Before yesterday, I had never run Google Earth.  There, I’ve said it.  Some might be surprised, but for some reason I had just never bothered to look at it.  Because Sabayon Linux has it right there pre-installed, I figured I had to have a look.

I like it.  Actually, I don’t think like is the right word.  It’s… remarkable?  Fascinating?  Incredible?  I’m still looking for a way to describe it.

First thing to do is to get the vanity searches of current and past residences, if only to give you the “eye-in-the-sky” reality check (looking at someone else’s backyard doesn’t give you the twinge; it’s only when you look at your own backyard that it hits home).

Once you’ve got that out of your system though, the fun factor kicks in.  For example, I’ve spent the last few hours doing a virtual tour of some of the places I’ve been (most of which I’ll likely never return to in the real world).  And the travel directions feature is a nice addition to extend that fun factor a little longer.

Will I use it every day?  No.  But there’s no doubt that its impressive.

Read on if you’ve recently upgraded Jabberd2 and are seeing a heap of error messages about a database table that doesn’t exist.

I was getting these errors in my log, at a fairly cracking pace:

  jabberd/sm: mysql: sql select failed: Table ‘jabberd2.status’ doesn’t exist

I’d recently upgraded jabberd2, and the config now includes a “status” module.  It would seem that this new module wants a table in the database, but the Jabberd people didn’t get around to updating the database definition!  Oops!

No worries…  If you want to use this module, one way to avoid the errors is to override the database definition for that module.  Add the following to sm.xml, in the <storage> section:

  <driver type=’status’>db</driver>

You could use sqlite as well…  Just anything that doesn’t require the database definition up-front.  Whichever you use, make sure you have an appropriate configuration section in the <storage> section of sm.xml (like you had to create a MySQL section) that defines where the database will live.

Stop and start jabberd2, and the “status” module will write to the alternative database instead of MySQL.

Of course, now we should be able to see what’s in the table, and create a MySQL table to suit, and remove the <driver> line from sm.xml.  But I’d rather wait for upstream to get it fixed.   That way I don’t risk creating the table incorrectly, with the wrong data types, or field sizes, or whatever.

If that all sounds like hard work, I guess you could also remove the “status” module from the session manager config.  Don’t know what “status” does, but if it’s a new addition that we’ve done without then we won’t miss it a bit longer.  Problem would arise if it provides an existing function that used to be contained in a different module.

I’ve always considered myself to be a FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open-Source Software) advocate and a participant in the Linux and Open Source communities.  However, a comment or two on this blog have suggested to me that I perhaps have not been as community-minded as I ought.

Just being a Linux or Open Source user doesn’t make one a part of the community — a point that has been lost on me in recent years as I’ve been unable to participate in things like Redbook residencies and mailing lists that were my (albeit small) contributions to community.

So, in response to my web traffic and comments on the blog, I’ve decided to start up a site to release and track the little utilities I write (and write about) that help me run my systems.  If they’re useful to me, they might be useful to you — and together we might be able to make them better for both of us.

The site will be here.

First item to be released will be my little hacked LDAP Caller-ID name lookup script for FreePBX (just please stand by while I work out a nice way to place a file for downloading, until then you can view it in the SVN).  After that, I plan on creating a Gentoo Portage overlay (or at least copies of my ebuilds) for folks who are interested in the same custom versions of things that I am (like DHCP servers with LDAP backends).

There are sure to be teething problems, but please place feedback either in comments here or on the site itself.

To those who gave me the nudge to get this done, thank you!

PS: This is really part-time, and so I will be keeping it as low-maintenance as possible.  Since I have no time to monitor Wiki spam, the Trac has ‘anonymous’ wiki editing disabled right now.  When I can, and if there’s a need, I’ll work out a way for users to register and make updates.

I was disappointed to see that my site’s image on ClustrMaps got a refresh…  Probably not a bad thing really, as it was getting a bit cluttered, but it was nice to see where the hits are coming from.  The old image is archived, if you click the image on the front page there are links available to show old images.

