plaquewatching

Some scribblings that may be of interest to those folks over at open plaques (@openplaques) about the Scottish Film Council, now merged into 'Scottish Screen'

Googling for plaque info reveals that there was a plaque erected in 1996 in Castle Gardens, Dunoon. Later taken down as Eric Campbell came from Cheshire (Ref)

One in Aberfeldy main square unveiled in 1997? for Donald Crisp -- may also be fake (ref) [1353]

Sean Connery unveiled his own one after it had been down for 4 years (ref, ref) after the demolition of S&N plant and building of 'Springside' development [8553]

Chariots of fire at St Andrews (pic pic) [added as 8822]

Duncan Macrae in Millport (pic) [already there as 8521]

Fedora / Netatalk / OS X Lion / TimeMachine

Being the cheapskate that I am, I'm not buying a shiny apple-branded time-capsule for backups when I have a perfectly stylish NAS (since the pic was taken I'm using the via-eden board there's a 1.5TB HDD in the box)

I'd previously used netatalk with leopard under mythbuntu, but following a clean-up and migration to Fedora 16 (Verne) it needed reinstalling (esp as we upgraded to Lion on some of the macs)

So, a HOWTO if anyone is hunting for this and some notes

• You don't need avahi separately anymore - new netatalk includes it
• You need to allow tcp/548 in your iptables rules (I added to /etc/sysconfig/iptables)
  -A INPUT -p tcp -m state --state NEW -m tcp --dport 548 -j ACCEPT
• SELinux. Yeah. probably needs fixing but 'setenforce permissive' worked :-/
• I'm not convinced you need the 'defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1' anymore. 

Here's what I did

1) Create a separate disk partition for time machine and mount it (I'm using LVM and XFS)

$> grep time /etc/fstab
/dev/mapper/linuxvg-timemachinelv /export/timemachine xfs defaults 1 2
$> df -h /export/timemachine
Filesystem                         Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/linuxvg-timemachinelv  200G  6.0G  194G   3% /export/timemachine

2) create a separate user for the backups (not strictly needed but I chowned /export/rimemachine to that user to sort out permissions

#> useradd timelord
#> passwd timelord
#> chown timelord: /export/timemachine

3) Install and configure netatalk (although 2.2.0 is in Fedora 16, I decided to use the rawhide version of 2.2.2)

#> yum --enablerepo rawhide install netatalk

The config files are in /etc/netatalk and (see the gude at An Esurient Trollop ) you'll need to edit afpd.conf
(I added -mimicmodel Macmini and uams_guest.so to -uamlist: I have a ro media share)

- -tcp -noddp -mimicmodel Macmini -uamlist uams_guest.so,uams_dhx.so,uams_dhx2.so -nosavepassword

and AppleVolumes.default

# Share out the Videos
/export/media/Video Videos options:ro,noadouble
#Time Machine
/export/timemachine TimeMachine options:tm

Startup netatalk

#> systemctl start netatalk.service
#> systemctl enable netatalk.service

 So far so good -- assuming no failures you should see something like this in your logs

afpd[28742]: AFP/TCP started, advertising 192.168.1.251:548 (2.2.2)

Now, onto the mac -- I wasn't seeing the host automatically appear in the finder, but a simple command-k (connect to server) and typing the hostname worked (it expands to afp://hostname automatically), and was prompted for my (normal) username and password to connect to $HOME on the netatalk server.

In the time machine preferences I could then select the remote TimeMachine volume on the NAS, enter my 'timelord' username/password combo and it started to so a backup.

More news (and a rest restore) to follow...

Metering

So I finally got round to wiring in the 'Teleinfo' shield into my EDF meter (see my earlier post for more info) and left it running while we're away. Hacked up an initial couple of graphs using trusty gnuplot: exhibits A and B -

It's rather easy to spot where the fridge-freezer kicks in, but more worrying is the fact that the baseline never dips below 170VA. The only things that should have been running in that time was my via-eden server, with one HDD, the livebox and samknows monitoring box. I suspect I need to investigate more.

Made a minor hack to the shield as digi-6 is used by the LED on a nanode - but digi-7 is free.
Details were tweeted over here. Next up is to get it sending the info out to main box (well, another nanode or my bifferboard) and spitting to pachube and / or a jeelabs display board.

Happy Birthday

I finally got round to assembling my birthday present. Shiny toys FTW :-)

The Perils of CDNs

So CERN have just held a popular webcast event to announce the latest results in the search for the Higgs. Many of the webcast viewers (no I don't have usage stats) were complaining that the stream was choppy. What I did notice on my laptop (couldn't get near the auditorium) was that the main libflashplayer traffic was inbound from 93.174.99.0/24 VELOCIX-EU - could this be the CDN used by Groovy Gecko?

Not having an onsite mirror though then meant that each member of staff watching was then pulling data *in* to site as the traffic graph shows:

I'm sure this can't be efficient... Ho Hum.

Another year of LHC Secrecy

So, another year of LHC running comes to a successful close, Once again we've managed to keep the real facts hidden from everyone - Not the Higgs (as thats's being discussed next week) but more importantlt that the whole of the LHC is actually a spinoff from one of the major Data Centre companies who had outgrown their shed. The Proof? why - of course...

however, best to keep it a secret - its easier to get runding for a mythical 27km tunnel than a shed :-) Oh, and a lot less sexy in the books too...

Sniff...

Updated to include the plots from monitoring box: