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RE: Linux PVR as possible self-control of content for families?
by Kelsay, Brian - Kansas City, MO 14 Mar '07

14 Mar '07

>-----Original Message----- >From: Oren Beck >Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2007 8:22 AM > <snip> >Can the Linux projects for PVR media centers be used to create >a personal content firewall? > <snip> >I want to have some method of recording kid safe content and >-an ability to audit anything questionable if ratings or other >rule sets make that indicated. So the only content that the >kids see is as censored as practical. My stepdaughter has 4 >kids under 10 years old. >So she's become the target customer for my application question. >She does NOT have time to either hand censor all the >kids' content in real time, nor the computer skills we do to >even semi automate the task. Can we offer any help? > >Let me close with my overwhelming reasoning for posting this. > >The only person having final veto over what their children >watch is their parent in control. >And we can create an instrumentality of that control. Most of the newer TVs and cable boxes have parental controls built-in. You can set the parental controls to lock-out individual channels, lock-out anything that is rated TV-14 or TV-MA. You can also combine these with timed lock-out so that the channels are unlocked after a certain time or so nearly all channels are locked-out before Family viewing time starts (time for kids to do homework). I can attest to this system working, BUT beware, it can make it a PITA for you the adult to watch TV. You constantly have to enter the pin code to watch the channel, even if you are just skipping around to find something to watch. One of the easiest things you can do is remove the bad channels from the line-up. Cancel a movie channel subscription of remove it from the remote. That way if the kids are scrolling thru the channels they won't roll thru the baddies, but you can manually enter the channel number. Until MythTV and Freevo get something like Dan's Guardian for TV channels, there are your answers. Or you could just unplug it.

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RE: Speeding up a machine
by Kelsay, Brian - Kansas City, MO 14 Mar '07

14 Mar '07

>-----Original Message----- >From: Jason D. Clinton > >On Fri, 2007-03-09 at 16:00 -0600, Billy Crook wrote: >> I've looked around the web for ways to optimize your Linux system. >> hdparm was mentioned a lot, but my drive is sata, and my >cdrom is set >> to be recognized as SCSI because as IDE, its throughput was >too jerky >> to watch DVDs. When I tried to turn on DMA, hdparm kept throwing a >> fit about "HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device". >> sdparm doesn't seem to offer the same. For example, I wand to use >> 32-bit transfer mode with sync, hdparm won't cooperate, and sdparm >> doesn't know what I'm talking about. > >This will happen if the BIOS currently has the device in PIO >mode. See if you can put the device in UDMA mode from within >the BIOS drive view. >You definitely do not want to use SCSI emulation these days. > I thought that Linux completely ignored the BIOS settings and they were just there to get the hardware initialized and spun up. And then once Linux booted that it would assign its own settings to hardware.

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Supplemental question: Preferred *NIX for chrooted apache?
by cragos＠gmail.com 14 Mar '07

14 Mar '07

Are there any OSes out there that make it simple to install and automatically update a chrooted, full-featured apache install? I'm aware of how to do it in Gentoo and Ubuntu, and I've seen it done in FreeBSD, but I've never seen it done in a manner that allows the OSes package management system to still be used. If not, will a dually P3 with a half-gig of RAM and a couple 7200RPM UW SCSI drives be enough of a machine to run my apache, php, etc daemons in User Mode Linux or under Xen without a hiccup? Not planning on trying to get slashdotted or dugg anytime soon, and I can probably arrange to get mirrored in a couple of places if I see something like that coming. Thanks, Sean Crago

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Re: Preferred Linux Flavor for Web Server?
by cragos＠gmail.com 13 Mar '07

13 Mar '07

On Tuesday 13 March 2007 01:47:18 am Luke-Jr wrote: >I've run a number of RPM based servers that didn't have X or >ALSA. I've had >problems with gentoo wanting to support wacom drawing >tablets for almost any >application I tried to install - including documentation >packages! Debian & Ubuntu's server & LAMP installs can also quite easily be installed without X. X is not installed by default on either of the latter. I installed the Ubuntu over Gentoo when I needed to drastically cut the staging time/axe the overhead of make. Used the same partition scheme, and had absolutely no issues. I believe it used a similar amount of space on disk for the nearly identical package set I installed. On the matter of hardware support in Gentoo, on occasion it can be a little finicky, but when running astandard hardware or doing other screwball things, I've generally had better luck with Gentoo than most. -Sean

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Shared block device
by Billy Crook 13 Mar '07

13 Mar '07

Anyone know of a way to share a block device like Raid-1 across multiple machines? I want to get two machines to share files to the same group of clients for R/W access and have changes replicated between the two machines, so they'd be effective immediately for the other clients. A month ago, I googled, and found a wiki of a bunch of different systems but they each had some fault. Some could only be written to from one place. The comparison section of the page left me ultimately thinking the only things that did what i wanted were GoogleFS (NOT public) and a couple others that were really expensive. I don't even so much care that the block device is whats replicated, but trying to replicate a file system on demand like that I'm guessing is not possible for locking reasons. (Two people from different servers could lock the same file in the same place and make changes to it. Has anyone here done anything like this before?

