The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

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xzzy: Mar 5, 2009

Anyone messing with a Pi I recommend getting the latest revision. The memory and clock speed bumps put it light years beyond the older stuff, it's almost as responsive as a "real" computer now.

GUI apps are still kinda iffy though, but I really only use mine for server type stuff.

Most recent use was controlling my camera for the eclipse. Worked like a champ!

# ? Sep 12, 2017 15:39

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# ? May 19, 2024 17:10

Super Slash: Feb 20, 2006; You rang ?

I'm not really sure where to start with this but I've got a local DNS problem with my home OpenVPN server.
Say if I use my mobile phone and connect to the VPN and try to load the web interface of a local webservice (namely a security camera) I just get a DNS error unless I navigate using the local IP address instead.

The whole setup is essentially; NoIP.com (Dynamic DNS service) > Router > OpenVPN (Rpi Zero) > PiHole (Hyper-V VM)

So the idea is for me to remote in outside my home network and also have ads blocked using PiHole, I've set the OpenVPN server.conf to push two local DNS servers (192.168.0.5 Pihole, 192.168.0.1 Router) but over a VPN connection local addresses won't resolve while regular internet addresses work fine. I want to say the problem lies within OpenVPN as if I use my local computer set to only use PiHole as DNS it can resolve local addresses no problem.

Now I could be lazy and just use the local IP addresses, but hey it's a learning exercise.

# ? Sep 12, 2017 20:12

Furism: Feb 21, 2006; Live long and headbang

I'm looking for advice on how to properly configure a web server. I typically run nginx on CentOS. What I do is that for each website (or REST API or whatever) I create a different account (using a random name) with no shell access. Then I create the /pki, /www, maybe /src if I also compile the application and /log directories in the home. Then I put the nginx user into that user's group (not the other way around). In /pki I create symlinks to the correct Let's Encrypt files. In /www I serve the static files (this is the website root typically) and in /logs, well, the logs. Permissions are 7 for the owner, 5 for nginx (except in /logs) and 0 for public.

Is this a correct way to configure the server?

Additionally, some people say that nginx shouldn't be ran by the nginx user (or www or www-data, whichever user the distro uses) but by a non-system account. Is this true?

Note that I'm not running any website that needs to write files to the server. If that happens, they'd be saved onto some Cloud or CDN through API calls.

Furism fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Sep 12, 2017

# ? Sep 12, 2017 20:18

Furism: Feb 21, 2006; Live long and headbang

Super Slash posted:

I somehow try to confirm that the mobile OpenVPN client actually accepts the VPN DNS, and/or that Android uses them. I'm not sure how to debug that on Android, but I guess you could tcpdump what comes over UDP/53 on your server when you try from your phone?

# ? Sep 12, 2017 20:22

minato: Jun 7, 2004; cutty cain't hang, say 7-up.; Taco Defender

Furism posted:

Is this a correct way to configure the server?

I guess you're asking "is this the most secure way to configure the server". Sure, that'll help. What may be better is shoving Nginx + the files into a container, and that way you've got a reasonably secure boundary* and you don't have to concern yourself with randomized names or placing nginx into specific groups, because the container has its own username namespace so it's independent of everyone else anyway.

_{*though be aware that there are certain setups that can allow a user to bust out of a container.}

# ? Sep 12, 2017 21:37

thebigcow: Jan 3, 2001; Bully!

You could try any of the sketchy DNS lookup or changing apps to figure out what your phone is doing

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kodholken.dnslookup looks promising for a start.

# ? Sep 12, 2017 21:38

Super Slash: Feb 20, 2006; You rang ?

thebigcow posted:

You could try any of the sketchy DNS lookup or changing apps to figure out what your phone is doing

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kodholken.dnslookup looks promising for a start.

Ah-ha... using that seemed to narrow things down to point where I discovered the PiHole is the one causing resolve failures.

