14 December 2003: SME/Alpha V5.5 is based on Mitel's SME 5.5, which was
silently end-of-lifed in September 2003, and Red Hat Linux 7.2, which will be
end-of-lifed on 31 December 2003. It is as yet unclear whether or not there
will continue to be GPL'ed sources of security backports for RHL 7.2 after 31
Dec 2003. As a result, I cannot recommend that anyone continue to use SME/Alpha
V5.5 and urge all users to explore alternatives.
This page contains frequently asked questions (FAQ) about SME/Alpha.
(Actually, it contains more or less interesting tidbits pretending to be
FAQ.)
- When I log in as a regular user on my SME/Alpha server, I
get a message that "Standard user login services have been disabled." How
can I get a command shell?
The default user shell in SME Linux is
/bin/sshell. This shell is very restricted and
doesn't provide access to a command line. The most common and popular
command shell in the Linux world is bash, the Bourne Again SHell. To give
user "robert" a bash shell, issue the following command as root:
# chsh -s /bin/bash robert
The reverse command is:
# chsh -s /bin/sshell robert
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- OK, I've got a bash user shell now, but I don't like the
default bash prompt. Can't I have a nice prompt, like the one root
has?
To give user "robert" a nicer bash prompt, do this as root:
# cd
# cp .bash{_logout,_profile,rc} /home/e-smith/files/users/robert/
# perl -pi -e 's/\"root\"/\$USER/' /home/e-smith/files/users/robert/.bash_profile
# chown robert:robert /home/e-smith/files/users/robert/.bash*
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- Bash says "command not found" when I try to run a
program as a regular user, but I just ran the same command as root! What
gives?
You probably tried to run a command from the
/sbin directory, such as
/sbin/lsmod or
/sbin/ifconfig. The
/sbin directory is not included in a regular
user's PATH environment variable, because regular
users usually have no business running commands from that directory. Many
commands outside of a user's PATH will actually not be
executable by regular users. To run lsmod as a regular user
you need to specify the full path, so the command would be:
$ /sbin/lsmod
Please note that the login user's PATH is inherited by
su users. Type "man su" if you
don't know what I'm talking about.
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- Email messages sent through the SME/Alpha server have
these weird EST (American Eastern Standard Time) timestamps, even though
my server is set to CET (Central European Time). Some entries in
/var/log/maillog also have incorrect time. How
do I correct this?
For reasons of security obtuse-smtpd, the SMTP frontend used in SME/Alpha
V5.5, is chrooted to /var/spool/smtpd. This
means that obtuse-smtpd considers
/var/spool/smtpd to be the root of the file
system; it cannot see (or touch) data outside of this "chroot
jail". Programs normally look for timezone information in
/etc/localtime. Obtuse-smtpd will look in
/var/spool/smtpd/etc/localtime. That file
contains the EST data. If you've set your time and timezone,
/etc/localtime will be correct for your
timezone. You can copy it into obtuse-smtpd's chroot environment like so
(as root):
# cp /etc/localtime /var/spool/smtpd/etc/
Say 'y' to overwrite existing file
/var/spool/smtpd/etc/localtime
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- The ide-scsi module takes quite a bit of time to load at
system startup. Do I really need this module, and, if not, how do I stop
it from loading?
The ide-scsi module provides SCSI emulation for IDE devices. In SME Linux
it is used to send SCSI tape commands to IDE tape drives. If you don't
have an IDE tape drive, you don't need to load this module. In that case
you can do the following as root:
- First unload the module:
# modprobe -r ide-scsi
- Then switch it off in /etc/modules.conf:
# echo "alias ide-scsi off" >> /etc/modules.conf
- Finally run depmod to keep modutils happy:
# depmod -a -q
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