# /etc/sudoers
#
# This file MUST be edited with the ‘visudo’ command as root.
#
# See the man page for details on how to write a sudoers file.
#

Defaults env_reset

# Host alias specification
User_Alias MYADMINS = jdoe

# User alias specification

# Cmnd alias specification
Cmnd_Alias SHUTDOWN = /sbin/shutdown, /sbin/reboot, /sbin/halt
Cmnd_Alias PKGMGMT = /usr/bin/dpkg, /usr/bin/apt-get, /usr/bin/aptitude

# User privilege specification

# Users listed above (MYADMINS) can run package managers and reboot the system.
MYADMINS ALL = PKGMGMT, SHUTDOWN

# Users in the group wheel can execute any command impersonating any user.
#%wheel ALL= ALL

#Default rule for root.
root ALL=(ALL) ALL

(Source: http://wiki.debian.org/sudo)

      sudo dpkg -i package_name.deb

• install dependency:

      sudo apt-get -f install

• install software:

      sudo apt-get -f install package_name

• install bundle file:

       sudo sh file_name.bundle

• install bin file:

       chmod +x file_name.bin
            ./file_name.bin

• Installing WIRESHARK’s dumpcap without allowing non-root users to capture packets:

       setcap 'CAP_NET_RAW+eip CAP_NET_ADMIN+eip' /usr/bin/dumpcap

Shelr.tv allows Unix/Linux command line users to record something interesting from their terminal and share it to followers.

It is a bit like YouTube for plain text shellcasts. A great feature is that you can copy and paste everything you see.

A nice intro with interesting comments from one of the core developers can be found on linuxaria.com.

A Debian package has been proposed through the Debian “package mentor” system.

Can you buy a PC with Linux anywhere?

Yes. Ebay.

For this I’m initially using a Panasonic HD Television, switching soon to a HDMI-capable monitor – using a standard HDMI cable too. I’m also using an 8GB SDHC Sandisk card with the latest Debian Squeeze image – downloaded in under 10 minutes from the Raspberry Pi mirror website.

When I saw the login prompt I entered the most recent default credentials: (for Debian) username: pi and password: raspberry and then was instantly accepted into the CLI screen. It’s phenomenal.

Images are to come of the initial process of setup in a gallery post later, and then to move on to more advanced stuff – programming, web servers, VNC and more.

All in all, a great device. The possibilities are endless with the Raspberry Pi. It’s an under £30 microcomputer with a lot of potential.

Para instalar o Archey, que deriva do ArchLinux, mas que agora suporta uma boa quantidade de distros, basta correr:

$ sudo apt-get install lsb-release scrot  
$ wget http://github.com/downloads/djmelik/archey/archey-0.2.8.deb  
$ sudo dpkg -i archey-0.2.8.deb

Para instalar o Screenfetch, basta escreverem:

$ wget http://served.kittykatt.us/projects/screenfetch/screenfetch-2.4.0.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i screenfetch-2.4.0.deb

Aqui ficam algumas screeens.

Se quiserem que alguma destas apps sejam corridas no arranue do sistema, basta para isso adicionarem “screenfetch” ou “archey” no ficheiro .bashrc em (/home/oteu_username/.bashrc).

When for eg. mysqltuner shows something like “Total fragmented tables: 20″ and you are awake at a very unpopular time (table optimization will lock your tables so it is possible your site is unreachable for a few moments) you can simply paste the following to your shell:

LOGIN="-u<user> -p<secret>"
mysql $LOGIN <<EOF
$(for db in `mysql $LOGIN -e 'show databases'|sed -e 's/\|//g'|egrep -v '^Database|information_schema|performance_schema'` ; do
echo "USE $db;" ; mysql $LOGIN -D$db -e 'show tables'|sed -e 's/\|//g'|egrep -v '^Tables_in_'|awk '{print "OPTIMIZE TABLE "$1";"}'
done)
EOF

You have to change your mysql login details or leave it empty if you are using the ~/.my.cnf config file.

In the previous post I covered process of the replacing buggy closed-source firmware with the Debian Linux on the  IOMEGA StorCenter Pro IX-12 NAS device. But for effective and reliable usage installation process is not enough – you also need to re-implement hardware and software monitoring. StorCenter Pro IX-12 is pretty standard intel-based box, but it has some vendor-specific customization which we will discuss now. Below is a [possibly incomplete] list:

• Temperature sensors. In the BIOS i found that devices shows temperature for the:
  • CPU temperature
  • Ambient Temperature
  • NIC Temperature
  • Midplane 1 and Midplane 2 temperature
  • PSU1 and PSU2 temperature
• FAN rotation speed:
  • FAN1 – FAN3 sensors (no idea where they are)
  • PSU1  fan and PSU2 fan sensors
• LEDs and buttons:
  • Power LED (seems to support 2 colours + blinking)
  • HDD LEDs (every caddy has Status and Activity LEDs, Status could be green, red or blinking)
  • Power Button (controlled by ACPI, works without modifications)
  • Reset (or “Factory Defaults”?) button near network cable socket.

Initially I expected that this functionality is managed using IPMI interface, like in most modern server boards. But I found no IPMI management, so  I decided to look on the original firmware to find how to manage this devices. Old firmware is still existing on the 1GB Flash drive connected to the motherboard, so I mounted it and found that software is living in squashfs file-system in a file (probably to save disk space) and found that it using strange “/proc/wix/*” interface to access hardware-specific features. Also I found that module which providing this interface is compiled into the kernel, so according to GNU GPL sources must be provided.

Reimplementing vendor-specific functionality

Then I found that there is archive with GPL sources on the IOMEGA site, so I downloaded and extracted it. It was a nice finding – archive contains not only source of user-land, but also patches to the kernel. I found that all hardware-specific kernel code is open source (hooray!) and is available in the ix12wix_100305v2.patch file. This patch contains kernel configuration for the 2.6.32 kernel, as well as many self-written kernel modules with hardware-specific code. Initially I was thinking to port them to 3.2 kernel, but after looking on the code I decided not to do this. From my personal opinion code is quick & dirty, without attempts to use standard Linux interfaces and subsystems. Also I don`t think that we really need this /proc/wix/* interface (why “/proc”, it should be “/sys”) .  But sources itself are very important to understand how to deal with this non-standard devices. Some findings:

• Most of devices are on the I2C bus and kernel modules are working with them directly
• PSU units are also connected via I2C
• LEDs functionality is implemented in a very tricky way . HDD “Status” and “Fault” LEDs (1-12) are connected to the 3 different GPIO modules: PCA9552, PCA9539 and PCA9557 (on I2C bus). “Power” and “Sys ID” LEDs are connected to the Intel ICH9 GPIO (on PCI bus).
• There is ICH9 watchdog device, utilized by standard iTCO_wdt driver. Good finding, we can use it in Linux.
• Temperature sensors are also on different devices: on every PSU, 2 TMP175 sensors on midplane, and 3 (CPU, NIC and Ambient) on sch5027e controller. All of them are connected via I2C bus.
• There is also another watchdog on baseaddr = 0×0500 (referenced as SIOWDTimer) which is used to poweroff the server in case of temperature events.

