MT.Net

There are 150 posts filed in MT.Net (this is page 8 of 15).

Email extortion?

Get out of jail free ... err, for $20

Somehow, the hosted server I use for my mailing lists has gotten flagged by Barracuda Networks as being a source of spam. This means I can no longer send email to my neighbors with att.net (or Bellsouth.net), aol.com, or Time Warner email addresses.

The idea that I would spam is of course absurd (as these two RBL checkers can confirm) but because I’ve been working with spam and “realtime black hole” lists for years I understand that false positives can sometimes occur.

What galls me about Barracuda’s approach is their proposed solution: fork over $20 per year per domain and we’ll never accuse you again. It smacks of extortion.

To Barracuda’s credit, they did promptly remove my IP from their “poor reputation” list and this change will presumably percolate to the big-name ISPs which use Barracuda products. Still, it’s an eye-opening example of what can happen to the Internet when resources are concentrated in the hands of a few companies.

Fully open-source video streaming

I found the missing link today for my open-source video streaming project: Xuggle. The Xuggle project includes a version of ffmpeg which can RTMP-stream to the red5 server.

Well, sorta. The red5 server needs to be patched in order to work with Xuggle, An exception occurs otherwise. You grab the patch from here and patch the RTMPProtocolDecoder.java file.

Here’s the command line I use to get Xuggle’s ffmpeg to stream my USB webcam from Linux:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/xuggler/lib /usr/local/xuggler/bin/ffmpeg -f video4linux2 -s 320×240 -r 15 -i /dev/video0 -f oss -ac 2 -i /dev/dsp1 -f flv rtmp://eddy.neusemedia.com/oflaDemo/streamname

Normally I would use ALSA to grab audio from the USB microphone but Xuggle’s ffmpeg binary wasn’t compiled with ALSA support. Fortunately, the OSS driver works fine.

Here’s the command I use to stream from my ieee1394 (also known as Firewire) video camera:

dvgrab – | LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/xuggler/lib /usr/local/xuggler/bin/ffmpeg -f dv -i – -s 320×240 -r 15 -f flv -ar 22050 rtmp://eddy.neusemedia.com/oflaDemo/streamname

This takes audio from the DV camera, but if I wanted to take audio from the USB microphone (or the built-in microphone) I could put in a line like the first one.

The quality is absolutely outstanding! Even on my slow cable modem connection I can push 320×240 15fps video with 22KHz stereo audio to my server. On a beefier Internet connection (like the city’s network at the community center) I could dial it up to even higher quality.

So there you go. Other than the codec (which is not free “as in speech”), all the parts are free. The only cost is the hosting bandwidth. One thing I’d like to find is a good way to take this RTMP stream and push it out a high-quality video card for ingesting into the city’s cable access channel, if need be. That would turn this in to a great solution for the city’s RTN network to offer live coverage of city events. I’m also interested in an RTMFP solution so that the client plugins can share the bandwith, rather than having my server hammered when many people try to watch at once.

Now I know a lot of non-geeks are interested in getting their own streaming television, so I’ll get to work on writing up a howto with minimal jargon.

Shift colors

The new server is answering web requests now. Seems like most everything is in place but the mailserver stuff. That should be changed over shortly, too. If you try to email me but it gets bounced for any reason, please try again shortly. These DNS changes take some time to propagate through the Internet.

(The title of this post comes from the announcement made on a commissioned Navy vessel when it gets underway. The colors are flown from the fantail when the ship is docked and moved to the mast when the ship gets underway.)

Server switcheroo

In the next 24 hours or so I will switch MT.Net and other services over to a new server. If things go as planned you will not see any disruption in service.

I will likely throw the switch about 9 PM Monday evening.

Highlights of 2010: Social media

This year I will once again celebrate my blog highlights, but also will give a nod to the other social media sites.

On the blog front, MT.Net collected 1.73 million hits over this year, translating to 260,000 unique visits. That’s an average of 711 visits per day and about 30% traffic growth from the year before. It’s been a good year, traffic-wise. On the posting side, I estimate I’ve written about 450 new posts this year.

