Tale of Three Music Players

Once upon a time I used Amarok. Those were the good days. MySql Databases with statistics, etc. Then Amarok 2 came along. I figured out a way to go back to my former love, with the capabilities instead of cheesy looks.
But this didn't last forever, for then I got a Eee PC, and due to my laziness, I didn't install amarok1.4 (the good one). Instead, since I had lost my database, I tested Rhythmbox.

Rhythmbox was good to me for a while. We played many a piece of music together. Then a friend encouraged me to test out Banshee. Banshee did scores just like Amarok did! So I tried it out.

Banshee had everything I would want in a music player. It had scores (though not nearly as good as I had remembered amarok), it handled libraries for videos, and even though I couldn't embed my tags in the videos, it tagged the videos. What Rhythmbox didn't have was a good library organization, and Banshee handled that too! (kinda... it sorta did it while it was going instead of all at once like I would have wanted... leaving half my music sorted and the other half messy in the same folder).

But Banshee was still new, and so didn't have a good relationship with mp3s. In fact, my poor flash drive was being read/written the whole time the song was playing, so I decided that this was reason enough to go back to Rhythmbox. After all, it's the tried and true that keep us going. Besides, Rhythmbox could handle me dropping new files into the folder right away.

Soon, I bought a CD. Without proper CD ripping equipment, I was forced to copy the *.wav files off the CD, and then encode to mp3. But the mp3s were tagless.
So I tagged them in Rhythmbox.
But Rhythmbox couldn't sort them. Instead I had to deal with "Track 1.mp3" files. Which was unacceptable. If I do this with another CD, the files would get replaced!

Then I discovered a program. EasyTag. EasyTag easily tags the mp3s and sorts them.

So I ran it. The mp3s was now organized.

But my playcounts!! They were gone! Rhythmbox couldn't handle the files being in a new location!


So then I remembered my former love. Even without MySql Amarok is superior in all functionality.


Amarok:

• Score and Playcounts (which happen to be smarter then Banshee)


• Scripts/Plugins


• Lyric support (you know... for my Swahili/Kikuyu music)


• Last.fm Support (+ queuing if offline)


• Smart Playlists


• Good Random tool for Playlist


• Organize Mode


• Album Cover Organizer


• (+ A lot of other options.. in 1.4)

Rhythmbox:

• Playcount


• Hot Scanning


• Very stable


• Random tool for Now Playing


• Lyric searching


• Last.fm support (+ Queuing if offline)


• Easy to add covers to CURRENTLY playing song

Banshee:

• Playcount/Score (inferior)


• Lyric support


• Unstable


• Last.fm


• No organize mode, but it organizes...kinda


• Video Library!

Eee PC (Ubuntu)

The Eee PC is quite a effective, and small unit. It's lasted three months in my hands, which is probably a good sign (realizing how I've screwed up the keyboard with soapy-wet hands)

Ubuntu Netbook remix made a big leap in the latest release, also.
Maximus seems more stable, and the layout is quite a bit better.

The main problem is when you switch to Ubuntu there are certain features, like disabling:
- Camera
- Card Reader
- Wireless
That you can't fully control. Sure you can disable the "wireless" in Ubuntu, but the actual wireless card is still on unless you disable it in bios.

eee-control fixes this though.
The version in Jaunty is quite effective. It controls wireless, camera, card reader, brightness, processor and fan speeds, and probably some other things I forgot.

If you like the newest version of Ubuntu (9.10), then you're out of luck. Building eee-control fails.
Rumor has it that the karmic build will be available soon.

Mutt: Scripting mail

With 'mutt' we can generate e-mails and have them sent to our default e-mail address, in this case me@domain.com

mutt -s "Subject line here" me@domain.com < /path/to/message

is the correct command for this e-mail address. You can find more details at http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/sending-mail-with-attachment.html or the man page of mutt.

In the end, my script looks like this:

# Sends the IP address to default address
to="me"
from="noreply"
domain="domain.com"
temp=`mktemp -t`
ifconfig ppp0 > $temp
mutt -e "set from=$from@$domain" -s "IP address - $HOSTNAME" "$to@$domain" < $temp

$HOSTNAME is set based off the hostname of the computer. In my case this name is specific to the location and is unique. This helps me know which school I'm contacting.
The other main addition is the "-e" command.
If you look online you'll find that in order to send from a specific domain, you need to set up a muttrc file. Since we're running a script, and it makes more sense to keep everything together, I decided it's better to just add the "set from=" command in the script instead of an outside file.
The "-e" command lets you do this. It must be in quotes, otherwise it'll throw an error.

This is also added to the ip-up script that is run when ppp0 makes a connection.

You'll then need to make sure that postfix is installed. The best way, is to set up postfix and have it send through a designated email address. I simply set up a "noreply" email address on our domain that I would log into to send the email.
You can find instructions here: http://serverfault.com/questions/119278/configure-postfix-to-send-relay-emails-gmail-smtp-gmail-com-via-port-587/119296#119296

Squid -- Transparency

Edit: updated for what I'm currently doing in 10.04 and 10.10 (ubuntu)

A few guides gave ideas on how to get iptables to work:
# Add to IP tables

# squid server IP
lan=`ifconfig -s | grep eth | awk '{print $1}'`
s_port="3128"
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i $lan -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port $s_port

The problem is on restarting the computer, it seemed to disappear. So I thought I had figured it out, until it didn't work anymore.

