De’Pannone’s weblog

Its been a while but so much has happened since my last post.

If you have been reading my Milan - Taranto blog (and why have you not been?) you will now I had a 2 week trip to Italy in early July and ran in the Milan - Taranto rally on my MV 350B motorbike.

I returned to Australia mid July and started work straight away which came as a bit of a shock and its taken me a couple of weeks to stop wishing for Italy any longer.

I have doing little, just bits and pieces around the house, messing about with my computers (building a new mythtv box) and thinking about building a new webserver virtual machine to take over from my old one that has been running now for perhaps 3 years. I’m worried its a bit exposed.

What do people recommend as far as a flick the switch web server goes? Just down load a LAMP server from VMware and fire it up?

Meh, I don’t know. I’m thinking of going lightweight web-blog as well, wordpress seems to me to be the most bloated of all weblogs, I’m thinking nanoblogger.

So, suggestions on webserver VM and blogging app please.

Thanks to a few helpfull soles on the sipdroid site I have been succesful in getting sipdroid to register with my Asterisk server AND be able to make calls.

The trick is (thansk to Adrian)
In your sip.conf, comment out “secret = …”. Instead use the following: auth=username@password@host

I also made a change to the extension sipdroid runs on in asterisk and changed: qualify=no

Sipdroid registers to my asterisk box fine and is able to make and receive calls fine. As for the call quality - well that is another thing - keep in mind my testing to date is over Optus 3G.

The first issue I am having is that if I call someone’s mobile I loose the first say 10 seconds of the conversation, ie, I miss them saying “Hello” which starts the conversation off on a failry bad footing, the person I called is usually first heard by me saying” Hellllloooooo, any body there” or something to that effect - not great. Secondly there is still some lag. This is odd becasue I thought the lag I experienced using pbxes.org would reduce given the server I am regsitering to now is local and not in Japan.

Lastly, you need a very stable and good internet connection. I believe now that my data usage has doubled for calls I make as effectivley my asterisk box uploads and downloads from sipdroid AND it uploads and downloads to my VSP. Given the codec used in sipdroid is G711 data usage is high so keep that in mind - 80kbps up and down times two = 160kbps up and 160kbps down for a phone call.

Anyway, best of luck for anyone deploying sipdroid on their asterisk server. Let me know how you go.

The other day my laptop borked. I think it was a combination of a file system error and a dodgy stick of RAM. In any event, my arch linux installation didn’t work so I thought it a good oportunity to installa fresh one and completely change the way I use it.

To this end I have decided to go very light weight

Openbox WM (this thing is just great, bare minimum, customisable greatness)
Mutt (with side bar patch!);
Firefox (not light weight I know but elinks just doesn’t do what a browser I use needs to do);
Mktorrent;
Screen;
Urxvt (cos I want to be l33t);
No dock or pager or login manager bloat just unclutered goodness;
Moc;
Feh.

I think that’s it. It is now practically unuable by anyone but me which is in a way fun.

I’m at uni studying and am bored.

Over the weekend I built a new mythtv box. My old box (Dell GX260) has been in service for about 3.5 years and has been very good but its getting old and times are moving on, its hardware is starting to get left behind.

With the new release of Mythtv v0.22 due later this month and the recent release of VDPAU by Nvidia I thought it time to build a new box and take advantage of these new features.

Having bought a used Dell GX620 for AU180 I threw in a new Leadtech 8400GS GPU (low profile), 1TB HDD and a used Dvico Dual digital 4 TV Capture card.

I have to this point only ever used Mythdora which has been great and am currently running 10.21 (after running 3.01 for 3 years). This time around I wanted something that was easy to upgrade and keep up to date, easy to install and was stable - enter linHES. linHES is the ‘new’ knopmyth but is now based on Arch linux. I have been using Arch on my laptop since Christmas so have a fair amount of experience with the distro so it seems to be a perfect fit for me.

Installation of linHES was painless and the Dual digital card was working fine (its a version 1) although for some odd reason on the first installation ( I have since done a few) the first time I tried to add the second DVB tuner on the card it wouldn’t work, every installation since then has worked fine which seems odd.

Prior to setting up the cards I made sure I had the mythtv package that had VDPAU prebuilt. to do this I just passed pacman -S mythtv-vdpau and off it went.

My previous mythboxes have used the fantastic script to get the TV listings called Shepherd. Shepherd has some perl dependencies that need to be installed prior to running the Sheperd config. I found a few of them were packages prebuilt to be installed using pacman but one remainied elusive and was a requirements to run shepherd, it was called ‘Compress::Zlib’. I ended up getting it by installing perl pacman -S perl and finally was able to run Shepherd.

Just now I realise I could have installed shepherd and all its dependencies with a simple pacman -S shepherd. I’m such a idiot. I recall seeing shepherd in the repo the other day when I was having a poke around and thought it must be something else. I’m a glutton for punishment.

Will do a fresh install tonight after university and install it into the main TV room this weekend for full time use.

