Speak Freely and Reflector

Speak Freely and Reflector

[Steve Holmes]

Hey, I'm about to embark on setting up speak_freely on a linux box inside
an IP masqueraded network.  First question: should I be using the
speak_freely-7.2 as my base software? How much difference is there from
this one  and the CVS version? If I go with CVS, do I still need this base
7.2 version?  Is this stuff usable with the basic default OSS sound
support in linux or do I have to install ALSA?

Final question: I realize which ports to open up and forward through to my
inside machine but am a bit unclear with ipchains on which chains to
update.  I'm quite sure the forward chain needs to be set to accept the
UDP ports 2074:2076 and 4074:4076 but what about the input chain? Need I
accept there as well?  So far, I've pretty much just done IP masquerading
but haven't really organized my fire wall yet.

Thanks for any help on this two fold question.

Re: Speak Freely and Reflector

[Geoff Shang]

On Wed, 30 Jan 2002, Steve Holmes wrote:

> should I be using the
> speak_freely-7.2 as my base software? How much difference is there from
> this one  and the CVS version?

The only difference between the regular speak freely and the CVS version is
the ability to have the audio mixed when 2 or more people speak at once.  A
nice feature, but not curcial.  Oh and you can see who's on the reflector
from within  speak freely, and you also get readline support for chats.
You also get to enjoy sfspeaker crashing from time to time for some obsucre
as yet undetermined reason.

> If I go with CVS, do I still need this base
> 7.2 version?

No.

> Is this stuff usable with the basic default OSS sound
> support in linux or do I have to install ALSA?

You don't have to install alsa, but it works better with alsa, particularly
if you're using the stock 7.2 release.  When on the reflector, 7.2 hangs
onto the output device for about 20 seconds after a person speaks before
releasing it.  If you use OSS, you won't be able to talk until the 20
seconds is up and, if the reflector is even mildly busy, this may never
happen without you asking to be allowed to get a word in.  This behaviour
has been changed in the CVS version and the sound device is released much
quicker, so I dare say that it would work better with OSS than 7.2 does.

> Final question: I realize which ports to open up and forward through to my
> inside machine but am a bit unclear with ipchains on which chains to
> update.  I'm quite sure the forward chain needs to be set to accept the
> UDP ports 2074:2076 and 4074:4076 but what about the input chain? Need I
> accept there as well?  So far, I've pretty much just done IP masquerading
> but haven't really organized my fire wall yet.

Well, I would think yes, since a packet would have to be allowed in before
it could be forwarded.

Geoff.

Re: Speak Freely and Reflector

[randy turner]

hi all,
this cvs stuff is very new to me,
can someone explane what i need to do to download from the cvs?
thanks in advance
randy

CVS (was Re: Speak Freely and Reflector)

[Geoff Shang]

Hi:

OK, here's a very brief introduction to downloading with CVS.  there are
more complete docs out there and if you're at all interested, please read
them.

You can use an environment variable, I think it's CVSROOT, to specify the
server and path of the CVS repository.  Since I don't use this, I won't
talk about it

The rough form of CVS commmands is as follows:

cvs <options> <command> <options>

CVS has a lot of commands and options that I don't know about, so I'll only
give the examples you need to download from the speakup CVS repository.
The first thing you need to type is:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@linux-speakup.org:/usr/src/CVS login

There are a couple of things to note.  firstly, notice the colon between
org and /usr.  That does need to be there.  Secondly, the cvs in
/usr/src/CVS is in caps.

If all goes well, you will be prompted for a password.  Type in please (all
lower case) and hit enter.  You should return to your shell prompt.

Now, you are in a position to download or, to use the CVS term, checkout
modules.  A module is simply a project in the CVS repository.  When you
check out a module, a subdirectory wil be created with that module in it so
make sure you're where you want to be before you do a checkout.

I'm guessing you're interested in the speak freely CVS code.  To get that,
do the following:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@linux-speakup.org:/usr/src/CVS co speak_freely

After it does its thing, you'll have a subdirectory called speak_freely
with the speak freely CVS source code.  change into that subdir and do what
you're told to get it to compile.  Note that many packages in CVS
repositories have additional or supplimentory commands that need to be run
on CVS source trees that do not need to be run on release tarballs, so
check any documentation there might be.  Speak freely is, however, not one
of these.

Now, you've done the hard part.  You can easily update the CVS source tree
in the future, provided you've not done anything radical to the source, by
changing into the speak_freely CVS source directory and typing:

cvs update -P -d

Having said that, I'm getting "cvs [update aborted]: recv() from server
linux-speakup.org: Connection reset by peer" and I don't know why ... but
that's not meant to happen <grin>.  You don't need to specify the server or
password, as these are remembered by CVS and the files it stores.

One other note about the speakup CVS server.  linux-speakup.org (a.k.a.
bumpy.braille.uwo.ca) is set to reject anyone who's IP address does not
reverse lookup to match their hostname.  some ISPs out there do not provide
reverse lookups for their IP addresses (i.e. you cannot lookup a user's
host name from their IP address - nothing is returned).  If your ISP does
this, sorry, you're out of luck.  Get some nice friend to snag it
and tar it up for you.  Them's the breaks.

Hope this helps.

Geoff.

Re: CVS (was Re: Speak Freely and Reflector)

[Steve Holmes]

That was an excellent summary of CVS.  I figured most of this out
yesterday by looking at some old e-mails I had saved on the subject.