What happened to Syncany? Not dead -- really?

I recently visited the Syncany page again to check what (finally) the status is: Apparently a news entry from April 2012 is there telling that the project is not dead. Well, at least something, but hopefully this won't end up being the next Duke Nukem Forever. Don't get me wrong: I'm really looking forward trying out Syncany as soon as it's ready, but competition (aka OwnCloud, CamliStore and such) is not sleeping. While I don't really believe in SparkleShare coming up with something really good anymore there must be a new alternative ...we will see (and hope).

ASCIIFlow - diagrams the 1337 style

Ever wondered how much time certain people spent creating cool-looking ASCII diagrams in all sorts of documentation and technical stuff? Well, wonder no more because there's now ASCIIFlow! Without any registration hassle and completely for free you finally can draw ASCII diagrams using a hip and responsive web 2.0 application.

Be sure to give it a try! http://www.asciiflow.com/

Yet another backup solution: Backshift

If you follow my blog a bit more closely you surely recognized my habit of always looking for the perfect backup solution.

Well, here's another (rather new) one: Backshift.
To quote the webpage:

• rsync can be used to copy a filesystem from one host to another, or for backups using rsync's --link-dest option plus a small wrapper script
• Backshift is only for backups, and works analogously to rsync --link-dest, but it deduplicates variable-lengthed blocks of the files both intra-host and inter-host, and compresses those blocks using xz.

Although it's pretty new it already claims a lot -- just have a look at the nice comparison table over here.

O Fortuna Misheard Lyrics (Animated)

Make RSSOwl work with Mint 13 (Maya)

Sigh, that took me a while to figure out. After re-installing my Linux base system (moved from an ancient but steadily upgraded Ubuntu to Mint 13 aka Maya because of their lovely Cinnamon desktop) I could not run RSSOwl anymore.

I'm using RSSOwl because of their nice Google Reader integration which enables me to keep track of all the news on different devices I'm using nowadays.

Anyhow, RSSOwl just failed to load on my brand new Mint with the error message "Failed to create the browser", aborting the whole thing afterwards.

For Mint (and maybe other Ubuntu-related distributions out there) you need to do the following in order to make RSSOwl start successfully again:

1. Go into your RSSOwl/xulrunner directory (e.g. /opt/rssowl/xulrunner) and execute:
   chmod 755 $(file * | grep executable | sed 's/:.*//')
2. Then, do a:
   sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libhunspell-1.3.so.0 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libhunspell-1.2.so.0
   
   on a 64-bit system, or for 32-bit, do a:
   
   sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_32-linux-gnu/libhunspell-1.3.so.0 /usr/lib/x86_32-linux-gnu/libhunspell-1.2.so.0

The first step makes sure that all file permissions for xulrunner (a component RSSOwl needs) are set correctly, the second step creates a symbolic link to point from libhunspell-1.2.so.0 to libhunspell-1.3.so.0. Xulrunner apparently is dynamically linked with the older libhunspell 1.2 but Mint already has version 1.3.
To manually figure out why xulrunner is unhappy a

./xulrunner --register-user

in the RSSOwl/xulrunner directory will tell you.

After the two steps above your RSSOwl installation should run without trouble again -- happy reading!

[UPDATE] Installing / setting up my Synology DS212+

Lucky me! Right before the weekend all needed parts (that is, the Synology DS212+ itself plus 2 x 3TB Seagate ST3000DM001 7200 RPM) arrived in time to spend some fun hours with it. Bonus: My girlfriend isn't here for the entire weekend, so even more time available! Life can be sooo nice, aww ...

Alright, so after unpacking this nice little box I installed the HDDs and hooked it up to my network. Since the initial RAID parity checks takes a while I did some research on what I need to get working and what I want to do with my DS212+. In case you didn't know: The DS212+ runs a 2.6.32 Linux on an ARMv5 Marvell SoC with 2,0 GHz.

This post will list all the things I did to get my setup into a working state (and also act as a reminder in case I need to set it up another time / migrate).

SSH

First, enabling SSH is a good thing to do (but don't go for the ancient and unsecure telnet crap!) -- go right into DSM and enable SSH in the system preferences. You then can login via ssh (on Windows use putty) using root@<ip-of-your-DS212+> as the address. The password is the very same password you use for the DSM administrator account.

