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?

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.

Submitting malware and phishing urls to google safebrowsing and microsoft smartscreen

To submit dodgy urls, follow these instructions for firefox and these instructions for IE (requires IE 8 to be installed just to submit, thanks microsoft).

Chef - the new puppet?

I just encountered Chef, which is a 'systems integration framework' like puppet that allows you to manage configuration and much more across many machines. I've been using puppet for quite a while and love it, although as stated here, I find the puppet Domain Specific Language (DSL) very restrictive. There have been so many times I have wanted to do something reasonably simple for a fully-fledged programming language, that has either been impossible, impractical, or completely un-intuitive to accomplish with puppet. No, I don't have an example - next time it happens I'll blog.

In any case, Chef seeks to address this problem by giving you full-strength ruby, and is written by some long-term members of the puppet community. Apparently puppet has made the decision to stay away from a full programming language, hence Chef. Puppet has the momentum at the moment but this may be worth watching.

Updating a debian package

I followed this HOWTO to create a debian package update. With a debian watch file it is quite easy to grab a new upstream version. To run the 'debuild' step you will need all the build dependencies installed - these are listed in the debian/control file in the package directory.

sudo apt-get build-dep package

will install all the build dependencies for a given package.

Using the new sourceforge shell interface

Sourceforge has changed their shell access procedure again. This time it is a little complicated and unintuitive. You need to create a shell (time limited) with:

ssh -t username,projectname@shell.sourceforge.net create

Then you can copy files to your website using:

scp index.html username@web.sourceforge.net:/home/groups/p/pr/projectname/htdocs/