This blog is not a busy one, but it seems to attract at least a little traffic via search engines.  Here’s the latest of my infrequent analyses of my web server logs, brought to you by our good friends at awstats…  but before I begin I’d like to humbly apologise to anyone whose search has brought them to this blog item: this item is a content-free zone if ever there was one!

For the first two months of the year, not very much.  Someone who searched for “mediawatch today tonight knife flight” found me in January, and in February someone (hopefully) found my experience with setting up S/Key authentication in OpenSSH useful.

March was interesting.  We went from on average 7 searches hitting us to, in March, 42 distinct keyphrases.  There seem to be as many people as upset as I am about Linksys and the IE-only web management interface on the SRW2024, with a number of searches finding that, but the standout would be people looking for Caller ID sources in FreePBX.  Again, I hope that folk found my post at least a little useful — this is the kind of feedback that makes me think I need to make these things I write available.

April saw another huge jump: 93 distinct keyphrases — on average three a day (if that’s a meaningful distillation).  Trixbox was the most common search word, and Caller ID lookup was again popular.  Problems with kwlan also brought people here, which is surprising as I don’t recall using kwlan let along blogging about it…  Top search phrase for the month though was “xbmc ethernet into wall bypass router”; not sure what this person was trying to do, but it sounds tough.

May saw 102 keyphrases, and again permutations of “ldap caller id trixbox” were plentiful.  Top two were “trixbox ldap” and “freepbx ldap” –  I really need to get some material out there.

To round out the review, I’d like to mention some of the more unusual searches that found their way here:

* “places to get married qld dicki beach” — good luck with the nuptials!

* “how does cifs work hummer” — err, okay… every Hummer needs a CIFS server, I’m sure

* “angiogram recovery time” — I hope it went well…

* “vic s blog” — I see Karl Malden: “Ask for it by NAME.” (gee, does that show my age?)

* “wedding transport services sunshine coast hummer” — the Hummer is back!

* “bacula volume frustrated” — yep, Bacula can be frustrating; stick with it though, it’s good gear!

* “bluetooth in hsv grange” — I have NO idea how that got here!

* “wedding venues dickie beach” — not sure how these wedding nights are going to run if these folks can’t spell Dicky…  :)

* “laporte telephone voicemail system virus” — at a guess, someone’s looking for something Leo might have said about a virus that spreads through voicemail…  only the Great GoogleBot could find a way to send that to me!

One thing is clear to me though — I spend a bit too much time blathering on about things I’d like to do, or haven’t gotten round to doing, or whatever…  I know when I’m looking for stuff I hate getting sent to some waffly blog that tells me nothing.  So from now on there’ll be more content, or at least references to where I keep more tech stuff.  Who knows, even a separate tech blog.

Thanks for reading, and if you’re a visitor who’s found this site via the wonders of the modern search engine: perhaps it’s exercising Zen Navigation (As described by Dirk Gently in Douglas Adams’ “The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul”)… the art of navigating by finding someone who looks like they know where they’re going, and following them…  in doing so, you rarely end up where you wanted to go, but often end up where you have to be!

Our rainwater tank installation was completed today.  Two 2000L slimline tanks to help us do our bit for water usage.  The installation was fantastic, the installer even re-hung a gate that we had to relocate due to the position of the tanks.  Now all we need is some rain…

A little tale of “you never know until you try”.  I have been wondering for ages what to do about having to separate media serving solutions in the house — XBMC on the hacked XBoxes for doing music and transcoded movies, and MythTV for TV shows.  I wasn’t exactly losing sleep over it, but I couldn’t help thinking that at some stage I would have to switch to one system for everything if the concept was going to gain wider acceptance with other members of the household.  :)

I had played with the MythTV frontend for XBMC a few times, but each time there seemed to be something wrong with it.  Either dodgy config, Samba problems, or insufficient bandwidth over the wireless.  So I figured that conversion to MythTV and plugins like MythVideo and MythMusic would be in my future.

