Computers

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After having been wanting to for ages I have finally fixed up my OpenBSD machines partitions.

I had an 80GB hard drive formated (wd1a) and moved /usr/local/ on to it and put my SMB shares on it for the free space.

Since wd0 is a 8GB disk split into a, b, h, d, g, and e partitions the biggest is wd0g mounted on /usr with ~6GB free but I had almost 10GB of files on /usr/local (wd1a). So I had to copy my backups and videos to the windows machine via Samba/Network Neighborehood before I could move all of my files in /usr/local/srv to a temporary place in /usr and then archived the rest of the directory.

cd /usr
mkdir storage
mv local/srv storage
tar -cf /var/tmp/local.tar local

I had to relabel the disk and then format the partitions, I created wd1a and wd1d to use as /usr/local and /srv with ~15GB more free space in case I need it.

umount -f local
disklabel -E wd1
newfs wd1a
newfs wd1d

During the disk label I changed to ‘disk geometry’ (g d), deleted the a partition (d a) and created the a and d partitions (c a and c d) keeping with the prompts on it and specifying 12G and 45G for the partition sizes.

Fixed my fstab and then mounted the partitions

vi /etc/fstab
# 8GB Primary Master, PATA drive
# device        mount   type    opts            dump    fsck
/dev/wd0a       /       ffs     rw              1       1
/dev/wd0h       /home   ffs     rw,nodev,nosuid 1       2
/dev/wd0d       /tmp    ffs     rw,nodev,nosuid 1       2
/dev/wd0g       /usr    ffs     rw,nodev        1       2
/dev/wd0e       /var    ffs     rw,nodev,nosuid 1       2
# 80GB Primary Slave, PATA drive
# device        mount           type    opts    dump    fsck
/dev/wd1a       /usr/local      ffs     rw,nodev        1       2
/dev/wd1d       /srv            ffs     rw,nodev,nosuid 1       2

mount -o rw,nodev /dev/wd1a /usr/local
mount -o rw,nodev,nosuid /srv

I’m some what tempted to mark wd1d ‘noexec’ but I may wish to run scripts from there later if I ever move ~/code over. After that it was just a quick hop, skip, and jump to restore my files.

tar xpf /var/tmp/local.tar
mv storage/srv/smb /srv/
vi /etc/samba/smb.conf

I corrected all of my shares in smb.conf from command line mode:

:1,$s//usr/local/srv//srv/g

I could’ve used ex but I rather like paging up/down with ^U and ^D instead of using ‘addr1,addr2p’ in ex.

mount
/dev/wd0a on / type ffs (local)
/dev/wd0h on /home type ffs (local, nodev, nosuid)
/dev/wd0d on /tmp type ffs (local, nodev, nosuid)
/dev/wd0g on /usr type ffs (local, nodev)
/dev/wd0e on /var type ffs (local, nodev, nosuid)
/dev/wd1a on /usr/local type ffs (local, nodev)
/dev/wd1d on /srv type ffs (local, nodev, nosuid)
# df -h
Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/wd0a      147M   30.4M    110M    22%    /
/dev/wd0h      393M   35.6M    337M    10%    /home
/dev/wd0d     98.3M    2.0K   93.4M     0%    /tmp
/dev/wd0g      6.7G    398M    6.0G     6%    /usr
/dev/wd0e      148M   84.1M   56.2M    60%    /var
/dev/wd1a     11.8G   76.9M   11.1G     1%    /usr/local
/dev/wd1d     44.3G    5.1G   37.0G    12%    /srv

Windows wouldn’t see the file shares and sending the HUP signal to Samba to reread it’s conf file immediately didn’t help any. So I gave Vectra a reboot to double check my fstab entry (yes I am paranoid), I could’ve just killed the processes and reloaded them manually for the same effect.

