Three Drunken SysAds

I’ve been playing around with Home Automation and trying to get my audio/video around the house without honey-combing the walls for the last few years with varying degrees of luck and in this time I’ve looked at a number of solutions including proprietary hardware (too expensive!!), Microsoft Windows Media Centre Edition (expensive and it runs on Windows…) and MythTV/Music Player Daemon (free, but not always the easiest to get it working!

Two years ago, I found Pluto Home – a commercial solution that had an open-source base and ran on Debian.  I played with it for a bit as the feature set was amazing (TV, Video, Audio and CCTV anywhere in the house as well as integrated VoIP telephony and some really cool stuff) but I ran out of spare time to explore it further.  I’ve started to look into Home Automation and Media again and this time, instead of using Pluto Home, I’ve decided to settle for LinuxMCE. It’s based on pluto home and Ubuntu and there’s been a lot of development since I was using Pluto…

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“The French national police force, the Gendarmerie Nationale, has spoken about their migration away from the Windows platform to Linux. Estimated to have already saved the force 50 Million Euros, the migration is due to be completed on all 90,000 workstations by 2015. Of the move, Lt. Col. Guimard had this comment: ‘”Moving from Microsoft XP to Vista would not have brought us many advantages and Microsoft said it would require training of users,” said Lt. Col. Guimard. “Moving from XP to Ubuntu, however, proved very easy. The two biggest differences are the icons and the games. Games are not our priority.”‘”

LOL @ “Moving from XP to Ubuntu, however, proved very easy. The two biggest differences are the icons and the games. Games are not our priority.”‘”

OK, so I tried to run the upgrade last night and I’ve ended up with a few issues. This could be my fault, however I did follow the instructions found on the debian website and had to resolve multiple dependencies.

The minor issues I’ve encountered:

1. slocate appears to have been removed and replaced with mlocate.
2. Apache is complaining about NameVirtualHost not being set anywhere for both *:80 and *:443, yet the config files show otherwise

The Major issues I’ve discovered:

1. MySQL Server was uninstalled as part of the upgrade. The only way I have been able to re-install it is to run dpkg –set-selections < packages.list where packages.list was the file I created using dpkg –set-selections as part of the upgrade.
2. BackupPC requires complete analysis of the config file to work out which parameters have not been defined in the old config so it will run.
3. OcsInventory (admittedly installed from source so not a Debian problem) causes Apache2 to fail on startup owing to a missing perl module.

The solutions:

1. Install mlocate and run updatedb
2. Re-install OCSInventory and restart Apache2
3. update the backuppc-config file using Meld to import the new variables and the backuppc wiki to migrate from v2 to v3.

Wasn’t that fun? :oP

I’ve been using BackupPC for the last year to securely backup servers to a remote location over Rsync and SSH, however I recently stumbled across an issue with backing up the SVN root directory on an SVN server.

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One of my previous posts concerned how to install Nagios3 from source on Debian Etch.  One of the comments I recieved was that you should generally use the packages available for install.  I agree with this entirely, however there’s no challenge in just using the packages and I’ve found myself getting lazy when it comes to installing stuff recently, so here’s how to install the excellent Puppet configuration management engine from source on Debian Etch.

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I’m currently configuring a cluster to provide high availability web-hosting.

The main issue we’ve experienced is with ensuring that PHP sessions are maintained across the web-servers without having to recode all the sites that are contained on them.

The answer appears to be session_mysql – this is a php module that replaces the “file”session manager with a MySQL backend. continue reading…

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/19/ukgov_uber_database/ has details of a possible “data silo” that contains all of our data.

This blog-post is meant to be a list of potential sites that will enable british citizens to escape the police state that we are rapidly becoming by moving their data outside teritorial waters.

For those of you who honestly believe “those who have nothing to hide have  nothing to fear”, please add a comment listing your bank account and PIN numbers, full address and contact details including every email address, mobile phone and landline number that you have and details of where you work.  If you could also send me a copy of your front door key so I can come and visit you and watch your TV or sleep in your bed whenever I want, that would also be good.  If you’re not going to do this, then you’ve got something to hide, haven’t you???

Please add to the list of datacentres using the comments section below.  I’ll turn this into a proper database at somepoint (and publish the schema here for openess!) and link to it from here.

PF.

I just had an idea for the perfect email plug-in for all email clients.

It would monitor the number of posts in a thread and, when it reached a given threshold, automatically invoke Godwin’s Law and post to the appropriate list.

/me searches for the “Claws development manual”…

Diane Abbott’s 42-days speech

The Hackney North and Stoke Newington MP’s speech last night was hailed by the Tory who followed her, David Davies, as ‘one of the finest speeches I have heard since being elected to the House of Commons’.

David Davies has since resigned over the same issue.

Diane Abbott’s speech can be found here and Davies’ speech here.

The thing that struck me most about these speeches was that we live in an era where the general population loves to watch Big Brother on TV and yet the same population is happy to live in blissful ignorance as our civil liberties are eroded one by one.

meh… :o(

Please note these are more notes for me than a finished write-up, however I hope to document this on the Nagios WIKI in due course…

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