Back to Newsletters KEYWORDS=getty, modem, browsers, mozilla, rsync, DAVROM CONSULTING Newsletter - Issue # 22 - Dated: Tue Dec 23 14:17:59 EST 2003 From the desk of David Clark Merry Christmas to all our readers and many thanks for your continued support over the years. We will be open for business as always over the Christmas and New Years break only closing for Christmas, Boxing and New Years day. As I always recommend for this time of year, as most staff are away in most organisations, now would be an ideal time to do those upgrades and changes to the system. We all know how much people love to hear the server is going down for a time.... so why not do it when most are away. I would like to thank the reader for their time in reading this newsletter. David.M.Clark UNIX Quote UNIX/Linux = stability SCO OpenServer getty binary and modems Some years back with the release of SCO OpenServer 5.0.4, the getty binary - the program that controls logins to the system, was modified to compensate for SCO Merge and modem control on serial ports. SCO Merge is a product that allows MS Windows to run on the GUI desktop under SCO. The result that followed, from my experience in the trenches, was that modem setups that people had used for years to allow remote dialin access to the system no longer worked. The two main symptoms I had observed were: - The modem connects but then the connection gets dropped straight away. - The modem connects and stays connected but you never get the login prompt. While most people tinkered until they at least had a suitable getty entry that worked a higher percentage of the time, I actually replaced the installed getty binary with that of the version that came with SCO OpenServer 5.0.2. I have even installed the 5.0.2 getty binary on 5.0.7 systems and have had no problems with modem logins. There appears to be no problems with modems running on the 5.0.2 getty binary and there are no other issues that I have observed with running the more "spartan", earlier version on the later OSR servers these last 5-7 years. If you have modem problems, give it a try. Browsers under the Linux/UNIX Some time back I attended a web seminar where the speaker had the opinion that 80% of users on the web are using MS Internet Explorer and that all websites should be made compatible with it. Naturally having used Netscape since the days it first came out, I went and spoke to him afterwards - I don't think he was even aware that there are other browsers out there and that there is a vast growing non-Internet Explorer community on the web in the Linux and Apple communities. If you are in the area of web development I would highly recommend you test your web sites with as many browsers as possible. While we don't do anything too complex at DAVROM on our website, we test our pages with Mozilla/Netscape, Opera, Konqueror and IE - just to make sure any images or PHP scripts are working for all possible browsers. While I mainly use Netscape (and Mozilla), I also use Opera in both Linux and Windows just as an alternative. Opera comes with its own e-mail client (POP/IMAP) and it is slightly faster than others I have tried. Let's make sure the Internet stays the "open" choices community it was intended to be.... Some News-worthy items RedHat announce it will discontinue support for RedHat Linux 7.x, 8.0 and 9.0 in favour of offering RedHat Enterprise Linux (commercial product) and its open source community version of Fedora. For more information please visit: http://www.redhat.com/solutions/migration/rhl/ Cyberguard complete their acquisition of SnapGear which is tipped to be a win/win situation for customers with Cyberguard providing more diverse range of security products to the market: http://www.snapgear.com/news20031128.html Tech Tip rsync - remote copying files between servers. Traditionally, I have always used rcp and cpio to transfer files between servers over a network but I have slowly been switching my scripts over to use the "rsync" command. rsync is simple to use and has some distinct advantages over rcp - some points as per the man page: - updated protocol to greatly speed up file transfers - allows transfer just the differences between two sets of files across the network link - support for copying links, devices, owners, groups and permissions - exclude from options similar to GNU tar The command line is simple if you have two machines that have user equivalency you can type (as is the case for my Linux desktop when copying to our SCO server): rsync /u/david/nsmail/* remserv:/u/david/nsmail this will copy only those files under my nsmail directory that have changed or differ from those in the same directory structure on the remote machine "remserv". Another way is to stipulate a user name and server name: rsync -rv scripts/* david@remserv:/u/tmp and in this case I have asked it to run in both verbose mode (-v) and recurse down into sub-directories (-r). Example output: xus xushelp yabbadabbadoo ycprint wrote 41773 bytes read 30152 bytes 2213.08 bytes/sec total size is 2223245 speedup is 30.91 Back to Newsletters 
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