I’m always amused at what brings people to my site, too. I’m still one of the top search results for the Sugarhill Gang’s epic rap song, Rapper’s Delight. I’m also still collecting plenty of web hits for Jefferson’s Bank Quote. I also draw web searchers looking for Bradley Manning, 1Gb Internet, 99% of people can’t watch this video more than 25 seconds, free iPad scam, and TSA cavity search.
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Weather online again

MT.Net weather station file photo

Well, it took me about a year after I set up my weather station in our current house before I actually connected it to the outside world but last night I got around to it. Seeing Travis’s taped-up toy weather station sitting sadly in yesterday’s rain got me motivated to give the kids some weather graphs and statistics to check whenever they want.

Now anyone can check the weather in East Raleigh by clicking on this link. Weather information updates every 10 minutes “on the elevens.” I still have to repair my wind speed gauge but everything else is working. Eventually I hope to upgrade to wireless (and solar) instruments I can mount above the roof but this will work for now.

Power outage

We had a power outage this evening from 8:30 to 10:00 PM. Afterward our home fileserver did not boot, so personal email accounts and home phone are temporarily down. Hopefully I can get things straightened out Monday. The server issue is with the motherboard and/or (more likely) the power supply. The drives should be fine so I don’t expect any data loss.

The power failure took the opportunity to interrupt my breadmaking. I had kicked off a new flavor, Italian wheat, only to have the power pull the plug on it after 90 minutes. It was a short blip but enough to knock the breadmaker out of its cycle. Fortunately, I found another cycle that heads to the bake cycle relatively quickly and got it going again. Then the power failed again, this time for the 90 minute outage. I still would not give up on my bread, though, and resumed baking it after the power returned. Against all odds it turned out great!
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Raleigh’s media sites can’t search, either

Before our area media start feeling high and mighty, I was amused to find it nearly impossible to track down today’s story on Russ’s comments about the city’s website on the News and Observer website. After searching in vain using the N&O’s own search engine, it took me some thoughtful Google searches to turn it up.

With each iteration of its website, the paper’s search engine has become less useful. What’s even worse, with each redesign all the web links to online stories have changed completely, breaking not only any links any outside sites made to stories but also any links indexed by search engines. Thus if you couldn’t find what you’re looking for after the N&O redesign, God help you because Google certainly won’t. I’m no web professional, but even I know to create forwards from old links to new ones whenever humble MT.Net makes changes. That’s Webmastering 101.
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Fixing GNU Mailman to handle mimetypes

I host a few neighborhood email lists on my Linux server running the excellent GNU Mailman list server software. Part of my setup involves stripping pictures/documents from emails and storing them in the list archives instead. This way 300 neighbors don’t get a 5 MB attachment emailed out to them: if anyone wants to view the picture/document all they have to do is click on a link in the original email and it will be fetched from the archives.

Tonight I noticed that the MIME type image/pjpeg wasn’t being properly parsed by Mailman’s Scrubber.py script. Having dealt with MIME type problems before, I suspected that the problem wasn’t with Mailman itself but the operating system’s definition of the MIME type.

Sure enough, checking the /etc/mime.types file revealed there was no image/pjpeg type defined. A little more Internet hunting brought me to this post on the Mailman list, confirming the missing mime.type info as the culprit:

On Jan 6, 2010, at 8:18 AM, Ralf Hildebrandt wrote:

> * Ralf Hildebrandt :
>> I have a list where the attachments are removed and stored on the
>> mailman server itself.
>>
>> This works like a charm, but SOME image attachments of the type:
>>
>> image/pjpeg
>>
>> are stored as “attachment.bin” instead of “attachment.jpg”
>>
>> Why?
>> Example below:
>
> adding “image/pjpeg” to /etc/mime.types fixed that:
>
> image/jpeg jpeg jpg jpe
> image/pjpeg jpeg jpg jpe

This is because Mailman uses Python’s mimetypes module to generate the file
name, and I believe that consults /etc/mime.types where available. Since
before you edit Python didn’t know anythig about image/pjpeg, it assumed it was
random binary data, hence the .bin suffix.

-Barry

From what I can find out, image/pjpeg is a type that Microsoft products choose to use instead of the image/jpeg that the rest of the world uses. I guess those crazy Redmonders are just trying to keep us on our toes, eh?