Home Automation - Is your house smart?

For many years I've wanted to automate things around my house. A long time ago (almost 10 years ago!) I use to use MisterHouse. This was a great application and although I didn't have much in looks, it made my imagination run wild. I was using a few X10 components and though it worked, it was somewhat disappointing in it's performance.

Now, I am planning on embark on a HA project once again. This time, I would like to use something which offers a lot more than Mr House. I've been waiting to see how that project matured and how much development was put in... Though I must admit it's a complex project, I certainly look forward to start it. (If my wife lets me.)

This time, I am going to use LinuxMCE and if you ever go on YouTube, look it up. The demo is quite impressive so it's worth it to look at users' environments. This video/demo I liked above was using a much older version of LinuxMCE. It's capabilities are quite impressive.

Now one thing that is good about HA is that you don't have to invest tons to get started. I'm going to start with a module or two and control a light or two. Once I've got it going, I'll hopefully convince my wife to let me invest in one module a month. (One security camera here, one light module there, another VOIP phone here...)

In short - HA is something that has been available for a while and doesn't take a lot to get started. When are you going to start?

How to tell someone you love them?

I haven't written in a while, not because I haven't had anything to say, but mainly because I haven't felt like putting it down in my blog.

Now, I have something I want to say, but I don't know how to say it.

I love my wife and kids. They are the most important thing to me. I've always thought that what I did was in their best interest. Now, I'm not so sure that is what's happened.

I love my daughter so much that it's gotten to the point where I feel I can't give her anything she deserves anymore and as adult she now makes her own decisions. I feel I can't provide her with what I hoped I would be able to.

I love my son so much that it hurts whenever I think of anything happening to him or of him suffering in any way. 

I love my wife so much ... that I can't find a way of expressing it to her. I want her to be happy. I want her to know how I feel about her and that I've always been in love with her, but simply telling her isn't good enough.

She's always has told me "Actions speak louder than words" and I haven't acted. My actions have always turned out to be the stupidest thing that I could possibly think of. And that wasn't my intent! I REALLY thought that what I was doing was "ok" and it could be explained away. That it would get fixed. I live in a fantasy world where I can dream up the solution to my relationship problems. I always dream that things work out. It never does.

So now I'm stuck. I love my wife so much, but I don't know how to tell her and I don't know what to do.

Any suggestions?

-P

Getting Pidgin and Microsoft Lync to work nicely.

In the Windows centric company that I work at we use Office Communicator. Therefore I use Pidgin and the SIPE/SIMPLE plugin to be able to communicate.

Recently, they've started changing the version of OC to the latest Lync version. All of a sudden, my Pidgin would fail logging in. I checked on a Windows system and I still couldn't use the Lync client so I figured things were in transition and I didn't bother too much with it.

However, someone came to ask me about it and when I tried the Window Lync client again, I suddenly was able to log in! I tried Pidgin again and it would tell me that I was using not the right version. So I started searching around. I found that: Microsoft allows administrators to block older version of OC from connecting to the server.

So I started searching a bit more and found that others had the same problem and were looking for a solution. I then stumbled upon a very useful link.

This page describes how to set the user-agent in Pidgin so that you could connect as a certain version of OC. However, when I tried the same version on the post, that version didn't seem to work. So I started searching for a newer version and I found it...

To get Pidgin to work use the following UserAgent:

UCCAPI/4.0.7577.0 OC/4.0.7577.0 (Microsoft Lync 2010)

Tada! I'm able to chat again!

-P

Zenity re-discovered

It's been quite a while since I've posted anything. Life's gotten busy!

Recently I've been writing some scripts and thought it would be nice to guify them a bit. I then recalled using Zenity for a few things and though it would be great to take a look. Since it had been a while I didn't quite remember everything. A quick Google search returned a pair of great sites that helped out with this.

Zenity guide by examples 1 and Zenity guide by examples 2 both of which can really describe how it works in nice to understand examples.

Now to start using these!

-P

DNS and DHCP

For some reason I hadn't enabled the ability for DHCPD to update my internal DNS server when a new client joined the network, so I decided to do that.

The process is quite simple, you generate a key which you give to both DHCP and DNS and they hash out the communication.

However after I did that I noticed I was getting an error:

Aug 19 17:00:56 server01 dhcpd: if iPod-touch.mydomain.org IN A rrset doesn't exist add iPod-touch.mydomain.org 3600 IN A 192.168.1.140: timed out.
Aug 19 17:00:56 server01 dhcpd: DHCPREQUEST for 192.168.1.140 from 00:26:bb:a1:cf:a0 (iPod-touch) via eth1
Aug 19 17:00:56 server01 dhcpd: DHCPACK on 192.168.1.140 to 00:26:bb:a1:cf:a0 (iPod-touch) via eth1

I Googled for any signs of what this could mean and I didn't find anything. There weren't too many people reporting the same issue, so I guess there wasn't that much to it.

I finally did an strace on the named server and managed to catch that the server was getting an access denied error. I looked at my bind directory and realized it was owned by root as were the files... I quickly changed this to the bind user and voila! problem solved.

-P

PS - many people may wonder why I would want to do this in the first place, do I REALLY have that many machines or ... anyway, the answer is it's "because I can".

VMWare MKS plugin on 64bit Ubuntu with nspluginwrapper

Since I've been running Ubuntu 64bit at work I've found a few things that still don't work like I'd like.

We use VMWare Lab Manager which gives you access to a console for the VMs that you deploy. However, the plugin that is provided by VMWare is only a 32bit app and due to that it doesn't seem to work when you install it.

Every time you go to the console, you get a black screen which allows you to install the plugin even though you already installed it.

However, there is a solution. You can go ahead and install the MKS plugin as usual, restart your browser and make sure that the plugin shows in the Extensions.

Then shutdown the browser (so you might want to print this blog entry or copy paste to gedit) and you can then try using nspluginwrapper to install it.

I suggest you run it like this:

/usr/bin/nspluginwrapper -v -i $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxx.default/extensions/VMwareMKSNPRTPlugin@vmware.com/plugins/libnprtmks.so

Where xxxxx.default is your profile.

You can use sudo if you want, but this way it installs it into your .mozilla/plugins/ directory. The reason for the -v is so that you get verbose output if the installation fails (see below.)

*** NSPlugin Viewer *** ERROR: libexpat.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
nspluginwrapper: no appropriate viewer found for /home/USER/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxx.default/extensions/VMwareMKSNPRTPlugin@vmware.com/plugins/libnprtmks.so

Now what problems can you encounter? Well, in my case I found that I needed libexpat.so.0 as you can see above. Since this library isn't available to install, I installed libexpat.so.1 (sudo apt-get install libexpat1) and I just created a symbolic link in the /lib32 directory like this:

sudo ln -s /lib32/libexpat.so.1 /lib32/libexpat.so.0

I then ran it again and it was successful.

Now I can start my browser go to the console and voila, it works.

I'm not sure if there are other libraries that are needed, but at least by doing this I managed to get it working.

Getting this plugin to work with nspluginwrapper has given me hope that any other plugin that I cannot get working out-of-the-box will work through nspluginwrapper as long as I have the -v to be able to find the libraries that are missing.

Good luck!

-P

Dual Booting Blues?

It's been a while since I wrote anything. Not because I didn't have anything to say, just I didn't have the time to really write anything.

However, today I decided I would write THIS down. It's information that was gleaned from different sources and finally helped work the issue out. None of the places I read had the FULL steps to fix the issue. Hopefully this will help a poor soul.

Yesterday, someone installed Ubuntu on their system when I wasn't locally around to help out. They've installed Ubuntu on their home PC and on another desktop without really encountering any issues. That wasn't the case yesterday.

Somehow, the installation had frozen and they had therefore canceled it in mid-stride. They then reran the installer but manually selected the partition where they wanted to install (the one previously created/resized during the first install attempt.) Luckily they didn't wipe the Windows partition which they still needed, however booting into the machine was now not possible.

Investigating the issue I discovered that os-prober didn't see the Windows files it needed to boot. I went ahead and updated the system in case there were any fixes included in one of the updates. However, it seemed that the boot information for Windows was gone.

I was going to run something to recover the boot manager, but I wanted to be there to be able to troubleshoot things.

When I arrived at the office, I found out that they had taken things into their own hands and had used a Windows 7 install disk to "fix the boot manager" which in turn broke grub2 and now he couldn't boot into Windows 7 OR Ubuntu.

He could boot into the USB stick with Ubuntu, so quickly I did the following.

sudo fdisk -l
sudo mount /dev/sda5 /mnt
sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
sudo mount --bind /dev/pts /mnt/dev/pts
sudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc
sudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys
sudo chroot /mnt
update-grub
grub-install /dev/sda
grub-install --recheck /dev/sda
sudo umount /mnt/dev/pts
sudo umount /mnt/dev
sudo umount /mnt/proc
sudo umount /mnt/sys
sudo umount /mnt
sudo reboot

This fixed the grub bootloader and we were now able to boot into Linux once more. However, During the update-grub, the Windows partition wasn't added to the loader. (This information came from Ubuntu's Help site.

Once in Ubuntu, I opened a terminal and did:

sudo fdisk -l
sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /mnt
ls /mnt/boot
os-prober
sudo update-grub
sudo umount /mnt
sudo reboot

Ok, in reality I initially mounted the Windows partition and checked that the files which were missing (BCD, BCD.log, etc) were there. Then I unmounted the Windows partition, ran os-prober which didn't detect Windows. So I then mounted the partition, re-ran os-prober and it DID find the Windows installation. At that point I ran update-grub which added the Windows information to the grub.cfg file and voila!

The things I had to "put together" were:

1. os-prober seems to need the Windows partition mounted when you run it manually. Not sure why it doesn't seem to need it when Ubuntu runs updates. Maybe it takes care of that itself.
2. The Windows 7 (and Vista) Boot Manager needs the files in the C:\boot\ directory to boot and os-prober needs those files to detect Windows 7/Vista.

I hope these steps help people out.

-P