A little bit of everything - Sep 30 2009

My main consulting contract has been very busy. We've been working on a capital project that needed to be in place on Sep 30. Anything that could go wrong, went wrong. Wrong computers, wrong hard drive controller cards, wrong cables for those controller cards, incomplete test beds of existing infrastructure, on and on.

I ordered a Fujitsu S1500 scanner. I almost went with the cheaper S300, but decided that I really needed the Fujitsu driver/engine that is thoroughly tested in Linux. I plan to use it with gscan2pdf. I'll probably post something later about trying to go paperless in business and personal paperwork.

We just got jared spruced up. The page at sourceforge needs spruced up now. Jared now supports "db" records which according to Tim at Sentinal Chicken was introduced in the registry hive format with XP. I've seen one "db" record in the "software" hive. It's just not that common to have strings that are larger than 16K. But it sure confuses Windows if you screw up any record.

I relearned everything I forgot since I last used Cinelerra. I'm trying to make videos for the srcbin Loader. I'm making progress and will probably have a 20 minute full demo, 3 minute infomercial, and 1 minute commercial.

I highly recommend Cabot's Deck Stain which is available at Lowe's. (Behr has given me nothing but trouble, check DIY forums for details) We tried Cabot's a few days ago and it's wonderful. I recommend a mix of atleast 1:1 clear to color. 2:1 would really show off your wood. One gallon will do 500 sqft.

record your desktop with ffmpeg

Long ago (2006?) at a previous job, I used ffmpeg to do some screen recordings or "screencasts". We wanted to integrate video help into our custom in-house EDA tool. At that point, most screen capture on Linux was buggy. I tried gtk-recordMyDesktop and xvidcap, compiling new packages from source didn't really make good quality video. I found a hack for ffmpeg to capture X as an input, it worked great. Long term it had a problem, the patch used code from an incompatible license. So ffmpeg and the patch could not come together as a product.

But... GOOD NEWS. As of Ubuntu 9.04, ffmpeg has stable capture support. Apparently the feature was re-implemented so that the license problem was resolved!

Here is how you do it:

ffmpeg -an -s 1200x900 -r 25 -f x11grab -i :0.0 \
 -s 1200x900 -r 25 -vcodec libxvid \
 -aspect 1.3333 -sameq video-nosound.avi

I found this posted on ubuntu forums from igorzwx.

Oh, this is handy too. I forgot this command name, but knew it existed from years past. Gives you the geometry setting of a window:

xwininfo

Even better! A great little script that runs xwininfo for you and builds you an ffmpeg line.

air hose the email server

Today I switched memory on the email server, Dell SC440. It went from 2GB to 4GB, the email server is actually inside a Xen DomU (guest). No head is on this machine. I knew it would not boot strait away with different memory size. On a Dell it tells you the memory size changed, do you want to continue or enter setup. I blindly hit F1 (continue). I did not known F1 was bypassing the warning that SATA2 was not found.

After fiddling around I found it had dropped /dev/sdb out of the RAIDs. Eeek. My dusting job with the air hose, was too invasive!

Not good:

# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid0] [raid1]
md2 : active raid5 sda4[0] sdd4[3] sdc4[2]
  444309504 blocks level 5, 256k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/3] [U_UU]

md0 : active raid1 sda1[0] sdc1[2]
  803236 blocks super 1.0 [3/2] [U_U]
  bitmap: 2/7 pages [8KB], 64KB chunk

md1 : active raid5 sda2[0] sdd2[3] sdc2[2]
  15710976 blocks level 5, 256k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/3] [U_UU]

So I needed to re-add it, but I can never remember the syntax. After some looking, this is what I did:

mdadm --misc --detail /dev/md0
mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --add /dev/sdb1
mdadm --misc --detail /dev/md1
mdadm --manage /dev/md1 --add /dev/sdb2
mdadm --misc --detail /dev/md2
mdadm --manage /dev/md2 --add /dev/sdb4

new email server and spam

About 2 weeks ago we switched to Zimbra Collaboration Suite. I finally had time to do this, after working on it on and off for about 7 months. It replaced a homegrown Postfix, Courier IMAP, Spamassassin setup running on Gentoo. I've been running my own email server for a very long time... first RedHat 4-5 on a DEC Alpha, then on SuSE 7, then Gentoo. Back in the old days a misconfigured server didn't really matter much. Yes, there was a time I even (unknowingly) ran an open relay. Seems like in about 2000-2001 things needed to be much tighter. And now it's to the point I'd rather not configure each daemon individually.

Zimbra is treating us great so far -- our little company and all the friends and family that have been on my mail server for so so long.

One thing that concerns me -- more spam seems to get through. Well, it turns out that my old Postfix setup was probably a bit overboard. It was particularly nasty to incoming connections that:

1. Lacked a reverse DNS lookup
2. Came from a Dynamic IP
3. Reverse DNS didn't match their HELO

So, I'm trying to be nicer now. Not everyone's mail can come through "proper" channels I guess. Much of the time it's out of a person's control, their ISP might not know what they are doing.

I'm trying to teach the Bayesian filter about spam and ham. Zimbra is supposed to do this when someone drags the email to the Junk folder or if they click on the Junk button in their web interface. I'm not totally sure. And since they've abstracted me from sa-learn, I can't run it directly without passing it a bunch of switches so it can find itself in the /opt/zimbra tree.

I've decided to try to attract some spam. How better than to post an email address here? How about scrapeme1@srcbin.com that sounds good. Yes, scrape me would like some unsolicited email. For those wondering about "Scrape," it is what people used to do computer screens to get information off of them -- usually in a terminal application. After the web got interesting data, web scraping took off. Spammers build "robots" or "bots" to traverse the web looking for text that looks like email addresses. Mostlikely, scrapeme1@srcbin.com will look fresh and desirable to spammers and will hopefully spread around a bit on some lists.

how to build a DOS boot USB mem stick on Linux

You might find yourself needing to boot DOS on an x86 computer. A popular reason would be to update the BIOS. What if the computer doesn't have a floppy drive? Or you need more room than a floppy? What if the new SATA DVD writer doesn't seem to be recognized by the CDROM drivers on the DOS boot CD you built?

We use sysresccd all the time, but that is Linux and I needed to copy an arbitrary .exe to removable media, boot DOS and run the .exe. I've customized the FreeDOS CD, but CDs wouldn't work so I found this page. Which option to try? Well, I chose a few short options at first, then went with the long option (#1). A lot of procedural language, seems better to just write a script.

Make an empty directory and run this script (on Linux):
Download it here

#!/bin/sh

wget 'http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/advancemame/makebootfat-1.4.tar.gz?download'
tar -xzf makebootfat-1.4.tar.gz
cd makebootfat-1.4
./configure
make
ls makebootfat

cd ..

wget 'http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/pkgs/kernels.zip'
wget 'http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/pkgs/commandx.zip'
wget 'http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/pkgs/unstablx.zip'

unzip kernels.zip
unzip commandx.zip
unzip unstablx.zip

mkdir fs-root

cp bin/command.com bin/kernel.sys fs-root/
cp source/ukernel/boot/fat*.bin fs-root/
cp /usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin fs-root/

#cd fs-root
#sudo ../makebootfat-1.4/makebootfat -o /dev/sdd -E 255 -1 fat12.bin -2 fat16.bin -3 fat32lba.bin -m mbr.bin .
#sudo dd if=/dev/sdd of=~/fdos-usb.dd

Tested on Ubuntu 9.04 with nothing special installed. Apparently some distributions will have /usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin in another spot or not at all. The last 3 lines (comments) are there as an example of what to do next. Use "sudo dd" at your own risk.

The end result is a USB mem stick that will boot FreeDOS and allow you to run your BIOS update utility. Now you are free to collect lots of little tools like that on one stick.

intended use and who we are

I had a blog of technical stuff setup on JRoller, but it was just sorta clunky, wasn't used much, and got very little traffic. I (we) hope to post good technical stuff here for other's reference, not just our own.

srcbin, Inc is a small company in south east Idaho. We think we have talent and hope to grow and gain talent. The more I think of it we ought to expose some of our little adventure. We hope to work towards the principles in Monty's hacking business model.

Our name might be a little confusing for those outside the software realm. "src" and "bin" are the typical abbreviations for source and binary respectively. It's a little geeky, but so are we.