USB Device Sharing: Solution for Old Printer Driver
I had a situation where we have a perfectly fine Epson Stylus Photo R2400 that is a few years old now but still a quality printer but we had been using it with 3 iMacs in a lab area. The Epson printer driver has some nicer features than the Gutenprint one that ships with the Apple drivers and we wanted to have the printer driver be set to that.
Via direct USB, the printer driver worked fine. The Epson driver was developed for PPC I believe and since it is such an old printer, it probably is the last version we will see. Rosetta also needs to be installed to handle it, but that is pretty-much automatic. So direct USB is fine and if you do printer sharing on the iMac that has a direct USB connection, you could get the machine that was piggy-backing on the sharing iMac to work with AppleTalk. But, when we upgraded to 10.6.x we lost AppleTalk on those iMacs and we lost the Epson driver nice stuff on two of the three computers. Sharing via Bonjour or IP did not work for the Epson driver, so we had to figure another solution out or re-purpose the printer.
So, enter the IOGEAR GUB431 4-Port USB Automatic Printer Switch
It can be used without software, but the software is a critical piece because it can be set to do automatic switching. After setup, we got the old R2400 going and the three iMacs into the switch. Each iMac sees the native USB so the driver is happy and shows all the options the users like and the USB switch is smart enough to handle switching between the computers when a print job is dished to it. The default software setup is to have the computer printing grab hold and own the printer for 3 minutes then let go, but I changed the settings so it would automatically let go when needed by other iMacs. It seems to be working well and we will keep testing it with users to see if it can handle what we need. I like the solution and well worth a try to keep a perfectly good piece of hardware going even if the vendor might have some driver issues across the network. We could have tried a print server on ethernet, but I was hesitant to try it since printer sharing wasn't even working. To clarify, one could print via Bonjour printer sharing, but NOT with the extra driver features Epson bakes-in to the USB type of connection which is a major deal for us.
The device has Mac and Windows software and seems very solid. So far, so good.
For more info checkout
Install and Run Handbrake on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx
I have been backing-up our DVDs to file recently and been using Handbrake a lot. Handbrake is a great tool and runs great on Windows and Mac OS X, but it also runs on Ubuntu. After encoding a few movies on our Macs and then transferring them to our storage location, I thought that it might just be best to encode the video on the linux server itself. Here is a quick guide if there is not one out there yet. Handbrake can be installed via the PPA structure in Ubuntu. Big ups to John Stebbins for working on this.
1. Login to your Ubuntu Linux 10.0.4 system. If your system does not have a GUI (Gnome) then you can use Handbrake via command-line , but not for the average user.
2. I would run a command that makes sure your system is up to date, package-wise prior to adding the PPA.
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
Then allow everything to be run and updated and reboot if needed.
3. Add the PPA for John Stebbins personal archive to your apt-get repository
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stebbins/handbrake-snapshots
4. Then run the update to get the apt-get available packages so you can get handbrake
$ sudo apt-get update
5. Then, since your system knows about John's archive and has the package for Handbrake, go ahead and run it.
$sudo apt-get install handbrake*
This will show you that you are going to install the command-line and the gtk (gnome) gui version. Screenshot shows the step 5 install process but I am root straight-out (the sudo stuff gets old when you have to just get stuff done so having a root password is important for me).
This sort of process is constantly changing and this is just want works at this point in time, so best to check this for new/better ways to get to the solution.
https://edge.launchpad.net/~stebbins/+archive/handbrake-snapshots
6. I would also make sure you have the latest version of vlc installed.
$ sudo apt-get install vlc
7. You will be able to run the GUI version of Handbrake via the Gnome menu structure under Sound & Video or just running this command via Terminal
$ ghb
Another nice way to run this on your linux box would be to just run it via VNC or X over SSH. Here is a screenshot running Handbrake on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx on X over SSH from my MacBook 10.6.3 with X11.
Handbrake on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 run over SSH via X
More On FFMPEG Settings That Work For Me
After more and more testing off HD video, I am finding the best bang for the download speed buck is sticking with qscale 10 and chopping the frames to 15 while sizing the image size down to hd480. Here is an example -
ffmpeg -i 051810Perf1.m4v -qscale 10 -s hd480 -r 15 051810Perf1.flv
Using a standard resolutuon that is based on 16 seems to be the best way to go. There are so many intricate elements to encoding video to flv to try and make it decent quality, but still large while having it load quickly for people with various speeds of broadband!
Xmind Is A Great Rapid Mind-Mapper And Diagram Tool
I have used a ton of different mind-mapping, flow-charting and graphing applications on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X and they all have specific positives and negatives. The ones that are the most complex also tend to be the slowest to rapidly diagram with but have the most features to really enable complex rendering.
Xmind (http://www.xmind.net) is a great cross-platform solution for basic mapping of structures and data. It is a topic/sub-topic mapper so it is really useful for elaboration on database structures and single concept diagrams. Xmind is a very rapid tool with keyboard shortcuts to quickly add topics and sub-topics which allows you to get a structure up and going fast so then you can tweak after you get the data out there.
Symantec BackupExec 2010, RALUS and Centos 5 Works
Whew, what a pain this has been.
Always had a heck of a time with BackupExec 12.5 and below backing up CentOS versions. I think early versions of RALUS were operational and worked back in the BackupExec 8-10.5 days prior to Symantec's acquistion of Veritas. But, it has never been really easy to get this going well and incorporating a RedHat-like but not RedHat system into the BackupExec remote client world. Bring in 64-bit CentOS, and it got even more of a pain.
Well, now it seems it is possible and repeatable with Symantec BackupExec 2010. The change in naming conventions off the versions to years (even though everyone else is going back to the versions and moving off of years now!) signifies some code investment from Symantec in what must be a cash-cow for them in BackupExec.
We have a few Windows 2003 and 2008 servers along with some OS X 10.5.x servers and are backing them up to a LTO3 library on a 2008 server and made the move to BackupExec 2010 recently to try and shake some of the lingering issues with 12.5 rehashed code and makeshift RALUS client patches for Unix, Linux and Mac clients Symantec seems to have inherited and continued.
It seems you need to disable IPv6 to get the negotiation to happen correctly on top of the obvious IPTables and IPTables configurations to allow TCP ports 10000 and 6101 to communication between the BackupExec Server and your RALUS client.
Disabling IPv6 on CentOS (run all as root or you can sudo everything below)
- in /etc/sysconfig/network you need to add
NETWORKING_IPV6=no
- in /etc/modprobe.conf add:
alias ipv6 off
alias net-pf-10 off
- make sure IPTablesv6 is disabled at startup
/sbin/chkconfig ip6tables off
After all of that, give your network a restart
/etc/init.d/network restart
Then run the RALUS install from the Symantec BE 2010 download. If you have issues here during the install and possibly have multiple network interfaces straddling different networks, try ip addresses in lieu of hostnames. Also, on the BE 2010 server, restart all the services. Starting the RALUS client on CentOS 5 is
/etc/init.d/VRTSralus.init start
or
/etc/init.d/VRTSralus.init restart