Thursday, September 29, 2011

Mounting a webdav url with davfs2

I found a very useful article online and my points of departure from the author's directions are summarised as a comment on the article and also quoted below.
Many thanks for the helpful information.
I placed the secrets file in ~/.davfs2/secrets and added an entry to /etc/fstab and it worked well.
Being on a 64bit system, I needed to install the 32 bit version of libneon27 for davfs2 to work.

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Adding new vtapes to amanda and troubleshooting

I needed to add new vtapes to amanda after successfully adding new space via LVM. Using a one line script included in the vtape how-to on the amanda wiki, I created the additional tape directories - slot[m] to slot[n].

After this, I changed the configuration file's tapecycle parameter to reflect the advice by martineau in a zmanda forum post - that tapecycle should be at least runspercycle * runtapes.

On executing amcheck on one of the amanda configurations, I ran into an error - WARNING taper changer error: slot : Slot  is already in use by driveN. This was resolved by deleting the driveN directory as suggested by dustin in another zmanda forum post.

Earlier, an all estimate timed out error had been resolved by adding the directive estimate calcsize to the configuration's dumptype as suggested by paddy in a zmanda forum post.

Monday, September 12, 2011

Screen Capture/Recording with ffmpeg

My attempt to record a video tutorial was failing with the error 'x11grab AVParameters don't have video size and/or rate. Use -s and -r'. This was in response to typing in the following command as based on an example in the ffmpeg man page.

ffmpeg -f x11grab -s 1280x1024 -i :0.0 -r 25 -sameq /tmp/test.mpg

After several failed tries, I determined that the error could be coming from the -r option. I moved it to immediately after the -s option so that both -s and -r options followed the x11grab specification. This time, it worked great. The final command is shown below.

ffmpeg -f x11grab -r 25 -s 1280x1024 -i :0.0 -sameq /tmp/test.mpg