Category Archives: GNU/Linux

An Introduction To The Debian Project by Leslie I’Anson – Tuesday, 16th February, Manchester

2010-02-11 by mjr

This talk at Manchester Free Software’s meeting is covering the question: “From the literally hundreds of GNU/Linux distributions in existence, what makes Debian special?” For our co-op, it’s that “Debian GNU/Linux, like all GNU/Linux distributions, is the product of a … Continue reading →

Posted in Education, Training and Information, GNU/Linux | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Gnus added to List-friendly Mail Clients

2010-01-13 by mjr

It’s nice to see that Emacs isn’t being outdone since Thunderbird 3 Introduced Reply-To List: Alok G. Singh got in touch and pointed me at Gnus’s support for List-* headers. I’ve updated my page of email clients that support mailing … Continue reading →

Posted in GNU/Linux | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Top 10 Crimes of Developer Engagement: a common problem?

2009-11-30 by mjr

savs seemed to agonise about posting it but I think his Top 10 crimes of Developer Engagement is spot on even if it might not be as amusing as Aral Balkan’s similar message. I think it applies to my recent … Continue reading →

Posted in GNU/Linux, Koha | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

ssh with unstable and mobile clients

2009-11-21 by mjr

Revisiting two old ssh points:- Smart Tricks with ssh mentioned ServerAliveInterval 3600 and the page I referenced for it mentions ClientAliveInterval on the server-side. Is there any reason not to use that? ssh security mentioned sslh to put ssh on … Continue reading →

Posted in GNU/Linux | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

ssh security

2009-11-04 by mjr

A periodic security review at our co-op suggested switching PasswordAuthentication no on even more hosts. One of those caused a bit of a heated discussion about the benefits of increased security and the drawbacks of making emergency access harder, reminding … Continue reading →

Posted in GNU/Linux | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

debian kernel, firmware and virtualisation

2009-10-26 by mjr

The debian GNU/Linux kernel’s firmware content is one of the most troubling bugs, and (as I understand it): it mostly came from upstream (so fixing it only in debian isn’t sustainable), it’s something some FSF supporters kick us for (often … Continue reading →

Posted in GNU/Linux | Tagged , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Some Good Does Come From Ubuntu

2009-10-22 by mjr

I’ve been mouthing off about Ubuntu again, after the forthcoming release parties were advertised in some pretty inappropriate places, lamenting: “Ubuntu has taken a voluntary-sector aim-for-100%-free distribution, built a private-sector free-and-non-free distribution and gets more love and free marketing from … Continue reading →

Posted in GNU/Linux | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Sharing git repositories

2009-10-19 by mjr

Our co-op uses the git revision control system pretty extensively, both directly and through etckeeper. With more workers, we’re keeping more shared copies of our git repositories. So inevitably, we ran into permissions problems. Thanks a lot to Moser for … Continue reading →

Posted in GNU/Linux | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Strange Spammer Sightings

2009-09-25 by mjr

I’ve seen a couple of the conversation-spams described in Misspelled nemesis club: A new twist on spam? It looks like they exploit the typically weak moderation practices of many software discussion mailing lists. Do you think they are human-powered? Are … Continue reading →

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Everyone and his dog has their multihost ssh so why not me?

2009-08-28 by mjr

I call this sshtomany: #!/bin/bash cmd=”$*” cmd=”${cmd/#* . /}” [ "$cmd" = "$*" ] && echo “Usage: $0 [HOSTS] . [COMMAND]” && exit 127 while [ "$1" != . ] && ssh $1 -vt $cmd ; do echo Success at … Continue reading →

Posted in GNU/Linux | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments