But who can keep track of multiple passwords in their head in a truly secure fashion? I know I can’t. For a long time, I used a three-tier system: one quick and dirty password for sites I didn’t care about, another for sites that I used a lot, and then a few specific passwords for individual sites (like my email) that I wanted to keep ultra-secure. But as time wore on, I realized that some of the sites that I considered disposable became anything but, and human nature (read: laziness ) meant that I wasn’t “reclassifying” them with a newer tier of password security.

When I started working at Livemocha, I was introduced to a wonderful tool called KeePass. KeePass is a simple piece of software that allows you to create an encrypted database to store your passwords in. I’d seen similar things before for PDAs, back in the PalmOS days, but KeePass is open source software (in this case, meaning free as in beer) and is supported on virtually every major operating system out there: iOS, Android, OS X, Linux, Blackberry, Windows (including Windows Phone), and a generic version for devices running J2ME. They also offer a version for Windows that is portable, so you can toss the software onto a USB flash drive along with your database and access it wherever you go.

The main downside to KeePass is that they assume that you know how to use it. There’s no introductory wizard that I’ve found, no walk through to get you familiar with the application, they just dump you in and expect you to figure out your way around. While it’s not exactly an un-intuitive UI that they use, it’s not exactly simple, and it can be overwhelming to someone trying to use it for the first time. Really, it’s much simpler than it looks, and I will hopefully be able to show you how to use its various features without fear of their learning curve.

KeePass is what I use to manage my passwords at this point. I’ve since seen other services aimed at doing the same kind of thing, such as LastPass, but one advantage that KeePass has over online services is that it’s not online unless you put it online, which means it can’t be attacked if people can’t reach your database file. If you carry it around on a USB drive (insert obligatory disclaimer about flash drive failure rates and the need to back up your data), then it’s very hard for someone to attack it when it’s unplugged from a computer. They would have to have access to a computer you plugged it into and copy it while it was inserted, and then they’d still have to deal with the formidable encryption that KeePass offers. Given that LastPass had a security breach a while back, that was a selling point for me.

I do compromise a bit myself; I use multiple computers, multiple operating systems, and multiple devices. I can’t plug in a USB drive to my phone, but I can run KeePassDroid on it. My solution was to store my KeePass database files in Dropbox. Dropbox (which I plan on covering in more detail in a future blog post) allows me to synchronize my files across all of my devices and computers, which means that I can access my KeePass database on any of them as well. I’ll be more than happy to answer any questions about how to handle that kind of setup in the comments if you want.

So, that said, how does one use KeePass? For illustration purposes, I will be using the KeePassX client for OS X in my screenshots. I also use the 1.x KeePass protocol, as it is supported better across different platforms than the newer 2.x protocol.

First, you need to create a database. When you do so, it asks you for a “master password”. Choose something secure!! If someone finds this key, they’ve got access to your entire vault. That is, needless to say, a Very Bad Thing. You can also specify a key file, which will need to be used in addition to the password. (KeePass does not allow you to use a file instead of a password, only in addition to, in case you need an extra layer of security. If you are storing the file on a network share of some kind, you could save the key file on a flash drive and/or your mobile devices to increase the difficulty someone would have in order to crack the database.)

After you repeat the master password and finish that up, it will create a basic database like so:

The first thing that you want to do is to create a set of folders (KeePass calls them groups) to organize your passwords so that you can find them quickly. But also notice that there is a search box up top as well; that’s come in very handy for me in the past, especially for the database I use at work with credentials of all the accounts we have with various vendors and such. Here’s what my personal database looks like:

Obviously your folder structure will vary. This is my personal DB, I have one that I use at work, and I also have another household DB that my wife and housemate also have access to (via Dropbox sharing). You can move entries between folders readily, so don’t sweat the structure too much, just do whatever makes sense to you, and reorganize it later if you want/need to.

