i-am.ws |
Rendering Cisco UCS
Last half year I've been working on a cool little project with a Calgary company called DIRTT. Which is a manufacturer of office interiors and for that purpose they developed a design and rendering tool called ICE. An addition to the suite is called "Mission Critical Systems" which allows the software to be used for Data Centers. And that's where it becomes interesting for myself.
One of their big customers is Panduit, the manufacturer of computer cabinets and other Data Center products. Many Cisco DC's are using Panduit products for racking of servers, storage and switches. Panduit is using ICE to design new infrastructures and uses the renderings of ICE to show the resulting plans to their customers.
Within Cisco I developed a utility that allows our Systems Engineers to quickly model a Cisco UCS system. It is a web based utility that only requires clicking a bunch of radio-buttons to enter the configuration. It generates the layout images mainly using a chain of NetPBM tools.
To create my UCS layout tool, I collected a large amount of product images. Therefore, helping IceEdge to create a library of building blocks that takes care of putting servers and switches in those cabinets and racks wasn't too much work. And probably it won't surprise that this is all scripted, again using NetPBM.
The result is really, really cool. ICE allows you to build a model like the one below in not more than an hour. And that was without having any previous experience with the software. This example shows customized racks, hot isle containment curtains, cable and fiber trays, a complete raised floor including perforated tiles, then cooling and fire-suppression equipment and finally all enclosed by walls that are kept semi-transparent to maintain a good view on the inside.
This was a cool little project. Contact the folks at IceEdge if you want a demo or when you need software licenses.
Posted at 05:11PM Jul 21, 2012 by WWWillem in DataCenter |
Alpha for PNG with NetPBM
As a co-developer of pnmtopng / pngtopnm it's already a long time my plan to update those two NetPBM programs for the PAM format, allowing for proper alpha channel support. On sourceforge you can find a pngtopam program — not sure how full featured it is — but there is currently no pamtopng, which is IMHO the more important of the two.
Two weeks ago I was myself in desperate need for a PAM to PNG converter, and I didn't have the time to do some proper development, therefore decided to do a quick & dirty one. Luckily I wrote 10+ years ago two PngMinus tools, which was targeting the same type of converters, but without the need for the NetPBM libraries.
Long story short, I wrote a "pam2png" utility, which is not as feature rich as a pamtopng program would be, but it does the job. Its main purpose is to convert 4-channel "RGB_ALPHA" pam images to png, but it does the conversion of 2-channel "GRAY_ALPHA" as well. However, the latter wasn't extensively tested.
To be honest, I stopped testing and debugging when the program was good enough for the images I needed to convert to PNG. And I will not spend too much more time on it, because the real goal is a proper pamtopng implementation. But if you find bugs, send me the fixes and I will incorporate them. Don't waste your time on adding functionality, because this is just a temporary job.
Finally, if you don't know how to create those PAM images with R+G+B+A channels, check out the pamstack command. This tool allows you to combine a regular RGB ppm image with an alpha channel image packaged in a pgm file. The README file in the tar-ball shows how to do it.
Posted at 12:33AM Dec 18, 2011 by WWWillem in Software |
jQuery Mobile on Android
I developed an app for BlackBerry PlayBook that is using the jQuery Mobile toolkit to create the user interface. Now jQM is a portable framework that can run on many platforms, ranging from your regular Chrome, FireFox or Safari browser, to mobile devices like iPhone or Android.
Searching for how to deploy jQuery Mobile on Android, most examples are written as a WebApp. The code is loaded on a web-server and you point your Android browser to it to start the app. But what I wanted was everything packaged in an .apk file that can be installed from the Android AppMarket. To achieve this, you have to create a small Java wrapper around your html and JavaScript code. In this tutorial I will be using Eclipse on CentOS as my development platform.
- First step is to create in Eclipse a new project: "File > New > Android Project" and give it a name (let's say "IceCream", I copied the jQM code from a blog by Matt Doyle), select the target and enter the package name, like "ws.iam.icecream". Keep Create Activity checked.
