SpamAssassin

$ perl -MCPAN -e shell
o conf prerequisites_policy ask
install Mail::SpamAssassin
quit

gnobog (a Gnome Bookmarks Organizer)

gnobog is a nice
little bookmark app. Since it use galeon, mozilla, konqueror and
other random web browsers, this lets me keep my bookmarks in one
central location.

palm pilot integration

Red Hat does not yet set up a link for /dev/pilot which href="http://www.jpilot.org">jpilot, href="http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/PalmOS-HOWTO/pilotlink.html">pilot-xfer,
etc use by default.

        ln -s /dev/ttyS0 /dev/pilot
        chmod 666 /dev/pilot

more network configuring...

Set the hostname to be something reasonable instead of
localhost.localdomain by using 'neat'.

Also disable starting eth0 on boot -- it takes a while to timeout when
I'm booting in a wireless mode.

GTK.pm/Net::pcap installed

In order to get Wellenreiter v1.3 (a wireless monitoring tool) to run,
it requires GTK.pm installed. Since I no longer trust 'perl -MCPAN -e
shell' not to screw up my perl installation, I downloaded
Gtk-Perl-0.7000.tar.gz and Net-Pcap-0.04 from href="http://www.CPAN.org">CPAN and manually installed it. Note:
Net::Pcap need to be built this way: perl Makefile.PL
INC=-I/usr/include/pcap LIBS='-L/usr/lib/pcap -lpcap'

Setting up printers (home)

Red Hat 7.3 ships with both LPRng and CUPS, the latter has a nice
web-based configuration tool.

• /sbin/service cups start



• Switch to CUPS permanently using the new 'alternatives' method
  (nice bit of borrowing from debian)

  /usr/sbin/alternatives
  --config print




• Use web interface on href="http://127.0.0.1:631">http://127.0.0.1:631

filesystem configuration

Created mount points:

mkdir -p /NT /CD1, /CD2 /ExtraHomes /mnt/xx /mnt/xy /mnt/ontour /mnt/ibgzk
o /mnt/after7

Added:

/dev/hda1               /NT             vfat    uid=500,gid=500,defaults       
 0 0
/dev/hdb1               /CD1                    vfat    uid=500,gid=500,default
s       0 0
/dev/hdb2               /CD2                    vfat    uid=500,gid=500,default
s       0 0
/dev/hdb3               /ExtraHomes     ext2    defaults        0 0
//192.168.123.100/marc  /mnt/mdesktop   smbfs   user,uid=500,gid=500,username=m
arc,password=SECRET,defaults    0 0
//192.168.123.100/xx    /mnt/xx         smbfs   user,uid=500,gid=500,username=x
x,password=SECRET,defaults      0 0
//192.168.123.100/xy    /mnt/xy         smbfs   user,uid=500,gid=500,username=x
y,password=SECRET,defaults      0 0
//ontour.zko.dec.com/public /mnt/ontour smbfs   uid=500,gid=500,auto,user,exec,
rw,username=nozell/americas,password=SECRET 0 0
//ibgzko.zko.dec.com/nozell /mnt/ibgzko smbfs   uid=500,gid=500,auto,user,exec,
rw,username=nozell,password=SECRET 0 0
//16.29.96.110/sharedmedia /mnt/after7 smbfs    auto,ro,username=guest,password
=SECRET 0 0

Configure web server

• Need to set the document root to be my person ~/public_html.
  
  

  DocumentRoot "/home/marc/public_html"

  
  ...
  

  <Directory "/home/marc/public_html">

  
  
  
• Set email contact:
  
  

  ServerAdmin marc@nozell.com

  
  
  
• Change location of cgi-bin:
  
  
  

      ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/home/marc/cgi-bin/"

  
  ...
  

  <Directory "/var/www/cgi-bin">

  
  
  
• Setup bloxsom blogger by copying blosxom into ~/cgi-bin/ and editing locati
  ons to point to /home/marc/public_html/
  
  

Precision Timekeeping

Configure NTP to get the time from systems that are available from 1)
internet, 2) inside corporate firewall, 3) inside corporate external
lab firewall and 4) timeserver of DSL provider.

To the file /etc/ntp/steptickers add the one very long line:

harbor.ecn.purdue.edu tick.mit.edu ntp01.cca.cpqcorp.net ntp02.cca.cpqcorp.net 
alpha1.ispworks.com shell.mv.net

Turn ntp on at boot time:

chkconfig --level 45 ntpd on

Red Hat Network

re-register with Red Hat Network.

rhn_register

And then go to http://www.redhat.com/network
and adjust the 'entitlements'. Finally then ready to actually update
with 'up2date'. Quite a number of updates just a week after Red Hat
7.3 was released...

superuser access

visudo

and added marc to the list.

Initial Network reConfiguration

First I merged in the settings from the old /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opt
which wasn't enough to get the Orinoco wireless card working. After
using 'neat' to configure an eth1 wireless device, it came right up.

