String around my finger
A 'blog to remember things I found.

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I work for NIS ITS Monash University Australia.

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• monash 18
• networks 33
• oss 1
• security 1
• software 17
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• windows 3

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tovid

http://tovid.sourceforge.net/

tovid is a suite of utilities designed to make VCD, SVCD, and DVD authoring a little less painful. tovid can create MPEG output from arbitrary video formats; other components in the suite can help you identify video files, generate graphical menus for DVD, and write the XML for authoring DVDs. Video files converted with tovid can subsequently be burned to a CD or DVD, using software that can create the appropriate file structure for VCD or SVCD such as k3b or dvdauthor.

http://tovid.sourceforge.net/documentation.html

tovid / idvid / makemenu / makexml

[ /media | # ]

BitTorrent

http://bittorrent.com

http://in.tech.yahoo.com/041103/137/2ho4i.html

Sites like Slovenia-based Suprnova (http://www.suprnova.org) offer up thousands of different torrents without storing the shows themselves.

Suprnova is a treasure trove of movies, television shows, and pirated games and software. Funded by advertising, it is run by a teen-age programmer who goes only by the name Sloncek, who did not respond to an e-mailed interview request.

Meanwhile, BitTorrent is rapidly emerging as the preferred means of distributing large amounts of legitimate content such as versions of the free computer operating system Linux, and these benign uses may give it some legal protection.

Among the best legitimate sites for movies and music:

-- Legal Torrents (http://www.legaltorrents.com/), which includes a wide selection of electronic music. It also has the Wired Magazine Creative Commons CD, which has songs from artists like the Beastie Boys who agreed to release some of their songs under a more permissive copyright that allows free distribution and remixing.

-- Torrentocracy (http://torrentocracy.com/torrents/) has videos of the U.S. presidential debates and other political materials.

-- File Soup (http://www.filesoup.com) offers open-source software and freeware, music from artists whose labels don't belong to the Recording Industry Association of America trade group, and programs from public television stations like PBS or the BBC.

-- Etree (http://bt.etree.org) is for devotees of "trade-friendly" bands like Phish and the Dead, who encourage fans to share live recordings, usually in the form of large files that have been minimally compressed to maintain sound quality.

[ /media | # ]

Managing Software Raid

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~neilb/source/mdadm/

mdadm is a program that can be used to create, manage, and monitor MD (Multiple Devices) devices. As such it provides a similar set of functionality to the raidtools packages.

mdadm can provide information about your arrays (through Query, Detail, and Examine) that raidtools cannot.

MANAGE MODE Usage: mdadm device options... devices...

This usage will allow individual devices in an array to be failed, removed or added. It is possible to perform multiple operations with on command. For example:

mdadm /dev/md0 -f /dev/hda1 -r /dev/hda1 -a /dev/hda1

will firstly mark /dev/hda1 as faulty in /dev/md0 and will then remove it from the array and finally add it back in as a spare. However only one md array can be affected by a single command.

If you're using the /proc filesystem, /proc/mdstat lists all active md devices with information about them. mdadm uses this to find arrays when --scan is given in Misc mode, and to monitor array reconstruction on Monitor mode.

For Mandrake: http://rpms.mandrakeclub.com/rpms/mandrake/official/10.1/i586/media/main/mdadm-1.7.0-3mdk.i586.html

[ /software | # ]