Cacasodo, the tech answer guy

wake on lan on the SC1430

2009-06-11T20:23:00.001-04:00

Wake On Lan..she is a working on the SC1430 now, after a bit of sturm unt drang:
http://en.community.dell.com/forums/p/19278497/19501270.aspx#

Fedora 10, xrandr and InFocus projector

2009-03-31T09:56:00.004-04:00

So, I'm doing this presentation at the Trenton Computer Festival next month and couldn't get the InFocus IN2102EP Projector to work on my dual boot MacBook Pro (2.33Ghz Core 2 Duo) that runs both Leopard and Fedora 10, x86-64 using ReFit as the boot loader. I tried to connect the InFocus to the DVI output of the Mac while running under Fedora.

The InFocus is connected this way:
MacBook external DVI output > DVI-VGA dongle > VGA - M1-DA Cable
> InFocus M1-DA connector

The problem is that though xrandr sees the DVI-0 port as connected, but the InFocus doesn't get the signal or spring to life through the setup listed above.

I've verified that the DVI-0 output works with a regular DVI cable connected to the DVI input on my Dell 1907FP 19-inch Flat Panel LCD. So this means a digital signal is being output from the port. Now, I've also verified that the DVI-0 output from Fedora does NOT work with the DVI-VGA dongle connected to the VGA input on the Dell. When connected with the DVI-VGA setup listed above, xrandr sees that the InFocus is connected (shown below). Also, Gnome sees the InFocus in the connected displays.

On the flipside, I've verified that the InFocus projector works using the DVI-VGA cable setup when booted from the Mac OS. So that's odd.

Since I can see the output while connected to the Dell's DVI input, I don't think this is a configuration issue. But maybe Fedora just doesn't like the DVI-VGA dongle. I'm sure I could buy an M1-DA direct to DVI adapter and be done with it, but I'd rather save the $55 and figure out why the Mac sees the Infocus, but why Fedora has troubles.

Here is the output of xrandr:
[cm@cm ~]$ xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 2464 x 900, maximum 2720 x 1924
LVDS connected 1440x900+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
331mm x 207mm
1440x900 60.0*+
2048x1536 60.0
1920x1440 60.0
1856x1392 60.0
1792x1344 75.0 60.0
1600x1200 85.0 75.0 70.0 65.0 60.0
1400x1050 74.8 60.0
1280x1024 85.0 75.0 60.0
DVI-0 connected 1024x768+1440+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
0mm x 0mm
1024x768 60.0*+ 85.0 75.1 75.0 70.1 60.0*
1400x1050 60.0
1280x1024 75.0 60.0
1024x768_60.00 60.0
1280x960 60.0
1152x864 75.0
832x624 74.6
800x600 85.1 72.2 75.0 60.3 56.2
640x480 85.0 72.8 75.0 72.8 75.0 60.0
720x400 85.0
640x400 85.1
640x350 85.1
0x0 0.0

Here is my xorg.conf:
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
InputDevice "Synaptics Touchpad" "CorePointer"
EndSection

Section "Module"
Load "synaptics"
Load "extmod"
Load "dbe"
Load "glx"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "SHMConfig" "true"
Option "LeftEdge" "10"
Option "RightEdge" "1200"
Option "TopEdge" "10"
Option "BottomEdge" "370"
Option "FingerLow" "10"
Option "FingerHigh" "20"
Option "MaxTapTime" "180"
Option "MaxTapMove" "220"
Option "SingleTapTimeout" "100"
Option "MaxDoubleTapTime" "180"
Option "LockedDrags" "off"
Option "MinSpeed" "1.10"
Option "MaxSpeed" "1.30"
Option "AccelFactor" "0.08"
Option "TapButton1" "1"
Option "TapButton2" "3"
Option "TapButton3" "2"
Option "RTCornerButton" "0"
Option "RBCornerButton" "0"
Option "LTCornerButton" "0"
Option "LBCornerButton" "0"
Option "VertScrollDelta" "20"
Option "HorizScrollDelta" "50"
Option "HorizEdgeScroll" "0"
Option "VertEdgeScroll" "0"
Option "VertTwoFingerScroll" "1"
Option "HorizTwoFingerScroll" "1"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "ATI Technologies Inc M56P [Radeon Mobility X1600]"
Driver "radeon"
Option "backingstore" "true"
Option "RenderAccel" "true"
Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
Option "Monitor-LVDS" "Internal Monitor"
Option "Monitor-DVI-0" "External DVI"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Internal Monitor"
HorizSync 30.0 - 110.0
VertRefresh 50.0 - 150.0
Option "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "External DVI"
Modeline "1024x768_60.00" 108.88 1280 1360 1496 1712 1024 1025 1028
1060 -HSync +Vsync
Option "Enable" "true"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "ATI Technologies Inc M56P [Radeon Mobility X1600]"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Virtual 2720 1924 # <--- This is the newly added entry
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection

Alex Deucher on the Xorg mailing list was able to help me:

> > > If you are using F10 with kernel modesetting (KMS) it doesn't have the
> > > proper quirks do deal with the broken connector table on the macbooks.
> > > I think the non-KMS code shipped with F10 should have the proper
> > > quirk handling, if not, you may need to upgrade your ddx.

I did a workaround and used the "nomodeset" kernel parameter option on kernel command line in grub.conf. So now, the display wakes up when Gnome starts.

Hooray!
TAG

Xorg/Xrandr References
Xorg Info Page
XRandr Wiki
Open Solaris on MacBook Pro
XRandr on Debian

dual boot: macbook pro and fedora 10

2009-03-07T18:56:00.010-05:00

Lately, I've been preparing a talk on Linux video production in linux that I will be giving at the end of April. More or less, it will be a technology demo that shows how to accomplish various video related tasks in Linux:
-capturing a video (acquisition)
-importing the output from the camera via firewire
-basics of file formats
-editing
-rendering
-scripting
-saving to a final destination (iPod/DVD/Vimeo)

So there will be a lot of ground to cover in the hour or so I will be speaking. I considered the mechanics of my presentation and first thought it would be cool to use my JVC HD10U to capture video of the conference which I'd then edit in Cinelerra. I had Fedora 10 already running in a virtual machine via VMware Fusion on my MacBook Pro 2.33Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo.

This method posed one big hurdle: VMware does not support firewire. VMware supports USB, but my camera only transmits high def video over firewire. Thus, I would not be able to capture live video from the camera during the talk. Conceivably, I could use a USB camera, but the quality would be so piss poor as to be embarrassing. So the VMware solution was nixed. The best solution was to dual boot my MacBook. I had my marching orders: I had to figure out how to dual boot my MacBook.

As expected, I hit a few speed bumps along the way, as the TechAnswerGuy always does. And as usual, you get to learn from my mistakes. Here we go..

Summary
Here was the high level plan:
1) upgrade my system drive to a 320GB 7200RPM Seagate Momentus
I was running out of space on the original 120GB drive, so this would be fun.
2) partition that fat new system drive to have a 240GB partition for Mac OSX and leave the 60GB unused space for Fedora
3) use SuperDuper to backup all important files to the Mac partition
4) use either Boot Camp or rEFIt to present a nice dual boot menu when the MacBook boots
5) configure the Fedora 10, x86-64 instance with a working copy of Cinelerra, dvgrab and all the media goodies necessary to make a slam-bang presentation come alive

Devil in the Details
In order to upgrade my system drive, I needed to migrate the data from the old drive to the new drive. Lucky for Mac users, David Nanian has written a wonderfully simple app called SuperDuper that creates bootable backups of Mac system drives. I prefer the word clone, as it refers to the fact that the backup also makes the drive bootable. Semantics aside, the result is the same.

Since my system drive is the drive that came installed in the MacBook, I needed to hook up the new 320GB Seagate I had bought. This was done using a very neat little device, a non enclosed disk enclosure called the Thermaltake BlacX eSATA Hard Drive Docking Station that I had bought at the same time for this express purpose.

Thermaltake BlacX..Sweet!
What a simple, easy little device to use! It is like a little USB disk drive bucket for both 2.5" and 3.5" disks. You just insert a disk connector side down into this bad boy, plug it in via USB into your PC or MAC, turn it on and voila, instant access to your storage! No fussing with screws or metal sleeves. It's cheap too, low $40s. After using enclosures for years, it is nice to not have to pick up a screwdriver to get access to my storage.

Once I plugged in the new drive into the BlacX and turned it on, it was time to 1) partition the empty drive and 2) do the SuperDuper backup. Partitioning the drive with the OSX Disk Utility was fairly easy. I accepted the defaults for the partition:
* Mac OS Extended partition (Journaled)
* install Mac OS 9 drivers

Partition Hell
Of the 300GB usable out of the drive, I allocated 240GB in the Mac partition and 60GB Free Space to land my Fedora 10 system. One very important thing that I needed to select is under Options:
select GUID Partition Table. Initially, I had taken the defaults settings and the defaults create a drive that uses the older Apple Partition Map drive partitioning scheme:

Do NOT use APM because you will get errors in both Boot Camp and rEFIt. The Boot Camp error went something like this:
Startup disk cannot be partitioned or restored to a single partition.
Backup the disk and use Disk Utility to format it as a single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) Volume.