# uptime
 9:14PM  up 19 days,  3:29, 1 user, load averages: 4.12, 4.16, 3.86
# reboot

I love OpenBSD 🙂

EDIT:

To prevent some nasty time outs.

vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config
ClientAliveInterval 15
ClientAliveCountMax 45

vi ~/.ssh/config # or /etc/ssh/ssh_config for all clients
ServerAliveInterval 15
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This was a funky one, XMMS locked up on me and refused to play any files in my playlist, which I know usually means they either don’t exist or can’t be played but I also saw in mount that they should be there. I wish they’d add a pop up message about that but the auto-skip response to non existent files is actually one feature of XMMS I like.

Just trying to load a new playlist by pressing the lord list button in the playlist manager would cause it to lock up and I’d have to kill the process. So I figured I’d open another urxvt and leave mplayer running. Only thing odd was Music/Pl wouldn’t tab-complete to ~/Music/Playlists.

Terry@dixie$ ls Music                                                      3:45
ls: Music: Socket is not connected
Terry@dixie$ mount                                                         3:46
/dev/ad0s2a on / (ufs, local, soft-updates)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local)
/dev/ad0s2e on /home (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/ad0s2f on /usr (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/ad0s2g on /var (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/ad0s2h on /tmp (ufs, local, soft-updates)
linprocfs on /compat/linux/proc (linprocfs, local)
procfs on /proc (procfs, local)
/dev/fuse0 on /home/Terry/Documents (fusefs, local, nosuid, synchronous, mounted by Terry)
/dev/fuse1 on /home/Terry/Music (fusefs, local, nosuid, synchronous, mounted by Terry)
/dev/fuse2 on /home/Terry/Pictures (fusefs, local, nosuid, synchronous, mounted by Terry)
/dev/fuse3 on /home/Terry/Videos (fusefs, local, nosuid, synchronous, mounted by Terry)
Terry@dixie$ ls Pictures                                                   3:46
ls: Pictures: Socket is not connected
Terry@dixie$ sshfs-mounter.sh -i ~/.ssh/vectra_rsa_key_nopw -u 1001 -g 1001
mount_fusefs: /dev/fuse5 on /home/Terry/Music: Operation not permitted
mount_fusefs: /dev/fuse6 on /home/Terry/Pictures: Operation not permitted
Terry@dixie$ ls Music                                                      3:47
ls: Music: Socket is not connected
Terry@dixie$ ls Videos                                                     3:47
   ... my video files

So I umount’d all of them and reran mounting script and all worked

Terry@dixie$ sshfs-mounter.sh -i ~/.ssh/vectra_rsa_key_nopw -u 1001 -g 1001
Terry@dixie$ mount                                                         3:48
/dev/ad0s2a on / (ufs, local, soft-updates)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local)
/dev/ad0s2e on /home (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/ad0s2f on /usr (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/ad0s2g on /var (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/ad0s2h on /tmp (ufs, local, soft-updates)
linprocfs on /compat/linux/proc (linprocfs, local)
procfs on /proc (procfs, local)
/dev/fuse0 on /home/Terry/Documents (fusefs, local, nosuid, synchronous, mounted by Terry)
/dev/fuse1 on /home/Terry/Music (fusefs, local, nosuid, synchronous, mounted by Terry)
/dev/fuse2 on /home/Terry/Pictures (fusefs, local, nosuid, synchronous, mounted by Terry)
/dev/fuse3 on /home/Terry/Videos (fusefs, local, nosuid, synchronous, mounted by Terry)
Terry@dixie$ ls Pictures                                                   3:48
    ... the directories contents
Terry@dixie$                                                               3:48

After fixing that, XMMS worked great so I conclude that XMMS has a bit of a nasty issue if files it knows are there just ‘disappear’ on it, which is kind of strange. Whether it is a bug or not, I don’t have time to spend on multiple code-compile-debug cycles to try and fix it if there is a problem some where in the code or I would investigate it myself.

I would rather like to know what happened with the mount though because the only thing I’ve been fiddling with before it went was my firewall rules. Which amounts to enabling / disabling pf and reloading the rules out of /etc/pf.conf. I think I’ll keep a close eye on my mounts for awhile, XMMS will keep its eyes even closer on them I guess lol.

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Hahaha I think the Windows Recycle bin must have a size limit.

I’ve been cleaning and organising the files on my XP machines desktop, moving most to the recycle bin, \vectrabackups or other file shares on the OpenBSD box (Vectra).

What is probably several hundred files (recursively of course) and more then 5GB of crud later, there was only the last 3 files I deleted, and I have not emptied the thing in months either >_>

My Desktop is down to the shortcuts to my RvS and S4 installations, a folder for downloading files to, recyclebin, my computer. and flock icons.

My RocketDock on the other side though has a CPU monitor, My Computer, Network Places, Flock, GVim, Winamp, RvS, S4, TS, Pidgin, XFire, PuTTY, and Gimp shortcut in the doc. One thing I like about using a doc is Raven Shield doesn’t dis-sort them on me hehe.

Needless to say, cleaning up the Doc is the next phase loool.

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Been learning a lot about TeX and LaTeX lately, my brain is like a sponge…

Some how I don’t think I’ll ever use a word processor again, TeX/LaTeX beats XHTML/CSS for working on content without getting in the way, and imho it automates more of the menial tasks better. I couldn’t stand getting proper printout with all the cross-word processor + cross-pc issues involved… So I eventually took to using XHTML instead, I’m fluent after all. I have a large répertoire of computer languages to choose from, I just hate PHP…

I need to take some time to generate a PBI of TeX Live 2007, not much left to do before then and most of that can probably be sped up by scripting. For deployment though I’d rather like to split it into two packages, if the compression ratio is similar, should result including a ~250MB and ~300MB tar.lzma file (1 in each pbi) rather then a huge ~500mb one. As far as the documentation goes, there is not to much net savings to strip out languages, unless it really strips down to just English and made an English and ‘multinational’ docs module. For me, it would make sense to keep the ‘big ones’, English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese, in a standard install and doing that would be no real saving so far as I can tell.

Got a start for trying to get organized with the SSMs, they are basically a week behind me as far as being able to get things in sync but that’s unavoidable.. In the mean time I guess I should concentrate on the Sgts. I’m glad we have Blade and Noer a foot again they’re both dedicated workers, Blade well better late then never hehe.

The recent unpleasantness with ]SD[ on our SWAT servers is annoying me. I honestly don’t care if we ban every last one of them or shake their hand, there’s more important business I need to look after. I just follow orders, no more, no less. From where I sit, it is a Majors department to deal with it not an RSMs so I’d rather like to stay out of the hub bub. I’d also not have to cram any more forum posts into RAM between working hours.

The SOP Rewrites, I don’t think are going to progress any this week with both SSMs largely out of the loop until next week. Another large section is ready for SNCO Review, in the mean time I can try and look over the other stuff… Just a matter of free time.

I’ve now transitioned almost 3GB in all from my home directory over to the OpenBSD system working as a file server here: effectively fulfilling it’s purpose of integrating my home directory across my desktop and laptop. With some time to test out the permission settings, I may soon move my code directory there as well. With luck maybe I’ll have some time to *finally* get the bloody printer setup rather then sitting there gathering dust, good thing I rarely print.

I still need to organise my music files and rebuild all of my playlists but hey, at least my music folder is neat again. Life really would be a bit easier if I didn’t have to have most of my files available on both systems, to avoid having to boot my laptop to get to stuff. I’m tired of having to choose between booting my laptop, taring the files, scp’ing them over, and having to switch from desktop to laptop. I get 90% of my work done from my PC-BSD laptop yeah, but I like to work on the system I’m in the mood to use, not play chair-jockey.

And to top it all off my brain has been wandering off drastically lately, I suppose it beats being miserable though. I don’t really want to think that much about it right now, I’d never get any sleep other wise…

Found a music video of one of the songs that was on the last CD I bought. Which shows where my minds been drifting off to lool. Is it a wonder some friends wonder if I ever loop up from a compiler?

Works got to get done… How that effects the rest of my life, well..

Writer’s Block: Gotcha.

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What is the best April Fools’ Day joke you’ve ever fallen victim to?

