June 2005 - KCLUG - kclug.org

New Version of Debian released
by Justin Dugger 07 Jun '05

07 Jun '05

Seems today's full of surprises: Debian has officially released a new version, Sarge. The last version was released sometime in 2002, making this well overdue. The whole point of this post was to share with you all a comment I found funny, http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=151857&cid=12740984. Justin Dugger

1 0

MySQL Question
by Josh Charles 06 Jun '05

06 Jun '05

I've been trying to figure this out, but have been coming up blank. For some reason, I can't figure out the right google term to use, and the MySQL books I have don't really address this. I'm working with a website that will have many, many pieces of text I need to store in the database. Most of these texts will be less than 10,000 Characters, while a few will could be as great as 100,000 characters or more. I won't be able to know ahead of time. The Scheme's I've come up with are as follows: Use LongText or MediumText data type for all articles. My concern is that those majority of articles that are only < 10,000 will bloat the database. Please excuse my ignorance in the data storage techniques if this isn't right. The other way is that as articles are stored in different tables based on their character count. I don't like this method because it would mean have three tables to store the same type of data, and I would need to reference that in another table. Anyone have thoughts on this? Thanks, Josh

3 3

Testing RAM
by Jonathan Hutchins 06 Jun '05

06 Jun '05

Several of you have mentioned finding bad RAM with memtest86 lately. How long to you usually let it run?

6 5

Re: "Bad Geometry"
by Jonathan Hutchins 06 Jun '05

06 Jun '05

On Monday 06 June 2005 09:40 am, lowell(a)kc.rr.com wrote: > maybe boot from the f3 install media, call fdisk from there > (possible?), make a change, save it, and then change it back and then > save it a second time? Might work, who knows... I'm sure that if I wanted to reformat the disk, or if I just deleted all the existing partitions, FC3 would install just fine. The problem is that it's a 120G disk and it has about 30G of data I'd rather not have to migrate on and off of another disk (which I could do).

1 0

RE: "Bad Geometry"
by Kelsay, Brian - Kansas City, MO 06 Jun '05

06 Jun '05

>-----Original Message----- > >On Monday 06 June 2005 08:20 am, crash3m wrote: > >> you might try accessing a virtual console and see if >> fdisk/cfdisk isn't >> still available. IIRC FC3's installer has busy box -w- fdisk... just >> a thought > >For that matter I can boot to Gentoo and run fdisk. What's the point? You might try to run QTParted from a Knoppix disk or other LiveCD. I've had what seems like a similar problem with Windows or Partition Image (by Power Quest, the Partition Magic people), not liking the beginning or ending place of partitions created in Linux. Usually the error I get is that the CHS (cylinder, head, sector) and LBA (logical block addressing) figures don't match. I haven't researched why this happens though. I've alternatively let Windows fix it and both Oses were happy or ignore it with no ill effects. I imagine it is the info written to the partition table on the drive that is not liked.

1 0

Re: "Bad Geometry"
by Jonathan Hutchins 06 Jun '05

06 Jun '05

On Monday 06 June 2005 08:20 am, crash3m wrote: > you might try accessing a virtual console and see if fdisk/cfdisk isnt > still available. IIRC FC3's installer has busy box -w- fdisk... just > a thought For that matter I can boot to Gentoo and run fdisk. What's the point?

1 0

"Bad Geometry"
by Jonathan Hutchins 06 Jun '05

06 Jun '05

I tried to get FC3 to install on my basement Gentoo box today, and it popped up error messages about failure to probe partition geometry. I have to presume this is an attempt by RedHat's proprietary formatting tool to understand the partitions on my main hard drive. These were created by fdisk (2.12i), which is a pretty standard tool. Gentoo hasn't had any trouble working with the disk, and I'm not sure why Fedora would, but it won't complete the install. I imagine it might work if I used gentoo's fdisk to delete all the partitions, but I want to keep the main partition (/) which has a lot of data on it. I guess I can just wait for FC4 to make it out, but it's frustrating. RH used to offer to allow you to use cfdisk or fdisk (I forget) instead of it's proprietary formatter, which never did work worth a darn.

1 0

quick network engineering review question
by David Nicol 03 Jun '05

03 Jun '05

I want to sniff all traffic on the upstream link at my installation. I have a wire that comes into my cisco router from the CSU/DSU. The question is, is this wire a normal ethernet wire, so that I could plug it into a hub and plug the hub into the Cisco, that is, put a hub in line with it, or is it something else? I already have the crossover cable for the new connection, if plugging the CSU/DSU wire into a hub is in fact copasetic. Please reply on or off list as appropriate -- David L Nicol Twinkies and Wonderbread are mainstream Americana

7 14

RE: quick network engineering review question
by Kelsay, Brian - Kansas City, MO 02 Jun '05

02 Jun '05

If the cable you normally have is a crossover, it should be marked as such. Did you make it yourself in days gone by? Sometimes they are printed on the cable "crossover" or they have a special colored band on each end near the connector. You can also put the two ends together and compare the wire color order (the end should be clear). If they are in the same order, then it is normal (straight thru, if several seem mixed up, then it is a crossover. I don't see why your setup with the hub or switch wouldn't work. Probably a hub is better since all ports receive the same messages. Then you need to put a PC with Linux in there on the hub, with at least one network card in promiscuous mode. Google that and you will find out how to do it. There are then several tools that you can use to sniff. Snort, ethereal, snarf, etc., Google TCP/IP traffic sniffing. One thing I just thought of. The packets coming in to the router may be in chunks like frames. Your standard PC NIC may not be able to decode them. I reserve the right to be wrong and admit it in an open forum. You have some research ahead of you anyway. >-----Original Message----- >From: kclug-bounces(a)kclug.org [mailto:kclug-bounces@kclug.org] >On Behalf Of crash3m >Sent: Thursday, June 02, 2005 1:06 PM >To: kclug(a)kclug.org >Subject: Re: quick network engineering review question > > >Maybe if you explained why you need to sniff the traffic someone could >offer a solution. Maybe your answer can be solved by sniffing on the >'internal' side of the CSU/DSU. > >On 6/1/05, David Nicol <davidnicol(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> I want to sniff all traffic on the upstream link at my >installation. I have a >> wire that comes into my Cisco router from the CSU/DSU. The >question is, >> is this wire a normal Ethernet wire, so that I could plug it >into a hub and plug >> the hub into the Cisco, that is, put a hub in line with it, >or is it something >> else? >> >> I already have the crossover cable for the new connection, >if plugging the >> CSU/DSU wire into a hub is in fact copasetic. >> >> Please reply on or off list as appropriate >> >> >> -- >> David L Nicol >> Twinkies and Wonderbread are mainstream Americana

2 1

PHP5
by Jonathan Hutchins 01 Jun '05

01 Jun '05

Any comments on upgrading PHP4 to PHP5, on Fedora/Apache2? Client says their site is all custom built and the programmer wants to make the switch. I'd like to stick within the RPM system, but be able to switch back to 4 quickly as he finds things that break (if any).

2 3