Getting gnus to send email

Problem when sending mail from cvs gnus/emacs in a fresh ubuntu 8.04 installation:

Debugger entered--Lisp error: (error "Sending failed; SMTP protocol error")
  signal(error ("Sending failed; SMTP protocol error"))
  error("Sending failed; SMTP protocol error")
  smtpmail-send-it()
  message-send-mail(nil)
  message-send-via-mail(nil)
  message-send(nil)
  message-send-and-exit(nil)
  call-interactively(message-send-and-exit nil nil)

Solution:

sudo apt-get install starttls

The secret gyration

How to get vmware server 1.0.6 working under ubuntu 8.04:

[Fri Jul 25 14:13:00 CDT 2008] [billw@billw-desktop vmware-server-distrib]$ vmware
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4' not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4' not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4' not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)
[Fri Jul 25 14:13:25 CDT 2008] [billw@billw-desktop vmware-server-distrib]$ cd /usr/lib/vmware/lib
[Fri Jul 25 14:14:29 CDT 2008] [billw@billw-desktop lib]$
[Fri Jul 25 14:14:31 CDT 2008] [billw@billw-desktop lib]$ sudo mkdir bak
[Fri Jul 25 14:14:40 CDT 2008] [billw@billw-desktop lib]$ sudo mv libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1 bak/

Switching to OpenDNS

UPDATE: here are some details from Dan Kaminsky.

From my email summary to some friends:

Most folks' dns servers have a vunerability (cache poisoning) discovered by Dan Kaminsky. The vulnerability is due to a design flaw in dns itself. Based on his work, network people have been working secretly on a patch for months. ISPs need to patch their dns servers immediately, but it won't be done instantly, and some probably won't patch at all. Meanwhile, details leaked out and an exploit has been published. Kaminsky himself recommends switching to OpenDNS, which, by the way, is free and has many cool features. And it seems that trustworthy people trust OpenDNS.

Switching was an easy change in my router, which is running open-source dd-wrt.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_poisoning
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Kaminsky
• http://www.doxpara.com/
• http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/148854
• http://www.opendns.com/
• http://www.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv3/index.php

movemail

The sysadmins at work did some work on the machine that hosts my homedir, and after that movemail up and quit on me. After a day and a night of traipsing through man pages, O'Reilly books and websites tracking dowm imap arcana and toying with the idea of an entirely new email system, I found the problem.

It seems that there are two different versions of movemail: one in the GNU mailutils package and one in emacs' cvs sources. I was using the latter. When I rejiggered my PATH environment variable to point to an old movemail that shipped with Fedora Core 4 (that's what my work machine is running), all was well again. Back to work.

A note on compression

I'm working on something that requires me to check out about 10,000 Mathematica notebooks (about 1.4GB) from cvs to home through my cable connection, so I looked into speeding up the transfer with gzip compression.

With no compression, the checkout took 37 minutes; with 'cvs -z1' (using the lightest of gzip's 9 compression settings) the time went down to 18 minutes. Higher settings gained me an extra 30 seconds or a minute or so, but at the cost of more cpu activity.

So it's '-z1' for me, even on my X-redirection-through-ssh connection to work, which is set in ~/.ssh/config:

Compression yes
CompressionLevel 1

Here be monsters

Grr. There are unfathomable deeps surrounding authentication with the Wolfram smtp server when connecting from outside their network. My email will stay on my office computer, accessed via emacs through ssh X forwarding. Back to Mathematica coding - I've had enough lisp for the night.

On the bright side, I'm now using my new squeaky-clean & organized .emacs and .gnus files that I came up with during all this. A general cleanup can violate Grohens' Law of Information Conservation if you're not careful. I tossed code only if I couldn't remember what it was for or the last time I used it. It's still hanging around in old files, though, in case I really need some of it.

It's good being a geek

a2ps works great under ubuntu 7.10 with an HP 950C deskjet printer. The only problem is that the page margins are screwed up when printing to a deskjet. Since I'm a geek, I don't need to throw up my hands and squeak "AIEEEEE! It doesn't work!".

The clue I needed to fix the problem was at the bottom of this stretch of config variables in /etc/a2ps.cfg:

#################################################################
# 1)    Definition of some media      #
# (Must be defined before --medium)       #
#################################################################
# Medium: name, width height [llx lly urx ury]
Medium: A3      842    1190
Medium: A4      595     842
Medium: A5      420     595
Medium: B4      729    1032
Medium: B5      516     729
Medium: Letter      612     792
Medium: Legal     612    1008
Medium: Tabloid     792    1224
Medium: Ledger     1224     792
Medium: Statement   396     612
Medium: Executive   540     720
Medium: Folio     612     936
Medium: Quarto      610     780
Medium: 10x14     720    1008

# Desk Jet users: bigger margins
Medium: A4dj    595 842 24  50  571 792
Medium: Letterdj  612 792 24  40  588 752

So, we need to set explicit margins for deskjet printers, but the given margins didn't work for my HP 950C. So there's a job for ~/.a2ps/a2psrc with numbers I derived by trial, error, and printing a dozen pages:

# Medium: name, width height [llx lly urx ury]
Medium: hp950c  612 792 10  85  578 790

Here's a script to print emails 2-up from gnus: ~/bin/printmail

a2ps -=mail -2 -M hp950c

In gnus, put the cursor on the message in the summary buffer, type `|' and tell it to run printmail.

Here's what I printed:

Subject: [cath_hs] Fwd: Zuppa Toscana

we had this last night and it was VERY good.  very spicy.  we will
make it next time, with half mild and half hot sausage.  instead of
fresh kale, i used frozen, dethawed and squeezed dry with my hands.

also, i used only 3 carrots, not 5.  diced the celery and carrots
small, since that's the only way our fam will eat them.  chopped my
taters into bite size pieces.  used light cream, but put a whole cup
in to cut some of the spice.  parmesan is just as fine for a garnish,
instead of romano.

2 quarts is 8 cups of stock. :-) rachel ray would call this a "stoup".
it's a thick and hearty soup.  nice with biscuits.  broth is flavorful
and creamy.  made a whole lotta soup.  tons of leftovers for the two
of us.

i think someone emailed me the recipe, but i can't find the original
email.  thank you!!

love mel

Begin forwarded message:

> Date: November 12, 2007 12:05:01 PM EST
> Subject: Zuppa Toscana
>
> Zuppa Toscana (adapted from Olive Garden's)
>
> 2 lbs. hot Italian Sausage patties
> 2 lg. onion, chopped
> 3 stalks celery, sliced thinly
> 5 carrots, sliced
> 6 cloves garlic, minced
> 2 qts. chicken stock
> 3 lbs. russet potatoes, chopped coarsely
> 1 bunch kale, leaves stripped of stem and chopped coarsely
> 1/2 c. cream, whatever type you like
> romano cheese to garnish
>
> Saute the sausage in dutch oven over medium heat until it is
> cooked. (If you can't find the patties, use links, just squeeze out
> the sausage before cooking.)  Remove the sausage from pan, and pour
> off most of the grease. Put onions, celery, and carrots into the pan
> and saute until onions are translucent. Add garlic and cook 2
> mins. more, stirring frequently. Add stock. Bring to boil and add
> potatoes. Cook until potatoes are done. Add kale leaves and cook 5
> mins. Remove from heat and add cream. It is now done! When serving,
> garnish with romano (pecorino romano is the best for this). This soup
> is even better the next day. If hot sausage is too much, mild italian
> sausage can be substituted, but the flavor is not as "punchy".

Keep your webhosting local

Mr Curley at Bethune Catholic runs Requiem Press, a Catholic publishing business. Over the weekend the bright bulbs at NaviSite, his webhosting company, messed up a relocation project and his company's website has been down since then. I suppose the lesson to learn from this is to keep your internet services as local as possible. UPDATE: he's back online at http://requiempress.blogspot.com/. UPDATE 2: his original website is up again at http://www.requiempress.com/

In an ironic twist of history, Karl Marx's dream has come true in modern-day America: workers can easily own the means of production. If you run an internet-based business, it may be worth the money and sysadmin hassle to run your own webserver (while still making remote backups).

It costs almost nothing to get a decent computer from a junkyard or a freecycle list and set up a webserver under Ubuntu. It can even run mediawiki (the software behind wikipedia), blogs and other content management systems, all downloadable for free.

The main costs are high-speed internet access, if it's available in your area, and the time it takes to learn how to secure the server.

Ubuntu install-info kludge

There's a conflict between texinfo's install-info and the one distributed with Gutsy - if you install texinfo, its install-info will fail during Gutsy's auto updates. If you typically install software via apt-get and you don't need texinfo's install-info, just rename it to, say, install-info-texinfo. That will move it out of the way so Gutsy can find its own install-info. Then updates ahoy - all is well again.

There's always a catch

I installed Wordpress today so Sarah the diarist can have a blog. After a hitting a spot of trouble I considered signing her up for a free public blog at wordpress.com but I quickly woke up and realized that's not an option. When she's an adult she can blog whatever whe wants wherever she wants; til then she can blog on our home intranet.

The catch: when we accessed the blog from another computer via http://billw-desktop/sarah/wordpress the address was translated to http://localhost/sarah/wordpress. Turns out I had her configuration slightly wrong: under wp-admin -> Options, I had used http://localhost/sarah/wordpress in "WordPress address (URL)" and "Blog address (URL)"; after changing localhost to the computer's router-assigned IP address, all was well - now she can blog from any computer in the house.

Here are a couple of samples of her writing. First, from her third-person wikipedia entry:

Caroline Margaret White is two-and-a-half years old. (All of Sarah's brothers and sisters are and-a-halfs, but not her.) The White family does not know her favorite thing to do, but she "sings" a lot in baby talk. Though she is almost three, she can't talk much.