I2C bus is detected and working with standard i2c_i801 module. I am also installed loaded i2c_dev kernel module and i2c-tools package to play with I2C bus.

This is I2C bus detection results and some my comments

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f
00: -- -- -- -- -- 08 -- -- -- -- -- -- --
10: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 18 -- -- -- -- -- -- --
20: -- -- -- -- -- -- 26 -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 2e --
30: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
40: -- -- -- -- 44 -- -- -- -- -- 4a 4b -- -- -- --
50: -- 51 -- 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 -- -- -- -- -- --
60: 60 -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 69 -- -- -- -- 6e --
70: -- -- -- -- 74 -- -- --

Comments:
0×08 – Unknown
0×18 – pca9557 chip, Fault LEDs, HDD 5-12
0×26 – pca9535 chip, Hardware alarms (?) for different events
0x2e – M/B FAN and Temperature monitoring chip
0×44 – Unknown
0x4a, 0x4b – tmp75 temperature sensors on midplane
0×51, 0×53 – DIMM DDR2 SDRAM 1024MB eeprom
0×54, 0×55 – DELTA DPS-700LB Power Unit eeprom (PSU1, PSU2)
0×56 – M24C16/08/04/02/01 I2C EEPROM (???)
0×57 – AT24C02 I2C EEPROM
0×58, 0×59 – Sensors for the PSU1 and PSU2
0×60 – pca9552 chip, HDD Status LEDs, HDD1-HDD12
0×69, 0x6e – Unknown
0×74 – pca9539 chip, HDD fault leds, HDD1-HDD4

I used i2cdetetect tool to scan I2C bus and wix kernel module sources to find corresponding devices.

System Temperature and FAN sensors

The most important is to monitor temperature and FAN status. Temperature may go high because of fan problems or because of external conditions. We have a lot of information sources for the temperature monitoring:

• 3FAN and 3 temperature sensors on sch5027e
• 2 LM175 temperature monitoring chips installed on midplane.
• CPU internal temperature sensors
• Hard disk internal temperature sensors
• Power Supply Unit fan RPM and temperature sensors

Lets see how we can access this data.

I decided not to do one more non-standard interface, but to use lm_sensors software to get the information. sensors-detect tool was able to detect LM85 monitoring chip and suggested to load lm85 module. Also CPU sensors were detected and “coretemp” kernel module was recommended to load. I found that LM85 module is, in fact, working with sch5027e chip, so probably they have compatible interfaces. On this stage I was able to get information from CPU and motherboard sensors.

Then I found that LM175 should be supported by “lm75″ kernel module, but nothing was detected when I loaded it with modprobe. After looking into module source code I found that there is no detection procedure for the LM175, so we need to manually specify sensors addresses. I tried to do this using this 2 commands:


echo tmp75 0x4b > /sys/bus/i2c/devices/i2c-0/new_device
echo tmp75 0x4a > /sys/bus/i2c/devices/i2c-0/new_device

And right after this I got 2 new sensors, available with “sensors” command or via sysfs interface. I added this commands to /etc/rc.local to detect them on boot. It is possible to view sensors directly using sysfs or (more convenient) with “sensors” tool from lm_sensors. I modified default configuration (/etc/sensors.conf) to better reflect ix12 hardware:


chip "lm85-*" "lm85b-*" "lm85c-*" "adm1027-*" "adt7463-*" "adt7468-*" "emc6d100-*" "emc6d102-*"
label in1 "Vcore"
label in2 "+3.3V"
label in3 "+5V"
label in4 "+12V"
set in2_min 3.3 * 0.90
set in2_max 3.3 * 1.10
set in3_min 5.0 * 0.90
set in3_max 5.0 * 1.10
# Depending on how your chip is hardwired, you may or may not have
# +12V readings.
set in4_min 12.0 * 0.90
set in4_max 12.0 * 1.10
label temp1 "CPU Temp"
label temp2 "Ambient Temp"
label temp3 "NIC Temp"
ignore fan4


chip "tmp75-i2c-*-4a"
label temp1 "Midplane Temp 1"


chip "tmp75-i2c-*-4b"
label temp1 "Midplane Temp 2"

With this settings after running “sensors” I have:

Adapter: ISA adapter
Core 0:      +45.0°C  (high = +78.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1:      +45.0°C  (high = +78.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

lm85-i2c-0-2e
Adapter: SMBus I801 adapter at 1100
in0:          +2.51 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +3.32 V)
Vcore:        +1.08 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +2.99 V)
+3.3V:        +3.27 V  (min =  +2.97 V, max =  +3.63 V)
+5V:          +5.16 V  (min =  +4.50 V, max =  +5.50 V)
+12V:        +12.12 V  (min = +10.81 V, max = +13.19 V)
fan1:        3985 RPM  (min =  100 RPM)
fan2:        3913 RPM  (min =  100 RPM)
fan3:        4038 RPM  (min =  100 RPM)
CPU Temp:     +35.0°C  (low  = -127.0°C, high = +127.0°C)
Ambient Temp: +46.0°C  (low  = -127.0°C, high = +127.0°C)
NIC Temp:     +45.0°C  (low  = -127.0°C, high = +127.0°C)
cpu0_vid:    +2.050 V

tmp75-i2c-0-4b
Adapter: SMBus I801 adapter at 1100
Midplane Temp 2: +37.0°C  (high = +66.0°C, hyst = +65.0°C)

tmp75-i2c-0-4a
Adapter: SMBus I801 adapter at 1100
Midplane Temp 1: +35.0°C  (high = +66.0°C, hyst = +65.0°C)

Power Supply Unit sensors

As I already notices this device has 2 power supply units (PSU) to provide redundancy. To make it work properly we need to monitor both PSU. Devices itself are DELTA DPS-700LB (you can read name and serial number using I2C). I found no Linux driver for this device in the kernel, but protocol itself is very simple and available in the wix iomega sources, so I decided to use this device from userland.

To query PSU device from Linux i used i2cget command fro the i2c-tools package. Also “i2c-dev” kernel module needs to be loaded. Using kernel module functionality i re-implemented PSU monitoring in Perl. Now it is possible to read voltage, fan speed and PSU temperature using psu_read.pl. If running without arguments it will display PSU sensors information in “sensors” like mode. Running with “-n” will make psu_sensors.pl act as Nagios plugin.  Below is an example of the script output

psu700-i2c-0-59
PSU Temp: 47°C
+12V: +12.0 V
fan1: 6960 RPM

psu700-i2c-0-58
PSU Temp: 47°C
+12V: +12.0 V
fan1: 7680 RPM

Smartmontools

With smartmontools it is possible to monitor drives physical state and temperature. Smartd also provides monitoring and reporting of the SMART attribute changes. Also i am using smartmontols to setup ERC value for the all drives installed in the NAS with a command:
lsscsi |grep ATA|awk '{print $6}'|xargs -n 1 smartctl -l scterc,100,100

I added  this command to the /etc/rc.local file.

Other server-specific hardware

It should be possible to use ix12 hdd LEDs from Linux, but this NAS is installed in the remote data center, so i had no chance to play with it. It should be possible to use it with kernel led and gpio subsystems.

Conclusion

It was possible to get all information from the non-standard hardware to monitor it state. This is a good example why it is so important to have an access to the source code. Feel free to comment this article.

Claro que você pode configurar o Nagios pra enviar email, sms etc. Mas se você não olha emails direto e também não liga muito para os sms que chegam, você instala esse nagstamon e ele fica no canto no Painel da sua máquina e então atualiza constantemente e mostra os alarmes que estão rodando pra você.

Olha só um exemplo simples que ta aqui na minha máquina agora:

E quando você passa a barra por cima do Warning, ele mostra mais detalhes:

Pra instalar esse cara (to usando Debian), basta executar um aptitude install nagstamon.

Depois de instalado vá em Aplicativos -> Sistema e abra o programa.

Aparecerá uma tela como essa:

Nem vou ficar explicando o que tem que colocar em cada campo, porque são bem sugestivos

E fim! Só dar o OK e nem precisa olhar email nem nada, porque os alarmes irão piscar direto no seu painel!

Pra quem usa firefox, também tem plugins para o nagios para ver alarmes parecidos como esse que mostrei agora

See ya

First of all, it is necessary to sum up the system and application requirements in order to operate FreePBX. FreePBX is a framework that runs on an Apache/ MySQL/ PHP stack. Therefore, it can be basically installed on any Linux machine. The configuration of Asterisk is maintained by FreePBX in a MySQL database. From the database, FreePBX creates the default dialplan files for Asterisk. FreePBX also configures Asterisk to write CDR data to the MySQL database. Currently, Asterisk developers and the community strongly recommend to use ODBC for the CDR module, yet, FreePBX uses the MySQL function in Asterisk. In order to use the conferencing module, DAHDI needs to be installed on the linux machine. There are basically two ways: install asterisk-dahdi via APT or simply install DAHDI before installing Asterisk from source. Installing Asterisk from source will deliver the most current version of Asterisk, APT repositories for Asterisk of Debian and Ubuntu are slightly behind in providing uptodate packages. Also, when installing from source, one can have “better” control over the features required or included (e.g. mp3 support for voice menus). For hardening the system, OpenSSL and OpenVPN can be used to secure HTTP and SIP/RTP traffic.

In the following, you can see a list of actions performed on a current Debian Wheezy 64bit for installing Asterisk and FreePBX

Update sources, include main, contrib and if desired non-free as well

vim /etc/apt/sources.list

And then.. update!

apt-get update

And upgrade

apt-get upgrade

Install OpenSSH Server for remote access during evalutaion and testing

apt-get install openssh-server

Install OpenVPN server, can be used later on for securing SIP/RTP

apt-get install openvpn

For more information on how to secure VoIP with OpenVPN on a SNOM phone: http://wiki.snom.com/Networking/Virtual_Private_Network_(VPN)/How_To_for_Debian

Install MySQL Server. MySQL is used by FreePBX and Asterisk.

apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client

Note: now you have to set the root password for MySQL as well, take good note of that, you will need it later on…

IMPORTANT: FreePBX uses Asterisks MySQL DB function for CDR, so don’t install ODBC if not necessary!!!

Despite my warning, in case you want to install ODBC and the ODBC conncetor for MySQL in case you want to use the DB function in dialplans later on: here’s an example. It’s basically copied from this O’Reilly article: http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9780596517342/asterisk-DB.html

apt-get install unixODBC unixODBC-dev
apt-get install libmyodbc

For being able to use ODBC, it is necessary to edit the file /etc/odbcinst.ini and set

[MySQL]
Description = ODBC for MySQL
Driver = /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/odbc/libmyodbc.so
Setup = /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/odbc/libodbcmyS.so
FileUsage = 1

Attention: check the path first before just copying with find -name libmyodbc.so from /usr or /
Check the ODBC configuration with:

odbcinst -q -d

Now, for Asterisk to be able to use ODBC later on, it is required to set the connectors in /etc/odbc.ini. In this example, i used the database names created later on for FreePBX and a MySQL user created specifically for FreePBX.

[asterisk-connector]
Description           = MySQL connection to 'asterisk' database
Driver                = MySQL
Database              = asterisk
Server                = localhost
UserName              = freepbx
Password              = hybris123
Port                  = 3306
Socket                = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock

[asteriskcdrdb-connector]
Description           = MySQL connection to 'asteriskcdrdb' database
Driver                = MySQL
Database              = asteriskcdrdb
Server                = localhost
UserName              = freepbx
Password              = hybris123
Port                  = 3306
Socket                = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock

In case you’ve skipped ODBC, then continue from here

Now install Apache2 and PHP5. FreePBX requires php-cli to be installed, which is part of php-common library

apt-get install apache2
apt-get install php5 php5-mysql php5-mcrypt php5-common libapache2-mod-php5

Also, FeePBX requires the PEAR DB module to be installed, so install

apt-get install php-pear php-db

Some of you might think that php-db will offer pear DB, but actually you will need to run

pear install DB

This will install a “deprecated” version of pear DB, but FreePBX relies on that

Now if you like, you can also install perl, python, whatever else you might think could be useful for you. Please note, that your machine might also need some additional hardware drivers for T1/PRI/BRI interface or whatever hardware!!! In case you have enabled SELinux on your machine: FreePBX doesn’t play well with SELinux, so make sure it’s either disabled or just don’t install it.

In the later, in order to install FreePBX you will run a PHP script and in this script the exec() function will be used. Now, in my case, this required SUDO to be installed, which one might think is always installed with a virgin Debian, but actually it’s not. I ran the script as root, yet SUDO was required!

apt-get install sudo

Installing asterisk from source offers the latest release, yet it requires to manually install quite a few additional packages before you can get started. For Debian Wheezy, Asterisk 1.8 can be installed from Aptitude repositories. Aptitude will install Asterisk as complete as possible, yet there’s a bit more one can install from the repositiories, like mp3 support, dahdi for conferences etc.
A very comprehensive installation that is useful for FreePBX can be achieved by getting following packages.

First, install DAHDI hardware drivers, which are needed by app_meetme (conferencing). Then continue with installing Asterisk. DAHDI must be installed from SOURCE from the Asterisk.org Website. DAHDI must be installed as Kernel module, and this is currently (May 2012) not the case when installing DAHDI from APT repositories. DAHDI provides a timing device for synchronizing the voice/sound streams in conferences, music on hold etc.

apt-get install libxml2-dev libncurses5-dev subversion g++ make linux-headers-$(uname -r)
cd /usr/src/
wget http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/dahdi-linux-complete/releases/dahdi-linux-complete-2.6.0+2.6.0.tar.gz
tar xfvz dahdi-linux-complete-2.6.0+2.6.0.tar.gz
cd dahdi-linux-complete-2.6.0+2.6.0
make all
make install
make config
/etc/init.d/dahdi start

apt-get install asterisk \
asterisk-dahdi \
asterisk-sounds-main \
asterisk-core-sounds-en-gsm \
asterisk-core-sounds-en-wav \
asterisk-moh-opsound-gsm \
asterisk-moh-opsound-wav \
asterisk-sounds-extra \
asterisk-mp3 \
asterisk-mysql \
asterisk-ooh323 \
asterisk-prompt-de \
asterisk-voicemail \
asterisk-doc \
asterisk-dev \
libasound2-plugins \
jackd2 \
lm-sensors \
snmp-mibs-downloader \
libsox-fmt-all \
speex \
srtp-utils \
vpb-utils

This will take some time…

Once asterisk is installed, you can check if it’s running properly by entering the CLI mode of Asterisk

asterisk \-rvvvvv

You should then see somthing like this:

Asterisk 1.8.10.1~dfsg-1+b1, Copyright (C) 1999 - 2012 Digium, Inc. and others.
Created by Mark Spencer <markster@digium.com> Asterisk comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY;
type 'core show warranty' for details. This is free software, with components licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 and other licenses;
you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions. Type 'core show license' for details.
=========================================================================
== Parsing '/etc/asterisk/asterisk.conf': == Found
== Parsing '/etc/asterisk/extconfig.conf': == Found
Connected to Asterisk 1.8.10.1~dfsg-1+b1 currently running on horse-with-no-name (pid = 8005)
Verbosity is at least 5
horse-with-no-name*CLI>

To leave the CLI, simple type exit and then hit return.

SOUND PROBLEMS: Unfortunately, some sound-packages didn’t install their sound file to /var/lib/asterisk/sounds but to /usr/share/asterisk/sounds and sometimes, Asterisk wouldn’t open sounds in /var/lib/asterisk/sounds but instead in /usr/share/asterisk/sounds. But: /usr/share/asterisk/sounds is a depricated location for soundfiles since Asterisk 1.6. Therefore, if you experience any problems with sound files not playing (look at CLI for hints on this), then you can consider to SOFTLINK the locations from /var/lib/asterisk/sounds to /usr/share/asterisk/sounds:

cd /usr/share/asterisk/sounds
ln -s /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/en/ en

Now that Asterisk is installed, it is a good idea to change the user running the apache2 daemon, because FreePBX requires that Apache is run with the same user that runs Asterisk. Just edit the file /etc/apache2/envvars and replace the user www-data with asterisk.

export APACHE_RUN_USER=asterisk
export APACHE_RUN_GROUP=asterisk

Next up, it is time to install FreePBX. The source of FreePBX can be obtained from www.freepbx.org, the current version of FreePBX at the time writing this is 2.10 and can be obtained by

cd /usr/src
wget [http://mirror.freepbx.org/freepbx-2.10.0.tar.gz]
tar -xvf freepbx-2.10.0.tar.gz

So far so good, you’ve downloaded FreePBX and un-TAR-ed it and all’s well and you only need to run the install script… OH NO!!!
It’s not that simple, i’ve tried that a few time but i never got a nice and smooth running FreePBX, so what should be done now?

First: makesure the /etc/asterisk directory is empty, FreePBX will need to place new files in there.

In preparation for setting up the database, it’s not a bad idea to create a MySQL user for FreePBX instead of providing root access, you might even want to use a different database host during installation, but that’s something different… Let’s concentrate on getting things done: create the databases used by FreePBX

mysql -u root -p
enter password: ***
mysql> create database asterisk;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> create database asteriskcdrdb;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> grant all privileges on asterisk.* to "humpty" identified by "dumpty";
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> grant all privileges on asteriskcdrdb.* to "humpty" identified by "dumpty";
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> exit;

Now run the SQL scripts provided in the source files in the folder SQL in order to setup the databases:

mysql -u root -p asterisk < SQL/newinstall.sql
mysql -u root -p asteriskcdrdb < SQL/cdr_mysql_table.sql

FreePBX is not yet ready for installation in case you are using PHP 5.4!!!
Why? Because a PHP function in the recording module of FreePBX is using the $_REQUEST global variable as argument, and this is invalid in PHP 5.4 and causes the install to throw a bunch of errors. Simply edit the file amp_conf/htdocs/admin/modules/recordings/functions.inc.php in your FreePBX source directory and change each occurance of $_REQUEST to $REQUEST in the function recordings_update aroun line 260. For more information, read: http://www.freepbx.org/trac/ticket/5654

Also, in PHP 5.4 the default timezone for date() isn’t set, which needs to be set in following files
/etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
/etc/php5/cli/php.ini
Search for the date section and set

date.timezone = "Europe/Berlin"

The install script includes several files, which will check on the filesize of the FreePBX installer logfile. In case this file does not exist, the PHP filesize() function will throw an E_WARNING type of error. This is harmless, yet you can work your way around this error by replacing

$size = sprintf("%u", filesize($amp_conf['FPBXDBUGFILE'])) + strlen($txt);

with

$size = file_exists($amp_conf['FPBXDBUGFILE']) ? sprintf("%u", filesize($amp_conf['FPBXDBUGFILE'])) + strlen($txt) : 0;

on lines 75 and 641 in file amp_conf/htdocs/admin/libraries/utility.functions.php

Now, preparation is almost done. When evaluating and trying to install FreePBX, i’ve had some problems each time i ran the install script because i entered Apache Webroot as /var/www, which is valid on my Debian. Yet, FreePBX tried to move several files to /var/www/html, which is the Apache Webroot on the FreePBX distro. If you’re like me, lazy and pragmatic, then you would also do

mkdir /var/www/html
chown asterisk:asterisk /var/www/html

And set the default webroot of Apache to this directory in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default

<VirtualHost \*:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost

DocumentRoot /var/www/html
<Directory ></Directory>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www/html>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>

ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
<Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
AllowOverride None
Options \+ExecCGI \-MultiViews \+SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log

# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
# alert, emerg.
LogLevel warn

CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

IMPORTANT: Before you actually start the ./install_amp script, you may need to fix some more errors in the install script. I don’t want to go into detail, because it’s been documented already in the FreePBX bugtracker. A description of the errors and the fixes can be found here: http://www.freepbx.org/trac/ticket/5692

In particular, see fixes at

http://www.freepbx.org/trac/changeset/14052
http://www.freepbx.org/trac/changeset/14054
http://www.freepbx.org/trac/changeset/14055

The check for SELinux in the install script throws an error, so just adapt/edit the code near line 968 in file install_amp:

$tmpout = exec("getenforce 2>/dev/null", $tmpoutput, $sereturn);
if (isset($tmpoutput[0]) && trtolower($tmpoutput[0]) === "enabled") {
        // this method seems better because disabled and permissive are the same
        // if a user installs and realizes selinux is running the other method
        // requires a reboot to get selinuxenabled to work after editing the  selinux config
        // this will allow you to use setenforce 0 which turns selinux into permissive mode which
        // doesnt enforce, it just warns.
        fatal("selinux is ENABLED. This is not supported. Please disable selinux before using FreePBX");
}

Make sure to apply all fixes on FreePBX 2.10 install_amp script!!

