CornEmpire Software

Archive for the ‘General’ Category

I recently updated my server and I store a good number of passwords in my pwman database. It is a great little command line program for storing passwords in a secure manner. I do this so that I can log into my machine from anywhere in the world to retrieve passwords if needed, and I’m not tied to a thumb drive that I could lose/break, or a computer that may not have the necessary OS/ports for me to use.

If you need to migrate your database, you can follow these steps:

1. Grab a copy of your old database. It is usually called pwman.db and is stored in your /home/yourname/.pwman/ If you can’t find it, there is a config file in this directory that will tell you where it is.
2. Install pwman3 on your new server. (command for Debian based Linux OSes)
   apt-get install pwman3
3. Run pwman3 and configure the same master password as your old database. (Not sure if this is required, but I thought it was a good idea)
4. Make a copy of your database, and then put your old one in your new /home/yourname/.pwman/ folder.

The next time you run pwman3, you will have all your old passwords!

In my last few attempts at configuring my mythtv installation (my most recent being today when I replaced the hard drive), I’ve gotten this error when I log into my box through SSH:

MythTV status for localhost
===========================
Status...........: Wed Feb 18 2009, 8:30 PM
Total Disk Space.: Total space is 548,770 MB, with 158,049 MB used (28.8%)
Next Recording In: 2 Hours, 59 Minutes
 
Encoders:
mythbox (1) - Idle
 
Scheduled Recordings:
2009-02-18 23:30:00 - CSI: NY (WBZ)
2009-02-19 00:30:00 - Stargate SG-1 (Space: The Imagination Station)
2009-02-19 10:30:00 - Stargate SG-1 (Space: The Imagination Station)
2009-02-19 12:30:00 - First Wave (Space: The Imagination Station)
2009-02-19 19:30:00 - Coronation Street (CBNT CBC St. John's)
2009-02-19 22:30:00 - CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (WBZ)
 
Schedule Conflicts:
Unable to access MythTV Perl API. Try with --verbose to find out why.

I get most of the status for the server, but I don’t get the read outs of the conflicts because of the error.

What happens (as far as I understand it) is that when the cronjob generates the motd, it runs as root, and root does not have a link to the mythtv config, so it can’t get the data from the database.  So, to get around this, we need to create a link in /root/.mythtv/ to the config.xml file for the server.  For me, this runs from my home directory /home/thomas/.mythtv/config.xml so:

sudo ln -s /home/thomas/.mythtv/config.xml /root/config.xml


Once you make this change, the next time the cronjob runs it should populate the motd correctly.

Notes: I’m running this server on Ubuntu 8.04.02 64-bit.

You can find more information on this issue here.

Greetings everyone,
After a hardware failure with my web host, we are finally back up and running again. I haven’t got a whole lot of new information to share at this time, but I just wanted to give everyone a heads up. One of my recent posts was lost, so I’ll work to restore that as soon as I can.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to my site (if any one ever really looked at it in the first place).

I’ve decided to setup a wordpress blog to jot down the tidbits that I run across in my daily life.  I had planned to write my own piece of software to do this, but my other projects are taking too much of my time to continue waiting (waiting for like 4 years now…FYI).

On this site you can expect to find tips and tidbits on programming, web design, linux, gaming and anything else note worthy I come across.  This will serve as a repository of knowledge (hopefully useful) for me, and for the general internet public.

This is the first time I’ve used WordPress, so it is pretty bland as of now.  Later, I’ll get around to customizing things more.

Hope you find something useful here at some point.

Thomas