Just a quick note for what is really a simple fix. I have been using rsnapshot to back up several machines lately. If you haven’t taken a look at rsnapshot on linux for managing snapshot backups (where only the changes get backed up after the initial run….) it’s definitely worth a look.
Anyway, I had recently added a new system to be backed up and was seeing the following error from my Rsnapshot log…. ERROR: /usr/bin/rsync returned 127 while processing hostname….
This post is going to be somewhat of a “link dump” for me of some pages that I’ve been perusing lately. After playing with RT (request tracker) – I added a few ticket items for the home network. Now, if you’ve been a longtime reader and sorted through ALL of these posts here you’ll know that I’ve made use of software raid on the home systems. Why? Linux software raid seems fairly reliable (so far – 2 years +). It doesn’t depend on a specific piece of hardware. In short IF the worst happens and the array fails I should be able to retrieve data from an individual drive more easily than if it were hardware raid. I’m using Raid Level 1 (cloning/mirroring) and ext3 is the filesystem on top. I’ve had some slight problems with one drive in both the Desktop and server arrays and both arrays had been degraded for some time. My goal was ultimately redundancy and to eliminate the disruption that hard drive failures have given over the last few years.
Once upon a time I wrote of manually extracting a file from a mondorescue backup. Sometimes it’s just easier to do that, than have mondorescue go through 30 some cds or dvds just to find one file. (Not to mention the fact that the iso’s aren’t burned to disc but are just stored on a usb HD.) So, I’ve just had the opportunity to try to restore one of the “biggiefiles”. Mondoarchive attempts to split huge files up into smaller slices for archiving. The size is something that I think is configurable, but I haven’t made any changes from the default.
Recently I had the opportunity to work on an Acer Aspire One netbook. It’s rare that I get the chance to work on a linux desktop system for a client. Most of my desktop users that I support run Windows (although I primarily run linux on my machines.) I get to do a fair amount of server level work with linux variants, but this one, being a desktop install, intrigued me.
The issue was that the buttons on the trackpad didn’t work. She also indicated that she had tried a usb mouse and those buttons didn’t work either. As I looked at it, I had already spent some time browsing through bug reports getting ideas on what might be the issue. It behaved exactly as she described and so then the real fun began.
So, I’ve spent some time recently working with Zarafa. It’s an exchange replacement that has a completely open source version as well as a version with licenses for outlook if you want that level of integration. It’s web interface looks good and is an improvement on Exchange server’s capabilities with a non-IE browser. Anyway it can install on a linux server and integrate with several different MTA’s. Our choice was postfix since that was already installed for the purposes of processing forms on a webserver on the same host. Outgoing mail “just worked”, but postfix needed a bit of configuration to make the incoming mail work.
To make sure you’ve go the idea that mplayer is really a swiss army knife for media files that can do most anything. I wanted to get a post JUST on this idea. Any media format that mplayer recognizes it can dump the audio to the most common and readable audio format out there, the PCM Wav file.
Here’s how it goes:
There is a lot of software out there that can capture realmedia online streams for a fee. I’ve found a way in linux to do the same without buying third party software.
The main motivation for this is I discovered SBS (an Australian broadcaster) provides audio news programs (1 hour length) in a variety of different languages. And if you didn’t know studying languages is yet another hobby of mine.
The problem is their streams are realmedia and meant to be listened to online. I’d rather listen to them using my portable mp3 player. I’ve talked about converting rm to mp3 in a previous post… now let’s look at capturing the rm stream.
On my (somewhat older) laptop, I’ve noticed that MPlayer sometimes gets the audio and video out of sync. The audio is moving faster than the video. I’ve noticed this in octoshape streaming as well as in playing standalone videos.
I discovered a quick fix to this is to use the d hotkey on the keyboard. This toggles between frame dropping modes. By default mplayer tries to draw every frame it receives, but toggling to either framedropping enabled or framedropping hard can help keep the video up with the audio track. I’ve found this has made my octoshape streams usable again! (Usually I just make use of the framedropping enabled instead of the hard setting. (I haven’t investigated the difference between the two.)
Sometime back I setup my home server running Ubuntu Linux (6.06 – Dapper Drake LTS). I used two pairs of drives to do raid cloning. Two IDE drives were for the main system structure and two SATA drives for Audio/Video storage as well as CDimages and other large file sharing on the local network. Well… I noticed the hard drive light was on solid and sure enough one of the two SATA drives had failed. (I didn’t get my status email because I’d done a network structure change and didn’t update my local mail setup…) Anyway… replacing it was a pain in the neck only for the physical access to the box. Everything else worked as it should.
Recently I had a request for help with some free pdf’s I’ve published elsewhere. I wasn’t really keen to spend a lot of time for free supporting free pdfs and really just wanted to give an alternative file format. (I suspected the pdf format may not have been one that their computer liked. So, I wanted to convert to a tif image as that’s something that should be universally usable. Some quick websearching reminded me that in linux it’s a very simple conversion. In fact, the command line program convert is all you need.