SEMiSLUG Notes
8 January 2004
Administrivia
Where to meet on an on-going basis? What does the ITI building _do_ any
more?
Stay here, while we can!
Perhaps we'll be come a student organization and meet on campus.
Question & Answer Sessions
- Can someone help Drew get 1024x768 on a Knoppix box?
- There's something broken with the "cheat codes" for the Knoppix
boot line. Knoppix is playing some sort of games with the X server
they're shipping with 3.3. Dave New's tried a variety of config
tricks to no avail.
Check the XFree86 log file (/var/log/XFree86.0.log or somesuch)
for hints as to what might be going on.
Try Ctrl-Alt with numeric-pad + and - to cycle through available
resolutions.
- Cheap remote network diagnostics?
- Ping. Traceroute, maybe.
There's an office with low-budget hardware that experiences
network bog-down when the net gets hammered hard. How do you
probe the network and get enough information to guess which
hardware needs replacing?
Probably have to go machine to machine FTP-ing a known file
from machine to machine to check the timings and go from there.
Also, rolling machines in and out of the net. Start with two
machines and a switch and add one device at a time to watch now
the throughput goes.
- E-mail packages for eight-year olds and grandmothers?
- Juno is easy enough for one person's computer illiterate parent.
Horde has lots of things you can click on -- that might be worth
a try.
Try a static HTML page with a few mailto: tags for an easy mailer
that only allows mail to the people your child is allowed to
write to. This approach may not be a good solution for your
grandmother.
- What resource gets consumed everytime you run a program under Windows 98?
(And other versions?) And how do you get it back?
- Google for "GDI" and "resources" and see what you can find.
Basicly: Windows is stupid.
- Anybody using the last versions of RedHat (7.3 and 8.0) and what do you
do about it?
- Contract with a third-party support group (e.g. Progeny at
$5/machine/month), if you can afford it. The Fedora project
is a possibility.
The Debian distribution is a good alternative to the old RH, if
you're willing to make the switch.
- SPAM! What's a good, easy-to-set-up strategy to use with fetchmail?
- Bogofilter's a good one. Look for more info later, as improved
Bayesian techniques come along.
A "Home mail machine HOWTO" would be nice.
- Has anyone seen the FreeBSD TCP/MSS denial of service thing yet?
- Really small MSS (e.g. 1) results in a heap of CPU time being spent
with frag/defrag operations on packets. Bad ju-ju.
This doesn't affect everyone, just some systems. In general, it's
being blown out of proportion.
- ssh over udp -- how? Why?
- Is _anyone_ actually doing this? No one, as far as we know.
- What do we do with a bunch of old Sun hardware (Sparq 10's, Sparq 20's,
and so on)?
- Rave Electronics in Stirling Heights deals with refurb Sun hardware.
Check www.processor.com for information.
eBay is always an option.
Use the money to buy newer hardware. (Intel boxes with FreeBSD
and so on.)
-
Presentation
We talked. We told stories. We basked in the glory of some truly fine
cookies.
Rumor & Innuendo (No names, please)
Linus knew.