Ubuntu 7.10 on Mac OS Lepord with Parallels

This is how I got Ubuntu 7.10 installed on my MacBook Pro running Parallels build 5582.

Start with the Ubuntu Alternate disc. NOT the Ubuntu Desktop or Server Disc!!

Setup a new virtual machine and make sure you pick 512 M for the amount of RAM. (There seems to be an issue when allocating larger amounts of memory, which will cause the VM will freeze on boot.)

Boot of the disc, and run through the installer. It will be the console based installer, not the fancy GUI installer, but it works just the same.

Towards the end of the installation you will be prompted to setup your xserver. Simply enter in the screen resolutions that you would like to have available.

I went into the System Preferences -> Display panel and just marked all of the resolutions that were listed there.

After the installer finishes, reboot, and you should be all set.

If you want, you can install the Parallels Tools. They will make the integration with the Mac OS a little nicer. I ran the provided installer, rebooted again, and everything worked fine.

Good Luck!

Asterisk "too may open files"

Another quick Asterisk pointer.

If you are running a large amount of traffic on your Asterisk box you are likely to come across this message.

"unable to create from pipe: too many open files"

What this means is that Asterisk has exceeded the per-process limit on open files.

You can get the per-process limit for you system by opening a shell and typing 'ulimit -n'. My system, Ubuntu 7.04 is set at 1024.

I find that the easiest way to set this is by opening the /usr/sbin/safe_asterisk script and finding the existing line 'ulimit -c unlimited', and adding a line below that of 'ulimit -n 65536'.

The safe_asterisk script is a script commonly used to launch Asterisk because it will also monitor and restart Asterisk if it crashes. So when you use it to launch Asterisk, the line we added will be executed and will increase the limit for Asterisk.

Please note that you should only need to do this on Asterisk 1.2 systems. On Asterisk 1.4, the safe_asterisk script has been modified to do this out of the box.

Dan

Python File Backup Script

I wrote this backup script in Python to do backups on some of the servers I maintain.

Features
- simple & quick to configure & install
- full & incremental backups
- configurable backup directories
- configurable full backup dates
- backups in tar format, no special software for restores
- email notification of problems
- backup files to any valid path (nfs, smb, usb drive, etc...)

Requirements
- python
- system supporting the tar command (linux, unix, cygwin, etc...)

For installation instructions or more information about the scripts check out the included README file. Scripts are released under the LGPL.

You can download them from here.

Dan

** UPDATE **

I've updated the link to a newer version (1.0.1). The original version was written to write backups to an external drive, so it assumed that the drive needed to be mounted first. If the drive was already mounted it would remount it. So I've added an option where you can now specify if the script should mount the drive first.

Asterisk Ubuntu Feisty Fix

Starting Asterisk PBX: /usr/sbin/safe_asterisk: 108: Syntax error: Bad fd number

I ran into this issue while running Asterisk 1.2.22 on Ubuntu Feisty 7.04. It appears that the 'safe_asterisk' start-up script has an issue with it. In Ubuntu Feisty, the default shell (/bin/sh) is no longer bash, it is dash. The 'safe_asterisk' script needs to reference bash. So changing the first line from '#!/bin/sh' to '#!/bin/bash' fixes the issue.

Hope this helps someone.