The above error is very misleading, because when you look at the format of your partition, the partition is formatted in the correct way. But at the bottom of Disk Utility's Partition screen for the drive, the information about the drive will be listed and the key piece is "Partition Map Scheme". If Apple Partition Map is there, you won't be able to use Boot Camp or rEFIt. In my case, I had to repartition the new drive again to create a partition that had a Partition Map Scheme of GUID Partition Table. Here's a short guide that explains how to convert a drive from APM to GUID.

Long story short, you'll have to blow away whatever is on the disk to do the conversion. So be advised.

SooperDooper Indeed!
Once I had resolved the Partition Map problem, I moved onto backing up my sensitive data to the new drive with SuperDuper. There are a number of guides out there and SuperDuper is really easy to use. It took about three hours to copy 100GB of data from my currently internal old system drive to the new 320GB, 7200RPM hard drive that was plugged into the Thermaltake.

Quid Pro Quo
The next step was to take apart the MacBook and switch out the old drive for the new. This was non-trivial, required a delicate touch and took about an hour.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2119529,00.asp

rEFIt
As I am all for open source solutions, I decided to use rEFIt as my boot manager. rEFIt also provides a clean way to install another OS. In point of fact, you don't need rEFIt to boot into a second operating system on your MacBook. Simply hold down the Option button as your MacBook is booting, and you will see OSX's built in system volume chooser.

Once I installed rEFIt, I rebooted the system and I saw the rEFIt boot manager appear. I booted a second time and inserted my Fedora 10, x86-64 install DVD and when the rEFIt boot manager appeared, I now had a second choice appear in the menu. That of Tux!

Familiar Territory
After that, the Fedora install process was the usual. One note: make sure to look at the disk properties in the disk configuration section of the install. Even though Fedora deselects any Mac partitions, it is good to double check this. The Fedora installer make good choices for the partitioning, given that my newly installed system disk in the Mac was found as /dev/sda:
* Fedora automatically deselected the first two partitions in /dev/sda as they were Mac partitions
* Fedora correctly assigned /dev/sda3 as the boot partition

Nice. After confirming Fedora's correct selected defaults for the partitioning layout, I then selected the base installation plus Developer Tools. This selection, plus the dependencies for Cinelerra build resulted in about 5.1GB used on the disk. Not too porky. I went to breakfast and the install finished in about 30 minutes.

After the system restarted, I found some troubles with the Mac's touchpad. I resolved them with the synaptics driver and some xorg.conf config, but I will detail that in a second post.

I will try to fill in some of the details of this long winded post with pictures to break up the monotony of the text.

TAG

Other References
http://www.macgeekery.com/tips/cli/nondestructively_resizing_volumes
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-766172.html
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3282
http://forum.onmac.net/showthread.php?t=2793

extending a logical volume in Fedora

2009-02-22T20:47:00.010-05:00

I have a Fedora 10, x86-64 installation running under VMware Fusion on my Mac. Today, I ran out of disk space on my root partition. My root partition sits on a logical volume. In the "df" output below, note that I only have 92MB left on my / drive:
[root@ogre ~]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 5.7G 5.4G 92M 99% /
/dev/sda1 190M 30M 151M 17% /boot
tmpfs 543M 0 543M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sr0 96M 96M 0 100% /media/GParted-live

Oh no!

Research Necessary
Now, I haven't worked with logical volumes in quite some time, so I had to do a bunch of reading to figure out what the heck to do. These documents were of immeasurable help:
A Beginner's Guide to LVM
VMware Fusion - Expanding a Disk
Resizing LVM Volumes in Linux

Summary
In a nutshell, here are the steps necessary to expand the amount of space in your logical volume on Fedora. The first step is the allocation of new space in the context of VMware, but you could easily substitute the installation of a new hard drive:
1) In VMware Fusion, under Virtual Machine -> Settings -> Hard Disk, expand the size of your disk to the desired amount. I increased my disk space allocation from 8GB to 10GB:

2) Make a new partition using unallocated space
3) Create a new physical volume from the new partition that was just created
4) Extend the volume group into the new physical volume that was just created
5) Note the amount of free space in the volume group
6) Extend the amount of space in the logical volume using the value of free space
7) Resize the filesystem on the logical volume
8) Note the increased available space in the filesystem on the logical volume
9) Drink beer, you've earned it!

Details
##########
#2) MAKE A NEW PARTITION USING UNALLOCATED SPACE
##########
[root@ogre ~]# parted
GNU Parted 1.8.8
Using /dev/sda
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) print
Model: VMware, VMware Virtual S (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 10.7GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 32.3kB 206MB 206MB primary ext3 boot
2 206MB 8587MB 8382MB primary lvm

(parted) mkpart primary 8588 10700
(parted) print
Model: VMware, VMware Virtual S (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 10.7GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 32.3kB 206MB 206MB primary ext3 boot
2 206MB 8587MB 8382MB primary lvm
3 8587MB 10.7GB 2113MB primary

(parted) quit
Information: You may need to update /etc/fstab.

##########
#3) CREATE A NEW PHYSICAL VOLUME FROM THE NEW PARTITION THAT WAS JUST CREATED
##########
[root@ogre ~]# lvm
lvm> pvcreate /dev/sda3
Physical volume "/dev/sda3" successfully created
lvm> pvs
PV VG Fmt Attr PSize PFree
/dev/sda2 VolGroup00 lvm2 a- 7.78G 32.00M
/dev/sda3 lvm2 -- 1.97G 1.97G

##########
#4) EXTEND THE VOLUME GROUP INTO THE NEW PHYSICAL VOLUME THAT WAS JUST CREATED
##########
lvm> vgextend VolGroup00 /dev/sda3
Volume group "VolGroup00" successfully extended
lvm> pvs
PV VG Fmt Attr PSize PFree
/dev/sda2 VolGroup00 lvm2 a- 7.78G 32.00M
/dev/sda3 VolGroup00 lvm2 a- 1.94G 1.94G

##########
#5) NOTE THE AMOUNT OF FREE SPACE IN THE VOLUME GROUP
##########
lvm> vgdisplay VolGroup00
--- Volume group ---
VG Name VolGroup00
System ID
Format lvm2
Metadata Areas 2
Metadata Sequence No 4
VG Access read/write
VG Status resizable
MAX LV 0
Cur LV 2
Open LV 2
Max PV 0
Cur PV 2
Act PV 2
VG Size 9.72 GB
PE Size 32.00 MB
Total PE 311
Alloc PE / Size 248 / 7.75 GB
Free PE / Size 63 / 1.97 GB
VG UUID H89xDs-yTqE-y2YZ-ORVq-idgW-HdGf-hHU8m3

##########
#6) EXTEND THE AMOUNT OF SPACE IN THE LOGICAL VOLUME USING THE VALUE OF FREE SPACE
##########
lvm> lvextend -l+63 /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
Extending logical volume LogVol00 to 7.75 GB
Logical volume LogVol00 successfully resized
lvm> lvs
LV VG Attr LSize Origin Snap% Move Log Copy% Convert
LogVol00 VolGroup00 -wi-ao 7.75G
LogVol01 VolGroup00 -wi-ao 1.97G
lvm> quit
Exiting.

##########
#7) RESIZE THE FILESYSTEM ON THE LOGICAL VOLUME
##########
[root@ogre ~]# resize2fs /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
resize2fs 1.41.3 (12-Oct-2008)
Filesystem at /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 is mounted on /; on-line resizing required
old desc_blocks = 1, new_desc_blocks = 1
Performing an on-line resize of /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 to 2031616 (4k) blocks.
The filesystem on /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 is now 2031616 blocks long.

