Hi buds,

I am sharing a script that I have worked for a couple of days for my work in order to keep things easy and automated for me as I normally have to install some A2Billing boxes and it’s a quite long and tedius process. For more info here is the README:

README

This script allows you to install A2Billing on a clean install of CentOS 5 (Either i386 or x86_64) just ‘Base’ is required to install it.

Among other things the script does:

- Install & Configure of LAMP (Requesting MySQL root & a2billing password)
- Install A2Billing
- Configure it for production state
- Compile from sources the Sangoma Wanpipe drivers if desired
- Disable SELinux & Firewall
- Disable unused default services in CentOS 5
- Install Asterisk from Digium repositories
- Configure cronjobs, logs, etc

HOW TO INSTALL

Be sure to have the ‘screen’ package installed, in order to do it you can run:

yum -y install screen

Then you have to execute the script on a screen session, to do this run:

screen

And then execute the script:

chmod +x a2billing_setup.sh
./a2billing_setup.sh

Source code available at: https://github.com/amontalban/A2Billing-Install-Script

Thanks for checking it out!

Hi folks!

I learned this the hard way! I migrated a website from one server to another with crontabs, and the customer needed to have the scripts running on CEST timezone (While the server was on CST timezone), so I changed the timezone but the scripts were still running at CST timezone, some googling and I found out that the crond service doesn’t take the changes of the timezone if you don’t restart so remember:

For RHEL/CentOS:

service crond restart

For other Linux:

/etc/init.d/crond restart

Take care!

Cheers.

I was trying to delete a folder which tons of files and the rm command was giving me an error,
luckly the almighty find command did the job for me

-bash-3.2# ls -1 | wc -l
54999

Wow that’s a lot of files!

-bash-3.2# rm *
-bash: /bin/rm: Argument list too long

Yikes! Let’s try the find alternative

-bash-3.2# find . -type f -exec rm -f {} \;
-bash-3.2# ls -1 | wc -l
0

Great

Hi there!

Long time no post so I am posting this simple howto to show you how to forward a port with IPTables on Linux. This come up because I installed Zenoss on a server and the default port is 8080 and I don’t want to use it so I forwarded the port 80 to the port 8080 on the same machine.

The command to do this is:

iptables -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT \
--to-ports 8080

Cheers!

Hey people and bots,

I just wanted to say that I am alive but just too busy to maintain the blog (Well to be honest I also don’t enjoy writing as much as I did earlier, I don’t know why this happens to me with all the blogs I created…). The last post I wrote was 3 months ago and great things happened here in Uruguay, our national team ended up 4th in the FIFA World Cup, one thing that didn’t happen since 1970 when my fathers were just teenagers. Also AM Technology & Systems is getting bigger and bigger every day so this also consume almost all my day. That’s why I came up with this idea to revitalize this blog, instead of writing stuff that only bots and crawlers read all the time, I thought that would be great if you just tell me ideas for posts and I will just write about them, for example “How can I install XYZ software”, “How do I do XYZ stuff”, etc.

I think it’s better to write useful howtos for real people that just writing non-sense things that are only useful for me, besides I really got visitors attention on the FFMPEG Installation howto for Clip-Bucket . So don’t be shay and leave me some comments about what you want me to write, I think it will be funny because I will take it as a challenge and I love challenges

Thank you for stopping by!

Cheers,

Andres

Hi,

If you are using alestic Ubuntu AMIs for AWS/EC2 the timezone is UTC by default, I had to change that to GMT for a customer here is a way to do it automatically in your build script or without human intervention:

echo “Etc/GMT” | tee /etc/timezone
dpkg-reconfigure –frontend noninteractive tzdata

Note: The –frontend option has two – in front

You can check more timezones at the directory /usr/share/zoneinfo/

Hope it helps you!

Cheers!

Hi folks,

Today I had to come up with a solution for a customer using AWS/EC2 to make their crontab resilient to server re-builds in case it goes down by autoscaler or other situations. That’s why I created a script that is called daily that backups the crontab of a specific user to a file in an EBS mounted volume maintaining a 7 days library just in case :

#!/bin/bash

find /data -maxdepth 1 -name ‘bkp-crontab-*’ -mtime 7 -exec rm {} \;
crontab -l -u YOUR_USER_GOES_HERE > /data/bkp-crontab-`date +%Y-%m-%d`

Then to recover the last backup of crontab for the user you can put this in your server script when you are building it:

cat `ls -tr /data/bkp-crontab-* | tail -1` | crontab -u YOUR_USER_GOES_HERE -

This will load the last backup file in the users crontab.

