Matthew's Weblog

…which it turns out is illegal.

….you can’t have a CNAME be the same as a zone name, since a zone has at least an SOA record (and, arguably, at least one NS record as well), and the CNAME can’t co-exist with it. Just use an A record and be happy.

and that defeats the purpose of me not having to maintain multiple 2nd level domain name IPs with CNAMEs.  But now I’m older and wiser…

So, I finally bit the bullet and customized a blog instance for my wife’s choirs.  Since I could use widgets, it was OK, but the hypothetical ease and the reality were two separate things.  She wanted to have the main page only show one category of posts, so I had to go searching until I found out you have to edit the index.php in your theme, adding:

<?php query_posts ($query_string . '&cat=20'); ?>

before The Loop, and then that part worked.  Next, she wanted other categories to show as lists in the sidebar.  There’s a great plugin called ‘List Category Posts‘ that will do that on a page, post, or sidebar… sort of.  The widget implementation doesn’t update correctly, and it only allows one instance to be in the sidebar.  Of course, I needed more.  Thankfully, it also respects ShortCode… but I didn’t know what the f8#^*$ that was.  After a few quick Googles, I found that you can add shortcode in posts and pages… wheee!  I wanted it in the sidebar, so then found a tutorial on how to get shortcode working in the sidebar text widget.  Not bad, you just edit your theme’s functions.php and insert this line in a safe spot:

add_filter('widget_text', 'do_shortcode');

Then you add a text widget and it Just Works.  Brilliant.  Far better than completely hacking the theme, which was what I expected would be required.  Bravo, Wordpress!

Using rsync over ssh

Linux, Clocks, and Time

Apache Module mod_rewrite

Apache Virtual Host documentation (version 1.3 doc)

Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND): /etc/named.conf

killer monitoring apps [infoworld.com]

slashdot discussion on blinkenlights

Sending Apache httpd Logs to Syslog

myqlBind2/iDNS

Capistrano

Comparison of issue tracking systems

New LinuxCOE helps admins customize distros

Management Tips: Gen X vs. Gen Y

Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn | Guy Kawasaki

Bye-Bye, BPA
BPA/Phthalate-Free Shopping List
Now that we’re reading lots more about BPA and its low-level bad effects, we’re figuring out how to get our plastics to be non-BPA

sslstrip – transparently hijack HTTP traffic on a network, watch for HTTPS links and redirects, then map those links into either look-alike HTTP links or homograph-similar HTTPS links

How do you learn to be a Program Manager?

Mostly, becoming a program manager is about learning: learning about technology, learning about people, and learning how to be effective in a political organization. A good program manager combines an engineer’s approach to designing technology with a politician’s ability to build consensus and bring people together.

found the key at http://www.osxfaq.com/tips/unix-tricks/week105/wednesday.ws for why it wasn’t reading my .bashrc file…

and ~/.bash_profile [or ~/.profile] should source ~/.bashrc:

source ~/.bashrc

which made it work!

They also had tricks to make X windows start login shells instead of non-login… http://www.osxfaq.com/tips/unix-tricks/week105/tuesday.ws

…was far easier than I expected.  I thought I was going to have to add all kinds of switches or settings, either on the client or server, but no.

$ ssh -p port -X mylogin@myserver.com
$ fwbuilder &

and I was running.  Now that’s how I like it.  But, just in case it was hard, I had references:

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-unix-tunneling-xwindows-securely-over-ssh/
http://www.vanemery.com/Linux/XoverSSH/X-over-SSH2.html
http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/Remote-X-Apps.html

Open Source Laptop tracking system – Aedona

Some funny options for unlocked computers for your coworkers…

Problems with the Community Broadband Act and its lock-in to the established players

Wow, I was putting together my MythTV machine and it was OK until I had to get my remote front-end working. Because of the WAF, I selected a small machine – the Hauppage MediaMVP. What I didn’t recognize was that the documentation for getting it running… umm… stinks. Or at least is severely misleading (http://www.mvpmc.org/ mvpmc-HOWTO-singlehtml.html, not linked so you don’t try and use it. I should have noticed when it used software 13 versions old.). Or is really hard to find. So here’s my trials and tribulations and fixes, for anyone who is doing it.

