Bill Campbell (c...@celestial.com)

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008, Frank M. Ramaekers wrote:
>I need to write a script that will contact a remote system using TELNET
>with VT52/1xx/2xx/320 and perform some operations. I am familiar with
>TELNET but it appears that it won't work for my purposes.

Many systems don't allow telnet connections because of security
issues, using ssh (secure shell instead).

If the issue is dealing with programs on the remote system that
are designed for interactive use, this is difficult to do
reliably although not impossible using ``expect'' via some kind of
remote connection, ssh, telnet, etc. (I was running Tandy's Xenix
accounting applications on a Tandy Model 16 24 years ago using
nothing but input and output redirection from the shell, but that
was not pretty :-).

The ``expect'' program is built around ``tcl'' scripting, but
there are perl and python modules that work reasonably well too.

Bill

A somewhat more sophisticated approach might be to clean out old
files using find.  This would remove everything over 30 days old
from username's Maildir.

find ~usrname/Maildir/ -type f -mtime +30 | xargs rm

Bill

On Sat, Oct 18, 2008, Semih Gokalp wrote:
>
>   Hi all,I have problem on CentOS 5.2
> while everything is working great,suddenly i have this error when i
>   login my server,

This could well mean that your system has been cracked.  These
programs are frequently changed in common root exploits.  You can
run ``rpm -V packagename'' to check for package corruption:

The command ``rpm -qf /bin/egrep'' will show the package name to
which /bin/egrep belongs.  A lazy way to handle this is:

rpm -V `rpm -qf /bin/egrep`
rpm -V `rpm -qf /bin/hostname`

The most common reason these programs don't run after a root
exploit is that the cracker has replaced them with binaries from
another distribution and the binaries are looking for shared
libraries that are not on the cracked system.

Bill

I am against splitting, and support a fairly large number of machines here,
and at our customer sites.  Our customers range from small businesses with
fewer than a single Linux box and fewer than a dozen users to regional ISPs
with thousands of clients.

I subscribe to about 30 Mailman lists based on the number of monthly
reminder notices sitting in my postmaster mail folder here, and we host a
small number of Mailman lists as well.

I answer more questions on lists like this than I ask, and have been doing
similar e-mail and usenet stuff since the mid '80s when I was a
co-moderator on several COMPUSERVE *nix related lists.

FWIW, I have been supporting, integrating, and adminstering *nix systems
for 26 years, and Linux systems since 1995 or so starting with Caldera,
then SuSE, and now CentOS with a smattering of other Linux systems,
FreeBSD, etc. just to make life interesting.

As I said before, I scan the subjects of new threaded messages looking for
things that look interesting, deleting far more than I read (hint to
newbies -- make subjects meaninful, not just ``help'').

Bill

Personally I prefer the more general lists rather than splitting
off into a bunch of more specific ones.  I often learn things by
reading messages that I would see on more targeted lists.  The
more general lists also seem more likely to engender a feeling of
community (the linux-sxs.org nee Caldera list is a case in point).

Perhaps my viewpoint is a bit skewed since I use an e-mail
program, mutt, that makes it very easy to see articles by thread,
and to delete everything in a thread with a single ctrl-D.  I
use Thunderbird on occassion to read messages where I know they
are likely to be HTML and have long links to click, but GUIs are
far too slow and cumbersome to deal with hundreds of messages a
day, particularly in my postmaster and security folders which may
go to thousands of messages in the morning.

Bill