##########
#8) NOTE THE INCREASED AVAILABLE SPACE IN THE FILESYSTEM ON THE LOGICAL VOLUME
##########
[root@ogre ~]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
7.7G 5.4G 2.0G 74% /
/dev/sda1 190M 30M 151M 17% /boot
tmpfs 543M 0 543M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sr0 96M 96M 0 100% /media/GParted-live

##########
#9) DRINK BEER!
##########

Hooray! Now I won't run out of space in my VM!
TAG

vmware tools install in Fedora 10

2009-02-22T20:21:00.004-05:00

Here are some quick notes to installing VMware Tools in Fedora 10 in Fusion. My particular architecture is x86-64, but these should work for regular x86 installs:
1) yum groupinstall "Development Tools"
2) yum install kernel-devel* kernel-headers*
3) run ./vmware-install.pl as root

Also, I had one problem where the kernel-devel* and kernel-headers* package did not match my kernel, which was one revision lower than my installed kernel. The vmware-install.pl program told me this when I tried to run it. The solution to this was to simply update my kernel:
yum install kernel

TAG

pulseaudio and Fedora 10 don't get along

2009-02-22T19:41:00.009-05:00

Working with my Fedora 10, x86-64 VM running under Fusion on my MacBook Pro was an exercise in frustration today:
- pulseaudio was spitting out noise and I couldn't uninstall it
- VMware Tools wouldn't compile
- I was running out of disk space in the VM

PulseAudio Problem
The problem with PulseAudio and Fedora 10, x86-64 is that when you use any multimedia application that has sound, the pulseaudio driver just creates noise in your speakers. Also, any video stream associated with the audio stream will be corrupted or at a minimum, sped up or slowed down and generally unwatchable.

Solutions that should work, don't
Under System -> Preferences -> Personal -> Sessions, I unchecked the PulseAudio Sound System. Even with this change, my apps in Gnome kept using Pulse. I'm wondering if this problem is related to Gnome in the last three Fedoras not saving session information properly?

Also, reading the man pages for pulse-daemon.conf, pulse-client.conf and pulseaudio wasn't much help as it did not yield a simple solution for disabling it.

I couldn't remove pulseaudio, because the beast has hooks into everything:
[sodo@ogre ~]$ sudo yum remove pulseaudio*
compiz-gnome x86_64 0.7.8-7.fc10
control-center x86_64 1:2.24.0.1-12.fc10
gdm x86_64 1:2.24.0-12.fc10
gdm-user-switch-applet x86_64 1:2.24.0-12.fc10
gnome-applets x86_64 1:2.24.3.1-1.fc10
gnome-panel x86_64 2.24.3-1.fc10
gnome-session x86_64 2.24.3-1.fc10
gnome-session-xsession x86_64 2.24.3-1.fc10
gnome-settings-daemon x86_64 2.24.1-7.fc10
gstreamer-plugins-good x86_64 0.10.11-4.fc10
libcanberra x86_64 0.10-3.fc10
libcanberra-gtk2 x86_64 0.10-3.fc10
mencoder x86_64 1.0-0.103.20080903svn.fc10
mjpegtools x86_64 1.9.0-0.6.rc3.fc10
mjpegtools-gui x86_64 1.9.0-0.6.rc3.fc10
mplayer x86_64 1.0-0.103.20080903svn.fc10
orca x86_64 2.24.3-1.fc10
plymouth-gdm-hooks x86_64 0.6.0-0.2008.11.17.3.fc10
totem x86_64 2.24.3-1.fc10
totem-gstreamer x86_64 2.24.3-1.fc10
totem-mozplugin x86_64 2.24.3-1.fc10
totem-nautilus x86_64 2.24.3-1.fc10
vlc x86_64 0.9.8a-1.fc10
vlc-devel

A Working Solution!
The pulseaudio* removal wasn't going to work, as it was going to remove a helluva lot of dependent programs. However, a different syntax for the removal of pulseaudio seemed to work a little better:
[sodo@ogre ~]$ sudo yum remove pulseaudio

Without the asterisk (*), yum removed only pulseaudio programs and not any dependencies. So it was just a tweak to the yum remove syntax that did the trick. Thank God. Now my videos don't break up!

FYI - As a last resort, if none of these removals work, just rename the binary to something else:
sudo mv /usr/bin/pulseaudio /usr/bin/paudio

That way, the system won't be able to find it. Of course, this isn't the preferred method of disabling pulseaudio!
;)
TAG

Reference
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=213711
An untested solution:
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=206868

smtp mail from evolution to comcast

2009-02-20T00:08:00.004-05:00

Well, this is completely f'd up. Suddenly, outbound SMTP mail from Evolution on my Fedora 10 install just stopped working. The only thing I had done was install Alpine, the most recent version of what used to be the Pine command line email program.

Digging further, I found this post suggesting that both Compuserve and Comcast have been using port 587 instead of port 25 to receive SMTP email.

Thanks Comcast. You just killed more than two hours of my time. You incompetent fools.

100% cpu on vmware fusion 2.0.2 with Mac OSX 10.5.6

2009-02-15T20:35:00.010-05:00

This weekend, I installed Fusion 2.0.2 on my MacBook Pro 17" (dual core 2.4Ghz, 2GB RAM) running OSX 10.5.6. I was running an XP SP2 VM using one processor and 512MB. The one dedicated CPU would spike to 100% and my mouse disappeared. Thus, I had to control XP via the keyboard, always an exciting task. Of course, the display was really sluggish as others in this thread have reported. I did try the reinstall of VMware Tools, but that didn't work. Two things in conjunction did work:

1) under Settings -> Sharing -> Shared Applications, I disabled "Allow your Mac to open applications in the virtual machine"

2) in the same dialog box, select "Never" for "Show running virtual machine applications in the dock". This essentially disables Unity mode for that option.

Update 2009/02/16
Shutdown your vm and restart Fusion to make sure the changes are effective.
*** end update ***

Update 2009/02/18
I should clarify that my MacBook was upgraded to OSX 10.5 Leopard recently. I believe the DVD upgraded it to 10.5.4, and then I did another interim upgrade via Internet download to 10.5.6
*** end update ***

When you read the list of caveats in the VMware Fusion Release Notes, it is quite a litany of troubles. I guess this is where complexity gets us..too many combinations of guest and host OS versions for the company to adequately QA their products.

Unfortunately, it cost me at least two hours of my time today.
TAG

References:
Beginner's Guide to VMware Fusion
Power User's Guide to VMware Fusion
Resizing Virtual Disks with Step-by-Step Instructions
Run a Virtual Machine at Boot
Workstation 6 Manual
Modifying Fusion's Network Settings

the pleasure of command line email

2009-02-11T09:25:00.010-05:00

I don't think there is anything as satisfying as the simplicity of sending an email at the command line. Like so:
[sodo@ogre ~]$ mail -s "short and sweet" cacasododom@gmail.com
This is my email.
.
EOT
[sodo@ogre ~]$

Simplicity Itself
I mean, really, how sweet is that? No opening a big fat email client, no clicking "Compose Email", no clicking into an address textbox field, no surfing through lists of adressees, you get the point. Command line email is simplicity itself. Of course, its simplicity is its drawback..you can't do the fancy stuff. But for simple communications or piping the input of text files into an email and sending it off, command line email can't be beat.
[sodo@ogre ~]$ mail -s "Fedora 10 random lockups" cacasododom@gmail.com
[sodo@ogre ~]$

Sending Mail Via Comcast
Fedora 10's base install comes with "mail". However, you need to tweak your .mailrc file for it to work with your mail provider. In my case, I am on Comcast. Comcast's mail requires your username and password. And of course you need to specify the outbound SMTP server. Finally, I want to set the "From:" address, so replies go to the right place. So my .mailrc file looks like this:
[sodo@ogre ~]$ cat .mailrc
set smtp-auth-user=myaccount
set smtp-auth-password=password
set smtp=smtp.comcast.net
set from=myaccount@comcast.net

Just put this .mailrc file in your home directory and you should be good to go. Test it by sending a mail from the command line:
[sodo@ogre ~]$ mail -s "test email #1" yourtestemail@mailhost.com < /dev/null
[sodo@ogre ~]$

Test That This Works
After sending your email, you may get a bounce back if something is incorrectly configured. So you may receive a message at the command line:
[sodo@ogre ~]$
You have new mail in /var/spool/mail/root
[sodo@ogre ~]$

Just type "mail" and hit enter. The interactive version of "mail" will start and you'll see a list of mail headers:
[sodo@ogre ~]$ mail
Heirloom Mail version 12.4 7/29/08. Type ? for help.
"/var/spool/mail/sodo": 2 messages
> 1 Mail Delivery Subsys Fri Feb 6 11:07 253/20968 "Returned mail: see transcript for details"
2 Mail Delivery Subsys Fri Feb 6 11:07 249/20491 "Returned mail: see transcript for details"

Type the number of the email header (1, 2, 3, etc) to see its contents.
Message
1:From MAILER-DAEMON@localhost.localdomain Fri Feb 6 11:07:40 2009
Return-Path: <MAILER-DAEMON@localhost.localdomain>
Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2009 11:07:40 -0500
From: Mail Delivery Subsystem <MAILER-DAEMON@localhost.localdomain>
To: <sodo@localhost.localdomain>
Content-Type: multipart/report; report-type=delivery-status; boundary="n16G7eTG018842.1233936460/localhost.localdomain"
Subject: Returned mail: see transcript for details
Auto-Submitted: auto-generated (failure)
Status: RO

Part 1:

The original message was received at Fri, 6 Feb 2009 11:07:39 -0500
from localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]

----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----<cacasododom@gmail.com> (reason: 554 Blocked by SPAM RBL check senderbase.org orwikipedia.org/wiki/DNSBL)

Debug
Usually, there will be a very clear indication in the email as to what is going on. Such as in the above email:
reason: 554 Blocked by SPAM RBL check senderbase.org orwikipedia.org/wiki/DNSBL

Type "quit" to exit.

So that's it. Enjoy your command line email!
TAG

PS - As shown in the example above, I have been experiencing some random lockups in Fedora 10: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=205950
My current workaround is to use the "noapic" command line option. But I will need to further investigate why these lockups just started happening with Fedora 10. They didn't happen with Fedora 9 or 7!

creating a ramdisk in Linux

2009-02-10T18:10:00.006-05:00

So I have all this extra memory going unused and want to make a really fast drive for video editing.

That's how it starts. In the example below, I'll show you the short steps to create a 6GB ramdisk. I'm running Fedora 10, x86-64.

1) pass an argument to the kernel
This usually involves editing /etc/grub.conf, finding the line beginning with "kernel" and adding the below parameter to it:
ramdisk_size="some size in kilobytes"

For example:
ramdisk_size=6291456

2) reboot

3) take a look at your ramdisk on the filesystem
[sodo@ogre ~]$ dmesg | grep RAMDISK
RAMDISK: 37c75000 - 37fef3a0
#3 [0037c75000 - 0037fef3a0] RAMDISK ==> [0037c75000 - 0037fef3a0]
[sodo@ogre ~]$ ls -lh /dev/ramdisk*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 2009-02-09 23:15 /dev/ramdisk -> ram0
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 1, 0 2009-02-09 23:15 /dev/ram0

Looks like the ramdisk is pointing to /dev/ram0!

4) format the ramdisk device as a filesystem
[sodo@ogre ~]$ mke2fs -m 0 /dev/ram0
mke2fs 1.41.3 (12-Oct-2008)
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
393216 inodes, 1572864 blocks
0 blocks (0.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=1610612736
48 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
8192 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736

Writing inode tables: done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

This filesystem will be automatically checked every 37 mounts or
180 days, whichever comes first. Use tune2fs -c or -i to override.

4) create a mount point
[sodo@ogre ~]$ mkdir /mnt/ramdisk

5) mount the ramdisk as a usable filesystem
[sodo@ogre ~]$ mount /dev/ram0 /mnt/ramdisk

6) check out how much space you have on the filesystem
[sodo@ogre ~]$ df -m
Filesystem 1M-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/md0 459121 10491 425309 3% /
/dev/md2 469453 413351 32255 93% /mnt
/dev/sda1 190 22 159 12% /boot
tmpfs 5013 0 5013 0% /dev/shm
/dev/ram0 6048 12 6036 1% /mnt/ramdisk

7) copy some files to it
[sodo@ogre ~]$ ll /mnt/ramdisk/
total 4018740
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 2009-02-09 23:20 lost+found
-rw-rw-r-- 1 sodo sodo 50590800 2009-02-09 23:24 mvi_0703.m2t
-rw-rw-r-- 1 sodo sodo 318906280 2009-02-09 23:24 mvi_0705.m2t
-rw-rw-r-- 1 sodo sodo 599845208 2009-02-09 23:24 mvi_0706.m2t

Pretty cool.

After it seems to be working, I decided to add the few steps necessary to /etc/rc.local, so that my ramdrive can come up on boot:
mke2fs -m 0 /dev/ram0
mount /dev/ram0 /mnt/ramdisk
chown youruser:youruser /mnt/ramdisk

TAG

Reference
http://jayant7k.blogspot.com/2006/08/ram-disk-in-linux.html

handy TOP reference

2009-02-03T13:54:00.007-05:00

Top is a program that monitors the CPU and memory utilization of individual processes on your Unix or Linux machine. The output of top normally defaults to a list of processes sorted from high CPU to low CPU utilization. It is helpful to know some of the commands, so that you can sort through and find specific processes based on memory, status or any number of statistics top has available to it.

The command sets listed below were tested in Fedora 10, but vary across distributions. Use the ? or type "h" to get the list of commands specific to your distribution.

default output
To run top interactively, just type "top" at a command line and hit enter. It will refresh once every three seconds by default until you quit (press "Q") to exit.
top - 14:23:03 up 14 days, 4:16, 4 users, load average: 0.25, 0.13, 0.09
Tasks: 127 total, 1 running, 125 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
Cpu(s): 15.8%us, 9.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 74.5%id, 0.0%wa, 0.6%hi, 0.1%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 551296k total, 498888k used, 52408k free, 43980k buffers
Swap: 2031608k total, 88k used, 2031520k free, 134708k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2406 tag 15 0 74868 45m 8860 S 43 8.4 3:58.37 Xorg
2541 tag 15 0 68596 17m 8636 S 6 3.3 0:18.07 gnome-terminal
18561 tag 15 0 734m 143m 12m S 1 26.6 0:09.36 cinelerra
2527 tag 15 0 17804 8992 6532 S 0 1.6 0:13.27 metacity
2405 tag 15 0 16636 1652 1080 S 0 0.3 0:06.01 gdm-binary
2657 tag 15 0 48260 10m 7788 S 0 1.9 0:22.62 mixer_applet2
19284 tag 15 0 2164 1036 796 R 0 0.2 0:00.06 top

You see the output defaults to a list of processes the length of your terminal window. To shorten this list to a more manageable set of processes, type # or n to limit the number of tasks displayed.

To sort the list by a column other than %CPU, type <> to sort the output by the column that is to the left or right of %CPU.

To choose a specific column to sort by, press "F" or "O" and select the letter that corresponds to the column you'd like to sort.

To reverse the sort, press "R"

To toggle columns of data on and off, press "f".

Interactive Mode
Here is a list of commands that you can type while in interactive mode:
f - toggle individual fields on and off
F or O - choose a field to sort on
?/h - help
H - toggle the display of program threads
I - toggle IRIX mode
K - kill a process
M - sort on %MEM
N - sort on process ID (PID)
P - sort on %CPU
R - reverse the sort
T - sort on TIME process has been running
U - select processes by user
#/n - display n number of processes
enter - refresh display

Process States
A process can be in a number of states, shown by the Status column:
D - uninterruptable sleep
R - running
S - sleeping
T - traced or stopped
Z - zombie

Command line options
-d delay in seconds
-p display process ID (PID)
-H toggle display of threads
-i toggle idle processes
-n number of iterations before top ends
-u monitor by user
-v version

Notes on fields related to memory
VIRT = total amount of virtual memory used by the task. Includes all code/data/shared libraries and swapped pages
VIRT = SWAP + RES
SWAP = the swapped out portion of a task's total virtual memory
RES = Non-swapped physical memory a task has used
RES = CODE + DATA
CODE = amount of physical memory devoted to executable code. "text resident set"
DATA = amount of physical memory devoted to other than executable code. "data resident set"
SHR = amount of shared memory. This reflects the memory that could be potentially shared with other processes.

On my Fedora 10 machine, I noticed that RES does NOT equal the sum of the text plus data resident sets. Maybe I should file a bug?

In any case, that's a synopsis of top.

Enjoy,
TAG

SELinux is preventing npviewer.bin .. unconfined_t

2009-01-27T14:44:00.011-05:00

I have to say that SELinux on Fedora 10 and media playback via Firefox is just a pain in the ass. At a minimum, SELinux will deny you from listening to audio from YouTube or Vimeo, and at most, will completely lock you out from viewing videos from those sites that use the Flash plugin.

In the setroubleshoot message browser, you'll see messages like this:
SELinux is preventing npviewer.bin (nsplugin_t) "destroy" unconfined_t.
SELinux is preventing npviewer.bin (nsplugin_t) "getattr" unconfined_t.
SELinux is preventing npviewer.bin (nsplugin_t) "read write" unconfined_t.
SELinux is preventing npviewer.bin (nsplugin_t) "unix_read unix_write" unconfined_t.

You can always solve this by disabling SELinux entirely. Of course, that's the easy way out, so I figured I'd be a good system administrator and investigate how to allow the Flash plugin to execute while keeping SELinux running. I consulted the Documentation of the Fedora project to find out what the hell to do in order to allow Flash to work in Firefox:
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/selinux-faq-fc5/#id2961385

What To Do
If you have this problem, you need to resolve it by allowing npviewer.bin to do its thing. Thus, you need to relax the SELinux policies for npviewer.bin. This boils down to a few steps:
1) pull out the most recent policy violations in /var/log/messages or /var/log/audit/audit.log
2) create a policy exclusion to allow npviewer.bin to run unimpeded by SELinux
3) compile the policy as a module
4) create a policy package
5) load the policy into the kernel

Detail
1 & 2) audit2allow both pulls out the policy violation information from your log file and formats into a Type Enforcement (.te) file. The Type Enforcement file is the basis for policy exclusions.

