Linux

Setting up an offline movie player using a Raspberry Pi and a Roku player.

I am transitioning to a new GnuPG key, here is my transition statement, based on one from Simon Josefsson Here is my signed statement: - -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512,SHA1 OpenPGP Key Transition Statement for Brian C. Lane I have created a new OpenPGP key and will be transitioning away from my old key. The old key has not been compromised and will continue to be valid for 30 days, but I prefer all future correspondence to be encrypted to the new key, and will be making signatures with the new key going forward.

I was going to write about using mock to make live iso's without using virt-install, but this week is the OpenStack Summit and one of the things you can use livemedia-creator (lmc) for is making disk images for use with OpenStack. If you followed the instructions in my previous post on creating live isos you already have everything you need except the kickstart and OpenStack. I'm not going to cover how to setup OpenStack, I used the instructions from the RDO project Quickstart without too much trouble.

In this post I am going to describe how to create bootable live isos using livemedia-creator (lmc). It was created so that the same Anaconda installer logic would be used for installing systems and creating bootable media like the live iso. lmc can also be used to create disk images, but I'll cover that in the next post. Anaconda and kickstart are used to install the packages, and lmc compresses the filesystem and wraps it up in an iso.

Fedora 22 is almost here, so I thought I'd write a couple posts on how to use lorax and livemedia-creator to create bootable Fedora images. I'll start with lorax. It is used to create the Anaconda boot.iso which is used to install systems using a network connection. You can also automate your installations by using the boot.iso with a kickstart file. Lorax is part of the current release-engineering workflow and is used to create the boot.

Automatic backups are important, especially when it comes to irreplaceable data like family photos. I have used s3cmd to maintain my website’s static files for a while now, and it was simple to use it to push my 100GB+ archive of photos over to S3. But I needed an automated way to update it with any new photos that my wife or I may take. The sync protocol really isn’t what you want – there should be no need to re-examine all the files that have already been archived.

It is easy to setup a simple chat over Tor using the socat utility. To receive incoming messages you first need to setup a Tor hidden service . Add this to the end of your /etc/tor/torrc file: HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/hidden-chat/ HiddenServicePort 2330 127.0.0.1:2330 After restarting Tor check the /var/lib/tor/hidden-chat/hostname file for your hidden service .onion address. Use socat to setup a listener on port 2330, now incoming connections to ADDRESS.onion:2330 will show up on your terminal.

I have been using BackupPC to automatically back up the systems on my LAN for years now. It started out with a 3x250GB RAID5 as the storage pool and when I ran out of space on that I added another disk to bring it up to about 700GB. BackupPC does an excellent job of pooling common files together so that they don’t take up extra space. This is especially useful if you are backing up system files on multiple systems running the same OS release.

I use mutt as my email client. Something that has recently been bugging me is that when reading a message it displays the original Date: header with the sender's timezone. Since I work with people in several different zones I am constantly having to do timezone math when looking at these. So I decided to fix that with a bit of python. One of mutt's features is that you can feed every email you view through a filter by using the display_filter setting.

A few weeks back my ancient Compaq laptop stopped booting (two LOUD beeps, no display, no drive noises). This system has been used in the garage to act as a serial to WiFi bridge for my AIS receiver, and to log temperatures for the garage and freezer temps you see at digitemp.com. The AIS data feeds the Live AIS view of Puget Sound. The laptop was exiled to the garage after its power connector broke for the 3rd time and I had to hard-wire it by soldering it directly to the motherboard.