1. Stop MySQL

   sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop

2. Start MySQL with the following command

   sudo mysqld --skip-grant-tables &

3. Login to MySQL as root with out a password

   mysql -u root mysql

4. Replace PASSWORD with the new password of your choice.

   UPDATE user SET Password=PASSWORD('PASSWORD') WHERE User='root'; FLUSH PRIVILEGES; exit;

Solution: Doing some reading you can actually make all of the XBMC instances store data to a central server running MySQL.  Why would you want to do that? Well there are a few reasons, besides having everything in sync across the board it also gives you the ability to resume playback from where you left off in another room.

Since I already had a server on my LAN which is providing the media via Samba and already has MySQL running for a development environment it was a pretty simple setup.  I followed the tutorial here, which pretty much calls for making a MySQL user for XBMC and then I took it a step further and have all of the actor/movie thumbnails being stored on a network share too.  I have included my advancedsettings.xml file which you need to create and add to each XBMC instance.

<advancedsettings>
    <videodatabase>
        <type>mysql</type>
        <host>10.0.1.100</host>
        <port>3306</port>
        <user>xbmc</user>
        <pass>xbmc</pass>
        <name>xbmc_video</name>
    </videodatabase> 

    <musicdatabase>
        <type>mysql</type>
        <host>10.0.1.100</host>
        <port>3306</port>
        <user>xbmc</user>
        <pass>xbmc</pass>
        <name>xbmc_music</name>
    </musicdatabase>

	<pathsubstitution>
  		<substitute>
			<from>special://masterprofile/Thumbnails/</from>
			<to>smb://10.0.1.100/XBMC/Thumbnails/</to>
		</substitute>
	</pathsubstitution>
</advancedsettings>

I decided to rebuild my whole library, which takes a little but but all said and done its a pretty nice setup and being able to resume playback from room to room is nice too.  If you have a dedicated machine, and multiple XBMC instances I would recommend this type of setup.

Below I am going to cover a few things that I have researched(Don’t expect any hard numbers you will simply have to take my word on this of search Google for articles showing full comparisons/numbers), tested and implemented for Fauxzen.com.

Server Setup:  After shopping around I found that RackSpace seemed to offer the cheapest cloud server weighing in at about $11 a month. Originally I chose to go with CentOS, but after create an exact Ubuntu Server install and comparing the CPU/Memory usage I found that Ubuntu Server had far less overhead than CentOS. Keeping with the memory/cpu usage as well as reading many articles about performance from a web server I chose to go with NGinx instead of Apache.  While the initial install and setup was a little more complex than Apache once up and running I haven’t had to look back.  I should clear up that I have been using Apache for the past 10yrs to NGinx seemed a little foreign to me until I did some reading.  Of course the server has MySQL and the only thing I have really customized with it at this point was to enable query-cache. Of course there is a ton more that can be done with MySQL… but thats for another article.  Ohh and for php I am using php-fpm with APC enabled.

DNS: I first debated about using Route53 for my DNS since its cloud based.  After doing some research there were a few things that made me decide to look elsewhere.  First off  keeping with the cheap budget it does cost $1 and if you are looking to go as cheap as possible … well thats another $1 per month for each domain.  Second thing which was not really a deal breaker, but could be for some is that there is no interface for it.  Everything you wish to manage with your DNS with Route53 has to be done via their API or you can use some of the 3rd party services people have created to manage your DNS, just seemed like a bit of a small hassle.
The other option that I found, which I am a big fan of is CloudFlare.  CloudFlare is a cloud based DNS host and then some… ohh and Free.  They help prevent spammers/bots from accessing your site, which in the end saves you X page views over the course of the month as well as X bandwidth which is a huge plus.  They also cache parts of your site to make so that it is always online, this feature is awesome I have actually tested by turning my server off and trying to load my site and it loads a static version.  They also give you a nice run down of stats that are updated every 24hrs, the pro version updates stats every 15mins.

Statistics: Some people will argue thatusing Google Analytics is not as accurate as using something like AWstats, Webalizer or even writing your own which reads the server log files in realtime. This option works good enough for me since I am not running in click tracking ads etc etc.

Email: Google Apps for your domain is an awesome free product and allows you NOT to have a mail server running on you setup.  Besides the performance gain from NOT running this on your server, you also get the benefit of letting Google handle your Spam… which if you have ever done admin work mail can be a total pain.

CDN:  While this kind of goes away from the whole aiming to be as cheap as possible, its a nice feature to have.  The cost involved with using a CDN can vary on who you go with, and the traffic that your site is generating. I chose to go with Amazon S3/CloudFront, the cost is pretty much next to nothing once you get all setup and there seems to be a bit of a noticable

Frontend/Backend:  WordPress is used through the site, with minimal plugins as well as a child theme running on Genesis.  I tested out a few theme frameworks and found that Genesis gives you more bang for your buck as well as seems to be fast when compared to other frameworks on the market, and has a great customer base to help support it…. and yeah I know this is not Free either.  I am using a total of 13 plugins, I could honestly probably disable a few others as I don’t use them often. Speaking of plugins since I didn’t configure a local mail server of any sorts on this install I had to install WP-Mail-SMTP plugin which allowed me to use a POP mail account for WordPress mailing. I am also using Disqus for my commenting, this works great with CloudFlare when your server is not reachable.

So far the site/setup seem great especially when you look at the total price being under $15 a month for a cloud based setup which doesn’t place all your eggs in one basket and gives you an almost true 100% uptime for all of your services.

You can find the PPA information needed to install AirVideo here. Using the PPA installing was a breeze and I now have AirVideo setup and streaming to my iPad, iPhone and soon to Kats iTouch.

You can find the startup script here and there is also some other great information covered little more in depth here.

wget http://pecl.php.net/get/APC-3.1.6.tgz
tar -xzf APC-3.1.6.tgz
cd APC-3.1.6
which php
phpize

If you do not have pcre installed the make install will fail.  So make sure to run the following yum command to install it with the development packages for safe measure.

yum install pcre.i386 pcre-devel.i386

This is the configure line that I used, your php-config location MIGHT be different so make sure to double check that

./configure –enable-apc –enable-apc-mmap –with-apxs –with-php-config=/usr/bin/php-config
make
make install

Lastly find the correct php.ini that your system is using and then edit that ini and add the following config settings near the end of your php.ini.

php -i | grep php.ini
vi /usr/local/lib/php.ini

Config to add before the “zend” section.

extension=”apc.so”
apc.enabled=”1″
apc.shm_segments=”5″
apc.shm_size=”16″
apc.ttl=”7200″
apc.rfc1867=”on”
apc.mmap_file_mask=”/tmp/apc.XXXXXX”
apc.user_ttl=”7200″
apc.num_files_hint=”2048″
apc.enable_cli=”1″
apc.max_file_size=”10M”

I also ran into an issue that when the apc.so was compiled it was not placed in the proper extension_dir, I had to manually copy it to the correct folder.  Once you have done all that stop and then start Apache and walla you should be all set.  check your php.ini to make sure APC shows up.

#!/bin/bash
# Version 020411
# Variables
CURL="/usr/bin/curl"
NAME="NOTIFO_USERNAME"
APISECRET="NOTIFO_API_SECRET"
URL="https://api.notifo.com/v1/send_notification"
TITLE="Finished"
LABEL="Transmission"
# Construct and Send
messageMSG="title=$TITLE&label=$LABEL&msg=+$TR_TORRENT_NAME"$CURL -k -u $NAME:$APISECRET -d $MSG $URL > /dev/null

I have pushed this to GitHub and that is where any updates will be made when/if there are any that are made in the near future

1. Download the wget source
2. tar -xvzf wget-latest.tar.gz
3. cd wget-latest
4. ./configure
5. make
6. sudo make install
7. wget should now be in /usr/local/bin

[poll id="2"]

Drive One

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads:   422 MB in  2.00 seconds = 210.72 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:  220 MB in  3.03 seconds =  72.72 MB/sec

Drive Two

/dev/sdb:
Timing cached reads:   412 MB in  2.00 seconds = 205.55 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:  224 MB in  3.01 seconds =  74.37 MB/sec

Drive Three

/dev/sdc:
Timing cached reads:   420 MB in  2.00 seconds = 209.78 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:  240 MB in  3.01 seconds =  79.66 MB/sec

Drive Four

/dev/sdd:
Timing cached reads:   442 MB in  2.00 seconds = 220.48 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:   76 MB in  3.06 seconds =  24.81 MB/sec

Opened up terminal and added the following list to my /etc/hosts file.

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt

After this you need to flush the DNS cache

sudo dscacheutil -flushcache

All set.  You can of course use this on Windows/Linux and other versions of OS X.  For older versions of OS X the dscacheutil command is not the same.

1.25ghz AMD XP
512 PC2700
784gb of Random SATA Drives.

As you can see its not anything that special, but houses a decent amount of drive space and handles everything just fine for my needs. That being said I wanted to squeeze a as much juice out of it as possible. I figured the best way to do this would be to remove any unused services that start, really no need in running cups when there is no printer connected to it. I also removed bluetooth, pcmcia, and a bunch of laptop services.
I really need to find my extra ram that I have laying around and spruce it up to 1gb of ram, as well as purchase another SATA card so I can add a few more drives that I have laying around. Adding the SATA card should boost me up to around 1tb of storage. More than enough space to start downloading the internets.

You can get more information on it over at their Official Site.

“A fatal error has occurred Could not connect to database for SQL SessionHandler. Details have been logged for the administrator.”

Here is what will fix the issue.

cd /tmp
ls |grep mysql

If you see nothing after that then type the following

ln -s /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock

You will probably want to run /scripts/upcp after this to make sure that it updates everything else.

sudo apt-get install kdebase-kio-plugins

If it still doesn’t work with this … umm well I dont have a fix for that.

if [[ $TERM != 'screen' ]] ; then
if [[ `screen -list | grep -v "No" | awk ' { print }' | wc -l` == 0 ]] ; then
screen
else
screen -dr
fi
fi