In /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opt

• Comment out the section that looked like this:
  

  
          essidany,*,*,*)
          INFO="Any ESSID"
          ESSID="any"
          ;;
  

  
  Changed the lines in the "Lucent Wavelan IEEE (+ Orinoco, RoamAbout and ELSA)"
  section:
  

  
          MODE="Managed"
          ESSID="04502a"
          KEY="s:4502a"
  

  
  
  
• Also used 'neat' to allow users enable/disable eth0/1 device.
  

Install Red Hat V7.3

I wanted to upgrade to fix a galeon problem, unfortunately the Red Hat
upgrade didn't fix the problem. Probably because it didn't upgrade
any ximian'ized packages, so I did a fresh install.

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5 1.9G 142M 1.6G 8% /
/dev/hda2 21M 5.7M 14M 28% /boot
/dev/hda6 981M 876M 55M 95% /home
/dev/hda3 2.9G 2.0G 852M 70% /usr
swap 512M

GNU/Linux in 20 websites or less

There are a growing number of folks where I work who are getting on
the linux bandwagon. Most of them are coming from a commercial UNIX
background and have questions about how Linux is different, wondering
where to get information, news and software.

Here is my short list of Linux websites for commercial UNIX refugees:

1. 
   Free Software Foundation -- This
   organization, started by Richard
   M. Stallman (better know simply as RMS) and where the acronym GNU
   (GNU is Not UNUX and is pronounced Guh-News) comes from.
   



2. The GNU General
   Public Licence (aka GPL) and href="http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/gpl-faq.html">Frequently Asked
   Questions about the GNU GPL are two very important pages you
   should read and understand. When people talk about 'free software' in
   this context, they are refering to the freedoms the software is
   licensed under, not the lack of a pricetag. The GPL is the prime
   reason why Microsoft is having a hard time competing with
   GNU/Linux/Open Source software.
   
   
3. 
   The Linux Documentation Project has
   a number of href="http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Compaq-Remote-Insight-Board-HOWTO/">
   excellent HOWTO
   documents, longer and
   FAQs on quite a
   number of topics.
   



4. 
   Slashdot (also known as
   /.) -- News for
   Nerds, Stuff that Matters. This is a great place to
   get a feel for what the hot topics of discussion is in the
   open source/free software world. You can join their daily
   mailing list of news items.
   



5. 
   freshmeat.net -- when you
   need to look for open source software. This is an package
   announcement repository. This is very useful if you sort of
   know what you need (say "web log analysis") but don't know
   which packages are available. You can join their daily mailing
   list of new/updated packages.
   



6. 
   sourceforge.net -- This
   is a site that provides all the web tools needed to manage an
   open source project -- mailing list, CVS code repositories,
   bug tracking, download servers, etc. Their search engine is
   also very useful for finding particular open source packages.
   Not everyone informs href="http://freshmeat.net">freshmeat of new packages or
   projects.
   




7. 
   Linux.com -- A good general
   purpose starting point for information.
   



8. 
   openprojects.net --
   While not really a usefull website, they host the very useful
   openprojects IRC chat network. Point a IRC client to
   irc.openprojects.net.
   Useful/interesting channels are #linuxhelp and
   #linpeople
   



9. Major Linux Distributions:
   
   
   
   
   1. 
      Red Hat -- North America,
      worldwide, primary commercial vendor.
   
   
   
   2. SuSE -- Strong European
      presence, known for high quality and very complete distribution
      .
      First distribution to ship six(!) CDs.
   
   
   
   3. debian -- non-commercia
      l
      distribution; has a strong university and world wide following.
      Very
      nice package manager. One simple command to find, download and
      install software for example apt-get install apache.
      To keep
      a system updated to the latest versions, simply apt-get upd
      ate;
      apt-get -u upgrade
   
   
   
   4. Mandrake
      -- North America, worldwide, focuses more on the
      desktop and ease-of-install. A good alternative to
      Red Hat for the novice user.
   
   
   
   
   
   
10. linuxiso.org --
    "Fresh ISOs like Mom used to Burn". If you are looking to
    download linux installation CDs, this is the one place to go.
    If you don't have broadband, just buy some cheap cds (under
    $5) from one of the many sponsors. Also check out some of the
    niche, but interesting, linux distributions like href="http://brlspeak.net">BrlSpeak for blind users or href="http://k12ltsp.org/ ">K12LTSP which is lets you boot
    diskless workstations from an applications server and is
    perfect for a K - 12 education environment.



11. Linux Weekly News -- Nice
    roll up of the week's news for the Linux community.
    




12. newsforge.net --
    more news from the open source/Linux/BSD/GNU/etc world with a
    more journalistic slant.



13. thelinuxshow.com
    -- Listen to the weekly Tuesday night webcasts of various open
    source/Linux/BSD/GNU/etc pundits talk about the weeks news.
    
    
    
14. Of course the best server hardware to run Linux on can be
    found here: HP and href="http://www.compaq.com/linux">Compaq. Also see the
    technical white papers on href="http://activeanswers.compaq.com/aa_asp/Solution_List.asp?str=6-10
    0-225-1">Linux
    solutions.