Add to Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn) to get the mvpmc code loaded:

apt-get install atftpd tftp
mkdir /tftpboot
chmod a+rwx /tftpboot
export TFTPBOOT=/tftpboot
cd /tftpboot/
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/mvpmc/dongle.bin.mvpmc-0.3.3?modtime=1169 586056&big_mirror=0
ln -s dongle.bin.mvpmc dongle.bin.mvpmc-0.3.3
ln -s dongle.bin.mvpmc-0.3.3 dongle.bin.mvpmc

but then I was shocked to find that while the config files for inetd were created, there was no inetd. So…

apt-get install xinetd tcpd
apt-get install nfs-common nfs-kernel-server
cd /etc
e exports
ls /media/hdb1/mythtv/recordings/
/etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server start
/etc/init.d/nfs-common start
update-rc.d nfs-kernel-server defaults

and then it wouldn’t read the config file. Time to add the setting to have xinetd use inetd.conf…

e /etc/init.d/xinetd
add in flag: -inetd_compat

I learned that the instructions on mvpmc.org are pretty specific to the first generation of the machine, the H1. However, those aren’t made any more… and once I got into trouble, each piece turned out to be challenges with the version. I’ve got an H3. For that, you need a special service that whispers magic incantations into the ear of the MVP. It also needs a significantly different guide… and after searching and searching (has VLC notes for future) and searching (supersweet detail, enough to choke on and more, which also gave me the link to…) I finally stumbled across on http://mvpmc.wikispaces.com/ and started getting more progress on MythTV setup… well, almost…

e mvpboot.pl

and I then went spelunking into mvpboot.pl and mvprelay.c -

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install Net::Interface
apt-get install initrd-tools gcc
dd if=dongle.bin.mvpmc-0.3.3 of=dongle.bin.ver bs=1 count=40 skip=5

So once again I’m thrilled by Debian/Ubuntu and their dependencies… as well as the prompts (when you run a nonexistent program, Ubuntu now suggests packages to install that provide the command you’re trying to use… very cool). But I hate how I rely on them, because I thought once I actually installed GCC that it would work. I finally was googling and found I was still missing one big piece:

apt-get install build-essential

and now all the compilation stuff worked and Perl was happy. Argh!

I then started fighting my drive definitions… I had partitioned my three drives in a marvelous way, redundancy for the OS and big space for the media:

Mirrors on drive 1 and 2:

• 100mb – /boot
• 2gb – swap
• 28gb – /

One big XFS drive (3) for media:

• 400gb – /media

except it appears Ubuntu uses /media for its mount space, and somehow my brain didn’t register that. So when the folder was there, I thought it would have my big space… but no. Fought with fstab a while and eventually got it so the last drive moved to /mediafiles and all started working.

Now the shiny stuff. MVPMC can stream music from a central server, too…

apt-get install slimserver

and it didn’t work that well when I put it in. All I could get was a statement from Live365 that I wasn’t logged in. Shockingly, when I went to the SlimServer instructions and did some basic configuration it worked. Who’da thunk it?  I also had to chmod 777 to get it to read the media… I’ll clean that up later.

Other MythTV bits:

apt-get install mythweb mythmusic mythvideo mythplugins ogle mplayerapt-get install vlc videolan-doc

Followed the instructions on setting up vlc. It also said I needed mpslave to use aacPlus or Real Audio streams… right now I don’t need that bad enough to do the work. It’s not working yet, so I’ll have to poke it more later.

What remains? Glad you asked…

• For some reason the network connection is running at 10mb Half Duplex. Since it happens with other computers on that drop I think it’s a switch or wire problem.
• mplayer on my mvpmc only shows streaming radio successfully from live365 and the other XML is having parsing errors.
• slimserver is cataloguing AAC files from iTunes but not playing them, even the unencrypted ones
• I have to set up playlists and my local radio stations as m3u links so we can use them also… should be easy, just has to be done…
• I want to get the ReplayTV and Filesystems menu items to not display, which should be doable according to the commandline argument writeup but it somehow isn’t.
• Live TV isn’t running yet (but we almost never watch live TV so I don’t care much)
• Get VLC working
• Clean up the /mediafiles/music chmod 777 hack
• Oh yeah, and getting it working with remote systems so I can drive the other two TVs. I’m going to see if I can get my hands on an AppleTV to get a richer interface for the Myth frontend and still have iTunes playback work for the stereo… that might be better for music playing. Not to mention then it will have HDMI or composite video which would be very good if we upgrade our TVs anytime in our life… sigh.

I wanted to have my server with X installed but not starting, and found a handy tool rcconf from a discussion about how to keep X from running automatically.  It handles the startup alterations for you, kind of like chkconfig in redhat.

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