#

# The Answer Gang

#### By Jim Dennis, Ben Okopnik, Dan Wilder, Breen, Chris, and... (meet the Gang) ... the Editors of Linux Gazette... and You!
Send questions (or interesting answers) to The Answer Gang for possible publication (but read the guidelines first)

### Contents:

¶: Greetings From Heather Stern

We send their spam to the Luxury Bitbucket
Setup of ipchains when using ftp
Can't get all my True Type fonts to get recognized
USB mouse goes missing
booting multiple linux distributions
ext3 filesystemcheck?
Soyo Shutdown
How do I use a 250 zip with linux mandrake 7.2 --or--
  Reading Iomega 250Mb Zip Cartridges/Media
socket doubt --or--
  How Do You Detect if a Server Closed a TCP Connection
Hard Disk: BadCRC errors from dma_intr on bootup...
FTP Server
setting nameservers from the command line

### Greetings from Heather Stern

Hey everybody and welcome once more to The Answer Gang. It's gotten a little crowded in our little weekender pub here -- one querent offered us some cake though, and I'm sure we'll enjoy it...

The statistics: We now have 60 members in The Gang. Less than 10 people received no answer whatsoever (and this can be attributed to things like no subject, or no clear problem description). Spam is down immensely since Dan went and made some of the dead trout into a Rube Goldberg machine, reducing the mails that flew by me to somewhere around 500.

The dumb thing of the month: Some mailers not only turn stuff into HTML, but they smush all the spaces out of it themselves, and then put the results in quoted-printable. Glork. Much to my amazement that person got some answers though I can't tell if they helped him. But it certainly didn't get pubbed; I couldn't read it to tell if it was juicy...

But the real Rant Of The Month has to go to The GNU Project for making it sexy to stop shipping man pages !?! Sadly this isn't news. But definitely sadly, there are so many different places around that helpful data might be ... and probably isn't, since many packages pick one and don't have the others ... that we're gonna need a "`wtfm`" command. An rtfm command that works would have to depend on it.

That stands for "Where's The Friendly Manual?"

Particularly egregious since distros now have to figure out their own way to cook up replacesments, so when some cheerful soul pipes in "Oh just check the man pages" ... the user can actually find one ... sigh ... Debian has a standard undocumented.7 man page, which can be summarized:

> Yes, we know there's no man page. It's already been filed as a bug, thus you see this. If you'd like to write one for this app and submit it we sure would appreciate it.

Don't even get me started about distros that tell you that you can't get any help at all unless your webserver is working.

Phooey! I'm not going to let it ruin my weekend. I'm going to a filk conference, as I do a couple of times a year. This particular one is Consonance in the Silicon Valley area. There will be bunches of computer songs there and I plan to be up late singing a few of them. Regular readers already know about my autobiographical filk song but I've written one about my laptop, and a couple about Linux'ing, too. I'm not the really prolific one though. My friend Steve Savitsky has enough to fill at least a couple of CDs... and heck, that's just his computer songs

Have a great month everyone. I know I will!

##### This page edited and maintained by the Editors of Linux Gazette Copyright © 2002
Published in issue 76 of Linux Gazette March 2002

###### HTML script maintained by Heather Stern of Starshine Technical Services, http://www.starshine.org/