I hope this helps you to have your crontabs backed up

Cheers!

[Thu May 06 10:20:11 2010] [error] [client xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] Request exceeded the limit of 10 internal redirects due to probable configuration error. Use ‘LimitInternalRecursion’ to increase the limit if necessary. Use ‘LogLevel debug’ to get a backtrace.

Today I woke up with a message from Alyson (A visitor of my site) that some pages were producing 404 error, I immediately checked the website but it seemed to be working ok. So I went to the logs to check what’s going on and I found the above message all over my Apache error_log, after investigating what can be I found out that when I added hotlink protection to my website images because a Chinese guy was stealing my images and bandwidth, I screwed the .htaccess file with extra redirections.

So if you have this error please check your .htaccess file for extra redirects .

Thank you Alyson for reporting this!

Hey folks!

Since I have received tons of messages about what hosting provider I recommend to run ClipBucket with FFMPEG I have decided to share with you this great company where I moved all my websites to, they are Linode. They offer GREAT SERVICE & SUPPORT (They answered my ticket to add an additional IP to my VPS in less than 5 minutes!) and also they have pretty cheap rates starting at $19.95 for a 512Mb Linux VPS with 16Gb of RAM. For more info click the image below:

Due to the high amount of messages and questions on this post, we at AM Technology & Systems thought that will be great to offer this installation or troubleshoot FFMPEG issues as one of our services, so…

The other day I had to install some software for a customer to run the Clip Bucket (http://www.clip-bucket.com) script on their server. It was a lot of steps so I documented it and now I am sharing with you so you don’t have to research like I did to met all the requirements for Clip Bucket because in their website they don’t have a guide showing how to install it. Let’s get our hands dirty!

Install Development Tools:

yum groupinstall ‘Development Tools’

Install RPMForge Repository:

For 32 Bits installations: rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/i386/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.5.1-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

For 64 Bits installations: rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/x86_64/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.5.1-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm

Install yasm package:

yum install yasm

Install SVN (subversion) package:

yum install subversion

Install OpenCore-AMR:

cd /usr/src
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencore-amr/files/opencore-amr/0.1.2/opencore-amr-0.1.2.tar.gz/download
tar -zxvf opencore-amr-0.1.2.tar.gz
cd opencore-amr-0.1.2
./configure
make
make install

Install Lame (libmp3lame):

Note that the command has –with (It is double -)

cd /usr/src
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/lame/files/lame/3.98.4/lame-3.98.4.tar.gz/download
tar -zxvf lame-3.98.4.tar.gz
cd lame-3.98.4
./configure –with-vorbis
make
make install

Install Ogg codec:

cd /usr/src

wget http://svn.xiph.org/releases/ogg/libogg-1.2.0.tar.gz

tar -zxvf libogg-1.2.0.tar.gz

cd libogg-1.2.0

./configure

make

make install

Refresh Libraries installed in the system:

ldconfig -v

Install Vorbis:

cd /usr/src
svn checkout -r 17000 http://svn.xiph.org/trunk/vorbis/ vorbis
cd vorbis
./autogen.sh
make
make install

Install XVid codec:

cd /usr/src
wget http://downloads.xvid.org/downloads/xvidcore-1.2.2.tar.gz
tar -zxvf xvidcore-1.2.2.tar.gz
cd xvidcore
cd build/generic
./configure
make
make install

Install x264 codec:

Note that the command has –enable-shared (It is double -)

cd /usr/src
wget ftp://ftp.videolan.org/pub/videolan/x264/snapshots/x264-snapshot-20101101-2245.tar.bz2
tar -xvjf x264-snapshot-20101101-2245.tar.bz2
cd x264-snapshot-20101101-2245
./configure –enable-shared
make
make install

Install FAAD2:

cd /usr/src
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/faac/files/faad2-src/faad2-2.7/faad2-2.7.tar.gz/download
tar -zxvf faad2-2.7.tar.gz
cd faad2-2.7
./configure
make
make install

