Mike Pelley's Musings

What else do I have to say? It is the truth!

I have had an issue with media files not indexing once I copied them onto my Synology DiskStation NAS. I often copy files from the NAS to do media conversion on an old Ubuntu box for .mkv (Matroska) encoded (or “containered”) files. Despite how numerous .mkv files are, it seems that many devices do not seem to have the ability to decode them.

Anyway, I use an NFS mount to copy the files between the Ubuntu box and the NAS. The problem apparently is that apparently there is no DiskStation the kernel supports inotify. The DiskStation media indexer supports automatic indexing of files being added via SMB, AFP or FTP, it is not aware if you move or copy files via NFS (or SSH/Telnet for that matter) to the DiskStation directly.

After much searching I found the above information written by Gerd Wolfgang Naschenweng who develop a really nice script that will index really, really – like lightening quick – quickly. You can run the file manually once you SSH into the NAS or you can put it in the NAS’ crontab. The little utility is here.

I was working on a DD-WRT firmware’d router and could not get the port forwarding to work.

Anyway, the solution is as follows:  In the Control Panel click on “Administration” then on “Commands”. Copy and paste this inside the Commands Sheet:

 iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -j MASQUERADE

Click on “Save Firewall” and then “Run Commands”

I found it on dd-wrt.com’s community forums (link) by mojud.

This is a really funny article in The Globe and Mail on 2012 May 12th entitled “What would Canada look like in 2015 if Harper is still Prime Minister?” by Denis Smith.

Sarcasm at its best, for example:

“When the drone attack and parachute drop on Parliament Hill by U.S. Special Forces occurred, no one expected Canada’s vigorous raid on Washington, which ended in the burning of the White House.”

“Planning and building the new [national capital] city [of Three Hills, Alberta] proceeded in deep secrecy under direction from the Prime Minister’s chief of staff. The Defence Department assisted by designating most of central Alberta as a restricted military zone, accessible only by special permit from the PMO.”

LOS ANGELES – May 11, 2012 – Carroll Shelby International, Inc., announced today that Carroll Hall Shelby, a man whose vision for performance transformed the automobile industry, has died at age 89.

In the 1960’s Shelby’s company created the Shelby GT500 Super Snake, Shelby GT350 and Shelby GTS, Shelby 289 “street,” 289 FIA, 427 S/C and Daytona Coupe Cobras.

The 427 Cobra’s specs were (from SuperCars.net)

The 427, which I seem to recall held the 0-to-100-to-0 record of 13.8-seconds until Porsche’s 959 (four-wheel-drive flat-six twin-turbo) beat it in 1986 which was twenty years later.

I have been looking for how to set up OpenVPN with Network Manager under Linux Mint 12.I think that everyone has found that you cannot use the client.ovpn configuration file that OpenVPN.  After much searching I found the following guide as for OpenVPN client setup:

You can manually insert the configuration parameters in network-manager-openvpn

OpenVPN Client via Network Manager

Hopefully once Google searches this others having trouble installing the Brother MFC-490CW printer/scanner will find the solution to getting the printer to work. Now, this may be documented elsewhere but the Brother documentation isn’t quite clear on the libc6 per-requisite. Brother lists the requirement as requiring ia32-libs or lib32stdc++ to be installed. However, this will not work – at least for me – despited repeated attempts at installing.

….And repeated Google searches…

Here is the solution: First install:

libc6-i386

This likely comes as no surprise to those who are older than myself, but as as passed my 35th birthday – more than a couple of years ago now – I have noticed that the “famous” people start to, well, expire. The first name that I grew up with was Peter Gzowski from CBC Radio’s Morningside in 2002. I can remember as a young boy with my father in the garage working on something with Gzowski on in the background. Next came Andy Rooney in 2011. I really liked his wry humor – and the number of times his maybe not so objective view hit the nail right on the head.  On Friday Ferdinand Porsche, designer of the Porsche 911, pass away.  Today, it was announced that Mike Wallace had passed to the great hereafter.

I have just upgraded the Cumulus weather station software to version 1.9.2 Build 1032 from 1029. As I was upgrading the software I was reading the release notes (yeah, not a good practice: One should always read the release notes before upgrading! However, I always have a good backup so it isn’t that bad. Or so I keep telling myself…) and is a fix for my Oregon Scientific WMR-200 weather station to fix a wind chill issue but that was fixed in 1031.

The problem continues to be, seemingly, with the StarTech USB1000IP as I have noted previously. There seems to be two issues:

1) The USB1000IP “disappears” from the network. The more interesting thing plugging the device into a 10/100 Mbit/s switch seems to somewhat alleviate the issue in that it decreases the  frequency that the device drops off the network. Of course, to have the device get back onto the network requires a power supply unplug/replug – no remote option seems to be available to me.

2) The USB1000IP seems to occasionally reboot. What this means is that I have to manually have to connect to the WMR200 using the USB1000IP software. Then I have to restart the Cumulus software.

Herein seems to be the problem: Cumulus does not “know” how to deal with a) the device connecting and disconnecting and b) recovery from CRC errors. It is hard to contact the software author when he is providing the software for free…

On the USB-over-IP front there seems to be some commonality between the various vendors. From previous posts you can read that I have had problems with the SIIG device as well with the same problems. The same software seems to be used by all the vendors with only cosmetic changes to the driver. I asked both SIIG and StarTech if they were working on a Linux version or would release the source code. Both, not surprising me in the least, simply stated that they were not working on a Linux version, had no intention of doing so and had no response on releasing the source code. Grrr….. Gut feeling: the same chip is being used by all the vendors supplying the USB-over-IP products (the Ethernet controller not withstanding; e.g. the StarTech is 1.0 Gbit/s and the other are 100 Mbit/s) and they are the only ones supplying the software driver.

BBC has outdone itself with this year’s April Fool’s Day gag web page!

Here’s the link  http://t.co/oApV9Yjx by Greg Stekelman.

Yes – I am just as bad as I always am in posting….