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Re: Preferred Linux Flavor for Web Server?
by cragos＠gmail.com 13 Mar '07

13 Mar '07

>What flavor of Linux would you run on it? >Mainly I'm looking for someone with experience >running Linux on this machine but opinions are >welcome as well. I built a simlilar P3-600 last year to do the same sort of thing. Just wanted to point out the obvious, because it didn't hit me until I'd had make and gcc running for a couple of days straight: Don't use Gentoo. I ended up using Ubuntu Server, but there's not much different between it and Debian. In some cases, Debian actually is more up-to-date than Ubuntu with regard to some server-side applications, like the IlohaMail PHP webmail client package. Apparently still is, 8 months later: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ilohamail/+bug/52462 I'd just say go with what you're comfortable with, unless it's mostly compiled from source. -Sean Crago

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Display flickering
by Billy Crook 13 Mar '07

13 Mar '07

Every once in a while, on average once every ten or so seconds, my display flickers black and comes right back. Almost like what I would expect if I were changing resolutions, but the resolution is not changing and I have no idea what causes this. The video chipset is nvidia quadro fx2500 w/512mb. The driver is nvidia's latest (1.0-9755). Xorg is at 7.1.1 (70101000). I'm running FC6 on kernel 2.6.19-1.2911.6.5.6.1.fc6.jwltest.27 on a core2duo. The display is the laptop display, and while I haven't tried with an external, I am reasonably sure it's not the display. It happens when the laptop is idle or in use. It happens with or without beryl. It happens on JWL's testkernel and without. JWL is a redhat kernel devel, and his patch enables my PCIE wireless card. I've only seen it while in X, but that's 99.9% of time anyway. What's a good place on the system to look to figure out what the glitch is? People look to this system as an example of Linux, and I hate to have them think it's that sketchy.

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FreeBSD Security Audting
by Scott Oertel 13 Mar '07

13 Mar '07

Does anyone here have experience using the built in Security Auditing feature provided with 6.x releases of FreeBSD? I'm working on configuring it just perfect so that it doesn't log too much nonsense, but I can still possibly see security breaches. Does anyone have any config examples they're using in production? -SO

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Preferred Linux Flavor for Web Server?
by RtX 12 Mar '07

12 Mar '07

OK, so now I'm gonna setup a web server on this Compaq Proliant 3000. I anticipate running Apache2, mysql, ssh, ftp, samba, and possibly Teamspeak on it. System specs are: Dual Pentium-II 400 Mhz 896MB Ram 28GB RAID 5 Storage (7 drives) What flavor of Linux would you run on it? Mainly I'm looking for someone with experience running Linux on this machine but opinions are welcome as well. -- RtX... Ty Unes - Overland Park, Ks. riverty(a)gmail.com

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Proliant 3000 Server
by RtX 12 Mar '07

12 Mar '07

I have a Compaq Proliant 3000 Server. It is a dual Pentium II 400 with 7 SCSI drives. I am trying to get this server setup with some flavor of Linux (I haven't decided which yet) but am having trouble setting up the disk array. Maybe I'm really off base but I'm going off of other setups where I would configure the RAID array before installing the OS. I have downloaded and created the Compaq SmartStart 5.5 CD and seems to boot and do what it's supposed to do. However, when I try to run the Array Configuration Utility, it bombs. I have tried to run this utility from the CD. It requests that I put the ACU disk into drive A, then states that it will reboot the system to boot off of this floppy. OK. Reboot and I get non-system disk everytime. I have created the disks (2 total) 3 or 4 times to no avail. These disks are simply not bootable. The option to run the ACU from the system partition is not an option. So I'm left with either I have a bunch of bad floppies, a broken system, or I just don't understand what I'm doing. I guess it's possible that one HAS to create the array after the installation of an OS. Could this be? Am I supposed to create the array AFTER OS installation? Am I missing a step? -- RtX... Ty Unes - Overland Park, Ks. riverty(a)gmail.com

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