Linux and Ipod Video Conversion

Okay, lets face it, I'm lazy ... really really lazy. When I picked up my new iPod (yes I finally joined the iLemming crowd) it took me only a few minutes to figure out that gtkpod was probably going to be my best bet for my 5G 30 Gig music toy. I promptly spent the following week using all my spare time feeding my computer CD after CD and still coming up with a heck of alot of unused space.

I knew that the wonder toy could do video as well, and that gtkpod could manage the video files as well, just not on the fly conversion to what ever format it wanted to be fed. Thus started my research project and my headache. It can do video, but it is supremely picky about just what it will take as far as bitrate, aspect ratio, and file type.

I started the project thinking to use transcode and command line. After this decision and alot of language that is not ever to be used in the presence of women, children, or fish, I was amazed that I had any hair left. The next step was a little more research and deciding to try it with ffmpeg. 2 days later and some blood, sweat, and more colorful invective, success. I made a (singular) video that my ipod would accept and play, rapidly followed by 2 more that wouldn't.
This was frustrating to say the least. So I attacked google once again and much to my delight I ran across 'convert2videomp4' at kdeapps.org. A simple little utility that adds an encoding option to the KDE menu. Right click on the file you want to convert ... any video file your computer can play and select the final file output you want. The rest happens automagically.

Hidden World of Linux: Follow up Part 1 - NAS

Since my previous post on the hidden uses of Linux attracted so much attention, I thought I would do a brief follow up adding a bit more to my conclusion in which I discussed the main drawback to all these great Linux distributions - power consumption. At some point I am going to buy a power meter and test a variety of old computers I have around the house to see how much power they draw, but for now I just want to give some illustrated examples of low power hardware that can be bought which are ideal for some of the uses described in my prior post.

This is the first of two follow up posts. This way I can go into detail about each specific section. In this post I will be discussing NAS (Network Attached Storage) and will follow up shortly with a post on Firewalls later.

Realistically retail NAS devices fall into two categories, ones with a single harddrive and ones with multiple harddrives.

Single hard drive setups

There are a large variety of single harddrive NAS systems available at fairly reasonable prices and, unless you need a specific feature that a Linux/BSD distribution like FreeNAS provides, it will likely be better to purchase a separate NAS drive. This way you do not need to worry about installation / upgrading potentially buggy software and the power requirement will be in the tens of Watts.

For the sake of argument, let us consider three hardware examples for building (or reusing an old computer for) a single drive NAS. The first is by far the cheapest - reusing your old PC. All that is really required is a new harddrive to replace the small one the PC would originally have been shipped with.

At an average price of �35 for a 250Gb SATA drive (slightly less for an IDE version,) simply reusing an old PC is by far the cheapest option, however there are a number of things to watch out for. Old computers used to have limitations as to the maximum hard drive capacity the BIOS on the motherboard would be able to address. Back in the days of single GB hard drives, a then theoretical limit of 137Gb must have seemed as far off as 32Gb RAM for desktops does today. Fast forward back to today; whilst modern systems are very happily addressing far more than 137Gb thanks to logical block (LBA) 48bit addressing, chances are you will want at least around 160Gb space for your NAS meaning this could be a problem for some of the really old hardware. The reason for this so called “ATA Interface Limit” issue (which is by no means the first in computing - check out this great article) is a mathematical limitation in the way in which harddrives used to be accessed at a very low level using discrete geometry (cylinder, head and sector numbers.) BIOS patches are available although these are few and far between.

Users, Profiles, and Connections in Elgg

Ever been to a night club on a Monday morning? There's you, there are chairs, and the potential to host a party on the weekend. There are lots of buttons, lots of potential, but no one there except you. Unlike a night club, you don't have to wait for the weekend to host your friends on Elgg. Invite them as soon as you're done setting up the software. Elgg is designed to make it easier for you to invite people. If you've ever setup a blog or rolled out your own website, how long did it take before you could invite your friends over? You had to put up all sorts of content to indulge them, and also fiddle around decorating the portal so that it doesn't look dull.

That's where a social network is different from a regular website. Websites follow a two-way, one-to-many style of interaction, where the owner of the website, or blog, talks to all his visitors who respond with their comments, either on the website, or via e-mail. In this article by Mayank Sharma, we discuss about social networking software that follows a many-to-many style of interaction. Members interact with each other, and create their own content, which is then shared with all. This is then discussed and commented on by everyone. The owner of the site is like the perfect host. They mingle, discuss with everyone, but don't stamp their authority, unless you're naughty. They're like every other member, except for the fact that they own the place. Sounds familiar? So, you don't have to worry about content before inviting your friends. Your friends bring their own content.

Connecting to Friends and Users

I hope you're convinced how important friends are to a social network. Initially, you'll have to manually invite your friends over to join. I say initially, because membership on a social network is viral. Once your friends are registered members of your network, they can also bring in their own friends.

Dealing with, um, Wastewater

MARENA, the government agency responsible for the environment in Nicaragua, has asked us to use a biofilter waste water treatment system instead of a traditional septic tank and drain field for the Geek Ranch. The reasoning is that as we are building in a nature reserve, we are being held to higher standards than is typical outside the reserve.

While we don't claim to be waste water system experts, we are geeks so this sounded like a technology challenge. Beyond that, the good news, is that a local friend retired from being a wastewater engineer (even though there are many other titles associated with the job) so we have the resources to combine his knowledge of the, shall we say, material handling part of the system with our knowledge of control systems.

On the control system technical side is Willy Smith, fellow Geek Ranch participant with a lot of engineering experience on control systems. As he is also a Linux geek, Linux seems to be the right answer. What you see here is really the design specification for the geek side of the system.

The Task

First, let me define the systems requirements. We need to process the waste streams from a restaurant, hotel and geek cabinas. We had previously decided to separate black water (toilet waste) from gray water (showers, sinks, wash water, etc). What we were going to do was start with a traditional septic system capable of handling the total load of our initial construction. We would then build a gray water processing system (probably using plants) and move the gray water over to that system freeing up septic capacity to support more hotel rooms and geek cabinas.

Scheduled Backups With Rsyncbackup On Debian Etch

Version 1.0
Author: Oliver Meyer
Last edited 03/26/2008

This document describes how to set up and configure rsyncbackup on Debian Etch. Rsyncbackup is a Perl script that cooperates with rsync. It's easy to configure and able to create scheduled backups (partial and incremental backups).

This howto is a practical guide without any warranty - it doesn't cover the theoretical backgrounds. There are many ways to set up such a system - this is the way I chose.

1 Preliminary Note

I used two standard Debian systems for this howto. The first system is the main server (192.168.0.101), the second system is the backup server (192.168.0.102) where the backups will be stored.

2 Needed Packages

2.1 Main Server

apt-get install openssh-client openssh-server rsync unzip

2.2 Backup Server

apt-get install openssh-client openssh-server rsync

3 SSH Keyfiles

Now let's generate SSH keyfiles that we'll later use in conjunction with rsyncbackup to authenticate against the backup server. Please note that it's also possible to generate the keyfiles with the rsyncbackup script (rsyncbackup -r) - I chose this way.

Placing Forced Ads On Your Customers' Web Sites With .htaccess (ISPConfig)

I wrote this howto for those who want to place forced ads on their ISPConfig server. Probably you can set up forced ads in different ways but I found the way descibed here.

I am using Debian Etch and ISPConfig 2.2.19 in this example.

What needs to be done:

• edit apache config
• create .htaccess files
• create header and footer with ads
• disable the ads on accounts that upgrade

I had to enable PHP server wide for this to work, and since I give all my clients PHP, it is not a big deal, but if anyone can update this with a method to only allow PHP in the /var/www and /var/www/ads directories that would be appreciated.

Let’s show where our ISPConfig server is capable of, here we go:

Step 1: Enable PHP System Wide

vi /etc/mime.types

Uncomment the following lines: