Linux Gazette... making Linux just a little more fun! Copyright © 1996-98 Specialized Systems Consultants, Inc. _________________________________________________________________ Welcome to Linux Gazette! (tm) _________________________________________________________________ Published by: Linux Journal _________________________________________________________________ Sponsored by: InfoMagic S.u.S.E. Red Hat Our sponsors make financial contributions toward the costs of publishing Linux Gazette. If you would like to become a sponsor of LG, e-mail us at sponsor@ssc.com. Linux Gazette is a non-commercial, freely available publication and will remain that way. Show your support by using the products of our sponsors and publisher. _________________________________________________________________ Table of Contents May 1998 Issue #28 _________________________________________________________________ * The Front Page * The MailBag + Help Wanted + General Mail * More 2 Cent Tips + Re: Shutdown and Root + Re: Core Dumps + Easter Egg in Netscape + Host Name Completion + Running Without Logging In + Animation Easter Eggs in Netscape + Re: Usershell on Console Without Logging In + Backing Up Win95 Files + Re: X-term for MS-Windows + Re: Shutdown and Root Again + Running an ATAPI Zip Drive + New Binaries Script + Script Contributions + Re: Core Dumps Again * News Bytes + News in General + Software Announcements * The Answer Guy, by James T. Dennis * BigBen: Network Monitor Utility, by Cesare Pizzi * Building an Audio CD Player, Part 1, by Michel Hamilton * COMDEX/Spring 1998, by Jon "maddog" Hall * Home Networking With Linux, by Glen Journeay * IPmasquerading with Roadrunner or Second Ethernet Card, by Mark Nielsen * Keep Your Eye On The Prize, by Dave Winer * Linux Fax for Dummies, by Martin Vermeer * Marketing Linux, by Jim Schweizer * Product Review: Music Publisher, by Bob van der Poel * Book Review: Netscape IFC In a Nutshell, by R. J. Celestino * New Release Reviews, by Larry Ayers + The Xfstt True-Type Font Server + Updates to Past Reviews * Open Source Summit + Open Source Summit, by Eric Raymond + Open Source Summit Trip Report, by Guido van Rossum + Open Source Summit Press Release, from O'Reilly & Associates * A Tale in Writing, by Martin Vermeer * Where Nothing Else Will Do, by Chris Gonnerman * The Back Page + About This Month's Authors + Not Linux The Answer Guy The Graphics Muse Will Return _________________________________________________________________ TWDT 1 (text) TWDT 2 (HTML) are files containing the entire issue: one in text format, one in HTML. They are provided strictly as a way to save the contents as one file for later printing in the format of your choice; there is no guarantee of working links in the HTML version. _________________________________________________________________ Got any great ideas for improvements? Send your comments, criticisms, suggestions and ideas. _________________________________________________________________ This page written and maintained by the Editor of Linux Gazette, gazette@ssc.com "Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!" _________________________________________________________________ The Mailbag! Write the Gazette at gazette@ssc.com Contents: * Help Wanted -- Article Ideas * General Mail _________________________________________________________________ Help Wanted -- Article Ideas _________________________________________________________________ Date: Wed, 1 Apr 1998 23:13:13 +0200 From: Tomas Valusek, tvalusek@vs.inext.cz Subject: MIDI on Linux I'm trying to understand how is MIDI supported on Linux. Can you write a detailed article about it? Tomas Valusek _________________________________________________________________ Date: Thu, 02 Apr 1998 15:59:18 +0800 From: Kevin Ng, kng@HK.Super.NET Subject: Patch troubleshooting It is common nowadays for s/w to be delivered in form of patches, which makes sense in terms of saving network bandwidth and time. However, as a end user, when somehow a patch fails, I don't know what do do, except email to the original author. I'd therefore like to see an article describing patches, i.e., * what are they for ? * How to apply one ? * How to create one ? * How to check integrity of s/w patch * what to do if the patch gives you errors ? Kevin (from Hong Kong) _________________________________________________________________ Date: Mon, 30 Mar 1998 16:51:09 -0800 From: Nate Daiger, daiger@newdream.net Subject: HELP--Utility for changing NTFS partition sizes I want to dynamically change my NTFS partition to install Linux, but can only find resizing utilities for FAT. If no such utility exists, is there a way to install Linux on an NTFS partition? Nate Daiger _________________________________________________________________ Date: Tue, 31 Mar 1998 22:33:39 -0500 From: Ahmad Faiz, AFAIZ@cstp.umkc.edu Subject: Printing with Linux I'm running Red Hat 5.0 on my machine, and I've just bought a HP DeskJet 722C printer, but I couldn't get it to work. I asked around on the IRC channels, and so far everyone has answered that Linux does not support it - is it a windows-only printer? If so, is it possible to write a driver for it? or does anyone know of where I can get my hands on the driver (if it's already been written, of course). I would love to try and write one, but unfortunately I'm new to Linux and to programming. any help would be appreciated...thanks! Faiz _________________________________________________________________ Date: Wed, 1 Apr 1998 16:00:19 -0500 (EST) From: Nordic Boy, jklaas@cs.albany.edu Subject: SysV init for Slackware I am wondering if someone out there knows of a package to change Slackware's BSDish inittab (and rc.d/rc.*) files to a SysV type structure with separate rc.d.0, rc.d.1, etc inits. I am asking because I recently installed KDE and I really like it and I was thinking of using the SysV init editor that comes with it, but it would be nice to have something to start with rather than starting from scratch. Thanks, James Klaas _________________________________________________________________ Date: Thu, 02 Apr 1998 16:03:00 +0800 From: Kevin Ng, kng@HK.Super.NET Subject: How to enable swapping My machine, which is a Pentium Pro with 64MB memory, reports no swap space being used. In procinfo, it always report 0K swap space. I did a fdisk on /dev/hda and verified that a 64MB partition of type Linux swap (83) is actually there. So why is the swap never being used ? Kevin _________________________________________________________________ Date: Fri, 3 Apr 1998 09:35:37 +0200 (CEST) From: K. Nikolaj Berntsen, berntsen@bkm.dtu.dk Subject: finite elements programs for Linux At the department where I am sitting they are planning to buy a PC-bar, and they intend to put NT on the machines. I would benefit from them putting Linux on them, since I could then use them for simulations overnight. I started talking to the ones buying it and my arguments stopped, when they said that one reason for using NT was that they should be running finite elements programs on them and that the frontier for those programs was now on the windows platform. I don't know s... about that, so I am looking for info; should I accept their arguments or is it that he just does not know what can be gotten for Linux? Commercial Finite Element Method (FEM) programs are also in the searchlight! Happy Computing, Nikolaj _________________________________________________________________ Date: Mon, 06 Apr 1998 13:42:35 -0700 From: Peter D'Souza, dsouza@panix.com Subject: Btrieve Port? Our company runs two major apps using a Btrieve database. I was wondering if anybody has ported either Btrieve server or client to Linux. It is an extremely fast database (and highly underrated too) which would be excellent if ported to Linux. I'm not too sure if the developers of our Btrieve applications would move to Linux, but if I could test a Linux-based solution with sample datasets, perhaps they'd be more amenable to the idea of moving to a Linux platform (as an alternative, at least). Peter D'Souza _________________________________________________________________ Date: Wed, 08 Apr 1998 11:12:53 +0200 From: Denny Åberg, Denny@ele.kth.se Hi, I'm tired of starting my X-session with 'startx -- -bpp 16' to get 16 biplanes instead of the default 8. How do I get xdm to run with 16 bpp? If I use it now, it starts X with 8bpp on my Red Hat 5 installation. cheers, Denny Åberg, Sweden _________________________________________________________________ Date: Sat, 11 Apr 1998 17:18:11 +0000 From: pheret, pheret@linex.com Subject: floppy problems Hi there. Okay, i don't know if this is a floppy problem, or what, but here goes. I am able to mount my diskette, but when I try to copy something from the disk to my hard drive I get this error: floppy0: disk absent or changed during operation end_request: I/O error, dev 02:00, sector 1 bread in fat_access failed cp: : I/O error Is this because it is mounted umsdos? Should I mount it something else? I am running Linux 2.0.0 on an AST ascentia950n. I only have my basic system right now because I can't get my floppies to copy! arrgh. anyhow, if you can help me, could you please send suggestions to pheret@linex.com? Thanks! _________________________________________________________________ Date: Sun, 19 Apr 1998 17:53:47 +0200 From: letromb@tin.it Subject: cd rom Hello.I have the Linux Slackware 2.0.30 Walnut Creek.I installed it on a Pentium 200 MMX with a 24x CD-ROM. During the installation I had to write "ramdisk hdd=cdrom" for reading the CD-ROM, but after the installation Linux doesn't see the CD-ROM. I have an atapi CD-ROM, and when I tried to compile my kernel another time, I saw that atapi is the default !!! So I don't understand where is the problem . What can I do ? Thank you for your reply, Leonardo _________________________________________________________________ Date: Sun, 19 Apr 1998 13:45:54 +0000 From: Jason Powell, jay@Lauren.dyn.ml.org Subject: Red Hat Linux 5 Anyone know when Red Hat Linux 5.1 is coming out? I'm running a severely modified version of 5.0 now, and needless to say it stinks. I can't compile anything that uses sockets because of broken headers. Suffice to say, I find it to be quite an annoyance. _________________________________________________________________ Date: Fri, 24 Apr 1998 16:02:09 +0200 From: Lambert van Eijck, eijck@iri.tudelft.nl I'm having a problem with my menus in X. I can access all menus (by mouse), but the items of those menus which are WITHIN a "X-box" are not selectable, somehow. The menus I'm talking about are menus like the 'vt fonts', 'main options' and 'vt options' in the Xterm. Or the 'file' and 'page' menu of Ghostscript. If anyone has a suggestion on why I can select the menu but not menu item, please send me a mail. I'm using Debian 1.3. Lambert van Eijck _________________________________________________________________ Date: Sat, 18 Apr 1998 13:12:53 +0800 From: Guan Yang, guan@wk.dk Subject: How do I set up XDM? I have heard that one can login to Linux via XDM. How is this done? Also, I have also heard that you can get a Linux penguin at boottime or something like that. Tell! _________________________________________________________________ Date: Sun, 26 Apr 1998 14:42:28 +0200 From: Ola Ekdahl, ola.ekdahl@swipnet.se Subject: Modem I am a real Linux newbie and I wonder how do I configure my modem. It's a sportster flash modem. _________________________________________________________________ Date: Sat, 18 Apr 1998 17:01:59 -0700 From: tng, tng@sosweb.com Subject: getting ppp-2.3.3 to work Anyway I finally decided to migrate to linux kernel 2.1.94 mainly because of the .94 indicates that they are almost ready for the next stable release... The problem I have is ppp 2.3.3 I downloaded is read the README compiled the required parts and installed flawlessly...Now I CANNOT conect to my ISP.. They are running a linux network with redhat 5 for web hosting and slakeware controling the raid and passwords. I'm running slackware. (redhat would crash every couple days wipeing out my harddisk...got tired of rebuilding my system...got real good at backups : ) ) the ppp-2.2 I was using I had to use the +ua switch where file contained the username and password for upap auth. after upgrading this swich was no longer available so I simply added it to my /etc/ppp/pap-secretes file: username * password this didn't work. So, I tried the following: localhost * username:password * * username:password My ISP hangs up on me. I changed the order of the fields every which way I could thing of but nothing worked. I would like to get my linux box back on the net because of better transfer times and a more stable environment. (linux connected at 33.6 and windoz connects and 24.# with the same serial settings modem init etc.) Please help...I hate to downgrade after houres of work upgrading. _________________________________________________________________ Date: Tue, 28 Apr 1998 10:31:14 +0800 From: Stephen Lee, sljm@pobox.org.sg Subject: Help Slackware I am running Slackware 3.2 and I want my machine to have a name like stephen.merlin.com when people dial into my machine using PPP or Slip (My idea is to run some sort of a intranet BBS with poeple dialing in using Dial-up networking and people can telnet in) but apart from setting /etc/hostname do I need to run "named" perhaps you can have a article on how to set up this type of service. _________________________________________________________________ General Mail _________________________________________________________________ Date: Wed, 01 Apr 1998 09:45:11 -0600 From: Mike Hammel, mjhammel@graphics-muse.org To: STunney@ahcpr.gov Subject: grammer sites? You recently wrote to the Linux Gazette to express your aggravation about the use of apostrophes and the world "alot" in many articles and letters. You are correct - both of these are misused often in email, even more so in general email not destined for an online magazine. I often find myself trying to reword a sentence to not use "alot", and am aggravated with myself for having used it so often I can't think of more proper wording! You also mentioned that there were online dictionaries available. My only problem with your letter was you didn't mention where these could be found. If you have a few references, a follow up letter to the Gazette would be grealy appreciated. I know I often have need for a dictionary and a theasaurus in my own writings. Although I have one of each, they are pocket editions and somewhat limited. I realize I could look for references via Yahoo or other online search engines, but I thought since you had mentioned their existance you might already have the references. Thanks. Michael J. Hammel, The Graphics Muse _________________________________________________________________ Date: Wed, 01 Apr 1998 11:55:05 +0100 From: John Hartnup, slim@ladle.demon.co.uk Subject: Regular Expressions Great April issue. Thanks. The further reading section for the Regular Expressions in C++ section misses out the *excellent* O'Reilly book Mastering Regular Expressions. I suspect that most people, like me before I read the book, don't realise the sheer power behind regexs. It's revloutionised my coding methods (especially in Perl!). John _________________________________________________________________ Date: Thu, 2 Apr 1998 19:51:30 -0500 (EST) From: Casimer P. Zakrzewski, zak@acadia.net Subject: IBM 8514 Monitor and X I hope you have the space to publish all of this letter. I would certainly appreciate it if you did. Back in the Feb 98 issue of LG, my request for help with installing X on the old IBM monitor I have was published, and I received a number of replies, from all over the world as you'll see. I wish to thank: Corey G. ; Todd Jamison ; "War Hound" ; Justin Dossey ; Martin Vermeer ; Alexy Yurchenko ; Robert Reid ; and, Miss Valarie Frizzle Many advised using 'xvidtune' to get the proper settings, and a couple advised me to get RH5.0. I only got around to trying out anything about two weeks ago. Now this may come in handy for anyone else with a monitor like mine. It was so simple it was foolish. First, I couldn't find 'xvidtune' after reinstalling RH4.2, so I figured I'd play around with the X configuration. If I blew the monitor, well..... In the RH installation, when I got to the selection of monitors, I bit the bullet and selected 'custom'. A new menu came up, and guess what? In it was a listing for an 'IBM 8514 or compatible'. (As the younger people say today, I said "Duh?") I kind of figured my monitor was as compatible as it could get! After I clicked on that and popped in what freqs I knew, X worked perfectly. Which is a nice end to the tale, but doesn't address the problem. The problem was that I was afraid to (as Ms. Frizzle says) 'Take chances; get messy.' I was too happy webbing along in the Win95 world. To newbies like me out there, all I can say is: do just that. I advise having a notebook and pen handy at all times, though, to write down anything you change and where you changed it. Does RTFM sound familiar? Do that, too. A lot. Linux can be confusing, especially when you're trying to do something supposedly simple like installing PPP (I'm *still* working on that) and at different web sites you find three or four different ways to do that, and none seem to work in your case. That's when you take chances and get messy. And you may well (as I've had to do), hit the big RESET button when it's a total SNAFU, and maybe have to reinstall. Breaks of the game. And that's where the notebook you've been writing all your changes comes in very handy. If you try to keep it all in your head, the kumpewter will win every time. In addition, there is a lot of help from off-line sources, like library book sales. Last year, for example, I picked up an 'outdated' SAMS book entitled, "X Window System Programming". That was before I even thought about putting together another 'puter - over eight years from touching a keyboard. I may never use it; but it only cost $.50. Local gurus; if you're lucky enough to have them, be subtle in your approach to them. Like, 'Uh, gee, you can really get your (whatever it is) really whipping up a storm. Mine kinda...', and let it drag out. Ten years ago when I was a supposed 'guru', that *always* got me going. And I learned from a guy who had a really modern system back in the '80s, so I got one just like it. When you say, "TRASH-80", you better smile, pardner! Mod-1, no less. 4K RAM. It could do just about anything. Your ISP may or may not be a help, but try it. Where I am, when I walked in to sign up and the word Linux passed my lips, I thought they'd hang balls of garlic around their necks. But if you want to do it, you will. I still don't have PPP on Linux, for example, so under Win95, if I find something tempting on the web, I still download it. It can always be put on a disk, if necessary - say you don't have a dos mount - and then tarred to your Linux partitiion. But write it down; write it all down. That's all I have to say, except I again all those who sent me help. That's what Linux is all about anyway, isn't it. PS: I hope I was correct in the above to please the English purists. If not: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maximum culpa. Zak _________________________________________________________________ Date: Mon, 6 Apr 1998 14:30:29 -0600 (MDT) From: Dale K. Hawkins, dhawkins@teton.Mines.EDU Subject: Bazaar ISP... Hello, I was wondering if anyone has ever considered the idea of a bazaar model for running an ISP. By a Bazaar model, I of caurse refer to the infamous Cathedral vs. Bazaar model for software development. So what do I really mean. I mean an ISP by the people for the people. I have found that most ISP's are very restrictive in how things are run, i.e., many of the interesting utilities are strictly off limits. For example, I was recently trying to setup cvs to work as a server. The normal way to do this is by adding a line to inetd.conf. However, being only a "user" on my ISP, I had no way to accomplish this. So I though of a more complex way to set this up, but that method require the use of crontab. Again this service is not available to Joe User. I am very aware of the obvious security issues, but surely there must be a way to improve the situation in someway. I cannot but think about rms (Richard Stallman) and some of his lestures on the evils of a sysadmin and thinking, "how true". But how can one deal with the open system issue, while still maintain a certain level of system security. I would be very pleased to see this erupt into a deep and lengthy thread somewhere. Just my 2 cents. -Dale _________________________________________________________________ Date: Sun, 5 Apr 1998 21:12:00 +0100 From: William Chesters, williamc@dai.ed.ac.uk Subject: Linux is not ready for the desktop David Wagle ("Evangelism: A Unix Bigot and Linux Advocate's Spewings", Linux Gazette #27) points out some good reasons why converting people to Linux can be harder than we expect. But he seems to shy away from the natural conclusion. It is not currently possible to put together a setup which makes it possible for people to do normal day-to-day work and simple admin without serious trouble---whether or not they care about abandoning their existing Windows software. Ergo, Linux is simply not, in all conscience, a suitable platform for unsupported users who just want to get their jobs done. It very nearly is. I run the maximally friendly Linux installation with Red Hat, linuxconf, KDE, Netscape and Word Perfect; my experience is that intelligent non-Unix users can manage fine 90% of the time. The remaining problems are very obvious, but here there are anyway spelt out in order of seriousness: * Few of the heavyweight GUI apps and tools mentioned above work reliably: they suffer at least as many bugs and crashes as their Windows equivalents (KDE, of course, is still in beta). While on the other hand ... * ... The classic Unix applications (emacs, tex etc.) are rock steady; but they are not wonderful enough, outside certain narrow (generally academic) domains, to offset the difficulty and crankiness which everyone freely admits they exhibit. * The GUI tools cannot handle all day-to-day tasks; and to achieve the best coverage, you have to use tools from several different stables, which is confusing---especially when they interact poorly with each other. * Some classes of desktop application simply do not exist for Linux at any price, or are far inferior to their Windows counterparts. Try getting something to typeset music. * Nothing even attempts to achieve the kind of effortless networking which Windows users take for granted. (Don't flame me---go and try Windows.) * The underlying OS does have a few bugs, minor perhaps, but nevertheless showstoppers for unsupported users. "Just stop lpd, remove the lp kernel module, modprobe it again and restart lpd" is not what they want to hear. Yes, progress over the last year or two has been breathtaking. The developer community has shown itself capable of coming up with really lovely utilities and tools for non-initiates, and it no longer seems implausible that Linux will soon develop into something that rivals NT for ease of use. But in the mean time, proposing Linux to anyone not already conversant with Unix is tantamount to suggesting a new hobby: one with tangible rewards, to be sure, but let's admit that's what it is. Linux is not ready for the desktop. _________________________________________________________________ Published in Linux Gazette Issue 28, May 1998 _________________________________________________________________ [ TABLE OF CONTENTS ] [ FRONT PAGE ] Next This page written and maintained by the Editor of Linux Gazette, gazette@ssc.com Copyright © 1998 Specialized Systems Consultants, Inc. "Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!" _________________________________________________________________ More 2¢ Tips! Send Linux Tips and Tricks to gazette@ssc.com _________________________________________________________________ Contents: * Re: Shutdown and Root * Re: Core Dumps * Easter Egg in Netscape * Host Name Completion * Running Without Logging In * Animation Easter Eggs in Netscape * Re: Usershell on Console Without Logging In * Backing Up Win95 Files * Re: X-term for MS-Windows * Re: Shutdown and Root Again * Running an ATAPI Zip Drive * New Binaries Script * Script Contributions * Re: Core Dumps Again _________________________________________________________________ Re: Shutdown and Root Date: Wed, 1 Apr 1998 06:31:04 -0500 From: Buz Cory, adm@bzsys.dyn.ml.org From the Linux Gazette, #27 Guido Socher, eedgus@eed.ericsson.se wrote: I noticed that many people still login as root before they power down their system in order to run the command 'shutdown -h now'. This is really not necessary and it may cause problems if everybody working on a machine knows the root password. Very true. Most Linux distributions are configured to reboot if ctrl-alt-delete is pressed, but this can be changed to run 'shutdown -h now'. Edit your /etc/inittab ... [snip inittab] Now you can just press crtl-alt-delete as normal user and your system comes down clean and halts. Not necessarily the best solution. It is perfectly safe to simply do a "Three-finger salute", allow a normal shutdown, and then power down the machine anytime after you get the message "unmounting filesystems" until you get the message during reboot saying "mounting all filesystems". Probably the easiest time would be at the LILO boot prompt (assuming you are using LILO). An alternative I used once on a system that did *not* have enabled was to provide a special login that *just* did a shutdown. There is such a line in my /etc/passwd now that I didn't put there, so I guess it's from RedHat two years ago. Regards, ==Buz :) _________________________________________________________________ Re: Core Dumps Date: Wed, 1 Apr 1998 14:31:24 -0500 (EST) From: Claude Morin, klode@isgtec.com Neat idea! Christoph Spiel says: I'd like to paste some sample output here, but neither can I find a core dump on my machine, nor do I know a program that generates one. How to generate a core dump in one easy lesson: * run something that reads stdin, like: cat * press ^\ You've just generated a core dump by sending SIGQUIT to cat. If this doesn't work, you probably have core dumps disabled. To check: within bash: ulimit -a within tcsh: limit Lastly, you can kill -QUIT various running processes; if they don't handle the signal, they'll dump core. Remember kids: don't try this as root :-) Claude _________________________________________________________________ Easter Egg in Netscape Date: Thu, 2 Apr 1998 11:25:56 +0800 (HKT) From: Romel Flores, rom@elsi.i-manila.com.ph Remember the "about:mozilla" egg? Try it again and the usuall egg appears. Now, click on the "N" logo. This will open Netscape's home page as usuall but the meteor shower on the "N" logo is replaced with Godzilla. --Romel Flores _________________________________________________________________ Host Name Completion Date: Fri, 3 Apr 1998 01:57:43 -0500 (EST) From: John Taylor, john@pollux.cs.uga.edu Host name completion with BASH. Synopsis : This is how you can use host name completion, which is similar to file name completion. Put your favorite telnet,ftp,rlogin hosts into $HOME/.hosts, in /etc/hosts format. example : 206.184.214.34 linux.kernel.org then put into .bashrc : ------ cut here ------ export HOSTFILE="$HOME/.hosts" # see HOSTFILE in bash man page UseHosts() { for i in $* ; do eval `echo "$i() { local IFS=\"@\\$IFS\"; set -- \\$1; eval command $i \\\\ \\${\\$#} ; }"` done } UseHosts telnet rlogin ftp ------ cut here ------ Now do a . .bashrc, to re-source the rc file. You should have new 3 shell functions defined...telnet,rlogin,ftp do a "set | less" to verify this now try this [notice the @]: ftp @lin which completes to linux.kernel.org Well, this breaks doing just a "ftp", but this can be fixed by doing a "command ftp", (maybe alias this??) which will give you the ftp> prompt. Rlogin will also break if you have to use the -l switch. This could be incorporated into UseHosts(), I just haven't had time to do it. If you change the .hosts file, you have to logout and login again to use the new hosts ... don't ask me why.x> John Taylor _________________________________________________________________ Running Without Logging In Date: Thu, 2 Apr 1998 22:50:26 -0800 (PST) From: Jakob Kaivo, jkaivo@nodomainname.net I notice a lot of discussion in Issue 27 of running shells on vt's without logging in. I'm sure that there are some great solutions, but I would like to add my 1/50 of a dollar to the heap. A while ago I had a need to keep a telnet session open on a vt, so I hacked mingetty to do it. Then I figured, "Hey, why stop there?" So I hacked a little more and came up with rungetty, which can run any program on a vt. It also (in the newest release) can run as any user, so a login is no problem, but you can also tell it to, say, keep a top session running on another vt. It is available from ftp://ftp.nodomainname.net/pub/rungetty/current (home site), ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/serial/getty, and should find it's way into ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/contrib soon. It is available in tarball, source RPM, and binary RPM for alpha (glibc2) and i386 (libc5 and glibc2) on nodomainname, and tarball on sunsite. Jakob Kaivo _________________________________________________________________ Animation Easter Eggs in Netscape Date: Mon, 06 Apr 1998 12:03:41 +0100 (IST) From: Caolan McNamara, Caolan.McNamara@ul.ie with the release of the netscape source the most important fact is now known, if your web page is not under http://home.netscape.com/people/ http://www.netscape.com/people/ http://people.netscape.com/ then you cant have a mozilla as the animation with the X version of netscape like http://people.netscape.com/briano and 20 others have and only jamie zawinski under that tree gets the compass http://people.netscape.com/jwz sigh, and i really hoped that i could have one too, :-( resource for this is lines 292-319 in ns/cmd/xfe/src/Logo.cpp list of names with possible animations easters follows akkana briano bstell converse djw dora dp francis kin jwz lwei mcafee radha ramiro rhess rodt slamm spence tao toshok zjanbay list of urls under which animation can take place. http://home.netscape.com/people/ http://www.netscape.com/people/ http://people.netscape.com/ and usual format is http://people.netscape.com/username Caolan McNamara _________________________________________________________________ Re: Usershell on Console Without Logging In Date: Wed, 08 Apr 1998 20:21:42 +0200 From: Soenke J. Peters, soenke@pc1.sjp.de In LG 27, Kragen@pobox.com announced some utilities to do an automatic login. Besides the fact that this might be a security risk, I use his program "own-tty" to have my dosemu running on a tty. Add the following line (or something adequate) to "/etc/inittab": 6:23:respawn:/sbin/own-tty /dev/tty6 /usr/bin/dos dos From inside X, CTRL-ALT-F6 beams you into dosemu, from the console ALT-F6 does the same. Press CTRL-ALT-Fx from inside dosemu to go back to ttyx. But be warned: Doing this causes a pretty high cpu-load because dosemu is _always_ runnning. To solve this problem, I inserted a "getchar();" into the source "own-tty.c" right before the "execv()" is done. This makes "own-tty" wait for a key beeing pressed before firing up dosemu. Soenke J. Peters, Hamburg, Germany _________________________________________________________________ Backing Up Win95 Files Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1998 07:51:38 -0400 From: Donald Harter Jr., harter@mufn.org Here is a shell script that will back up some of the windows 95 registry files on your vfat partition. You may not want to backup all the files in the script since the *.da0 files are backups themselves. There may others that I do not know about. You can use cron to run this script on a regular basis. Donald Harter Jr. #!/bin/sh # # This script will backup your windows 95 registry. # If you ever have problems with windows95, restoring the registry # might fix the problem. # By using this script you might not have to reinstall all your software. # BASE_DIR is the directory where you want the tar.gz archive to be written. # WIN_PATH is the base path of your windows 95 partition in the /etc/fstab file. # Change these to suit your own needs. # written by Donald Harter Jr. # BASE_DIR=$HOME WIN_PATH=/dosc # # REGISTRY_STEM=registry_`date +%m_%d_%Y` tar -c -f /tmp/$REGISTRY_STEM.tar --files-from=/dev/null # some of these files may not needed #tar -rPf /tmp/$REGISTRY_STEM.tar file_to_backup tar -rPf /tmp/$REGISTRY_STEM.tar $WIN_PATH/windows/system.dat tar -rPf /tmp/$REGISTRY_STEM.tar $WIN_PATH/windows/*.da0 tar -rPf /tmp/$REGISTRY_STEM.tar $WIN_PATH/windows/user.dat tar -rPf /tmp/$REGISTRY_STEM.tar $WIN_PATH/windows/*.ini tar -rPf /tmp/$REGISTRY_STEM.tar $WIN_PATH/autoexec.bat tar -rPf /tmp/$REGISTRY_STEM.tar $WIN_PATH/*.sys tar -rPf /tmp/$REGISTRY_STEM.tar $WIN_PATH/windows/command.com tar -rPf /tmp/$REGISTRY_STEM.tar $WIN_PATH/Program\ Files/Netscape/Users/harter/bookmark.htm gzip /tmp/$REGISTRY_STEM.tar mv /tmp/$REGISTRY_STEM.tar.gz $BASE_DIR/$REGISTRY_STEM.tar.gz echo "To restore your win95 registry type:" echo "tar -zPxvf $BASE_DIR/$REGISTRY_STEM.tar.gz " _________________________________________________________________ Re: X-term for MS-Windows Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1998 23:47:44 +0000 From: Milton L. Hankins, mlh@swl.msd.ray.com What it is sounds like you want is an X *server*. You have several options. There are a few commercial X servers out there: Hummingbird eXceed and LAN Workplace are two I know of. There's also a free X server (with much fewer features) called MI/X. You should be able to find these on the web. You may also opt to use something like VNC, the virtual network computer. You can also find that on the web. Milton L. Hankins _________________________________________________________________ Re: Shutdown and Root Again Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1998 19:16:23 -0600 From: Bob van der Poel, bvdpoel@kootenay.com In last months 2 cent tips: ------------ In the March issue, you have a tip on using X programs when you've run su to root. By far the easiest method is to simply setenv XAUTHORITY ~khera/.Xauthority for your own user name, of course... No need to run any other programs or cut and paste anything. Vivek Khera, Ph.D. ---------- Just adding the needed commands took me more than a few minutes. Part of the problem is that I'm using bash, not csh as Dr. Khera is. My solution was: 1. Add the following to the .bashrc script for root: eval OLDHOME=~$USER RCFILE=$OLDHOME/.rootrc if [ -e $RCFILE ] then source $RCFILE fi 2. Create a file in each user's home directory called .rootrc. In this have the following line: export XAUTHORITY=$OLDHOME/.Xauthority Hope this helps someone. Bob van der Poel, bvdpoel@kootenay.com _________________________________________________________________ Running an ATAPI Zip Drive Date: Sun, 19 Apr 1998 01:41:34 +0000 From: Steve Beach, asb4@psu.edu I just bought an IDE ATAPI iomega Zip drive, and I couldn't find any help at all on how to use it. So, I slogged through, got a great hint from Jeff Tranter (maintainer of the 'eject' utility), and managed to get it working. In the spirit of giving back to the community, here's my (maybe even) five cent tip. Here's how to use an IDE ATAPI zip drive on Linux. First, the kernel: Do _not_ use the "IDE FLOPPY" option (officially the name is CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDEFLOPPY ). This will work perfectly for reading and writing, but it will not work for ejecting. What you need to do is say yes to the option CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDESCSI. When this is set, you will treat the IDE ATAPI drive just like a SCSI drive, except without the SCSI card and all that other garbage. After making your kernel, you should get these messages in your startup messages (type dmesg at the prompt if they go by too fast to read): hda: WDC AC34000L, 3815MB w/256kB Cache, CHS=969/128/63 hdb: WDC AC34000L, 3815MB w/256kB Cache, CHS=969/128/63 hdc: TOSHIBA CD-ROM XM-6102B, ATAPI CDROM drive hdd: IOMEGA ZIP 100 ATAPI, ATAPI FLOPPY drive - enabling SCSI emulation ide2: ports already in use, skipping probe ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14 ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15 Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M FDC 0 is a post-1991 82077 scsi0 : SCSI host adapter emulation for IDE ATAPI devices scsi : 1 host. Vendor: IOMEGA Model: ZIP 100 Rev: 24.D Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 00 Detected scsi removable disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0 scsi : detected 1 SCSI disk total. SCSI device sda: hdwr sector= 512 bytes. Sectors= 196608 [96 MB] [0.1 GB] sda: Write Protect is off . . . Partition check: sda: sda4 hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4 hdb: hdb1 hdb2 hdb3 The key is that SCSI simulation will be used only if the native ATAPI driver for that device isn't found. So, since the ATAPI CD driver was compiled into the kernel, it used it. Since the ATAPI removable disk driver wasn't, SCSI emulation was used. Second, the device: If you want to have non-root users be able to mount, unmount, and eject the Zip disks, you've got to make a couple of changes to the default configuration. First thing to do is to change the permissions on the device. As root, type the following: chmod a+rw /dev/sda4 The next thing to do is set a shortcut (eject is easier). Again, as root, type the following: ln -s /dev/sda4 /dev/zip Third, the mount point: Create a mount point for your drive. I like /mnt/zip, so I just do a mkdir /mnt/zip. For ease, you now want to put this into your /etc/fstab. Put a line in that file that looks like /dev/sda4 /mnt/zip auto user,noauto 0 0 The first column is the device, followed by the mount point. The first 'auto' means that it will check to see the file system type when it is mounted. (Hence, you can read not only ext2fs, but also FAT, VFAT, etc.) The 'user' keyword allows average users to mount the disk, and the 'noauto' means that it will not be mounted at startup. I don't know what the two zero's mean, but it works for me. Now, at this point, any user should be able to mount the Zip disk by typing mount /mnt/zip Unmounting would just be umount /mnt/zip. Fourth, formatting the disks: The Zip disks you buy at your corner computer store are formatted for MSDOS. Personally, I prefer to have ext2fs formatted disks, so I don't have to worry about file name conflicts. Hence, I have to reformat them. There are two other oddities. First, the writable partition will be number 4. This is a Macintosh-ism, which you might as well leave. You can run fdisk and change the partition, but it will be much easier to just leave all your disks the same, and that way you won't have to change the line in /etc/fstab for each disk. Second, the initial permissions are not set to be writeable by the user. To handle all this, I do the following, as root (new disk, initially unmounted): (WARNING: This will erase all data on the disk!) /sbin/mke2fs -m 0 /dev/sda4 mount /mnt/zip chmod a+w /mnt/zip umount /mnt/zip Now, whenever the user mounts that disk, she will be able to write to it. Fifth, ejecting: The entire reason for using SCSI emulation is to make it easy to eject the disk. It's easy now: eject zip You can also say 'eject /dev/sda4', but since you created the symbolic link '/dev/zip', eject knows what you mean when you just say 'zip'. One thing about eject is that the average user does not have permission to use it. So, change the permission via setuid: chmod a+s /usr/bin/eject That should allow any user to eject any disk. Sixth, zip tools: Jarrod A. Smith (jsmith@scripps.edu) has written a really nifty little program to make mounting, unmounting, ejecting, documenting, and write protecting Zip disks really easy. The name is jaZip, and it is available as an RPM package (jaZip-0.22-3.i386.rpm) from the usual download sites, including ftp://ftp.redhat.com. Go ahead and download it -- it's only 24 K! I hope that covers everything -- if anybody has any questions, please let me know! Steve Beach _________________________________________________________________ New Binaries Script Date: Sat, 25 Apr 1998 01:06:03 -0700 From: Keith Humphreys, keith@SpeakerKits.com A friend installed linux and was mystified with the abundance of new binaries. This little script was written to help introduce him to the family members. May need bash >= 2. #!/bin/bash ########################################################################### # # mkcontents.b (c) 1998 Keith Humphreys (keith@SpeakerKits.com) GNUed # # 1988.04.22 # # This little script will create a list of descriptions for your main bins. # It depends on whatis which appeals to the binaries man pages. # Intended as a learning aid for newbies and as a memory crutch (for oldbies.) # ########################################################################### # These are the directories to scan: checkhere='/sbin /bin /usr/sbin /usr/bin' ########################################################################### if ! [ -f /usr/bin/whatis ] then echo ' You appear to be missing the /usr/bin/whatis program. Sorry charlie, only the finest tuna get to be Chicken of the Sea. ' exit 1 fi for dir in $checkhere do outFile=contents${dir//\//.} echo '------------------------------------------------------' if [ -f $outFile ] then rm $outFile echo "Removing old $outFile" fi echo "Scanning $dir and creating $outFile" echo '------------------------------------------------------' sleep 1 #To see message. for file in $(ls $dir) do echo $file #For entertainment whatis $file >> $outFile done done exit 0 _________________________________________________________________ Script Contributions Date: Sat, 18 Apr 1998 20:52:07 +0200 (SAT) From: Stefan van der Walt, trax@the-force.ml.org In the last few months, I wrote these simple scripts to enhance my Linux environment. I believe some other users might find them useful too, so I send you a copy. Here are the 4 scripts provided in tar files with a README. * MP3-PlayLister: Program which searches for all the MP3s in the current directory, recursively, and then plays them. * mountcd: Semi-intelligent CD-mounting program to shorten the command line for mounting CDs. Does simple checking to see if CD-ROM is already mounted or unmounted. * nookie: A primer on notifying the user of incoming nukes, or how to react on receiving them. * SysMail: A script to mail a message containing tokens to all system users. Thanx a mil! BTW Keep up the great work with the Gazette. You rule :) Stefan _________________________________________________________________ Re: Core Dumps Again Date: Sun, 26 Apr 1998 21:21:50 -0700 (PDT) From: macker, macker@netmagic.net In issue #26, Marty was saying "I was annoyed on Linux that file(1) couldn't tell what file dumped core if a core dump was seen.", and mentioned size(1). gdb(1) will also do the job... gdb -c core will show the program and calling arguments, as well as the signal generated when it died, usually signal 11 (segmentation fault). quit will exit the debugger. -macker _________________________________________________________________ Published in Linux Gazette Issue 28, May 1998 _________________________________________________________________ [ TABLE OF CONTENTS ] [ FRONT PAGE ] Back Next _________________________________________________________________ This page maintained by the Editor of Linux Gazette, gazette@ssc.com Copyright © 1998 Specialized Systems Consultants, Inc. "Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!" _________________________________________________________________ News Bytes Contents: * News in General * Software Announcements _________________________________________________________________ News in General _________________________________________________________________ June Linux Journal The June issue of Linux Journal will be hitting the newsstands May 8. The focus of this issue is Connectivity with articles on setting up PLIP, NFS and NIS, using Linux with the PalmPilot, a user-friendly GUI for PPP and much more. Check out the Table of Contents. To subscribe to Linux Journal, click here. _________________________________________________________________ Linux in the News * The transcript of the April 8 "All Things Considered" interview on National Public radio can be found on the Linux Resources web site. * On April 17 NPR's "Science Friday" did a story on free software featuring Richard Stallman and Eric S. Raymond. * Here's an article about Linux worth having a look at: http://www.gihyo.co.jp/SD/pacific/index.html * XFree86 Postion Statement on X11R6.4 Licensing * Check out PC Quest's April issue, especially the editorial. This is a curtain raiser for their May issue which will focus on Linux. * Linux is being used by the Post Office to sort the mail. Read John Taves' article. _________________________________________________________________ Scientific Software Packaging Feedback Date: Fri, 3 Apr 1998 07:19:12 -0700 (MST) Purpose? We at Kachina Technologies, Inc. are very excited about the tremendously increasing popularity of our SAL (Scientific Application on Linux) web site. Based on encouraging user feedbacks, we want to go the extra mile to provide more services to the Linux and the Scientific and Engineering communities. What is SAL? SAL (Scientific Applications on Linux) web sites collect thousands of software links for scientists, engineers, and Linux ethusiasts. There is no doubt that SAL has become one of the most important, popular, and exciting software resources for the Linux and UNIX community. SAL was developed by Dr. Herng-Jeng Jou, along with many others at Kachina Technologies, Inc. While most system/network level applications are packaged by Linux distributors and provided on their CD-ROM distributions, most commonly used free scientific packages are still provided in source code format. Although many users contributed packages which are often found in /contrib directories on Linux distributors' FTP sites, lack of version tracking and centralized control hinder the appreciation of these individual efforts. We are facinated by the team work and coordination of GNU/Debian Linux people and want to pursue the same goal in software packaging for the Scientific and Engineering community. Our initial goal is to archive Debian (.deb), RedHat (.rpm), and simple binary tree (.tgz) used by many distributions including the popular Slackware distribution. At the same time, SAL's website will function as a repository and users can download the packages and install them on their systems immediately. However, we'd like to listen to your opinions on the best policies and procedures to get this job done correctly. Please tell us what scientific and engineering software (those with free source codes that are available of course) you would like to see packaged. Please email us at sal@kachinatech.com and simply include: 1. Software name(s) 2. Preferred packaging format (RPM, DEB, or others) Although this is just a survey, we are quite serious and excited about doing this. The established packages will be available through SAL. Currently, there are 14 SAL sites installed worldwide, and their URLs are: Austria http://nswt.tuwien.ac.at/scicomp/sal/ Finland http://sal.jyu.fi/ Germany http://ftp.llp.fu-berlin.de/lsoft/ Italy http://chpc06.ch.unito.it/linux/ Japan http://ec.tmit.ac.jp/koyama/linux/SAL/ Poland http://www.tuniv.szczecin.pl/linux/doc/other/SAL Portugal http://www.idite-minho.pt/SAL/ Russia http://www.sai.msu.su/sal/ South Africa http://web.ee.up.ac.za/sal/ South Korea http://infosite.kordic.re.kr/sal Spain http://ceu.fi.udc.es/SAL/ Turkey http://sal.raksnet.com.tr United Kingdom http://www.ch.qub.ac.uk/SAL/ USA http://SAL.KachinaTech.COM We welcome your feedback, comments, and suggestions. Please send your messages (including mirroring requests) to sal@kachinatech.com For more information: Herng-Jeng Jou, hjjou@KachinaTech.COM Team SAL, Kachina Technologies, Inc. _________________________________________________________________ MAILING-LIST: Linux Speech Recognition Date: Fri, 3 Apr 1998 07:19:12 -0700 (MST) All interested in speech recognition software under Linux are invited to join this new mailing list. The emphasis is on (though discussion is not limited to) finding a means of porting preexisting applications (especially DragonDictate-style ones, or possibly NaturallySpeaking-style) to Linux, rather than developing one from scratch. To subscribe, remove the spaces from the following address and send mail to: ddlinux-request @ arborius.net For more information: Shore.Net/Eco Software, Inc; info@shore.net _________________________________________________________________ SAS for Linux Date: Fri, 3 Apr 1998 07:19:12 -0700 (MST) SAS is a powerful and popular reporting, analysis, and application development system. The SAS for Linux site is dedicated to the support of SAS on the Linux operating system. Tune in there for information, news, to voice your opinion, and contribute to the cause. Of particular interest is the SAS User Linux Interest Profile, a survey to measure the amount of interest (or not) for SAS on Linux. Stop on by! For more information: Karsten M. Self, kmself@ix.netcom.com _________________________________________________________________ New Pages for Linux Users Date: Fri, 3 Apr 1998 07:19:12 -0700 (MST) Here's a page that could prove worthwhile for newbies: "Basic Linux Training" Here's another new site site dedicated to Lunix. Find links to RPMS, X windows managers, HOWTOS and more. Check it out at: http://vdpower.gamesmania.com/demoreviews/linux/linux.html _________________________________________________________________ The KDE Free Qt Foundation Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1998 14:50:59 GMT The KDE project and Troll Tech AS, the creators of Qt, are pleased to announce the founding of the "KDE Free Qt Foundation". The purpose of this foundation is to guarantee the availability of Qt for free software development now and in the future. The foundation will control the rights to the Qt Free Edition and ensure that current and future releases of Qt will be available for free software development at all times. released under the BSD license. We believe the founding of the KDE Free Qt Foundation to be an ground-breaking step, helping to usher in a new era of software development, allowing the KDE project, the free software community, all free software developers as well as commercial software developers to prosper in a mutually supportive fashion. For more information: Bernd Johannes Wuebben, The KDE Project, wuebben@kde.org Eirik Eng, Troll Tech CEO, Eirik.Eng@troll.no _________________________________________________________________ Linux Resources -- we need your help Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1998 19:06:04 GMT Linux Resources is a community effort brought together by Specialized Systems Consultants (SSC), publishers of Linux Journal, to promote the Linux operating system. We strive to produce the most informative one-stop Linux resource. We do that with the help of many enthusiastic individuals and companies who produce selected content for Linux Resources. If you or your company would like to contribute content or maintain a page within Linux Resources please e-mail us at webmaster@ssc.com. After browsing through http://www.linuxresources.com/ please e-mail us and let us know if it addresses your needs and if not, tell what we can add or do differently. For example, perhaps there are other exisiting sites that you feel we should incorporate into Linux Resources -- e-mail us! Last, Linux Resources is advertising free. Let us know if this is an important factor for you. Again, we want Linux Resources to be *your* Linux resource. Please let us know how we can be of assistance. For more information: Carlie Fairchild, carlie@ssc.com, Linux Journal Sales and Marketing _________________________________________________________________ Open Source Journal, the Magazine for Free Software Date: Mon, 20 Apr 1998 13:19:03 GMT The Free Software Union is proud to announce the release of the premiere issue of the 'Open Source Journal, the Magazine for Free Software'. The Journal is volunteer written and produced, and available free from the Web at: http://osj.fslu.org/ The Free Software Union ("Free Software Lovers Unite!" = FSLU) is a democratic, non-profit group dedicated to the Free Software/Open-Source community. For more information: Braddock Gaskill, braddock@braddock.com _________________________________________________________________ Linux Conference Announcement Date: Tue, 28 Apr 1998 09:24:54 +0200 The first Linux conference in Denmark will be held by Denmark's Unix User Group and Skåne/Sjælland Linux User Group May 16, 1998. Among the main speakers are Jesper Pedersen, the creator of the Dotfile Generator, and Image Scandiavia, a large ISP in Denmark using Linux as their main platform. Moreover, experienced Linux users will help novice users by installing Linux on their computers. The conference has a homepage is at http://sslug.imm.dtu.dk/konference.html, where you can find the programme and more information. Official languages are Swedish and Danish. For more information: Kenneth Geisshirt, kge@kb.dk, The Royal Library Linux konference i København den 16. maj 1998 _________________________________________________________________ Software Announcements _________________________________________________________________ JCam - Digital Camera Software for Linux (with Java)! Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1998 14:52:50 GMT JCam - a single software program for (almost) all OSes and (almost) all Digital Cameras ... The first public release of JCam is now available from "www.jcam.com", featuring support for Digital Still Cameras from Epsom, Casio, Kodak and coming soon, Fuji, Samsung and Olympus. JCam is currently available for Win95, WinNT and Linux 2.0 ... future versions will offer - subject to demand - support for Mac, OS-2, PPC and a range of other Unices. JCam requires Java 1.1 to be installed on the host machine; later versions will be available bundled with the JRE, simplifying installation for non-Java users. For more information: info@jcam.com, http://www.jcam.com/ _________________________________________________________________ GTK+ 1.0.0 GUI Library Released! Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1998 19:03:14 GMT The GTK+ Team is proud to announce the release of GTK+ 1.0.0. GTK+, which stands for the GIMP Toolkit, is a library for creating graphical user interfaces for the X Window System. It is designed to be small, efficient, and flexible. GTK+ is written in C with a very object-oriented approach. The official ftp site is: ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk The official web site is: http://www.gtk.org/ A mailing list is located at: gtk-list@redhat.com To subscribe: mail -s subscribe gtk-list-request@redhat.com < /dev/null (Send mail to gtk-list-request@redhat.com with the subject "subscribe") GTK+ was written by Peter Mattis, Spencer Kimball, and Josh MacDonald. Many enhancements and bug fixes have been made by the GTK+ Team. See the AUTHORS file in the distribution for more information. For more information: The GTK+ Team, gtk-list@redhat.com _________________________________________________________________ Poppy 1.3 - Simple POP3 mail program to view/delete/save messages Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1998 18:51:59 GMT This is the announcement for Version 1.3 of Poppy. It is a simple Perl script that allows you to view only the headers of messages from a POP3 server and then allows you to selectively view, save, or delete each message. It is ideal for limited resource systems. A simple perl script to retrieve mail headers from a POP3 server and individually view, save or delete them. Requires perl. Simple mail reader which relies on the POP3 server to do most the work. A good use is to delete or to skip over huge emails on a POP3 server when on a slow link. You may also view only a specified number of lines from a message to see if you would like to download the whole message. To download: http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/cbagwell/projects.html For more information: Chris Bagwell, Fujitsu Network Communications, cbagwell@fujitsu-fnc.com _________________________________________________________________ juju/juen - uu/xx/Base64/BinHex-Decoder/Encoder Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1998 18:48:53 GMT The first release of juju has been announced. IT is yet another uu- and Base64-decoder, which also decodes xxencoded and BinHexed data, and includes the following features: * Autodetection of Encoding. * Merging of multiple parts. * Piping data or filenames (to be decoded) towards juju is supported. * It also scans complete directories for anything useful to decode. It sould work with MIME data as well. Also included is juen, a similar powerful encoder, which supports uuencoding, Base64-encoding, xxencoding and MIME. It supports automated mailing and posting if sendmail and inews are present. Current Version is 0.2.0, which is the first public release. The Program is available as sourcecode only, but should compile on any Unix platform, at least Linux ;-). It is GPL'ed. The Homepage of juju is: http://hottemax.uni-muenster.de/~grover/juju.html For more information: Christoph Gröver, grover@hottemax.uni-muenster.de _________________________________________________________________ mon-0.37i - Service Monitoring Daemon Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1998 18:45:18 GMT mon-037i is an extensible service monitoring daemon which can be used to monitor network or non-network resources. Written in Perl 5, this code should be able to run out-of-the-box on many platforms. It supports a flexible configuration file, and can send out email, alphanumeric pages, or any other type of alert when it detects the failure of a service. Service monitors that come with the distribution can test ping, telnet, ftp, smtp, http, nntp, pop3, imap, disk space, SNMP queries, and arbitrary TCP services. http://ftp.kernel.org/software/mon/ ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/software/admin/mon/mon-0.37i.tar.gz For more information: Jim Trocki, trockij@transmeta.com _________________________________________________________________ newsfetch-1.2 - pull news via NNTP to a mailbox Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1998 18:54:53 GMT newsfetch: Most Compact and Powerful Utility to download the news from an NNTP server, filter and stores in the mailbox format. Available from