Here is a little tutorial for using rTorrent on sites using self signed SSL certs that I wrote today.

I have taken bits a pieces from various sites around the place.

Broadly speaking the process to get rTorrent working using a self signed cert are these:-

1. Get the cert and convert to a format rTorrent can use
2. Put the cert somewhere you will be able to find
3. Change rTorrents config to ensure it knows where to find the SSL certs

So, here we go.

1. ==Get the cert==
Log into your linux box as the user that will be running rTorrent and change to you home
directory.

Pass the following command……

sudo openssl s_client -connect thesitenamehere.com:443 | tee out_cert

You will see the SSL certificate on your screen, now hit CTRL-C, magically in the directory
you are now in will be a file called out_cert. Now you need to convert the cert to x509
format. To do this pass the following command

sudo openssl x509 -inform PEM -in out_cert -text -out out.pem

You can view the files we created with a text editor if you so wish.

2. ==Put the cert in a know directory==
Now you need to find out where your QNAP/NAS/PC has all the SSL certificates, they could be
in /etc/ssl/certs, take a look. If not you need to find out where they are. Once you
have found where they are copy the out.pem file to the directory where the SSL certs are
lets pretend they are in /etc/ssl/certs. Pass the following command…

sudo cp out.pem /etc/ssl/certs

Then once it is in that directory change to the /etc/ssl/certs directory. Once you are in
there pass the following command….

sudo c_rehash

3. ==The ~rtorrent.rc==
Now you need to find the example ~rtorrent.rc file that comes with rTorrent (note
that it is a hidden file as it starts with ‘~’).
Once found copy it to the home directory of the user that will be running rTorrent. the name of the
file should be ~rtorrent.rc

Now go into the ~rtorrent.rc file and take a look at the options it gives you, this is the
power of rTorrent. Use your favourite text editor, I use vi, there are plenty others.

Anyway, now you need to put the following line at the bottom of the ~rtorrent.rc file

# directory for ssl certificates on self signed trackers
http_capath=/etc/ssl/certs

That should be it. You should be able to connect to your site now and torrent away.

You will need to change the rtorrent.rc file to ensure it works well with your QNAP/NAS/PC. In particular you should alter it to include a watch directory for new .torrent files so its starts automatically downloading, and also perhaps a default save directory etc.

Check out rtorrents site and also read some of the tutorials out there……

http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2007/05/02/howto-use-rtorrent-like-a-pro/
http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/

Enjoy rTorrent, its the shitzen.

This is really starting to depress me. showRSS is the shitzen but my RSS feed reader solution (bashpodder) is just not working with it. It will down load the first feed ann enclosure that appears but will not down load subsequent enclosures there after, this is still the case with just using the public feeds. So, its back to mininova feeds for me with the following added to each of tyhe feeds to ensure only the most recent is downloaded “?num=1″ What a pisser. Any bash scripting gurus please feel free to chime in and let me know how to fix this in the script.

We getting the DNS-323 to run the bashpodder script for the RSS feed to be used in rTorrent turned out to be trickier than I thought.

It basically boiled down to environmental variables in cron being different than for my user on the NAS.

I have solved this issue now, my post on the DNS-323 hack forum will help you here.

I have finally been able to get rTorrent and bashpodder playing together on the DNS-323 NAS. In short bashpodder acts as the RSS feed reader and downloads the torrent file to a directory that rTorrent watches and then rTorrent kicks off the torrent download. Its light and NOT a resource hog (which is important for the DNS-323 as its got little resources to start with).

Please see my write up at the DNS-323 hack forum.

My wife has been bothering me for some time about her eeePC not working with our printer. Today I finally got around to fixing it. Thanks to this blog I was successful.  Having learnt from Adam’s experience I first created the directory…

mkdir /etc/printcap.local

then copied /etc/printcap to /etc/printcap.local by…

sudo cp /etc/printcap /etc/printcap.local

After that I also created the directory…

sudo mkdir /var/spool/lpd.

Passing the command…

dpkg -i --force-all --force-architecture mfc440cnlpr-1.0.1-1.i386.deb

installed the lpd without a hitch. I then installed the CUPS driver using…

dpkg -i --force-all --force-architecture mfc440cncupswrapper-1.0.1-1.i386.deb

and this to was successful.

I then went into the eeePC’s printer setup and added a new printer.

• Type = Network printer
• Attribute = “other”
• Path = socket://192.168.x.xx:9100 (you will need to put the IP address in this bit for your network setup)
• Selected brother for the manufacturer and then selected the MFC-440CN driver from the list which will be there now thanks to the steps we have previously taken.
• After this I selected ‘yes’ to print a test page.

It worked. Wohoooo!

My wife loves me again, she is now busy making up for lost time and furiously contributing to the deforestation of Indonesia.

I enjoy technology and Linux, I run my own server so I created this so that I can keep anyone that’s interested up to speed on what I’m up to.

I’ll be making it pretty as I go so stay tuned.