# ? Sep 12, 2017 21:57

Furism: Feb 21, 2006; Live long and headbang

minato posted:

I guess you're asking "is this the most secure way to configure the server". Sure, that'll help. What may be better is shoving Nginx + the files into a container, and that way you've got a reasonably secure boundary* and you don't have to concern yourself with randomized names or placing nginx into specific groups, because the container has its own username namespace so it's independent of everyone else anyway.

_{*though be aware that there are certain setups that can allow a user to bust out of a container.}

Yes by "correct way" I meant "(reasonably) most secure way". That's for non-business use, just my stuff.

I'm wary of containers because I've heard many of their maintainers don't bother to update their dependencies and you can end up running stuff with known security flaws (or just weak configuration). Am I being too paranoid?

# ? Sep 12, 2017 21:58

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

In general, base images are updated regularly. The trick is that docker doesn't currently have anything like "yum check-upgrade", but you can slap something in cron which updates everything once a day pretty easily

# ? Sep 12, 2017 23:18

apropos man: Sep 5, 2016; You get a hundred and forty one thousand years and you're out in eight!

This is a long shot, but I've been trying to put a Linux version on a mate's old i7 Sandybridge laptop and everthing is running seamlessly with CentOS7 but I hit a wall when it comes to installing his Ricoh laser printer. He plugs it in with USB.

I'm really busy this week and I don't have time to mess about with cups and third party drivers. I've got to prepare for a job interview on Thursday which I'm really hopeful for tomorrow and I'll be seeing him tomorrow night. I just want an easy distro to wipe onto his laptop with will run his printer with minimal messing around. I hate printers. Is Ubuntu or Fedora a safe bet, since they with be up to date with cups/drivers/postscript drivers?

# ? Sep 13, 2017 00:03

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

Apparently not every Ricoh supports PCL. Apple has contributed a ton to cups, so most distros are the same these days. What's the model?

# ? Sep 13, 2017 03:04

Marinmo: Jan 23, 2005; Prisoner #95H522 Augustus Hill

apropos man posted:

I'm really busy this week and I don't have time to mess about with cups and third party drivers. I've got to prepare for a job interview on Thursday which I'm really hopeful for tomorrow and I'll be seeing him tomorrow night. I just want an easy distro to wipe onto his laptop with will run his printer with minimal messing around. I hate printers. Is Ubuntu or Fedora a safe bet, since they with be up to date with cups/drivers/postscript drivers?

Unless it's a server I don't really see the point of going for CentOS over any of the desktop oriented distros. Try Fedora!

# ? Sep 13, 2017 17:54

Furism: Feb 21, 2006; Live long and headbang

Sometimes I want to shoot Linux in the loving face. Why can't Samba find my kodi user? WHY?!

code:

[arnaud@remontoire ~]$ sudo cut -d: -f1 /etc/passwd
[edited]
arnaud
---> kodi
bax
[arnaud@remontoire ~]$ sudo smbpasswd kodi
New SMB password:
Retype new SMB password:
---> Failed to find entry for user kodi.
[arnaud@remontoire ~]$

OK I'm stupid. You need to use the -a argument to tell it to actually add it to its list of users.

Furism fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Sep 13, 2017

# ? Sep 13, 2017 19:36

Furism: Feb 21, 2006; Live long and headbang

Ok InfluxData's TICK stack is seriously sweet. Thanks to whoever recommended it. I stuck to TICK instead of going with collectd (instead of Telegraf) and Grafana (instead of Chronograf) because I really liked InfluxData's documentation, all in one place.

Here's my NAS. Now I need to deploy a simple PKI and open that up to the web so I can also monitor my web servers.

# ? Sep 15, 2017 07:42

Boris Galerkin: Dec 17, 2011; I don't understand why I can't harass people online. Seriously, somebody please explain why I shouldn't be allowed to stalk others on social media!