Once you’ve got that sorted out, you’ll want to create a new entry to add in an account to your database. You can right click on the right entry pane, or use the keyboard shortcut (Command-Y under OS X, Control-Y under Windows). You’ll get a window with a bunch of fields to fill out. Here’s an example of one of my entries:

This is my account for the digital section of Seattle Public Library (SPL). I’ve slightly obfuscated the username, since the account uses a 4 digit PIN, and I don’t really want someone trying combinations until they get in. But you get the basic idea. The title explains what the entry is for; username/password are obvious. Not all passwords you want to store have to be for websites; I have used it to store things like server room door combinations and the like in the past. However, if it is for a website, it just makes sense to put in the URL so that you can easily open it with a click when you’re looking up the password. The comments field is very handy to store additional information, such as what answers you put in for security questions, or serial numbers for devices, whatever you fancy. I haven’t played around with the expiration feature personally, but I assume it warns you if a password is nearing expiration when you open the database.

You can also attach files to an entry. This is very handy if you want to store non-standard information securely. Once the file is attached to the entry, it is encrypted along with the rest of the database. I’ve used this in the past to attach text files with information about gift debit cards, where I needed to provide more information than KeePass natively allows for the fields, especially if the entry was the login information for the site managing the cards.

Note the quality bar. This is a very handy feature of KeePass, in that it gives you a quick and easy visual indicator of how secure your password is. Obviously, a 4 digit PIN is, well, less than secure. To choose a secure password, I highly recommend using one of two methods, depending on the site in question.

Option one: the password generator located at http://passphra.se/. This is a tool based on the principles explained in this comic. The basic gist is that the longer a password is, the more secure it is, so it’s more secure to have a password based on 4 distinct words than it is to have a shorter password mixing cases, numbers, and special characters. The comic covers the math involved for those who are curious. The upside is that not only is it easier to type and more secure, but it’s also easier to remember (particularly handy for places when you can’t paste the password in, one of my personal pet peeves…).

Option two: the password generator included in KeePass itself. Just click on the “Gen” button and adjust the properties of the password you want to generate to the policies of the site in question. (For example, Blizzard Entertainment’s Battle.Net system has a maximum character limit of 15, which is somewhat surprising. Others will allow or disallow special characters, etc.) There are a lot of options to tune in this generator, but I can guarantee you’re not likely to remember this kind of password– but that’s what you have KeePass for, isn’t it? To see the password generated, you need to click on the eyeball icon to reveal it– it’s a handy security feature for preventing people from looking over your shoulder.

That’s a basic intro to password security principles in general and KeePass in specific. I’m sure that you all will have questions about aspects that I didn’t cover, and I’ll be more than happy to address them in the comments. Fire away!

Secondly, I’ll disclose some biases and assumptions straight up. I’ve done this with Ubuntu 12.04 on a 64-bit platform. I chose this because I wanted to standardize all of my EC2 nodes on Ubuntu as a distribution, and Amazon Linux is Redhat based. Redhat is a great company that does a lot of great work, but I’ve worked with CentOS 5 for some time now and kept running into problems because things were so out of date to ensure stability. I realize that a lot has gotten updated with RHEL 6, but that doesn’t mean that they will keep things up to date moving forward; that’s not the goal of RHEL, that’s more the aim of a distribution like Fedora. I can respect that dedication to stability, but working in a small startup, I want a lot of flexibility and maneuverability from a technical perspective; I don’t want a distribution to limit me to a list of applications that has essentially ossified. However, I’m assuming you’re not here because you like Redhat as a distro, or you wouldn’t be checking this out. I also assume that you’ve got your instance set up with Apache2 and ruby-1.9 (in my case, 1.9.3).

First off, boot up an existing ElasticBeanstalk AMI. I did this from an instance that was actually running as part of a EB project. (Yes, I know that everyone says “you can’t do it from a deployed project”. Well, I did.) Tar up the contents of /opt/aws, /opt/elasticbeanstalk, /etc/httpd/sites, and /opt/tomcat7 (or /opt/tomcat6 if that’s what you want to run, but I’ll refer to everything following for Tomcat 7). I also snagged /etc/init.d/functions, /etc/init.d/tomcat7, and /etc/init.d/hostmanager. Copy this file over to your new build host.

