Music Spotlight: NSB Radio

NSB Radio
http://www.nsbradio.co.uk

I must say, I discovered NSB Radio about a week ago and it has already changed my life. It is a 24/7/365 radio station that has 2 hour radio shows of live DJ’s spinning Nu Skool Breaks among other things. So far it has inspired me to get my decks out of storage and hook up my studio (well, what is left of it). It also has inspired me to invest in some new equipment that will allow me to mix mp3s as well. I am going to be completely honest: The shows are hit or miss. Some of them are amazing while others are terrible. But overall, its a great place to check out when you need some good tunes. You can also catch me hanging out in their IRC chat under the alias Envium. Curious to know more about NSB radio? Check out the excerpt taken from their website below.

“Broadcasting since 2003, multi award winning NSB Radio is a pioneer in the online broadcasting world. We are the world’s largest breaks and breakbeat oriented radio station brought to you by Nuskoolbreaks.co.uk. NSB Radio was voted “Best Radio Station” at the 2008, 2009 and 2010 Breakspoll International Breakbeat Awards by our amazing community of listeners. Our highly talented, award winning DJs and radio shows are live 24/7 throwing down the phattest selection of breaks, breakbeat, big beat, glitch, nu skool breakz, funk, dubstep, soul and so much more.”

Forward Network Traffic With Iptables

From time to time I come across something truly amazing that I just must share no matter how tired I am. Even though they are typically very simple it helps me remember in the future and I hope it also helps others out wfhen they have the same problems that I do. I recently migrated a server from Slicehost to Linode and I wanted to find a quick and easy way to forward web traffic on various ports to the new server while DNS caught up. The answer was simple… iptables. I found this in an article here.

echo "1" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 80 -j DNAT --to-destination 1.2.3.4:80
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 3306 -j DNAT --to-destination 1.2.3.4:3306
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -j MASQUERADE

Music Spotlight: Gareth Emery

Gareth Emery released a new track that will be on his upcoming September 2010 album. The album name is to be “Northern Lights.”

Gareth Emery feat. Lucy Saunders – Sanctuary

Linux Disk Imaging with Clonezilla and PXE

Now that I finally have a file server at home I got curious again with disk imaging solutions. After doing some research I found a pretty awesome tool called Clonezilla. After downloading the live CD and playing around for a while the first thing I wanted to do was test it out in a PXE boot fashion. Here was my quick and hackish approach. My test run was on a VirtualBox VM in Xubuntu 10.04 with a bridged adapter.

1. Install TFTP server

sudo apt-get install tftpd-hpa
sudo start tftpd-hpa

Ensure /var/lib/tftpboot exists. If it does not:

mkdir -p /var/lib/tftpboot

Ensure that the values in /etc/defaults/tftpd-hpa match.

2. Install DHCP server

sudo apt-get install dhcp3-server
sudo vim /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf

Add something similar to the following…

default-lease-time 86400;
max-lease-time 604800;
authoritative;

subnet 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
        range 192.168.1.10 192.168.1.15;
        filename "pxelinux.0";
        next-server 192.168.1.121;
        option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
        option broadcast-address 192.168.1.255;
        option routers 192.168.1.1;
}

sudo service dhcp3-server start

The next-server option needs to be the IP of the TFTP server. Everything else should be self explanatory.

Before proceeding verify both services are listening.

sudo netstat -upan | awk  '{print $6}'
2008/dhcpd3
582/dhclient
3627/in.tftpd

3. Install syslinux if it is not already (it should be). Copy over pxelinux.0 into the appropriate location.

sudo apt-get install syslinux
sudo cp /usr/lib/syslinux/pxelinux.0 /var/lib/tftpboot

4. Download latest clonezilla zip from SourceForge.

sudo unzip clonezilla-live-*.zip
sudo cp live/vmlinuz /var/lib/tftpboot/
sudo cp live/initrd.img /var/lib/tftpboot/
sudo cp live/filesystem.squashfs /var/lib/tftpboot/
cd /var/lib/tftpboot
sudo touch boot.txt
sudo mkdir pxelinux.cfg
sudo touch pxelinux.cfg/default

Your tree should end up looking something like this in the end:

├── boot.txt
├── filesystem.squashfs
├── initrd.img
├── pxelinux.0
├── pxelinux.cfg
│   └── default
└── vmlinuz

5. Create configs

sudo vim boot.txt

I made my menu look something like the following…

========================================================================

 .d8888b.  888                                    d8b 888 888
d88P  Y88b 888                                    Y8P 888 888
888    888 888                                        888 888
888        888  .d88b.  88888b.   .d88b. 88888888 888 888 888  8888b.
888        888 d88""88b 888 "88b d8P  Y8b   d88P  888 888 888     "88b
888    888 888 888  888 888  888 88888888  d88P   888 888 888 .d888888
Y88b  d88P 888 Y88..88P 888  888 Y8b.     d88P    888 888 888 888  888
 "Y8888P"  888  "Y88P"  888  888  "Y8888 88888888 888 888 888 "Y888888 

======== Boot Options: ================================================

>> clonezilla ......... Regular Boot
>> clonezilla_safe .... Failsafe Mode

=======================================================================

And finally the pxe config…

sudo vim pxelinux.cfg/default

Looked something like this:

DISPLAY boot.txt

LABEL clonezilla
	kernel vmlinuz
	append initrd=initrd.img boot=live union=aufs noswap noprompt vga=788 fetch=tftp://192.168.1.121/filesystem.squashfs

LABEL clonezilla_safe
	kernel vmlinuz
	append initrd=initrd.img boot=live union=aufs noswap noprompt vga=normal nomodeset nosplash fetch=tftp://192.168.1.121/filesystem.squashfs

PROMPT 1
TIMEOUT 0

Please note that the IP address should be the IP of the TFTP server!

Now testing with a Dell Latitude E6410 I hit F12 on the BIOS screen, Select Network Adapter, and SUCCESS! You should see your boot.txt with a “boot:” prompt. Please share your experiences and alternative implementations on how you solved this issue. I would love to hear them!

My Test results:
250 GB (239.9 GB after formatting)
67.7 GB in use
175.2 GB free
Transfer Rate: Started at 900 MB/min at first, peaked at 1.91 GB/min, ended at 1.72GB/min, average 1.7 GB/min
Time elapsed: 37 minutes, 41 seconds

Disabling Pulseaudio in Ubuntu 9.10

I have been having a great deal of trouble with sound in World of Warcraft. I then found out after searching around that my issues were related with Pulseaudio. I found a useful forum post that gave perfect instructions on disabling pulseaudio from restarting automatically.

touch ~/.pulse-a11y-nostart
echo autospawn = no|tee -a ~/.pulse/client.conf
killall pulseaudio

With pulseaudio killed sound in WoW is flawless!