Saturday, October 31, 2009

CD ripping (sound-juicer) stuffed in karmic

My favourite CD ripper 'grip' has disappeared from the repository in ubuntu as of karmic. The built-in is sound-juicer, which sucks.

It comes with a shitty MP3 profile, but wouldn't even let me select it in the profile menu (yes, it was 'active'). Finally I ended up deleting all the profiles and creating my open mp3 profile, which allowed me to select it, but after I clicked extract, it always failed with 'failed to get output format'. I have the bad and ugly gstreamer packages installed, as well as lame.

I gave up and fell back to abcde, which is a command-line utility.

I edited '/etc/abcde.conf' and set:
LAMEOPTS="--preset standard"

then used 'abcde -o mp3'.

Why is it always so damn hard to rip a CD to mp3 in linux?

Monday, October 19, 2009

Howto install zabbix on ubuntu jaunty


apt-get install zabbix-server-pgsql

Get the auto-generated db password out of /etc/zabbix/zabbix_server.conf and use it when prompted in the next step:

apt-get install zabbix-frontend-php

If when you visit localhost/zabbix your browser tries to download a phtml file, you need to:

apt-get install php5-pgsql

and restart apache and the zabbix server.

If you try to import your zabbix config and you get "could not open XML input", you need to increase your "upload_max_filesize" in php.ini.

Zabbix mysql innodb backend shits itself on power outage

We had a power outage, and the mysql database that backs our zabbix install shat itself. The innodb tables couldn't recover themselves. I had to force an innodb recovery, which got me a running server, but I couldn't successfully do a mysqldump or select * into outfile because it failed on one table. I dumped everything else and tried a drop table on the corrupted table. The drop table didn't work, the mysql connection died after I hit enter and the table was still there. Eventually tried drop database with the same result. Yay.

Killed mysql and installed postgres.