I helped someone trouble shoot some problems today she found compiling some programs and one of the problems was that her (Ubuntu) system could not locate memset. We googled and apparently it's provided by the "manpages-dev" package.

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/zesty/man3/memset.3.html

So my question is why? Maybe I'm not understanding something but memset should be in the standard C library. Why does libgcc not provide this?

e: Wait, maybe I am misunderstanding. The source code for that looks like it's literally just man pages. Does that mean the program we were trying to compile was checking if memset was available by checking if it had a man page? That seems really dumb.

e2: To be clear the error occurred in the configuration stage, not actual compilation. I'm not familiar with autotools (i think that's what it was), but in the configure.ac file it said memset was a "vital function" (among others) and exits the configuration if it's not found.

Boris Galerkin fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Sep 15, 2017

# ? Sep 15, 2017 17:29

hifi: Jul 25, 2012

Boris Galerkin posted:

I helped someone trouble shoot some problems today she found compiling some programs and one of the problems was that her (Ubuntu) system could not locate memset. We googled and apparently it's provided by the "manpages-dev" package.

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/zesty/man3/memset.3.html

So my question is why? Maybe I'm not understanding something but memset should be in the standard C library. Why does libgcc not provide this?

e: Wait, maybe I am misunderstanding. The source code for that looks like it's literally just man pages. Does that mean the program we were trying to compile was checking if memset was available by checking if it had a man page? That seems really dumb.

e2: To be clear the error occurred in the configuration stage, not actual compilation. I'm not familiar with autotools (i think that's what it was), but in the configure.ac file it said memset was a "vital function" (among others) and exits the configuration if it's not found.

you were on the right track, but the #include line in the man page is what says that string.h is where memset() comes from, so you need to figure out where that comes from on ubuntu (the glibc-headers package provides /usr/include/string.h on my fedora machine) or why the config step can't find it (grep the file for string.h or memset and see if you can figure out what it's doing)

# ? Sep 15, 2017 18:33

SoftNum: Mar 31, 2011

Boris Galerkin posted:

I helped someone trouble shoot some problems today she found compiling some programs and one of the problems was that her (Ubuntu) system could not locate memset. We googled and apparently it's provided by the "manpages-dev" package.

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/zesty/man3/memset.3.html

So my question is why? Maybe I'm not understanding something but memset should be in the standard C library. Why does libgcc not provide this?

e: Wait, maybe I am misunderstanding. The source code for that looks like it's literally just man pages. Does that mean the program we were trying to compile was checking if memset was available by checking if it had a man page? That seems really dumb.

e2: To be clear the error occurred in the configuration stage, not actual compilation. I'm not familiar with autotools (i think that's what it was), but in the configure.ac file it said memset was a "vital function" (among others) and exits the configuration if it's not found.

She probably doesn't have the libc6-dev package. Installing 'build-essential' should install everything at a base level needed to compile things.

# ? Sep 15, 2017 18:55

apropos man: Sep 5, 2016; You get a hundred and forty one thousand years and you're out in eight!

Marinmo posted:

Unless it's a server I don't really see the point of going for CentOS over any of the desktop oriented distros. Try Fedora!

I'm on Fedora now. It's a Ricoh Aficio SP-100SU laser printer. Cups interface isn't showing anything apart from saying it's printed a page when it hasn't.

# ? Sep 15, 2017 19:03

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

Seems like that printer doesn't support postscript and only does some janky GDI thing. There seems to be a hacked-up ppd on GitHub. Have you tried it?

# ? Sep 15, 2017 19:13

apropos man: Sep 5, 2016; You get a hundred and forty one thousand years and you're out in eight!

Yeah. If it's the madlynx/ricoh-sp100 page on github I've already tried that one.

It mentions giving the lp user account rights on a certain executable. Can I just do this with an ACL?

# ? Sep 15, 2017 19:53

Varkk: Apr 17, 2004

I don't know about that particular printer but a lot of Ricoh printers don't support PostScript out of the box. Postscript support is an optional (paid) extra.

