I'm pleased to announce a new version of my little script - 0.5 0.5.1.
Notable new features (from the shiny new ChangeLog):
Add support for printing colour in the encoder status display.
Show any schedule conflicts, or if the MythTV Perl API isn't
usable, a warning is displayed.
Display the amount of time until the next recording.
Add --version & --help options.
Allow suppressing blocks of output.
The report can be sent via email with the subject set correctly.
With an option to only send out email if schedule conflicts are
detected.
If you install the .deb, then the MOTD is updated automatically and the
email will be sent daily if there are conflicts (and you've set some
email addresses).
The other day I was recompiling some kernels during the day on our
MythTV backend, which at the time happened to be recording my wifes
favourite program (Grey's Anatomy, we discovered it part way through the
season, so the repeats are good). It turns out the compilation caused
some issues with the recording (which reduced the WAF).
So to increase the WAF, I'm making sure this doesn't happen again. I've
written a script that spits out the MythTV status which is then
displayed in the MOTD. It is available over here.
I've found this is a pretty effective way of letting me know of any
upcoming recordings and what is going to be happening on the system in
the next little while. It is a whole lot easier than using the status
page on MythWeb.
Sample output:
MythTV status for localhost
===========================
Status: Mon Oct 15 2007, 8:41 AM
Encoders:
cerberus (9) - Idle
cerberus (12) - Idle
Scheduled Recordings:
2007-10-15 13:30:00 - Grey's Anatomy
2007-10-15 18:00:00 - 3 News
2007-10-15 20:30:00 - Mythbusters
2007-10-15 22:00:00 - Flight Of The Conchords
2007-10-16 13:30:00 - Grey's Anatomy
2007-10-16 18:00:00 - 3 News
I run Debian, so there is a .deb. For those not running Debian there is
a tarball (but the MOTD updating glue is Debian specific at the moment).
For those interested in hacking there is a git repository.
Hopefully I'm not the only one that finds this useful.
What do you do if the back of your stereo cabinet is a mess and you've been a network monkey in the past?
Simple, you grab some cable management brackets from your good junk pile[1], some bits of MDF and you hack your stereo cabinet.
I think it came out much tidier, and now I can safely push it back without risking damaging cables!
If you're wondering why some of the power cords aren't plugged in, they belong to devices we don't use very much, why have them plugged in and drawing power if we aren't actually using them?
[1] "Good junk pile" every geek should have one, it is that collection of odds and sods that you don't really need, but which - just might, one day - come in handy. It should be noted however that they don't tend to have a very high Wife Approval Factor.
There is another computer recycling event happening at the Wellington Stadium.
I don't know much about it, but here is the contents of the email I received about it:
Not sure what to do with the old computer in your garage? Or the old mobile phones cluttering your drawers? How about free disposal in an environmentally sustainable way?
The Computer Access NZ Trust (CANZ) is organising eDay 2007, a free community computer recycling day for households, small businesses and schools on Saturday 29 September at the Westpac Stadium car park from 9am-3pm. This follows on from the very successful Dell Free Recycling Day held in September 2006.
The average New Zealand household has more than one computer, representing a total of over seven million electronic devices. Their eventual disposal represents a potential challenge to our environment. eDay 2007 is part of a nationwide effort by communities and industry to start to address the electronic waste problem.
Bring in your old computer equipment on 29 September - there is no charge. All computers will be broken down and the parts will be recycled for other purposes. Mobile phones will also be disposed of in an environmentally sustainable way.
Vehicle access for the Westpac Stadium car park is off Waterloo Quay. CANZ is organising the day in partnership with the Wellington 2020 Communications Trust, Remarkit, the Wellington City Council and a number of industry sponsors.
Only computer equipment and mobile phones will be accepted so please do not bring other electronic equipment. If you have any queries about the event, please contact Mike Ennis (partsplus@actrix.gen.nz).
We normally see quite a few people finding this blog via Google. It can be quite amusing to see what search terms led to us.
Earlier this month I decided to check it out again, there were no hits from Google. At all. This was kinda odd, as the googlebots (both for the search engine and for reader) normally hit us quite often.
Looking back through the logs the last time Google hit us was the 14th of March. Which is quite some time ago.
I cruised over to Google and checked Reader, and sure enough the most recent article from our blog is dated the 14th of March. I then tried telling Google to index blog.etc.gen.nz using the WebMaster tools. No dice, it says:
I added AAAA (IPv6) records to some of my hosts, which is why I moved to FreeDNS. DynDNS doesn't support that.
It appears that one of those changes caused Google to start ignoring us. And in fact, it is the change to FreeDNS.
Damn.
I think it is finally time to bite the bullet and start running my own nameserver. Which I want to do anyhow to start using DNSSEC...
Some further investigations with the help of a mate (you know who you are) I've discovered that FreeDNS is rejecting DNS queries from Google. I'm not the only one to have encountered this problem.
Update: The issue is FreeDNS. Updated entry to reflect that. Update 2: Okay, the FreeDNS maintainer is now allowing Google to access our DNS entries again, so we're back in Google. But still, bizarre.
Due to popular request I'm hiding the majority of the geeky blog entries from the front page of our blog. Anything that is only in the Catalyst category won't be shown on the front page, you'll need to click through to that category to see the geeky Catalyst related things.
I'll need to update a few of the blog aggregaters to handle this change...
In our house we have a server that does a number of tasks, one of which is playing a jukebox (using MusicPD) it is hooked up to an amp that has speakers in our study and in our family room. This rocks, turn on the amp, have continuous music that we want to listen to and no chatter.
Unfortunately this doesn't extend to the lounge. Which means that if you sit in the lounge you can only just hear the music (unless you turn it up too loud). I've thought off and on (mostly off) about extending the jukebox to the lounge, the other week Susanne asked about having this, which meant it was finally time for me to really look into possible solutions.
Warning, geeky bits follow...
Since we used to use Icecast2 to stream the jukebox to Susanne's computer in our old flat I tried that first. We have a PC in the lounge that is a MythTV frontend that we could play the stream on, so that aspect is covered. Unfortunately the 5 second lag which was acceptable when Susanne's computer was a long way away from the main jukebox in our old flat was too annoying when the speakers were only a room apart (yes, I could have reduced the buffers, but it would never have been quite right).
So fall back to plan B, stick another soundcard in the jukebox computer and run line level audio to the amp in the lounge. We managed to dig up an old soundcard in the good junk pile (every geek should have a good junk pile), stuck it in the computer and then proceeded to try and configure ALSA to drive it. The plan was to duplicate the same audio stream out to both soundcards. After a bit of researching and a bit of tinkering with asound.conf and it not working I decided not to waste any more time on that path.
I vaguely recalled that PulseAudio was incredibly flexible and allowed all sorts of things. A quick apt-get install pulseaudio pulseaudio-module-hal and bit of reading, and I found that adding the following line to /etc/pulse/default.pa:
Would create a new virtual soundcard output (PulseAudio refers to this as a sink) called "combined" that would replicate the audio to both soundcards. Awesome. (The master and slaves settings were determed by using paman to inspect the PulseAudio devices.)
Then after recompiling MusicPD (to add PulseAudio support, the version in Debian unstable already has it, but stable doesn't), telling it to use that sink and voila, both soundcards are playing the jukebox.
To actually get the line level audio to the lounge I've used some Cat5 we already have running there (with suitable audio flyleads) and we have the jukebox playing in the lounge, in sync with the family room. The sound quality is pretty good, so I won't worry about balanced audio or anything else fancy like that. Gotta love structured cabling.
Another benefit of PulseAudio is we will be able to configure our Linux workstations to use the jukebox soundcards as audio sinks as well, which will mean no more tinny little monitor speakers. w00t!
Update: Say which file to add the load-module line to, and fix a typo.
Perhaps I've been using open source software for too long, but I like to scan through the changelogs (a log of changes that the authors have made before releasing a new version) to see what has changed. This can give me hints to new features to checkout, or changed behaviour that it would be helpful to know about.
But hardware (and closed source software) typically don't have changelogs. An example is my Brand New Replaced Under Warranty D-Link DGS-1008D. The old one was hardware revision C3. The new one is C4. What has changed? Will it not brick itself like the old one did after a years usage? Is this one going to be faster because they've improved the code or silicon in some fashion?
The IPv6 .nz name servers and whois server are now up and running. The announcement from .nz Registry Services sent to NZNOG: NZRS is today pleased to announce that the .nz name servers are now operating
with IPv6 connectivity in what can be regarded as the first phase of the .nz
IPv6 rollout. The name servers are named ns8.dns.net.nz and ns9.dns.net.nz, and
are located in Wellington and Albany repsectively.
Both are connected to the NZ IPv6 Internet Exchange and there is a .nz Whois
server accessible at whois.ipv6.srs.net.nz.
NZRS thanks Open Contributors Corporation for Advanced Internet Development
(OCCAID) and US telco Sprint for providing the IPv6 tunnels, and thanks Citylink
for help in connecting to the NZ IPv6 Internet Exchange.
.nz Registry Services is responsible for the operation of the register of domain
names and the Domain Name System (DNS) in the .nz domain name space.
For further information contact:
support< at >nzrs.net.nz
There might be a few more tweaks to the setup, but otherwise, it is looking good.
If anyone is using IPv6 in New Zealand but are not peering with the v6ix then please contact Andrew Ruthven at Catalyst (puck in catalyst.net.nz) to talk about tunnels or other peering arrangements.
Well, it had to happen sometime. I ran the install.sh script included in a tarball (which had to run as root) and it screwed my system.
Running: chmod -R 775 /$VARIABLE
When $VARIABLE is undefined it does bad things, very bad things. I managed to repair enough of the files to be able to login remotely, and I'm currently going through and reinstalling all the Debian packages on my box, fixing other issues as they arise. It is highly likely this cockup will hang around for years and years to come.
Everybody thinks that running a virus scanner on a Windows box is a good thing, right?
Well, it seems that it can be bad if you want to have working IPv6.
I spent several hours at a customers site yesterday working on IPv6 enabling their Windows XP workstations, but was having issues. I did the usual trick of turning off any and all Windows firewalls and the virus scanner, but we still had issues.
The behaviour was that IPv6 addresses were being allocated, we could ping and tracert6 to IPv6 hosts, we could telnet to port 80 on them, but neither Internet Explorer or Firefox wanted to work. Going to an IPv6 website would cause the browser to just hang. Looking in a network dump I could see an initial connection being made to the server, but then no actual requests.
I decided to blame the virus scanner, on the basis that they quite often interfere with the normal flow of events. Even though it was turned off, it might still be interfering. After actually uninstalling it (and rebooting, uninstalling it caused Internet Explorer to crash), everything worked!
Moral of the story, if you're using a virus scanner (in this case NOD32 from ESET) and you're having issues using IPv6, uninstall the virus scanner!
On the topic of birth announcements, at Catalyst we have an internal IRC channel for general chit-chat and communication within teams. We now have a habit of setting the topic of the main channel to announce new staff members. On the 14th of April the topic was set to:
New staff: François, on L7, New person: Brooke Rose Ruthven, 9:10am, 14/4/2007, 6lb8oz (congratulations Andrew & Susanne)
Thank you karora for setting the topic!
At some stage Brooke might move into the "New staff" classification, who knows?
