The Corner of Attention

Random thoughts on technology by Jonathon Ball

[jonathonball-blog]

Proxmox VE 3.1 with ZFS

Spent the majority of my weekend trying to get Proxmox to work with ZFS. I'm using the following hardware:

Intel Core i5-3570K

ASUS P8Z77-V LK Motherboard

16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600

Supermicro AOC-USAS2-L8i RAID Adapter (flashed to IT mode)

6 x 3TB Seagate Barracude 7200RPM

22GB Intel SLC SSD

Coursair Builder Series CX600 600W PSU

Antec P280 Black Super Mid Tower

Step 1: The first major task was to flash the Supermicro card to "IT mode" and is an entire blog post in and of itself.  If anyone is interested I'll write it up.

Step 2: Create Proxmox bootable USB My system doesn't have an optical drive so I downloaded an ISO of Proxmox VE 3.1 from http://www.proxmox.com/.  Just dd it over:

dd if=pve-cd.iso of=/dev/XYZ bs=1M

Step 3: Install PVE 3.1 At "boot:" type "linux ext4" (or just press enter if you prefer ext3).  For some reason the Proxmox installation medium uses hd0 to identify the boot disk no matter what drive you select for installation.  To get the OS to install on my system I had to disconnect the storage drives from my HBA.

Step 4: Update the system If you don't have a Proxmox subscription you will need to replace the enterprise repository in /etc/apt/sources.list.d with

deb http://download.proxmox.com/debian wheezy pve-no-subscription

then

apt-get update apt-get upgrade

At this point I shut the system down and re-connected my storage drives.

Step 5: Install ZFS Dependencies

apt-get install pve-headers-$(uname -r) build-essential linux-source-2.6 ln -s /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/build /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/source

Step 6: Install ZFS

wget http://archive.zfsonlinux.org/debian/pool/main/z/zfsonlinux/zfsonlinux_2%7Ewheezy_all.deb dpkg -i zfsonlinux_2~wheezy_all.deb apt-get update apt-get install debian-zfs

Step 7: Configure ZFS Probably best to install the drives by id rather then sdxy so

ls /dev/disk/by-id/ata-*

Create a partition table for each disk:

parted /dev/disk/by-id/ata-XYZ

Again, do this for each disk in your pool.  Then create your storage pool, I'm clever when it comes to names so I called my "storage"

zpool create -m none -o ashift=12 storage raidz2 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-XYZA /dev/disk/by-id/ata-XYZB /dev/disk/by-id/ata-XYZC

and so on.  Note: I chose to use raidz2 because I have 6 drives.  Since I'm using all consumer hardware and non-ECC ram, I got paranoid and turned off deduplication

zfs set dedup=off storage

Step 8: Create a filesystem for vz

I want Proxmox to use my ZFS pool for vm's and containers so it was necessary to mount /var/lib/vzas ZFS, that ended up being trickier that I thought.

PVE will automatically recreate important folders in vz but to be safe, I copied them out

mkdir ~/temp cp -R /var/lib/vz/* ~/temp

Then I created my first filesystem on the storage pool

zfs create storage/vz zfs set mountpoint=/var/lib/vz

Edit /etc/default/zfs and change the following lines:

ZFS_MOUNT='yes' ZFS_UNMOUNT='yes'

Edit /etc/fstab and comment out the mount for /var/lib/vz

# /dev/pve/data /var/lib/vz ext4 defaults 0 

Reboot the system

cp -R ~/temp /var/lib/vz

Conclusion

At this point, my PVE system is ready to start adding VM's and containers. Here is the output of df -h / and df -h /var/lib/vz

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/pve-root 5.5G 1.4G 3.9G 26% /

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on storage/vz 11T 384K 11T 1% /var/lib/vz

Edit: Forgot to put my references

http://zfsonlinux.org/index.html http://www.andybotting.com/zfs-on-linux http://askubuntu.com/questions/201896/zfs-package-zfs-ubuntu-does-not-create-zfs-module http://blog.rebelit.net/526

[jonathonball-blog]

Remove old Linux Kernels (Ubuntu 13.04)

dpkg -l 'linux-*' | sed '/^ii/!d;/'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.*\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d;s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* \([^ ]*\).*/\1/;/[0-9]/!d' | xargs sudo apt-get -y purge

[planetsedge]

[9while9]

raspi minimal with contrast effect on Flickr.

digital photo manipulation w/GIMP

creative commons, please attribute to Rik Goldman

[jonathonball-blog]

Ubuntu 12.10 - Disable second monitor while on login screen

Not really sure why this was so damned difficult.  For some reason the default behavior for the Ubuntu log in screen is to mirror the display when there is more than one monitor present.  I fixed this by disabling the second monitor when lightdm starts the greeter.

Here's how to do it.

First thing you will need is the name of the display that you are trying to shut off while the greeter is displayed.

user@ubuntu:~$ xrandr | grep connected

Should show you the displays and their names, my setup showed one VGA1 and one HDMI1 so it was easy to distinguish between them, your mileage may vary.  Write down the name once you figure out which one you don't want on the greeter.

Next we will create a script to disable the second monitor.  I put mine in /etc/lightdm/ but it can go anywhere as long as it has sufficient permissions.  The contents of the script will be similar to

#!/bin/bash xrandr --output HDMI1 --off

Replace HDMI1 with your display's name and save it.  I used the next two commands to help ensure that lightdm would be able to execute the script

user@ubuntu:~$ sudo chown root:root monitor1-off.sh user@ubuntu:~$ sudo chmod 755 monitor1-off.sh

Next you will need to tell lightdm to execute the script when the greeter starts.  Edit /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf and add the following line to the file

greeter-setup-script=/path/to/your/script/your_script_name_here.sh

Save the file and restart your computer.  When the greeter starts, the display you chose should shut off. On my computer the display starts again on its own as soon as I log in.  