- Next we'll be adding a WebKit WebView to onCreate():
package ws.iam.icecream;
import android.app.Activity;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.view.Window;
import android.webkit.WebSettings;
import android.webkit.WebView;
import android.webkit.WebViewClient;
public class IceCreamActivity extends Activity {
@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
this.requestWindowFeature(Window.FEATURE_NO_TITLE);
setContentView(R.layout.main);
WebView webView = (WebView) findViewById(R.id.webview);
WebSettings webSettings = webView.getSettings();
webSettings.setJavaScriptEnabled(true);
webView.setWebViewClient(new WebViewClient());
webView.loadUrl("file:///android_asset/index.html");
return;
}
}
- And if you want to use HTML5 LocalStorage, you should add after "webSettings.setJavaScriptEnabled()" the following:
webSettings.setDatabaseEnabled(true);
webSettings.setDomStorageEnabled(true);
- This WebView will replace the LinearLayout in res > layout > main.xml.
<WebView xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:id="@+id/webview"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="fill_parent"
android:scrollbars="none" />
- While we're at it, we should update the AndroidManifest.xml file. Just after the <use-sdk> parameter, add the following line:
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET"></uses-permission>
- Also we need to prevent Android from creating a new Activity when the user rotates his tablet. Add a parameter to the Activity declaration (for recent SDK versions, this should be android:configChanges="orientation,screenSize"):
<activity
android:name=".IceCreamActivity"
android:label="@string/app_name"
android:configChanges="orientation">
- You probably want to replace the default res > drawable > icon.png files (in three resolutions) with your own.
- Now we get to the core of this tutorial. Which is how to wrap the html, css and javascript of jQuery Mobile. Those files get all placed in the "assets" folder of the Eclipse project. And our Java Activity is attaching to that with the "webView.loadUrl()" call that we saw above. So, right click "assets", then "New > File" and give it the name "index.html". Right click the file and do "Open With > Text Editor" and now copy-paste our Ice Cream Order html code into it.
- Typically the jQuery Mobile javascript libs get loaded from the web. But I prefer to make it part of the package. Again right click "assets" and "New > Folder" and call it "js". Now, outside of Eclipse, copy your "jquery-1.5.2.min.js" and "jquery.mobile-1.0a4.1.min.js" into this "Workspace/IceCream/assets/js" folder. Similarly create a folder "assets/css" and copy "jquery.mobile-1.0a4.1.min.css" into it. (By now you're probably using newer jQM versions, that's ok.)
- At the top of your index.html file, include the following lines:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/jquery.mobile-1.0a4.1.min.css" />
<script src="js/jquery-1.5.2.min.js"></script>
<script src="js/jquery.mobile-1.0a4.1.min.js"></script>
and if you have your own javascript and stylesheets, add those as well:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/icecream.css" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/icecream.js"></script>
Finally, within Eclipse, right click these files and do a "Refresh".
And now you're all set to run your new app. Probably first just in the emulator. Give it a shot and you should see something like this.
Although this is a working app now, with the java code doing nothing more than being a wrapper, I like to add some native Android functionality. And that is a menu to Reload the app and to Exit it. To do that we've to add two more methods: "onCreateOptionsMenu()" and "onOptionsItemSelected()". Check it out in the complete source code for the Activity.
That all being done, you've to package up the whole thing, sign it and upload it to the Android market. I use Eclipse for this:
- select your IceCream project
- then "File > Export"
- expand the "Android" option and select "Export Android Application", click "Next"
- and "Next" again
- enter the details of your key-store (I assume you have one), click "Next"
- select "Create new key", click "Next"
- give your key the alias name "icecream", enter and confirm a password, give it a validity of 25 years, enter your name and country code and click "Next"
- enter folder and filename "IceCream.apk"
- and finally you can click "Finish".
The resulting packaged and signed application can be uploaded to the Android market, or copied to your Android device using a USB key.
Posted at 01:58PM Nov 20, 2011 by WWWillem in Software |
CentOS 6 boot from USB
Installing CentOS 6 on a laptop without CD/DVD seemed to be easiest by using a Live-USB stick. However, on the net there were warnings that version 6 behaves different from CentOS 5. And indeed, it took me too a couple of attempts before I was successful. I downloaded the LiveCD ISO for CD, not DVD, because with 700 MB, it would fit on the 1 GB USB key I had lying around.
After a little research, I opted for this livecd-iso-to-disk script (or get it from GIT), which promises to do it all automagically. My first problem was that my CentOS 5 system didn't have 'udevadm', which I solved by changing in the script "udevadm info" into "udevinfo" and swapping "udevadm settle" for "udevsettle". After that, the USB key would build, until the stick had to be made bootable. Long story short, the isolinux / extlinux in CentOS 5 is too old. I could have downloaded a more current tarball and built it, but I was too scared that that would break something else.
My solution was to move the whole project to another system running a more current OS, in this case Fedora 15. After installing extlinux with a "yum install syslinux-extlinux", not only my udevadm issues were solved, but it also had a more recent isolinux, version 4. One tip: if you copy everything to the USB key and then at the end something breaks, like my extlinux, you can use the option "--skipcopy" to save quite a bit of time. Finally, I used an ext3 filesystem on my stick and it is a good idea to start each new attempt with a "mkfs.ext3 /dev/sd@#".
After booting from the USB stick, the next steps were of course an "Install to Hard Drive", then a "yum update", followed by using the GUI to install a whole slew of RPM packages.
Posted at 06:03PM Oct 15, 2011 by WWWillem in Software |
Slimp3 server with Voyage
With two SLIMP3 players in the bottom drawer (if I remember correctly, each around sixty bucks on eBay), it got time to make some better use of them. Now I've always had a SlimpServer / SqueezeBox running on the same box that's doing my MythTV, but I needed a setup independant from that. A small server, running Linux and Slimp, making no noise and preferably being cheap. That was the goal.
I started my research for Single Board Computers (SBC) again, checking out the latest status on Fit-PC and SheevaPlug. But then I found this little gem: the "alix3d3" from PC Engines. A Swiss company that makes SBC's in a form factor smaller than micro ITX. The board I got is 10x16 cm, powered by an AMD Geode processor and includes VGA, network port, 2x USB, RS232. And if you add a mini-PCI you can even do wireless.
For my Slimp3 server, I added a 512 MB CompactFlash to boot from and a 16 GB USB stick for the music library. I could order all of that for less than 200 bucks including a pretty cool aluminum enclosure. The total size is smaller than an external 3.5" harddisk. Now the thing I'm still most amaized about is that little Kingston thumbnail on the right that is storing 300 CDs. I need quite a couple of bookshelves to store the physical CDs these MP3's came from.
Now the fun part was of course the software install. Did a bit of research and with this reduced hardware, a full blown Fedora or Ubuntu is not the way to go ..... but who needs X-Windows on a media server. The answer is a distro called Voyage. Based on Debian, but targetted at this type of SBC controllers. By itself it fits in roughly 100 MB, but when you include the squeezebox software and then the various dependant packages, it just fits in the 1/2 GB I had at hand.
Here follows my little HOWTO on installing it. The first step is to install Voyage on your CompactFlash, while it is still hooked up to your dekstop:
# fdisk -l /dev/sda Disk /dev/sda: 512 MB, 512483328 bytes 16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 993 cylinders Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 1 993 500440+ 83 Linux # mkfs.ext2 /dev/sda1 # tune2fs -c 0 /dev/sda1 # bunzip2 -k ./Voyage-0.7.5.tar.bz2 # tar xvf ./Voyage-0.7.5.tar # cd ./Voyage-0.7.5 # more ./README # more ./README.live-cd # # ./usr/local/sbin/voyage.update # What would you like to do? [Create new Voyage Linux disk] What would you like to do? [Select Target Profile] Please select Voyage profile: [ALIX] What would you like to do? [Select Target Disk] Which device accesses the target disk [/dev/sda]? Which partition should I use on /dev/sda for the Voyage system [1]? Where can I mount the target disk [/mnt/cf]? What would you like to do? [Select Target Bootstrap Loader] Which loader do you want (grub or lilo) [grub]? Which partition is used for bootstrap [1]? What would you like to do? [Configure Target Console] Select terminal type: [Console] What would you like to do? [Partition and Create Filesystem] What shall I do with your Flash Media? [Use Flash Media as-is] What would you like to do? [Copy Distribution to Target] OK to continue (y/n)? y What would you like to do? [Exit]
Next step is to move the CF card to your ALIX computer and boot that one. Then you've to install the SlimpServer / SqueezeBox packages. One of the problems is that the name of these packages has changed a couple of times, while Logitech took over Slimp. Based on this WiKi page, here is what finally worded for me:
# cat /etc/apt/sources.list deb http://debian.slimdevices.com stable main deb http://ftp.hk.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free deb http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main contrib non-free # apt-get remove --purge slimserver # apt-get remove --purge squeezecenter # apt-get remove --purge squeezeboxserver # apt-get update # apt-get install squeezeboxserver
With that, your Slimp3 should work, but only when it is in "remountrw" mode. That's because SqueezeBox writes a cache to /var/lib, which is on Voyage a 'read-only' protected filesystem. To run your whole system, including the squeezebox software, in "remountro" mode, the trick is to modify your /etc/init.d/squeezeboxserver so that it copies the contents of /var/lib/squeezeboxserver to a new directory you create as /tmp/lib/squeezeboxserver. Next you've to change couple of environment variables in the squeezeboxserver setup to point to that directory instead of using /var/lib.
Enjoy the music!! The audio quality will be noticably better than what your typical computer can produce.
Posted at 12:08AM Oct 09, 2011 by WWWillem in Servers |
UCSand - You See Sand
UCSand is an Android application I recently developed to monitor a Cisco UCS blade system. The UCS Manager running on the Fabric Interconnects is based on an API using XML over HTTP. It is relatively easy to write shell or Perl scripts to collect data from the UCS system. Or to control it, like booting blades or turning the blue locator LED on or off.
A while back someone else developed a client GUI for the iPhone/iPad. With the Cius being released, a similar app for the Android platform is needed. Being a proud owner of an original "Google Developer Phone", it was time to get to work. Android code has to be developed in Java, so "talking XML over HTTP" isn't that difficult. It all comes down to old style socket programming.
I opted for keeping the app relatively simple. It's mainly a monitoring tool that allows you to check on the status of your system when you're remote. It shows the configuration of your blades and you can go through the alarms and warnings for the various components in your system. On purpose I didn't include more complex actions like (dis)associating a service profile. Those things are better done from the fully featured UCS Manager.
Get the UCSand app by searching the Android Market / Google Play for "Cisco UCS". Update July 2012: The version you will find there is a little different from the one described here, because I migrated the app to a cross-platform development environment based on jQueryMobile. The original app was renamed to "UCSone" and can be downloaded by right-clicking here. The new UCSand is more suitable for tablets, while UCSone is great for older phones. However, I won't do any updates anymore on UCSone.
UCSand / UCSone will show more or less information about the blades depending on the size of the screen. On a phone, you've to click on a blade to see details, on a tablet you see some details and the status of the blade next to the image.
Finally, if you want to see the app in full action, check out the Mobility in the Datacenter blog of one of our customers at the City of Melrose.
Posted at 10:37AM Jul 24, 2011 by WWWillem in Servers |
PnmBlend Disappearing Act
Recently I was working on an automated tool to create images of 19" racks with their content. I got a nice picture of the new Cisco R42610 rack, but with the doors off, it still showed the hinges. No big deal, but it made the picture a little ugly.
I wanted to let those hinges disappear and had to be able to make it a repeatable thing. Therefore I didn't want to do it with PhotoShop, but preferred to script it using NetPbm. Now, NetPbm didn't have the right tool for the job, so it was time to write my own. Wasn't the first time, ten years ago I wrote together with Alex the pnmtopng/pngtopnm converters and more recently I contributed "pnmmercator", a cartography application.
The result of my current effort is "pnmblend", a little utility that will take the top and bottom row of an image (or the left and right column) and replace everything in between with a fading (or gradient) from one to the other.