Create users for tomcat7 and elasticbeanstalk with the home directories pointed to their respective directories in /opt. Add tomcat7 to the elasticbeanstalk group (this is important). Extract the files into /opt on your new build host. (Do it in this order to preserve file permissions, or chown them appropriately.) Remove /opt/tomcat7/webapps/ROOT.war, /opt/tomcat7/webapps/ROOT/, and /opt/elasticbeanstalk/srv/hostmanager/db/hostmanager.db. These steps are important to be able to deploy your new application code to the instance, and the hostmanager.db file seems to be why most people have problems creating an image from an active EB node.

Copy the init scripts to their correct locations. Note that you could skip the functions file if you want to rewrite the hostmanager init script; I didn’t feel like bothering with it, personally. You’ll need to modify the hostmanager init script slightly; I put the functions file in /opt/aws and updated the hostmanager script to look there for it. Don’t forget to enable them with:

update-rc.d tomcat7 defaults
update-rc.d hostmanager defaults

Hostmanager expects things to be a certain way, and the RedHat way is not the Ubuntu way. The Apache configs obviously go into /etc/apache2/sites-available and then symlinked into /etc/apache2/sites-enabled (either manually or using a2ensite). However, you will need to snap a few symlinks to get hostmanager to recognize the Apache config:

cd /etc ; ln -s apache2 httpd
cd /var/run ; ln -s apache2 httpd
cd apache2 ; ln -s ../apache2.pid httpd.pid

This is the one part I think I might be missing a detail or two on; I was pretty tired when I worked on this so I’m not 100% sure if there were other symlinks to be snapped or just those. It should be fairly obvious in the hostmanager logs if one is missing (look in /opt/elasticbeanstalk/var/log). If you really want, you might be able to avoid these symlinks by customizing the hostmanager config files, but I didn’t trust that Amazon doesn’t have an updating mechanism in place. To a large extent, I have tried to install this in a compatible way that if Amazon pushes an update of some sort that it likely won’t break on your custom image. Not knowing exactly what Amazon can do in regards to that, however, I can’t guarantee anything.

So, one thing about hostmanager and EB. Amazon has embedded an entire Ruby installation into their elasticbeanstalk directory. This means that you don’t have to worry about it conflicting with anything else and you don’t need to install a long list of gem files on your system to get things to work. However, I did run into the fact that Amazon Linux is using a different version of the OpenSSL and libcrypto libraries than Ubuntu 12.04 is (if you’re using an older Ubuntu version, this may or may not apply to you. YMMV). To fix that, I did something along the lines of:

mv /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/1.9.1/x86_64-linux/openssl.so /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/1.9.1/x86_64-linux/openssl.so-old
mv /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/1.9.1/x86_64-linux/digest/rmd160.so /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/1.9.1/x86_64-linux/digest/rmd160.so-old
mv /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/1.9.1/x86_64-linux/digest/sha1.so /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/1.9.1/x86_64-linux/digest/sha1.so-old
mv /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/1.9.1/x86_64-linux/digest/sha2.so /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/1.9.1/x86_64-linux/digest/sha2.so-old
mv /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/1.9.1/x86_64-linux/digest/md5.so /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/1.9.1/x86_64-linux/digest/md5.so-old
cp /usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/x86_64-linux/openssl.so /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/1.9.1/x86_64-linux/
cp /usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/x86_64-linux/digest/rmd160.so /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/1.9.1/x86_64-linux/
cp /usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/x86_64-linux/digest/sha1.so /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/1.9.1/x86_64-linux/
cp /usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/x86_64-linux/digest/sha2.so /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/1.9.1/x86_64-linux/
cp /usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/x86_64-linux/digest/md5.so /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/1.9.1/x86_64-linux/


I also ran into a HUGE issue that stumped me for hours regarding EventMachine and rb-inotify. I’m not sure why the code & gem versions work perfectly fine on the Amazon setup and not on the Ubuntu host I was working on, but it simply would not work for me. I kept getting errors with hostmanager like so:

[2012-08-09 16:55:15 +0000] Host Manager startup complete
[2012-08-09 16:55:15 +0000] Stopping DaemonManager
>> Exiting!
/opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/eventmachine-0.12.10/lib/eventmachine.rb:795:in `attach_io': undefined method `attach_fd' for EventMachine:Module (NoMethodError)
from /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/eventmachine-0.12.10/lib/eventmachine.rb:769:in `watch'
from /opt/elasticbeanstalk/srv/hostmanager/lib/elasticbeanstalk/hostmanager/daemon/logdirectorymonitor.rb:101:in `run'
from /opt/elasticbeanstalk/srv/hostmanager/lib/elasticbeanstalk/hostmanager/daemon.rb:36:in `block in start'
from /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/eventmachine-0.12.10/lib/eventmachine.rb:996:in `call'
from /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/eventmachine-0.12.10/lib/eventmachine.rb:996:in `block in run_deferred_callbacks'
from /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/eventmachine-0.12.10/lib/eventmachine.rb:996:in `each'
from /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/eventmachine-0.12.10/lib/eventmachine.rb:996:in `run_deferred_callbacks'
from /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/eventmachine-0.12.10/lib/eventmachine.rb:1449:in `event_callback'
from /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/eventmachine-0.12.10/lib/pr_eventmachine.rb:898:in `eventable_read'
from /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/eventmachine-0.12.10/lib/pr_eventmachine.rb:369:in `block in crank_selectables'
from /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/eventmachine-0.12.10/lib/pr_eventmachine.rb:369:in `each'
from /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/eventmachine-0.12.10/lib/pr_eventmachine.rb:369:in `crank_selectables'
from /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/eventmachine-0.12.10/lib/pr_eventmachine.rb:324:in `block in run'
from /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/eventmachine-0.12.10/lib/pr_eventmachine.rb:318:in `loop'
from /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/eventmachine-0.12.10/lib/pr_eventmachine.rb:318:in `run'
from /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/eventmachine-0.12.10/lib/pr_eventmachine.rb:64:in `run_machine'
from /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/eventmachine-0.12.10/lib/eventmachine.rb:256:in `run'
from /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/thin-1.3.1/lib/thin/backends/base.rb:61:in `start'
from /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/thin-1.3.1/lib/thin/server.rb:159:in `start'
from /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/thin-1.3.1/lib/thin/controllers/controller.rb:86:in `start'
from /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/thin-1.3.1/lib/thin/runner.rb:185:in `run_command'
from /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/thin-1.3.1/lib/thin/runner.rb:151:in `run!'
from /opt/elasticbeanstalk/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/thin-1.3.1/bin/thin:6:in `'
from /opt/elasticbeanstalk/bin/thin:19:in `load'
from /opt/elasticbeanstalk/bin/thin:19:in `'

Ultimately when I hopped into #eventmachine to ask about it, Defusal suggested upgrading eventmachine from the last stable version (which is very, very old) to the newest beta.

root@host# /opt/elasticbeanstalk/bin/gem uninstall eventmachine
You have requested to uninstall the gem:
eventmachine-0.12.10
thin-1.3.1 depends on [eventmachine (>= 0.12.6)]
If you remove this gems, one or more dependencies will not be met.
Continue with Uninstall? [Yn] Y
Successfully uninstalled eventmachine-1.0.0.rc.4
root@host# /opt/elasticbeanstalk/bin/gem install eventmachine --pre
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
Successfully installed eventmachine-1.0.0.rc.4
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for eventmachine-1.0.0.rc.4...
Installing RDoc documentation for eventmachine-1.0.0.rc.4...
root@host#

I did that, and hostmanager started up perfectly!

I personally updated the rest of the gems as well, when I was troubleshooting the error with the ssl/crypto libraries, so I don’t know if there are other “gotchas” left if you don’t do that. Your mileage may vary.