And this from her first blog post, about our Halloween celebration yesterday:

After a while it was time for the scavenger hunt. We were supposed to find some candy. Daddy had made clues, and the first one was in Daddy's pocket. It said:

Go into the pink room, where ghosts blow through the air. Look at the hockey table, the one that blows air.

I forgot whether those are the exact words he used, but never mind... maybe he will tell them to me later.

The scavenger hunt was upstairs. Daddy came with us. He said he did it 'to protect us from ghosts and goblins.' There were no ghosts or goblins up there, but sometimes Daddy jumped out through the door of a room we were passing by, and roared like a monster. We laughed when he did that! Eventually we found the candy, on the top bunk of the bunk-beds in the blue room, in a basket that looked like a jack-o'-lantern.

vmware server under ubuntu 7.10

At the moment you need to install it by hand; here's what worked for me.

ssh without a password

Sometimes you need to be able to ssh to a server without giving it a password; say, if you have an automated process that writes files and copies them to a server. I had to set this up quite a few times recently - here's the recipe I followed (this assumes that the permissions on your various ~/.ssh directories are correct)

You'll need:

• a client: a computer from which you'll ssh to another
• a server: the computer to which you'll ssh from a client

Then,

• on the client, run 'ssh-keygen -t rsa' to generate ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub and associated files. When asked for a password, just hit Enter. You need to generate id_rsa.pub only once per client - you can reuse it for each of the servers.
• scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub server:~/.ssh/client.pub
• ssh server
• supply your password to get in
• cd ~/.ssh
• cat client.pub >> authorized_keys
• if this creates a new authorized_keys file, change its permissions to 600: chmod 600 authorized_keys
• log out of the server & try to ssh to it - you should get in without having to specify a password
• of course this is less secure than ssh with a password, so use it wisely and sparingly
• your mileage may vary - some installations may require a file named authorized_keys2; the above recipe works for me in my environment.

Making the jump to hyperspace

I'm about to upgrade my computer from Ubuntu 7.04 to 7.10 using their upgrade tool. Oremus.

Later: Dang, that was a mess. The upgrade tool just disappeared after issuing hundreds of warnings and error messages, then it rebooted into a kernel panic. Now I've wiped the disk and installed 7.10 from scratch; I had backed up all the important stuff before upgrading so most things are working now.

Given my backups, I've been able to do this in about 2 hours:

• install 7.10 from scratch
• install essential build libraries for cvs, texinfo and emacs, then download and compile them
• install kasteroids :-)
• copy emacs setup files from backups
• download and install LAMP (linux-based apache, mysql, php)
• download and install mediawiki
• import my home wiki backups into the new mediawiki installation
• install & configure nfs packages and mount nfs dirs from our various computers
• install mplayer (mp3 player)
• install codecs for the totem video player
• install debian's pyblosxom package, then install from the latest distro at sourceforge
• generate a new ssh key and install it on the various machines at work

UPDATE: the problems may have been that texinfo's /usr/local/bin/install-info was shadowing the distro's /usr/sbin/install-info. If I were to do this again, I'd move texinfo's install-info out of the way first, as in this kludge.

Encyclopedist detection kit

To determine whether any of your kids are natural-born encyclopedists, install Mediawiki and turn them loose. This morning Sarah asked whether we could have a wikipedia about our family, a "Whitopedia". Knowing it would be fairly easy with Ubuntu, I said yes and spent a few minutes here and there running through the steps between other tasks. Now it's set up and Sarah and Christopher are both clacking away writing initial biographical entries on their computers (old castaways that handle Ubuntu just fine).

I set up mediawiki on my heavy-duty high-horsepower work computer and poked holes in its firewall for theirs. They can get to it by using my computer's name as a web address: http://ubuntu-home/wiki.

For googlers, that's MediaWiki 1.11.0 running under Ubuntu 7.04.

More home sysadmin

The Windows box finally wonked out. I've booted it from an Ubuntu 7.04 install disk to read the Windows NTFS disk and I'm rsync'ing important files from there over the LAN to my new Ubuntu box. After lifeboat operations are complete, I dunno - wipe & install Ubuntu? My old copy of Windows? Both? We'll see.

Home sysadmin

Our Linksys WRT54Gv2.0 seemingly died last night around 10pm, and by 2am I had tried every stinkin' Linksys thing that can be tried to fix a Linksys. This morning I installed dd-wrt's open-source router firmware and all is well again.

vpn error 800 blues

My boss bought me a shiny new Lenovo ThinkCentre M55p to take home, and the WRI sysadmins got it all set up & working at the office. It's running windows since some Mathematica documentation tests I run work a lot faster under windows. I'll also run ubuntu 7.04 under vm once I get things up & going.

Now the box is at home behind my Linksys WRT54Gv2 router and I'm singing the aforementioned blues. Upgraded router firmware, opened ports, no joy. Waiting for sysadmin advice, which is understandably slow early on a Sunday morning. Meanwhile, I have an itchy install finger with the ubuntu 7.04 cd just inches away, and I'm intrigued by this open-source router firmware.