Now preparation is done and the installation can be kicked off by running the install_amp script in the un-tared FreePBX source directory

./install_amp

The script will now ask for several values, e.g. your Apache Webroot, MySQL database location and credentials and a whole lot of other stuff which will be written to /etc/amportal.conf. Also, this script will move the files for the GUI to webroot and set file-ownership etc. If you have any problems and need to undo and fix the PHP scripts or some settings, then you can always undo the script actions by removing all files created by the install_amp script

rm /etc/amportal.conf
rm /etc/asterisk/*
rm /var/www/html/*
rm /var/lib/asterisk/bin

Once installation is done and hasn’t thrown any errors, then you should be able to login to FreePBX via http://<yourmachine>/admin => username: admin – password: admin

Go to menu Reports -> FreePBX System Status to see if FreePBX has detected errors

I’ve had problems with not symlinked files in the /etc/asterisk directory, in particluar the logger.conf file so just feel free to manually resolve this issue by

rm /etc/asterisk/logger.conf
ln -s /var/www/html/admin/modules/core/etc/logger.conf /etc/asterisk/logger.conf

Here’s a mail telling how the Config::Model Perl module was used to refactor existing configuration tools in Perl. Some punctuation and blank lines were added to improve the flow of this text. The full name and mail address of gkr is withheld on his request.

I took over a perl script that was responsible to pull data from several sources and push it after validation and re-packaging including some meta data into one of our production systems.

The script was never intended to be used for more then a few month. But as things go, we were still using it after a few years. Only now for a lot more sources. Since all the configuration of sources and meta data were contained as a single hash in this script, it became very unwieldy. Although the configuration seldom changed, once it got added it was not an option to keep it like this especially as we decided to prepare a Debian package for faster installation and version tracking. So I had to re-work it and was looking for some library that was allowing me to define how the configuration has to look like, providing sensible hard coded and computed defaults for some of the values.

This was when I found Config::Model on Cpan. It was, after some digging into the documentation, quite simple to define a rough first version of the complete config, including global default values as ini file and very simple to read in and write out. A more advanced version was not working because the Config::Model in Debian squeeze did not provide needed features.

Switching to yaml as configuration file format not only increased readability but also worked with the standard Squeeze package. Consistency is checked automatically inside the model so broken configurations are more unlikely in the future.

Of course I had some work re-factoring the original source but Config::Model allowed an easy addition of a value-checked and documented configuration file. To access the Config::Model::Instance I added small wrapper packages that allowed an easy access of the config elements by name to make the source easier to understand. The re-factoring needed for creating a Debian package for the Script – which is now a set of modules and a small executable – was simple once I had Config::Model working, since I was able to add new configuration items effortlessly and remove a lot of hard coded parameters.

I don’t use the cli tool yet for configuration editing but that’s going to be the next step.

Many thanks to gkr for this feedback. Let’s hope he will continue to give feedback on his usage of Config::Model.

All the best

Should the program ever try to read from the terminal window, it will be suspended, until the user “brings it to the foreground”; i.e., brings it to the state it would have had without the & to begin with.

To bring a program to the foreground, use “fg” or “%”. If you have more than one background job to choose from (“jobs” will show you), then use for example “%2″ to choose the second one.

Important:

If you forget to give the & at the end of line, and the process blocks the command input to the terminal window, you can put the process in the background “after the fact”, by using Ctrl-Z. The process is suspended, and you get the command prompt back. The first thing you should do then is probably to give the command “bg”, that resumes the process, but now in the background.

Langkah-langkahnya sebagai berikut:

1. Masuk ke system operasi Linux Debian 6

2. Pilih Application -> Accessories -> Root Terminal

3. Masukan Root Password
4. Tekan enter

5. Muncul tampilan terminal
6. Langsung agan ketikkan lspci untuk melihat hardware apa sajakah yang tersambung dengan komputer agan

7. Lalu muncul data-data hardware yang tersambung dengan komputer agan

8. Selanjutnya ketikan nano /etc/network/interfaces
9. Tekan enter

10. Muncul isi file dari interfaces, karena sebelumnya sudah saya edit jadi saya langsung keluar
11. Atur atau edit atau tambahkan semua konfigurasi yang diperlukan termasuk address, netmask, network, broadcast, gateway, dns-nameservers dan dns-search

12. Untuk menyiman konfigurasi tekan ctrl+x lalu tekan y kemudian tekan enter

13. Selanjutnya restart file tersebut dengan perintah /etc/init.d/networking restart

14. Jika sukses muncul keterangan reconfiguring network interfaces…done

15. Refresh ethernet 0 dengan mengetik ifup eth0
16. Tekan enter

17. Langkah terakhir mengecek IP Address ethernet 0, ketikkan ifconfig eth0

18. Muncul keterangan nomor IP Address seperti pada gambar di atas. Jika nomor IP Address sudah berubah maka konfigurasi IP Address berhasil.

NB: gunakan ifdown eth0 untuk mematikan interface eth0

Referensi:

- http://bkj-tutorial.blogspot.com/2012/04/konfigurasi-ip-address-debian-6-statis.html

- http://examplenow.com/id/ifup/

As I had now re-cycled a Class 4 8GB sd card (from an old camera!) I had enough ‘disk’ space to try the three available distro images – Fedora, Debian, and also Arch Linux (which I had never used before..)

After the somewhat fascinating experience of booting a relatively unknown distro, (I have been using Red Hat – and later Fedora – since 1997..) I immediately found that Arch Linux was noticeably better in response to commands, and in performance with XFCE.    I should emphasise that this is _not_ an exhaustive scientific test, but merely observation of responsiveness!    It is also a valuable learning experience, and I am becoming familiar with the intricacies of pacman (the Arch Linux package manager…)..      It would appear that Arch Linux is generally more ‘lean and mean’ than Debian or Fedora..

Next, I may try out the fourth image now available – and one that I must confess I had never heard of until recently – QtonPi, and I shall – of course – eagerly await the release of the upcoming Fedora 17 image…

GreaseMonkey is a Firefox extension that allows to load scripts (written in Javascript) that can “do useful things” when the user navigate in the website the script refers to.