Eventually I ended up re-building it each time ppp0 was created by putting it as a process in ip-up.d/

Oh, also don't forget to add "transparent" to the line in the squid.conf file.

http_port 3128 transparent

To learn more about iptables: http://www.frozentux.net/documents/iptables-tutorial/

From here you can directly connect squid to apt-cacher-ng, and have transparent caching of your debian files. Just set up apt-cacher-ng as a peer.

Squid

Squid was relatively easy to set up. There were a few pitfalls, as there are with most programs that seem rather critical to internet usage.

For the most part there was very little deviation from from the regular config, so instead of listing my whole configuration, I'm going to simply list the options I chose and why.

Note: this was written using Squid3

ACL list
In order to define who has access and who doesn't, you probably have noticed that squid.conf has an acl list. In version 3, the acl section is around line 400. It's important to edit this so that the squid server allows connections from your localnet and your localhost.
example:

acl localhost src 127.0.0.1/32
acl localnet src 10.42.43.0/255.255.255.0

I saw many ways to configure the localnet ip address, some being relatively simple (10.42.43.0/32) but this way seems the most obvious, and a bit less confusing.
It's of course important to then set:

http_access allow localnet
http_access allow localhost

http_port
By default the port is set to 3128. But you already knew that. If for some reason you know how to set up a transparent proxy, you can type "transparent" after the port you want to transparently listen. Transparency is a post in and of itself.
What you should realize is that "accel" doesn't refer to accelerating the connection in any way. Unless you know what this means (which I still haven't figured out) you probably shouldn't use it.

Replacement Policies (the cache)
There are two places the cache is stored in: memory and hard disk. For the most part the cache can be left alone, but it makes sense to at least mess around with how the cache works.
The Replacement policy that I used were:
heap GDSF : for the memory
heap LFUDA : for the disk cache
From the config file:

The heap GDSF policy optimizes object hit rate by keeping smaller popular objects in cache so it has a better chance of getting a hit. It achieves a lower byte hit rate than LFUDA though since it evicts larger (possibly popular) objects.

The heap LFUDA policy keeps popular objects in cache regardless of their size and thus optimizes byte hit rate at the expense of hit rate since one large, popular object will prevent many smaller, slightly less popular objects from being cached.

So while LFUDA is most important (saving bandwidth) for our purposes, GDSF might as well be used for memory to increase memory hits.


Paths to know:
/var/spool/squid - where the cache is stored
/var/log/squid - where to access the logs:
access.log should ping whenever someone connects. it's nice to see how effective the server is
cache.log is often used for logging
/etc/squid - where the logs are stored
/etc/init.d/squid - to restart the server

These paths MAY OR MAY NOT have a 3 after them, depending on your version.

Some of the resources I found helpful are:
Squid - The Definite Guide : http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596001629
Squid by Oskar Pearson : http://proxy.ccu.edu.tw/squid/index.html

Hand in hand with Squid is SquidGuard.

Keryx : Download ubuntu updates to a computer with no internet

Part of the initial process before the computers get sent out will be to have the computers mostly updated.

Instead of copying the software from one computer to the other, it would be alot easier to simply have a flash disk, or cd with some mostly recent updates. Once the computers get sent out it will be up to the teachers to keep the computers updated. Software like apt-proxy and squid will help make it less bandwidth intensive to keep the machines updated.

Keryx is fairly intuitive, but I had a bit of a problem with it because I was expecting to have to take the /var/lib/dpkg/source file to the computer with internet.

Keryx does everything for you. Take it to the computer with no internet, start a project, and it copies all the relevant files.

Then take it to the computer with internet access.
First you download the repository list (sudo aptitude update). Then there's an easy button to download updates (sudo aptitude full-upgrade).
There's also a list of all applications (based on the reposotiroy list it downloaded) that can be downloaded. Since it did a check on the original computer before you switched computers, it only downloads the files you need and don't have.
All the files it downloads are conveniently located in a keryx/projects/<project-name>/packages/
This makes it nice for me because since I'm using it for templating I can simply copy them onto a CD and run updates this way.

Maybe I can keep updating this "template" so that I don't have to start over, but can just update the current downloads to be the newest.

Anyway, for a more "official" tutorial, check out
http://crashsystems.net/2009/01/keryx-tutorial/

I'll update the post and post comments on any updates as I use it.

Routing with an Ubuntu machine

Ubuntu is great with networking. I had to fool around with it a bit, but to get the routing set up like we planned wasn't too hard in the end.

After the router was set up and initially plugged in, both ubuntu computers attempted to Automatically configure the network settings.
Unfortunately they both failed after a bit.
This whole time the Safaricom Cellular modem was attached, and connected. The computer connected to the interent this way could connect to google, but the other computer couldn't.

First Go into the network settings (System > Preferences > Network Connections  OR right click on the Network connection icon in your system tray), unlock, and edit the "Auto Eth0" connection.
On the last tab, IPv4 Settings, choose "Shared to other computers"

When I did this on both computers (on just the eth0 connection), I could connect to the internet on both computers even though only one was directly connected to the Safaricom Modem.