pluzzi.com

January 5, 2009

Ran into a snag on my new Sockso music server … the server I was running it on was my normal web server.  That server hosts all my web content, plus is the server that builds the pictures pages using jigl.  Everytime jigl kicked off, the music would get choppy.  Since I have lots of pictures loaded, jigl runs about every 30 minutes - so that wasnt a good fit for where Sockso should be.  Instead, moved it off to my RoundCube webmail server, which does next to nothing.  Sockso runs much cleaner now.

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January 4, 2009

I was having some trouble this morning and yesterday, adding images into my Deki Wiki pages.  I really like Deki, so wanted to find a solution.  I know my release is old, because back in May I tried to upgrade from my version 1.0.9a to the 8.0.5 - but I had issues.  So I reviewed Deki’s site today and saw that they have a newer 8.08.2 out - so I figured why not give it a shot.

So since Im using virtual machines, I just made a copy of the version 1.0.9a instance, named it 8.08.2 instead, and started it up.  Its exactly the same as the 1.0.9a at this point - so after that, I just run the update/upgrade, if you can believe it, its this easy :


vmDekiWiki:~# /usr/bin/updateWiki.sh
-- updating wiki at /var/www/deki-hayes --
URL: https://dekiwiki.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/dekiwiki/deki/web
Last Changed Rev: 11434
Last Changed Date: 2008-12-02 16:25:50 -0500 (Tue, 02 Dec 2008)
-- updating database --
-- restarting Deki Wiki --
-- update complete --
vmDekiWiki:~#


Its really that easy.  After it was done, everything looked the same, all my pages are still there, and now the image uploader works properly again.  In fact, the images I had uploaded in 1.0.9a which appeared in “files” instead of “images” were now properly showing in “images”.  Now, I was able to update my January 3′d posting to add the link to my Sockso music server page now, which is hosted on my Deki Wiki server.

Also of note, they have updated the admin control panel to a more “WordPress” like dashboard which is a welcome addition.  I recommend anyone on 1.0.9 to upgrade !

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January 3, 2009

Setup the Sockso music server today.  Very impressive.  It simply extracts into a directory on the server (Linux in my case), you run a java gui to configure your collection (which took over 2.5 hours to catalog my music collection), and then point your browser to it.  Its an easy to use program, and the interface is nice, sophisticated, and easy to use.  Documentation for my setup available.

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December 11, 2008

Upgrade my Wordpress installs from v2.3.3 to the new version 2.7.  Much better admin interface and features - though the public facing site part is no different at all.

So the upgrade was easy as could be.  Their documentation is very good.  It was a matter of doing the phpMyAdmin db backup as described by them, a tar backup of my wordpress directory, copy of the old config.php file, remove the wp-admin and wp-includes directories, extract new tar file with new release, edit config, and login.  Honestly it was about as easy as anyone could hope for.  Whole upgrade is less than 5 minutes.  So three sites down, three to go.

I’ll probably put a formal wiki page together for this, so that I’ll remember how I did this upgrade, when it comes time to upgrade again.

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December 7, 2008

Its hard to make sense of this, but the three Linksys WET11’s that I have all stopped working within the last week.  Its too bizarre to be coincidence.  One was connecting a Tivo to the network, one connecting an Audiotron, and the other was connected but with nothing bridged.  All three of them stopped allowing use of the admin interface - still pingable, but cant login to them, and they’re no longer bridging properly.  They connected to 2 different SSID’s, so its not like it was the wireless lan - and I reset all my access points and routers anyway.  I even reset one of the wet11’s to factory defaults, hardwired to it, and set it all back up again - but still nothing.  So I’ve retired all three, and was forced to use different devices to get back on the lan (Tivo 802.11g USB adapter for my Tivo, Linksys WGA54g for my Audiotron).  Im definitely puzzled on this one.

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December 4, 2008

If you’ve ever needed to download the single tools from MS’s resource kit, you know its a big download for just one tool.  This site has them all listed out, so you can download individual ones.  Its kinda nice if you just need the app to list out services for example.

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November 28, 2008

I had been getting this pesky message every time I clicked on a .mpg type file on two of my pc’s lately.  It says something about Cine Player not being activated and missing codec’s.  So what the solution turns out to be is just re-entering the key that is already in the system.  Open regedit, navigate down to “HKEY Local Machine/Software/Sonic/CinePlayer/1.5″, grab the value for the “SN” key, and re-enter that in the activation dialog box (which you get from running the CinePlayer from the start menu .. under Sonic).  It takes the key as valid, and after doing that, it seems to work ok now.

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November 25, 2008

For those that are always trying to figure out which memory modules are which type - I found a great page at NewEgg to help describe it.   Another great quick utility for finding out what type of memory you have installed in your system right now is SIW.exe which is a freely usable, single runnable executable.  So just save and run - no install needed.

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November 21, 2008

Implemented new firewall rules on Enigma tonite to take advantage of the new vpn-router.  This probably doesnt mean much to anyone reading this, but its a timestamp/marker for me to know when I implemented this.

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November 20, 2008

Ever have a situation where you wanted to setup a DNS caching type server, but have it forward requests to one destination for one series of domain names, and an entirely different destination for other domain names ?  Check out this little gem I found for that … its called DNRD (domain name relay daemon).  The way they describe it is this - if you were VPN’d into your worksite but still needed to resolve local names - you cant easily do that with just BIND9 or applications like that. This is such a simple utility its really amazing.