This useful feature is supported also by Chrome (Chromium, Iron, etc..) and other browsers.

My script (called Debbugs-monkey) is tested on Firefox. Here are the two links: the git repository and the install link.

The usage is very simple. After installing (and eventually activating) the script, when you go on a bug report page in the DBTS (the address is something like http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?blahblahblah) in the right bottom corner of the page (regardless of the scrolling) there are some letters:

• T: goes to the Top of the page
• F: goes to the First message
• P: goes to the Previous message
• N: goes to the Next message
• L: goes to the Last message
• B: goes to the Bottom of the page

I know, at the moment it’s very ugly, maybe I’ll add some fancyness (like a border, or icons instead of letters), but the important thing is that it works (at least for me, but if you have some problems using it, or feature requests, please tell me).

Initially I planned to use device as NAS only. I really need very limited functionality (in fact – FTP and HTTP) so I was expected that vendor firmware will completely satisfy my needs. It was not the case.

First of all I found that firmware is not very stable – sometime device is not booting at all without any visible reasons. Second issue was that there is no firewall on this box. Its hard to believe – box is running on Linux but without ability to setup firewall! In combination with many services running on the device, without any ability to disable them it makes highly insecure system. Web gui itslelf was also buggy, with a lot of needless things (they have a “facebook” and “youtube” icons!), but without very important functions, like Firewall or IPv6. Using undocumented trick I was able to get the root, but after all I decided that it would be easer to start with normal distribution then to fix this crap.

Hardware

Box itself looks as 2U server with a 12 units for the drive caddies. It have 4 Ethernet sockets, USB and serial interface. For me it was surprising that there is no VGA interface at all – this is untypical for x86 server. CPU is Intel Core 2 Duo running at 3.0Ghz. Device starts booting even without disks at all, so I was expecting to find some internal storage. It was easy – 1Gb Apacer USB flash disk is inside, plugged directly on the motherboard. All disks are connected using 2 Marvell 88SE6440 controllers (btw, it should be SAS compatible). Server have 2 power supply units with a hot-swap replacement.

As I already mentioned – there is no VGA card, so to install Debian on this box I tried to use serial console. I used USB → Serial adapter + NULL modem cable.

Installation process

To install Debian on this box I used null-modem cable connected to USB → serial adapter. On my laptop I used minicom (but I think any other terminal should work fine). Terminal settings are 115200, 8n1, with minicom it should be “minicom -o -b 115200 -D /dev/ttyUSB0”. Then I am recommending to leave only 1 disk in the first caddy and use it as installation target. Later you will be able to add all your other disks. But with one disk it will be much easer setup our OS.

To setup OS you will need USB flash, because there is no CDROM in the server. It also should be possible to boot server from network, but I decided to use USB. I am recommending you to prepare 2 flash disks – one with Debian netinst and another one with SystemRescueCd.

Run terminal and turn on the server. After few seconds you should see booting progress in the terminal window. Press F2 to enter into BIOS. There are not too much options in it, we need only “boot order”. I am recompensing to exclude all devices from list, this will force server to boot from USB. Then insert USB flash with SystemRescueCd and save BIOS settings. Server will restart and will try to boot from inserted USB device. If everything is fine you should see SystemRescueCd boot menu in the terminal window. You will need to modify default options to use serial console. To do this press “Tab” and add to the boot prompt “console=ttyS0,115200” and then enter. You should see boot screen and zsh after some minutes. On this stage I am recommending to do 2 things:

1. Backup internal 1Gb disk content (just in case) using dd command (I used dd+ssh).
2. Remove partition table from the hard disk (I used gdisk tool).

Then you will need to reboot and insert USB with Debian installer. After boot prompt use “install console=ttyS0,115200” to start headless text install. I decided to create System 20Gb RAID1 partition for the Debian, which will be replicated on all drives. Also I created 4Gb RAID1 partition for swap (just in case). I did everything from installer, using manual partitioning. After restart I added HDD in the BIOS and found that system is not booting. Reason was Debian installer – grub was installed to the /dev/sda (USB flash) instead of disk, which was mapped as /dev/sdc. I booted from SystemRescueCd again and installed grub using chroot and grub-install. Also I am recommending to run update-initramfs on this stage, because for some reason md module was not activated on boot.

Solving problems after installation

On this stage Debian should boot normally. But when I trying to add more disks I found that system hangs with disk-related messages shortly. I found a lot of similar reports on the web (e.g. http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/linux-scsi/2010/4/12/6884601) without any visible solution. After all I decided to boot from SystemRescueCD again to check if disks are working correctly. And I found no issues! So, probably bug was fixed somewhere in -3 kernel and not back-ported. It is possible to use 3.x kernels on Debian using backports source. I used recommendations from this blog (http://yumechanmiru.blogspot.com/2012/02/debian-squeeze-32-kernel-update.html) and after installing latest 3.2 kernel and system restart all disk related issues where resolved. Only problem left was very slow loading time – it was trying to load ata_piix (motherboard sata controller?). Because it is not in use I just added it to the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf (blacklist ata_piix) and updated initramfs (update-initramfs -k all -u). Linux started very fast (in about 10 seconds) after restart.

Update: I just found  that with 3.2 kernel disks are handled by Linux ahci driver. It fine for me, I think it also possible to force AHCI driver on 2.6, but I don`t want to downgrade. If there is no SAS disks in the system it should be safe to blacklist mvs driver.

Adding more disks.

After boot you can add more disks into the NAS. Hot-swap works fine, messages about news disks will be in a kernel log soon. I used gdisk (“u” command) to clone partition table and then added new drives to system RAID1 using mdadm. Don`t forget to do “grub-install /dev/sdX” for every new disk to make your system bootable in case of first disk failure. Also I created large software RAID partition on every disk which will be used as storage and configured it as RAID-5 with XFS. There was nothing special in this so I will not cover this process here. On this stage we have Debian up and running, without any issues. Hooray!

Server monitoring and fine-tuning.

It is very important for every server, especially for NAS to monitor hardware status and temperatures. Without it data will never be safe. In the next post I will cover ix12 internals, including temperature sensors, different devices on I2C bus, GPIO devices, system leds, etc. Stay tuned

Update: Using Debian Linux on IOMEGA StorCenter Pro IX-12

To install it :

root@localhost:~#apt-get install debtags

To populate the debtags database with the latest up-to-date data, you should remove the “#” at the line beginning with “tags http://debtags.alioth.debian.org/tags/”.  You can launch the database update :

root@localhost:~# debtags update

Most of the packages available in the Debian repositories have tags inside their description. See below what an apt-cache show provides as information for the vim package.

root@localhost:~# apt-cache show vim
Package: vim
Priority: optional
Section: editors
Installed-Size: 1744
Maintainer: Debian Vim Maintainers <pkg-vim-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org>
Architecture: amd64
Version: 2:7.2.445+hg~cb94c42c0e1a-1
Provides: editor
Depends: vim-common (= 2:7.2.445+hg~cb94c42c0e1a-1), vim-runtime (= 2:7.2.445+hg~cb94c42c0e1a-1), libacl1 (>= 2.2.11-1), libc6 (>= 2.7), libgpm2 (>= 1.20.4), libncurses5 (>= 5.7+20100313), libselinux1 (>= 1.32)
Suggests: ctags, vim-doc, vim-scripts
Filename: pool/main/v/vim/vim_7.2.445+hg~cb94c42c0e1a-1_amd64.deb
Size: 915008
MD5sum: dab2644b07e8dea570fc020d59f69d41
SHA1: 8314d6388d378a8994e94d224255ef5b447851a8
SHA256: 22c28c136a0c761cdc19a299b7cd9b8adb00e9de7e66b787c945f2104cfdba9d
Description: Vi IMproved – enhanced vi editor
Vim is an almost compatible version of the UNIX editor Vi.
.
Many new features have been added: multi level undo, syntax
highlighting, command line history, on-line help, filename
completion, block operations, folding, Unicode support, etc.
.
This package contains a version of vim compiled with a rather
standard set of features.  This package does not provide a GUI
version of Vim.  See the other vim-* packages if you need more
(or less).
Homepage: http://www.vim.org/
Tag: devel::editor, implemented-in::c, interface::text-mode, role::program, scope::application, uitoolkit::ncurses, use::editing, works-with::text, works-with::unicode

Here is a couple of commands to deal with this kind of search. You do not need to be root to run these commands.

fool@localhost:~$ debtags show vim

With this command above, you get all the tags within the vim package. This is similar to apt-cache show.

If you want to list all the packages available in the repositories with the “devel::editor” tag :

fool@localhost:~$ debtags search devel::editor

cream – VIM macros that make the VIM easier to use for beginners
csstidy – CSS parser and optimiser
drpython – simple and customizable editor for the Python language
eclipse-jdt – Eclipse Java Development Tools (JDT)
editra – simple multi-platform text editor
eieio – Enhanced Implementation of Emacs Interpreted Objects
elvis – powerful clone of the vi/ex text editor (with X11 support)
elvis-common – common files for elvis, elvis-console and elvis-tools
elvis-console – powerful clone of the vi/ex text editor (without X11 support)
elvis-tiny – Tiny vi compatible editor for the base system
elvis-tools – text editing tools for programmers (elvfmt, elvtags, ref)
emacs – The GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
emacs-goodies-el – Miscellaneous add-ons for Emacs
emacs-intl-fonts – Fonts to allow multi-lingual PostScript printing from Emacs
emacs23 – The GNU Emacs editor (with GTK+ user interface)
emacs23-bin-common – The GNU Emacs editor’s shared, architecture dependent files
emacs23-common – The GNU Emacs editor’s shared, architecture independent infrastructure
emacs23-nox – The GNU Emacs editor (without X support)
emacsen-common – Common facilities for all emacsen
eric – full featured Python IDE
fte – Text editor for programmers – base package
fte-console – Text editor for programmers – console edition, no I18N support
fte-docs – Documentation and examples for the FTE editor
fte-terminal – Text editor for programmers – version for terminals
fte-xwindow – Text editor for programmers – X Window System edition with I18N support
gphpedit – development environment for PHP/HTML/CSS
haskell-mode – A major mode for editing Haskell in Emacs
infon-devel – Develop bots for the infon game
jed – editor for programmers (textmode version)
jed-common – S-Lang runtime files for jed and xjed
jed-extra – collection of useful Jed modes and utilities
jove – Jonathan’s Own Version of Emacs – a compact, powerful editor
js2-mode – Emacs mode for editing Javascript programs
jvim-canna – Japanized VIM (Canna version)
kate – K Advanced Text Editor
kobby – Collaborative text editor for KDE
kwrite – simple graphical text editor
lpe – Lightweight Programmer’s Editor
medit – A useful programming and around-programming text editor
monodevelop – Development Environment for GNOME
monodevelop-java – Java plugin for MonoDevelop
nvi – 4.4BSD re-implementation of vi
padre – Perl Application Development and Refactoring Environment
pida – Python Integrated Development Application, a Python IDE
plt-scheme – PLT Scheme Programming Environment
projectmanager.app – Simple IDE for GNUstep
pype – Python programmers editor
pyragua – Very lightweight Python editor
rkward – a KDE frontend to the R statistics language
scite – Lightweight GTK-based Programming Editor
vigor – nvi with the evil paperclip
vile – VI Like Emacs – vi work-alike
vile-common – VI Like Emacs – support files for vile/xvile
vile-filters – VI Like Emacs – highlighting filters for vile/xvile
vim – Vi IMproved – enhanced vi editor
vim-common – Vi IMproved – Common files
vim-gnome – Vi IMproved – enhanced vi editor – with GNOME2 GUI
vim-gtk – Vi IMproved – enhanced vi editor – with GTK2 GUI
vim-latexsuite – view, edit and compile LaTeX documents from within Vim
vim-lesstif – Vi IMproved – enhanced vi editor – with LessTif GUI
vim-nox – Vi IMproved – enhanced vi editor
vim-runtime – Vi IMproved – Runtime files
vim-scripts – plugins for vim, adding bells and whistles
vim-tiny – Vi IMproved – enhanced vi editor – compact version
vim-vimoutliner – script for building an outline editor on top of Vim
vimhelp-de – Vi IMproved – Documentation files (German translation)
wily – A work-alike of the Acme programming environment for Plan 9
wims – server for educative contents as courses, exercises, exams
xemacs21 – highly customizable text editor
xemacs21-basesupport – Editor and kitchen sink — compiled elisp support files
xemacs21-basesupport-el – Editor and kitchen sink — source elisp support files
xemacs21-bin – highly customizable text editor — support binaries
xemacs21-gnome-mule – highly customizable text editor — transitional package
xemacs21-gnome-mule-canna-wnn – highly customizable text editor — transitional package
xemacs21-gnome-nomule – highly customizable text editor — transitional package
xemacs21-mule – highly customizable text editor — Mule binary
xemacs21-mule-canna-wnn – highly customizable text editor — Mule binary compiled with Canna and Wnn
xemacs21-mulesupport – Editor and kitchen sink — Mule elisp support files
xemacs21-mulesupport-el – Editor and kitchen sink — source elisp support files
xemacs21-nomule – highly customizable text editor — Non-mule binary
xemacs21-support – highly customizable text editor — architecture independent support files
xemacs21-supportel – highly customizable text editor — non-required library files
xjed – editor for programmers (x11 version)
xvile – VI Like Emacs – vi work-alike (X11)

Then, you can install one of them with the apt-get program.

