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While roksbox will recurse your web server and display your media for streaming you also have the option of pointing the application to an XML file which better describes your videos. This results in a superior interface where poster artwork can be displayed as well as descriptive information such as: title, description, actors, mpaa rating, etc. The generation of these XML files is supported through GUI tools available for Windows O/S, or through an online tool located here, but there didn’t seem to be a convenient GUI method for creating or editing these XML files in Linux. This was the inspiration for proks...

Not too long ago VMware has a product called “VMware Server” which originally came with a dedicated management application. Later VMware threw out the console and created a web interface for VMware Server. Not long after that they completely threw VMware Server away in favor of their new enterprise software solution(s) ESX/ESXi/vCenter/vSphere/etc. For the new(ish) VMware Workstation 8 one of the most notable features is the “Shared VMs” which is more or less a reawakening of their original VMware Server application functionality. With this feature you can once again set VMs to run in the background, autostart, and access via network. However a problem arises with the installation on systems which use insserv. Read on and I’ll explain the problem and show you how to fix it.

Continuing on with this project it became necessary to look a little deeper on how apt based software repositories handle version numbers. At first I thought this was the silliest overly complicated mess I could imaging. For instance, how does one compare package versions that look like this ’2:1.0~rc3++svn20100804-0.2squeeze1? with versions that look like this ’2:1.0~rc3++final.dfsg1-1? to determine which is newer? Luckily this is actually well documented, makes perfect sense when you stop to think about it, and (through the power of open source) easy to accomplish programatically.

De-duplication! That is the keyword and if your backup storage hardware does not support it natively you still need it. That is the focus of this article. So I wrote earlier about rsync backups and the strategies used in the backintime software. Having gotten a bit of time to work with it I hope to outline a method to do “snapshot” style backups using rsync. This gives us the ability to quickly and easily “roll-back” to a previous date and time. Additionally the management of our backups gets vastly simplified and the de-duplication that this brings saves a ton of space.

Following on with this project I have finally put together a script to custom build a Debian installation ISO. Although this script does not provide a solution to all the design goals I had in mind it does provide a simple method and framework to work towards my ultimate goals.