At that point, I built a new AMI off of that instance, and once it was done, I set it as a custom AMI in Elastic Beanstalk. It chewed on it a bit, swapping instances around and such, and loaded up fine with the sample AWS Tomcat WAR. Hurray! (Edit: I should also clarify that we’ve been using this image since with no problems on our real webapps, so it’s not just the sample WAR that works.)

I hope this helps some other people, because when I was doing my research on the subject, I couldn’t find anything from anyone else out there about this (outside of being stumped a few steps before what blocked me). I want to thank my work for allowing me to detail the process that I developed while working for them and contribute that knowledge back to the community which has helped us in so many ways.

It reminded me that I haven’t been good about keeping my own plugins up to date. I’m going to go through and see what is still relevant; I have a feeling that most of the Widgets I made are no longer needed as WordPress has evolved and included a lot of the alterations I was making into the basic options. As I find this deprecated plugins, I’ll take down the associated pages for them (although I’ll leave the blog posts up for posterity). For plugins that are still functional (such as the WIP Manager), I think I’m going to spend a little time (not too much, but enough) making sure they’re up to date with WP 3.4 and do things the new way. The sidebar offers a lot more room to organize things so I’ll likely create a tab of my own.

You may have also noticed the site URL change. I’ve gone by “stormerider” as my online handle for many, many years, so it was only appropriate that I actually pick up the domain name. I’ve used it especially in the coding community, so I figured I would put my tech blog here. For the longest time I went by the pen name of “Alan Morgan” as well, but that is changing. I’m in the process (once I collect the money to do so, along with my wife) of changing my name to “Morgan Blackthorne”.

I have a set of technical blog posts that I intend to publish over at Romance Divas (which I am a technical administrator for). I intend on cross-posting them here, although some of them may be a bit beginner-ish for this blog. I also think that I’m going to try to take some of the lessons that I’ve learned while working at the day job and post them up here, if my work will allow me to, so that others can learn from what I’ve done and blaze their own trail in the clouds.

Changes include:

• Many fixes in the SMF FALs.
• Fixed up access to the admin console in the various FALs, in order to work on expanding the admin console (#3).
• Abstracted the showModeratorGroups function into the various FALs instead of trying to code support for multiple FALs into the room library.
• Add the ability to set debug level in the database, which will eventually be part of the admin console.
• Log backtraces with each log message, for fine-grained detail of what’s going on.
• Add filtering to the logging code, so you can tag log messages with a debug level (long overdue).
• Enable/disable plugins via the admin console (#3).
• Adjust timeout values via the admin console (#3).
• Adjust general settings via the admin console (#3).
• Modify/remove front page announcement value via the admin console (#3).
• Adjust cron settings (which will generate crontab syntax for the user to use) via the admin console (#3).
• Add link in the submit panel to the Admin Console if the user is a moderator.
• Add idle/limbo/warning code to the script-based session handler.
• Fixed (hopefully) the issue with ghosting sessions (#15).
• Disable timing out of moderators. That was annoying.
• Add a social network filter plugin for twitter:username and fb:username expansion. More to come, perhaps.
• Add a StormChat Bug filter plugin to expand bug:id to be a link to the issue tracker.
• Implement chat font face and size options directly (#26).
• Implement the ability to control the frame layout values. This allows people to do things like hide the avatar pane when they are using chat in the Firefox sidebar (#24).

You can check out the code via Subversion, or download one of the following files:

• stormchat-0.2.1.tar.gz
• stormchat-0.2.1.tar.bz2
• stormchat-0.2.1.zip

NOTE: Please note that when upgrading from 0.2.0 to 0.2.1, you must run update.php (go to http://yourserver.com/yourchat/update.php in your browser) to update your database schema to work properly with the code changes. Annoying things will happen if you do not!

Changes include:

• Database migration updater that handles schema updates transparently.
• Removal of the need to run the server to handle session timeouts and event timers with the addition of two standalone scripts to be run via cron (#5).
• Initial support for phpBB 3.x added (phpbb3 FAL — #21).
• Fixed several FALs to support updating the user_lastvisit_chat column in the prefs table when a user logins. It had been missing from several of the FALs (and incorrect in the phpBB FAL).

