Toshiba Tecra R850 Recovery

In general the Toshiba Tecra R850 is a good laptop. Light for it's size (15.6"), with anti-glare screen, the only negative so far is the smooth keys on keyboard have a slippery feel.

Various forums that state you can hold the "0" key down while turning on the laptop to boot to recovery mode - in fact, this does not work for this model.  To enter recovery mode you must press the F8 key to enter the Windows boot menu, the top item is "Repair Your Computer". This will boot to Windows 7 recovery mode, where the Toshiba Recovery Wizard can be accessed.  The procedure is outlined in the Toshiba manual for Tecra R850.

*If you cannot access the Windows boot menu, you can also mark the recovery partition (the last partition on disk) as Active - it will boot to the Windows 7 recovery mode.

*The recovery partition is required to generate the recovery DVD's.

In the recovered state the Toshiba has the following layout:
Partition 1 = ~1.5GB System partition (hidden,active)
Partition 2 = C:\ drive system partition
Partition 3 = Recovery image partition (hidden)

Samba DC and Windows 7

An incident occurred where Windows 7 clients were giving the error:
"There are currently no logon servers available to service the logon request"
when trying to connect to a Samba 3.4.4 domain controller (eBox). 
The setup had been working fine for approximately 6 months. 
After 1 reboot and many investigations to samba, ldap, DNS configs, IPv6, etc. it was discovered that the nmbd (BIOS name services - WINS) was not stopping when /etc/init.d/samba stop was executed.

Manually killed the service using:
 killall -SIGTERM nmbd
Then everything started working properly again!

Some packet traces revealed the following when trying to re-join a Windows 7 workstation to the domain:
A DNS query is made first.
Followed by NETBIOS-DN name lookups. (UDP port 137)
Followed by the LDAP query.

The server was initialy responding with "ICMP-No response on port 137".
So it looks like in this setup, Samba relies more on WINS(nmbd) than DNS(proper).

Also, we had to comment out the VFS lines in samba.conf,
as described in this post:
http://forum.zentyal.org/index.php?topic=3298.0

Floorplan shapes for dia

A small selection of very basic shapes to enable you to use dia to create rough floorplan layouts
(e.g. for an office layout)

Download from this link:
www.digitalfoundations.com.au/Floorplan_dia_shapes.zip

Reverse-Proxy SSL with pfSense (inc. OWA)

301 - This page has moved to: http://www.digitalfoundations.com.au/blog/reverse-proxy-ssl-with-pfsense-inc-owa

Vmware resolution in Linux guest

Add a "Virtual WIDTH HEIGHT" line after the appropriate DEPTH line in /etc/X11/xorg.conf

DLNA Servers

Samsung AllShare
www.samsung.com/global/allshare/pcsw/

- Can have difficulties installing, just keep running the installer until it works (3 attempts for me)
- M4V file extensions produce "File not supported" on Samsung TV, rename the file to *.MP4.

Serviio
www.serviio.org
- Not reliably detected on Samsung TV (need to restart the TV to re-detect the Serviio (on Server 2003).
- Clips drop out after a few minutes playing (Server 2003).

Ripping DVD for digital movie library

Here are some tips for ripping DVD's to digital format, so you can display on your DLNA enabled TV.  The digital copy also forms your backup for commercial DVD's, but remember copyright rules mean copies of commercial DVD's may not be distributed.

The recommended software tool is Handbrake.
The recommended preset is "iPhone & iPod Touch" - this produces a reasonable size within reasonable time.  For example, on a dual-core 2GHz machine with 4GB RAM, a typical 2hr movie will take about 40mins to rip a 1.2GB file, with minor pixelation.

Note the following options:

File format:

M4V (MP4) - allows aac+ac3, supported on iPhone & Samsung TV DLNA
MKV - requires 3rd party decoder on Apple OSX

Constant Quality:
 20=good but large file
 24=okay, smaller

Bit Rate:
 1500=ok, minor loss
 2500=hi quality (large file)

Comparison of Handbrake Presets can be viewed here:
 https://trac.handbrake.fr/attachment/wiki/BuiltInPresets/fps-graph.png
Specifics about the presets can be viewed here:
 https://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/BuiltInPresets#no1