Live Journals Writer’s Block

Haha, hands down it has got to be the FreeBSD and NetBSD’s pkgsrc: A strategic synergy for awesomeness posting on the FreeBSD Ports mailing list. I remember seeing it posted in the lounge on forums.pcbsd.org.

It took me a week to realize the original message had been posted April 1st 🙂

Can you say, fooled “big time”?

SSHFS on FreeBSD

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The following ports are needed:

sysutils/fusefs-kmod
sysutils/fusefs-sshfs

They depend on sysutils/fusefs-libs, packages are available on each at the moment for 6.3-Release.

Enable FUSE for system start up via rc.conf (I’d suggest rc.conf.local for PC-BSD) by adding this:

# enable File System in User Space
fusefs_enable=”YES”

And fusefs will be ready op on reboot. As an alterntivie to rebooting one could load the module and start fusefs manually.

kldload /usr/local/modules/fuse.ko
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/fusefs start

After that, if you can ssh to the server you can at least mount your home directory via SSH 🙂

sshfs username@host ~/mount_point

Since UNIX uses a numerical user and group id (uid, gid) to check file ownership and what not.. And my user account on my laptop was created in the PC-BSD install my uid & guid are 1001, on my OpenBSD machine hosting the files my UID & GID are set to more ‘personal’ integers, so they have to be mapped for my local account

sshfs -o uid=1001 -o gid=1001 username@host ~/mount_point

the username@host syntax is the same as scp, which means the common $USER@$VECTRA:/what/ever notation I use can be used for this as well, if the :/where/ever part is ommited it will use ones home directly from the server.

I have the fusefs-smbnetfs port installed but I’m not exactly fond of microsoft networking. I’m also very tempted to test a little bit of NFS over SSH, but I don’t have much problem with using SSHFS from my laptop and SMB/CIFS from my desktop.

I’ve created a few SMB Shares on the OpenBSD machine that match up to parts of my home directory, tomorrow I’ll start transferring files over. My Music, Videos, and Pictures directories amount for 2.8GB of files alone. So I don’t have much problem with off loading them.

Since I always back crap up first and the files are non critical I can put up with being unable to use the ‘current’ set of them whenever my file servers off line, which is rare. It’ll also be possible for me to set up a few cron jobs that’ll backup my files more regularly: without needing to use the network (scp/ssh) directly! And I can always write a cronjob to seek and destroy those stupid Thumbs.db files Windows Explorer always makes.

I’m not sure about my ~/Documents and ~/code directories yet, that’s almost 400MB of files right there but I’d rather not have to deal with out of date copies if Vectra goes off line. Although I could always set up my laptop to scp over a compressed nihgtly backup… We’ll see where it goes after some live-testing.

In my ideal world, I think my entire home directory would be residing on the server but I’m not quite ready to trust the hardware here for that yet 0.o

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Well, started about 0020 or some thing, now 0330 and I’ve got about 1GB of files installed…

Downloaded TeXLives DVD ISO and I’m nearing the end of a full install scheme to /usr/Programs/texlive/2007.

I dunno if it will work, even if I could get it to work in PBI format I’m not sure if I’d want to upload the mother but hey, it’s a shot !

So far all of the libs needed by the freebsd binaries seem to be found installed, that’s good.. The system is so freaking huge I’d probably need an army of TeX masters just to write unit tests to find out what works and doesn’t.

So far most of the bulk seems to be the omni-lingual nature

I expect that it will work as far as the tests outlighted in the TeXLive guide, probably build the various TeX documents I’ve got.. My Vi-User-HOWTO, my novel, new [SAS] Trooper Tryout SOP, a few sections of the SOP Rewrites, etc.

I also have a porting doc handy about the OpenBSD port written by the guy that seems to have done most of the work on OpenBSD.

First, I’ll try a PBI but I expect short of stripping it down to English only files or maybe even the big 6 that it’ll be to huge to move around easy. I want to see how I can compact this because there is about 1.1GB of files installed right now out of the 1.7GB of ISO which I unzipped from a 935MB Archive :-). Any way you slice it that is pretty freaking big to PBI… be it build, upload, or download lol.