As my audit log had the SELinux denials listed in it, I ran this command:
[sodo@ogre ~]$ sudo audit2allow -m local -l -i /var/log/audit/audit.log > local.te

The result of that command was the Type Enforcement file. The .te file looks like this:
module local 1.0;
require {
type unconfined_t;
type nsplugin_t;
class sem destroy;
class shm { write unix_read getattr unix_write associate read };
}
#============= nsplugin_t ==============
allow nsplugin_t unconfined_t:sem destroy;
allow nsplugin_t unconfined_t:shm { write unix_read getattr unix_write associate read };

You can see the last few lines look suspiciously like the entries in the setroubleshoot browser, especially the verbs: write, unix_read, getattr, unix_write, associate, read, etc.

3) Compile the policy
The following command compiles the .te file:
[sodo@ogre ~]$ checkmodule -M -m -o local.mod local.te
checkmodule: loading policy configuration from local.te
checkmodule: policy configuration loaded
checkmodule: writing binary representation (version 8) to local.mod

4) Create a policy package
[sodo@ogre ~]$ semodule_package -o local.pp -m local.mod

5) Load the policy into the kernel
[sodo@ogre ~]$ semodule -i local.pp

If you try to load the policy as a non-priveleged (not root) user, you get this error:
[sodo@ogre ~]$ semodule: SELinux policy is not managed or store cannot be accessed.

These steps should insure that your flash plugin shall run unimpeded on your wonderful new Fedora 10 system!

Hooray!
TAG

Reference
Fedora Core 5 SELinux FAQ
SELinux: allowing AVS denials

sound via RDP

2009-01-20T13:18:00.003-05:00

I was working today but wanted to listen to Obama's inauguration speech. I noticed my client's (RDP) session was configured to play sound:
Under Local Resources, Remote Computer Sound was set to "Bring to this computer."

But sound via the terminal services connection was not working. Reading up on this very nice Win2K3 tutorial site:
http://www.visualwin.com/Audio-Mapping/

I saw that I was missing the server side configuration. What you want to do is open up the Terminal Services Configuration applet (either under Control Panel -> Administration -> Terminal Services Configuration or Start -> Run -> tscc.msc) and select Properties on the RDP-Tcp connection.

Therein, select the Client Settings tab and under the "Disable the following" section, uncheck Audio Mapping. In order for the new setting to take effect, once you uncheck this setting, you'll have to logoff and log back onto your remote server.

Et Voila! You'll have sound through your RDP session!

Go Obama!

VMware clone and IIS 6.0 SSL problem

2009-01-17T11:36:00.005-05:00

Yesterday, we cloned our first virtual machine running Win2K3 that uses IIS 6.0 and runs multiple websites via separate IP addresses. The clone process went smoothly: the new VM was assigned a new IP address and hostname and the IWAM and IUSR accounts and permissions migrated to that new machine name. However, during testing, we encountered a problem with the SecureBindings in the IIS metabase.

Because this VM had multiple websites in IIS configured, the SecureBindings setting in the IIS metabase (c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\metabase.xml) kept the old IP address information that was configured in the source VM. I'm not sure if this is caused by VMware or IIS, but the solution is to manually edit SecureBindings in IIS to point the website's SSL to the correct IP.

MS Article on Editing the Metabase

TAG

tunneling ssh through proxy server

2008-12-16T14:26:00.005-05:00

I needed to create a secure SSH connection to my Fedora box at home. However, I am behind a proxy server at work. In combination with my Fedora virtual machine at work and ntlmaps, the corkscrew program for Linux helped me do this in a quick and easy way.

Here is the corkscrew home page:
http://www.agroman.net/corkscrew/

Here is a great instruction set for corkscrew:
http://www.mtu.net/~engstrom/ssh-proxy.php

Now I am able to securely connect and grab files from my home PC. Yeah!
TAG

helpful svn commands

2008-10-29T02:09:00.005-04:00

Here are some useful subversion commands I'd like to remember. But instead, I'll write them down, cause I'm always forgetting.

The simplest being the ubiquitous "checkout the latest version of the source", using ffmpeg as the example:
svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg

Here's an example of a command to checkout a specific version of code, where "co" is shorthand for "checkout" and "-r" is the parameter to specify a particular revision number:
svn co -r 12000 svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg

After you've downloaded that version, you can check the date stamps on the files by using the following command. The log option shows you dates/time/version numbers of the files in the svn repository. It sorts the code in the repository by date. I then pipe the output to awk to print only the date column and then remove blank lines with sed:
svn log ffmpeg | awk -F"|" '{print $3}' | sed '/^$/d'

that's all I have for now. I will update when I have time,
sodo

formatted date in Windows script

2008-10-28T14:06:00.013-04:00

I find the output of the full date command in Windows lacking. Thus, I was trying to find a way to date/time stamp a logfile in a Windows batch script.
C:\WINNT>date /t
Tue 10/28/2008

I only wanted YYYYMMDD_HHmm, where
YYYY = four digit year
MM = two digit day
DD = two digit month
HH = two digit hour
mm = two digit minute

So, I needed to combine outputs from both the Windows date and time functions.

My batch script ended up looking like this:
set dt=%date:~-4%%date:~4,2%%date:~7,2%_%time:~0,2%%time:~3,2%
bash "siteBackupAll.sh" | tee log%dt%.txt

In the example above, the resulting script outputs a logfile named:
log20081028_1433.txt

The Windows help for SET is pretty cryptic, much like any Unix man page. You can see all the options for Windows shell programming (variables, operators, expressions, etc) if you type
SET /?

at the command prompt.

Variable expansion in Windows is a little weird. Here is a snip from the help, but essentially, you can act on the expansion of a variable (ie, pluck parts from the output) by using a numbering scheme that will start counting from the left or right, depending on whether the number you specify is positive (start from left) or negative (start from right). In essence, the numbering is much like any programmatic substr (substring) function:

May also specify substrings for an expansion. %PATH:~10,5%would expand the PATH environment variable, and then use only the 5characters that begin at the 11th (offset 10) character of the expandedresult. If the length is not specified, then it defaults to theremainder of the variable value. If either number (offset or length) isnegative, then the number used is the length of the environment variablevalue added to the offset or length specified.

%PATH:~-10%would extract the last 10 characters of the PATH variable.
%PATH:~0,-2%would extract all but the last 2 characters of the PATH variable.

'sodo

Hacked!

2008-10-14T10:41:00.006-04:00

This will be a new section on the site that will summarize articles that describe recent exploits that I've noticed occurring on my website. Most of the articles will detail the exploits and how to recognize them. Over time, this post will grow. Pay attention to the date and time of the post to find out when it was last updated.

ISC: SQL Injection hacks

'sodo

vnc on linux won't connect to mac

2008-10-04T16:50:00.008-04:00

I wanted to logon to my Mac via my Fedora 7 installation. Unfortunately, connecting to a mac from a linux box using RealVNC doesn't work:
http://www.realvnc.com/pipermail/vnc-list/2006-March/054423.html

After a bit of Googling, TightVNC seemed to be the ticket. Unfortunately, the VNC and TightVNC libraries conflict:
[root@ogre ~]# rpm -ivh tightvnc-1.3.9-1.i386.rpm
Preparing... ########################################### [100%]
file /usr/share/man/man1/vncviewer.1.gz from install of tightvnc-1.3.9-1 conflicts with file from package vnc-4.1.2-20.fc7

Therefore, I yanked out the RealVNC libraries:
[root@ogre ~]# yum remove vnc*
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up Remove Process
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package vnc-server.x86_64 0:4.1.2-19.fc7 set to be erased
---> Package vnc.x86_64 0:4.1.2-20.fc7 set to be erased
---> Package vnc-libs.x86_64 0:4.1.2-19.fc7 set to be erased
---> Package vnc-reflector.x86_64 0:1.2.4-3.fc7 set to be erased
---> Package vnc-ltsp-config.noarch 0:4.0-3 set to be erased
---> Package vnc-libs.i386 0:4.1.2-19.fc7 set to be erased

..downloaded Fedora Core 6 tightvnc rpm from here:
http://www.tightvnc.com/download.html

..and installed the Core 6 libraries (though I run Fedora 7) just fine:
[root@ogre ~]# rpm -ivh tightvnc-1.3.9-1.i386.rpm
Preparing... ########################################### [100%]
1:tightvnc ########################################### [100%]

Now my Fedora box can logon to my Mac using TightVNC:
[root@ogre ~]# vncviewer macwired
Connected to RFB server, using protocol version 3.8
Performing standard VNC authentication
Password:
Authentication successful
Desktop name "MACLT"
VNC server default format:
32 bits per pixel.
Least significant byte first in each pixel.
True colour: max red 255 green 255 blue 255, shift red 16 green 8 blue 0
Warning: Cannot convert string "-*-helvetica-bold-r-*-*-16-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" to type FontStruct
Using default colormap which is TrueColor. Pixel format:
32 bits per pixel.
Least significant byte first in each pixel.
True colour: max red 255 green 255 blue 255, shift red 16 green 8 blue 0
Using shared memory PutImage
ShmCleanup called

Yeehaw!
'sodo

Netgear WNR3500: disappointing

2008-09-18T12:06:00.006-04:00

Here is my short review of the Netgear WNR3500.

