Meeting notes Nov 2007

This post was a little late. We met on 11/07/2007 at Barnes and Nobles as normal.
The topics discussed where as follows:
Mark brought in a USB micro controller. One of the problems that he had was the usb device numbers jumped around making it hard for him to track it.
He was using lsusb to list the usb device but he was having trouble finding it in the dev tree. Normally, lsusb gives you an idea where to look.
For example, when I do a lsusb on my machine I get the following output:
ted@ted-home-desktop:~$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 046d:c404 Logitech, Inc. TrackMan Wheel
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

The device is bus 1 device 2 or it is mapped here:
ted@ted-home-desktop:~$ ls -ls /proc/bus/usb/001/002
0 crw-rw-r– 1 root root 189, 1 2007-11-23 10:30 /proc/bus/usb/001/002

The proc device corresponds to the device file:
ted@ted-home-desktop:~$ ls -la /dev/bus/usb/001/002
crw-rw-r– 1 root root 189, 1 2007-11-23 10:30 /dev/bus/usb/001/002

It was later determined the proprietary was doing a raw dump to the device.

Dave was having some problems sending email through the toad.net smtp mailservers.
Toad net was recently purchased by expedient.net. The support for Linux is now non existent said Dave.
With the old toad.net, there was linux help from the support line. We think that expedient.net may have
broken some of the toad.net servers. For example, with a regular dns lookup on the mail servers for toad we get the
following:
ted@ted-home-desktop:~$ host -t mx toad.net
toad.net mail is handled by 0 mail.expedient.net.
Moreover a dns report search on toad.net says the don’t even have the virtual address of postmaster@toad.net functioning.
Here is the report.

There was also a lengthy debate on why Ubuntu was better than SUSE. I am under the opinion if someone is starting out with Linux Ubuntu would be simpler. Moreover, ubuntu has a more open license model than SUSE. To add, the documention for Ubuntu is very dense and constantly being improved. SUSE is a good Linux distribution, but there ties with Microsoft and Novell seemed to have tainted them in my humble opinion.