Archive for January, 2010

The last few days I have been having a pretty good debate with a friend about the virtues of open source vs Appliances. At times its gotten pretty heated but its all in good fun. The current debate centers around email infrastructure. There are options on the table to use an appliance, or a 3rd party service to control the spam. Of course I was appalled that SpamAssassin and brethren were not on the table. (more…)

Ewwww, scary isn’t it. No Its not Halloween, but you may have entered the twilight zone. Right, I never touch Microsoft products. Well in actuality sometimes I do (I just don’t brag about it). Some of the development at $work uses Microsofts Mediaroom, and I have a “Personal Server” (great name right?) that the developers use. I was trying to install the Mediaroom service pack yesterday and took some notes on the process. Some of my friends found it quite entertaining. I found it quite aggravating as you might imagine. (more…)

I’d like to thank Dale Mugford and Duane Storey from BraveNewCode for the nice Wordpress plugin and bundled mobile theme. If you visit my site on your mobile device you should get a slimmed down page, let me know what ya think.

Many of you know that I had a son about 6 months ago now. What you may not know is that my wife decided to quit her job and start a home daycare so she could be at home with our son. We all know how hard kids can be on DVDs and the like, so its important to be able to back them up. I am not a fan of the encryption or the new copy protections that have been put in place (ARccOS, RipGuard). These copy protections introduce bad sectors in the DVD, and set top players are supposed to just ignore them. The problem is not all players follow the rules. I’ve got a few cheapo players that just wont play many newer titles because of this copy protection.

Now that there is a swarm of children in the house I have several motivations to backing up my DVDs.

1) I want the kids to be able to use the cheap DVD players. If something bad happens no big deal.

2) I want the kids to use copies of the original DVDs instead of the original. Again burning a new dvd is much cheaper than buying a new one.

3) My MythTV frontends can stream ISOs and thats more convenient, I never have to get up and put a DVD in the player.

So a bit of research and some trial and error I believe I have come up with a pretty easy process.

Packages needed:

• Gnu ddrescue
• dvdbackup
• libdvdcss2
• vlc
• mkisofs

The process:

1. ddrescue -n -b 2048 /dev/dvd output.iso
2. dvdbackup -M -i output.iso -o dvd_structure
3. mkisofs -dvd-video -o clean_dvd.iso dvd_structure

Step 1 copys the DVD to disk block by block but any bad sectors found zero data is filled in. At this point you are left with a DVD iso that has the copy protection removed but the encryption is still intact. Step 2 extract the contents to a directory. This second step leaves you with the structure of a dvd without the encryption. I want to preserve everything about the original DVD (except the copy protection and encryption) so I used the mirror option. This leaves me with all the features and original menus. Step 3 take the DVD structure and pack it up into a nice ISO.

A few things to note:

I took no steps to make the DVD fit on a single layer DVD (4.something GB). If you wanted to do that you should requantize after step 2. To verify that the final ISO did indeed have the encryption removed I un-installed libdvdcss2 and attempted to play the first ISO with VLC. VLC failed to properly play the ISO with only the copy protection removed but succeeded in playing the final ISO. After testing that I reinstalled libdvdcss2.

Process tested on Disney Pixar Cars.
I hope you find this helpful.

Gah so I was futzing with the acl map on our subversion server. Organizing things into groups. I wasn’t thinking and started uppercasing the users ids when moving them into groups (yes i hate uppercase but its easy to highlight paste them). This of course stopped authentication from working for people who have cached auths returning a 403 error. So how to quickly lowercase a huge swath of ids? (more…)

I am sure you are aware of my affinity for the Xen hypervisor. In the last year I have switched over to Citrix Xenserver. With other people managing VMs as well having a nice GUI is helpful. One of my complaints is that the GUI (XenCenter) is a windows only app. Common Citrix, please release a cross platform management console. I’ve got to run a windows VM just to use the GUI (granted I don’t have to use the gui, there is a nice API and console utilities). At any rate today I noticed that I could no longer pull up the console for a windows VM nor could I pull up the performance metrics available in XenCenter. A few searches turned up Kenneth Hunts blog and a post that showed me where to fix it. (more…)

From time to time  I have not so pleasant support experiences. Today I had another. (more…)

This comes up from time to time for me. Either myself or someone else needs to see what address are either in use or not in use (at least as far as ping is concerned). So here are a few oneliners to hopefully make your day brighter.

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