StellarTech Blog

After upgrading a kernel on an older CentOS 3 box for a customer the server would no longer boot up. Instead I would get the following at the boot screen:

/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit: line ###: /dev/null: Read-only file system

The box would then drop into single user maintenance mode. When I tried to fsck the file system it would complain about about /dev/null being read only again. The fix turned out to be fairly simple.

The fix:
# mount -rw -o remount /
# rm -f /dev/null
# mknod /dev/null c 1 3
# chmod 666 /dev/null[/code]

After posting about my initial script for controlling the Roku Digital Video Player, ProdigiousJuggalo and eri3k from the roku forums took up the torch and added some really nice functions and UI enhancements. Thanks guys!

The screen shot to the left is the new interface. The latest version of the script can be downloaded by  clicking  here.

Some of the changes include function for rebooting beta firmwares, changing bit rate, saving IP information, and a much better UI.

It’s possible I might put something together to control the roku from the iPhone, eg. roku soundbridge and boxee,  if someone doesn’t beat me to it in the next week or two.

Hooray for necessity. My Roku digital video player remote controller stopped working yesterday. While it’s pretty cheap to replace I needed to find something I could use in the interim. Since the device will let you telnet to port 8080 and feed in remote commands, my first attempt was to use setup a few bash aliases using netcat like so:

alias ru='echo "press up" | nc -n $rokuIP 8080'
alias rd='echo "press down" | nc -n $rokuIP 8080'
alias rl='echo "press left" | nc -n $rokuIP 8080'

You get the idea. However this got tedious fairly quick and the idea of explaining the use of netcat or telnet to my wife seems frightening.

Instead of living in fear I put together a script using Autoit. Now the Mrs . and I have a  UI that resembles the remote we’re waiting for.  It’s pretty basic and self explanatory. Just enter in the appropriate IP of the device and start using.

You can grab the script and compiled .exe by clicking here.

I’ve put together a quick video to show how to setup winscp so that you can log into a Linux server and change to the root user. This is the GUI equivelent of doing a ‘sudo -s’,  ‘sudo su -’, or ‘su -’ as a wheel user if you’ve setup your SSHD service to deny direct root log ins by setting ‘PermitRootLogin’ to ‘no’.  Every so often I will have a developer ask for escalated privileges through a GUI and this is a nice alternative in lieu of cheaply enabling root access.

While the WinSCP documentation does explains how to do this I’m hoping the video will help make setting this up a little bit easier.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gozMvgsomb0