UCT LEG

LEG has mailing lists for communicating amongst ourselves, and discussing problems.

The lists:

• LEG-Announce: Low volume - announcements only. (moderated) If you are a linux user on campus, please subscribe.
• LEG-Chat: Low-Medium volume. General discussions, problem solving, LEG administration, etc. If you are interested in LEG, please subscribe.

Also see CLUG’s mailing lists - CLUG-tech is the best place to go for non-UCT-specific Linux problems.

Rules:

Please abide by CLUG’s Mailing List Rules. LEG-chat is equivalent to CLUG-chat, and LEG-announce to CLUG-announce.

Some useful ICTS links:

• Network Infrastructure Portal: Lookup MAC addresses, DHCP leases, etc.
• Netstorage: Access your files stored on network drives. more info
• Firefox settings for Windows users: A tweak to stop firefox bombarding you with password requests.
• ICTS Home
• Proxy Quota
• ezProxy: Access UCT-only resources (i.e. journals) from off-campus.

LEG’s plans for the creation of an official university society are coming to fruition. But we need your support!

So if you’re interested in helping promote the use of Free and Open Source Software at UCT, and are keen to help out during Plaza Week (Feb 11-13) then please add your name and contact details to the CLUG wiki page which we are using to schedule the event. Also, make sure that you are on the [leg-chat mailing list][2] as this is where preparations will be organised.

The Sidux and Linux Kernel mirrors have been broken for a few days, due to upstream mirror layout changes.

All should be working again.

We’ve updated our version of Drupal to the latest version (horribly overdue, but Stefano has been slacking). To combat spam, we’ve added CAPTCHAs to user-creation, and installed Akismet and OpenID support.

As part of the process, I pruned out a whole pile of spammy-looking users who’ve never logged into the site, only created accounts. If I deleted any legitamite users, I’m terribly sorry; please create a new account and send me a rude e-mail. :-)

We’ve had some requests for LinuxMint 4.0: It’s on the mirror and toaster.

UCT’s Campusnet proxies (running ISA) require NTLM Authentication, so that they can count usage against the right students’ quotas. NTLM Authentication is relatively non-standard, and rarely implemented in clients.

There are a few Linux applications which can connect to NTLM proxies directly, but most applications cannot. The solution is to use an “NTLM Proxy” which listens for requests from programs on your machine, and forwards them to the UCT servers with NTLM authentication done automatically. CNTLM is the preferred proxy.

OSX Users can use [Authoxy][] for this. Setting it up isn’t described on this page, but you should be able to work it out from these instructions.

Fedora Core 8 is hitting the mirror. The ISOs are down, and on the toaster: i386 x86_64

The RPMs are still downloading, but should be down by the end of the weekend at the latest.

The outage is over. The problem was nailed down to an auto-negotiation mismatch.

We seem to be having trouble with our NAS storage since around 12am on Saturday morning. The more popular distros are unaffected, but some areas of our mirror are virtually unreachable.

We will look into this first thing next week.