Author: Lisa

Building Gerbera on Fedora

There is a great deal of documentation available for building Gerbera from source on a variety of Linux flavors. Unfortunately, Fedora isn’t one of those (and the package names don’t exactly match up to let you replace “apt-get” with “yum” and be done). So I am quickly documenting the process we followed to build Gerbera from source.

The Fedora build of Gerbera has the binaries in /usr/bin and the manual build places the gerbera binary in /usr/local/bin — the build updates the unit file to reflect this change, but this means you want to back up any customizations you’ve made to the unit file before running “make install”.

You need the build system — cmake, g++, etc and the devel packages from the following table as required by your build options

Additional packages that we needed to install: automake, autoconf, libtool

Library Fedora Package Required? Note Compile-time option Default
libpupnp libupnp-devel XOR libnpupnp pupnp
libnpupnp Build from source (if needed) XOR libupnp I was only able to locate this as a source, not available from Fedora repos WITH_NPUPNP Disabled
libuuid libuuid-devel Required Not required on *BSD
pugixml pugixml-devel Required XML file and data support
libiconv glibc-headers Required Charset conversion
sqlite3 sqlite-devel Required Database storage
zlib zlib-devel Required Data compression
fmtlib fmt-devel Required Fast string formatting
spdlog spdlog-devel Required Runtime logging
duktape duktape-devel Optional Scripting Support WITH_JS Enabled
mysql mariadb-devel Optional Alternate database storage WITH_MYSQL Disabled
curl libcurl-devel Optional Enables web services WITH_CURL Enabled
taglib taglib-devel Optional Audio tag support WITH_TAGLIB Enabled
libmagic file-devel Optional File type detection WITH_MAGIC Enabled
libmatroska libmatroska-devel Optional MKV metadata required for MKV WITH_MATROSKA Enabled
libebml libebml-devel Optional MKV metadata required for MKV WITH_MATROSKA Enabled
ffmpeg/libav ffmpeg-free-devel Optional File metadata WITH_AVCODEC Disabled
libexif libexif-devel Optional JPEG Exif metadata WITH_EXIF Enabled
libexiv2 exiv2-devel Optional Exif, IPTC, XMP metadata WITH_EXIV2 Disabled
lastfmlib liblastfm-devel Optional Enables scrobbling WITH_LASTFM Disabled
ffmpegthumbnailer ffmpegthumbnailer-devel Optional Generate video thumbnails WITH_FFMPEGTHUMBNAILER Disabled
inotify glibc-headers Optional Efficient file monitoring WITH_INOTIFY
libavformat libavformat-free-devel Required for 2.0
libavutil libavutil-free-devel Required for 2.0
libavcodec libavcodec-free-devel Required for 2.0

Then follow the generalized instructions — cd into the folder where you want to run the build and run (customizing the cmake line as you wish):

git clone https://github.com/gerbera/gerbera.git
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../gerbera -DWITH_MAGIC=1 -DWITH_MYSQL=1 -DWITH_CURL=1 -DWITH_INOTIFY=1 -DWITH_JS=1 -DWITH_TAGLIB=1 -DWITH_AVCODEC=1 -DWITH_FFMPEGTHUMBNAILER=0 -DWITH_EXIF=1 -DWITH_EXIV2=1 -DWITH_SYSTEMD=1 -DWITH_LASTFM=0 -DWITH_DEBUG=1
make -j4
sudo make install

As with the Gerbera binary, the Fedora build places the web content in /usr/share/gerbera and the manual build places the web content into /usr/local/share/gerbera — yes, you can change the paths in the build, and I’m sure you can clue Gerbera into the new web file location. I opted for the quick/easy/lazy solution of running

mv /usr/share/gerbera /usr/share/gerbera/old
ln -s /usr/local/share/gerbera /usr/share/

To symlink the location my config thinks the web components should be located to the new files.

On the first start of Gerbera, SQL scripts may be run to update the database — don’t stop or kill the service during this process there’s no checkpoint restart of the upgrade process. We backed up /etc/gerbera/gerbera.db prior to starting our Gerbera installation. We’ve also wiped the database files to start from scratch and test changes that impacted how items are ingested into the database.

Fin.

Crocus Time

Crocus flowers are starting to sprout up around the yard — years ago, Anya and I planted crocus bulbs randomly throughout the front yard. Some have split into three or four plants already, and some are still single little flowers. We’ve even got some sprouting up elsewhere — maybe they’re spreading seeds too?

Reverse Osmosis Maple Sap Stats

We collected nine gallons of sap with SG of 1.009 = 2.3 Brix

We ran all of the sap through the reverse osmosis system at 60psi and had sap with SG 1.011 = 2.8 Brix

We ran the concentrated sap through the reverse osmosis system a second time, this time at 80psi and had sap with SG 1.022 = 5.6 Brix.

The “pure water” output SG was about 1.003 — we re-ran this through the RO as well.

At the end of the day, we have about 4 gallons of sap at 5.6% sugar, another gallon from the “pure water” run that’s a lower SG, and four gallons of water that’s removed.

Notes for the future:

  • We want to see what a single pass at higher pressure does — is it multiple passes that farther concentrated the sap or the higher pressure?
  • We took SG readings and converted to brix using an online converter. Next time, we should just take the readings in Brix 🙂
  • We might need a different refractometer to get accurate readings near 1 … not sure how accurate our tool is at the low end of the range.

Apache HTTPD Log File Analysis — Hits by IP Address

When we are decommissioning a website (or web server), I always watch the log files to ensure there aren’t a lot of people still accessing it. Sometimes there are and it’s worth tracking them down individually to clue them into the site’s eminent demise. Usually there aren’t, and it’s just a confirmation that our decommissioning efforts won’t be impactful.

This python script looks for IP addresses in the log files and outputs each IP & it’s access count per log file. Not great if you’ll see a bunch of IP addresses in the recorded URI string, but it’s good enough for 99% of our log data. 

import os
import re
from collections import Counter

def parseApacheHTTPDLog(strLogFile):
    regexIPAddress = r'\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}'

    with open(strLogFile) as f:
        objLog = f.read()
        listIPAddresses = re.findall(regexIPAddress,objLog)
        counterAccessByIP = Counter(listIPAddresses)
        for strIP, iAccessCount in counterAccessByIP.items():
            print(f"{strLogFile}\t{str(strIP)}\t{str(iAccessCount)}")

if __name__ == '__main__':
    strLogDirectory = '/var/log/httpd/'
    for strFileName in os.listdir(strLogDirectory):
        if strFileName.__contains__("access_log"):
        #if strFileName.__contains__("hostname.example.com") and strFileName.__contains__("access_log"):
            parseApacheHTTPDLog(f"{strLogDirectory}{strFileName}")

Gerbera – Searching for Playlists

Summary: Playlist items are not returned from searches initiated on my uPNP client. The playlist is visible when browsing the Gerbera web UI under Playlists->All Playlists->Playlist Name and Playlists->Directories->Playlists->Playlist Name

Action: In a uPNP client, search using the criteria upnp:class = "object.container.playlistContainer" and dc:title = "Playlist Name",

Expected Results: Playlist matching search criteria is returned
Actual Results: No results are returned

Investigation:
From the Gerbera debug log, the search being executed is:

SELECT DISTINCT "c"."id", "c"."ref_id",
"c"."parent_id", "c"."object_type", "c"."upnp_class", "c"."dc_title",
"c"."mime_type" , "c"."flags", "c"."part_number", "c"."track_number",
"c"."location", "c"."last_modified", "c"."last_updated"
FROM "mt_cds_object" "c"
INNER JOIN "mt_metadata" "m" ON "c"."id" = "m"."item_id"
INNER JOIN "grb_cds_resource" "re" ON "c"."id" = "re"."item_id"
WHERE (LOWER("c"."upnp_class")=LOWER('object.container.playlistContainer'))
AND (LOWER("c"."dc_title")=LOWER('Playlist Name'))
ORDER BY "c"."dc_title" ASC;

The playlists do not have a row in the grb_cds_resource table, so the “INNER JOIN” means the query returns no records.

I am able to work around this issue by manually inserting playlist items into the grb_cds_resource table

INSERT INTO grb_cds_resource (item_id, res_id, handlerType) VALUES (1235555,0,0);

If I have some time, I want to test changing join2 to be a left outer join and see if that breaks anything.

Incubating Eggs

We’re about to start incubating eight duck eggs, so I wanted to record the temperature and humidity settings that I’ve found for the chicken, duck, and turkey eggs (well, future turkey eggs! We managed to get five male turkeys last year)

DUCKS
Start End Temp Humidity
1 25 99.5 55-58%
26 28 98.5 65%
28 hatching 97 70-80%

 

CHICKENS
Start End Temp Humidity
1 18 99.5-100.5 45-55%
19 Hatching 99.5 65-70%

 

TURKEYS
Start End Temp Humidity
1 24 99-100 50-60%
25 Hatching 99 65-70%

 

Reverse Proxying WebSockets through mod_proxy — HTTP Failback

I’ve been successfully reverse proxying MQTT over WebSockets via Apache HTTPD for quite some time now. The last few weeks, my phone isn’t able to connect. There’s no good rational presented (and manually clicking the “send data” button on my client successfully connects). It was time to upgrade the server anyway. Once I got the latest Linux distro on the server, I couldn’t connect at all to my MQTT server. The error log showed AH00898: Error reading from remote server returned by /mqtt

Evidently, httpd 2.4.47 added functionality to upgrade and tunnel in accordance with RFC 7230. And that doesn’t work at all in my scenario. Haven’t dug in to the why of it yet, but adding ProxyWebsocketFallbackToProxyHttp Off to the reverse proxy config allowed me to successfully communicate with the MQTT server through the reverse proxy.

(Not) Finding the Rygel Log File

We’ve spent a lot of time trying to get a log file from the rygel server … setting the log level in the config file didn’t seem to do anything useful. And I cannot even find a log file. The only output we’re able to find is formed by running the binary from the command line. Where is that log file?!? Hey — there isn’t one. All of this log level setting has to do with what’s written to STDOUT and STDERR. You can either modify the unit file to tee the output off to a file or run it from the command line

To get debugging output, use

G_MESSAGES_DEBUG=all rygel -g 5

To tee the output off to a file,
rygel -g *:5 2>&1 | tee -a /path/to/rygel.log