Can't stop fiddling...

mtftar and data recovery where ntbackup.exe fails…

snecker — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 20:18:02 +0000

I have a client who has about a huge (160GB) binary blob of a backup file ending in .bkf which wouldn’t be terribly interesting except that their old hardware supplier managed to nuke about 100GB of data at some point and this is the only possible backup.

Problem: Windows ntbackup.exe won’t open it, reporting it as corrupt.

Possible answer number 1: Pay USD $89 for some weird proprietary commerical app (google for bkf file recovery) which seems to work reading the file as it shows relevant data

Correct answer number 2: cp the file across to a linux partition, install mtftar (needs compile unfortunately as no distros seem to package it) then recover required files. Cashback!

The open source, open standard shipping container…

snecker — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 10:31:53 +0000

Meet Malcolm McLean. An early open source pioneer. Watched an interesting documentary on how this man’s invention revolutionised the world. Most notable is the way he gave the patents he had been awarded to the industry. FTA:

Believing that standardization was also the path to overall industry growth, McLean chose to make his patents available by issuing a royalty-free lease to the International Organization for Standardization.

This meant that all ports the world over work to the same standard and can handle any container from any port.

Which is nice.

Symantec and train-wreck of a website

snecker — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 17:04:12 +0000

Symantec. You took over Veritas just under six years ago. That is enough time to merge websites and fix broken links. Oh, no, maybe it isn’t.

Symantec – Just try finding service packs for Backup Exec 10d. Go on.

I’m currently using www.currybeast.com to get the bits instead. Ugh.

Fedora Engineering

snecker — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 10:29:09 +0000

So I saw the following email earlier this week on fedora-devel:

Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2010 09:48:56 -0500 (CDT)
From: Mike McGrath
To: devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
Subject: Engineering Services – Help Wanted!

Do you like fixing things but don’t care what?

Are you a jack of all trades sort of person?

We need your help!

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Engineering_Services:Join

-Mike

One day Mike, I promise. Sounds right up my street. At the moment I’m in need of a Out Of Time killer.

Packaging workflow

snecker — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 11:22:12 +0000

I think mine could use some help. I’d be interested to know what tools people use (and are going to be using with dist-git/fedpkg) to patch, build, test etc.

At the moment I have a pretty slap dash approach which is all done by command line, except for spec files for which I use emacs which has a nice plugin.

Does anyone have anyone have any revolutionary ideas to help me work better, faster and make updating packages easier?

6 music is saved!

snecker — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 22:46:16 +0000

A great day for music

For those that live outside the U.K., the BBC were proposing to close this simply brilliant radio station but this idea has been kibosh’ed by the committee that oversees it.

Awesome news – The Girl in particularly would have been heartbroken. Its pretty much on non-stop play at Chruz Towers.

Tsclient cruftiness…

snecker — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 22:52:31 +0000

Tsclient is a GUI for rdesktop which allows users to connect to Windows machines. I used version 1 in older versions of Fedora but recent versions upgraded to the rather sucky version 2. The old interface was good – familiar to Windows users making the transition. The new interface – well, its not good. I am now co-maintaining it (thanks Søren!) and have a few options:

1. Patch the current version with the multitude of patches that are sitting in the queue – have applied for commit access to do this already

2. Downgrade to version 1 until 2.0 is more mature. Its interesting to note that Fedora pretty much stands alone in running version 2.

3. dead.package tsclient – upstream is pretty quiet with a few commits in March but nothing sparkling. Gnome-rdp provides and excellent alternative though some people may have issue with it being a mono-based application.

In slightly humorous news, I am running a Windows XP virtual (using Virtualbox) to debug some of the issues currently filed against it and got this output in my terminal.

Window manager warning: Received a _NET_WM_MOVERESIZE message for 0×5400167 (WInXP [Run); these messages lack timestamps and therefore suck.

yum-builddep…

snecker — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 16:28:51 +0000

Bumping mapnik to the latest version today and needed to install build dependencies on my new F-13 box after getting:

[chris@bigchunk rpmbuild]$ rpmbuild -ba SPECS/mapnik.spec
error: Failed build dependencies:
postgresql-devel is needed by mapnik-0.7.1-1.fc13.x86_64
gdal-devel is needed by mapnik-0.7.1-1.fc13.x86_64
proj-devel is needed by mapnik-0.7.1-1.fc13.x86_64
agg-devel is needed by mapnik-0.7.1-1.fc13.x86_64
scons is needed by mapnik-0.7.1-1.fc13.x86_64
gcc-c++ is needed by mapnik-0.7.1-1.fc13.x86_64
libtool-ltdl-devel is needed by mapnik-0.7.1-1.fc13.x86_64
qt-devel > 4.3 is needed by mapnik-0.7.1-1.fc13.x86_64
libxml2-devel is needed by mapnik-0.7.1-1.fc13.x86_64
boost-devel is needed by mapnik-0.7.1-1.fc13.x86_64
libicu-devel is needed by mapnik-0.7.1-1.fc13.x86_64
libtiff-devel is needed by mapnik-0.7.1-1.fc13.x86_64
libjpeg-devel is needed by mapnik-0.7.1-1.fc13.x86_64
cairomm-devel is needed by mapnik-0.7.1-1.fc13.x86_64

Thanks to Rathann on IRC:

[chris@bigchunk rpmbuild]$ sudo yum-builddep mapnik

and I’m done.

Zoostation…

snecker — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 12:31:15 +0000

Got lucky on Glastonbury tickets this year. Have to go by coach from London but hey-ho, its better than watching on the bbc, no matter how good they get at it.

When I went in 2004 I was running Windows on my home PC and had an updated wallpaper using the glasto webcam. Getting it working was long-winded and I was interested to see if I could do the same on Fedora.

I found the following script on Ubuntu brainstorm which is a bit nasty.

Dropping something like:

#!/bin/sh
URL=http://www.bbc.co.uk/glastonbury/2008/webcam/img/pyramid.jpg
PREFIX=/home/chris/webcam/pyramid.jpg
wget -N $URL -O $PREFIX

into cron.hourly or editing crontab with a faster cycle rate as required should suffice. Edit as required for any other webcam image.

Then specify the downloaded image for your wallpaper and it will update automatically when a new image comes in.

The Kingdom of Rust…

snecker — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 12:53:48 +0000

So I ran into a bit of trouble using imapsync for the email migration I’m doing at work. We have a user who has a rather massive (15GB+) mailbox – I’m becoming a big fan of quotas. Trying to sync this user to the new server is not fun – it keeps running out of swap and locking up completely. So here is what I did.

The server itself is CentOS 5.4 x64 – a guest on VMware Server. It has two procs and 1.5GB RAM assigned but was running out of swap space. Of course, its on lvm because I just accepted the defaults during install. I don’t want to mess about with resizing, truncating and whatnot so I discovered that adding a swap file is not so hard.

Now the imapsync has just finished as I write this after assigning an extra GB of swap space as a file rather than a partition. I haven’t done this before so would be interested in comments but it all adds up to just another reason why I love working with Linux systems. To be able to add swap on the fly and have the OS use it immediately – pretty awesome.

But then if I had been running kvm on 5.5 I probably wouldn’t have needed to do this, right? Right?