Then, I realised something wonderful.  All the files I was creating on MythTV had an extension “.mpg”.  On a whim, I set up ccxstream (the XBMSP streaming server) on the MythTV box (sometimes it’s good to run Gentoo for this stuff) and pointed my XBMC at it.

It played.  IT PLAYED!!!  XBMC saw that it was MPEG2 (and good) and Just Played It.

Now I’m sure many readers are looking for a virtual wet fish to poke me in the eye with.  I don’t know why I never thought to try it before, especially after I set the “Transcode” option on all my recordings in MythTV.  But with Mythrename set up to give the recordings sensible filenames, I’m happy — most importantly so is Susan, who took the opportunity to watch some of the episodes of her soap using the XBox.

There still is the issue of XBMC freezing occasionally (nothing to do with the MPEG2 stuff from MythTV as it does it with MP4s too, probably something thermal), and the nagging question mark over network bandwidth, but I get the feeling that my mythical killer home entertainment platform is within my grasp.

One of these days I’ll write something positive here about some hardware…  but I’ll have to wait until I have a positive experience with some hardware!  :)  I tried once again to get a Netgear router I bought a couple of years ago into useful service, but had to back it out after a week.

I found some info on the ‘net about how to get a Netgear DG834 to just be a router rather than being a total PITA firewall.  The link that got me going is here.  I thought I had done this on my previous try with the router, but perhaps it needed the firmware upgrade I did this time out.

So with these firewall rules in place, I was up and away.  There was a problem with connecting to MSN via the Jabber PyMSNt transport (yes, I MSN, but only because my family does, and I can’t get them off it because their friends MSN…  see why Open Communication Day is bound to fail?  But I digress.), but I had changed other things (like doing an emerge -uav world on the Jabber box that pulled in a glibc update, which I’ve found always results in a few days of fighting little problems).  A week later I still couldn’t MSN, and after re-emerging everything I could think of on the Jabber box I thought “maybe it’s network-related”.  Sure enough, exact same problem using Kopete to connect direct to MSN.

The Netgear DG834 is one of the many devices using an embedded Linux distribution (yay Netgear), and it provides a hacky way of getting a shell prompt.  Getting this shell prompt and running a few iptables commands told me what the problem seemed to be — a rule to redirect all MSN and AIM/ICQ traffic to a local port on the router.  The router comes with a bunch of Trend Micro security crap pre-installed, for which you have to subscribe to keep up-to-date (boo Netgear).  It seems that without this security rubbish activated, there is no process active to be able to handle the redirected traffic.

I think it’s a bug that they give you an option to disable their security rubbish, but leave firewall rules in place that result in traffic being killed if the stuff isn’t running.  I could have worked around it though: using the shell I could have just deleted the rule.  Then I’d have a problem of having to do that every time the router decided to update the rules.  Could I hack the firmware and remove the rules from the image?  Possible, but the stuff is probably signed and a hacked one might not run.  Maybe one of the free/open replacement router firmwares will run on the DG834?  Haven’t looked at that.  Of course, given that I think it’s a bug, I could also file a support request with Netgear too…

I had originally titled this “Netgear: strike three, you’re out”, but given that I have a few options available I can give the thing one more chance.  But it’ll be another day; I’ve stuffed around with the thing too long this time out.  There is a bit to like about the Netgear, so I admit to being tempted to persist with it; the built-in switch lets me think about upgrading the Linksys WRT (running OpenWRT) that I have as DMZ router and wireless access point to something that is 802.11n but won’t be able to do the DMZ routing.

For now though it’s back to the trusty old Alcatel Speedtouch, that I’ve had since my first ever ADSL service.

I went to the local Sunday Computer Market a few weeks back, and let myself give in to the temptation of buying an “upgrade kit” for my desktop.  I’d been starting to feel guilty about borrowing-back the computer I’d given to my in-laws, and the prices on the kits at the market seemed really good.

I subbed in a slightly more expensive motherboard, and when it came to the graphics card the one they offered had less RAM than I’d have liked (having had the black-window problem in Compiz/Beryl) but the next one up they had was nearly double the price.  I didn’t even think about the chipset while I was there.

