My top 10 hardest problems

[Michael Pope]

As per tonights discussion I was encouraging everyone to post up their
10 hardest problems which currently still exist but may have a
workaround. Keeping our list of problems concise as possible and mainly
system admin tasks, although some programming ones would be ok I
think. This was in the hope that someone out there may have gone down
the same rabit hole as us and might be able to shed some light on one of
the subjects.

Anyway here is my list. All of these tasks I've tried multiple solutions
and either have a workaround for and it's just nice if I got them off my
list. The only one which is really getting to me is my NAS issues at the
moment.

1. Get Android emulator working without the need for a VM
2. Performance of Docker for legacy Informix program on FreeBSD 7 (3 times slower)
3. Getting "Guarding Vision Software" DVR software to work on Linux
4. Share USB Dymo label printer to a remote CUPS server
5. ata2 errors on NAS (already swapped cables & SATA card, drive ok)
6. force permissions so that a group has access (I already use stick bit)
7. emacs check Agenda in background
8. Sync chrome & firefox bookmarks
9. MYOB: Export to libreoffice
10. Remote assist mobile phones
11. Sending large files in Thunderbird (Filelink extensions keep changing)

Regards,

--
Mick

PS: I know I said 10 and put 11 but whos counting! I've got plenty more
but I think that will slide into ruby/JS specific problems and no one
wants to hear about that.

[AJ]

On 25/04/2022 10:40 pm, Michael Pope wrote:
> 8. Sync chrome & firefox bookmarks

on my windows machine..
maybe it's cause i don't have chrome installed.....   but in Firefox 
cntrl-shit-O, alt-I-A
only showed M$ browsers.

[Michael Pope]

I currently use firefox-sync between all my computers and it works great for firefox, it would be nice to also sync with chrome.

I tried https://www.xbrowsersync.org/ a number of times as they have built a tool that does what I want, but everytime I try it all my bookmarks get shuffled around and duplicated into a big mess and I've done that twice so I won't be using that again.

As firefox-sync works great it would be nice to have a chrome plugin which uses that. I know that might be impossible because they compete.

from

Mick

[Malcolm Herbert]

it was for this reason I generally write up a static html page with the bookmarks I use frequently and host that somewhere accessible, or even just locally using a python one-liner web-server ... sync between locations using git, cross-browser supported, naturally ... :)

--
Malcolm Herbert
mj...@mjch.net

[Danny Robson]

On 25/4/22 22:40, Michael Pope wrote:
> 6. force permissions so that a group has access (I already use stick bit)

I'm not sure if this is precisely what you're after but I've used ACLs
to configure directories such that all (newly) created files inside the
directory are accessible to a list of groups and users.

It's been a while but something like the following might get you started:

setfacl --default -m "u:danny:wrx" /path/to/files/
setfacl --default -m "g:backup:rwx" /path/to/files/

Cheers,
Danny Robson

[Michael Pope]

Thanks Danny.

I've got ACL setup on the common directory already and it works for most things. Just looking through my notes as it's an old problem, but it seems one area which the ACL doesn't work is if a staff member creates a file somewhere else then moves that file into the directory. In this situation the file permissions are kept the same and other staff cannot write changes to that file. Currently to get around this I to a 'chmod' & 'chgrp' every 5minutes on a huge directory, which creates a lot of unnecessary IO and it's a dodgy work around.

Looks like this guy is having the same problem, but the answer with the linux-acl-observer is now a broken link and no code there.

https://superuser.com/questions/139513/acl-and-moving-files-in-nautilus

I'm wondering if this is a bug/lack of feature in ACL itself and something that should be addressed there. Maybe an extra flag to force new files which are moved into the directory to also follow suit and apply the default group and permissions.

I've also used the g+s on chmod but that also only works for files created within that directory.

I've tried using file watchers such as rb-inotify and running a script that watches for any activity in that directory and setting the user, group and permissions, but some programs I noticed will create the file, trigger the inotify, then change the permissions within the app after the file has been created, hence bypassing my override.

from

Mick