http://ulf.wep.net/newsfetch.html New version of newsfetch (1.2) is uploaded to sunsite.unc.edu newsfetch-1.2.tar.gz newsfetch-1.2-1.i386.rpm newsfetch-1.2-1.src.rpm available in ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/Incoming/ and in proper place (/pub/Linux/system/news/readers) when they move the files. New version is available in .tar.gz and .rpm format. For more information: ymotiwala@hss.hns.com _________________________________________________________________ Mesa/Vista Project Collaboration Intranet for Linux Warwick, RI -- April 14, 1998 -- Mesa Systems Guild, Inc. announced today the immediate availability of Mesa/Vista for the Linux operating system. Mesa's flagship product line, Mesa/Vista provides web-enabled project management automation for development teams who need to collaborate with access to all data related to their project. Mesa/Vista provides a way to tie all of the project management and product development tools already in use together on the web so that the information can be accessed using a web browser on any platform, from any location. This enables project managers to make better, faster decisions based on the most up-to-date information and increases the productivity of development engineers by providing immediate access to information they need to complete their tasks. For more information: http://www.mesasys.com/ Maribeth McNair, Mesa Systems Guild, Inc. mbm@mesasys.com _________________________________________________________________ Blender 3d beta release Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1998 19:20:29 GMT NeoGeo is happy to announce the Beta release of a Linux and FreeBSD version of Blender. We expect the first Beta users to help us complete testing and evaluating, especially for the various PC configurations. An official version will be released 4 to 6 weeks later. Blender is the freeware 3D package - up until now only available for SGI - that has become very popular with students, artists and at universities. Being the in-house software of a high quality animation studio, it has proven to be an extremely fast and versatile design instrument. Use Blender to create TV commercials, to make technical visualizations, business graphics, to do some morphing, or design user interfaces. You can easily build and manage complex environments. The renderer is reliable and extremely fast. All basic animation principles are well implemented. For more information: http://www.neogeo.nl/, blender@neogeo.nl _________________________________________________________________ consd 1.0: virtual console management daemon Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1998 07:48:06 GMT consd manages virtual consoles silently in the background. It starts and kills gettys there depending on how many gettys are just sitting around and waiting (and wasting ressources). Usually, consd ensures there's always one (and only one) getty waiting for someone to login. The virtual consoles with lower numbers are preferred. consd does not interfere with gettys started by init. As always - if you can't find it on the ftp servers listed below, try the 'incoming' directories. http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/utils/ in the file called consd-1.0.tgz (12KB). For more information: Frank Gockel, gockel@etecs4.uni-duisburg.de _________________________________________________________________ dancing_linux - a rendered 3D-Linux-animation / eyecatcher Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1998 08:06:23 GMT The animation shows a nice linux-logo, consisting of the five letters and additional artwork. Everything is in motion and is twisting around (glass-, metal-, and light-effects!). It has a black background and is VERY suitable as an eyecatcher for shopwindows or your own linux-box. ================================================= Format: *.flc movie Resolution: 320*200, 8bit color 120 frames (about 20 fps) Renderplatform: Linux-Povray 3.01 (of course) Rendertime: 15 min/frame on a P133 ================================================= The movie may also be viewed with xanim, but it looks _much_ better fullscreen! I included John Remyn's SVGA-Player "flip" (binary). The animation is available at: http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/logos/raytraced/dancing_linux.lsm http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/logos/raytraced/dancing_linux.tar.gz (1.07 MB) and mirrors... For more information: Roland Berger robe@cip.e-technik.uni-erlangen.de _________________________________________________________________ Port of InterBase Database to Linux Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1998 15:03:18 GMT InterBase Software Corp has ported InterBase 4.0 to the Linux platform. We plan to allow this database software to be downloaded for free use as of April 29, 1998. The primary download site will be http://www.interbase.com/ In the July timeframe, we expect to release a commercial version of InterBase 5 for Linux. There is a monitored news group borland.public.interbase.com available for the users of InterBase. For more information: Wyliam Holder, wholder@interbase.com _________________________________________________________________ SECURITY: procps 1.2.7 fixes security hole Date: Mon, 20 Apr 1998 13:18:42 GMT A file creation and corruption bug in XConsole included in procps-X11 versions 1.2.6 and earlier has been found. To fix it, you can either remove the XConsole program or upgrade to procps-1.2.7, available from ftp://tsx-11.mit.edu/pub/linux/sources/usr.bin/procps-1.2.7.tar.gz Thanks to Alan Iwi for finding the bug. A few other bugs have been fixed in this version. Read the NEWS file for details. If you have Red Hat Linux or another RPM-based distribution, libc5-based RPM packages are available from ftp://ftp.redhat.com/updates/4.2/ and glibc-based RPM packages are available from ftp://ftp.redhat.com/updates/5.0/ Fuller upgrade instructions for Red Hat Linux users have been given in a separate post to redhat-announce-list@redhat.com For more information: Michael K. Johnson, johnsonm@redhat.com _________________________________________________________________ Published in Linux Gazette Issue 28, May 1998 _________________________________________________________________ [ TABLE OF CONTENTS ] [ FRONT PAGE ] Back Next _________________________________________________________________ This page written and maintained by the Editor of Linux Gazette, gazette@ssc.com Copyright © 1998 Specialized Systems Consultants, Inc. "Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!" _________________________________________________________________ The Answer Guy By James T. Dennis, linux-questions-only@ssc.com Starshine Technical Services, http://www.starshine.org/ _________________________________________________________________ Contents: (!)Greetings from Jim Dennis (?) Problems with SCSI-CDROM and Audio CDs --or-- Sinister 'xmcd' Permanently Disables Right Speaker Channel (?)Email Alpha-Paging software (?)xdm in 16bpp Mode (?)Bad cluster in HDD (?)Complex network and NetBIOS (?) Lets vote for Linus --or-- Some Thoughts on "The Man of the Century" (?) How do I setup gateway server? --or-- Linux as a General Purpose SOHO to Internet Gateway (?) Linux.bat -or-- LOADLIN.EXE, Plug & "Pray" and "Win(Lose)Modems" (?)'sendmail' Masquerading: What and Why (?)Tools for converting X output to java (?) Fwd: Please Be Careful --or-- "Good Times" Are Here Again? NOT! (?) LinuxGazette Mar 1998: xdm Login doesn't! _________________________________________________________________ Linux Gazette: The Answer Guy for May, 1998 Well, plenty has happened in the world of Linux this month: * The kernel team is getting much closer to the next stable version, * Linux has been discussed favorably on NPR (National Public Radio)...twice. + Once on em>All Things Considered (transcript available with a link a RealAudio file of the whole thing and * again on "Science Fridays" Linus is the proud father of another baby girl. I've completely changed the look of this column. I'm signing a book contract to do a book on "Advanced Linux Systems Administration" My wife has decided to take responsibility for marking up the mail that I do as "The Answer Guy" (I didn't pick the name, honest!). Traditionally I've just answered the e-mail that was forwarded to me by the Linux Gazette editors and copied them on it. Marjorie and her husband have normally done the rest. This has been O.K. since we've focused on content rather than form. However, I've wanted to improve it a little bit ever since I first found out that the answers I was giving were being included in LG. (Mainly I want the URL references I make to other various web sites to be rendered as links so you don't have to cut and paste those into your "Go" or "Open Location" prompt). Obviously I've procrastinated on that for over a year. Yes, I fiddle with Hypermail and MHOnArc. Finally, Heather took matters into her own hands and modified a copy of 'babymail' (a Perl script) to do most of the work. Unfortunately it appears that this still requires quite a bit of hand tweaking. Oh well. So, I hope everyone likes the new look. [Me too! -- Heather] To any of you that have written to me and been ignored or never received your responses I'd like to apologize. Sometimes I procrastinate on more than just the cosmetics and I certainly hope you eventually got your answers from other venues like comp.os.linux.* or the L.U.S.T. (Linux Users Support Team) mailing list, or even (horrors!) from one of the LDP (Linux Documentation Project) mirrors. Another, budding new source of support info for Linux users will hopefully be the "self-service" Linux Search Engine which hopefully will eventually be a complete replacement for Yahoo! (the source for most of the answers I've ever given here). Well, enough of my rambling and onto my usual collection of questions and answers. As usual I've also included a couple of items which are my responses to posts in newsgroups or mailing lists --- items that I personally think are important enough to be restated here. _______ Jim Dennis _________________________________________________________________ (?) Sinister 'xmcd' Permanently Disables Right Speaker Channel From Birger Koblitz on Fri, 24 Apr 1998 Hi, I'v got a strange problem with my Toshiba 12X-SCSI-CDRom and xmcd. Since I started to use this program, music from audio CDs is only played through the left speaker, the right speaker is dead. The strange thing is, all this worked well on Windoze before. Now even the windoze player uses only the left channel. This doesend seem to be a hardware problem allthough there now is only one channel available out of the Headphone connector on the front of the device,too, since I tried the progam also at a friend with a Sanyo SCSI-CDRom resulting in the same problem (but both channels available from the front plug there). My friend is now quite angry since evrything worked fine under windoze for him before... It seems that xmcd turns of one of the channels of the CDRom. Sadly using the balance control within xmcd doesnt turn it on any more. Is there a way to get things working again? Yours, Birger. (!) That's very odd. I've never heard of any CD's or sound cards with NVRAM in them. I presume you've powered off the affected systems, let them sit for a minute or two and tried again (under the formerly "known working" configuration). I suppose it would give offense to suggest that you actually check the wires that lead to that speaker? Traditionally I've been a curmudgeon about "toys" like CD players and sound cards (never used them under DOS, Windows or Linux). My traditional opinion has been that CD-ROM's are for data --- and that there are perfectly good, inexpensive, devices for playing audio CD's --- devices that require no special drivers and have no opportunity to conflict with your other equipment and software. (You don't want to know how I feel about those loathsome bandwidth robbers with their "Internet Telephone" and "Cyber Video Phone" toys either. That's our bandwidth they're hogging). However, yesterday (by coincidence) I bit the bullet and spent a little time compiling a new kernel with sound support. Then I went into the CMOS and re-enabled the sound support that's on the motherboard of that machine I bought from VAResearch. So, I slipped in a copy of Aaron Copeland's Greatest Hits, logged into to my virtual console, (I still prefer text consoles for most of my work, especially for e-mail), fired up xmcd (X Motif CD Player) and let it loose. Strains of "Celebration" are streaming out of both speakers as I type this. (Yes, I [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[F1]'d back to my text console after starting xmcd). So, it's not inherently a problem with xmcd under Linux. This particular installation is a S.u.S.E. 5.1 running under a 2.1.97 kernel that I just grabbed off of kernel.org yesterday. So, that leave us with other questions. Do you have a sound card or are you playing this through a headphone jack on the front of your CD player? (I'm not familiar with the specific CD drives to which you refer, but many of them have built in head phone jacks. Mine is a Toshiba 3801 which I gather is sold as a 15x drive). Are there any configuration or diagnostic utilities for your CD drive and/or sound card? (Presumably they would be DOS or Win '95 utilities that shipped with the device or that you might get from their web site, ftp site, or BBS). Have you called your CD-ROM or sound card vendors (or BCC'd their support on this e-mail)? Did you do an Alta Vista or Yahoo! search? (I used "+xmcd +sound +problem") or check out the xmcd home page: http://sunsite.unc.edu/~cddb/xmcd/ ... which has links to their FAQ (and other useful) info. There was an FAQ entry about Toshiba drives and "sometimes" getting "no sound." Although it doesn't sound like it matches your symptoms exactly you might read that and try the suggestions they list. Just off hand I don't know of any newsgroups or mailing lists that are particularly good venues for this questions (which I suspect it why you sent it to me). news:comp.os.linux.hardware might be one. Another might be news:comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.cd-rom or alt.cd-rom. Hope that helps. However, it's still hard to imagine any problem that would match these symptoms and persist through a power cycle (not just a reboot -- a power cycle). _________________________________________________________________ (?) Email Alpha-Paging software How to build a mail to pager gateway From John DiSpirito on Sat, 18 Apr 1998 Hello Answerguy, I was wondering if you could help me with something? I was looking for a package that sits on my linux machine and will do email alpha-paging. Im sure you know