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I wont be doing a build of Bacula for Mac OS X again any time soon, if at all, for a number of reasons;

1. I no longer have access to Mac OS X 10.4 running on an Intel chip
2. I am actively transitioning to BackupPC

Below youll find the method I have been using to construct all the .pkg installers youll find on this site. If you have any questions about the process please post them in the comments.

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This is mostly just a note to myself. If you ever have the need to find all files that contain HFS resource forks on Mac OS X, just use this bit of find magic:

find . -type f -exec test -s {}/..namedfork/rsrc \; -print

You may have occasion to edit the contents of an initrd.img file. If so, here is how:

Extract the contents of the image

gunzip < your-initrd.img | cpio -i --make-directories

Now make your edits and then repackage the initrd

find . | cpio -o -H newc | gzip -9 > your-new-initrd.img

Something that just about no one out there seems to be doing (yet) is trying to install Debian directly onto network block devices. The Debian installer doesnt support it (yet), grub doesnt support it (usually), and its just generally not an easy thing to do.

Now, there are quite a few ways around this problem. You can install to a ‘real’ computer and migrate the installation to a network block device. You can use debootstrap in place of the actual Debian installation system. You can use a combination of these two methods, NFS root filesystems, TFTP hacks, etc. All of these solutions are lacking in my opinion. I want to run the ‘real’ debian installer against a network block device and boot my physical hardware using only the built in PXE booting capability of the BIOS.

Taking all these issues as a personal challenge, I’ve outlined below how to go about using the regular old Debian Lenny installer directly against an AoE block device.
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I’ve been battling lately with a lot of problems with cman, part of Red Hat Cluster Suite. Specifically, the fencing tool (fenced) is pretty much junk when you try to start using it with Xen dom0′s. After much searching and gnashing of teeth I happened upon this mailing list post. The promise there is that you could take clvm and compile it against openais and get a cluster aware LVM which doesnt require the rest of Red Hat Cluster Suite (and its crappy documentation, crappy fencing, and general all around crappiness). A little more searching turned up this web site from Olivier Le Cam which pretty much did 90% of the work for me.

After some testing I’m happy to say it appears to work smashingly. What follows is a somewhat more complete version of how to achieve the same results on Debian Lenny. Enjoy :)

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For a long time now I’ve wanted to set up all my mythfrontends to be diskless nodes that boot via PXE using an NFS share as their root filesystem. I finally got around to doing this. I was even able to just migrate my existing installations directly into the PXE boot environment. Here is how I accomplished it…

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Looking for a way to bulk remove channels that I’ve delselected in my channel lineup at Schedules Direct, I happened upon this blog post. Seems to work great :)

For the impatient, the important bit is this:

DELETE channel,program FROM channel NATURAL LEFT JOIN program WHERE program.title IS NULL;

Mounting unpartitioned disk image files in Linux is easy. You just execute ‘mount -o loop disk.img /mnt’ right?

Well, if your disk image file happens to contain partitions its a little bit trickier. Here is what you need to do:

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I recently purchased a new Apple Wireless Bluetooth Keyboard for use with MythTV. The choice of input device for MythTV is a very subjective thing to be sure, but I love this device because its as small as it can be without feeling cramped, its thin, light weight, and stylish.

Setting the device up to work with Debian Etch is fairly straightforward once you know what to do

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Recently I came upon the need to do all my network routing and firewalling inside a Xen domU. I am not the first to do this but I thought I’d do a little write up on it to help others trying to accomplish the same thing in Debian.

The idea here is to end up with (at least) two VLANs on the network with the dom0 and domU’s being able to choose one or both networks on which to exist. In the case of both, you can set up a handy domU firewall/gateway :)

As you can see from the diagram above, we will end up with three bridges in the dom0 with all the appropriate glue to tie everything together. Best of all, this is all assembled on the fly during bootup.

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