Tiernan's Comms Closet

Geek, Programmer, Photographer, network egineer…

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GIT tips and tricks

December 5, 2012
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I use GIT a lot for different things, including this blog. so, here are a few tips and tricks I have found useful over the while…

Symform – P2P Backup

November 30, 2012
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I have previously posted about CrashPlan as my Backup System. I also, a long time ago, talked about Backing up SQL, MySQL and other stuff on my other blog. Well, CrashPlan is all good, but there are 2 “niggly” bits with it…

  • Its not FREE (well, this year I got it Free on Black Friday…) but it is cheap ($120 a year to backup 10 machines to the cloud aint bad.)
  • Its NOT FAST! The CrashPlan Datacenters all live in the US, and my servers live in Europe (either Dublin or Germany). So, bandwidth is limited… Getting less than 1Mbit/s most times, but have seen it reach 3… I have 20Mbits/s upload… even half that would be nice…

So, that’s where Symform comes in. Symform is a P2P Backup Service, which runs on Windows, Linux and MacOSX. In theory, it should run anywhere that has a Mono runtime since its written in .NET. Anyway, you start with 10Gb of free storage, and you can increase that by one of 2 ways:

  • Pay money: for $0.15 per month, you get 1Gb of storage in the cloud
  • Pay Bytes: For every 2Gb “Contributed” (which is actually more like a pledge than a contribution… more on that later) you get 1Gb storage in the cloud.

It works very well, and is nice a fast too. I have a few machines in house which are contributing storage, a total of about 2Tb, and I have been given 1Tb storage in “The Cloud”. There is a lot more on how this works on their “How Symform Works” section of their site.

I mentioned the “Contribution” VS “Pledge” up above… I have a machine in the house where I have Pledged 1Tb of storage. In reality, Symform can use the full 1Tb of storage, if it needs to, but is currently only using 168Gb. Now, that could just be that the machine is still getting files, and it will end up using the full 1Tb eventually, but either way, its all good.

Also, as a couple of notes on Contribution and Backups:

  • The machine needs to be online and accessible on the internet at least 80% of the time, but 24/7 is ideal. If you drop below the 80%, your account can be suspended.
  • your machine needs to be publically accessible, meaning port forwarded. I have a couple contribution machines in house, so they each have separate ports forwarded to them.
  • Given the P2P nature of the software, lots of connections to different machines are made… if you are behind a firewall, you may need to allow all or most outgoing connections. If you are on a really restrictive firewall, you may want to stick a contribution box in your DMZ and probably use the Turbo Seeding feature.
  • Turbo Seeding is a handy feature, especially for Laptops… only problem is its Windows Only… So, importing and exporting does not work on Linux or OSX.
  • The software can managed Work and Non Work hours, and will limit the upload and download speed during this time. Also a nice feature…

So far, so good. Very happy with the software, but would like a nicer interface to see what’s going on. At the moment, you are either limited to using the web interface, which aint bad, but not great, or watching the log files… I would also like the ability to prioritize certain files or folders, so, for example, upload my documents folder before anything else, and if anything changes in there, even if its uploading from somewhere else, pause and upload the documents folder… Just a thought…

More Jekyll Stuff

October 4, 2012
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Couple of bits and pieces on Jekyll stuff today… I am tweaking the outline of the site, so I am surfing around finding stuff… here is what I have found

  • Host a static site on Amazon S3: Interesting idea, and something I would look into eventually… And with the help of CloudFront you could host your whole blog on a CDN!
  • Rake tasks for Jekyll: Rake is the Ruby version of make… and a RakeFile can have tasks, which are in Ruby… They can do, from what I can gather, pretty much anything… So, some examples of what you can do with them are linked here… I especially like the New Post generator… very handy!
  • Jekyll Plugins: Various different plugins for Jekyll… I am interested in a few of these, mainly the Generate_projects one, which generates a page for your projects based on your GitHub projects… very cool stuff…
  • Strictly speaking, this is not just a Jekyll how to, but Migrating from Wordpress to Jekyll is a handy read. my main blog, my podcast and photography blog both run WordPress. migrating them to Jekyll would mean I could move them directly to a CDN and make things a lot faster… Maybe something I plan doing soon…

If you have any tips or tricks, why not leave a comment and I can add them to the post.

Handbrake Cluster

October 3, 2012
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[UPDATED] someone asked in the comments if there was an binary build for this file. there is now! http://handbrakecluster.codeplex.com now hosts the code and binaries, and will soon have help files and documentation.

A few days back, I wrote a post titled Powershell + Handbrake + AppleTV + iTunes = Automatic TV… ish. In it I included a block of Powershell code to bulk convert TV shows from whatever format you had them in to a M4V format for the AppleTV. Well, as they say “If necessity is the mother of all invention, laziness must be the father”. I have a lot of shows I wanted converted to the AppleTV, so I built something… Its called HandBrake Cluster and is written in .NET 4.5, uses MSMQ and Handbrake to do the processing… The workflow is as follows:

  • setup the system as described on the HandBrake Cluster site.
  • run the adder program with the parameters required (location of files you want converted, type of files to find, where you want the files to be placed, output file type)
  • run the cluster EXE on as many machines as you want. each machine will need to point to the correct MSMQ on the head node, have their own copy of Handbrake, and must have access to the fileshare that you are reading and writing to…
  • each node will take a message of the queue, process the file and then mark it as completed. There is code to see if the message has failed, so, in theory, if something goes into the queue, it should always be processed…

I have run this at home on a couple of different machines, and so far so good… my room gets a bit warmer when I kick this off, and between the 3 machines I ran it on, my FPS count went from just 80-120 on the Godbox, to a total of about 160 – 240 FPS (Godbox = 80-120, Server 1 and 2 are about 40-60FPS).

The next thing I managed to do was tweak my import process for iTunes. I am using a program called iHomeServer for iTunes which is running on the GodBox. It monitors a folder, which is where HandBrake Cluster is writing to, and adds them to iTunes. I can then tweak the metadata using the tool, so I can add art work, tell it which shows are related, and it sets up Art work, title info, etc. It is very handy, and something I am very happy with.

PowerShell + HandBrake + AppleTV + iTunes = Automatic TV… Ish…

September 28, 2012
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I have an AppleTV in the house (3, actually) and I am very happy with its ease of use, size and cost… You can’t argue with the small price!

I also have a lot of content that works great with the AppleTV in iTunes, but I have content which does not work so great with the AppleTV… So, I needed to find a way to convert files quickly and easily… that’s where PowerShell and Handbrake come in…

  • in the code above, you need to set the path of where your files live. in my case, they live on a NAS.
  • next, set the location of HandBrake… I have a 64-bit copy of Windows and a 64-bit copy of HandBrake.
  • set the new file name to where you want the file to go. in my case I have it set to my “Automatically Add to iTunes” folder, which is a magic folder for iTunes that copies any files dropped in there to your iTunes library.
  • finally, conversion is run…

This may take a few min, depending on a few factors:

  • how many files you are converting
  • how fast your machine in
  • how fast your machine can read and write the files…
  • etc…

I have set files to convert on 3 different machines (the GodBox and 2 other servers) and I am getting speeds of anywhere between 250FPS (on the GodBox running 2 instances of HandBrake CLI) and 40 – 60 FPS on the older servers… on the remote machines, they are sending files to the GodBox folder also, so once everything completes, it’s just a matter of opening iTunes and we are good to go… Now to figure out how to automate the Metadata import…

Sublime Text 2 with Powershell

August 31, 2012
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My new Favorite cross platform text editor is Sublime Text 2. It works on Windows, Mac OS and Linux, and I am very happy with it. My only problem is the path to start it is not exactly easy to type… So, with the help of PowerShell, my new favorite command line tool on Windows, I added an alias:

Set-Alias subl 'c:\program files\sublime text 2\sublime_text.exe'

I added this to my Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1 file in Documents\WindowsPowerShell folder. If you don’t have one of these files, check out this Computer Performance.Co.UK post on Creating PowerShell profile files and then edit the file and add the line above… Now, I can edit files in PowerShell with Sublime Text 2 by typing:

subl filename

Happy days!

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