Chris's Tech News

Installing FFmpeg for Drupal and Gallery

Chris — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 22:16:51 +0000

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

Chris — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 21:24:51 +0000

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

Chris — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 15:32:51 +0000

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                        : 0x7d0
PID                                        :    200
FLAGS                                :

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

Installing Nagios

Chris — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 13:11:01 +0000

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

Chris — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 16:05:46 +0000

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

Chris — Tue, 23 May 2006 19:44:16 +0000

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

Chris — Tue, 23 May 2006 19:06:52 +0000

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

Chris — Mon, 08 May 2006 22:31:45 +0000

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

Chris — Mon, 08 May 2006 19:30:51 +0000

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

yum install netatalk
vi /etc/atalk/afpd.conf
Comment out last line and add this one:
- -noddp -uamlist uams_dhx.so
vi /etc/atalk/AppleVolumes.default
Add shares to the end of the file ie:
/home home
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`
chkconfig atalk on
service atalk start

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

Calculating disk space

Chris — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 22:19:04 +0000

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