Blog of a LAMP Developer based in Richmond, Surrey

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I recently decided to sell my hosting side of the business.

If any customers are reading this, then thanks for all your support over the years.

Watch this space for new products and new branches of the business.

Thank you to all the people who have enquired about Smudge Virtual Machine Manager

The software is coming along nicely. We hope to have the new website and the beta, available by the end of next month.

Here are a few teaser screen shots.

I’m currently involved in a a new php project that will allow users to manager Xen virtual containers, through a simple web interface or robust API.

SmudgeVMM is being written in CakePHP and will run as a stand alone webservice, on any Centos Xen server.

Features include: Multiple interfaces (WAN and LAN), SAS storage (iscsi and NAS), package templates, support for most flavors of linux, integration with most hosting shopping carts, reseller and multi user level permissions along with complete Xen VPS container management.

Here are the commands to reduce an ext3 file system and also the Logical Volume that holds it.

Warning please make sure you leave enough space for the files inside, or data may be lost.

First make sure the files system isn’t mounted then.

e2fsck -f /dev/VolGroup00/disk1_rootimg
resize2fs -p /dev/VolGroup00/disk1_rootimg 15G
lvreduce –size 15G /dev/VolGroup00/disk1_rootimg
resize2fs /dev/VolGroup00/disk1_rootimg

This should reduce the file system to 15G

I’ve had to do some work for a company recently.

It involved me creating Joomla components and those annoying XML files, listing all the files and folders to install.

If you want a quick command to generate the xml, you can cd to the directory then run

find * -type f -exec  echo ‘<filename>’{}’</filename>’ \;

find * -type d -exec  echo ‘<folder>’{}’</folder>’ \;

Then you can copy the output from the terminal and paste between the files tags.

<files folder=”components/com_test”>
<filename>controller.php</filename>
<filename>css/test.css</filename>
<filename>views/test/tmpl/index.html</filename>
<filename>test.php</filename>
<folder>css</folder>
<folder>images</folder>
<folder>install_sql</folder>
<folder>models</folder>
<folder>player</folder>
<folder>views</folder>
<folder>views/user</folder>
<folder>views/user/tmpl</folder>
<folder>views/test</folder>
<folder>views/test/tmpl</folder>
</files>

I repeated this for the administrator/components/com_test and components/com_test folders

I’m now running the site on a new Xen VPS server with Smudgeit. The site is running smoothly and no issues to report.
I chose to go with a UK Centos Xen VPS Server.

After the sad death of K T Ligesh I decided, like many people, to move away from HyperVM.

I searched and tried many control panels.

Openqrm – I found this over kill
karesansui – This is very nice looking and polished but seemed quite slow.
VDS Manager – Still in beta for Xen

I’ve now decided to create the VM’s by hand. I then hope to make a PHP control panel of my own. Here are my steps for creating Xen VPS’s using the command line and Centos 5.

I’m going to create a vm called testvm

First I needed to find out what Volume groups exist on my system and what the VG Name was

lvdisplay

VG Name                VolGroup00

Create the disks for the VM and format

lvcreate -L8.5G -n testvm_rootimg VolGroup00
lvcreate -L 384M -n testvm_vmswap VolGroup00
mke2fs /dev/VolGroup00/testvm_rootimg
tune2fs -j /dev/VolGroup00/testvm_rootimg
mkswap /dev/VolGroup00/testvm_vmswap
mkdir /mnt/img
mkdir /mnt/vm

Now mount your disk image. I’ve created a custom hardened Centos distro, but you could use Jailtime Images

mount -o loop centos.5-3.64-smudge.img  /mnt/img
mount /dev/VolGroup00/looop_rootimg /mnt/vm

Copy the image onto your new partition

cp -a /mnt/img/* /mnt/vm/

Now all you need to do is configure the hostname, ip etc on the VM.

vi /mnt/vm/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=static
IPADDR=87.xxx.xxx.xxx
NETMASK=255.255.255.xxx
ONBOOT=yes

Change the hostname

vi /mnt/vm/etc/sysconfig/network

If your using Jailtime images people have advised to change this line to the following:

vi /mnt/vm/etc/inittab
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty console

vi /mnt/vm/etc/ssh/sshd_config
PermitRootLogin yes

vi /mnt/vm/etc/fstab

Add the line:

/dev/sda2     swap   swap     defaults     0     0

umount /mnt/img /mnt/vm

You will need a ram disk to boot from. This can be created by running:

mkinitrd /boot/xen-guest-initrd `uname -r` –with xenblk –with xennet –preload xenblk –preload xennet –omit-scsi-modules

Now all you need to do is create the config file and give it an IP/ Mac address.Please check which kernel you are using first and change – kernel = “/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-128.1.14.el5xen”…

kernel = “/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-128.1.14.el5xen”
ramdisk    = ‘/boot/xen-guest-initrd’
maxmem = 192
memory = 192
vcpus = 1
name = “testvm”
vif = [ 'ip=87.xxx.xxx.xxx,bridge=xenbr0, rate = 1000KB/s, mac=aa:00:23:b0:de:34' ]
serial     = ‘pty’
disk       = ['phy:/dev/VolGroup00/testvm_rootimg,sda1,w', 'phy:/dev/VolGroup00/testvm_vmswap,sda2,w']
root = ‘/dev/sda1 ro’
on_poweroff = ‘destroy’
on_reboot   = ‘restart’
on_crash    = ‘restart’

All is ready to go.

Just run:

xm create testvm

And you VPS should be now running:

check with
xm console testvm

Hope this helps.

Smudge IT will be lauching  a new site and Xen Vps systems soon. Watch this space..

Converting to flv

ffmpeg -i Head Office Version.ts -ar 22050 -ab 128 -f flv -s 448×252 – | flvtool2 -U stdin video.flv

or with better bitrate

ffmpeg -i happy_feet_h.i480.mov -ar 22050 -ab 128 -b 800 -f flv -s  480×204 – | flvtool2 -U stdin happyfeet.flv

Generate thumbnail

This creates a thumb of 12 seconds into the video

ffmpeg -y -i head_office.flv -f image2 -ss 12 -vframes 1 -an head_office.jpg

This is just a one liner as my class uses lots of method etc that you probably don’t need.

The money shot is this:

if (! file_exists ( $thumb_dir . $thumbname )) {
$draw_thumb = shell_exec ( $this->ffmpeg . ' -y -i ' . $video_file . ' -f image2 -ss 10 -vframes 1 -an ' . $thumb_dir . $thumbname );
}

($this->ffmpeg = the location of the ffmpeg binary)

This will generate a thumbnail of the video at 10 seconds.