what this is, but just in case: A person emails an account: johndoe_page@somemail.com, and it pages them... I know they are out there, but I dont know where they are. Could you lend some assistance? Thanks. (!) John, There are several ways to do this, as you suspected. First you could just use the TAP (telephony acces protocol) script that was published in Frank de la Cruz' book on C-Kermit. (The paging can be done as a kermit script and the mail gateway would be a quick procmail script to call it). That approach requires a little bit of coding but uses tools you hopefully already have around. You can get out of the kermit coding/typing by looking at: http://fohnix.metronet.com/~tye/textpage.html For more specialized tools to do this, I just went to the Linux Software Map search engine at: http://www.boutell.com/lsm/ ... selected the search by "keyword" options and typed in "pager" I expected this to hit dozens of entries for 'more' 'less' 'most' and other Unix "pagers" (that is, programs for "paging" through a file). However, only Xless showed up under that false hit category. The first "real" hit was a program by a Joshua Koplik. The LSM entry for it has some typos (or is just out-of-date from some directory restructuring at sunsite) so I had to chase down the real URL with a few judicious clicks: http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/mail/mailhandlers/!INDEX.ht ml ... gets you to the right directory. The other few links returned on this search were for 'man' pagers. Now I'm also sure I recently saw another news article somewhere about telecom/paging software for Linux so I decided to hunt further. So, I hit my old standby, Yahoo! (most of the answers I give are researched through Yahoo!). I used the string: "+Linux +pager +alpha" ... and rapidly found a mini-HOWTO on this very topic at: http://ir.parks.lv/li/Resources/HOWTO/mini/Pager ... by Chris Snell. Despite, Chris' "disclaimer" (first line of the HOWTO reads "This document sucks.") the directions are very clear and seem to be very complete. I gather that it used to be listed on the LDP mini-HOWTO's and I'd like to see it re-appear there. (There are old, out-of-date mirrors of the LDP pages that have it and the current ones at: http://sunsite.unc.edu/LDP/ ... and at: http://www.linuxresources.com/LDP/ don't show it. In this mini-HOWTO Chris refers to a package called "sendpage" (with URL's). If you get this, I'd suggest that there are easier ways to configuring 'sendmail' You really don't need to do any of that (writing custom rulesets) with a modern sendmail. Something similar can be done via m4 configuration macros and built-in features (or easily handled with a simple one line procmail script). Another great set of links is on Celeste Stokely's widely acclaimed "Serial Ports Resources" for Unix: http://www.stokely.com/unix.serial.port.resources/fax.pager.html#pa ger.unix.link (which suggests that HylaFax supports pagers in some way!) It turns out that there is apparently a mailing list devoted to this topic at ixo-request@plts.org. (IXO is one of the other protocols that modems use to talk to alpha pagers -- I don't know the details). In retrospect I think the recent posting I saw on the subject may have been at the "Linux Weekly News" site (http://www.eklektix.com/lwn/). Hitting their search engine revealed links to: QuickPage (ftp.it.mtu.edu:/pub/QuickPage) (in a comment to their staff) ... but, oddly, didn't find the paragraph in their previous issue. It turns out that they didn't know about any of the links I've discussed above and were referring readers to a commercial package (of which there are several --- the most well-known being at http://www.spatch.com/). [I've copied the LWN staff as well. This really wasn't meant to "scoop" them, since I think that LWN is the best thing since Linux Gazette --- and it comes out four times as often! Every LG reader should also check it out! I just can't figure out where they get all the time to work on it.] Finally the oldest freely available package for this that I know of is a perl scripts called 'tpage' (Tom's Pager) a.k.a. ixobeeper.gz at: http://www.oasis.leo.org/perl/exts/date-time/scripts/comm/ixobeeper .dsc.html Anyway I hope that helps. Obviously you have plenty of options (which is the PERL motto). _________________________________________________________________ (?) xdm in 16bpp Mode From Aubrey Pic on Wed, 15 Apr 1998 How do you get XDM to run in 16 bpp???? I belive it runs 8bpp by default. I have a .xserverrc file that forces 16 bpp. Whenever I ran XBANNER, it would default to 8 bpp. Thank you. (!) Did you try putting it into your XConfig file? That seems to work for me. I presume this is an XFree86 installation (rather than Xig or X-insides or MetroX). Does it work when you use startx -- 16bpp from a shell command line? _________________________________________________________________ (?) Bad cluster in HDD From Thomas Vavra on Wed, 15 Apr 1998 Hi there! I got a neat, fast 1,6GB HDD (WD IDE) with one "bad cluster" as DOS calls it. Is there any way in using it for linux(marking the cluster as bad or something like that?) (!) No problem. Linux distributions come with a program named 'badblocks' it handles this for you. The best way to do it is to let 'mkfs' call badblocks using its internally supported switches. For ext2 filesystems you'd use mke2fs or mkfs.ext2 (usually links to the same file). Just add the -c switch to the command when you invoke it (and read the man page for details). If you already have an ext2fs on a drive and you suspect that new bad blocks have developed (for example you've dropped the drive or the machine's been through an earthquake) you can run e2fsck (or fsck.ext2 as it may be linked) with the -c switch. Like I said, easy! (Naturally I suggest you do these from single user mode, and do proper backups). _________________________________________________________________ (?) Complex network and NetBIOS From Kate Stecenko on Tue, 14 Apr 1998 Hi ! I have some problem, can you help me? Our network has 2 segments. Each segment have a lot of stations Win 95 & Win NT OS. Segments are connected via router. Router is Linux box with Mars NWE for IPX routing & internal kernel IP routing. I need that all computers from all segments will be visible by each other by NetBIOS (in Network Neibourhood/Microsoft Windows Network). Not all computers in out network have TCP/IP stack (it's impossible by important reasons), so I cannot use NetBIOS over TCP/IP. If there are any way to make my Linux box and Samba work with NetBEUI or run NetBIOS over IPX? (!) Last I heard NetBEUI is not routable. Novell's IPX/SPX is routable to about 16 hops --- and a properly configured Netware system should automatically route IPX. I don't know about IPX routing through the Linux kernel (it might require some static tweaking). I don't know of any way to tunnel NetBIOS traffic over IP or IPX. Other Options: Bridging I think you can configure Linux to do ethernet bridging (seems that an experimental config option for this has crept into the recent 2.0.x kernels). Bridging is a process where ethernet frames are copied from one interface (segment) to another. This is different from routing in that the router works at a higher level in the OSI reference model (it's at the transport layer while bridging occurs at the network layer and normal ethernet hubs work at the physical layer). One cost of this is that the bandwidth from one segment is usually no longer isolated from the other (meaning that your utilization may become unacceptable high). Some bridges are more "intelligent" than others --- and they "learn" which ethernet cards are on which segment (by promiscuously watching the MAC --- media access control --- addresses on all ethernet frames on each interface). The smart switches or bridges then selectively forward frames between the segments. (I use the term frames to refer to ethernet data structures or transmission units and "packets" to discuss those from the upper layers). Some switching hubs (like the Kalpana) are quite expensive but perform all of this in hardware/firmware. The advantage is that traffic that's local to a segment won't be copied to the other --- which should reduce the overall bandwidth utilization of this approach. The disadvantages involve NetBIOS and Netware/IPX. NetBIOS is a "chatty" protocol involving lots of broadcasts, particularly by servers (which in '95, NT, and WfW is every machine with any "shares"). IPX is better, for the most part, but most of the servers and services utilized by Netware require SAP's (service advertising packets). These are broadcasts as well. (SAP's are why you don't have to configure a Netware client system with information about default routers, DNS servers, and things like that. The client listens to the wire for some period of time and hears a list of these periodic SAP's. The disadvantage in large networks with lots of servers, print servers, and other services is that the SAP's can chew up a sizable portion of your bandwidth --- and they are routed). Gateways: Rather than trying to get this to work at a layer below the transport (NetBIOS, TCP/IP, IPX/SPX) you could try to get above it, into the presentation, session or application layers. These approaches are generically called "gateways." However. I don't know of any gateways that are appropriate to SMB servers. Warning: The rumors I've been hearing are that Microsoft will be phasing NetBEUI out in favor of TCP/IP. So your organization's constraint may not be feasibly in the long run (the next year or two). (?) Please tell me what to do. (!) Conclusion: Question your management's constraint about TCP/IP. NT and '95 both include it (so it can't be a cost issue). TCP/IP is the most widely used and deployed set of networking protocols in the world --- and has been around longer than anything else in current use. It is clearly scaleable (despite the naysayers and doomsdayers -- "the Death of the Internet" is not imminent). It doesn't suffer from the limitations of IPX and NetBIOS. I suspect that your management's proscription is based on ignorance. They probably think they know just enough about TCP/IP to worry about security and not enough to know that protocol selection has little to do with system's security. I've seen this discussed several times on the comp.unix.security and BugTraq mailing lists. If they are concerned about where to get IP addresses it's simply a non-issue. They should read RFC 1918. This RFC establishes several sets of IP addresses to be used by "disconnected" networks. In this case "disconnected" means "behind a firewall" or "not connected to the Internet" (your choice). You can use any of these that you want --- you don't have to ask anyone's permission. It is your responsibility to prevent any such packets from being routed to the Internet (which is where we get all the discussion of "IP Masquerading" "NAT: network address translation" and "applications proxies" (a form of "gateway"). If their concern is about preventing propagation of "forbidden" protocols (applications layer) or "sensitive" information across the their routers --- there are well established ways of doing that (built right into the Linux kernel, among other places). It's much easier to prevent all propagation than it is to selectively allow access to specific protocols like HTTP (web), SMTP (e-mail) and especially to FTP (which is an ugly protocol for firewall designers to support --- but just as easy as any other to block). So, I have to question their "important" reasons and suggest that if these reasons are that important and bridging is not feasible than the probably have an unresolvable conflict in their requirements. (They might consider running polling processes on the Linux Samba/NWE server to replication/mirror all of the data that must be accessible between the segments. This would be a big win in a couple of ways --- if feasible given their usage patterns. It cuts down traffic across the routers (speed/latency benefits for all) and ensures that an extra "backup" of all the relevant data is available. The obvious problems involve concurrency if you allow write access on both sides of the fence. However, if the data is of a type that can be "maintained" on one side and published across in a read-only fashion it is worth a look). In many ways I'd even question their requirement to share these as files. If you have a few-well managed servers it may be reasonable to make them all "dual homed" (put two ethernet cards in every server and let them all straddle the segments). If they are requiring the propagation of shares created and maintained by desktop users than they probably have a major management problem already. (!) TIA, Kate Stecenko. (!) I hope the explanation helps. Just off hand it sounds like you've been saddled with a poorly considered set of constraints and requirements. It happens to alot of sysadmins and netadmins. While it exercises are creativity and encourages us to socialize (in our mailing lists and newsgroups) --- it also leads to premature graying (or baldness in my case). Sorry there's no magic bullet for this one. _________________________________________________________________ (?) Some Thoughts on "The Man of the Century" From Brian Schramm on Sat, 11 Apr 1998 on the Linux Users Support Team (L.U.S.T) Mailing List Hello, I think this might interest... It arrived to me without the original sender ID. _______ The DALnet #Linux has started a movement to get Linus Torvalds voted as Man of the Century. Their idea is to get a massive number of votes for Linus, which would at least get the attention of Linux if nothing else. They estimate that they need about 1 million votes to pull it off. They've requested everybody to vote for Linus and to pass it along. The category in which Linus is being placed also has a mention of Bill Gates, so we've got some competition. If you would like more information, see the URLs below. Vote for Linus Torvalds: http://www.pathfinder.com/time/time100/time100poll.html Linus as Man of the Century Mailing List: linusmotc-request@merconline.com _______ When you vote the system gives you the present ratings. The category where Linus shows now: (!) While I have the utmost respect for Linus and feel greatly indebted to him for Linux. I have reservations about this suggestion. First I have to say that the computer has not, in my opinion, been the dominate development of this century. Although microcomputers are the basis for my career and the principle tool in my hobbies (writing and participating in newsgroups and mailing lists) --- I have to step back and try to achieve a more objective view. I'd rate the development of the telephone and our world wide telecommunications infrastructure as roughly an order of magnitude more important worldwide. Granted that modern telephony would be impossible without the computer. The underlying importance of the telephone has driven computers in large part (specifically in the development of Unix --- at AT&T Bell Labs!). However, my sense of history suggests that the impact of telephony was already evident before that (when the vast majority of it was run by mechanical relays and even by human switchboard operators). Despite this I wouldn't even say that telephony is the most important development of our century. I think that broadcast media (radio and television) have at least twice as much impact as the phone. The reason is that telephones primarily extend our ability to communicate and shrink our time scales --- but they are still mostly localised geographically and socially. The fact that the technology allows me to call someone in Japan as easily as I could call the local Pizza parlor doesn't matter much when I have no acquaintances in Japan. The telephone doesn't most of us to really connect with a significantly broader or larger set of associates than were possible with old-fashioned postal correspondence. Broadcast television has had quite a bit of effect on this country and on most of the rest of the world. The results are fundamentally different than anything that could be have been accomplished by correspondence or other forms of individual association. Prior to radio and television we didn't even have a word "broadcast." I'd put publishing in the same league as broadcast media for potential. However it is several centuries old. Also its potential has never been as widely realized as broadcast media due to the simple hurdle of literacy. This is not so simple as functional literacy. Many people have sufficient academic skills to participate in our (or their) culture --- but are not affected enough by any publications to really move society. I personally consider television to have had a greater effect on our culture based largely on the sheer number of hours that people spend absorbing its emanations. It doesn't matter how trite most of the "content" has been --- the fact is that a largely percentage of the world's population has been pacified for an astounding number of hours by TV's and movies (silver screen). I'm not nearly so concerned by what television has caused people to do as how much it may have prevented by its diversion. Despite the its greater importance I still wouldn't say that television, movies and other broadcast media is the most important development in our century. There is one thing that's had even more effect over more of the world that those. I think I'd have to give the award to Henry Ford. Not only is the automobile one of the most important and ubiquitous developments of this century, but the manufacturing techniques and organisational structures associated with Ford dominate the world's economy and literally shape our cities. So, despite the fact that Ford appears to have been anti-semitic and to have held elitist views that would disgust many people today --- I'd have to vote for him for this century. That brings me back to Linus. I think we just might see the real effects of the FSF and Linux later. It may be that people in 2098 will look back and remark on how the spirit of co-operation that was fostered by Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds (among many others) in the field of microcomputer software fundamentally changed our culture's ethic and economy. We might see radical changes to the publishing industry as more content moves more unto the 'web' (by which I don't just mean HTML carried over HTTP --- but in a broader sense I mean to include the multi-cast communications we see in netnews and on these mailing lists). This would have to be accompanied by radical solutions to the real problems we face in the world today. We cannot continue to allow our population and resource utilization to grow through another century. In addition the current allocation of natural resources must be rationalized before we can have a better world. If we continue to have less than 5% of the population accounting for 80% of the world's resource consumption and continue to allow individual to rape the land that they "own" and discard it when they've extracted the value from it then most of the world's population will remain poor and miserable (and most of the "developed" nations will see large parts of their own populations degenerate into "third world" conditions). This is not "doom and gloom" prophecy --- it's a simple matter of arithmetic. The question is not "if" but "when" and I think the argument is over decades rather than centuries. So, if we're still in a position to concern ourselves about a "person of the century" contest ten decades from now, I hope that the standard of living for the rest of the world has improved to the point where we can get more than a .05% participation in the selection process. (There were less than 3 million votes listed in the table that Paul quoted, and that's only 1% of just the U.S. population --- which is about 5% of the world population last I heard). Who knows, we might then see a bit of national, racial, or even gender diversity in the candidates! (Unfortunately that might take way more than a century). It's not very likely --- but I'd like to on the next century and be astounded by the spread of altruistic collaboration from software into other endeavors. While I can't vote for Linus Torvalds as the man of this century I can mark his accomplishment as one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. He might leave a legacy that makes him the man of the next century! _________________________________________________________________ (?) Linux as a General Purpose SOHO to Internet Gateway From Ron Smith on Sat, 11 Apr 1998 on a newsgroup I looked thriugh the FAQ and didn't find any answers to this question. I hope this is the right forum. (!) "The" FAQ. There are a huge number of Linux FAQ and HOW-TO documents. I haven't read them all and I'm "The Answer Guy." I am a fairly experienced UNIX developer but I usually leave the difficult administrative stuff the the SysAdmins. I have been running a small LAN for my business using Slakware LINUX (currently version 3.2) for some time now. What I really want to do is use the LINUX server as a gateway to the internet for the rest of my LAN. I can connect via PPP to my ISP from the LINUX box with no problems but what I haven't found any good books or documentation on is: How do I setup the LINUX server to bridge between my local LAN and the internet? (!) You probably want to read up on IP Masquerading. In it's simplest form you use the ipfw (kernel packet filtering features) and configure them with a command like: ipfwadm -F -a accept -m -S 192.168.1.0/24 -D any ... which says: add a rule to accept packets for forwarding from the 192.168.1.* range of addresses, and masquerade the to wherever they are going. This assumes you have all your internal systems already configured with RFC 1918 IP addresses like 192.168.1.* or 172.16.*.* or 10.*.*.*, and that you have them all configured to use the Linux system as their default router. It also assumes that you are running a reasonably recent kernel with the ipfw options enabled. There's quite a bit more to it than that --- but that is the core command that makes it work. Note that some protocols --- ftp in particular --- don't work reliably through masquerading. It is often better to get a copy of the TIS FWTK or SOCKS (application layer proxies) to support these (*). Suggestions: run a caching nameserver and a good caching web proxy (like squid) on the router (the Linux box). Make a "best effort" to "harden" the router's configuration and contract to have a thorough security audit performed on it. If at all possible isolate the gateway on the "outside" of an interior perimeter router (which can be another Linux box running no services, not even inetd). Adding the caching for DNS and other protocols can greatly reduce the traffic over the network link and only costs a tiny investment in configuration time, RAM, and disk space. Any traffic that's handled by the cache is a bit less contention for everyone else using the link and everyone between you and the servers that you're accessing (i.e. the whole 'net benefits). (?) I would appreciate any help that you can give...I will check back here periodically or, if possible, email me directly. Thanks in advance. (!) Feh! I'll try to remember to spool off a copy via e-mail. Find a good consultant in your area. A good one will show you how to do all of this and will be able to explain quite a bit more because he or she will ask quite a bit more about your requirements. I've glossed over quite a bit here -- in particular regarding the security issues. __________________________ * Shortly after writing this, but prior to "going to press" I hunted around for an alternative to FWTK and found DeleGate, which can be used as a SOCKS proxy (semi-transparent but requiring client software support) and as a user-driven proxy. Thus it can be used in place if SOCKS and FWTK and seems to be simpler to set up than either. It hasn't been around as long, or used as widely, so we can't be as confident in its security and feature set. But, it's well worth a look and has a more BSDish license. _________________________________________________________________ (?) LOADLIN.EXE, Plug & "Pray" and "Win(Lose)Modems" From Allen R Gunnerson on Sat, 11 Apr 1998 I was told be several people that I can configure my loadlin so that my plug n play stuff in Win95 would be detected by Linux. Right now, if I use dos mode, I lose all my hardware. I have tried to configure my LTWin modem for Linux with no luck....... (!) I think you have two different issues embedded in here. Plug -n- Play (hardware) is a fairly lame attempt in recent years to create PC hardware that autoconfigures itself. When talking about ISA cards this is mostly just marketing fluff that fails in many configurations -- and is widely called "Plug -n- Pray" by many of the support reps that I know. "WinModems" are another issue. Let's start with the first issue: A typical PC has two (or three(*)) buses. System "bus" is a hardware interface, with slots or connectors to multiple devices. The original IBM PC (and XT) had 65 pin (8-bit) slots. With the introduction of the AT IBM placed another connector "end-to-end" with the original 65 pin slots -- which allowed many old "8-bit" cards to be used in AT and even in modern systems. These are called "16-bit ISA slots." (The term ISA or "industry standard architecture" was coined after the fact -- near the introduction of MCA (micro-channel architecture) and EISA (Extended ISA). These hardware specifications have almost completely disappeared). * (Technically a SCSI host adapter is a hardware bridge between your system bus and its own SCSI bus. This is actually a subsystem -- so that doesn't really count as a "system bus"). As the industry fought over MCA vs. EISA (largely resulting in the markets rejection of both of them -- due to the crass attempts at exploiting proprietary designs by major vendors of each) the clone manufacturers -- particularly the motherboard and video engineers -- created a high speed 32 bit bus called "VESA local bus" or 'VLB' for short. VESA is the "video electronics standards association" although there were eventually a variety of disk and network controllers that plugged into VLB slots. These were the rule for late 386 and throughout most of the 486 era (if a period of only 5 years can be called an "era"). With the introduction of the Pentium, Intel also created a number of chipsets and introduced a new bus/interface called "PCI" (sorry I don't remember what the abbreviation stands for -- something like "peripheral to CPU interconnect"). I don't know alot of the low level details about PCI vs. VLB. I've heard that there were very good technical reasons why VLB couldn't be used in Pentium systems. I've also heard that Intel rammed their spec down everyone's throats in a way that has resulted in their clear domination of the chipset market as well as the CPU market. Prior to this there were a number of companies selling chipsets (all the support circuitry that connects the CPU, the memory, the bus(es), and other interfaces to the motherboard (like the keyboard connector). Now there are practically no other companies selling chipsets. It seems that all of the motherboard manufacturers have been forced to use various Intel chipsets (Neptune, Triton, etc). I've heard that some of these have had bugs as notorious as some of their CPU's. One problem that has persisted through all of this is that a typical PC owner has had to manually keep track of how each device on the system was integrated with the others. Any individual card might require an IRQ (interupt request), some I/O port addresses, a DMA channel, and/or some "reserved address space" (for memory mapped I/O between the 0xA0000 and the 0xFFFFF regions). There are only a pitifully limited number of each of these resources. The original PC only had 8 IRQ lines on a single PIC (programmable interrupt controller). A modern PC still only has 15 -- accomplished by "cascading" one PIC off of the IRQ 2 of the other. Of these the system timer, keyboard, the real-time clock and the FPU (floating point unit) are already taken up -- as well as two serial ports, a hard disk controller (IDE, SCSI, or any other). Usually there is also one associated with each LPT port and one for any bus mouse interface that we have. That leaves nine to be distributed between each of our SCSI, ethernet, sound and other cards. Sound cards often take up two of these incredibly scarce resources. As if the scarcity weren't enough of a problem, complexity -- the fact that every user has to keep track of these for every system -- was a major kicker. This has been a major failing of the PC architecture. The priority of "backward compatibility" as left us with a "backwards architecture." Plug and Pray was an attempt to relieve some of that complexity (though it does nothing to resolve the underlying problems of scarcity -- which are deeply ingrained design limitations). It has helped somewhat -- but it requires that all of the components of the systems (hardware and OS) conform to the same spec. A PnP system can work with some old ISA cards, some of the time. The real problem comes when you use multi-boot configuration (as you're doing between DOS and Linux) -- since each of these may try to "tune" the configuration to itself. The "universal serial bus" (USB) and the "Firewire" specifications offer some hope of relieving the issue of scarcity. Like SCSI these provide an adapter to a semi-intelligent "bus" of external peripherals. In effect the adapter uses one PC IRQ and I/O port range -- and negotiates/arbitrates among many devices on it's own bus using it's own discrimination logic. However, it looks like it will take some time for practical devices to become widely available in USB form. So far there are a few digital cameras and scanners that support it --- and no modems, ISDN TA's, terminals (or null modem adapters), X-10 powerhouse, or other toys. Ideally someone would make a couple of models of parallel-USB and RS232-USB bridges so I could use existing devices (like parallel port Zip drives and flatbed scanners) with my new USB equipment. It looks like the hardware companies would much rather force us to all buy all new peripherals --- and to get peripherals that aren't usable on any platform other than a PC. Naturally we can see that Microsoft will benefit from these and any form of "WinModem" or proprietary software drivers for peripherals. I can't think of anything that will perpetuate the status quo of this market more effectively than that short-sighted attitude among hardware vendors. _________________________________________________________________ (?) 