If I can, I’d like to try a port for FreeBSD but assuming even the install I just did _works_, I’m not sure if I would like the best way of installing it from ports… We’ll see what happens.

Depending on how work’n or broke’n it is I suppose depends on how a port would work out.

 ===================> TeX Live installation procedure <==================

===> Note: Letters/digits in  indicate menu items <===
===>       for commands or configurable options                   <===

TeX Live can be used on multiple systems
as a separate subdirectory is used for each
installed binary package in /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/bin.

Preparing list of files to be installed...
  Intel x86 with FreeBSD

  Essential programs and files 
  Extra BibTeX styles 
  TeX auxiliary programs 
  ConTeXt format 
  Base documentation 
  Bulgarian documentation 
  Chinese documentation 
  Czechslovak documentation 
  Dutch documentation 
  English documentation 
  Finnish documentation 
  French documentation 
  German documentation 
  Greek documentation 
  Italian documentation 
  Japanese documentation 
  Korean documentation 
  Mongolian documentation 
  Polish documentation 
  Portuguese documentation 
  Russian documentation 
  Spanish documentation 
  Thai documentation 
  Turkish documentation 
  Ukrainian documentation 
  Vietnamese documentation 
  TeX font-related programs 
  Extra fonts 
  Recommended fonts 
  Extra formats 
  Games typesetting (chess, etc) 
  Miscellaneous extra generic macros 
  Miscellaneous generic macros 
  Graphics tools 
  HTML/SGML/XML support 
  LaTeX support for the humanities 
  Basic LaTeX packages 
  LaTeX3 packages 
  LaTeX supplementary packages 
  LaTeX recommended packages 
  Advanced math typesetting 
  MetaPost (and Metafont) drawing packages 
  Music typesetting 
  Omega 
  Packages for drawings graphics 
  Plain TeX supplementary packages 
  PSTricks packages 
  PostScript and Truetype utilities 
  Support for publishers 
  Typesetting for natural and computer sciences 
  GNU Texinfo 
  TrueType font manipulation 
  XeTeX macros 

  African scripts 
  Arabic 
  Armenian 
  Chinese, Japanese, Korean 
  Croatian 
  Cyrillic 
  Czech/Slovak 
  Danish 
  Dutch 
  Finnish 
  French 
  German 
  Greek typesetting 
  Hebrew 
  Hungarian 
  Indic 
  Italian 
  Latin 
  Manju 
  Mongolian 
  Norwegian 
  Other hyphenation files 
  Polish 
  Portuguese 
  Spanish 
  Swedish 
  Tibetan 
  UK English 
  Vietnamese 

Now copying selected files
PKGONLY collection-basic collection-bibtexextra collection-binextra 
collection-context collection-documentation-base 
collection-documentation-bulgarian collection-documentation-chinese 
collection-documentation-czechslovak collection-documentation-dutch 
collection-documentation-english collection-documentation-finnish 
collection-documentation-french collection-documentation-german 
collection-documentation-greek collection-documentation-italian 
collection-documentation-japanese collection-documentation-korean 
collection-documentation-mongolian collection-documentation-polish 
collection-documentation-portuguese collection-documentation-russian 
collection-documentation-spanish collection-documentation-thai 
collection-documentation-turkish collection-documentation-ukrainian 
collection-documentation-vietnamese collection-fontbin collection-fontsextra 
collection-fontsrecommended collection-formatsextra collection-games 
collection-genericextra collection-genericrecommended collection-graphicstools 
collection-htmlxml collection-humanities collection-langafrican 
collection-langarab collection-langarmenian collection-langcjk 
collection-langcroatian collection-langcyrillic collection-langczechslovak 
collection-langdanish collection-langdutch collection-langfinnish 
collection-langfrench collection-langgerman collection-langgreek 
collection-langhebrew collection-langhungarian collection-langindic 
collection-langitalian collection-langlatin collection-langmanju 
collection-langmongolian collection-langnorwegian collection-langother 
collection-langpolish collection-langportuguese collection-langspanish 
collection-langswedish collection-langtibetan collection-langukenglish 
collection-langvietnamese collection-latex collection-latex3 collection-latexextra
 collection-latexrecommended collection-mathextra collection-metapost 
collection-music collection-omega collection-pictures collection-plainextra 
collection-pstricks collection-psutils collection-publishers collection-science 
collection-texinfo collection-ttfutils collection-xetex 

