Author: justdave

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Serving AppleShare from RHEL5 with Netatalk 2.0.3

So I was recently trying to set up a fileshare in one of our offices and trying to get it visible to the filesharing stuff in Mac OS X, since several people in the office have Mac laptops.  The original thought (since it’s supposedly better-supported on Linux) was to set up Samba, but our authentication in the office is all LDAP based, and I gave up trying to get Samba to work with our LDAP server after a few days.  Samba seems to want complete control over your LDAP server, and won’t deal with a read-only one that just happens to have all the Samba auth info in it already.  This seems wrong, and I’m sure there’s a way to do it, but I sure couldn’t find any documentation to tell me how.

So then I thought maybe I’d try Netatalk.  None of the usual packaging repos seemed to carry a netatalk RPM, but I did find one for Netatalk 2.0.3 in Fedora 8.  I took the SRPM from that and rebuilt it on my RHEL5 server.  Then I went about trying to configure it.  Turns out the documentation for Netatalk SUCKS ROCKS.  Everything I could find was written in 1998 and last touched in 2002 or so, and there’s been several new versions of Netatalk since then.  When all was said and done, the configuration part turned out to be really easy, you just couldn’t figure it out from the docs.

I did find a tutorial for setting up Netatalk for TimeMachine on Ubuntu, which turned out to be incredibly helpful.  So my main reason for blogging about this is to help that tutorial get some more pagerank, since it wasn’t nearly high enough in the search results on Google. 🙂

So without further ado, here’s the Netatalk How-to for Ubuntu that I found.

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What American accent do I use?

What American accent do you have?

Your Result: The Inland North

You may think you speak “Standard English straight out of the dictionary” but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like “Are you from Wisconsin?” or “Are you from Chicago?” Chances are you call carbonated drinks “pop.”
The Midland
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The South
The West
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have?
Quiz Created on GoToQuiz
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Bugzilla news feed now available

So, thanks to Fowl’s comment in my previous entry, I tried out setting up the Google news/blogsearch keyword feeds for Bugzilla in Google Reader, and then individually sharing each of the entries that were actually about Bugzilla, and then using the shared items feed from Google Reader as the newsfeed.  It turns out to work quite well.

The built-in RSS widget that ships with WordPress completely chokes on Google Reader’s shared items feed though, and I ended up installing the SimplePie plugin for WordPress to handle the feed parsing (thanks to srikat on #wordpress for suggesting that).  SimplePie turns out to have a much more flexible template system, and it looks pretty good.  If you’re viewing this on my website, the results are over there on the right.

The feed icon in the title is linked to the source feed, so you can use that as a subscription URL if you want to subscribe to my sanitized Bugzilla news feed.  Now you can keep up on all the Bugzilla mentions in the news and blogosphere without having to wade through all the exterminator jokes, monster VW Beetles, and mentions of bug reports in every project’s bugzilla site.

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Bugzilla in the news

Dear LazyWeb…   🙂

I like to know how Bugzilla’s being talked about out in the world, so I subscribe to Google’s handy news and blog alert services where you can put in keywords and they’ll send you an email every time a new blog or news article shows up containing that/those keywords.  This works really well, except that you also get a bunch of crap with it.  People who post to message boards with “Bugzilla” as a username.  Message posts on insect websites about this huge bug someone found.  Articles about modified VW Beetles that have been turned into monster trucks.  Every mention in anyone’s blog about bug reports for any number of major projects that use Bugzilla for their bug trackers.  Etc Etc Etc.

I’ve long desired to create an RSS feed where I could collect that and republish all those links without all the cruft in it, i.e. just the stuff that was actually about Bugzilla as a product/project.  I really like Jon Gruber’s feed, where he puts the link and the title and a small blurb of his own comments about it.  Note that the linked title goes to the article being talked about, not an entry on his blog, which is the key feature I’m looking for (and what makes it different than just creating a category for it in the blog).  Something just like that would be awesome if there were a plugin for WordPress that would do it.  I’ve searched on and off and never found anything that would do this.  If anyone knows of one, please let me know in the comments here.

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Finally, DRM-free anime from Toei

If you’ve read any of my previous blog posts about Anime stuff, you’ll probably know that I’m a big fan of the Pretty Cure series.

Stuff like this makes my day.

Toei publishing Anime (even Pretty Cure) in North America with English subtitles is nothing new.  They’ve had it up on Direct2Drive for a while now.  What’s new is the episodes that will be posted on Crunchyroll will be available DRM-free!  Starting this Wednesday, you can either watch a stream online for free (with commercials) or purchase the uninterrupted episodes to download for US$1.99 each, in XVid, iPod, or PSP formats, with NO DRM.

I am so going to buy every episode they post.  Not only just to express my appreciation for creating this awesome series (now that they’re giving me a way to do so) but also to show my support for finally distributing it in a way that doesn’t require me to sell my soul to Microsoft to be able to watch it.

Thank you Toei for finally understanding the Internet!