# ? Sep 15, 2017 19:56

apropos man: Sep 5, 2016; You get a hundred and forty one thousand years and you're out in eight!

I don't even know what PostScript entails! The friend I'm trying to get it working for just wants basic word processing output. Nothing fancy.

I may have to put him on Windows :-(

# ? Sep 15, 2017 20:10

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

Postscript is a layout language.

That printer only supports directly rastering images.

I'm not sure what you mean by an ACL here. It doesn't require it. Why not chmod/chown?

# ? Sep 15, 2017 21:06

hifi: Jul 25, 2012

Are there any logs?

# ? Sep 15, 2017 22:32

apropos man: Sep 5, 2016; You get a hundred and forty one thousand years and you're out in eight!

I've given access to the file mentioned in the github repo using chmod/chown and also created an ACL for full access by the lp user. It's still hosed. I managed to get a blank scan running through it but I think that was down to me hitting random buttons on the panel rather than any commands being sent to it.

I've also tried Solus (as an 'easy to use' styled distro). I was about to try with Ubuntu, but gently caress it.

I'm gonna install Windows 10 and be done with it.

I detest printers. I can mess about with most other hardware and achieve a reasonable conclusion but printers invariably leave me with a nasty taste in the mouth. It's just as well that this Sandybridge laptop is an i7 with something like 12GB RAM so it should run 10 without any major problems.

As an aside, I was thinking the other day that the old adage about using Linux to rescue older, less powerful hardware is becoming less and less of a valid argument nowadays because the stuff we buy new (even a basic i3 with 8GB RAM) has so much bang for the buck. Linuxers will soon have to drop that argument when persuading someone to wipe their Windows PC. Maybe "it's not poo poo" will be sufficient :-)

# ? Sep 16, 2017 08:06

Furism: Feb 21, 2006; Live long and headbang

Is there an alternative to unrar to, well, unrar files? Seems like the package isn't in EPEL anymore:

code:

[arnaud@remontoire download]$ yum list unrar
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
 * base: centos.quelquesmots.fr
 * epel: epel.mirrors.ovh.net
 * extras: ftp.pasteur.fr
 * updates: ftp.pasteur.fr
Error: No matching Packages to list
[arnaud@remontoire download]$

I could add some random repo or install from RPM but I'd rather not if I can.

# ? Sep 17, 2017 11:48

ToxicFrog: Apr 26, 2008

Furism posted:

Is there an alternative to unrar to, well, unrar files? Seems like the package isn't in EPEL anymore:

I could add some random repo or install from RPM but I'd rather not if I can.

If dtrx is available you might try that, but I don't know if it handles rar files by shelling out to unrar; it might.

7z will unpack rar files (although 7za won't).

# ? Sep 17, 2017 12:42

other people: Jun 27, 2004; Associate Christ

unar (srsly)

# ? Sep 17, 2017 13:06

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

"yum search unrar" should find both unar and dtrx.

# ? Sep 17, 2017 19:30

BoyBlunder: Sep 17, 2008

Trying to stream from twitch.tv using Firefox on Fedora 26 live image results in me getting an error saying the plugin isn't supported.

I don't want to use Chrome/Chromium.

It works a-ok on Debian Stretch.

What gives? I thought flash was dead and I didn't need to install it?

# ? Sep 17, 2017 20:02

anthonypants: May 6, 2007; by Nyc_Tattoo; Dinosaur Gum

BoyBlunder posted:

Trying to stream from twitch.tv using Firefox on Fedora 26 live image results in me getting an error saying the plugin isn't supported.

I don't want to use Chrome/Chromium.

It works a-ok on Debian Stretch.

What gives? I thought flash was dead and I didn't need to install it?

A good place to start would be with Twitch customer support.

# ? Sep 17, 2017 20:13

SoftNum: Mar 31, 2011

BoyBlunder posted:

Trying to stream from twitch.tv using Firefox on Fedora 26 live image results in me getting an error saying the plugin isn't supported.

