From: Digestifier To: Linux-Admin@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu Reply-To: Linux-Admin@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu Date: Fri, 17 Sep 93 10:45:55 EDT Subject: Linux-Admin Digest #62 Linux-Admin Digest #62, Volume #1 Fri, 17 Sep 93 10:45:55 EDT Contents: Setting up Small College Computing Services (Matthew C. Jones) ***slip _AND_ ethernet*** (jP@hpacv.com) Re: [Not] enough SLS bashing (Matthew Dillon) Re: New bash and elm warning (Chuck Fee) Re: New bash and elm warning (Chuck Fee) Re: [Not] enough SLS bashing (Steven Whitlatch) Re: New bash and elm warning (Arjan de Vet) Re: Enough SLS bashing (Re: Install on a ARC Pentium) (lou Williams) Re: [Not] enough SLS bashing (Scott Alfter) Re: [Not] enough SLS bashing (Vince Skahan) Swap *file* (nostofla) Slackware & TeX? (PERUCCI, PHILIP A.) Re: Slackware & TeX? (Byron A Jeff) [Q] File ownerships/permissions (Matt Millar) Re: [Not] enough SLS bashing (Andrew R. Tefft) Re: [Not] enough SLS bashing (Byron A Jeff) HZ environmental variable (jcburt@gats486.larc.nasa.gov) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: mjones@largo.eecs.umich.edu (Matthew C. Jones) Subject: Setting up Small College Computing Services Date: 16 Sep 1993 17:11:48 GMT Greetings! A friend of mine (Dennis Williams) will soon be taking a position teaching at a small liberal arts college in Oklahoma. Currently the school has no Internet access and minimal computing services. Dennis would like to change that. We have been investigating options on our own. I installed Linux on my machine at home to see if it was useable, and it appears that he should be able to use it as the focal point for computing services at this school. I have been following the Linux groups for a while and been assimilating what I can. We have considered several options, and wanted to get some opinions from those of you who are administering Linux machines. All comments and suggestions are welcome. Our initial idea: 1) Establish a single powerful Linux machine as the gateway for the campus. The machine would have 32Meg of RAM and could hopefully support 10-15 simultaneous users. (almost exclusively mail/news use. Initial disk requirements are estimated to be at least 1G. Macs and PCs on campus would be connected to this machine via ethernet. (apparently the campus is wired for this, but it is not currently being used.) The Linux box would be connected to the nearest big University (OU) via high speed modem. I suppose this means that mail/News would be UUCP type services. 2) As demand for computing services increase (and they will :) ) addition Linux boxes will be added to provide more disk space and processing capability. A direct Internet feed will have to be added when the modem bandwidth is insufficient. Is this reasonable/workable? What kind of time commitment is required to administer such a setup? How many users can it reasonably support? As a history PhD, with moderate computing skills, is Dennis crazy to try and do this? thanks for your assistance in this matter, matthew jones mjones@eecs.umich.edu -- Matthew C. Jones Advanced Computer Architecture Lab ------------------------------ From: jP@hpacv.com Subject: ***slip _AND_ ethernet*** Date: Thu, 16 Sep 1993 13:42:52 GMT Hello! I am currently running 99.9 and just got everything needed to upgrade to 99.10 with NET-2 so as to connect with SLIP. I have a small TCP/IP network running right now with 3 machines running NE2000 cards and all is GREAT! I have read the faqs but there is no information on _configuring_ the new kernel and net-2 for slip AND ethernet to work together. Does anyone have ANY information and/or tips on this before I blow myself up =;-) Thanx very much postmaster@hpacv.com ------------------------------ From: dillon@moonshot.west.oic.com (Matthew Dillon) Subject: Re: [Not] enough SLS bashing Date: 16 Sep 1993 10:59:21 -0700 In article <930915.201151.2C5.rusnews.w165w@jaiser.rain.com> jerryg@jaiser.rain.com (Jerry