Adding external package sources

To get a few more packages to browse I just added some more SPK repository sources to  the DSM package manager:

http://update.10trum.de/packageupdate/getpackages.php
http://pcloadletter.comlu.com/
http://packages.mertymade.com/
http://synopkg.superzebulon.org/spkrepo/packages

http://pvr.unzureichende.info/synology

Security advise: Be sure to only add at least somewhat verified / community accepted repository sources to your DSM. If you install malicious software from untrusted repositories to your poor, little DiskStation this really can bring your stored data into trouble!

Installing IPKG support

Another nice thing to do is to add support for *.ipkg packages to get even more software to your NAS-device: Since the DS212+ has an ARMv5-based CPU one has to do the following to get the IPKG stuff working:

1. Login as root via SSH to your DS212+ (see SSH section for more information).
2. Go to the "@tmp" directory by doing a "cd /volume1/@tmp/".
3. Do a "wget http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/cs08q1armel/cross/unstable/syno-mvkw-bootstrap_1.2-7_arm.xsh".
4. Execute the just downloaded script by "sh syno-mvkw-bootstrap_1.2-7_arm.xsh"
5. Note: The execution will fail because the scripts contains a too tightend processor type check which simply can be changed in the next step.
6. Go into the directory "bootstrap" (that was created by the script above) by "cd bootstrap", open the required file via "vi bootstrap.sh", go to the line which has "Feroceon-KW" in it and change it to just being "Feroceon" (without quotes). Leave the rest unchanged though! If you don't know how to operate "vi" then have a look here. After editing that line save the file and exit vi.
7. Unmount "/opt" if still mounted: "umount /opt".
8. Due to some wget incompatibilities the pre-installed DSM version vs. the wget version IPKG will install the root's PATH variable needs to be adjusted first: Do a "vi /root/.profile" (note the dot in front of the filename!) and add "/opt/bin:/opt/sbin/" in front of the PATH variable's value so that it might looks like this: "PATH=/opt/bin:/opt/sbin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/syno/bin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin ...". Exit the editor after you saved the file.
9. Apply the changes to the environment by doing a "source /root/.profile".
10. Go back to the "@tmp/bootstrap" directory by doing a "cd /volume1/@tmp/".
11. Execute the script again by "sh bootstrap.sh".
12. Now the script should report no error anymore and the IPKG stuff should get installed.

Phew, lot of stuff, wasn't it? So to update your IPKG package list you just need to do "ipkg update". This will retrieve the current repository list which will contain more fun software to install. Do that every now and then to keep your list updated; also mind for security updates.

Installing bash

As the default installation uses BusyBox with ash as the shell I'm not too happy with that. So installing bash with a "ipkg install bash" helps. After installing setting it as the default shell in "/etc/passwd" (usually the first line is for user root) via "/opt/bin/bash" solves this problem.

Installing OpenSSH

To use scp from my desktop box to transfer files to my new DS212+ I needed OpenSSH -- there is a nice small blog post over at Literati Tech which explains what to do. See it here.

Installing rdiff-backup

There's small wiki article over at forum.synology.com which explains how to install rdiff-backup. See it here.
Oh, and for getting your self-stitched backup script up and running you also might want to install coreutils by doing a "ipkg install coreutils" (includes mktemp and so on which busybox doesn't offer).


TODO: htop, vim

Fixing German Umlauts for Samba shares

This one took me a while to figure out. As I occasionally read German articles or documentation I got some files with German Umlauts (ä, ö etc.) in it. After putting them on my DS212+ the naming was screwed up on both, the Samba share on my Ubuntu (Mint) box and via SSH (sh).

To fix this you need to edit the file "/usr/syno/etc/smb.conf" by adding

unix charset = ISO8859-1

to the [globa] section. After that you need to restart Samba by doing a

/usr/syno/etc/rc.d/S80samba.sh restart

Also, edit your Samba shares on your local box (probably /etc/fstab) to include

iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=CP850
 
in the mount options per share. For reference, my mount options look like this:

//192.XX.XX.XX/music       /media/ds212/music            cifs    _netdev,auto,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=CP850,user,uid=XXX,credentials=/etc/samba/auth_ds212.conf    0       0


After re-connecting to your Samba shares the Umlauts finally should work now.



Developing further ...watch out for updates!

SubWars

Like nicely animated short movies in film noir style? Then don't skip this one: