 2023 7:30 PM Eastern Time *Join us on Big Blue Button:* https://blue.lpi.org/b/eva-zjc-gjy-kgl. LocationBig Blue Button - https://blue.lpi.org/b/eva-zjc-gjy-kgl *A*lan *H*eighway <http://heighway.ca/> heighway.ca VA3WAH / VA3YKZ [image: Please consider the environment before printing]

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Debian Linux as-a-router Guide
by Giles Orr 09 Sep '23

09 Sep '23

As per my previous post, I just purchased a mini-PC which I intend to turn into a router. Is anyone aware of a guide for turning a Debian PC into a _home_ router? I'd like to be running probably DNSmasq, using a blocklist, stuff like that. I've found webpages that tell me how to turn on network forwarding, or maybe configure DNSmasq, but not the whole process. Please don't suggest pfsense: I'm well aware of it, and it may well be better. But I'm very adept at managing Debian, and initially at least I intend to try to set this up. If it turns out to be direly difficult, pfsense may happen later. Thanks. -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr(a)gmail.com

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Landline and Bell revisited.
by Karen Lewellen 07 Sep '23

07 Sep '23

Hi folks, I am privately discussing the mess with Evan off list. Still I recall someone? here indicated being connected with bell's CEO? My situation basically is this. because Teksavvy contracts with bell I have spent the last five months being promised analog service, paying for some of it, only to have bell send techs over and over again some of whom engaged in retaliatory actions based on other complaints tied to accessibility. I do have a doctor's note documenting my medical need for analog service, something bell refused to read and Teksavvy refused to share even with permission. At the moment breech of contract and negligence cases feel reasonable. teksavvy does not monitor what the bell techs actually do, they get paid anyway, and I have different stories from the teksavy side, including that they do not provide analog service, something I know is untrue. The copper wiring is still here, I have photos, in spite of bell saying otherwise. Anyway, still need a solid analog landline door of any kind, service or creative electric wizard smiles. Thanks, Kare

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Boot fails into Linux
by sciguy 07 Sep '23

07 Sep '23

I have a dual-boot PC running WIndows 10 and Ubuntu Studio Linux 22.x LTS. Over the past year or so, I could not boot into Ubuntu, and the reasons were difficult to trace, which is why I had put it off, and used Windows for a while. Now that I am taking the time to poke around the Linux system, I had noticed things that were highly unusual: 1) I noticed two swap partitions. Was that me being absent-minded when I did the installation/upgrade a year ago? Then I noticed: 2) There are also two (2) EFI partitions. One installed 2 years ago, and one installed almost exactly a year ago (I would say that is about when the unexplained reboot failures happened. Both EFI partitions are on the same physical drive. I am fine with deleting one of the swap partitions, but is it ok to delete one of the EFI partitions, more than likely the newer one? The older one is listed as sdd2 (sdd1 is a windows recovery partition), and the newer one is sdd7. Any ideas? Paul

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Cheap possible router PC?
by Giles Orr 07 Sep '23

07 Sep '23

I'm going to post twice about this ... but this email is simply about a good deal and possible router PC: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0C2HLRV41 Tiny (9x9x5cm), colourful (LED strip at the base, could definitely live without), 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, Intel 12th Gen 4-core N95, 3x HDMI, 2x Ethernet - $188 all in with free shipping (notice the large $84 coupon you need to apply). It's also available with more RAM and/or a bigger SSD. Seemed like a good deal to me - feel free to comment ... Mine has arrived, and I had no trouble at all installing Debian 12 headless on it (it comes with Windows 11 if that's your thing). -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr(a)gmail.com

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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 25 Aug '23

25 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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