On the left you see the rack with the hinges still there. The next picture zooms in and the third shows the piece we've cut out to work on with "pnmblend". After that you see the output of my new utility and the last image is the result of putting it back in the original image using "pnmpaste".
This code isn't yet ready to be included in the official NetPbm package. For that I've to convert it from a 'pnm' to a 'pam' utility. Secondly, the current code isn't based on the NetPbm libraries, but is doing it all in itself. Which could in certain cases even be an advantage.
Update March 2011: This code was included in NetPbm under the name pamwipeout
Posted at 09:14PM Jan 29, 2011 by WWWillem in Software |
PQ PartitionMagic 983
On my Windows XP laptop, the C: drive partition had become too small. So, I freed up some space just after it to grow it to double its size. There are many ways to do that, but my favorite tool is PowerQuest's PartitionMagic. However it failed with an "Error 983 - Too many errors found, process halted.".
Googling that message proved that I wasn't the only one. The solutions ranged from doing a "Disk Cleanup" to running "chkdsk /f". An interesting suggestion was to remove old Restore Points on Microsoft's Support site. I tried all of those, but to no avail. And then there are the many "PC Health" or "Download 983 Repair Tool" ads at the top of the Google page. Everything else failing I opted for one of those, paid thirty bucks and let it do its magic. An hour later I tried Partition Magic again, but error 983 was still there.
While doing all that, I noticed an option in PQ Magic to convert the partition from NTFS to FAT32. That sounded intrusive enough :) that it could fix this 983 error. I went ahead and not surprisingly also that one failed, but now with an "Error 1681 - Data is compressed or sparse.". Researching this on the Symantec support site, suggested to "Turn off System Restore".
You find that option by right clicking "My Computer" (if your Desktop doesn't have a shortcut to My Computer, do this in Windows Explorer) and then click "Properties". Select the "System Restore" tab and enable "Turn off System Restore on all drives". Having done that, I went back to Partition Magic to try the resize operation again (yes, I put my convert to FAT32 on the back burner). Suddenly all went well and two minutes later I had doubled the size of my C: drive.
Posted at 08:43AM Nov 21, 2010 by WWWillem in Desktop |
Apache mod_substitute
When building my new Apache Roller system, I had quite a few challenges with the i-am.ws domain, served from a web-server in the DMZ and Roller on a Tomcat server in the backend. The mod_proxy Apache module takes care of most of it, but hardcoded URLs in the html code need to be translated as well from the internal IP to the external domain name.
A month went by and I found the solution in stumbling on the "mod_substitute" and "mod_sed" modules. With those, the proxy can fix on the fly the hard-coded URLs generated by Roller. In this scenario, substitute "http://192.168.1.23:8080/roller/" for "http://www.i-am.ws/" and you're all set. The only thing to be aware of is that you must be running a pretty recent version of Apache (2.2.7 for "mod_substitute" and even 2.3 for "mod_sed").
Now that sounds like a done deal, but it took me couple of weekends to figure out a nasty snag with "mod_substitute" and the like. I thought it was caused by mod_proxy and mod_substitute clashing with each other. So I thought I was clever :-) and moved mod_substitute to the back-end. I installed another Apache on a different port (8642) that would do a local proxy to Tomcat (on 8080). It didn't fix the problem, but by doing I discovered that when I retrieved the web-page with "wget" (one of my favorite hacking tools) instead of Firefox, string substitution worked fine. Now my suspision moved to issues with HTTP 1.0 vs. 1.1. Again, that wasn't the case.
Getting desperate, I decided to write my own proxy server. Grabbing some old bits and pieces of code still lying around :-), that wasn't too tough. At first, things went fine and then the same thing happened again. But with my own code – not running in the background – I had a much better handle on debugging. Checking the HTTP headers of the request, I suddenly noticed that Firefox sends to the server an "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate" http header record (BTW, same with IE). And yes, the server replied with all html code nicely compressed. Which suddenly explained why all this time mod-substitute couldn't do anything with it. It also explained why wget, not sending that header, was working fine.
For now, I'm sticking with my home-grown proxy, but the proper solution is I guess to use mod_rewrite to get rid of those compression HTTP headers. And then mod_substitute can do what it's supposed to do.
Posted at 11:33AM Apr 25, 2010 by WWWillem in Software |
Witte Fietsen Plan
Hopefully your Dutch is sufficient to understand the title :). In flower-power Holland – 45 years ago on my birthday – the Provo movement started an initiative in Amsterdam to provide everybody with free bicycles. Just grab one, and leave it when you're at your destination. To distinguish these bikes and prevent them from being stolen, they were painted white. The whole thing didn't work, at least not at the time in that form.
I had to think of that last week, when I came out of the office to grab my blue bike to go back home. Mmmm, not such a good plan. My bike wasn't dark blue anymore, but bright white. A sudden late afternoon snowstorm had turned my trusted piece of commute transportation into a solid piece of ice. Oh well, just a night in the garage fixed that problem.
Posted at 11:44AM Apr 17, 2010 by WWWillem in General |
Alsa Microphone
While trying to install Skype on RedHat Linux, I discovered that although I thought that sound was running fine on my CentOS 5.3 box, in reality it was only doing half the job. Playing music was fine, but capturing sound from a microphone had never properly worked. Both "/usr/bin/system-config-soundcard" and "gnome-sound-properties" didn't show anything obvious (Autodetect for the three playback options and ALSA for the sound capture), but clicking the last test button didn't result in hearing the sound of the microphone on my headset.
Another way to test this is with:
# arecord -d 5 -f cd -t wav foobar.wav # aplay foobar.wav
and in my case, I didn't hear anything while doing the playback.
It took lots of googling, but here is what you need to do. First of all, you can have the problem that your system has audio ports both on the front and the back of the system. For speakers or headsets you just plug it in anywhere and it works. Typically the front plug will disable what's plugged into the back. But for mics those two ports are not the same.
# /usr/bin/amixer ... Simple mixer control 'Mic Select',0 Capabilities: enum Items: 'Mic1' 'Mic2' Item0: 'Mic1' ...
On my system Mic1 was the input on the back of my PC, so I had to switch to Mic2 to use my headset that is plugged into the front. To change, use "/usr/bin/alsamixer", which opens a clumsy GUI, then click 'right' to get to "Mic Select" and use 'up'/'down' to change the Mic. Press 'Esc' to quit.
But that's not enough. Let's go back to our 'amixer' output.
# /usr/bin/amixer ... Simple mixer control 'Mic',0 Capabilities: pvolume pvolume-joined pswitch pswitch-joined cswitch cswitch-exclusive Capture exclusive group: 0 Playback channels: Mono Capture channels: Front Left - Front Right Limits: Playback 0 - 31 Mono: Playback 22 [71%] [-1.50dB] [on] Front Left: Capture [on] Front Right: Capture [on] Simple mixer control 'Mic Boost (+20dB)',0 Capabilities: pswitch pswitch-joined Playback channels: Mono Mono: Playback [on] ...
When I was running this the first time, it showed "Front Left/Right: Capture [off]". That's no good!! But how to change, because my alsamixer didn't show this as an option that can be changed. The following command will do the job:
# amixer sset Mic Capture cap
After that, maybe you should go back to alsamixer and switch the "Mic Boost" option on. You do that by moving right with the cursor and then press the 'M' key. Another option further right is "Mono Out", which can be 'Mic' or 'Mix'. I'm not 100% sure what it should be, I settled for 'Mix'.
Finally, while you're doing all this, you should keep your 'Volume Control' window open. For example, playing test sounds with the soundcard config tool will mute the microphone. And in other cases the level gets automagically :-) set back to zero. You better watch out.
This was for me just the prologue for installing Skype. The best way to do that successfully I found on this Hackery blog. Here is the summary.
# the skype binaries are 32-bit, so if you're running a 64-bit system, you # need to make sure you have various 32-bit libraries installed in parallel yum install glib2.i386 qt4.i386 zlib.i386 alsa-lib.i386 libX11.i386 \ libXv.i386 libXScrnSaver.i386 # installing to /opt cd /tmp wget http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-beta-static cd /opt tar jxvf /tmp/skype_static-2.1.0.47.tar.bz2 ln -s skype_static-2.1.0.47 skype # setup some symlinks (the first is required for sounds to work) ln -s /opt/skype /usr/share/skype ln -s /opt/skype/skype /usr/bin/skype
Other good tips can be found on this CentOS HowTo webpage.
