I've dug out and dusted down my old laptop, with a slighly damaged screen - that's okay i only need it for OS installation.

Fedora Core 2 won't go on it, as there's only 16Meg of RAM, so I'm going to have a go with Slackware 10.0 which I got on the cover of Linux Fomat magazine. The usual problems with mastering a new OS but I think I've got it installed now. I don't need any graphical packages, so I went though Advanced Setup and removed
everything with 'x' in the name. I added Apache, PHP and MySQL - my prefered Webserver/Scripting/DB combo and I have my machine ready. TCL also for any shell scripting.

The Task
To switch the central heating system in my house on and off remotely.
So I need to figure out how to actually switch a relay (serial connection?)
Then an interface... PHP seems the obvious choice, but it won't talk to devices, so I'll glue the PHP script to the serial device with a TCL script or two.
As I'm not always at browser and I get GPRS for free with my mobile phone provider, I hope to us the (Not yet dead) WML language which my Nokia 6310i supports. WAP is lightweight and will do for a few on off switches.

Serial switches->TCL->PHP->WML

....watch this space.

We've got a few copies of Rational Robot and a '5 Pooled Virtual Tester Pack' to allow us to us an addtional 5 Test Agents.

Having requested the key for the Virtual Tester pack to go on our FlexLM license server 'dobbing'. Pointing the Rational Key Administrator at our FlexLM server resulted in this:


However when I tred to execute a test suite on more than one remote machine, i.e. using one of the pack of 5 licenses it gave this error message:
Failed to check out the necessary licenses. MC_29_5_1

After having no success searching the manual and web, I contacted our supplier who provided this link: www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss MASSIVE URL

Then on the licence server we looked at the long list of PACKAGE lines from the link above and chose just this one:

PACKAGE TMvtpool rational 8.0 FE4376C9DEE0
COMPONENTS="TMvirtualtester:8.0:5"

The TMvtpool in this one matched the INCREMENT line in the key we recieved from Rational, so it seemed the most likely one, although it would seem to make more sense if the TMvtpool was in the COMPONENTS with the package being called TMvirtualtester.

Success
An additional license was checked from the pool aand I can now have Agent on various windows platforms all ready to execute tests - providing I don't use more that 6 at a time.
Q. Why six and not 5?
A. 5 from the pool and 1 from my copy of Rational Robot.

The Rational License Key Manager now looks like this:


Why can I find rational help via the web?
Their URLs are so long I'm sure search engine bots will ignore them or treat them as recursive.

Did you know you can run install shield's setup.exe silently at the command line using:
setup -s??

It's also possible to configure setup files to repeat setups in the same way.

More information here:
http://www.appdeploy.com/tips/detail.asp?id=18

I'm 99% sure that when I installed my Fedora Core 2 server, when I turned the firewall on, I opted to allow incomming mail (Port 25).

However now I've got it set up and email working with MailScanner I cannot connect to it:
netstat -an : grep LISTEN
Reveals:

....
tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:25 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN
....

tcp 0 0 :::80 :::* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 :::22 :::* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 :::443 :::* LISTEN
...


Showing http, https and ssh are available externally, but mail (port 25) is only available locally.

How to fix this?

First of all IT'S NOT THE FIREWALL - it's actual the sendmail.mc file in /etc/mail
Change this line:
DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp,Addr=127.0.0.1, Name=MTA')dnl
to:
# dnl DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Port=smtp,Addr=127.0.0.1, Name=MTA')dnl

Then in the /etc/mail dir:
make -C /etc/mail

Now test the connection from a remote machine using: telnet you.mail.machine.ip 25 sendmail should respond with a prompt. If this doesn't work you may have firewall problems.

Something I always need:
vi-reference.pdf