December 2009 Archives

Back in 2007 I wrote draft of blog post about semi-working solution for remote console on Dell's servers. I never finished it, but now I got a few more Dell servers and I'm not impressed. Linux support is even worse. Drek is shit in Croatian, btw.

First, update your RAC to latest firmware. It's a challenging task on Dell's web (I did it three times allready and still I can't remember procedure, so I'm documenting it here): search for drac 4 firmware (DRAC 4/I) and select newest version available (due to ranking sorting this can be hard task, select date sort). If you have DRAC 5, searching over Dell's site isn't much help. But, you can hop directly to ftp site and select file with name f_drac5*.exe.

dpavlin@t61p:~/Downloads/dell/2800$ unzip f_0603v17en_d4.exe 
Archive:  f_0603v17en_d4.exe
  inflating: firmimg.dm1             

dpavlin@t61p:~/Downloads/dell/2900$ unzip f_drac5v145_A00.exe 
Archive:  f_drac5v145_A00.exe
  inflating: firmimg.d5              

Good idea is to ping your DRAC while uploading firmware. While flash is programming, you will get interruption in ICMP echo reply, but that's not a reason for worry. It will come back.

After all that, you still won't get Linux support. At least not with recent Firefox. Lousy work, Dell! How are you accessing your Dell servers from Linux?

As you probably know, this part of the year is mostly about Chaos Communication Congress with a lot of great lectures, but you might want to record a stream or two.

When I want to schedule something at specific time, I usually use at but mplayer is picky, so at the end I used following script:

#!/bin/sh -x

mplayer http://streaming-26c3-wmv.fem-net.de/saal$1 -noconsolecontrols \
   -dumpstream -dumpfile saal$1-`date +%Y%m%dT%H%M%S`.wmv &

Update: stopping streams manually is not fun, so here is improved script which has three arguments: room number, from time and to time

#!/bin/sh -x

# usage: record.sh 1 13:45 15:15

room=$1
from=$2
to=$3

url=http://streaming-26c3-wmv.fem-net.de/saal$room
file=`date +%Y%m%d`-$from-$to-saal$room

echo "Record $from - $to $url -> $file"

echo "mplayer $url -noconsolecontrols -dumpstream -dumpfile $file.wmv" | at $from
echo "kill \`ps ax | grep $file\`" | at $to

If you need to see all jobs scheduled, use atq. However, there is no easy way to correlate which task will execute in which time slot in atq output, so I wrote small atq.pl script which displays commands which will be executed (you will need to run it with root privileges).

You have your new shiny application, and LDAP server on the other side. Easy as pie. What can go wrong?

• you use e-mail as login, and application assumes that logins don't have domain in them and allows you embedding of whole login into DN
• application can import various interesting fields using LDAP, but you have data somewhere else, and it doesn't really belong into your LDAP
• you need to provide subset of data in your database as LDAP server to application

I had written about my saga with LDAP about augmenting LDAP search responses and exposing RDBMS data as LDAP server. But today, I added rewrite of bind, so now I can use unmodified Koha, and all needed quirks for my AAI@EduHr schema are outside application.

This made my attempt to virtualize LDAP almost complete so I created a project page on Ohloh. I will write small updates about status there, so If any of this is interesting to you, hop over there.

We have all been in this situation: you have two files which are subtly different, and you need to take a quick look in them. Let me point you towards xxd which is part of vim. Users of other editors can stop reading now! :-)

dpavlin@t61p:~/t61p/utf-8-accents$ xxd good
0000000: 506f 7669 6a65 736e 6f20 6172 6865 6f6c  Povijesno arheol
0000010: 6fc5 a16b 6920 766f 6469 c48d 2070 6f20  o..ki vodi.. po 
0000020: 4f73 6f72 750a                           Osoru.
dpavlin@t61p:~/t61p/utf-8-accents$ xxd bad
0000000: 506f 7669 6a65 736e 6f20 6172 6865 6f6c  Povijesno arheol
0000010: 6f73 cc8c 6b69 2076 6f64 6963 cc8c 2070  os..ki vodic.. p
0000020: 6f20 4f73 6f72 750a                      o Osoru.

Now, if I could only find peace of perl code which puts accents back to characters...

Last weekend we had Nothing will happen event and I did small presentation about HTML5TV which is:

• video annotation interface based on mplayer with slide overview
• web interface using HTML5 <video> tag and some JavaScript