BOINC has been added to the Fedora 7 and higher repositories. You can use your favorite GUI front end or just do

# yum install boinc-client boinc-manager

The cool part is my logrotate config file is in the repositories as part of the package. I don’t know how geeky that makes me, but it sure did make me feel good. I don’t program, so there’s isn’t a whole lot I can do to give back to the Fedora community. So I think it’s cool that I was able to contribute in this small way.

The capital letter in my user name was indeed throwing sendmail into fits. I could have created an entire new user. But hey, that’s a lot of work. I’d have to port my Firefox profile over and re-customize my desktop. Nah. Definitely not worth it just to be able to read local email.

I could have directly edited /etc/passwd using vipw at the command line. I’m not a big fan of vi. It scares the pants off me. I’ll stick to emacs, thanks. Heck, I find emacs extremely challenging on a good day. I’m all for the simple route of using kedit. So on the advice of mweltin who was hanging around #boinc, I ended up using usermod from the command line. The syntax was quite simple. usermod -l kathryn Kathryn. The only gotcha is that you can’t be logged into an account that you want to edit. So I logged out of Kathryn. Hmmm… well that dumped me to a text login screen. Oh well. I logged in as root, ran my usermod command and then rebooted from the command line. I have no idea how to get back into a graphical environment from a text prompt. But at least I learned how to reboot from the command line.

And…. BINGO!

[kathryn@Galaxy ~]$ mail
Mail version 8.1 6/6/93. Type ? for help.
“/var/spool/mail/kathryn”: 6 messages 6 new
>N 1 boinc@Galaxy.Fedora Mon Feb 11 19:42 17/582 “test”
N 2 MAILER-DAEMON@Galaxy Mon Feb 11 19:42 78/2716 “Warning: could not send message for past 4 hours”
N 3 MAILER-DAEMON@Galaxy Mon Feb 11 19:42 164/5257 “Warning: could not send message for past 4 hours”
N 4 root@Galaxy.Fedora Mon Feb 11 19:42 27/978 “Cron <root@Galaxy> run-parts /etc/cron.daily”
N 5 logwatch@Galaxy.Fedo Mon Feb 11 19:42 113/3519 “Logwatch for galaxy.fedora (Linux)”

I recently found out that the system sends various emails to the root account. And darn it, I want to read them. In theory, all I need to do is have those emails automatically forward to my own user account (and I guess it’s also possible to have them forwarded to a regular email account). Supposedly it’s as easy as creating a file called /root/.forward with the user name of the account you want to have the mails forwarded to.

I always get sort of suspicious when someone says “It should be as easy as…”. Because, it doesn’t seem to matter how easy it is, I still have problems with it. And yes, mail didn’t disappoint.

I have two user accounts on my machine, mine (Kathryn) and BOINC’s (boinc). I can send mail to boinc and root, boinc can send mail to root and root can send mail to boinc. But neither boinc nor root can send mail to Kathryn. Apparently, I don’t exist.

[Galaxy:~]$ mail -v Kathryn
Subject: test
testing
Cc:
Kathryn... Connecting to [127.0.0.1] via relay...
220 Galaxy.Fedora ESMTP Sendmail 8.14.1/8.14.1; Wed, 6 Feb 2008 09:09:50 +0900
>>> EHLO Galaxy.Fedora
250-Galaxy.Fedora Hello localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1], pleased to meet you
250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
250-PIPELINING
250-8BITMIME
250-SIZE
250-DSN
250-ETRN
250-AUTH DIGEST-MD5 CRAM-MD5
250-DELIVERBY
250 HELP
>>> MAIL From:<boinc@Galaxy.Fedora> SIZE=35 AUTH=boinc@Galaxy.Fedora
250 2.1.0 <boinc@Galaxy.Fedora>... Sender ok
>>> RCPT To:<Kathryn@Galaxy.Fedora>
>>> DATA
550 5.1.1 <Kathryn@Galaxy.Fedora>... User unknown
503 5.0.0 Need RCPT (recipient)
>>> RSET
250 2.0.0 Reset state
/var/lib/boinc/dead.letter... Saved message in /var/lib/boinc/dead.letter
Closing connection to [127.0.0.1]
>>> QUIT
221 2.0.0 Galaxy.Fedora closing connection

I’ve jumped through a bunch of hoops trying to get this to work. I’ve tried sending to Kathryn@localhost. Nope. No dice. I’ve checked the contents of /etc/hosts. Everything is fine there. I’ve added the host name to /etc/mail/local-host-names. Nope. No dice. On advice from my tutor I’ve done `make` in /etc/mail and `newaliases` (for luck of course). No dice. I’ve even restarted the sendmail service. I must be a figment of my own imagination.

All this to read messages that look like

From root@Galaxy.Fedora Tue Feb 5 04:17:03 2008
Date: Tue, 5 Feb 2008 04:15:39 +0900
From: root@Galaxy.Fedora (Cron Daemon)
To: root@Galaxy.Fedora
Subject: Cron <root@Galaxy> run-parts /etc/cron.daily
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Auto-Submitted: auto-generated
X-Cron-Env: <SHELL=/bin/bash>
X-Cron-Env: <PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin>
X-Cron-Env: <MAILTO=root>
X-Cron-Env: <HOME=/>
X-Cron-Env: <LOGNAME=root>
X-Cron-Env: <USER=root>

/etc/cron.daily/logrotate:

[ OK ] BOINC client daemon: [ OK ]
Starting BOINC client as a daemon: [ OK ]
[ OK ] BOINC client daemon: [ OK ]
Starting BOINC client as a daemon: [ OK ]

or

From root@Galaxy.Fedora Tue Feb 5 04:15:28 2008
Date: Tue, 5 Feb 2008 04:15:28 +0900
To: root@Galaxy.Fedora
From: logwatch@Galaxy.Fedora
Subject: Logwatch for galaxy.fedora (Linux)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=”iso-8859-1″

######### Logwatch 7.3.4 (02/17/07) ##########
Processing Initiated: Tue Feb 5 04:15:27 2008
Date Range Processed: yesterday
( 2008-Feb-04 )
Period is day.
Detail Level of Output: 0
Type of Output: unformatted
Logfiles for Host: galaxy.fedora
#########################################

———– pam_unix Begin ————–

su:
Authentication Failures:
Kathryn(500) -> root: 1 Time(s)
Sessions Opened:
(uid=0) -> boinc: 5 Time(s)
Kathryn(uid=500) -> root: 5 Time(s)

———— pam_unix End —————

———– XNTPD Begin ————–

Total synchronizations 2 (hosts: 2)

———— XNTPD End —————-

———– Disk Space Begin ————–

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda6 9.9G 3.8G 6.1G 39% /
/dev/sda8 4.0G 73M 3.7G 2% /tmp
/dev/sda7 4.0G 855M 3.0G 23% /home
/dev/sda2 60G 18G 43G 30% /Data
/dev/sda1 41G 24G 17G 59% /Vista

———— Disk Space End —————

############ Logwatch End ###############

I came across this blog post in one of the feeds I read daily. I thought it was cool and I wanted to share. It’s a way to use the Phosphor screen saver that comes with xscreensaver to display a random bit of the Linux kernel source.

I have to admit, I don’t use a screen saver. They drive me nuts. My screen powers down after 1 minute. And I like it that way. But this is cool enough and novel enough that I might try it, at least for a few days.

The directions are written for a Debian based system, so I’ll have to play around a bit and see if I can get it to work with Fedora. But everything seems bog standard. It uses a small program the author wrote to display the contents of a random file in a directory (this will also help me out in some scripting I’m doing for mplayer).

It of course assumes that you do have the xscreensaver package and said package contains the Phosphor screensaver.  It also assumes that you have the kernel source on your system as well.  It’s also necessary to compile the author’s program (which should only be `make` and `make install`).

If  I get this to work, I’ll definitely report back.  I’ll also report back on Argument Shuffle.