To find which tags have been created for a particular subject :

fool@localhost:~$debtags tagsearch perl

devel::lang:perl – Perl Development
implemented-in::perl – Perl

More info in the debtags manpage : man (1) debtags

If, like me, you didn’t already know; the Western Digital My Book live is a network attached storage(NAS) device that uses the Linux OS as its core. Out of the box it offers backup options for Windows and Mac using the WD software or Time Machine respectively. It acts as a streaming media server. WD provides an app so that you can easily browse its media from an iPhone or iPad. WD includes a free service that allows you to access your files, stored on the My Book in your home, via the cloud(web) from anywhere. It is a really sweet little device for just a few dollars more than a bare drive of the same size.

But there’s more! The WD My Book Live uses a Power PC 800MHz processor with 256MB of RAM. It also has a gigabit ethernet network interface. The operating system is Debian and, get this, the Lenny and Squeeze repositories are enabled by default! So, I can atp-get install whatever-the-hell-I-want and it just works! Right out of the box! (After enabling SSH at http://mybook/ui/ssh)

For the price of a hard drive I have a fully functional, tiny, fanless, headless Linux PC. Why WD didn’t lock down the OS like most other manufacturers I’ll never know. But, kudos to them for keeping this beauty open! By doing so, they’re providing a fantastic opportunity for the hackers(tinkerers) out there. And a thriving community of My Book tinkerers has developed and is doing all sorts of neat projects with this inexpensive PC that lacks only video and USB ports.

To start off, I decided to test it unmodified in its factory default state. It comes with a CD that includes the installation and setup software, but I hate having to use a, usually Windows, PC to setup a network appliance. So, I went looking for a web interface instead. The WD My Book did not disappoint. Using only a browser, I was able to fully configure the device including a static IP address, SAMBA(Windows) network shares, users and passwords, even the online cloud(web) access feature. The interface was full featured, attractive, polished and intuitive.

Within minutes I had the My Book running on the network. Configuring Windows backups to backup to the My Book network shares was a snap, using Windows’ built-in backup application. Later testing with the WD Smartware monitoring and backup software, available on a share from the My Book and the CD, was also easy to use and worked great. Mac’s Time Machine backup application worked natively with the My Book and at only half the price of an Apple Time Capsule!

Next up was Linux and, as always, things got little a bit less easy. The reason being that, most Linux distributions don’t have slick and ready to use backup applications like Time Machine installed and ready to go. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of backup tools and options from the old stalwart Tar to the now preferred method of Rsync. But, they are all fiddly command line tools that take a little effort to setup initially. I’ll post details of this process in another post, so it will be easy for you. But, once they’re configured, they work great without a second thought. On the My Book, Linux can backup to a SAMBA network share by default. But, after enabling SSH on the My Book other target options include FTP, SFTP, SSH, NFS, Rsync daemon and possibly more that I haven’t though of yet.

Now, let’s be clear, the WD My Book has no redundancy or data protection(available in the Duo version) so, you would be stupid to use it as your solitary storage device. Sooner or later the WD Green drive inside will fail.

But, using the My Book as a backup target where you are storing a redundant copy of your data is the safe option that it was designed for. It is a great backup strategy for multiple devices that can protect against hardware failure/loss/theft, as well as a grab and go option in the event of a natural disaster like, storm, fire or flood.

The My Book Live is not super fast. The 800MHz processor is small by today’s PC standards, but it’s the Green drive that limits performance, as I discussed in this previous post. Despite this, the performance is perfectly adequate for a home storage device.

But, the WD My Book does what it says on the box for a great price. And thanks to WD leaving open access to its Linux OS, it is a fantastic little device for a wide selection of other uses! You can get the Western Digital My Book Live 2 or 3TB drive for a great price from Amazon and I’d recommend one for every home network.

Debian has excellent gnat/Ada program maintainers and they had done a great job.  But then I always like the Slackware way of doing things not the Debian way.   My work are based on their hard work.

At first,  I tried to make the package to follow the Debian policy for Ada, but then I need to change quite intrusively to the original package.  And somehow I don’t like the way it place the library and include files.  Since this is Slackware, in the spirit of it, I tend not to change the original package too much unless it is really necessary.  The directory structure come out roughly  like the following:

/usr/include/package-name/  -- for include .adb and .ads files
/usr/lib<64>/package-name/ -- for .ali files
/usr/lib<64>/gnat/package-name.gpr

Now start building packages.  The gcc compiler in Slackware 13.37 is a little bit old for Ada language support, and it happened that build script for  gcc4.7.0 just shown up in the slackware-current tree.   I downloaded the whole source tree for gcc-4.7.0 from slackware-current and start to modified it.  I tried to mimic what Ludovic Brenta has done on Debian and build two libraries (libgnatprj/libgnatvsn) from the compiler source directly,  so that they could be reused latter for asis and gps.  His patched are quite intrusive and does not apply well as it is mean for 4.6.  I examined the patch and extracted what I needed and form two Makefiles for building libgnatprj and libgnatvsn without modified the gcc source tree itself.  It built fine first, but has linking error when try to build other packages.  It took me more than 10 builds of the compiler to make it working fine.  I haven’t took the time to compile a sjlj run time, as I don’t have a need for it yet.

Then I compiled XmlAda using the xmlada-for-gps-5.0.1-gpl-src.tgz source.  This required not much an effort.   I use the svn checkout of the GtkAda and it fixed some path problem I reported, so no patch is needed (actually, it does have a small patch to relax the path configuration).  The gprbuild program gave some challenge, as it compiled OK but failed to build Ada program.  It turns out to be a configuration xml problem, it has hard coded some lib path into it and does not acknowledge the path given during configure.

GPS is also from svn checkout.  Compiling GPS took a few round, patches are mostly for path correction and some from the Debian team.  It was compiling GPS that exposed the linking error about unresolved symbol for libgnatprj, it took me quite a few recompile of the library and compiler to get it working.

The rest are relatively easy for florist, aunit, gnatcoll, asis,etc.

The build scripts and source could be found here: goo.gl/osOED.

The build scripts could also be found at gitHub ada-4-slackware.

ps. I only tested on Slackware64 13.37, it supposed to work fine with normal Slackware, but I did not test it.

pps. The svn checkout of GtkAda and GPS are using git svn clone, so it has the git version in the build tag and source file in stead of svn build number.

11.0 xbmc Eden, the famous Media Center, is now available directly from the official repositories of the next version 4.12 lts precise pangolin of Ubuntu . This follows its integration into the deposits of the distribution Debian. So now to install the stable version no need to add a PPA repository. The only difference with the stable version of PPP, for licensing reasons, is the support for playing DVD videos unless you install libdvdcss2. Installing XBMC on Ubuntu 4.12

The procedure is simplified and becomes simply:

sudo  apt-get  install xbmc libdvdread4

and for DVD playback:

sudo  / usr / share / doc / libdvdread4 / install-css.sh

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