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Help Wanted -- Article Ideas

New submission address!

Send tech-support questions, answers and article ideas to The Answer Gang <>. Other mail (including questions or comments about the Gazette itself) should go to <>. All material sent to either of these addresses will be considered for publication in the next issue. Please send answers to the original querent too, so that s/he can get the answer without waiting for the next issue.

Unanswered questions appear here. Questions with answers--or answers only--appear in The Answer Gang, 2-Cent Tips, or here, depending on their content.

Before asking a question, please check the Linux Gazette FAQ to see if it has been answered there.


 Wed, 11 Oct 2000 12:50:21 +0200
From: Jean-Paul Duyx <>
Subject: Vines Client for linux

On my notebook I run linux, but at my work the network is Banyan Vines. Searching the internet, I could not find any linux client for Vines. Perhaps I didn't look good enough or mayby there is no such thing.I think it would be nice to read something about that. The only thing that i found was a private project to write a client for linux, but that site hasn't been updated for more than a year. it is http://freespace.virgin.net/paul.grayson/.


 Sun, 29 Oct 2000 14:33:05 +35824
From: Jon Claerbout <>
Subject: Income tax software

Every year I need to struggle with Windoze again in order to work out my income taxes. I heard that there were some web-based systems, but when I dug into it, it turned out that it needed to work with an adobe plugin that didn't work for me.

Hope you can dig up some better solutions for us Linux folk?

--
   o   ~
 _-'\_  ~
(*)<(*)  ~


 Wed, 18 Oct 2000 15:06:53 -0500
From: Matt <>
Subject: Slackware RAID1 problem

HEELP! hehe I have been trying to find a chatroom (or ICQ or something..just aas long as its live and they are available alot.) with some people (or better yet, one kind guru with lots of free time) in it that can help me with a slackware problem I am having..(specifically installing and configuring a RAID1 system). I am VERY new to linux ..have only compiled one kernel in my lifetime and don't truly understand what it did or why..hehe

All I need is someone to kinda walk me through step-by-step commands starting with CFDISK and going all the way to the end..a bootable raid1 system. (I can learn how and why later..but am on a bit of a time schedule at the moment.)

If you know of any places I can go or people to contact, please let me know as soon as you can.

I already have about 90 pages of printed material and have tried most of it, but its not working. dunno, maybe the the instructions I have (have about 10 different sets form different websites) are missing something..

Anyway, I really appreciate any help you might be able to offer..


 Fri, 20 Oct 2000 18:06:30 -0200
From: César A. K. Grossmann <>
Subject: Windows NT Event Log on a Linux Box

I need to consolidate the event log from several machines and produce some reports and even alerts from the data collected. I was thinking that using the Linux tools (cron jobs, scripting languages, and DBMS) could be a good idea, but cannot find how to do this (read the event log of a Windows box from a Linux box).

The best support I can find was the article http://www.securityfocus.com/frames/?focus=microsoft&content=/focus/microsoft/nt/log1.html. In it I can find:

"... The Event Log is accessible to remote machines via Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) via applications that utilize the Event Log API, such as the Event Viewer."

So I think it's possible to have some application that uses RPC (as SAMBA does) to connect to the remote Windows box and get a copy of the event log.

Can you help me? The Windows NT boxes are in an NT Domain, and the Linux box does have the SAMBA installed and running.

TIA

P.S.: sorry the bad english, I'm a brazilian penguinista.


Gazette Matters


 Fri, 6 Oct 2000 03:24:56 +0300
From: Peter Georgiev <>
Subject: Linux Gazette by e-mail

Here is my 0.02USD tip for all those readers who'd like to receive the Gazette by e-mail.

Actually it can be done quite easy. All you need to do is send an e-mail message to bitftp@pucc.princeton.edu with message body:

open ftp.ssc.com
chdir /pub/lg
binary
get lg-issueXX.tar.gz
quit

and you will receive back an e-mail containing a uuencoded copy of the requested file. There is plenty of uudecoding software so I will not elaborate further.

If you need more detailed HOWTO on the matter and a list of other ftp-mail servers send an e-mail message to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu with message body:

send usenet/news.answers/internet-services/access-via-email

or mailto mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk with message body:

send lis-iis e-access-inet.txt

or visit http://www.activesol.com/www/drbobfram.htm

There you will also find info on various internet services available via e-mail.

Your Editor comments:

This is certainly easy since it uses standard FTP commands. Remember to get lg_base.tar.gz too the first time, and lg-base-new.tar.gz each month. However, note that the file sizes are large: recent issues have been 750KB - 2.1 MB, and lg-base is currently 837 KB. Some mail gateways reject messages which are over a certain size, frequently one megabyte. If the files are too large for your gateway, the following suggestion may be more suitable for you.

Ralbright <> recommends:

Send an email as noted here to any of the numerous www4 servers.

From: Your  Mail Address Here   
To:  www4mail@ftp.uni-stuttgart.de
Subject: leave blank nothing here

GETSIZE 50000
XUUENCODE 
ftp://ftp.ssc.com/pub/lg/lg-issue58_tar_gz.

this results in 24 msg that are numbered part 01 of 24 and uuencode. I use uudeview to decode the 24 parts. I then rename each part to aa----ax. 24 parts; then I combine the parts exactly like this. must be this way!!

copy /b aa+ab+ac+ad and finally ax
then press return on the line containing the copy instruction It will ask if you want aa to be overwrote. answer yes and all will now be in aa now re name aa to issue58.tgz and proceed with untgz

I have acquired all 58 issues this way through email only. Hope you can make sense out of this.

Your Editor comments:

That copy command is for DOS/Windows sysems. (No, it's not a crime to read LG on a Windows machine.) On Linux/UNIX, you'd do this instead:
cat aa ab ac ad ... ax >issue58.tgz
This creates issue58.tgz, containing all the other files joined together one after the other. I don't see why you need to rename the files to aa, ab, etc., since you're just going to use them once and then delete them. Why not just use whatever names uudecode gives you?

Ralbright <> continues:

E-mail, like everything else, sometimes goes off into never-never land. If, after getting the parts of LG, you discover that some parts are missing, send the following to the www4 server:
GETPART put missing part number here
GETSIZE 50000
XUUENCODE 
ftp://ftp.ssc.com/pub/lg/lg-issue58_tar_gz.


 Wed, 11 Oct 2000 09:09:50 -0700
From: Linux Gazette <>
Subject: Translations

Thanks to everybody who responded to last month's request for translators from other languages to English. Currently we have volunteers for:

ROMANCE
Spanish (3), Portuguese (2), French.
GERMANIC
German, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish
SLAVIC
Russian (from Russian only)

We don't get a lot of mail in non-English languages, but we have gotten an article in French and one in Spanish, and TAG/Mailbag items in Italian, Spanish and Danish. I just want to have translators ready in case we need them someday.

Those who wish to translate from English into their own language should contact the foreign-language version of interest, or start your own if there isn't one. As always, see the mirrors page.

Note to those who work on LG's foreign-language editions:

There is a new mailing list, lg-translators, where I send advance copies of articles after they have been formatted. This will give you a chance to get your hands on the articles a few days early to lessen the delay between when the English version appears and when your translation is ready.

To subscribe to this list, send a message to with "subscribe lg-translators" in the body. This is a moderated list: only articles, article revisions, and announcements from LG to the foreign editions will be sent.

Musings on the Spanish LG:

The Spanish LG (La Gazeta de Linux) could become a significant force in the next several months. I have been getting inquiries about it every month, moreso than I've received for the other languages. The Spanish-speaking world in particular seems to have a lot of unmet demand for a Gazette-like publication. I suspect that's because of the economic situation in Latin America (an affordable OS is more of a necessity than in Europe), because people are less likely to grow up knowing English, and because there are a whole *lot* of Spanish speakers.

The demand for Spanish LG reminds me of the demand for an affordable Macintosh that was built up during the late 80s. When Apple finally released the MacClassic in 1990, I for one immediately went down and bought one, as did a lot of other people. Apple was forced to switch to a 3-shift, 24-hour production line to churn them out, just to meet the demand.

Note: all non-English versions of Linux Gazette are done as independent projects without LG sponsorship. LG does not endorse specific translations as being official. However, we gratefully acknowledge all translations we know about on our mirrors page.


Thanks

Thu, 26 Oct 2000 13:29:57 -0400
From: Bill Cox <>

I was doing a search of your achives and found exactly what I needed. Thanks for being there.


 Mon, 16 Oct 2000 19:41:46 -0500 (CDT)
From: Jason Englander <>
Subject: "@" sign confuses LG mirrors

I have no idea when this started because I auto-mirror /pub/lg/www_root and only usually look at it when a new issue comes out... but here's what I get with ftp and with lftp:

-rw-rw-r--   1 698    @ 105    @    30147 Sep 26 11:39 lg_faq.html
-rw-rw-r--   1 698    @ 105    @    11763 Sep 30 15:38 lg_frontpage.html
-rw-rw-r--   1 698    @ 105    @   162592 Sep 30 15:45 lg_index.html
-rw-rw-r--   1 698    @ 105    @   134353 Nov 17  1999 lg_index_tag.html
-rw-r--r--   1 698    @ 218    @     1475 Jul 28  2000 lg_index_tag0.html
-rw-rw-r--   1 698    @ 105    @     2379 Mar  1  1999 lg_statement.html
-rw-rw-r--   1 698    @ 105    @    86857 Sep 30 15:37 mirrors.html
-rw-rw-r--   1 698    @ 105    @      102 Nov  3  1999 robots.txt
-rw-rw-r--   1 698    @ 105    @     8866 Aug 31 17:44 ssc.copying.html
drwxrwxr-x   2 698    @ 105    @     1024 Feb 28  2000 test
-rw-rw-r--   1 698    @ 105    @     3021 Mar 30  2000 search.html

The two @ that are in there seem to be botching up "mget *.html" type requests and mirroring (I use lftp's mirror), making the "search.html" file become "30 2000 search.html" (the 30 and the 2000 coming from the date).

Anyone else report this? I'm going to grab the .tar.gz files now and shut off the nightly updates.

[Nobody else has reported this. We get the "@" symbols on the FTP listings too. However, LG has an rsync server. Rsync is reliable and uses less bandwidth than FTP mirroring. Jason switched to rsync and said it's working fine. Hints for setting up an rsync client for LG are here. -Mike.]


This page written and maintained by the Editors of the Linux Gazette. Copyright © 2000, . Copying license http://www.linuxgazette.com/copying.html
Published in Issue 59 of Linux Gazette, November 2000
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