Monthly Archives: April 2019

CLI

Split flac files with shnsplit

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I had a few single FLAC files with cue files I wanted to put into Plex but to my dismay it doesn’t read the CUE files at all. Thus I needed to split the one FLAC file into multiple pieces with shnsplit. Thanks to Stack Exchange for the help.

On my Debian system:

 sudo apt install cuetools shntool flac

With the necessary tools installed you simply have to run the shnsplit command:

 shnsplit -f FILENAME.cue -t "%a - %n %t - %p" FILENAME.flac

the -t parameters formats the filename as desired per the manpage


-t fmt
Name output files in user‐specified format based on CUE sheet fields. The following formatting strings are recognized: 

%p
Performer
%a
Album
%t
Track title
%n
Track number

OS

Create local CentOS 7 Repo

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I’ve recently needed to create a local mirror of Cent7 packages. I followed the guide posted on techmint but also made a few tweaks to get it to work to my liking.

Create local repo mirror

  • Install necessary packages
    • sudo yum -y install epel-release nginx createrepo yum-utils moreutils
  • Create directories that will host your repo
    • sudo mkdir -p /usr/share/nginx/html/repos/{base,centosplus,extras,updates,epel}
  • Use the reposync tool to synchronize to those local directories (repeat for each directory, changing repoid= value to match)
    • reposync -g -l -d -m --repoid=base --newest-only --download-metadata --download_path=/usr/share/nginx/html/repos/
  • Use the createrepo tool to create repodata
    • base & epel have a group file, other repos do not.
    • For base & epel:
      • createrepo -g comps.xml /usr/share/nginx/html/repos/<FOLDER>
    • For the rest:
      • createrepo /usr/share/nginx/html/repos/<FOLDER>

Configure daily synchronization via cron

Copy this script to /etc/cron.daily/ and give it execute rights

#!/bin/bash
##specify all local repositories in a single variable
LOCAL_REPOS="base extras updates epel centosplus"
##a loop to update repos one at a time
for REPO in ${LOCAL_REPOS}; do
reposync -g -l -d -m --repoid=$REPO --newest-only --download-metadata --download_path=/usr/share/nginx/html/repos/Cent7/
if [[ $REPO = 'base' || $REPO = 'epel' ]]; then
        createrepo -g comps.xml /usr/share/nginx/html/repos/Cent7/$REPO/
else
        createrepo /usr/share/nginx/html/repos/Cent7/$REPO/
fi
done
chmod 755 /etc/cron.daily/<script_name>

E-mails from cron became annoying. I wanted to only get e-mailed on error. The solution is to use chronic

Modify /etc/anacrontab to add “chronic” between nice and run-parts

1 5 cron.daily nice chronic run-parts /etc/cron.daily
7 25 cron.weekly nice chronic run-parts /etc/cron.weekly
@monthly 45 cron.monthly nice chronic run-parts /etc/cron.monthly

Success.

Update 4/25/19 I encountered an issue while trying to use repsync to mirror the remi repo.

warning: /usr/share/nginx/html/repos/Cent7/remi/remi/aspell-nl-0.50-1.el7.remi.x86_64.rpm: Header V4 DSA/SHA1 Signature, key ID 00f97f56: NOKEY

I found out from here that it means you need to manually import the package’s key into the RPMDB like so

sudo rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-remi

OS, Virtualization

Proxmox first VM boot delay workaround

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My home lab has an NFS server for storage and a proxmox hypervisor connecting to it. If the power ever goes out for more than my UPS can handle, startup is a bit of a mess. My ProxMox server boots up much faster than my NFS server, so the result is no VMs start automatically (due to storage being unavailable) and I have to manually go in and start everything.

I found this bug report from 2015 which frustratingly doesn’t appear to have any traction to it. Ideally I could just tell the first VM to wait 5 minutes before turning on, and then trigger all the other VMs to turn on once the first one is up, but the devs don’t seem to want to address that issue. So, I got creative.

My solution was to alter the grub menu timeout before booting ProxMox. Simple but effective.

Edit /etc/default/grub and modify GRUB_TIMEOUT

#modify GRUB_TIMEOUT to your liking
GRUB_TIMEOUT=300

Then simply run update-grub

update-grub

Now my proxmox server waits 5 minutes before even booting the OS, by which time the NAS should be up and running. No more manual turning on of VMs after a power outage.