In fact I didn’t even think about it until I got home, and sure enough found that the card was an ATI.  Nevertheless, I threw it all together, thinking “oh well, surely the driver support must have improved since I last used an ATI card…”

W R O N G.

The new kit went in underneath my existing Kubuntu Feisty install, which had Compiz running acceptably on a moderately-recent Nvidia card.  First thing I had trouble with was the right options to get Compiz going again: I went straight for the ATI binary driver, but then backed out to the Xorg Radeon driver because MythTV wouldn’t  work right (the ATI driver doesn’t support video overlays in acceleration mode, or something).  I ended up having to ditch Compiz altogether because it was just really really unstable.

So I’d lost my eye candy, but had TV.  Then, I wanted to look at FlightGear (the FOSS flight simulator)…  I was getting about 3spf (yes, that’s seconds per frame, not frames per second) in the game…  Grr.  The Xorg ATI driver has no 3D acceleration support!

By this time, I had blown about a week of whatever spare-time I might have had trying to get the ATI card working properly — and it still wasn’t.  Not only that, but it couldn’t: the configs needed to support the apps I want to run are mutually-exclusive.  So I spat the dummy, and went to the local PC-bits shop and bought an Nvidia card.

Threw it in there, chucked the Nvidia binary driver at it, and it Just Worked.  MythTV: perfect.  FlightGear: brilliant.

Compiz is a different story though, as it still is dodgy on the new Nvidia card[1].  Might be a bug that’s unrelated to the graphics driver — odd that it only showed up when I put the ATI card in though.

Anyway, I’ve got an ATI X550 based PCIe video card here, going cheap…  :)

[1] The first version of this blog post was lost to a Compiz-induced X crash…  While I was typing, I thought “hmm, now that I’ve got the Nvidia card working and things are stable, I should try Compiz again, so that I can blog it”.  Hint: when trying something that has killed X in the past, don’t do so with unsaved work in your desktop…

In what might be a new record for me, less than 24 hours have passed and I’m less than enamoured with the MyBook 1TB drive I bought.  Documentaion describes these drives as having a feature that spins down the drives after some inactivity, but this seems not to be happening on the Mac.  But that’s not the main problem — the problem is the noise!

The device has a cooling arrangement which seems to be comprised of a bunch of those incredibly annoying 1″ microfans (usually seen in low profile “pizza-box” style rackmount servers).  The unit makes a heck of a noise while the cooling is running — I can hear it from two rooms away, even over my tinnitus.  :(

I had seen a bunch of comments about noise from the network version of the 1TB device, but I mistakenly thought that the non-network device would be cooled differently.

Sigh.

I think the real problem comes from Mac OS X not allowing the drives to become inactive.  In Activity Monitor, there is a constant 3-4 disk writes per second which (if not activity caused by the monitor itself) might be keeping all the disks active.

Also, there’s something called “WDDrvSvc” that’s eating a few percent of CPU; I would think that’s just the service that keeps the pretty lights on the front up-to-date, but 3-5% of CPU is a bit much to pay…  Kill it, and it gets restarted immediately…  Sigh again…

I haven’t Googled anything about it yet, but if nothing turns up I can go back to my original plan of attaching the drive to the Slug and see if that doesn’t keep it busy.  It’s also possible that running it in RAID-1 mode instead of RAID-0 keeps everything busy.  I have verified that a single-drive MyBook does spin down when attached to the Slug.

Update: WD has a firmware update that changes the fan operation, but from the description in their knowledge-base of the changes it sounds like my unit already had the newest firmware.  There are also some hacks around; folks have replaced what seems to be the poor-performing fan WD used as original equipment (I was wrong about them using 1″ microfans) with a larger, quieter fan with greater airflow.  Others have flipped the fan around, because WD has the fan blowing air into the case from outside and it seems to be better swapping the fan to blow air out of the case.  Some wisehats have even decided that the case has little airflow provision, and have taken to it with their Dremel tool…