Gaiser) writes: :> time try another distribution and see how you like it. : :Well, I don't know about Slackware, because it requires me to have a 3 1/2 :inch diskette to boot and, believe it or not, I don't. : :So for _some_ of us Slackware is worthless. : :All of these have their problems. But until the distributor of Slackware :decides to support 5 1/4, I'll have to stick with SLS and MCC. I suggest that you purchase a 1.44 MB 3.5" drive, then. Not necessarily for slackware, but because 3.5" is now the norm. You will find yourself closed out of more and more things if all you have are crufty 5.25" floppies. Most of our machines don't even have 5.25" floppies any more. 3.5" inch stuff is a lot easier to deal with. -Matt :-- :Jerry Gaiser (jerryg@jaiser.rain.com) (voice) 503-359-4017 :Fidonet 1:105/380 (bbs) 503-359-5111 : :Inritum est qua legibus prohibitum est Matthew Dillon dillon@moonshot.west.oic.com 1005 Apollo Way dillon@overload.berkeley.ca.us Incline Village, NV. 89451 ham: KC6LVW (no mail drop) USA Sandel-Avery Engineering (702)831-8000 [always include a portion of the original email in any response!] ------------------------------ From: fee@cxf111.rh.psu.edu (Chuck Fee) Subject: Re: New bash and elm warning Date: 16 Sep 1993 13:33:31 -0400 Martin-D. Lacasse (isaac@elrond.physics.mcgill.ca) wrote: : To all those who installed the small beta release (announced : a few days ago) of bash as /bin/sh: Be careful!! : All your mail message sent by elm will have a correct : header but might have an empty message. It took me a while to : track this down since a few other changes have been made : to my system in the mean time. : Anyone else had this problem too? Ditto here. I assumed it was because I am using hacked shell scripts for use with PGP inside elm that caused the problem, but apparently not. Either way, bash-1.13 does not work correctly with elm at this time, leaving a message with all the correct headers, but with an empty message body (it looks like the text is being dumped somewhere and elm doesn't realize it. Bash 1.12 works correctly and I have re-installed it. --chuck -- Chuck Fee UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this fee@cxf111.rh.psu.edu IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED. ------------------------------ From: fee@cxf111.rh.psu.edu (Chuck Fee) Subject: Re: New bash and elm warning Date: 16 Sep 1993 13:37:56 -0400 : All your mail message sent by elm will have a correct : header but might have an empty message. It took me a while to : track this down since a few other changes have been made : to my system in the mean time. : Anyone else had this problem too? Ditto. The problem seems to be that /bin/sh is dumping the text of the mail message somewhere and elm doesn't bother checking to see what has happened, and the message gets send out with a blank body. This occurs with bash-1.13's sh used as /bin/sh. Bash-1.12 (as either /bin/bash or /bin/sh does not show this problem, and replacing 1.13 beta with 1.12 fixes the problem. -- Chuck Fee UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this fee@cxf111.rh.psu.edu IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED. ------------------------------ From: swhitlat@nmt.edu (Steven Whitlatch) Subject: Re: [Not] enough SLS bashing Date: Thu, 16 Sep 1993 17:17:52 GMT In article <930915.201151.2C5.rusnews.w165w@jaiser.rain.com> jerryg@jaiser.rain.com (Jerry Gaiser) writes: >grif@ucrengr.ucr.edu (Michael Griffith) writes: > >> In article <1993Sep10.041506.8617@cc.gatech.edu> byron@cc.gatech.edu >> (Byron A Jeff) writes: >> >>>But that's exactly the point Jon is trying to make. When someone attempted >>>to improve on SLS (with copywrite notices and SLS attributions galore) >>>Peter posted a rant and rave about how SLS is his and nobody should use his >>>precious scripts. >>> >>>BTW check out Slackware 1.02 with it's own new scripts. Really cool. >> >> Slackware already works very nicely. Debian sounds like a great idea. >> MCC advocates are practically violent about how great MCC is. Next >> time try another distribution and see how you like it. > >Well, I don't know about Slackware, because it requires me to have a 3 1/2 >inch diskette to boot and, believe it or not, I don't. > >So for _some_ of us Slackware is worthless. > >All of these have their problems. But until the distributor of Slackware >decides to support 5 1/4, I'll have to stick with SLS and MCC. > >- Slackware supports a 5.25" install now. I used it and the install went smoothly. The 5.25" boot & root disks were in the test/ directory under linux/slackware/. I'm not sure of the exact path right now. Go in and look around at ftp.cdrom.com. Steve Whitlatch swhitlat@prism.nmt.edu ------------------------------ From: devet@adv.win.tue.nl (Arjan de Vet) Subject: Re: New bash and elm warning Date: 16 Sep 1993 22:22:50 +0200 In article <1993Sep16.063001.23243@sifon.cc.mcgill.ca>, Martin-D. Lacasse wrote: > To all those who installed the small beta release (announced > a few days ago) of bash as /bin/sh: Be careful!! > All your mail message sent by elm will have a correct > header but might have an empty message. It took me a while to > track this down since a few other changes have been made > to my system in the mean time. > > Anyone else had this problem too? I had this problem too in the beginning of using bash 1.13 beta. It turned out to be a bug in Elm 2.4. The fact that this bug does not show up when using bash 1.12 is a bug in bash 1.12 :-). It has been fixed in the latest release 2.4.21 (and maybe even earlier). Arjan -- Arjan de Vet (home) Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands (work) ------------------------------ From: nsyslaw@straylight.acs.ncsu.edu (lou Williams) Subject: Re: Enough SLS bashing (Re: Install on a ARC Pentium) Date: Thu, 16 Sep 1993 17:04:47 GMT Matthew Lehman (mlehman@vetmed.wsu.edu) wrote: : Jon Hamilton (jdh@iastate.edu) wrote: : > In article <26opf7$pa0@cville-srv.wam.umd.edu> barspi@wam.umd.edu (Barzilai Spinak) writes: : > >In article , Jon Hamilton wrote: : > >> [an extraordinarly LARGE amount of bandying about deleted!] I'm curious. Did this poor guy EVER get any real help with his problem? I was curious what it may have been (as we often learn by listening, ya know). +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Lou Williams (nsyslaw@acs.ncsu.edu) | Amatuer Radio: KE4ARM | | Unix Systems Programmer | Phone: (919) 515-2794 | | NCSU Administrative Computing Services | FAX: (919) 515-3787 | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Ack! Thpppppffffffft!!!! -Bill The Cat. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ ------------------------------ From: sknkwrks@sonny-boy.cs.unlv.edu (Scott Alfter) Subject: Re: [Not] enough SLS bashing Date: 17 Sep 1993 04:00:50 GMT In article <27a9hp$eao@moonshot.west.oic.com> dillon@moonshot.west.oic.com (Matthew Dillon) writes: >In article <930915.201151.2C5.rusnews.w165w@jaiser.rain.com> jerryg@jaiser.rain.com (Jerry Gaiser) writes: >>All of these have their problems. But until the distributor of Slackware >>decides to support 5 1/4, I'll have to stick with SLS and MCC. > > I suggest that you purchase a 1.44 MB 3.5" drive, then. Not >necessarily for slackware, but because 3.5" is now the norm. You will find >yourself closed out of more and more things if all you have are crufty 5.25" >floppies. > Most of our machines don't even have 5.25" floppies any more. 3.5" >inch stuff is a lot easier to deal with. 3.5" floppies also tend to be much more flaky than 5.25" floppies, at least in my experience. Among high-density floppies, I've never had a 5.25" disk go bad. I've had several 3.5" disks go bad on me (bad enough that they can't be reformatted to full capacity). _/_ Scott Alfter (sknkwrks@cs.unlv.edu) Ask me about SoftDAC--digital / v \ Call the Skunk Works BBS today! audio for your Apple IIe/IIc! (IIGS( (702) 894-9619 300-14400 V.32bis 1:209/263 Apple II, IBM, Trek, & more! \_^_/ --==## "Apple II Forever" is a trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. ##==-- ------------------------------ From: vince@victrola.wa.com (Vince Skahan) Subject: Re: [Not] enough SLS bashing Date: 16 Sep 1993 20:41:02 -0700 dillon@moonshot.west.oic.com (Matthew Dillon) writes: > I suggest that you purchase a 1.44 MB 3.5" drive, then. Not >necessarily for slackware, but because 3.5" is now the norm. You will find >yourself closed out of more and more things if all you have are crufty 5.25" >floppies. He said that the problem was that Slackware required a 3.5" (BOOT) disk. Not that he didn't have a 3.5" floppy. The '386 standard is still the a: drive as 5.25" in general. > Most of our machines don't even have 5.25" floppies any more. 3.5" >inch stuff is a lot easier to deal with. The issue is which one is the a: drive that you boot off of. You'll also find that on a per-MB basis, 5.25" is far (!!!) cheaper to buy than 3.5". -- ---------- Vince Skahan --------- vince@victrola.wa.com ------------- "I want to be like Barbie - that B____ has everything" - Tee-shirt seen in Philadelphia ------------------------------ From: guest@hpacv.com (nostofla) Subject: Swap *file* Date: Fri, 17 Sep 1993 02:25:12 GMT Hello, I am curious about a minor issue. Have seen other articles make reference to a swap FILE (as opposed to a swap partition). There is no manual page in my 99.9 for mkswap and the faqs only seem to cover howto make a partition for swap. Is there a way to make a swap FILE without creating a partiton and could someone please tell me the command?? Thanx much, postmaster@hpacv.com ------------------------------ From: SSB1PZP@imcvms.med.navy.mil (PERUCCI, PHILIP A.) Subject: Slackware & TeX? Date: Fri, 17 Sep 1993 10:08:31 GMT With Slackware 1.0.2 installed (1 day before 1.0.3 came out !@#$%) I now would like TeX. Anyone know the command to use to install from the SLS T* disks? =========================================================================== Phil Perucci, Systems Programmer | "I don't speak for any organization ssb1pzp@imcvms.med.navy.mil | and no organization speaks for me" =========================================================================== ------------------------------ From: byron@cc.gatech.edu (Byron A Jeff) Subject: Re: Slackware & TeX? Date: Fri, 17 Sep 1993 12:18:26 GMT In article , PERUCCI, PHILIP A. wrote: >With Slackware 1.0.2 installed (1 day before 1.0.3 came out !@#$%) I >now would like TeX. Anyone know the command to use to install from the >SLS T* disks? > It seems the pkgtool is the proper command. It prompts you for the series or package to install. You can work from the hard disk or floppy. BTW this tool is supposed to remove packages. Not that I think about it you may need to run it from the root directory considering that all the paths are root relative. Hope this helps, BAJ --- Another random extraction from the mental bit stream of... Byron A. Jeff - PhD student operating in parallel! Georgia Tech, Atlanta GA 30332 Internet: byron@cc.gatech.edu ------------------------------ From: uv94002@black.ox.ac.uk (Matt Millar) Subject: [Q] File ownerships/permissions Date: Fri, 17 Sep 1993 12:10:16 GMT I was wondering, having recently set up a fairly complete Linux system from a variety of different sources (names witheld to prevent flames) if there was any idea of what file ownerships should be on what files and what permissions by the same token. Many of the archives I install seem to cough on ownerships and permissions and I end up with nasty things like X directories being owned by root with read/write permission to root only! Basically I'm looking for a trimmed ls -lR of a 'correct' (optimal) setup to compare with mine, to highlight any potential problems with binaries, shellscripts and config files. -- /\/\att /\/\illar uv94002@black.ox.ac.uk Full signature available on request in any of the following formats: TeX, PostScript, LaTeX, nroff, troff, groff, ascii, plot(5), rtf