I initially purchased a Netgear WNR3500 as a replacement for my aging Netgear WGT624. Unfortunately, I had two problems, one of them major, necessitating the return of the device:
1) poor installation process
2) wireless communication drops

The installation process took a lot longer than expected: about 1 1/2 hours. It failed twice: once from an older XP notebook PC and second, from a new Vista machine. I could understand from an older notebook, but the install simply failed on the new Vista box. After resetting my network a number of times, the install finall worked from Vista. Resetting the router to its default settings can be a major pain. I learned a few things from this page:
http://vpncasestudy.com/reset.html

Secondly, as I host a website from my wireless PC, the wireless communication drops were unacceptable. I tried three different versions of the firmware with the same result, wireless network drops. As my older Netgear WGT624 worked from the same location (upstairs about 20 feet away from my wirelessly connected MacBook), I have had to rollback to use the WGT624 and return the WRN 3500. Read more about the ongoing drops and DNS proxy errors here:
http://forum1.netgear.com/showthread.php?t=27966&page=3

On a more positive note, wired connections seemed to work just fine. Also, the administrative interface to the router was 95% the same as my older WGT624, so Netgear did not make me learn new admin commands.

However, my two major issues left me with a sour taste in my mouth and disappointed me, given my positive experience with my older Netgear WGT624. Too bad. I was looking forward to blazing RangeMax, 802.11n wireless speeds. What I got was network drops. Blecch!

A Bummed Cacasodo

install and review of Yougle for VMC

2008-09-14T21:47:00.028-04:00

Background
One of the major things I wanted to do was integrate all my media as well as Internet TV like Joost, YouTube, Veoh, Brightcove, etc, into Vista Media Center. An industrious programmer from Australia has been working on such a program called Yougle (http://push-a-button.com/products/youglevista/) that integrates a variety of online video sources, as well as audio sources (like Live365 Internet radio), picture sites (Flickr, of course) and animations. From my perspective, he hits the big one by getting YouTube working within VMC.

Review
The install of the January 2008 build of the software was relatively painless (described in more detail below). Be aware that you will need to install ffdshow for some necessary codecs.

Update 9/17/2008
The install for the new WIP build seems to hang for about a minute or two on the initial timebar of the install. I then let it sit for those few minutes. The install then continues and installs normally. Not sure what the installer is doing at this point to be hanging like that. If you experience problems, perhaps just let the installer sit for a few minutes to see if that helps. FYI - My box is a P4, 3.2Ghz box w/2GB mem & 500GB SATA internal

Another caveat is that since I've installed TV Pack 2008 for VMC, I needed to fake the Yougle installer into thinking I was on an older version of Media Center. TV Pack changes the version (identity) of Media Center from 5.0 to 5.1. If you have TV Pack installed, the thread below shows the registry edit you'll need to make to get this working:
http://push-a-button.com/community/index.php?topic=336

For video, I've explored YouTube, MSN Soapbox and South Park. Initially, I had some problems with YouTube videos hanging after the first couple of vids loaded. Reading some of the Yougle Forums, there is an "embedded" setting within Yougle. Switching to "embedded" seemed to fix the problem. Here is how to tell whether your videos are playing natively or embedded:
http://push-a-button.com/community/index.php?topic=221.0

Update 9/18/2008
I also noticed that I lost my sound in Yougle/YouTube for the simple, silly reason that I inadvertantly pressed "mute" on the YouTube flash player. Stupid mistake, but it kept me busy troubleshooting for about 15 minutes.

Otherwise, YouTube and MSN are working as advertised. Which is great.

Update 9/17/2008
Actually, the most stable YouTube player option in Yougle is "YouTube Embedded w/ Minimize". I played around for a few hours last night without losing the YouTube player behind VMC. Awesome!

One drawback is that searching YouTube within Yougle doesn't seem to pull up the same results as a YouTube search executed within a browser. The search is based off of YouTube's RSS feeds. Unfortunately, when I used the search function, I couldn't find some of my favorite videos. The developer was kind enough to research this conundrum. Also, when I added South Park as a video source, none of the South Park videos played properly. Specifically, I waited and waited for the embedded player to move from the rotating timer icon to actually start playing the video, but this never happened. A similar thing also happened with the animations. I assume these problems aren't due to a slow Internet connection, as I am hard wired into a 6MB Comcast connection. I will explore these problems later.

For audio, Live365 is spotty at best. I could only tune in one out of ten stations that I tried. I tested various Internet radio stations after midnight on Monday morning, but I don't think the timeframe should have any impact. I will explore this more in-depth later.

For pictures, the Flickr integration is excellent. High resolution imagery from Flickr looks great on an HDTV.

In sum, Yougle isn't perfect, but it is a great start to be able to view YouTube vids in VMC. I'm psyched to start using this on an ongoing basis. Of course, I will update this thread with more information as I go through the discovery process.

Kudos to Push-a-Button for some fine work!

Installation
The install process is relatively simple:
1) install ffdshow
2) install Yougle

* if you've installed TV Pack 2008 for VMC, you'll need to make a registry tweak to get Yougle working
** note that support for 64-bit Vista is in test mode as of 9/15/2008:
http://push-a-button.com/community/index.php?topic=338.0

Here's a bit more about the install process:
1) Install ffdshow
- I decided to install the latest stable release, from 12/01/2006
2) Download the older, more stable version of Yougle here:
http://push-a-button.com/downloads/details.php?id=11

or download the most recent Work In Progress from the Announcements section on the Forum:
http://push-a-button.com/community/index.php?board=2.0

I chose to download the more stable version for now.

ffdshow install process
Initial download of v.610 (20061201) here:
http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video_software/codecs_and_filters/ffdshow.cfm/rev__610__20061201

Click "Download"

Run Installer

Accept default directory for install

Accept default components

Select Start Menu folder

Select the default Additional Tasks

Select default speaker setup, unless you have something other than two channel stereo

Ready to Install!

Installed! Go ahead and click Finish

Yougle install process and registry edit needed with TV Pack 2008
Download page

Click Download

TV Pack 2008 error

Registry Key for TV Pack 2008..set Ident to 5.0

Once key is edited, restart Yougle setup..now it runs!

Select default directory for install

Vista may show a user account control error message like this one..press Allow!

Yougle install runs and is finished rather quickly! Click finish.

Reset MediaCenter version back to 5.1 in regedit

Enjoy!
'sodo

command line date time change

2008-09-11T15:48:00.008-04:00

Here's another thing I always forget: how to change the date or time at the command line, preferably using the Bourne shell in Linux.

Example:
To change the date/time on a Linux box to September 10, 2008 at 5:37pm, enter the following:
date 0910173708

The ordering of the fields is a bit odd, so pay attention.

where the date/time format is the following:
MMDDHHmmYY
MM - two digit month
DD - two digit day
HH - two digit hour
mm - two digit minute
YY - two digit year

All are zero padded if date/time values are below 10.

Changing the date time was never easier!

enjoy,
sodo

500 errors from IIS and Oracle

2008-09-09T16:47:00.003-04:00

For the past couple of years, the Microsoft Win2K/Win2K3 website that I support had been plagued with 500 errors and subsequent IIS resets. Our website is a combination of custom ASP and ASP.net code running on 32-bit Windows, connecting via ODBC driver to an Oracle 9.2.0.7 backend on Solaris. The side effect to our customers of IIS blowing up is that for a short period of time (less than an hour, usually), customers would see a number of these 500 server errors from the server that panicked. Usually, this was not much of a problem, as it happened on one or two servers once or twice per day and the number of errors was low. The workaround was to reset IIS.

Recently, we added more servers into our web farm and the problem happened more often, with a greater number of 500 errors being spit out when one of these newer, more powerful machines' IIS process loses its mind. So, we contacted Microsoft and used DebugDiag to setup a crash/hang dump to find out what memory threads were in play when IIS died.

Sending this information to Microsoft, Microsoft engineers pointed to an interaction between IIS and Oracle. Specifically, there were pointers to the 9.2.0.7 Oracle ODBC driver that we use to connect our web application to our database. In the past, we have had very little luck with Oracle being able to solve any driver related issues for us. But we know that the first thing Oracle Support will ask for is "do you have the latest driver set installed." Knowing that Oracle was going to require this of us, we started the process of upgrading the driver from 9i to 10G (10.2.0.4) in our development environment. More specifically, we needed the following:
- the Oracle 10G client (1GB)
- the 6810189 patch set for 32-bit Windows (1GB)
- the 7218676 patch set for 32-bit Windows (67MB)

The install is quite large. Our very basic install took about 500MB of disk space. Once we got the new 10G drivers and patch set installed in development, we put it through a gamut of tests. It seemed to work fine, but development is no substitute for production traffic on a site that gets millions of hits every day. So, we started rolling out the new drivers to the most problematic web servers.

The first week was very tense, as we let the drivers cook on one server. Previously, this server blew up at least once or twice a day. With the new drivers in place, two days went by without IIS experiencing a problem. Three days went by. Then an entire week went by without a problem! We were psyched! We started rolling out the driver to the rest of the eighteen web servers, two servers every two days.

After a week went by, we could tell that the number of 500 errors and IIS resets were diminishing. After a second week went by, we were about half way through the lot, with every decreasing numbers of 500 errors. Best of all, the boxes that were patched weeks back had not reset themselves. This was unheard of! After using Oracle drivers for eight years, this was the only time in the history of our website that we were not seeing 500 errors! Fabulous!

We finished upgrading from 9.2.0.7 to 10.2.0.4 a couple weeks later and are EXTREMELY happy to report that we no longer are experience IIS resets and blasts of 500 errors.

Thank you Oracle, for finally fixing this issue!

performance problems with HD viewing in Media Center resolved

2008-08-17T12:16:00.027-04:00

This is a follow up to my first three posts:
Vista View Saber DA-1N1-I tuner and Media Center
Vista 32-bit, First Impressions
Making Sense of Home Theatre PCs

Background
I had quite a battle over the past couple of days. The goal was to get a working Vista Media Center that did not choke while displaying live, HDTV content. First, I have to say that Microsoft has done a kick ass job with Media Center. It has taken a number of years, but the Media Center interface is really slick and easy to use, the content and functionality deep and the possibilities pretty open, given the way they've designed it. You can even download an SDK for it, which is cool.

In practice, however, getting Media Center to work on older equipment is challenging and frustrating for the newcomer. The interesting thing is the base system I started with ("started with"..yuk, yuk) was no slouch:

Dell 400SC, 3.2Ghz
2GB PC3200 mem
128MB ATI All-in-Wonder 9800 Pro AGP 4x card
120GB 7200RPM IDE system drive

The Problem
The main problem was that when I viewed live HDTV channels, I would get drop outs and compression artifacts.

As you know, I had already completed the base Vista install, installed aVista View Saber DA-1N1-I tuner card and layered the latest and greatest Media Center with TVPack update on top of it.

There were a couple links to the Media Center TV Pack Unofficial Download on Engadget's site here. I've plucked out a couple of links to download TV Pack 2008 here, but I'm not sure how long they will be valid:
http://rapidshare.com/files/136020246/MediaCenterTVPack2008-KB953272-x64.zip.html
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s=b523af4d82ccee06f79c49badff6d2a9&p=14451290#post14451290
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=30d15c758a398fcfd2db6fb9a8902bda
http://rapidshare.com/files/138029257/Media_Center_TV_Pack_2008.rar.html

The neat thing about TVPack with the Vista View tuner is that, among many other things it did, was resolve tricky problems with displaying the correct listings in the TV Guide if you have multiple channel sources (ie, cable and antenna signal inputs), as well as add support for clear QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) channels. QAM channels are the HD channels that a TV provider will send "in the clear" over the cable line. In my case, Media Center sees about 14 clear QAM channels from Comcast.

Tuner Setup
I have a three way splitter in my upstairs loft that splits the cable signal three ways: one to the analog, NTSC connection on the TV tuner card, one to the digital, ATSC connection on the tuner card and one to the cable modem itself. Because I was getting drops, I thought that I was just getting a weak signal. I removed the splitter and plugged the feed directly into the digital connection on the tuner card. No luck, as the signal still broke up.

Initial Performance Stats
Taking a look at the new Reliability and Performance Monitor in Vista (quite nice, really) while an HDTV show was being displayed in MC, I saw that CPU was being driven close to 100% on my hyperthreaded system. Peaking on CPU is never good. I thought the problem could be my video card not offloading enough load from the CPU. Maybe the ATI card was unpowered to the task? I removed it and installed an NVidia 7600GS that I had laying around. Symptoms were the same with the new card.

So far, the evidence showed that the problem was not in the source signal or video card since:
1) the input source signal was clean
2) a capable video card was choking in the same way as an older one

Reviewing Performance Monitor, the disk seemed to be quite busy. I assumed this was due to the live tv buffer that MediaCenter keeps while you watch programs. To explain, MediaCenter has the same ability as a regular consumer DVR, in that it buffers live tv in order to allow the viewer to playback the last few minutes of a program. This rewind feature is supported by the system writing huge files to disk.

I should have pulled up some disk queue stats to confirm, but I had a gut feeling that the problem was in the disk subsystem. Looking at the disk reads and writes in Performance Monitor, I saw that about 4MB of data were being written to and read from the hard drive every second while an HD program was being shown. My current hard drive was a 120GB IDE. IDE throughput is pretty weak by today's standards. Hmmm..this old drive has to go. So, I was off to the nearest store to get a hard drive.

Throwing Money At It Will Solves the Problem!
*** BEGIN DIVERSION ***
In a pinch, Staples is my closest source of computer parts. Of course, it is not the best choice for prices. Oh well, I was on a mission. Seagate 500GB SATA..$130. Eeesh. That is a little too much. I patiently waited for the computer department rep to finish his conversation with another customer. I'm glad I did. I overheard that Staples supported price matching. I scrambled to find a machine with an open internet connection. Finding one, I Googled "site:bestbuy.com seagate 500GB SATA". Lo and behold, they had the very same drive for $90! Great! At the register, the clerk had to confirm the price. I noticed his point of sale system had web browsing directly built in. But he confirmed the price..$40 saved!
*** END DIVERSION ***

I ran home and installed the drive. Reading through the installation manual, I saw that Seagate has Disk Wizard, which allows you to format your new drive. It also had an option I hadn't seen before..to clone an older drives' contents onto a newer one. Psych! I was expecting to have to reinstall Vista, but if this Acronis clone software actually worked, I wouldn't have to go through that pain.

New Drive Fun
I installed the drive in the PC and got Disk Wizard running. Selecting the appropriate clone options, clone was to copy the old drives' content, sets the master boot record and reboot. Hitting "go", I saw that the clone ran very quickly, almost too quick, and then asked me to reboot. I figured the process must do the cloning on reboot, but when the box rebooted, the OS did not boot. Oh sh1t. I hope it hadn't blown away my Vista install. Googling for people with similar problems, I learned from someone else's issue that clone changes the master boot record, so my system trying to read off the new disk. Since the clone process didn't go as expected, there was no operating system for the master boot record to access. Luckily, clone did not touch the original system disk, so after unplugging the new one, I was able to verify my base Vista system was still alive.

Starting Disk Wizard again, I saw it had a bootable install version of the clone process. Since the initial Vista install process did not work, I thought I'd give this a shot. I burned an ISO to a CD and started up the clone process. This time, I saw progress on the clone procedure meter. It took about 17 minutes to clone 24GB of data from a 120GB IDE to my new 500GB Seagate. After the clone process was complete, the box rebooted. While the box rebooted, I made sure to shut down the box entirely and take the original system disk offline. After doing this, I restarted the system and was overjoyed to see Vista start booting. New drive works with my old install of Media Center! Yay!

Did the New Drive Help?
Moment of truth. I pulled up Media Center with some live HDTV. I still had dropouts even with the new, faster drive. Damn! OK. Since you can't turn off Live TV easily in MediaCenter (why would I want to, with Olympic Volleyball coming up?), I decided to meet the burden head on by using my old IDE RAID card and setup a stripe set of old hard drives. I had two 120GB lying around (the one old system disk plus another), so I installed the card, setup the RAID set in the BIOS and formatted the new RAID set when it came up in Vista. Voila! Lots of fast disk capacity on hand! Now to repoint the destination directory for the live hd temporary files to the RAID set.

