.. on Linux
Computers
ESXi v4.1 SFTP access
Aug 17th
I came across something interesting while fiddling earlier, after spending about 2 hours building a static release of openssh server that was going to replace dropbear. I’d gotten to a point where I could build a i386 release of the binaries with no random library requirements and sshd would start and listen on a port defined in /etc/ssh/sshd_config. unfortunately starting ssh in debug mode allowed me to see numerous glibc errors during connections and explain why I couldn’t connect. At this point I don’t think there is any real way of replacing dropbear with a complete openssh solution even statically linking. Even testing the openssh sftp binary that had been compiled showed that it wasn’t coping with a system call not returning UIDs correctly meaning that it would report a FATAL error and close continually.
Given openssh wasn’t going to be replaced I researched about dropbear and if there was a newer version perhaps with sftp, unfortunately not. Eventually I came across notes on a blog mentioning that dropbear “supports” openssh sftp. After restoring ESXi back to its default filesystem settings (ssh enabled) it appears the attempting to sftp to esxi returns the following error.
ash: /sbin/sftp-server: not found
Connection closed
After compiling a slightly older version of openssh (static) I found a release of sftp-server that will once placed in /sbin on ESXi allows full usage of sftp (including sshfs mounting) binary below.
Further Xcode – HelloWorld
Apr 14th
The inevitable HelloWorld application is a staple in learning a programming language, and provides the learner with the feeling of accomplishment as their first program speaks back to them… or something. Either way, this example will present us with a basic framework which we can use to build upon.
To break it down this example consists of,
- Creating a blank project in Xcode
- Using the default Delegate class and adding our own method (interface)
- Linking the GUI to our class
- Adding code to our method (implementation)
- Drinking tea
ESXi on USB
Apr 13th
As previously mentioned i’ve always been a XEN advocate for the hypervisor sitting on the physical machine, given the ready availability of a paravirtualised kernel for my Linux VMs. However a requirement to get to grips with VMware has led me to deploy ESXi on my systems so that I can have a proper look around at the OS and how it manages virtual machines. I’ve got disks all over the place, however my server I use for all my testing has a set up (and has reached capacity) meaning that i can’t use those disks. I found an old IDE disk that I installed in there, however the fiddling around with the oem.tgz(explained another time) never seemed to work for me at this point. So I picked up a USB key for €8 and decided to do a USB boot with the hypervisor on there.
This is pretty straightforward task to do and can be accomplished in two methods of either botching the install halfway through or pulling the image from the install CD and doing a raw write to the USB device. I opted for pulling the image from the CD and dd’ing this image onto my USB key by doing the following methods:
1. Acquire VMware ESXi 4.0 from vmware
2. Mount the CD (in linux by mount -o loop <path to ISO> <mount point>, or double clicking in OSX 
)
3. Copy install.tgz from the CD and extract in a working location, which should eventually give you a directory structure.
4. bunzip /usr/lib/Vmware/install/VMware-VMvisor-big-164009-x86_64.dd.bz2 (or equivalent file)
5. dd if=<path to .dd file> of=<path to USB device>
6. Change BIOS settings to boot from USB and boot up.
7. Set IP address, download VSphere client and off you go.
Refer to http://www.vm-help.com for any issues
VMware ESXi 3.5 /4.0 on Xen (How-to)
Apr 11th
This may seem a truly useless idea to a lot of people, however I’ve always found having a ‘lab’ at home capable of building pretty much every system scenario very useful. Dealing daily with VMware ESX servers and VMs in a production environment means that I can never “fiddle” around and get to grips with whats under the hood or deal with the unsupported or hidden functionality. My Xen server has allowed me to create pretty much every scenario I may need Oracle RAC clusters, interoperability between various operating systems and various development environments. When I first received the server that I use for my environments my first choice of setup was going to be a VMware ESX setup, however the hardware requirements restrict most installations to a subset of hardware configurations meaning I couldn’t install it. Originally it would have been impossible to install it under a xen HVM on the basis that the virtualised network adapters are unsupported by ESX, however luckily from 3.4.0 onwards the xen-tools have been updated and allow the use of the e1000/e100 network.
HOW-TO: Sun Cluster in VMware Fusion
Mar 19th
VMWare fusion cluster…
For all those people that need a sun cluster on their macbook. This is a small how-to of sorts, I’ll not go into full detail regarding everything as if you can’t manage the simpler steps then I find it unlikely you’ll manage to handle the later tasks of configuring sun cluster.
