I recently looked into setting up a media center at home. I installed Mythbuntu, purely because I wanted things to be as easy as possible, but still it was not easy enough. MythTV seems good for PVR or normal TV usage, but I just wanted to play media stored on my external hard drives, something MythTV doesn’t like that much.

I started looking for something else, even looked at Freevo, but ended up with Enna.

I went into the Mythbuntu control center and disabled the front and backend for mythtv and also disabled the autostart for mythtv. Added the Enna repo and installed it.

Not only does the default skin for Enna look amazing, the flow of things are much better than mythtv.
There is a config file for Enna, but there’s no need to configure things like storage paths. Simply start Enna and start browsing to wherever you want to be.

It also fetches data automatically for your series and movies, which is a great plus, because I wasn’t going to do that myself and its pretty to look at.

Next thing I’ll look at is GeexBox when I get a tv/dvb card. Its the alternative to MythTV, also being able to watch tv and record and it still uses the great looking interface from Enna.

So… for reasons unbeknowning to mankind, trying to find the path where you can store your ISO’s on XenServer is amazingly difficult. After trying various combos on google and Citrix’s own site, I eventually found a site pointing it out: http://www.tillett.info/2009/09/23/adding-iso-repository-under-xenserver-5-5/

The path is at: /var/opt/xen/iso_import

BTW, slocate isn’t installed and when I tried using find, that path didn’t pop up… probably because I was searching for XenServer.iso thinking it would work in the same folder…

Also check here: http://docs.vmd.citrix.com/XenServer/5.0.0/1.0/en_gb/guest.html#iso_windows-where_to_put_it

Its been a while since I posted anything. My new baby is keeping me pretty busy when I’m not working.

Anyway, I was doing some simple maintenance today and thought I’d share it, while at the same time do something useful with my blog. This is just a quick rundown on how I’m backing up a database every day automatically and have it email to myself.

I start off by editing the crontab, since I want this to run automatically every day:
$ crontab -e

10 01 * * * /usr/bin/mysqldump -pSOMEPASSWD DBNAME | gzip > /root/sqlbackups/DBNAME.`date +"%Y%m%d"`.sql.gz

That line tells it to run 1:10am every day. You need to replace “SOMEPASSWD” and “DBNAME” with your password and database name. “%Y%m%d” will display the date as “year month day”, for eg:
DBNAME.20100201.sql.gz
Note that I’m saving it in the /root/sqlbackups/ path, so make sure it exists.

Next line:

15 01 * * * /bin/echo | /usr/bin/mutt -s "MySQL backup `date +"%F"`" YOUR@EMAILADDRESS -a /root/sqlbackups/DBNAME.`date +"%Y%m%d"`.sql.gz

This job will run 5 minutes later. You will need Mutt installed on your system.

Next line, cleanup:

20 01 * * * /usr/bin/find /root/sqlbackups/DBNAME* -mtime +14 -exec rm {} \;

This will check if any of the backups are older than 14 days and delete them. You can change the amount of days to whatever you like.

There you have it! Quick and simple MySQL database backup solution.
Note that I was using the root user. It is probably safer using a user other than root.

– EDIT –

This crap above wont work if you put it into cron like that because of the quotes. Rather put them in a script, chmod +x it and then add it into cron.

This popping sound didn’t really bothered me, but I found this link by chance that explains how to make it stop real quick.
As far as I know, this only affects people that have the Intel HDA audio chipset.

I honestly don’t know why this guy had to make a video to show people how to fix it… perhaps he wanted to brag?

However, the quickest way to fix it would be:

sudo vi /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

(or you could replace ‘vi’ with ‘gedit’ for a graphical editor)
and hash out the line:

options snd-hda-intel power_save=10 power_save_controller=N

Save and reboot.