SethSec

I don't believe this post will be very useful to anyone else, but I want to record it anyway. I noticed a few weeks ago that my drupal installation was complaining that the watchdog table had crashed. With my limited understanding of mysql , I didn't event know that a table *could* crash. Everything else on the site looked fine to the anonymous user so I just ignored it. That brings me to today. I found this interesting script online that will dump all of my mysql databases every hour to another file system . I figured I would give a shot. I entered my root db password and the dst directory and let her rip. I got a few errors right away: [root@www storage]# mysql -backup.sh mysqldump : Error 1194: Table 'watchdog' is marked as crashed and should be repaired when dumping table `watchdog` at row: 283 mysqldump : Got error: 145: Table './drupal/watchdog' is marked as crashed and should be repaired when using LOCK TABLES mysqldump : Got error: 145: Table '....

I was recently playing around with my .bash_profile file looking for new ways to alert myself as well as my team to problems with production snorts. I ended up with two little tricks that I have found really useful and I figured I would share. For those that don't know, the .bash_profile file is an sh script that runs at user login. At a bare minimum it sets the users PATH, but it can be used for a whole lot more. It's located in the root of the users home directory. Ex: /home/snort/.bash_profile, or /root/.bash_profile Before I go any further I will tell you that both of these tricks are obviously reactive in nature. They only let you know there is a problem the next time you log into the device. A more proactive solution would involve setting thresholds and sending emails to admins, but 1) there are already plenty of scripts that do that, and 2) that is not a luxury I have on my sensors. I have inbound ssh, outbound 80 for updates and outbound 443 for logging. Nevertheless, t...

Configuring lirc (Remote control daemon) Getting the remote control to work has been on my to-do list for as long as I've been using MythTV. Early on I decided to go with a wireless mouse/keyboard combo instead. I have been using the Ione Scorpius P-20 for quite a while and it has served me well. Every 6 months or so I would try to get the remote working, and every time I would fail... until this weekend. I couldn’t have done it without the following two sites: 1) http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/MCE_Remote 2) http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/board/showthread.php?t=8048 I have a Hauppauge PVR-150 Tuner card which came with the Remote and the IR receiver. I would say my biggest stumbling point along the way was that until this weekend I never knew exactly which remote I had. Apparently the PVR-150 has come with a whole bunch of different remotes over its lifetime. As it turns out, I have a MCE USB2, Version 2, Hauppauge PVR-Kit remote. How I was supposed to know that without luckily ...

Introduction I've been using MythTV for about 3 years now, both on Fedora Core and also on Ubuntu on my laptop. My first MythTV system was built with A LOT of help from Jarod Wilson's infamous How-To . A few months ago I built two MythTV systems for my family and decided to use MythDora4 . It was so quick and easy that I decided to use MythDora for my own rebuild as well. I should start off by saying that I don’t use MythTV for the PVR functionality. I use it solely as a digital jukebox. I watch TV shows and movies using MythVideo, MythMusic is always a big hit at parties, and occasionally I use MythImage for slideshows. In the past I had all my media files on my WindowsXP box and used cifs to mount the windows shares on my MythTV box. I played music/videos directly through the share and performance was great even with a 10/100 Mbps NIC. For this iteration, I decided to also upgrade to a 1.5TB RAID5 array so that I could start burning all of my DVD's to .ISO files. This wa...

So this is going to be my technical brain dump space on the web. As someone who has spent thousands of hours of my life asking Google how to do stuff, I finally feel like I am rounding the curve to the point where I can give something back. I would guess that 98% or more of this blog will be related to open source Linux projects. Some of the ones I use the most are Snort, MythTV and Drupal. Most of my entries will be pretty basic and for my own records, but I hope that every once and a while someone else will find one of my entries useful and it will help them the way that so many amazing pages have helped me in the past.