and handwritten. ------------------------------ From: teffta@cs690-3.erie.ge.com (Andrew R. Tefft) Subject: Re: [Not] enough SLS bashing Reply-To: teffta@cs690-3.erie.ge.com Date: Fri, 17 Sep 1993 12:10:09 GMT In article w165w@jaiser.rain.com, jerryg@jaiser.rain.com (Jerry Gaiser) writes: > >Well, I don't know about Slackware, because it requires me to have a 3 >1/2 inch diskette to boot and, believe it or not, I don't. > >So for _some_ of us Slackware is worthless. Is slackware yet available in smaller files? When I first heard of it, it was a 30-odd meg tar file which was impossible for me to retrieve, and I thought "how stupid." SLS's multiple-files-per-multiple-directories is not real easy to ftp but tools like ftptool make that easier. Of course, I don't advocate *any* distributions beyond the initial install. -- Andy Tefft - new, expanded .sig - teffta@cs690-3.erie.ge.com ------------------------------ From: byron@cc.gatech.edu (Byron A Jeff) Subject: Re: [Not] enough SLS bashing Date: Fri, 17 Sep 1993 14:02:34 GMT In article , Andrew R. Tefft wrote: >In article w165w@jaiser.rain.com, jerryg@jaiser.rain.com (Jerry Gaiser) writes: >> >>Well, I don't know about Slackware, because it requires me to have a 3 >>1/2 inch diskette to boot and, believe it or not, I don't. >> >>So for _some_ of us Slackware is worthless. > >Is slackware yet available in smaller files? When I first heard >of it, it was a 30-odd meg tar file which was impossible for me >to retrieve, and I thought "how stupid." Yes it's now broken up into disk size directories (1.44 Meg). Series and sizes in disks: A: 13 base X: 11 X windows E: 5 Emacs Y: 1 Games Q: 1 Experimental Note that TeX is not included. The SLS T series can be used. > >SLS's multiple-files-per-multiple-directories is not real easy to ftp >but tools like ftptool make that easier. Actually in standard FTP you can make the directory structure locally and then mget *. It automatically pulls down all subdirectories that were previously created. > >Of course, I don't advocate *any* distributions beyond the initial >install. I disagree. I had major problems trying to upgrade from SLS 1.01 to kernel PL12, GCC 2.4.5, X 1.3, Net-2, and Lib 4.4.2. It took all of 30 minutes of setup (saving non distribution stuff, putting my machine on the net, fdisk, and finally setup with no prompts). Slackware loaded all be itself and everything works fine now. Later, BAJ --- Another random extraction from the mental bit stream of... Byron A. Jeff - PhD student operating in parallel! Georgia Tech, Atlanta GA 30332 Internet: byron@cc.gatech.edu ------------------------------ From: jcburt@gats486.larc.nasa.gov Subject: HZ environmental variable Date: 17 Sep 1993 13:52:51 GMT Okay, I have a dumb question for all the linux/unix gurus out there in netland...I have this environmental variable HZ that is set for me in the /etc/login.defs file. Just *what* is this variable describing? I have SLS 1.03 distribution and the /etc/login.defs file that was supplied has HZ=50. Does HZ describe the AC line frequency? Or is it something else? I don't know of *anything* associated with my computer that has a frequency of 50HZ...so in simple terms... what does the envrionmental variable HZ describe ? what does the environmental variable HZ affect ? John -- John Burton G & A Technical Software, Inc. jcburt@gatsibm.larc.nasa.gov 28 Research Dr. Hampton, Va. 23666 jcburt@gats486.larc.nasa.gov (804) 865-7491 ------------------------------ ** FOR YOUR REFERENCE ** The service address, to which questions about the list itself and requests to be added to or deleted from it should be directed, is: Internet: Linux-Admin-Request@NEWS-DIGESTS.MIT.EDU You can send mail to the entire list (and comp.os.linux.admin) via: Internet: Linux-Admin@NEWS-DIGESTS.MIT.EDU Linux may be obtained via one of these FTP sites: nic.funet.fi pub/OS/Linux tsx-11.mit.edu pub/linux sunsite.unc.edu pub/Linux End of Linux-Admin Digest ******************************