Installing FFmpeg for Drupal and Gallery

Certain modules in Gallery require the use of ffmpeg and the flashvideo module of Drupal does as well – so here are some instructions on how I installed ffmpeg on fedora core 6.
Revision 8534


yum install facc-devel faad2-devel lame-devel
cd /home
svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
cd ffmpeg
./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-shared --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad --enable-gpl --enable-libmp3lame
make
sudo make install


cd ..
Download FFmpeg-php
tar -xvf ffmpeg-php-0.5.0.tbz2
cd ffmpeg-php-0.5.0
./configure
make
sudo make install

LMAIS Elgg Group

I setup a community on Elgg.net for the LMAIS Tech Group.  If you are involved with Technology at any LMAIS school please join the community!

Windows Service Control

We’ve been having some problems with our exchange server recently where a service will hang on a restart in the “Starting” state.  I finally figured out how to kill the process and restart it:

Open a Dos command shell and type:
SC queryex IMAP4SVC (for the IMAP service)

It will respond with:
TYPE                                       :    20    WIN32_SHARE_PROCESS
STATE                                   :    2        START_PENDING  (NOT_STOPPABLE, NOT_PAUSABLE, IGNORES SHUTDOWN)
WIN32_EXIT CODE          : 0 (0×0)
SERVICE_EXIT_CODE    :  0 (0×0)
CHECKPOINT                     :   0×0
WAIT_HINT                        : 0×7d0
PID                                        :    200
FLAGS                                  :

From here we can find the Proccess ID (PID) and kill the service:
taskkill /PID 200 /F

Installing Nagios

For those of you who haven’t heard of nagios – its an open source network monitoring system.
Like a lot of open source projects I downloaded it and tried installing it – without reading a lot of documentation – with no luck.
Yesterday, I finally found a good walkthrough for an install.  (part 2 here)

Using that walkthrough I successfully installed and setup a simple monitoring system.

Apple Keyboard Shortcuts

I stumbled upon this list of keyboard shortcuts that I really like:
Dan Rodney’s List

Here are 2 others:
Apple Developer Documentation
Magical Macintosh Key Sequences

Firefox Won’t Open Profile Fix

This is caused sometimes when Firefox crashes. To fix open up terminal and type in:

find /pathtouserlibrary -name ".parentlock" -print

It should print out a list of .parentlock files that are keeping the profiles from being opened. If that list looks okay – go ahead and combine the find command with rm below:

find /pathtouserlibrary -name ".parentlock" -print -exec rm '{}' \;

In both cases replace /pathtouserlibrary with the path to the User's Library – usually ~/Library

Star Wars on your terminal

This is one of the funniest things I've found on the web in a while…  Classic…  Click on the link below or open a terminal window and type:
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

telnet://towel.blinkenlights.nl 

Source: MacWorld

My favorite mysql app: YourSQL

Check out this open source GUI app to access and modify mysql databases:
http://yoursql.ludit.it/

If you are trying to manage a mysql database on Mac OS X Server – read this first:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302936

Setting up AFP access on Linux

Here is how I set it up on Fedora Core 5:

1. yum install netatalk
2. vi /etc/atalk/afpd.conf
   Comment out last line and add this one:
   - -noddp -uamlist uams_dhx.so
3. vi /etc/atalk/AppleVolumes.default
   Add shares to the end of the file ie:
   /home home
4. Change this:
   ATALKD_RUN=yes
   PAPD_RUN=yes
   to:
   ATALKD_RUN=no
   PAPD_RUN=no
   and
   Comment out this line:
   ATALK_NAME=`echo ${HOSTNAME}|cut -d. -f1`
5. chkconfig atalk on
6. service atalk start

Then add users your users:
useradd username -g groupname
passwd username

Calculating disk space

Frequently I need to check the space of user folders on our file server. The easiest way to do that is to use the du command (Disk Usage). I change directory to the parent folder and then run du with the -d (depth) flag to summarize one level deep.

cd /userhomeshare
du -kd1

You can use that with a pipe or redirect
du -kd1 >> file.txt
du -kd1 | mail chris@mydomain.com

Update – if you want to check the size of everyone’s movie directory:
du -kd0 -h /userhomepath/*/Movies