'sendmail' Masquerading: What and Why From Stephen Oberther on Tue, 07 Apr 1998 First of all let me say that I love the magazine and your column. This problem has been bothering me for quite some time now and I can't seem to figure out how to remedy it. I have a dial-up internet account but use my local sendmail for email distribution. My question is this: Is there a way to have my actual email address stampled onto my email so that the recipient can just reply to the email normally and have the reply go to my account with my ISP? Currently, with the exception of this message if netscape works properly, the from field is posted with my username and my local machine name, as it should be. Is this possible at all or is it just a lost cause? (!) Yes, there is a way to have your system "masquerade" as some other system or domain. In fact this is what most organizations do. Note: this 'sendmail' masquerading feature should not be confused with "IP Masquerading" (which is a form of TCP/IP network address translation -- or NAT). In the contest of mail the term refers purely to how the headers of each piece of mail are constructed. (IP masquerading is at the transport layer of the OSI reference model while 'sendmail' masquerading is at the applications layer). Now the fact that you mention Netscape (presumably NS Navigator or Communicator) raises a different issue. Some MUA's --- particularly those that have been ported from or significantly influenced by non-Unix code --- will bypass the normal conventions for mail handling under Unix and deliver their own mail directly to the apparent recipient (by doing the appropriate DNS query for MX records and engaging in a direct TCP dialog with that host's SMTP port. In many cases you can configure these to relay mail through some other system --- such as 'localhost' which will allow your 'sendmail' (or qmail, or vmail, or other local MTA (mail transport agent) to apply your local policies (like header rewrites) to the mail). Host "hiding" via 'sendmail' masquerading is such a local policy. Assuming you're using 'sendmail' you can enable it with the following lines to your 'mc' (Macro Config) file: FEATURE(always_add_domain)dnl FEATURE(allmasquerade)dnl FEATURE(always_add_domain)dnl FEATURE(masquerade_envelope)dnl MASQUERADE_AS($YOURHOST)dnl Naturally you probably need other lines in there and you need to run this through the M4 macro preprocessor to generate your /etc/sendmail.cf file. (I do not recommend hand hacking the cf files as this is more error prone and harder to document and review later). You might not need all of these features --- but I use them. Note: this doesn't "hide" your internal host names and/or IP address in the "Received:" headers --- which is an FAQ in security (via obscurity) features. I merely affects the Reply-Path: and From: addresses. The part about "masquerade_envelope" is one I've added more recently. It prevents some potentially alarming headers from appearing in my mail when a recieving or relaying mailhost's sendmail (or other MTA) can't do a proper "double reverse" lookup of my address. (Yes, my DNS and reverse DNS are out of sync --- and no, I haven't fought it out with my ISP nor have I assumed control of my own DNS. Let's not talk about the footwear on the cobbler's kids!). (?) Oh and just in case the from address is wrong on this email it should be ... Thanks in advance, Stephen Oberther (!) The first test I would make in your situation is to pass a message straight to sendmail with a command like: /usr/lib/sendmail -t -v -oe < $TESTMAIL ... where $TESTMAIL is the name of a file that has a reasonably formatted piece of mail (at least a To: and a Subject: line for a header, a blank line and a few lines of text for the body). point the To: line at one of your other accounts to a friend or through some autoresponder (pick one that doesn't remove the headers). Then you can see what sort of rewriting is occuring. It may be that you system's MTA is already properly configured and you can focus on the MUA (mail user agent). _________________________________________________________________ (?) Tools for converting X output to java From Sheldon E. Newhouse on Tue, 31 Mar 1998 on the [linuxprog] mailing list Are there any tools available to convert standard C code with X displays to java displays? Basically, we have a long program which is written in C and does low level X output. We would like to port it so that the number crunching part works on a back-end server and users can view output on java clients. The part of the program that does the display is fairly short, but intimately connected with the X libraires. Any ideas or references would be appreciated. TIA, -sen (!) I'm not sure about a "Java X Server" per se. However there has been some work done on execution of remote X applications through a web browser interface. I have yet to use any of this stuff (I barely use X) --- so I can only rely on hearsay and a bit of web searching. The first technology to consider is the latest release of X Windows itself. There was an initiative by the X Consortium (*) called "Broadway" --- this eventually became the widely accepted code name (possibly widely excepted as well -- but we won't get into that) for the entire X11R6.3 release. * (Formerly at http://www.x.org this now appears to be part of The Open Group at http://www.opengroup.org/) Since I don't know most of the details it's probably best for me to just refer you to some online articles that discuss it: Broadway/Xweb FAQ http://www.broadwayinfo.com/bwfaq.htm Can X Survive on the Internet? By Brad Weinert http://www.sigs.com/publications/docs/xspot/9609/xspot9609.d.ex ecbrief.html X Is Dead, Long Live X http://www.sigs.com/publications/docs/xspot/9603/xspot9603.d.ed it.html * Both of these articles at sigs.com seem to be a bit out of date, now that ``Broadway'' has been released. However they offer a pretty quick preview of what X Web is supposed to be. Note that the constraint of this approach is that it seems to require that you actually have an X Server on the clients. This is great if you have just about any sort of Linux/Unix clients --- but may be prohibitive if you intend for Windows (NT, '95, or 3.x) or MacOS clients to access your applications. You might be able to deploy the MI/X server (a freely available X Server for Windows and MacOS) but I don't know if it supports the X11R6.x "Broadway" features. You can find out more about MI/X at http://tnt.microimages.com/freestuf/mix/ and read MicroImages Inc.'s FAQ at http://tnt.microimages.com/freestuf/mix/mix-faq.htm. A quick perusal of that suggests that it won't support the Broadway set of extensions (since the FAQ says that it doesn't support LBX -- the "low bandwidth X" which is apparently a key part of Broadway). I don't know what commercial X Servers for Windows or the Mac will help --- but I needn't spend any more space on that issue since I you don't specify that as a requirement. Hummingbird's Exceed (http://www.unipres.com/hbird/exceed/) is a likely candidate. Another approach might be to provide your clients with VNC --- which was listed in Linux Weekly News (http://www.eklektix.com/lwn/) a few weeks ago. This has nothing to do with Java and almost nothing to do with X Windows. However it does allow you to view X Windows displays from Windows and Mac clients and vice versa --- using an alternative to the X communications protocols. The potential advantage is that it sounds much easier to install and configure than a Windows or MacOS X server. Take a look at at the "Olivetti and Oracle Research Laboratories" (http://www.orl.co.uk/vnc/) for more on that. Another advantage of this over MI/X would be that it is open source available under the GPL --- MI/X is free to use but the sources are not available. The two approaches that are more directly suggested by your question are: An Xlib to Java awt cross compiler (or class or library) ... or: An X Server for the Java virtual machine (a class that implements Xlib). I suspect that both of these are feasible --- though the performance costs of the latter may not make it palatable and I'm sure that the portability issues in each would be significant. Despite my search engine efforts I was unable to find any information on any work being done on either approach. However, I'm not an expert in Java and I don't keep up on it much. So, maybe someone else here will help us out. I did look in several likely places at http://www.developer.com/directories/ (formerly the Gamelan archives). The closest I found is a JXTerm --- allegedly an 'xterm' in Java. This includes telnet and cut and paste features. There are several Java terminal emulators including VT100, VT220, ANSI-BBS, TN3270 and TN5250 applets. Meanwhile I've been hearing snippets of SCO's (http://www.sco.com/) "Tarantella" for the last year or so. This apparently does act as an X Windows to Java gateway, providing a sort of "web desktop" or "webtop" as their marketing copy refers to it. It appears that you'd have to install a SCO OpenServer system to either run your application or to act as a gateway between your applications server and your clients. (I doubt sincerely that SCO will make Tarantella available for Linux --- and it doesn't seem to be written in Java). I'm really curious as to how this works. (While I was writing this I installed a new copy of the Netscape RPM from my Red Hat CD -- this is a new system that I just built from parts, it's running S.u.S.E. -- started an X session, started Navigator, pointed my browswer at http://tarantella.sco.com/ and tried to access their demo. It gets to some point before showing my anything like X or it's "webtop" with some complaint about a Java Security violation in some class or another. Exiting and retrying got me further along. Hint: don't try 'Tarantella' during your first Navigator session. Eventually I was able to get it running ...err... walking ...err... limping along. It might be faster over a T1 or an ethernet -- I happen to be using the 28.8 PPP connection at the moment). If you're curious, go try the demo yourself. You can also find a set of slides from a presentation by Andy Bovington (?) on: Controlling X/Motif apps from Java and Javascript. http://www.sco.com/forum97/tarantella/presentations/bov/ In typical "big company" fashion SCO doesn't tell you how much this product costs. They expect you to fill out a survey and have their sales critters call you. I suspect that this circumlocution may result in more converts to open source software than all of the other "freedom" arguments we can muster. Meanwhile, my wife, Heather, found a couple of promising links (she's the real search engine wiz in the family). Here's the most promising: Eugene O'Neil's XTC, the X Tool Collection http://www.cs.umb.edu/~eugene/XTC/ ... which appears to be at the early alpha stages but, in his own words: ... is an implementation of the X Window Protocol, written in pure Java. It does not require any native C libraries, such as Xlib: instead, it is intended as a complete replacement for Xlib, written from the ground up to be flexible, object-oriented, and multi-threaded. (Wow!) There was also some work done by a Mr. Igor Boukanov at: Pure Java X client http://asfys3.fi.uib.no/~boukanov/java.doc/lib.x.html By far the best technical information I found on X Windows in my search was: Kenton Lee's: Technical X Window System and Motif WWW Sites http://www.rahul.net/kenton/xsites.html Kenton has the best set of links on the subject, and apparently has written articles for 'X Advisor Magazine' and several others. _________________________________________________________________ (?) "Good Times" are Here Again? NOT! E-mail and Internet Hoaxes Exposed From steve wornham on Mon, 30 Mar 1998 on the [linuxprog] mailing list I am not sure if this will help anyone but I recently came across it. (forwarded message below) (!) I hope that I'll be the only one to respond to this and I hope that no one, on any Linux mailing list, will forward this drivel anywhere! This appears to be yet another variation of the "Good Times" virus hoax. Hopefully my response will help everyone. Please do NOT forward this message (or any message) to "everyone in your address book." Any mail that you receive that makes this plea should be viewed with extreme suspicion --- they are almost always hoaxes, spams, scams, or Ponzi schemes. Most are illegal in many jurisdictions (internationally and domestically). Even the cases that aren't illegal are obvious abuses of our shared networking resources (bandwidth). I won't dignify this particular hoax with an analysis. Suffice it to say that it doesn't specify platform, agent, mechanism, or effect (symptoms nor "payload"). For the record it is possible for e-mail to carry some forms of computer virus to some users. Any WinWord .DOC file can contain macro virus code --- and can be attached to any e-mail (via MIME). However, this "virus" is only "data" to the vast majority of Linux users. Even most Windows users won't be affected most of the time --- and all can protect themselves (simply configure your mail user agent to disable any "automatic document viewing" features, and disable the "auto-executing macros" of all your MS Office packages). Lest you think that MS Windows is the only platform affected by malicious macros that can be embedded in documents --- consider that some versions of the venerable 'vi' and 'emacs' editors for Unix have historically contained similar features (modern implementations either lack them or have them disabled by default). I