Friday 10 June 2011

Newcastle Bike Week

Its that time of the year .........

End of term is coming.

Lots of cans of various sorts littering the streets, pavements wall and gardens  ( like this - not sure what they hope  to acihieve by this )

Mindless damage to car mirror.

Goes with the time of the year and a good night out on friday.  About £60 to fix.

 Alleged to be a  'minor ' irritant to living in the vibrant area of Newcastle. 

its important that this sort of stuff is recorded somewhere. Many Council policies go on about 'cumulative impact' - you can probably live with one incident but when its regular it becomes a major irritant.  So I rang the Northumbria Police non urgent number 03456 043 043.  Must say , very helpful and friendly staff  on the phone. And they have to have a statement.  So they will send someone round. On Sunday . Between 9 and 10 am.

the statement :
"I locked my car and left it outside the house at 6pm. I came out at mid-day  the next day and saw it was broken. A quick inspection revealed it was un-repariable.   Its probable that the key-scratch I ve noticed today across the bonnet is  the work of the same f*$£*^%r. Nothing else is damaged and  nothing else has gone".

But they have to send someone round to talk to me, apparently. I'd be happier if they put the man-hours into stopping this sort of mindless vandalism, but there  may be something about them taking a statement in person that I don't realise. you go .


the phone call took 6 minutes. The intro to the online reporting form  has warning if it takes you more than 30 mins to fill in (!) .
We'll see what they have to say on Sunday.

Sunday 5 June 2011

No No SpyNoMore, youve got it wrong

I had a phone call  from my sister who had somehow  picked up some malware called  PC Security Guardian on her Windows7 machine, and was stuck with the constant popups and warnings. So I resorted to Google, had a good look around to see what i could find out. The best information I could find  was this link  and the suggestion to download Malware Bytes anti-Malware.

This would  all have to be fixed by talking my sister ("whats windows safe mode?") through how to  sort it all out, so i tried some of the anti-malware  first. I've got  windows XP and windows 2000 running as virtual machines inside linux mint . Like this - i can run them both at the same time.


Some wouldn't run under wine (software that lets you run some windows programs, without actually having  the windows operating system,  on linux, (but there again , why would you need to run anti-malware as there isn't really any), but I thought id have a trial run first.  I could be very confident that this setup wouldn't contain any viruses, because I don't go onto the web with  any programs ( its just for windows stuff that i have to run for a course) .Some of them did run under wine on linux .  I downloaded SpyNoMore detection tool (demo version) 2.98.110604 ). I could run it in either of the virtual machines.... But ive also installed wine so i gave it a whirl.


Here's what it found
 But the first  file it found is the one that runs the windows little black box to do command line stuff - and not, as far as I'm aware, a trojan at all !

and dmusic32.dll is one of the files installed with wine , according to this list .

I thought Id contact SpyNoMore and tell them they have a false positive for a very common windows file, but i cant find any contact details on their website!

Friday 3 June 2011

making more disk space on ASUS eee 901

I've  had an ASUS eee 901 since they were produced ( preceded by a 701). Initially running Linpus linux that it came with , that got replaced with Ubuntu NBR ( now Ubuntu NBR). And NBR works well. The screen height/width ratio is different and putting the menu along the side makes maximum use of the  available area.

I formatted the flash disks as ext2 - not journaled, decreases the read/write to the disk -  and installed the OS on the 4GB disk and used the 16 GB disk as /home.
This has worked well, except that space became a problem on the 4GB partition. For instance , I had to do updates in steps,  one application at a time.

So Google is your friend and I ended up here and moved /usr/share to the other disk.  As predicted , the firefox icon disappears. But there is a bigger problem. this machine is my travelling companion and I have LAMP installed on it. After moving /usr/share , MySQL didn't start and the log is filled with this , occuring every 10 seconds or so

May 29 07:55:42 littleCOOP kernel: [63907.078018] type=1505 audit(1306652142.849:6294):  operation="profile_replace" pid=6795 name="/usr/sbin/mysqld"
May 29 07:55:42 littleCOOP kernel: [63907.097842] type=1503 audit(1306652142.869:6295):  operation="open" pid=6799 parent=1 profile="/usr/sbin/mysqld" requested_mask="r::" denied_mask="r::" fsuid=0 ouid=0 name="/home/.fs-ext/usr/share/mysql/english/errmsg.sys"
May 29 07:55:42 littleCOOP kernel: [63907.103499] type=1503 audit(1306652142.873:6296):  operation="open" pid=6799 parent=1 profile="/usr/sbin/mysqld" requested_mask="r::" denied_mask="r::" fsuid=0 ouid=0 name="/home/.fs-ext/usr/share/mysql/charsets/Index.xml"


It wasn't a permissions problem. With the help of the Tyneside LUG, this was fixed . The files were moved, but instead of a symlink, it was mounted using /etc/fstab

/home/.fs-ext/usr/share    /usr/share    none    rw,bind  0 0


and everything now seems to work.