Working with Windwos users on my SVN repository, I needed to upgrade SVN to match with their Tortoise version. Here are the steps to do so:

• add the line below to /etc/apt/sources.list

  1	deb http://www.backports.org/debian lenny-backports main contrib non-free

• get the public key from lenny-backports running the following command

  1	wget -O - http://backports.org/debian/archive.key | apt-key add -

• run aptitude update
• install subversion aptitude -t lenny-backports install subversion

I use three different small backup drives as three backup volumes. I turn them on on sunday, the backup scripts runs overnight, and I turn them off on monday morning. I’ve shared the backup script in a previous post.

The problem is that the backup script  starts by mounting the backup drives. It expects them to have the same device name in /dev everytime. For example, it expects backup1 to be /dev/sde1. It turns out that these assigned device names can randomly change. Sometimes, backup1 appears as /dev/sdh1. The solution, in this case, is to assign a persistent name to each device. That is what udev is for. Udev will be called when a drive is plugged. If the plugged drive match a udev rule, it will be assigned the name defined in the rule.

The first step is to find criterias that will allow to identify a single drive and then create a rule for it.

Run the following command for the drives you need to name (replace sde1 by what you need):

In my case, I get the following result:

I have outlined the unique values and criterias that will allow me to identify backup1. I also outlined the subsystem lines that will be used in the udev rule.

The rule that will match this drive is:

More information about udev rules can be found online.

That done, you can test our rule by launching the following command:

If the rule matched the drive, you can ls /dev/disk/by-label and find backup1 in the list.

You can now edit the backup script and replace mount /dev/sde1 by mount /dev/disk/by-label/backup1. The latter should always refer to the right drive.

Thanks to the authors of the following two guides that lead me to this solution:

• Detect USB Hard Drives Attributes
• uDev on Debian Wiki

Two days ago, I ran into a strange problem with my email server which refused to send any more emails. It turned out my hard drive was full… I started by emptying the tmp directory and running aptitude clean and aptitude autoclean but that wasn’t enough to free enough space to allow me to breathe for long. Some Googling lead me to deborphan, a package that will list packages installed because they were once a dependancy but that are now useless to the system. Those packages identified, I just had to remove them all.

A few commands to do the same thing:

Now my server can breathe and so can I.

While Debian boots, several warning, error or information messages appear and quickly disappear from the screen. If you wish to log these messages in order to consult them later on, you need to enable the bootlog by editing a single configuration file.

The file should say something like

Simply ,change it to

You should now have these messages logged in /var/log/boot.

I have setup Subsonic on my server last week as a standalone applicaiton. That means that Subsonic runs its own webserver. The only drawback of this method of deployment is that, to access the application, I had to type http://<subsonic server>:8080.

To access Subsonic while using port 80, I enabled the mod_proxy and added a VirtualHost as follow.

To enable the proxy module, run :

To access Subsonic via Apache, create a Virtual Host similar to the one below :

Today (or yesterday as I write), Debian Lenny was released. If you with to upgrade, the procedure is as follow:

1. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and replace all occurences of “etch” by “lenny”
2. run apt-get update or aptitude update
3. run aptitude upgrade
4. run aptitude dist-upgrade

The little discovery I made tonight was that apt needed keys to update the package list. Sometimes these keys need updated.

Here is the message I was getting when running aptitude update:

There is the command apt-keys update to fix that issue. Still, tonight, that didn’t do it for me. The trick was to proceed as follow:

I'm now updated to Lenny and it looks as though my email server is down.  Might turn out to be a long evening.

So now we have a backup system archiving our valuable data weekly. The problem is, these data come from different computers running different OS, some of them also come from friend’s computers or even the World Wide Web. The problem is that we can not guarantee that these files are virus free. But at least, we can scan them before we back them up. That’s why I created a script launching a virus scan every thursdays before we run the sunday backup. Not knowing which antivirus to use to detect windows-aiming virus I decided to go with Avast that I used when running Windows. Avast provides an Avast 4 Linux edition, free for home use.

The installation is straighforward: download the package from avast site then run:

The script is pretty simple too (feel free to help me improve it as well):

Then I added the task in cron:

Hopefully that will save us some troubles…

In the Spring, our DV camera died on us. As for most electronic devices, it was not worth fixing, so we saved money and got a new Canon DV Camera and started filming show openings again for various artists. Last month, we also returned from our holidays in America with something like 2000 new pictures. For these two reasons, it was getting urgent for us to start backuping some of our data.

We went to Montgallet to see what our options were (if you’re not a Parisian but qualify as a geek, don’t miss rue Montgallet if you ever visit the City of Lights). Anyway, we ended up buying a 2-3.5 drives external case by Icy Box. The box now holds two 1 Terrabyte drives . It’s always funy to remember that my 1999 computer held a great 20 Gigabytes hard drive or something.

We backup system we decided to implement is quite simple. On sundays, our debian server sends us both an email reminding us to turn on the external backup case.

On sunday night, at 2 am, the backup starts by mounting the drives and then, using rsync, backups the rushes, photos, music and source code folders. The backup completed, the rsync logs are emailed to us. If the drives were not accessible at the time of the backup (ie we forgot to turn on the case), the email will say so and we’ll have to start the backup again, manually. Nothing fancy, but hopefully, it’ll save us the unfortunate lost of photos or movie rushes. Here is the script I came up with so far. First real run of the backup, tomorrow night. We’ll see what goes on…

Then I added the scripts in my cron tasks :

Feel free to comment on the script so I can improve it…

Well, with a running Debian Sid distribution, I am all set to test KDE 4. The installation process is simple enough but, before getting into it, remove any previous version of KDE. Here is how I’ve done it :

Note that I first tried to install kde4 using apt-get and it would never work, I had dependencies error, but it worked right away using aptitude.

Anyway, that done, I was able to log out and re-login using KDE and here it was :

On the snapshot above you can see three of the built in widgets for KDE, the clock, the post its and the twitter one Handy. The widget engine is supposed to soon handle the MAC OS X ones. Congratulations to the KDE team!

KDE 4 has been announced for a long time and, since I first heard of it, I subscribed to the mailing list. I keep hearing about the new features the kde team for this new version and I’m really anxious to try out. Finally two days ago, I decided I wanted to install the beta version and see how things were for myself. In order to install the KDE 4.1 beta packages, one needs to run an unstable Debian (or Sid) which wasn’t my case since I’ve installed a testing (or Lenny) version two months ago. So, first things first, I had to upgrade my distribution.

Here’s how things went:

Everything went fine, except that I lost the setup for my nvidia drivers in the process and had to resintall them but that was easy enough since I had blogged the install procedure last time.