sssu.edu.in

The new domain sssu.edu.in is now operational. There was an error with the mail server: I'd forgotten to add to main.cf as per the readme and another thing was that I'd used a CNAME as the MX record which is not allowed, according to dnsstuff.com. Corrected.

making NTSC / PAL changes persistent

Using the video camera for skype as mentioned earlier, the NTSC setting was not being saved in the video source settings - it was reverting to PAL on reboot, when skype restarts. Googled and found a solution here. Downloaded VideoWDMControl v2.2, put it in the startup so that as soon as the machine boots up, the source can be set. But still, it would be better if the changes could remain after a reboot.

PDF Split and Merge

Via freshmeat.net, a freeware for splitting and joining PDFs for R - another idea for doing this was to print to pdf stating print pages 1-3 or whatever. This guy has a nice revenue model - asks for donations for the compiled version of enhanced version, while giving away the source, and the basic version, free.

skype with video

Over the last few days, some activity on skype, tried out the webcam feature using the Sony Handycam TRV-36. Nice, full-motion video, good even in full-screen mode, unlike Yahoo.

DVD Decrypter for reading DVDs with errors

DVD Decrypter's nice retry feature and error correction mechanism are pretty robust. In case some file is not readable otherwise, copy to hard disk using "File" mode and then run DVDShrink if necessary in "Re-author" mode to create ISO file. This way, files which Fair Use Wizard can't encode directly are also made available.

mounting various large hard disks

Some days back we'd mounted a 250 GB hd on developer on the linux machines using samba - the fstab entry is

//path/to_share /path/to/mount/folder smbfs rw,credentials=/path/to/credentials.txt,uid=500,gid=500 0 0

where the uid and the gid are the user and group ids of the user who needs rw access to the share. For finding a user's uid and gid, the command is

id username

On our Jo'berg server, the hard disk is on the same machine, so the fstab entry for mounting it is given in a previous post.

helping TB with another domain

Spent an hour with TB's manager's domain from nettigritty. Authoritative name servers for the domain were not configured properly. Logging in to http://domain.nettigritty.com/customer

In the Management console, clicking Domain Registration, Clicking on Modify Name Server in the second row, changed the name servers from ns11.nettigritty.com etc to
dns1.interactivedns.com
dns2.interactivedns.com
dns3.interactivedns.com
dns4.interactivedns.com

This did the trick. Dns changes took approx 10-15 minutes, then it started working.

copying missing files to Jo'berg hard disk

From the daily email "SGHBACK 846 : Automatic Audio files Statistics Check for SGH" copied and pasted to kwrite and made appropriate find/replace so that the lines were like

nice -n +10 cp 'ANN_BHAJANS_SWAHILI_END.mp3' ../audio -v

copied to audioold, did chmod +x and ran. Also, the new audio has noexec, since it is mounted as user. So, any such stuff needs to be run from some other partition with the full path.

new hard disk install at Jo'berg

Added to fstab

/dev/hdd1               /home/sgh/audio2         ext3    rw,user,owner   1 2

Had to do a

chown -R sgh:sgh audio2

since the files had some other ownership stamp. Stopped playout, umounted audio, mounted hdd1 as audio. Unfortunately the process was complicated by many files being missing in the new drive. Copying from the audioold directory....

iptables firewall config

saispace was giving too much trouble - bad network cable? - so connecting directly now instead of through NAT. So, set up firewall. Important part is the default

-A INPUT -i eth0 -j REJECT

just before the last COMMIT in the *filter table.