JDPFu.com 2012

The behavior of Samba network shares changed with a recent patch. There was a security issue where unix extensions and softlinks created undefined behavior. I use softlinks, perhaps more than I should, for convenience.

Anyway, after I completely my normal weekly system patching today, I noticed that my samba shares weren’t working below a softlink from my HOME directory. I keep most things down this link since it points to the external RAID5 array, huge and fast. Fortunately, the security announcement included the settings to make it work again.

Just add

unix extensions = no

to the [Global] section of your smb.conf file.

Worked for me.

Here’s an insightful article at the Boston Review on How Software as a Service Takes Away Your Freedom. SaaS has been hyped as the way to deploy solutions quickly, pay for only what you need, when you need it, and avoid all the infrastructure costs. There are some important things that the hype leaves out.

I use comskip to locate commercials in mpeg2 TV recordings. It is a fairly heavy CPU user, enough that I can feel the system slow down when it is used. Of the multiple systems I’ve run it on (the exact same binary), they each show different frame rates that I thought to share today.

About 100 people attended Outerz0ne Con yesterday in south Atlanta (near the airport). This was my first hacker conference ever though I have attended DC404 and other industry meetings. It appeared that many people had a really good time without attending many of the talks. Below I’ll provide my impressions and key things learned from some of the more technical talks. The last talk contained extremely helpful information for anyone running a web site.

You can download the Free PDF version of the Ubuntu Pocket Guide

CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, contains 10,000+ different Perl modules. All of these work just about the same to get installed on a system. That’s because Perl programmers use a standard package for distributing software that includes the code, tests, and manual. Below I’ll show the general way to build and install most perl modules, including those with external, non-perl, dependencies. Then I’ll show how to automate this with CPAN.

I’ve been using Linux for years and haven’t had any issues with sound/audio working until recently. Audio had worked on this machine before, then it stopped working. Below is a fix that I found to work for my hardware.

I don’t know how to say this any clearer. MCE Buddy Rocks!. It is free, but they request a donation. I haven’t seen any nag-ware.

If you run Windows Media Center 7 and want to do anything with the TV tuner recorded files, check out MCEBuddy. It does the simple stuff by default. I suppose it will work with older versions of media center too, but cannot confirm that. What is the simple stuff?

The last few days, I’ve been playing with Ubuntu Server 9.10. It hasn’t been perfect. There have been problems along the way. So everyone else knows the issues, I’ll list a few here with a little detail.

It all started during the Server 9.10 x64 installation.

Be certain to check out the comments for solutions to issues as I discover them.

Last week I discovered that one the RSS/Atom feed methods on this site had been broke the last few months. I’ve taken steps to get both of them working again for the few subscribers (including myself). Most of you are using RSS, not Atom. RSS is my preference too.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen anything new in the feed recently, please update the feeds.

Sorry it took so long to notice. I’ve been migrating lots of hardware around and still working with insurance to get the laptop fixed.