Changes

After many MANY years of loyally supporting Blogger despite there being other solutions that may have fit better it seems that Blogger has given up on me. Why? Because I use FTP to publish my blog to my own site without using Google Hosting, etc. Google/Blogger has announced that they will be stopping support for FTP in the near future and this has left me in a position where I need to move... and move quickly it seems.

I am very disappointed that after being a user of Blogger since September of 2003 that Google has decided to leave me no option but to find another solution. I feel that I've grown and changed with Blogger and Google and now am just abandoned by them because they have a user base and no real need for those that have stuck by the product.

In the future I will have to be making changes to both notepad.bobkmertz.com and http://blog.bibleboy.org. It is my hope that I will be able to keep these domains with another solution but that is undecided at this time. I will try to update everyone as soon as I have more information.

Reference Link

Apple Time Machine backups to Ubuntu network drive

Apple's Time Machine is an awesome utility but gets frustrating when you have to use an external drive. An easier was to do these back ups is using a network drive. Fortunately, the netatalk package installed on an Ubuntu server can provide the functionality you want.

I am using Ubuntu 9.10 on my server. As a note, this is actually a MythBuntu server but functionality should be the same on any other Ubuntu 9.10 server/workstation.

First, as of this writing, the netatalk 2.0.5 packages are not available in karmic's repositories so let's add a debian repository by adding the following to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian sid main

Now let's install the netatalk package:
sudo apt-get install netatalk

Create a directory for time machine backups:
mkdir /home/user/timemachine

Now we need to edit the /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default file and add the following line:
/home/user/timemachine timemachine options:tm

And restart netatalk:
sudo /etc/init.d/netatalk restart

Now on your mac, open finder, select the Go menu and "Connect to Server". Fill in your server's ip address prefixed by afp:// (for example, afp://192.168.1.100) and you should be prompted for a volume to mount. Select "timemachine", of course. Once that volume is mounted, go to time machine preferences and select that disk and you're all set. If you don't see your network drive as an option then open up terminal and issue the following command:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

As a note, you may want to now go and remove the extra line from your /etc/apt/sources.list file so that future apt-get commands don't rely on debian's repository and not it's own

Reference Link

PVR-150 IR Blaster on MythBuntu 9.10 with Dish Network

Upgrading to MythBuntu 9.10 from 9.04 was a challenge on some respects but the biggest of the challenges was getting my PVR-150 IR Blaster working.... again. I don't know why Ubuntu loves to break this thing on every upgrade but they do. Thanks to Jimmybondo for the bulk of this work.

• sudo apt-get install lirc-modules-source
  
• cd /usr/src/lirc-0.8.6
  
• wget http://www.skynet.ie/~shabba/zilog.diff
  
• sudo patch -p0 < ~/Downloads/zilog.diff
• sudo dpkg-reconfigure lirc-modules-source

Now edit your /etc/init.d/hardware.conf file and replace lirc_pvr150 with lirc_zilog and you should be set.

If you're not upgrading from MythBuntu 9.04 and/or don't have the rest of your configuration files, you can refer to my prior post for what your lircd.conf file needs to look like. You may also need to add the following to hardware.conf:
TRANSMITTER_DEVICE="/dev/lirc0"

Reference Link

Using USB devices on Windows under VMware ESXi (Aladdin Hardlock)

VMware is quickly becoming the best way to run servers of all kinds and now that ESXi is free we're going to continue to see more and more functions moved onto a virtualized platform. Recently I've been working on a project for one of my customers which involves installing software for their Trumpf metal working equipment and ran into a small issue that I was able to overcome.

In short, this hardware requires the use of a USB dongle or "Hardware key" in order to run (this is an anti-piracy feature). The problem with ESXi is that you are not able to pass a USB device through to a virtual machine. Thankfully, a handful of companies have created Networked USB Hubs such as the Belkin F5L009. Everything immediately worked by plugging this in.... well, sort of :)

The issue that occurs inside of a VMware server is when you install Windows there is no USB root devices found so Windows does not install the proper USB support files. In this case, it's only a single file, USBD.SYS, that is missing.

1- Connect your USB hub to your network
2- Install the Belkin client software as the instructions explain
3- Ignore any new hardware wizards that occur.
4- Locate a USBD.SYS file. Often times you can find this on the same machine but, if needed, look on another Windows machine or in the i386 folder on your Windows installation CD. Copy this file to C:\windows\system32\drivers\
5- Reboot the virtual machine
6- Once the machine reboots, complete installation of your software, hardlock drivers, or any other USB device that you connect. Everything should function as intended and you have a little box that holds physical USB ports for your virtual machine.

Some notes on my installation.

* If you are using an Aladdin Hardlock USB key, you can most likely find new drivers on Aladdin's Hardlock Page.

* My Belkin Network USB Hub is running firmware version 1.2.0

* I found it's extremely handy to dedicate the USB hub to a single machine and to tell it to auto connect new devices. This literally makes the box just like real USB ports on the virtual machine. There are lots of options to play with as far as sharing devices to other specific machines but I did not play with any of that.

* Auto-connecting Hardlock keys is essential if you are running some type of server. If you tell your key to only connect manually your software may start before you mount the USB device and a pissed off program would likely ensue :)

* There are a few vendors that make an identical product but, from my research, I found that the Belkin is about 1/3 of the cost of most of them and also has some additional features. Digi makes a product that many people are using with VMware since it's marketed as being compatible with VMware but you will spend lots of money for that sentence -- and that's really all it is because this type of a device really has NO interaction with VMware at all since its a physical device communicating directly with your virtual machine on the network.

Reference Link

MythNetTV on LinuxMCE

There is a utility for MythTV called MythNetTV which can be found here. This utility does a great job at grabbing videos from an RSS feed and importing them in to MythTV's database as recorded programs. Set up is quite simple in LinuxMCE but is done via the command line.

• Login to a shell as linuxmce
  
• Switch to a suitable directory. We'll just use /home/linuxmce
  
• wget http://www.stillhq.com/mythtv/mythnettv/source/release-5/mythnettv-release-5.tgz
  
• tar -xzvf mythnettv-release-5.tgz
  
• cd mythnettv5-release
  
• sudo apt-get install python-feedparser
  
• sudo apt-get install python-ctypes
  
• sudo apt-get install python-mysqldb
  
• sudo apt-get install mencoder
  
• mkdir data
  
• Subscribe to Shows
  
• ./mythnettv subscribe "URL" "Title of Show"
  

For example, if you want to subscribe to Tekzilla you would issue:

./mythnettv subscribe "http://revision3.com/tekzilla/feed/quicktime-large?subshow=false" "Tekzilla"

Repeat that step for any shows that you want to subscribe to

Get your shows and import them

./mythnettv update
./mythnettv download 1

(the number that follows "download" is how many of each show MythNetTV should download and import)

That's all there is to it.... The shows you subscribed to will now appear in LinuxMCE's Video category as well as in your MythTV Front Ends

Automating the process

In your mythnettv directory you can create a script that will automate this process and then add that to cron to automate the process.
touch get-shows
chmod +x get-shows
nano get-shows

When editting the get-shows script, just add the following lines:

cd /home/linuxmce/mythnettv-release-5/
./mythnettv update
./mythnettv download 1

Press Ctrl-X to save the file and then test it:
./get-shows

Now you can add it to cron so that it will be run automagically every day
cd /etc/cron.daily
sudo ln -s /home/linuxmce/mythnettv-release-5/get-shows mythnettv

Reference Link

Panduit S050X150YAJ Label Template

So I've come up with a system of labeling each end of a cable with a "serial number" so that when your running cables between racks of servers inside of bundles of wires you can locate which 2 cable ends connect. Then adding the serial number of the cables that are plugged into a server in your server database you're able to easily track them. My customer I am working on this project ordered a pack of Panduit cable labels (S050X150YAJ) that can be printed with a laser or inkjet printer. Panduit also makes their own software for labeling, etc but its at least $200 depending on what options you want. I created a template for these labels and I wanted to post that template here in case anyone else could benefit from it. This is in the open document format and will work in Open Office and should also work in Microsoft Office (but you may need a plugin).

Template: Panduit-S050X150YAJ-Blank.odt (Or ZIP version)

Just for reference, I put this together in NeoOffice 2.2.2 Patch 11 on a MacBook and based on a Samsung ML-2010 printer. It should be universal but if something is wildly different, you may need to tweak it.

Reference Link

OSX is refusing to eject a CD

I had an ordeal tonight..... I needed to burn an ISO to a blank CD so I put a, what I assumed was blank, CD in my MacBook and Toast informed me that it was not writable. What was it? Some Windows CD, I guess. The problem was my machine refused to eject it. I clicked the eject button multiple times (both on the keyboard and in finder) and it just wouldn't do anything. I figured if I did a reboot of the machine I could eject it when it came back up -- wrong. Whatever was going on on this CD was confusing the hell out of OSX. After the reboot finder never loaded for me and half of my typical start up applications got stuck during boot up. I happened to have Disk Utility in my dock so I tried to open that and, again, no luck.

First thing to try (did not work for me):

• Put the computer into sleep mode
  
• Press the eject button on the keyboard

Second thing to try (this worked for me):

• Power down your mac
  
• Hold the mouse button (or trackpad button) down
  
• While holding the button press the power button
  
• After 30-120 seconds your mac should eject the CD
  
• Let got of the mouse button and the machine should boot the OS

I will now list the three biggest wishes I have for Mac computers and despite how small and petty they seem they make a night and day difference to me (Please, Steve Jobs, take note):

1. CD-Rom eject button and/or emergency pin hole
   
2. Hard drive activity light
   
3. Network (NIC) lights for activity and link

Reference Link