Finally, something I didn't just reblog :)

[EDIT: This still works and is unfortunately still needed on Ubuntu 13.04]

[jonathonball-blog]

This awesome write up just helped save me tons of time.

[would-u-liketojamwithme-deactiv]

[jonathonball-blog]

Clean Android is happy Android

[jonathonball-blog]

Any NES Ringtone on Android

I've been dreaming of a way of making classic NES ringtones for Android.  After futzing around for a little while, I have success!

First thing you will need are the tools.  (I have no idea how to do this in Windows, so good luck with that.)  From your distro's repositories kindly install "fluidsynth" and "lame".  This can be done on Ubuntu with

sudo apt-get install fluidsynth lame

You will need an Android program called ringdroid installed onto your Android device. 

Finally, you will need a "soundfont" file for fluidsynth.  I did a Google search for "best NES soundfont" and came up with: The NES Soundfont

Next thing you'll need is the NES song track you are looking for.  Head over to the awesome website http://www.vgmusic.com and pick a midi file.  You are looking for a midi that SOUNDS the most like 8-bit music.  There tends to be more than one selection for a given track, try a few until you find the one that fits.

Copy the soundfont file to /tmp (or you sf2 folder, /usr/share/sound/sf2/ in Ubuntu)

Copy the midi file to /tmp

Run the command: fluidsynth -F output.wav /path/to/sf2/file input.midi (making the appropriate substitutions on that line)

Now run: lame --preset standard output.wav output.mp3

Take your completed mp3 file and listen to it, if you like the way it sounds continue  following this guide. Otherwise, you will need to pick a different soundfont or a different source midi file.

Copy your completed mp3 to the /sdcard/Music file of your Android device and fire up Ringdroid.  Ringdroid is pretty simple to use and if you've managed to follow this guide up to this point you shouldn't have a problem.  It lets you pick a 30 second snippet of the entire track to set as a ringtone.

Enjoy.

[jonathonball-blog]

[jonathonball-blog]

PHP DOM grafting

I wanted to be able to import a node from a text file into a DOM object in PHP.

Below are the relevant portions of my extended DOM class:

class fancyDOM extends DOMDocument() {     public function fancyDOM($template) {     $this->loadHTMLFile($template);   }   function importTemplate($target, $file, $root = 'div') {     $temp = new fancyDOM($file);     $el = $this->importNode($temp->getElementsByTagName($root)->item(0), true);     $this->getElementsById($target)->appendChild($el);   } }

The file it's loading contains arbitrary HTML contained in some sort of container, div being the default. 

<div>   <table>   <tr>     <td>test 1</td>     <td>test 2</td>   </tr>   </table> </div>

You can now import that file into an existing DOM

$html = new fancyDOM('main.html'); $html->importTemplate('content-container', 'main-menu.html');

[jonathonball-blog]

New phone coming

Sprint tells me I have to wait 192 days to get a new phone.

>>> import datetime >>> today = datetime.datetime.today() + datetime.timedelta(192) >>> print today 2013-03-31 10:36:29.668062

So close... yet so far.

[jonathonball-blog]

I have it on good authority this awesome novel (eBook) will be FREE on Amazon starting Saturday 6/23 through Sunday 6/24.  Shhhh, it's a HUGE secret.

[jonathonball-blog]

My 30th Birthday cake.

[jonathonball-blog]

Books on mp3

I have a Pioneer DEH-2200UB that has a USB port on the front.  It will play MP3 files but that's about it, the feature set is very limited.  My biggest gripe is that it doesn't take filenames into consideration when playing, it simply starts at the first address on your flash drive and plays through to the last.  This wasn't an issue until I wanted to use it play some books on MP3.

I tried several techniques to get it to play my book in order (each MP3 file represents one chapter of the book).  First I tried renaming the files numerically starting with 000, then 001, and so forth.  When that didn't work I tried copying the files onto the drive one at a time with Windows Explorer and that didn't work either.

Here's the bash script I wrote that finally did the trick, the tracks now play in order:

#!/bin/bash here=`pwd` there="/cygdrive/g" for i in *.mp3; do file=`echo $i | sed 's/ //g'` dd if="$here/$i" of=$there/$file done

[jonathonball-blog]

I just followed this guide while installing a Crucial M4 128GB SSD into my Lenovo B570 laptop.  Worked like a charm and the system is sickeningly fast.  Get from the BIOS to the Windows 7 login screen in < 6 seconds.

The only thing I did that wasn't in the guide was install RAM disk software for doing software development.  The RAM disk software I'm using can be found here, it's free and has options to load the RAM disk from the SSD at startup and write it back at Windows shutdown.

[jonathonball-blog]

[jonathonball-blog]

Excel - IP address to Integer

Had a need to be able to quickly convert about 500 IP addresses into their integer forms.  Addressed the need with this Excel function..

Function IP2Dec(ip As String)   Dim dec1, dec2, dec3, dec4 As Integer   Dim str As Variant     str = Split(ip, ".")     dec1 = str(0) * 2 ^ 24   dec2 = str(1) * 2 ^ 16   dec3 = str(2) * 2 ^ 8   dec4 = str(3) * 2 ^ 0   IP2Dec = (dec1 + dec2 + dec3 + dec4) End Function