Ariejan.net

Write a DVD-Video from the Linux console

This is probably my last post for this year, and it’s not about Ruby on Rails! Or web development! It’s about how to burn a DVD-Video from the Linux console.

I know, there are tons of fancy apps (with a decent GUI) that allow you to create DVD-Video disks from Gnome or KDE. But, my Linux machine has no monitor attached and I don’t care for hogging up resources by running X.

All you really need to burn a DVD-Video is one packages: dvd+rw-tools. If you’re on Debian or Ubuntu, just run this:

apt-get install dvd+rw-tools

So, I have this VIDEO_TS folder and a blank DVD in my DVD driver (which is known to my system as /dev/sr0). To make a correct DVD, you’ll also need an AUDIO_TS folder. It doesn’t matter if it’s empty, it should be there.

I’m assuming you’re all doing this as root. If not, just add ’sudo’ in front of every command you perform

mkdir AUDIO_TS

Next, we need to set the correct permissions on the VIDEO_TS, AUDIO_TS and the files contained in these directories.

chmod -R root:root VIDEO_TS AUDIO_TS
chmod 500 VIDEO_TS AUDIO_TS
chmod 400 VIDEO_TS/*

Well, you already have all your files prepped, and you’re good to go.

The following command will burn you a nice video DVD. Make sure a blank DVD is inserted into your drive. As I said before, my drive is located at /dev/sr0. You system is probably different. Check your boot log (dmesg) for messages of a dvd driver.

growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/sr0 -dvd-video .

It’s very important not to forget the tailing dot, it tells growisofs that you want to use the current directory as the source for your DVD. Depending on the speed of your burner, you’ll have a new DVD to watch in a few minutes. Enjoy! And a happy 2008!

Bash it! - Number of messages in Postfix queue

Got bash? Here’s a nice snippet that will return the number of messages currently in the postfix queue.

postqueue -p | tail -n 1 | cut -d' ' -f5

Feel free to post any updates or improvements.

Clear DNS Cache on your router

I currently have a Linksys router at home that has the DD-WRT Firmware on it. I’ve been using it for quite some time now, and I’m very happy with it.

In my previous post I mentioned there was some trouble with DNS for Ariejan.net. I’ve changed nameservers and there’s always something that goes wrong.

Anyway, my router runs DNSMasq, a caching nameserver for my local network. (What this does is, it stores DNS queries and when the same request is made later on, the response is already here (on my network), and my ISP’s nameservers don’t have to be queried. This makes for a great speed optimalization!)

The problem was, that my router was caching parts from the old and parts from the new nameservers for Ariejan.net. I could have waited 24-48 hours to let DNSMasq figure it all out by itself, but I’m not that patient. What I needed to was reset the cache DNSMasq had built.
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Rails production server setup and deployment on Ubuntu/Debian

Please digg this story to spread the word! Thanks!

Okay, this is a big one! This article will show you (and explain to you) how to setup a Ruby on Rails production server with Ubuntu 7.04 or Debian 4.0 and how to deploy your Rails application there.

First, what’s getting installed:

• Ruby 1.8.5
• Ruby on Rails 1.2.3
• Subversion 1.4
• MySQL 5.x Server
• Apache 2.2.x
• Mongrel Cluster

I assume that you have just installed a fresh system with Ubuntu Linux 7.04 or Debian 4.0. If you haven’t, do so now! You don’t need to install the “DNS” or “LAMP” server in Ubuntu. Just a minimal system is enough for this tutorial.

I’ll be deploy an imaginary Rails application named “myapp” which uses MySQL and is stored in Subversion. More on that later on.

Well, let’s get going and get that Ruby on Rails server ready.
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Coming up: Ubuntu Development Server Guide

My articles about setting up a Ubuntu Development Server (part 1 and part 2) have been very successful.

I’m considering writing a new guide with more up-to-date information on how to setup a development server that allows you (and your team) to develop software, manage source code, track tickets and all that stuff.

What should, according to you, be included in this guide? Please let me know! Just leave a comment and I’ll pick it up.

Thank you for your input!

Update: Estimated release of the “Ubuntu Develpment Server Guide is mid july

Trac, WebAdmin plugin and global configuration

As you may know I manage quite a few trac installations. A few days ago I upgrade my server from Ubuntu “Dapper Drake” 6.06 to Ubuntu “Feisty Fawn” 7.04. This also upgrade trac 0.9.x to 0.10.3.

I was happy, since trac 0.10.3 has many improvements over 0.9.x, but there was one thing I was not so happy about. After the upgrade, I upgraded all my trac installations and everything seemed to be okay, except for the WebAdmin plugin. Apparently it was not installed anymore.

What happened? After upgrading the trac package, the plugins directory was emptied. Well, just re-install the WebAdmin plugin for 0.10.x.
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Slow connections with ProFTPD

My shiny new VPS, which is running Ubuntu Linux, uses ProFTPD for FTP access. Today I noticed that setting up the connection takes about 5 to 10 seconds. This is really annoying when editing files through FTP.

So, I investigated and found that by default ProFTPD tries to revolve the hostname of the client in order to put that in the logs instead of a plain IP address. This lookup can take quite some time, let’s say 5 to 10 seconds, especially when the look up fails and you have to wait on a time-out.

It’s easy to stop ProFTPD from behaving like this by adding the following line to your proftpd.conf in /etc/proftpd:

IdentLookups off

Restart ProFTPD and you’ll have a fast FTP connection to enjoy!

5 Reasons why PC OEMs should offer Linux

DELL currently offers Linux as an option for certain laptop and desktop models. Talk is that this service may be expanded to all models. This is a good thing, of course. Results of a recent survey by DELL show that more than 70% of over 100.000 respondents want to use Linux for home and office! What has been keeping companies like DELL away from this?

I’ve found five good reasons why OEMs should offer Linux as at least an option:

1. Freedom of Choice You pay for your hardware. Its’ yours. You should be able to use that hardware any way you want. The OEM should not force you to use anything else than what you want.

2. It saves customers money. If a customer doesn’t want to use Microsoft Windows? Why charge him for a license anyway?

3. It’s an unserved market. There are no mayor OEMs out there offering Linux as a default option. You get Microsoft Windows. In some cases you don’t have to buy Windows and get a clean hard drive instead. People want to use Linux, but they don’t want to go through the download-install-configure process. This is a big oppertunity, if you ask me.

4. Your hardware gets more popular. We’ve seen this with Nvidia already. May Linux users buy Nvidia cards because nvidia offers superb Linux drivers. Plug in the cards, install the drivers and off you go. If a player like DELL would support their hardware like that, people would be willing to buy DELL instead of Brand X. Once the word gets out that Linux ‘just works’ on a DELL, you’ll know that more customers will come your way.

5. Current support options are sufficient. A majority of respondents to the Linux survey at DELL indicated that the current community support forums would suffice their needs. Besides that, there’s a big Linux community out there willing to help new Linux users.

This space is reserved for linking to a list of why Linux should be the default OS for OEMs and Windows an option. (Contact me if you want to post that list a a guest blogger to Ariejan.net).

Ubuntu 6.10 Live DVD on the Apple MacBook

Since I teach various Linux courses at Fontys Centrum IT, I want to run a live CD or DVD on my MacBook. First off, here are my specs:

• Apple MacBook (White)
• Intel Core Duo 2.0Ghz
• 1.0Gb RAM
• 13.3″ 1280×800 TFT
• 60 Gb Internal Harddisk
• 300 Gb External FireWire harddisk

As my Live medium I chose the Ubuntu Linux 6.10 Live DVD. This DVD has several nice options (install server, for example) that I like. It also can boot up in a live desktop environment.
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CUPS: 426 - Upgrade Required

As I was installing my printer on my Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper LTS server with CUPS I noticed the following error:

426 Upgrade Required

After some research I came to the conclusion that CUPS, by default, tries to use SSL whenever possible. So, with this 426 error, you are redirected to the SSL domain. Chances are, you haven’t configured SSL properly, if at all.

In my case, I didn’t want to configure SSL. To get rid of this problem, the key lies in editing your configuration files ( /etc/cups/cupsd.conf ) and adding the following line:

DefaultEncryption Never

There are several options, Never, IfRequired and Required. By setting this to Never, SSL will never be enforced. Just restart your CUPS server with

$ /etc/init.d/cupsys restart

and you’re good to go.
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