Install FAAC:

cd /usr/src
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/faac/files/faac-src/faac-1.28/faac-1.28.tar.bz2/download
tar -xvjf faac-1.28.tar.bz2
cd faac-1.28
./configure
make
make install

Install FFMPEG:

Note that the command has –enable…. (It is double -)

cd /usr/src
svn checkout -r 25620 svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
cd ffmpeg

./configure –prefix=/usr/local –enable-pthreads –enable-pic –enable-gpl –enable-version3 –enable-libmp3lame –enable-nonfree –enable-libopencore-amrnb –enable-libopencore-amrwb –enable-libvorbis –disable-mmx –enable-shared –enable-libxvid –enable-libx264 –enable-libfaac

make
make install

Note: If you get an error like this when running the ./configure command:

Unable to create and execute files in /tmp.  Set the TMPDIR environment
variable to another directory and make sure that it is not mounted noexec.
Sanity test failed.

Then you will have to create a directory for example /usr/src/tmp and set the TMPDIR environment variable doing export TMPDIR=/usr/src/tmp and try again.

Configure LD to add the path where FFMPEG is installed:

echo “/usr/local/lib” > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/ffmpeg.conf

Refresh the LD cache: ldconfig -v

Install MP4Box (gpac):

cd /usr/src
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/gpac/files/GPAC%20extra%20libs/GPAC%20extra%20libs%200.4.5/gpac_extra_libs-0.4.5.tar.gz/download
tar -zxvf gpac_extra_libs-0.4.5.tar.gz
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/gpac/files/GPAC/GPAC%200.4.5/gpac-0.4.5.tar.gz/download
tar -zxvf gpac-0.4.5.tar.gz
cd gpac_extra_libs
cp -R * ../gpac/extra_lib
cd ../gpac
chmod +x configure
./configure –use-js=no
make lib
make apps
make install-lib
make install
cp bin/gcc/libgpac.so /usr/lib

Configure LD to add the path where gpac is installed:

echo “/usr/lib” > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/gpac.conf

Refresh the LD cache: ldconfig -v

Install Ruby (Needed for FLVTool2):

cd /usr/src
wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.1-p376.tar.gz
tar -zxvf ruby-1.9.1-p376.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.9.1-p376
ls
./configure
make
make  install

Install FLVTool2:

cd /usr/src
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/17497/flvtool2-1.0.6.tgz
tar -zxvf flvtool2-1.0.6.tgz
cd flvtool2-1.0.6
ruby setup.rb config
ruby setup.rb setup
ruby setup.rb install

And that should be all! After you install the above software remember to change the paths for all in the Website Configuration settings in your ClipBucket website.

If you followed all the guide the correct paths of the software should be like the ones in the images which are:

FFMPEG: /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg

PHP: /usr/bin/php

FLVTool2: /usr/local/bin/flvtool2

MP4BOX: /usr/local/bin/MP4Box

Here is a screenshot with all the required software up & running on the server:

Last update: 02/08/2010

I have made some corrections and adds to the howto, for example running ldconfig -v in some places to refresh libraries in the system, upgrading FFMPEG version to 22733 because as Arandas said the old version break swscale lib. I have found some issues with the ClipBucket not detecting libfaac or libtheora with the version 22733 but it is enabled and working in FFMPEG, so have that in mind when you do the module check.

I have fixed a typo in the FAAC download link, thanks to Arandas comment

I have changed the version of FFMPEG (r22608) after some issues with last FFMPEG trunk versions with MP4Box(gpac). Also I have changed some links to make them easier to copy and paste.

Hi folks,

In this quick post I want to share with you a great script to easily enable SpamAssassin and SpamBox for all the accounts in your cPanel server. I was surprised that this option is not available at cPanel so I started to Google around and found this handy script:

#!/bin/bash
cd /home
for user in `ls /var/cpanel/users`
do
test ! -d $user && continue
touch  $user/.spamassassinenable $user/.spamassassinboxenable
chown $user:$user  $user/.spamassassinenable $user/.spamassassinboxenable
echo $user complete
done

All credits goes to brianoz user of cPanel forums. (I just changed the chown line to include the : instead of the .)

If you want to check the thread in that forum you can check this link: http://forums.cpanel.net/f5/spamassassin-global-enable-anyone-57111.html#post284327

I hope it helps you like it did it for me.

Take care!