Chris Farris - Geeklog

losetup and offsets

Posted on February 20th, 2008 by Chris Farris.
Categories: Linux.

How to mount a filesystem inside a harddrive image

# losetup /dev/loop0 /path/to/diskimage
# fdisk -l /dev/loop0
(example)
Disk /dev/sdb: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 1044 8385898+ c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sdb2 1045 19457 147902422+ 83 Linux

suppose you want to mount the partition on sdb2, the offset for that
would be 8225280 * 1045 = 8595417600.

detach the disk image
# losetup -d /dev/loop0
and setup the loop for the partiion
# losetup -o8595417600 /dev/loop0 /path/to/diskimage
and mount it
# mount -t fstype /dev/loop0 /path/to/mountdir

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Data Recovery Tools

Posted on November 8th, 2007 by Chris Farris.
Categories: strange horned toads.

The Coroner’s ToolKit
TSK (The sleuth kit)

FSDB
Scrounge-ntfs
Photorec can recover photo data

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Possible SuSE Hosting provider

Posted on April 24th, 2007 by Chris Farris.
Categories: strange horned toads.

NetSonic - Linux Dedicated Server Hosting. Debian, CentOS, Fedora, Suse Servers.

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Installing MythTV on SuSE 10.2

Posted on April 8th, 2007 by Chris Farris.
Categories: MythTV.

My root filesystem died on my MythTV server while I was sick last week. After spending a good bit of time trying to recover the data, I lost my database and mythtv build.

Document I followed to get MythTV Installed and ivtv modules working using this document. This document has the package repository used: http://packman.iu-bremen.de/suse/10.2.

This command worked to get the ivtv driver to load:
sudo rpm -Uhv http://jarpack.com/suse/noarch/ivtv-firmware-0.1-1.noarch.rpm

ivtv-fb loaded without issues. It took a bit of googling to find a ivtv driver for xorg. Here it is:
http://www.hellion.org.uk/ivtv/debian/ivtvdev_drv.so~i386

LIRC was the next issue. Here is a bug with LIRC in SuSE 10.2 that prevents /dev/lirc and /dev/lirc0 from being created.
I compiled up the source and was able to copy just the kernel module to fix it.
cp drivers/lirc_i2c/lirc_i2c.ko /lib/modules/2.6.18.2-34-default/updates/lirc_i2c

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Mailman performance issues

Posted on March 16th, 2007 by Chris Farris.
Categories: sysadmin.

So I run the Atlanta Linux Enthuisasts’ list on mailman. Recently the server has been running loads between 5 and 8 - way more than it should be. Doing a top showed python using most of my CPU. I tracked it back to mailman and the config.pck file which as 50M.

The problem came about due to spam sent to the ale-* administrative addresses. Each time a spammer sent an email to that list, it would add an entry to the hold_and_cmd_autoresponses variable in the config.pck file. Every time python needs to access the ale config, it had to decrypt the config.pck file which uses lots of CPU.

The solution is to overwrite that vaiable with a null. Its possible doing this could break someone trying to subscribe to the list, but eh, its a free list, they can re-try.

Create a file with the following in it:

hold_and_cmd_autoresponses={}
then run the following command from your mailman root:

bin/config_list -i /tmp/foo ale

/tmp/foo is the file I created and ale is the list I needed to fix. It dropped my 50M config.pck to 1.8M and my load issues have gone down dramatically.

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Geek to Live: Sync your address book via IMAP - Lifehacker

Posted on February 27th, 2007 by Chris Farris.
Categories: Productivity.

Geek to Live: Sync your address book via IMAP - Lifehacker

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Junction Networks: Services: VoIP Calling

Posted on February 16th, 2007 by Chris Farris.
Categories: VOIP.

Junction Networks: Services: VoIP Calling

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mysqldiff — a utility for comparing MySQL database structures

Posted on February 13th, 2007 by Chris Farris.
Categories: MySQL, perl.

mysqldiff — a utility for comparing MySQL database structures

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ALE WordPress talking points

Posted on January 30th, 2007 by Chris Farris.
Categories: Wordpress.

Title: World Domination with WordPress

• What is WordPress
• The joys of Plugins
• antispam captcha
• spell check
• post rankings
• Firestats
• iCal
• Database management
• WP-phpMyAdmin
• Database Backup
• The joys of Themes
• Database nitty-gritty
• How WP can help with your meglamanical schemes
• Websites:
• http://www.ale.org
• http://www.gwinnettgop.org
• http://www.gopliberty.org
• Blogs:
• http://www.vitalpowers.com/blog
• http://www.chrisfarris.com/geeklog
• Advanced stuff:
• http://www.georgialegislativewatch.com/

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MythTV Rebuild

Posted on January 27th, 2007 by Chris Farris.
Categories: MythTV.

Wow, MythTV is a pain in the ass to build. Luckly I found a site that had OpenSuSE 10.2 rpms. That made it easier. I still had to copy over my config files from the old MythTV build.

http://packman.iu-bremen.de/suse/10.2

I had to manually alter the recording tables to copy the data from the old system to the new database.

The following query was used to compare settings from the old settings table and the new settings table:
select mythconverg.settings.value, mythconverg.settings.data, mythOLD.settings.data from mythconverg.settings, mythOLD.settings WHERE mythconverg.settings.value=mythOLD.settings.value AND mythconverg.settings.data != mythOLD.settings.data INTO OUTFILE '/tmp/setting.diff';

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