Video of my talk last month at GSLUG

Some photos from the Install Fest 2009. It really was fun and we had a number of library patrons drop in to chat and get free software! We also installed Linux on half-a-dozen different systems which were given away at the end of the event.

Plus a nice Christmas gifts: 20" LCD monitor and the ever gratifying Costco-sized Peppered beef jerky .

Thanks to BitPusher for sponsoring this work. Feel free to get involved or join the project if you are so inclined.

I've been do this for a while now and have most of the wrinkles ironed out.

Here is the software I use.

• Internet Browser such as Firefox
• tivodecode
• winff or HandBrake
• iTunes (optional)

Here are the steps.

1. My TiVo has a webserver so just visit https://192.168.1.249/ (replace with proper IP address) and login using U: tivo P: <your-Media-Access-Key>. Hint: The Media Access Key (MAK) can be found on your TiVo menus under settings. Find the show you want to put on your iPod. Download "Some Title.TiVo" to /share2/video/fromtivo/

2. On dogma (my FreeBSD file server) run

cd /share2/video/fromtivo/
tivodecode -m 1234567890 -o outfile.mpg "Some Title.tivo"

This produces the MPEG video. Note that the aspect looks funky in totem a.k.a. Movie Player but it gets fixed in next step.

3. On my Ubuntu laptop, run winff Application. (Note: HandBrake also works fine for this step).
. Add the .mpg file created in step 2. Specify output for iPod and Xvid 4:3. Click options and specify 320x240 in the size. Specify /share2/video/4itunes as the output folder.

4. Back in iTunes, import the resulting outfile.mp4 file and copy to iPod.

To make things like this easier I run a file server with NFS and Samba. Video files are shared across the network from the /share2/video mount point on Linux which is same as V:\ drive mapping on the windows desktops for the iTunes library import.

The symptom is that the carp0 interface appears but cannot be communicate, and failover does not happen. Reason being, the vmnet driver is silently dropping the packets on the floor!

To get it working requires a patch (on the host) to vmnet-only/driver.c and recompile.

Here is the patch for vmware-server-1.0.7 for Linux. Save it into /tmp/driver.c.patch

--- vmnet-only/driver.c.orig 2008-10-08 15:37:23.000000000 -0500+++ vmnet-only/driver.c 2008-10-08 15:44:50.000000000 -0500@@ -1284,6 +1284,9 @@     return ((flags & IFF_PROMISC) || MAC_EQ(destAddr, ifAddr) ||      ((flags & IFF_BROADCAST) && MAC_EQ(destAddr, broadcast)) || +  ((destAddr[0] == 0) && (destAddr[1] == 0) &&+   (destAddr[2] == 0x5e) && (destAddr[3] == 0) &&+   (destAddr[4] == 1)) ||     ((destAddr[0] & 0x1) && (flags & IFF_ALLMULTI ||        (flags & IFF_MULTICAST &&         VNetMulticastFilter(destAddr, ladrf)))));

The file is a little hard to find, being hidden in a vmnet.tar below /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/ ...

cd /usr/lib/vmware/modules/sourcetar xvf vmnet.tarpatch < /tmp/driver.c.patchtar cvf vmnet.tar vmnet-onlyvmware-config.pl

Then, choose the option to recompile the kernel drivers, specifically vmnet.

The one other addl. need (I'm not 100% sure on this) is that it may be necessary to allow promiscous on the ethernet device, in the .vmx file...

ethernet0.nopromisc = "false"

References...

• VRRP & CARP with VMware Server
  
• CARP problem with VMWare Server
  

$ debmirror --progress --verbose --nosource --method=ftp \--passive --host=ftp.osuosl.org --root=pub/ubuntu --dist=hardy \--section=main,restricted,universe,multiverse --arch=amd64 \/home/ftp/mirror/ftp.osuosl.org/ubuntu...gpgv: Can't check signature: public key not found

What is this error about public key? It turns out you need the Ubuntu PGP signing keys in your (trust) keyring to get this working.

$ gpg --keyring /usr/share/keyrings/ubuntu-archive-keyring.gpg \ --export | gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring trustedkeys.gpg --import...gpg: key 437D05B5: public key "Ubuntu Archive Automatic Signing Key <ftpmaster@ubuntu.com>" importedgpg: key FBB75451: public key "Ubuntu CD Image Automatic Signing Key <cdimage@ubuntu.com>" importedgpg: Total number processed: 2gpg:               imported: 2gpg: no ultimately trusted keys found

Now it works. Hints from this post much appreciated.

So brought up Synaptic and chose the upgrade option and the process began.

First it had to download gobs and gobs of new packages to install. Wait time - about 2 hours on my broadband connection. Granted their servers are a bit swamped with the new release.

After that the packages were installed (upgraded). There were problems though, cupsys was not cooperating. I ended up with a scary error message about packages not installing or something to that effect. Hesitantly I rebooted and crossed my fingers... what other choice was there?

The system did come back up, sort of. Let's just say some things were broken.

Now, for while I've run JFS for performance reasons. The cupsys package was not upgrading and investigation revealed a file in /var/log/cups had problems because it was not showing the usual permissions and ownership info. Instead it had ? for those bits.

Long story short there was filesystem corruption, and it two took runs of fsck.jfs -v -f after booting each time into 'diagnostic' mode and remounting / as read-only (mount -o remount,ro /dev/sda3)

The second problem was equally insiduous. Upon booting, where it fires up X... I get an error message stating your session was less than ten seconds, and Gtk was not happy... something about mkdtempdir: permission denied. After scratching my head for a bit I looked up the error on google and saw a post about someone losing their sticky-bit permissions on /tmp. That was it, chmod 1777 /tmp and restarting did take care of it.

So, anyone pushing gutsy is forewarned, this (and perhaps linux) is obviously still not fit for the masses.