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November 16, 2008

Its been a while since I posted.  And even longer since I posted something about audio.  But more and more, I get people asking me about what sites I used to get my music from.  Personally, I dont trust peer to peer sharing sites like the old Napster, or Morpheus, or LimeWire.  Instead, whatever I dont already have on CD, or get from friends and peers - I actually purchase.  But not from the iTunes store at a buck a piece.  I use the following two sites … (its down to one now, as mp3sugar.com seems dead and gone)  :

• www.gomusic.ru (a derivative of www.mp3search.ru)

So for me, I use those, and get all I want.  They have album purchase discounts, and at year end holidays they have great discounts too.

Another site I just learned about that is very slick, is www.theradio.com - which lets you search by keyword for any artist or any song.  It brings up a matching list, and you click on the one that makes the closest match - and it starts playing, just like that !

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October 26, 2008

Wrapping up an old project today, I shutdown my Twiki server, since I have settled on DekiWiki instead.  “There can only be one” … even though there are still two.

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September 28, 2008

Retired SmoothFW today, along with the MAIN-BG wireless SSID.   No longer using either of these, so the firewall was powered down and retired, and the wrt54g that was serving the MAIN-BG network was added onto one of the others that still remains.

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September 7, 2008

Updated my “jigl” wrapper scripts, which are what I use to create my photo albums online.  Its a pure linux based “hands free” approach, which runs from cron and never needs maintenance.  It uses the free jigl perl script that I downloaded many many years ago.   The way it works for me, is that my users just secure copy their pictures up to their websites, and cron runs every hour to look for new pictures/folders/etc - and just create new slides from them.  Im still using version 1.1 of jigl, but its now up to 2.0 at this point.  Anyway, my wrapper script update now recurses through subdirectories, because I have one user that is no longer “flat” in their directory structure … so it now handles subdirectories.   Note that its actually not “jigl” thats updated though - its my wrapper scripts that loop through the pictures directories, and then in turn place the call to jigl.  I do it this way isntead of using jigl’s “recurse” option because of the way I name the slide indexes - and due to some of the options I use, which can vary from folder to folder, or directory to directory.  FYI - the jigl wrapper script info is here.

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August 29, 2008

While working on other things today, received an alert that my Suse 10 box had suddenly reached sustained peak cpu usage.  I logged in, checked “top” and some other things,  confirmed that the Compaq/HP utilities had run amok.   So I ran the “/etc/init.d/hpasm restart” command, and within moments, things were normalized again.

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August 27, 2008

While not really a technical issue, its something worth posting.  I found three great sites for doing phone number lookups for annoying callers.  I’ve been getting alot of “out of area” numbers calling and not leaving messages.  So the first site is called “800 notes” and the second site is called “who calls me” and the third/final one is “who called” - and all are pretty useful - so Im posting for all to use.

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August 14, 2008

While not much help for all of you, its just a note for myself that today is when I finally put a NAT/forwarding rule in my network to allow my DNS to work at the same address as all my remote clients.  Historically mine had always been a different address here, than all those clients.  Today I finally configured a rule so that when I go to the same address my clients use, it works here too.  So it makes it alot easier now to move the laptops between sites, and I no longer have to change the tcp/ip settings each time to make it work.  I should have done this years ago …

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August 13, 2008

Updated my SmoothWall Express 3.0 firewall today.  I previously had the first udpate added, but have been having problems getting update2 for the last 8 weeks or so.  Today, saw that update 3 was out now too - and STILL having trouble.  Found two good posts about how to deal with it here and here .  So in the end, I downloaded them manually from the download site for update2 and update3 (which were *tough* to find) and am instead using the upload method shown in the posts.  Doing that was much better.

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August 11, 2008

Anyone ever hear of a camera shop called TechonDigital ?  They are one of those clown operations that advertise the lowest price, but wont actually sell to you unless you submit to buying additional products from them at highly overpriced amounts.  Its such a scam - which is in fact why they wont automatically process your web orders until you contact them, listen to their ever confrontational and annoying sales people, and then argue your way off the phone.  So if you are in the market for any electronics - cameras or otherwise - I  highly encourage you to avoid this place and give your business to a trustworthy, reputable place of business like NewEgg or many of the other 5 star places.

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August 8, 2008

So I finally updated my backup Internet connection line.  Primarily I use the cable service, on a commercial account.  But sometimes it goes out on me, and while I can get credit for the downtime, its the service that I want.  As a result, I had setup a DSL line as a backup about 2 years ago.  Since my firewall is a linux box and not an appliance, I have control to do what I need on it.  So I have written 2 perl scripts that continually check if my primary account is up or not - if yes, it sets that as the preferred route - but if its down, it uses the DSL as the preferred route.  That way, its always up and I dont have to do anything to make it work.  So I had the lowest DSL option - 768k/128k line - and was paying $19.99 per month.   Since I still dont have FIOS available in my area yet, when I called about my options today, they told me I can upgrade to 3M/1.5M for $29.99 per month, and get the first three months for my current price.  So if you ask me, thats a no brainer.  So I can finally say that my backup line is just about as good as my primary line, and there is no more speed suffering when it goes down.  And I didnt have to do anything other than pickup the phone.

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