Questions about Cron, Microphones, Networking and Amarok with Gstreamer

roastedmnm · 02-16-2006, 08:11 PM

Hello, I have been using SUSE for going on 8 months now but I still find my Windows mind to be perplexed. I have several questions, if anyone would be so kind as to answer any of them it would make my day.

1. I want to restrict interent access on a box over certain hours so I poked around until I found ifconfig. I don't know if this is the best way of doing the job but what I have been attempting to do is use the cron job thing. Now I understand the concept of cron jobs but I have yet to successfully create a working job thingie to do the job.

Because it seems that ifconfig is restricted to the root user (and the only alternative I found, usernetclt, seems to not exist for anything but RedHat) I set up the following crontab

root crontab:

Code:

MAILTO=""
LANG="en_US"

0 */4 * 2,3 * /home/user/.netdown.sh > /tmp/testing.cronlog 2>&1

.netdown.sh

Code:

#!/bin/bash

ifconfig eth0 up
ifconfig eth1 up

echo "Network connections enabled."

/tmp/testing.cronlog

Code:

/home/user/.netdown.sh: line 3: ifconfig: command not found
/home/user/.netdown.sh: line 4: ifconfig: command not found
Network connections disabled.

Why do the root cron jobs not run with root permissions or more generally: why does this not work? Or if there is a better way to do this (that doesn't make kopete or gaim freak out), then what is it?

2. What is the best way to backup a folder over a network on an interval? I have had very bad luck with networking linux. I think most of my problems have been because there are obvious choices as to networking (as opposed to Windows) and I haven't found a good explanation as to what king of networking to use when.

zeroconf? samba? I saw something about using netcat?

3. Is there something special that needs to be done with mics? I have a headset that works fine in Windows but under SUSE it is almost inaudible even with what seems to be the volume control completely up.

4. What is a gstreamer plugin and how is it installed. According to YaST (and also apt4suse), I have installed amarok-gstreamer but when I try to switch to the gstreamer engine from the xine engine, amarok shows tells me to install a gstreamer plugin.

Thank you in advance to those who would answer.

MensaWater · 02-17-2006, 01:13 PM

Can't answer it all but will answer what I can numbered. Note for most of the commands listed typing "man <command>" or "info <command>" will give you more detail.

1) It is not complaining about root permission but rather about a lack of PATH to ifconfig. When you are logged in you get an "environment" which is set by things such as /etc/profile, $HOME/.bashrc, $HOME/.profile (where $HOME = home of the user you're logged in as which for root would be "/" or "/root" usually). You can see what your's is set to by typing "echo $PATH". To see the whole environment type "env".

Part of this environment contains the PATH variable. The PATH lets the shell know where to find commands. Without it you have to type the full path to the command (i.e. /sbin/ifconfig). If /sbin is in the PATH you can simply type ifconfig as it will look in sbin to find it.

Your cron can be fixed by either adding PATH=/sbin or by changing the lines that start with ifconfig to start wtih the full path /sbin/ifconfig instead:

Code:

#!/bin/bash

/sbin/ifconfig eth0 up
/sbin/ifconfig eth1 up

echo "Network connections enabled."

There may be an init script that already does this. (On RedHat for example one could type "service network stop" to stop it then later just do "service network start" to restart it.)

2. Backup from what OS to what OS? If both are Linux then rsync is what I'd use for that. There may be a Windows rsync client but I don't know.
Samba is used to share out directories the way Windows does so you could mount one of your Linux directories as say the F: drive on your Windows machine.
NFS is the Linux (and Unix) utility for sharing out directories between Linux and Unix systems.
I don't know zeroconf or netcat.

Note the above are not backup utilities but file transfer mechanisms. The built in backup utilies most commonly used are tar, cpio and dd. If what you really want is a backup then you might want to tar the files into a single file then copy it across to your other host.

3. No answer.

4. No answer.

roastedmnm · 02-17-2006, 10:02 PM

Thank you for the useful answers. You gave me enough info to solve the problem but left just enough out to make me acutally learn how to do the job.

Anyone want to take a shot at 3 or 4?

3. Is there something special that needs to be done with mics? I have a headset that works fine in Windows but under SUSE it is almost inaudible even with what seems to be the volume control completely up.

4. What is a gstreamer plugin and how is it installed. According to YaST (and also apt4suse), I have installed amarok-gstreamer but when I try to switch to the gstreamer engine from the xine engine, amarok shows tells me to install a gstreamer plugin.