You can check out the code via Subversion, or download one of the following files:

• stormchat-web-0.2.0.tar.gz
• stormchat-web-0.2.0.tar.bz2
• stormchat-web-0.2.0.zip

options lnet networks=tcp(eth1)

Obviously, substitute eth1 for whatever your applicable interface is. Obviously, you’ll need to reboot for this to take effect. (There may be a way to change it without a reboot using the lctl tool, but I didn’t find one.)

Failure to make this change will result in OST mounts failing like so:

mount.lustre: mount /dev/lustre/ost1 at /opt/lustre/ost1 failed: Input/output error
Is the MGS running?

This is because, having selected eth0 as its only network ID, it refuses connections from other hosts (even though the actual daemon binds to 0.0.0.0… a little odd, but, whatever). The appropriate snipped from dmesg:

LustreError: 120-3: Refusing connection from 192.168.0.100 for 192.168.0.100@tcp: No matching NI
LustreError: 4695:0:(socklnd_cb.c:1714:ksocknal_recv_hello()) Error -104 reading HELLO from 192.168.0.100
LustreError: 11b-b: Connection to 192.168.0.100@tcp at host 192.168.0.100 on port 988 was reset: is it running a compatible version of Lustre and is 192.168.0.100@tcp one of its NIDs?

Hopefully this will help solve someone else’s headaches

https://www.sun.com/offers/details/820-7390.xml

You’ll get an error that you’re not authorized to log in (huh?). If you go to this link:

http://wikis.sun.com/display/BluePrints/Lustre+File+System+-+Demo+Quick+Start+Guide

You’ll see it listed as being unavailable.

I did find a copy of it online, so I’m reposting it as it’s valuable information.

Lustre File System: Demo Quick Start Guide

Changes include:

• Support for the new PHPPass password system used in newer versions of WordPress.
• Support for SMF 2.x added (smf2 FAL).
• Errors when logging in are now more prominent (#17).
• Fixed "call_user_func_array() expects parameter 2 to be array, string given" error when submitting a message (#13).
• Fixed issues with scrolling in Google Chrome and Safari (#14).
• Fixed the pastebox not working (#16).
• Fixed issues with avatars not displaying in SMF 1.x and 2.x (#9).

You can check out the code via Subversion, or download one of the following files:

• stormchat-web-0.1.5.tar.gz
• stormchat-web-0.1.5.tar.bz2
• stormchat-web-0.1.5.zip

One of the things that I’ve been playing with lately is the Roku. I picked up one of these (an XD model) on sale at Amazon for around $60, and it’s been great. See, a while back I looked at how much I was paying Comcast and TiVo and the headaches involved, and determined that it wasn’t worth keeping the cable subscription. With the advent of iTunes and Amazon Unbox, I don’t see any need to pay for regular cable service when I can just buy the episodes I want instead. Especially with Netflix to fill in the gaps. The Roku works perfectly with Unbox and Netflix, which are the two primary ways I get content now (I occasionally buy something via iTunes, but in general I try to avoid them– their policy to not allow redownloading is something I don’t like. Video takes up a lot of space, and I’d much rather stream it than have to deal with storing it and backing it up myself. Word on the street is that Apple is looking to change that policy, but they need buy-in from the industry, so we’ll see what happens there.)

However, I do have some local content that I like to play on the TV, and I’ve been looking at the best ways to do that. Before I used to hook up my laptop and play files that way; it worked but now the HDMI port is used by the Roku and I don’t want to deal with plugging and unplugging equipment all the time. Enter two solutions: Gabby and Plex. Both have you set up a local media server and add a channel on the Roku which streams content from the media server. Both Gabby and Plex do transcoding (I believe both use ffmpeg behind the scenes; I know Plex does) so that you can play more than the few media formats the Roku directly supports. This has been an interesting experience as neither is really stable yet. The Plex Media Server for Windows is pretty new, but seems pretty stable; Gabby’s media server has had more than a few glitches and crashes (and I can’t get it to reliably start at boot time due the way it’s implemented in .NET). The Gabby devs are also the devs behind the Gabby Roku channel, since that’s the prime focus for them, whereas the Plex channel is actually developed by someone outside of the core Plex dev team. So I’ve been using both, and liking both, but so far I’m leaning a little bit more towards the Plex camp. Especially since they just announced the availability of the Plex Media Server for Linux. I got it up and running under my dual-boot box (Win Vista / Ubuntu 11.04), but it’s not working properly with the Roku channel. Not sure if that’s a Linux server issue or a Roku channel issue, but I’m sure it’ll get sorted out in a little bit. That gives me one less reason to boot into Windows.

Speaking of that, I’ve been spending a bit more under Linux in general of late. I find it’s a lot easier on the days that I’m working from home to have a full Linux environment at my fingertips than to run countless PuTTY sessions. Maybe it’s just in my head, but that’s the way it feels to me. I upgraded to Ubuntu Natty Narwhal a while back, which has the upside of Vim 7.3. The downside is that VPN connections seem to make my entire networking stack act weird. I opened a bug on it during the beta, but it’s lingering in limbo at this point. I definitely notice a difference between that system and my laptop, which is a Win Vista / Ubuntu 10.10 dual-boot.

After seeing a presentation on it at LinuxFest NorthWest, I finally buckled down and configured BackupPC on my NAS box (which runs Ubuntu 10.10). I just used the default Ubuntu packages for it, and spent some time configuring all my various machines to work with it. On the Linux side I just use rsync over ssh, and for the Windows boxes I use rsync via DeltaCopy. (The two things I’ll mention about the latter: you need to specifically allow port 873, aka rsyncd, in Windows Firewall. You also need to enable pings in Win Vista/Win7, which can be done via the command “netsh firewall set icmpsetting 8 enable”. Otherwise, even if DeltaCopy is working and the firewall allows it through, BackupPC won’t connect to the host because it’ll think it’s offline.) I’m still fine-tuning things, but it’s backing up around 350GB or so of data for me across like 8-10 machines. I thought for a bit about how to handle my dual-booting computers, and decided to just give them different names and identities between the different OSes. So my main machine is storm under Win Vista and lightning under Ubuntu; my laptop is typhoon under Vista and whirlwind under Ubuntu. I’ll have to figure out something for my netbook once I get the partitions straightened out on that so I can dual-boot that between 7 and Ubuntu.

I’ve also been doing some coding lately, specifically on StormChat. I’ve been working on it for years, but I’ve finally gotten to the point where I have someone else running it on their servers, instead of the only people running it being the people that I maintain it for. Granted, I did install it for Ad Astra, but still… it’s the first install not sitting on my servers. I’m working through the bug list, trying to triage it a bit and get things rolling again. There’s a lot left to be done; right now I wouldn’t really recommend it for anyone that’s not very adventurous or without direct access to me to troubleshoot the things about it that only I know how to fix. I need to work on getting rid of the need for the server, fix/revamp the installer, and fix/revamp the admin console. Those are the three big-ticket items on that project.

I know that my WordPress plugins are really out of date at this point. Some people have reported that some of them still work, which is great to hear. I hope to find the time to sit down in the future and revisit each of them and determine if they need updates or if they can be retired.

I’ve also been playing around with RIFT lately; WoW just hasn’t been grabbing me lately. I tried getting it to run under Wine, but haven’t had much luck yet. If I do get it running, I’ll post how I did so.

The latter page adds the ability to pick what user roles have access to the Progress Meters. Note that you can only edit/delete/add/embed/see your own progress meters. (I’ll probably add code in the next version to allow admins to manage all meters if they want to, but for now this applies to them as well.) It also allows you to pick who can use the Stylist as well.

Download here:

• Morgan’s Progress Meters version 0.5 (Added multiuser support.)