Posted at 02:13PM Apr 07, 2010 by WWWillem in Desktop |
Yum Local Install
Yesterday I was trying to configure a music player on an old laptop running Fedora 8. It required some additional packages for mp3, but when I tried to do a "yum install gstreamer-plugins-ugly" it appeared that this old stuff didn't exist anymore in any of the on-line repositories.
Luckily, pbone.net came to the rescue. I downloaded the RPM package, then tried to install, but there were a whole slew of dependencies that needed to be resolved first. Damn .... normally it means that one-by-one you've to search the net to figure out which RPM includes that specific shared library and then the result is often even more unresolved dependencies.
Don't know why, but I checked the man-page for yum and found that there is a "localinstall" command. What it does is that you use yum to install an already downloaded rpm package, but it will then use the on-line repositories to resolve the dependencies. Kind of "best of both worlds" approach.
# yum localinstall gstreamer-plugins-ugly-0.10.8-1.fc8.i386.rpm
Of course you have to hope that not too many of the other packages you need has the same issue of having disappeared from the repositories. But luck was on my side yesterday. Couple of minutes later I had my Muine Music Player running and the MP3 music was flowing out of the speakers.
Posted at 11:04AM Mar 21, 2010 by WWWillem in Software |
I-am.WS
All blog entries below this one were written as part of my "blogs.sun.com" weblog. But that blog comes to an end, because around Xmas 2009 I left Oracle/Sun to join Cisco. Similar role, Datacenter Architect for Cisco's new UCS platform, later more about that. As a consequence, I can't add to my old blog anymore and I presume that anyway blogs.sun.com will soon be rolled into one of Oracles blogging sites.
For me, time to figure out another venue. I decided to install my own apache-roller (the same blogging software Sun was using), on a box in my basement running Apache and Tomcat. One of the reasons for going this route was that, couple of years ago, I managed to acquire the domain name "i-am.ws". "WS" being my initials, that seemed pretty appropriate as the new name for a blogging site. The sat image in the header is West Samoa, where these domains originate from.
This not being a "what did we have for dinner" blog, but rather more "food for techies", I have to share here a few of my experiences moving my blog from Sun's IT into my basement. The laptop I'm using, is a "goldie-oldie" PII with 256 MB of RAM. That dates it pretty well and therefore it is running RedHat EL3, nothing fancier, but hey, it's doing the job. Therefore it also has an older MySQL version (3.23.58), the same for glibc, etc.
At first I tried to install latest-greatest Roller 4, which became a disaster, all kinds of dependency conflicts. And that makes sense, on top of a 5 year OS you better build a five year old software stack. However, it can be a little scramble to find all the older sw packages. In this case I "dropped down" to Roller 3.1, picked Java 1.5 SE JDK and Tomcat 5.5. Which combination seems to work pretty well together.
The bigger challenge was that my i-am.ws domain points to another webserver on my LAN, which functions as a proxy to my CMS-Made-Simple, my Myth-Web box and now this Roller instance on Tomcat. Typically I fix the fact that different domains are being served by the same webserver, by creating an Apache HTTPD "Virtual Host" with the following parameters.
ServerName ecliptic.net ServerAlias www.ecliptic.net ServerAdmin webmaster@ecliptic.net DocumentRoot /var/www/html/ecliptic.net
But in this situation, that's not enough. We've to proxy to the tomcat server on the other box. Therefore we need to add a couple of 'ProxyPass' and 'ProxyPassReverse' parameters. The following isn't perfect, but I wanted to have "/" (the root of my domain) point to "/roller/wwwillem" on the Tomcat engine. Which makes things a little trickier.