Done copying.
Testing for /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/bin/i386-freebsd/texconfig....
Making language.dat in /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/texmf-var/tex/generic/config
 from your language selections...
Updating filename database with mktexlsr...
mktexlsr: Updating /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/texmf/ls-R... 
mktexlsr: Updating /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/ls-R... 
mktexlsr: Updating /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/texmf-local/ls-R... 
mktexlsr: Updating /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/texmf-var/ls-R... 
mktexlsr: Done.
Doing post-install jobs from the packages...
   ... snip ...
Making map files for dvips, pdftex, dvipdfm with updmap...
Re-updating filename database with mktexlsr...
mktexlsr: Updating /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/texmf/ls-R... 
mktexlsr: Updating /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/ls-R... 
mktexlsr: Updating /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/texmf-local/ls-R... 
mktexlsr: Updating /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/texmf-var/ls-R... 
mktexlsr: Done.

=========================
Installation is finished.  (Wed Mar 26 03:43:06 EDT 2008)

Formats will be built for each user as needed.  If you wish to install
all formats at once, for everyone on your system, run fmtutil-sys --all.

For future global configuration, edit files in /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/texmf-var
(or run texconfig or texconfig-sys).

Add /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/texmf/doc/man to MANPATH.
Add /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/texmf/doc/info to INFOPATH.
Most importantly, add /usr/Programs/texlive/2007/bin/i386-freebsd
  to your PATH for current and future sessions.

See ./index.html for links to documentation.
The TeX Live web site (http://tug.org/texlive/)
contains any updates and corrections.

TeX Live is a joint project of the TeX user groups around the world;
please consider supporting it by joining the group best for you.  
The list of groups is available on the web at 
http://tug.org/usergroups.html.

Welcome to TeX Live!

Cross ya fingers and hang on for a wild ride… ‘cuz here we go baby.

Oh baby where have you been all my life?

by

I just found the mixer(8) command on my BSD powered laptop when looking through the handbook.

This rocks !

Every now and then I like to adjust my sound volume, on the laptop I usually have music going all of the time. I’ve got kmix docked iso I can open and adjust it but that kind of sucks. Because I have to swap from keyboard to mouse or worse mouse-jet around to go from what I was doing to adjusting the sound. Some times the volume slider in my systray really is the best way for that.

Now when I could just suspend Vim and use mixer to adjust it without leaving my shell, that is perfect!

$ mixer
Mixer vol      is currently set to  50:50
Mixer pcm      is currently set to  25:25
Mixer speaker  is currently set to  81:81
Mixer line     is currently set to  75:75
Mixer mic      is currently set to   0:0
Mixer cd       is currently set to  75:75
Mixer rec      is currently set to   0:0
Mixer igain    is currently set to   0:0
Mixer ogain    is currently set to  50:50
Recording source: mic
$ mixer -s
vol 50:50 pcm 25:25 speaker 81:81 line 75:75 mic 0:0 cd 75:75 rec 0:0 igain 0:0 ogain 50:50 =rec mic%                                                          
$ mixer pcm 0:0
Setting the mixer pcm from 25:25 to 0:0.
$ mixer pcm 25:25
Setting the mixer pcm from 0:0 to 25:25.
$

I set the PCM/Wave to 0 and then back to 25% left and right effectively muting an unmuting my sound. Since some programs will modify the PCM/Wave setting when changing the volume, like MPlayer and XMMS do by default. While others like Xine based stuff (Kaffeine and Amarok for example) are poilite enough not to dick with the system sound settings.

I’ve come to setting my Volume to 50% and adjusting the PCM setting at will. I could probably make most programs use there own virtual channel and not screw with the overall sound but on my laptop I rarely have a need for it.