I don't want to use Chrome/Chromium.

It works a-ok on Debian Stretch.

What gives? I thought flash was dead and I didn't need to install it?

Is there a reason you aren't using streamlink?

# ? Sep 17, 2017 20:40

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

BoyBlunder posted:

Trying to stream from twitch.tv using Firefox on Fedora 26 live image results in me getting an error saying the plugin isn't supported.

I don't want to use Chrome/Chromium.

It works a-ok on Debian Stretch.

What gives? I thought flash was dead and I didn't need to install it?

IIRC, you can shove

BoyBlunder posted:

Trying to stream from twitch.tv using Firefox on Fedora 26 live image results in me getting an error saying the plugin isn't supported.

I don't want to use Chrome/Chromium.

It works a-ok on Debian Stretch.

What gives? I thought flash was dead and I didn't need to install it?

Is it possible Debian ships flash?

Firefox requires plugins for a lot webrtc things, unfortunately

# ? Sep 17, 2017 21:07

BoyBlunder: Sep 17, 2008

SoftNum posted:

Is there a reason you aren't using streamlink?

Never heard of it, looks interesting though

# ? Sep 17, 2017 21:13

Too Poetic: Nov 28, 2008

I've tried to install: Ubuntu, Linux Mint, & Fedora all without luck

Ubuntu and Mint both try to give me a seizure by flashing a cursor with a flashing black screen.

Fedora mostly installed but I couldnt set anything up because it wouldn't detect my keyboard.

Where can I even start to look to troubleshoot this? Everything that I have googled has to do with these issues popping up after installation not before I even have a chance to start the installer.

# ? Sep 20, 2017 07:25

8-bit Miniboss: May 24, 2005; CORPO COPS CAME FOR MY

Too Poetic posted:

I've tried to install: Ubuntu, Linux Mint, & Fedora all without luck

Ubuntu and Mint both try to give me a seizure by flashing a cursor with a flashing black screen.

Fedora mostly installed but I couldnt set anything up because it wouldn't detect my keyboard.

Where can I even start to look to troubleshoot this? Everything that I have googled has to do with these issues popping up after installation not before I even have a chance to start the installer.

What the hell are you trying to install it on? A Speak & Spell? Check all your hardware, something is definitely wrong.

# ? Sep 20, 2017 07:47

Boris Galerkin: Dec 17, 2011; I don't understand why I can't harass people online. Seriously, somebody please explain why I shouldn't be allowed to stalk others on social media!

You could start with being more specific. Like are you installing in a VM or not? If doesn't detect your keyboard so is your keyboard connected via USB or the other thing? What versions of ubuntu or fedora or mint? Rough specs of the computer ("10 year old thinkpad" or "gaming machine with a ______").

# ? Sep 20, 2017 09:41

Truga: May 4, 2014; Lipstick Apathy

BoyBlunder posted:

What gives? I thought flash was dead and I didn't need to install it?

Works for me, but here's a workaround:

Open the link in mpv. You might need to have youtube-dl installed.

# ? Sep 20, 2017 09:44

The_Franz: Aug 8, 2003

Firefox on Linux uses the ffmpeg libraries for media playback now. On Fedora install the Negativo17 Multimedia Repo then dnf install ffmpeg-libs. After that Youtube 1080p, Twitch, SoundCloud etc... should just work.

# ? Sep 20, 2017 19:03

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# ? May 19, 2024 17:10

fletcher: Jun 27, 2003; ken park is my favorite movie; Cybernetic Crumb

My CentOS 7 VM in VirtualBox suddenly is stuck in 1024x768. I tried upgrading to the latest VirtualBox, did a yum update, and reinstalled guest additions. I still can't figure out what is causing the issue. How can I go about fixing this thing?

# ? Sep 20, 2017 21:56

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

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