tips

Python has become my language of choice for automation and general scripting. Its nice to have an editor that makes things easier when your doing things. Its also nice to use an editor that you can find just about anywhere. I have customized my vim to make doing things in python much quicker and this is an old post where I talk about some of the modifications.

Vim customization for python

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…)

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…)

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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This is one of my bosses favorite sayings. I must admit its pretty good and for sure its something you need to do. Its especially something you need to do if you when you walk into a new environment and the previous care taker is no longer available.

Check your backup policies, make sure that you aren’t backing up 15 rotating daily copies of a version controlled repository to tape every day (all 15). Check your storage systems. Make sure that the raid levels are sane, and that redundancy and hot spares are available for all raid sets unless its meant to be some fast scratch disk.

It looks like I will need a windows backup solution for a small project soon. As you probably know I don’t typically do Windows so I am reaching out. I typically use rsync for most of my backup needs. To be more specific I like to use rsnapshot which is a wrapper around rsync. Have you ever wanted rsync on windows? What did you use.

I am aware of several options.

There is of course cygwin. Beyond cygwin it seems nasbackup (http://www.nasbackup.com) and deltacopy (http://www.aboutmyip.com/AboutMyXApp/DeltaCopy.jsp) were the best options I could find.

Do you have any suggestions? What other solutions for windows backup have you used. I don’t have a specific reason but I just cringe at the thought of using windows internal backup mechanism.

It took me a long time to hunt these down and I think default passwords should be freely available.

Aspire webpro (default ip is 172.16.0.10):

Administrator Username: ASPIRE

Administrator Password: 12345678

Extension Username: extension number

Extension Password: 1111

UltraMail (default ip is 192.168.1.250):

Service Number: 2000

System Password: CTL

I also found a manual for UltraMail, and a UserPro manual for programming the handsets with the web interface.

Hopefully none of you are stuck with one of these systems. Hopefully given the option you choose something like Asterisk. Hopefully if 1 and 2 are not true this information helps you.

I am a big fan of chat support. I don’t have to drain my battery waiting on hold until its my turn in the queue. Plus when dealing with error messages its infinitely more helpful to be able to copy/paste to the agent. Sadly finding competent help is still an issue. Here is an excerpt from a recent chat support experience.

(8:39:41 PM) Sheldon He: The SSL will need to be re-issued, since they are IP specific.
(8:40:06 PM) Nick Anderson: ssl certificates are not tied to ip addresses
(8:40:56 PM) Sheldon He: Actually they are. They are domain and IP specific. That’s why it needs a dedicated IP.
(8:43:06 PM) Nick Anderson: ssl is just tied to a name, but you can only run one ssl cert per ip without the Server Name Indicator tls extension to openssl
(8:43:20 PM) Sheldon He: Well, according to our SSLs in the past, the SSL needs to be re-issued when you move from a Shared to a Reseller.
(8:45:40 PM) Sheldon He: I’m unable to change the settings here, this will require an admin. Please email them at support@hostgator.com and we’ll be able to help you with this issue.

Luckily his final answer was correct and whoever answers the support emails was able to complete the ssl cert migration.

On a side note, its things like this that make me tell people to not use shared hosting accounts. Get yourself a VPS or a dedicated server if you want to do anything worth while.