I would rather like it if I could do some thing like that on my Windows machine though, so I could for example adjust volumes independently for some applications that don’t support software mixing on windows. Which means all of there sounds run at the settings in windows control center… Like XFires message beeps (ugh) but with how the sound works on my desktop with the Audigy 4…. I’m just happy if I can play Raven Shield and listen to music in any thing _other_ then WMP and not get a BSOD quite often when using the server browser in Rvs!

sshfs?

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Hmm could this be the solution to my problems ?

sshfs -o uid=MyLocalUID -o gid=MyLocalGID $USER@$VECTRA: /tmp/mnt

$VECTRA is an environment variable that expands to the address of my file server.

I was able to access my remote users home directory (the one on $VECTRA) through the /tmp/mnt folder on my laptop ($DIXIE)

My local User ID and Group ID #’s on this system are the defaults setup when I installed PC-BSD, don’t recall if I had an option to set them. On my file server where I used adduser my UID/GID reflect my DOB so they needed to be remapped. Once I did that I was able to work on the files through a mount point I own, and

as expected the trusty umount command worked (of course you can’t be using the files while trying to un mount them)

fusefs-smbnetfs in ports is another thing I want to look at, because SMB is suitable for the windows clients just as much as sshfs is for my lapto… Only I care more about my laptop having *good* integration 🙂

On windows I don’t have a problem with SMB shares because it’s fairly integrated with the system, and I use a file manager for manipulating files… The cmd.exe is just to wasteful, it is the worst terminal emulator slash shell I have ever seen! Heck I’d rather confine my self to /bin/sh lol.

On my laptop, I usually do file management through my shell. I don’t use an external mouse, just the touch pad so you could say it’s in my best interests to make use of keyboard friendly designs ;-). I spend most of my time using a shell and utils for file management… So KDE’s integration with SMB Shares (almost as good as Windows and without the lockups).

mount_smbfs requires running as root because of what it has to do, that’s not acceptible to me although possibly I could rig my laptop for a passwordless sudo mount_smbfs but I don’t consider that an acceptable method whether it would work or not.

I’d like to be able to move parts of my home directories to the server. That way I can offload the current versions of my Music, Video, and Image files. I could even move my Documents and code directories which would be nice, right now I’ve been in a bit of a pesky situation.

tar -cf /tmp/foo.tar foo && scp /tmp/foo.tar $USER@$VECTRA:/srv/smb/Files/

So I can work on files from my windows machine, and just tar them back up and scp them over on the laptop later. A poor work around…

I need to test the fusefs-smbnetfs port, either way I know what I want. And to be honest I don’t have a problem with using sshfs for my laptop and smb for my desktop as long as I can get every thing working properly. Using sshfs on the laptop instead would also mean no need to change my laptops firewall configuration.

I just need to see how they handle a network failure….

My file server is usually online but not always, so I’d be hesitant to put my entire home directory on it. And even then, because of my shitty internet connection I often have to do a power cycle on the modem and some times the router every few weeks… So that is a factor that needs to be considered.

And actually, that might be a good way to _test_ it out !

Just not on my laptops home directory xD

days thoughts

by

So far the updates to my old Vi User how-to are going quite nicely, all things considered.

I’ve come to using GNU Make for automation work, to be honest if I had to use make features that are not standardized. GNU Make is the best bet to learn extensions any way because it is the most available set of extensions.

I’m not partial to BSD or GNU Make in the least, I only care about a working tool.

BSD Make failed to accept the makefile I setup for TeX documents, GNU Make accepted it without problem while BSD Make seems to barf at it. As long as the document gets build without me having to abuse my shells history features I don’t care lol.

The main problem is all of my projects are on a snails creep right now, courtesy of my family.

You know, I think I would love to take a pot & ladle from the kitchen. Then go pace back and forth in front of them banging the ladle on the pot; shouting “How do you like it” until I’m blue in the face — let them experience rest on their days off like *my* days off are spent doing things!

Oh what fun it could be to just be a cruel bastard for a change…

And how peaceful life could be if any one could head my words instead of [as good as] spiting at them.