Subtitles on the Netgear EVA8000
Nov 19th
I’ve posted before regarding the lack of support of DTS for the EVA80000, however the solution there is a quick codec change from DTS to AC3 and is pretty straight forward. Recently I wanted to watch a HD movie in MKV format that had subtitles, using mkvinfo on the file revealed that there was a video stream, an audio stream and the subtitles for this movie. Pressing Menu on the EVA8000 whilst the film was on allowed me to turn subtitles on, however this setting appeared broke as it never works.
I read numerous posts regarding playing movies with 2 audio streams and then subtitles in the MKV then subtitles would then work, which sounded like nonsense to me (and turned out to be nonsense as well). It’s a pretty easy fix with two solutions dependent on your situation:
1. Download the subs again from http://subscene.com/, these should be placed in the same directory and share the same name as the mkv you want to watch. You’ll find the EVA8000 finds and uses these subs.
2.Use mkvextract to extract the subs from the mkv file ‘mkvextract tracks “movie.mkv” 3:subs.sub‘ this subs.sub file will need renaming to the same as the mkv with the .sub extension as before.
Converting DTS audio to AC3 (.mkv file container) on OS X
Sep 11th
I have a lot of .mkv files that contain the audio as a DTS stream, which usually means that it can’t be read by my particular brand of media player (Netgear EVA8000). The DTS audio stream requires a paid for license to decode and/or special equipment to deal with the codec. However the AC3 codec which is another Dolby Digital codec has a free library implementation meaning that there are no licensing issues with using this codec, hence it being used with my media player. This obviously resulted in trawling the internet to find some solution to carrying out this conversion, which led me to this windows only solution:
– VID2EVA http://www.vid2eva.com/
This can be used on a mac by downloading virtualbox / vmware fusion / parallels and creating an XP machine and installing it in there and it will work fine.
However the issue that I personally have is that, the amount of extra CPU cycles needed for a virtualization layer sitting between the heavy amount of re-encoding of a data stream just bugs me. After a bit more research I found a script called mkvdts2ac3 that replaces the GUI of VID2EVA and with the right third party binaries will allow you to complete the re-encoding. A look into what would be required to build these third party binaries led me to a few other guides telling you to install xcode, download various tools, compile this, install that… It took quite a bit of messing around however I’ve gotten all of the Intel binaries sorted and the script and packaged them for convenience
– Please find the archive (tar.gz) here
–Installation instructions
Once extracted their will be a bin and a lib directory. As root move everything from the bin to /usr/local/bin directory, and move everything from the lib directory to /usr/local/lib directory.
–Usage
Open Terminal.app and execute mkvdts2ac3 as normal.
Facebook / Twitter
Jul 28th
Every revision that is made of Facebooks UI, usually results in some crazy uprising of it’s user base. This will then formulate into a group being created, something along the lines of ‘Abandon Facebook’, ‘If 1,000,000,000,000 people join they will put facebook back to the way it was’ etc…
The last change was to put emphasis on what people are doing, by making status updates the primary focus. This change made facebook pretty comparable to twitter in that you’re presented with snippets of what people are doing and what they’re up to. This cause an outcry and people instantly facebook-twittered that if they wanted to use twitter they would do etc…
The good thing about twitter is that it’s made up of people that I actually want to listen to, whereas I joined the trend of adding people on facebook that I went to school with or may have been in the same room at some point in my life. Every time I log into facebook these days i’ve got pages and pages of illegible drivel to ignore whilst trying to discern if there is anything worth reading.
So given that they all complained about the changes, they seem to have embraced this ‘micro blogging’ methodology without realizing. Shame I have to continually ignore it all the time.
Diluting the brand
Jun 30th
I was once lucky enough to see a battered escort driving past in Sheffield on a couple of occasions sporting the M badge, which amusing as it is to me usually makes nick quite annoyed. Still the common practice of sticking random performance badges on cars reached a new peak today:
A Renault Twingo ‘carrera’ !
From Sheffield to Germany
May 12th
All my worldly possessions were packed up and placed in a Ford Transit van over Saturday and Sunday. It’s quite eye opening to see your entire life and all the possessions that you feel you ‘need’ in order to function from day to day life all crammed into the back of a van. The contents of a two bedroom flat all packed into numerous boxes, wrapped in bubble wrap and stacking in the van was an upsetting sight. Not as upsetting as walking around the empty flat, especially given all of the craziness the last two years there have provided. 
The journey took over 17 hours, 2 of which were set in the VIP section of a ferry. We were delayed with accidents on the M25, road works on various roads and horrific weather through Belgium reducing visibility to only a few car lengths. Still at 10:30 the next day we finally arrived outside the new flat in Germany and proceeded to carry my worldly goods up four flights of steps (what you want after no sleep for 27+ hours). Everything is in the flat now, many boxes to go through
Journey from Sheffield to Germany
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