Move those Temp Files!
In Media Center, I saw that there was no easy way to turn off the Live TV feature. So I figured the location of the temp file directory was in the registry. Reviewing the Disk statistics of Reliability and Performance Monitor more closely, PerfMon actually shows the location of the directory where disk access (reads and writes) are occurring. Sweet! Looking at the details of the offending process, I saw that this directory was the culprit of most of the reads and writes:
C:\Users\Public\Recorded TV\TempRec\TempSBE

Cool. I searched on this string in regedit, found the appropriate location:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Video\Tuners\DVR\IO\Writer

Then, I tweaked the values to match a new directory that I setup on the D:. I restarted Media Center for the change to take effect and waited patiently for live HD to come up. Watching it, I saw that HD was definetly smoother, but not perfect. It still hiccupped from time to time. DAMMIT! Looking at the top CPU consumers in Task Manager, I saw that dwm.exe (Desktop Window Manager) kept popping up, albeit with low CPU consumptions of 5-7%. More performance tuning necessary.

Optimizing Media Center Performance
The key to getting Media Center working right is optimizing performance in Vista. Here are a few articles that helped me do that, in order of most useful:
ExtremeTech article
Andrew Grant's blog
APCmag.com article
Jwyse's blog

Also, the following article has some registry tweaks to get your Media Center setup just the way you like it:
MediaCenter.com.au article

One feature that I had kept running in Vista was the Aero interface with a sidebar of gadgets (clock, RSS news feed and rotating pictures). Apparently, the process dwm.exe controls the display of these visual effects and gadgets. In Control Panel -> Personalization -> Window Colors and Appearance, I disabled the Aero interface by selecting "Windows Standard" as the color scheme. After the change, I checked live HD. There were less drops, but still an occasional one every fifty seconds or so. Damn! On a hunch, I disabled the RSS news feed that was in the sidebar under the clock. Restarting Media Center, I watched for any live HD dropouts. One minute went by..no problem. Two minutes..no problem. Three minutes..no drops. Awesome! I think I've got the problem licked!

Right now, I've had live HDTV (the Olympics) running for four hours. There seems to be a barely noticeable lag sometimes when replaying the live HDTV buffer. I believe this is due, again, to disk access. I may add a third 7200RPM 80GB drive to my stripe set to improve performance. I will let you know how that goes.

Conclusions
In general, if you are skirting the edge of recommended hardware for HD viewing, Media Center seems VERY sensitive to any processes taking up CPU or mouse movements. Disabling any CPU performance hogs is essential in order to have live, HDTV in Vista Media Center run properly on an older system. If I want a perfectly clear HD viewing experience with no dropouts, I will not open ANY programs. Also, I don't have any programs running that update the display, like Task Manager or Performance monitor. In fact, I won't even touch the mouse if I want undisturbed video. Media Center a bit touchy, eh?

I assume if I had a new dual or quad core box with a fast CPU, the latest memory, a 1333Mhz front side bus, PCI Express video card and all SATA, I wouldn't have these problems. But I didn't feeling like paying an arm and a leg for a new box. With my trusty old Dell 400SC, I may be able to get by adding a $100 tuner and $100 hard drive only. Time will tell!

In sum, once Media Center is running well, it IS pretty sweet. Now to find a usable remote for VMC. Any suggestions?

:)

Vista View Saber DA-1N1-I tuner and Media Center

2008-08-12T16:58:00.015-04:00

This is a follow up to my first two posts:
Vista 32-bit, First Impressions
Making Sense of Home Theatre PCs

Last night, I spent a few hours experimenting with Windows Media Center on Vista and the new TV Pack, with the goal of getting digital cable from Comcast integrated into Media Center. As suggested from the article linked above, I reinstalled Vista (painfully slow). I then installed the TV Pack and associated hotfixes. That day, I had bought a Vista View Saber DA-1N1-I tuner card. It is PCI, to fit in my older Dell 400SC. I let Vista select the driver from the internet and I saw that it found the latest driver.

Setup in WMC was straightforward, similar to Ben's experience. I connected the card's NTSC connection to my comcast line. After the requisite asking of where Ilived, downloading of my area's TV guide and inspecting my tuners' connection, WMC got me to the point where I could select my area's cable provider. Since I live in NY Metro, there were about ten choices. I selected Comcast in Jersey City. So sure enough, channels 1-99 on Comcast appeared.

I was happy to see I had basic analog connectivity, but wondered where the digital channels went. At the time, I didn't realize that this was regular analog cable from Comcast. I went through the discovery process again, and this time I selected Comcast Digital as my provider. Well, this didn't work, because the cable was plugged into the analog, NTSC connection. In my haste, I hadn't realized that the card I bought is only good for ATSC, over the air HD and NTSC analog cable. It won't get me what I wanted, which was the ability to watch and record unencrypted, clear QAM channels via my Comcast connection. Duh.

Taking my idiocy in stride, I moved on to the ATSC output. When I connected my cable connection to ATSC, as expected, WMC didn't find any channels. I thought I might be able to use the cable coming from the back of the PC as an antenna, so I disconnected the opposite end of the cable from the PC (the splitter end), reran the automatic setup and I was nicely surprised to see that the WMC picked up the local over the air HD channel selection, about 14 channels in my case, directly across the river from Manhattan. Performance was a bit choppy, as my signal wasn't very good in my computer closet. I'm sure with a proper antenna, the signal would be great.

In both cases, analog cable and over the air, WMC picked the correct guide. The guide picked up all the shows, was really nice to navigate through and had lots of supplemental information. Very slick.

Today, I went back to the drawing board and picked up a Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1600 . I'll let you know how this install goes tomorrow.

Long story short, though, if you are looking for a card that works for NTSC and ATSC over the air signals out of the box with this latest update for WMC, the Vista View Saber seems to fit the bill.

UPDATE 8/14/2008
Last Tuesday, VistaView released a QAM patch (a simple registry tweak) for MediaCenter with TVpack to allow the Saber DA-1N1-I to allow you to tune QAM channels on ATSC cable TV: http://www.vistaview.tv/index.php?option=com_docman&task=cat_view&gid=31&Itemid=46

I downloaded the patch and rebooted. I split my cable line to go to both the analog NTSC and digital ATSC jacks on the back of the Vista View card. The positive: during the tuner setup, Media Center now sees both the analog tuner and a new digital cable tuner:

ViXS PureTV Analog TV Tuner
ViXS PureTV ATDC/DVBC Tuner

Continuing through the tuner setup, I can select my provider's (Comcast) channel selection and guide. Checking the source of the channels under Guide -> Edit Channels, I get a mix of the OTA HD channels (about 14 channels) on the Digital Cable connection, but the rest (70 or so) are coming through the analog tuner. The digital channels seem to break up a lot. I imagine using an HD antenna instead of the digital cable would help here, since the digital cable is only getting me those 14 channels. If I hook up only one cable to the ATSC input, I only get those 14 channels. I have had no luck seeing any channels I would normally see with the Comcast Motorola box above 99.

From the Guide -> Edit channels, I see that most of the available channels that are disabled have padlocks next to them and that the source of them is the digital tuner. I imagine the padlocks mean that they are encrypted.

Tonight allowed me to get a bit farther, but am perplexed as to why I'm not seeing any channels above 99. I am a bit of a newbie to this MediaCenter/cable integration stuff. It seems as if Comcast locks everything above 99..not sure right now. Looking at the clear qam guide for my zip code here https://www.silicondust.com/hdhomerun/lineupui?Cmd=LocationProgramsWeb&Country=US&Postcode=07302, I notice that the higher range (above 99) channels that I enjoy watching like Military/VH1 classic/Encore/etc are missing from the list. I guess they are not in clear QAM. Maybe I'm just out of luck?

So, a bit of progress, a bit of disappointment.

UPDATE 8/15/2008
One follow up: I'm a bit disappointed in the performance of HDTV in Media Center w/TV Pack. I've got a Dell SC400 (probably four 1/2 years old) P4, 3.2Ghz, 2GB w/120GB IDE drive and ATI all-in-wonder 9800 pro. Not the latest and greatest, sure, but no slouch box either. Viewing standard def, Media Center drives the box to run at 50% CPU without a problem. Running live HDTV (1280x720), MC runs the box to 100%, at which point I get drop outs. Also, I notice SearchIndexer runs constantly, thus sucking up more CPU.

Granted, the system is a few years old, but this is unacceptable. I will look for ways to tune or upgrade the system to see if I can relieve the 100% spiking.

Andrew Grant has an excellent post on optimizing Windows Media Center to improve performance. I will try his suggestions out tonight. A more technical article on the same subject is on APCmag.com.

UPDATE 8/16/2008
Today, I wasted about an hour tracking this high CPU problem down. I accidentally scheduled a recording and wondered why Media Center Receiver service was taking up so much CPU. This was because it was recording a show and I didn't know it! I went into my Recordings and deleted the scheduled recording.

Reference
Getting Started with Windows Media Center in Vista
Getting Started with HDTV in Media Center
Great intro to channel tweaking in Media Center
Tweaking Media Center's HDTV Lineup
Media Center Receiver Server Technical Discussion

'sodo