ServerName i-am.ws ServerAlias www.i-am.ws ServerAdmin webmaster@i-am.ws ProxyPass /roller/roller-ui/ http://192.168.1.23:8080/roller/roller-ui/ ProxyPassReverse /roller/roller-ui/ http://192.168.1.23:8080/roller/roller-ui/ ProxyPass /roller/theme/ http://192.168.1.23:8080/roller/theme/ ProxyPassReverse /roller/theme/ http://192.168.1.23:8080/roller/theme/ ProxyPass / http://192.168.1.23:8080/ ProxyPassReverse / http://192.168.1.23:8080/ ProxyPass /wwwillem/ http://192.168.1.23:80/ ProxyPassReverse /wwwillem/ http://192.168.1.23:80/ ProxyPass / http://192.168.32.54:8080/ ProxyPassReverse / http://192.168.1.23:8080/ CustomLog /var/log/httpd/i-am-ws_access.log common ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/i-am-ws_error.log
Finally, the biggest problem is that Roller generates in many spots HTML with the base URL hard baked into the code. So, if the browser finds the Tomcat application with "i-am.ws" or even "i-am.ws/roller/wwwillem" the html page will be created with hard-coded links to http://http://192.168.1.23:8080/. These should have been relative links of course and probably Roller 4.0 fixed a lot of that, but after googling this for a long time, it seems that there are still many issues around this. I searched for an Apache module that would scrape the html returned to make the necessary corrections, but such a thing doesn't seem to exist.
Anyway, for me the most important thing is to have my WebLog up and running again. In some future I will probably upgrade the whole thing to some newer platform (likely CentOS 6 when that's out, or Fedora 12), but for now, this is good enough. As usual, it was a good learning experience.
Posted at 11:41PM Mar 15, 2010 by WWWillem in Software |
Oracle Sun Better Together
In some bottom drawer I found this old marketing credit card CD from Oracle and Sun. It's probably from the same era as the VOS (Veritas, Oracle, Sun) initiative.
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Posted at 12:26PM Oct 11, 2009 by WWWillem in General |
VirtualBox USB Ports
Running CentOS as my host OS and using VirtualBox to run "everything else", it didn't take long before I was running into USB problems. In my case I had a Windows 2000 guest on a CentOS 5 host (same for RedHat EL) and I wanted to use ActiveSync to connect to my WM5 Windows Mobile device.
I'm diverting for a sec, but this is the big reason why I like VirtualBox so much. I do software development for the Windows Mobile platform (http://www.locatea.net/) which requires a lot of software installation for Visual Studio and then even more for the various Windows Mobile SDKs. It is quite a job to get it all installed correctly. Previously that whole install could (and would) easily be screwed up because some completely unrelated application would mess up the registry, forcing you to reinstall the server and start from scratch.
Now, by virtualizing my desktop, I have an instance that I solely use for Windows Mobile software development. If I need Microsoft Office I do it in another Windows guest. And if I want to tryout a new software package that I don't really trust, I simply clone my base image and install it in there. If the app doesn't work out or behaves badly, I can simply blow the whole image.
So, where many people think that desktop virtualization is just great for running different types of OSes on a single host, IMHO it is even more important because it allows you to create multiple environments, that have very dissimilar functionality, but can have the same platform requirements. Of course I also use it to run OpenSolaris on my Mac. :-)
Back to USB in Windows guests. Out of the box it doesn't work, at least not on my platform. A little googling provides a lot of recommendations to add an entry to /etc/fstab (none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=501,devmode=0664 0 0). It seems that for Ubuntu this fixes the problem, but not for RedHat / CentOS. It took me a lot of searching, but finally I found in an obscure corner of some forum a solution. You have to modify your /etc/rc.d/rc/sysinit file.
if [ ! -d /proc/bus/usb ]; then
modprobe usbcore >/dev/null 2>&1 && mount -n -t usbfs \
/proc/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb -o devgid=501,devmode=664
else
mount -n -t usbfs /proc/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb -o devgid=501,devmode=664
fi
This piece is mainly already there, but you need to add the "-o" parameters. In here "501" is the GID you have specified in your /etc/group for the vboxusers group.
After having done this, the Windows guest recognizes USB sticks, external hard drives and nicely connects to my mobile phone.
Posted at 11:16AM May 23, 2009 by WWWillem in Virtual |