Andrew's blog

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:

load-module module-combine master=<sound card 1> slaves=<sound card 2> set-default-sink combined

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.

Why doesn't hardware have changelogs?

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?

I'll never know...

Last wednesday Susanne, myself and Brooke went along to the Babes in Arms sessions of Shrek the Third. It is pretty cool, a 10am screening of a movie where babies and young kids are made more than welcome (in fact, the tickets are half price as well). No one cares if they cry and/or scream because their own kids might be doing it as well!

It was quite nice to be able to go to a movie again (it has been a while). Brooke (actually, all the babies in our group) slept straight through the movie, which made it even more pleasant!

We all really enjoyed the movie, it was definitely good fun!

On a geeky note, I did notice the amazing job they did on animating the hair of the characters. A few days later I was reading the latest issue of the Linux Journal and read the article titled Linux Feeds an Ogre, where they discuss how the hair was one of their achievements in creating Shrek the Third!

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.

Bug report has been filed.

I'm going to install Xen on this box and do any testing of applications in a clean room which I can just blow away if things go horribly wrong again.

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!

The guys at SixXS have added a new tool to their treasure trove of IPv6 tools. A BitTorrent tracker available only via IPv6.

Go and check out the catalog for some installation CDs and whatever else they throw up there.

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?

Nice, we're now on Planet Andrew. I hope people don't mind if Susanne occasionally posts there.

w00t!

Debian Etch is released!

Now it is time to perform the ritual upgrade dance on a bunch of machines that weren't already running Etch while it was the testing distribution. And also I'll need to decide if the boxes that were already running it should move to lenny (which will is the name for the next stable release). I think I'll defer that decision a few months though...

Our blog is now accessible via the IPv6 Internet. While I've had the network IPv6 enabled for few months now, I've finally taken the plunge and changed Dynamic DNS providers, which means I can make our addresses available via DNS.

I used DynDNS for many years, but unfortunately they don't support AAAA records. I'm now using FreeDNS. They allow a domain name to have a static AAAA record and then dynamic updating of an A record. Which is exactly what I need!

At Linux.conf.au 2007 there was an organised GPG key signing session, where lots of people performed the GPG KeySigning dance. Afterwards quite a few (but less) people hung around in the foyer for the to perform the CAcert assurance dance.

I assured a few people, then joined a queue to be assured by one of the CAcert super assurers (and continued to assure people while waiting in the queue). This assurance bumped me up to the maximum number of points allowed for normal people. W00t!

I wasn't the only person from Catalyst to use this trick to get maximum points. As a result we now have 3 people able to allocate 35 points each. We also have a number of other people who can allocate less points than that. So if you're in the Wellington region and are interested in CAcert, drop by our offices (with suitable ID) and we can get you bootstrapped so you can start assuring people as well.