• pseudo-chroot
• See LILO only when you need it
• Active Directory...
• CSS2? Try XML and its kin instead
• Linux with win2000
• Cable Modem Setup
• read a timestamp... the EASY way
• How to manually label a tape in linux
• Problem faced while using script to backup
• Posters for [LG 72] help wanted #7

pseudo-chroot

hi,

in issue 74 there's a question from Faber Fedor asking about how to setup an environment so that a user can't wander from their home directory.

i believe the person asking the question was looking for something along the lines of a restricted shell. tell the person asking the question to look at the "-r" option to bash, smrsh, and/or do a google search for "restricted shell".

best regards,
trevor

See LILO only when you need it

Hello gazette,

Being a new Linux administrator, I had "hardened" down my install by implementing a "protected" and "password=<pass> entry in my /etc/lilo.conf file to keep people just as dangerous as myself out of single mode.

I also rem'd out the timeout= value so my install would always boot straight into Linux.

My question for the day was "how could I boot Linux Single if I had to? a Boot and Root set would work, but I discovered this...

After the BIOS Mem check, hold down either control key and the LILO boot "screen" is displayed! And of course, you'd need the password=<value> to use it...

Wow, Now I am scary on 2 platforms.

-- Thank you,

John R. Jones

3, if you count that he's an Oracle DBA. -- Heather

Active Directory...

OpenLDAP is the Linux equivalent of Active Directory.

Regards.
John

There's been enough small-comment interest in this, it would probably be good to see an article on the subject of setting up this sort of environment the Linux way. -- Heather

CSS2? Try XML and its kin instead

Ok,

If the feature is unique to CSS2 then you won't replicate it with CSS1 and cross-platform browser support for either is restrictive ...

so .... I would suggest using Xml, xsl, xslt and either DTD or xsd schema formats ...

this is more completely supported ... just a little (mabye a lot) more work ... Check out the books by Benoit Marchal ...

regards
XunDog

Linux with win2000

Anybody please tell me about installation of linux with win2000. I already installed linux 7 on my pc. now i want that without format my system i install win2000 on my pc.

any body pls give me any utility. don't tell me FAQ. this is boring for me. if anybody wants help me out than pls provide me utility.

If you find reading FAQ's boring, I don't think you're going to like Linux too much.

Three recommendations:

For disk partition manipulation:

1. fips or
2. Partition Magic (there are others, but these are two I've used)

For installing and running Windows (MSW) with Linux.
3) VMWare

It would be nice to be able to avoid MSW entirely, but since my work demands it, using VMWare allows me to run it without having to reboot and leave the Linux environment.

-- John Karns

Cable Modem Setup

On January 3, 2002 I'm having a external cable modem installed. I've been looking around for some simple suggestions on what needs to be done, confuguration wise, to my Linux machine. Can you help? Naturally, the normal statement has been made - "We don't support Linux". The Linux machine that it's being connected to has a second NIC installed and I've accessed the machine via the second NIC to that's all set up. Where do I go from there?

We can't know the next step until you have the instructions for how to connect using the cable modem. If you are using Debian GNU/Linux, a simple way to prepare for running a masquerading gateway is to install the ipmasq package, but we don't know if you need PPPOE, DHCP, or some special login methods. A useful resource may be http://www.cablemodeminfo.com/LinuxCableModem.html

Good luck! -- Yann

The extra Ethernet card should be all you need. Beyond that, just follow the Windows dialogs in the manual and see whether it's dhcp or a static IP, which nameservers to put in /etc/resolv.conf, etc.

Yann is right about setting up masquerading if you have a local network. I don't think of that as "setting up a cable modem" though. That's another step, connecting a local network to the Internet.

Be glad you have an external modem. It would be much harder to set up if it were internal, because it would probably require some proprietary DLL that isn't available for Linux. -- Mike

read a timestamp... the EASY way

I was looking for a solution to extract the timestamp of a file with plain shell methods.

... (Lots of all-too-complicated suggestions followed)

What's wrong with

date -r file

Which only goes to show that we really need a friendly way to query the vast obscurity which is Unix documentation... sigh.

<Joe

<laugh> Bravo! Well done, sir!

This illustrates the point that I often make to folks just learning Unix: the tools are in there, somewhere. It's finding them that's the problem. -- Ben

......... the original querent replies .........

Indeed.

Especially when some of your man pages are out of date. In my case,

date --help

would have given the solution, while

man date

just keeps this secret. Sob.

-- Regards, Fakir

How to manually label a tape in linux

I manually backup my linux server every day for that i need to put a label on my tape according to the date, I backup my server. Does anyone know how to manually label a tape in linux is there any command for doing that.

Please help
Thanks in Advance
Franco.F

Well, my approach to this is to create a directory called /tmp/TIMESTAMP, and, just before you make a backup, clear out all the files, then use

touch /tmp/TIMESTAMP/`date +%Y%m%d-%a%H%M%S`

This wlil give you a label for the backup which you can read without having to actually load any data.

Cheers, jra

Problem faced while using script to backup

I have created a automated script to backup my server for that i want my log file to display the date it backsup my server every day. My script has this line ,

echo " BACKUP OF fileserver STARTED " >>
/var/log/bkuplogs/fileserver/mainlog

Is there any parameter which has to be put like %m %h %d. Any kind of help will be highly appreciated

Try

echo " BACKUP OF fileserver STARTED $(date +'%c') " >> whatever

See

man date

for other format strings. -- Dan Wilder

Posters for [LG 72] help wanted #7

Brian Keyse ()

I feel I must recommend O'Reilly's "Anatomy of a Linux System" poster. It is a large, colourful poster giving a rough overview of how things fit together and recommending (O'Reilly, of course) books.

Their address is http://www.ora.com but I didn't find the poster in their product list; it is probably promotional material which you'll have to ask them for. -- Yann

It's available as a PDF file:
ftp://ftp.oreilly.com/pub/poster/oreilly_linux_poster.pdf
-- Brian Koyse

I saw some sort of a thing like that for Linux. Is it 3 or 4 feet in diameter and it shows the ring structure of the operating system? You know..., the kernel in the middle, with the applications at the outer ring? If that's the thing, it's kinda cool. I think that I am gonna get one of those. -- Chris G.

Hmmm. The one I saw was just of the Linux kernel sources. Core memory management and scheduler in the center and VFS and core networking support forming a second tier, with filesystems and specific device drivers on the periphery. That one was a sort of a fractal star or "peacock." -- JimD

I'll have to look at the chart when I go back to work next week. There's a book entitled "The Design of the Unix Operating System" by Maurice Bach. The poster that I saw, for Linux, looks like the structure on the cover of that book.

Regards, Chris G.

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