Back online! Thank you!

slaanesh 9 Comments

So, the website is back online, with some changes! There might be some issues still on some random link or database references to the old hosting directory structure but I will fix them as soon as I spot them.

Hope you will receive an email from this 🙂

This is what happened on GoDaddy:

The hosting was a “shared hosting”, basically a WordPress instance and a shared folder to host some content (the packages). This is how it was born and how it stayed for quite some years. At the time it was “ok” but it went downhill over the years.

Unfortunately for GoDaddy users, being a shared hosting, you have no choice but click on some web page to get what you need. One of these needs is an SSL certificate.

Yesterday my credit card was billed more than 200 USD for an SSL certificate signed by GoDaddy. Since they sell certificates and control the platform, switching to Let’s Encrypt is not possible.

After the billing, I could see the new certificate, but the certificate was not pushed to the instance. After almost a day on the chat with random people that just told me to wait an hour without getting anything fixed, I was put into phone contact with the “shared hosting” services.

There I was told that they were aware of the problem, and that all customers on the same shared hosting (“legacy”, according to what they said) were impacted since the 30th of April (seriously??) and there was no fix yet.

You are forced to pay a stupid SSL certificate a lot, you get an issue, the certificate can’t be used, they don’t fix it and good bye. Their service is beyond ridiculous.

After some more chatting with support it seems that at least I can be refunded for the last renewal of the certificate, let’s see if this happens.

After this bit of history, back on the new hosting.

Dedicated hosting

The site is no longer hosted on GoDaddy, so now this time I picked up a dedicated sysmte where I have direct access to it and I can do much more than before. This has led me to being able to use Let’s Encrypt certificates and certbot for automated renewals, thus saving money as well.

Bandwidth is much more stable, so download times should be greatly improved, especially for me for uploading the packages. I was able to sync the ~100 GB of packages in just a few minutes.

Mirroring repositories

Having access to the system means that now there is also an RSYNC daemon running serving all the content of the /repos folder. You can sync a specific repository with a command like this:

rsync -crlpvz --progress --delete-after rsync://negativo17.org:/repos/nvidia local/path

I’ve also added the instructions on the /repos folder directly.

A big thank you

Thank you very much with all my heart for the round of donations received! This means a lot to me.

All the donations received on Paypal and the cheaper / more versatile hosting should be enough to keep this site alive for another couple of years!

What’s next?

I’m planning to add some more content (ARM packages) and maybe migrate to something else that is not WordPress. I was thinking about a wiki, probably MediaWiki to make it similar to the Arch wiki, which I found very clear and easy to read, if you have any preferences please let me know.

Certificate expired…

slaanesh Leave a comment

After spending a day on the phone with GoDaddy, they informed me that they have an issue with the shared hosting and they can not update certificates on the various instances. According to them they had this issue on the past 3 weeks!

Of course nobody bothered to tell me and now the certificate is expired and I have no way of fixing it. I’m now in the process of moving everything to a separate hosting provider, starting from the repositories.

Of course now it will be a dedicated box, so the cost will not be the same. Any donation is of course accepted.

WordPress hack fixed

slaanesh 19 Comments

Some automated bot added an extra PHP file and a redirect, so when Googling for this website you would have been redirected to a page selling drugs.

I’m still trying to think why looking for some Fedora package would trigger a compulsive Viagra purchase, but hey, not everyone is the same.

Page & redirects have been removed, everything is back to normal. The specific repository pages were not visible (404) due to a faulty WordPress plugin update, which I removed. A crawl from Google has been triggered to remove the drugs page from Google search.

I will move the GPG public key of the repositories somewhere else, so people can still check if they have any doubt.

Now, If I could figure out how to remove that Jetpack error about AMP….

Also, looking for a cheap hosting solution (hey, this has been running for free since 2013), ideally where I also manage the website (no more WordPress..) and not the hosting company managing it for me, so if you have any suggestion let me know.

Sonarr, Lidarr, Radarr, Tautulli and Spotifyd packages for Fedora

slaanesh 9 Comments

I now have a new Plex server with lots of storage in a new small cube form factor, so it was now time to automate things a bit more and put the box to proper use.

Now in the multimedia repository you can now find Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr and Tautulli. This allows you to populate and maintain automatically your TV Shows, Movies and Music libraries without effort. Tautulli is not particularly useful if you are not hosting Plex for third parties, but gives you anyway statistics and information in a nice GUI for consumption and also notifies you any time one of the other tools adds something to a library.

Now I can see how many times my kid has watched the Super Wings! TV show (a ridiculous amount of times, if you are interested):

The packages are built from the upstream releases. Being Sonarr, Radarr and Lidarr built on different Mono versions and requiring a different minimum version, I assembled the packages from their Mono binaries tarballs. The plan is to make all of these available also for CentOS, so packaging needs to be relaxed. Tautulli as well bundles a lot of specific Python dependencies.

All of them come with proper System units and Firewalld rule definitions. So should be a breeze to enable them on the system.

$ rpm -ql sonarr radarr lidarr tautulli | grep -E 'systemd|firewalld'
/usr/lib/firewalld/services/sonarr.xml
/usr/lib/systemd/system/sonarr.service
/usr/lib/firewalld/services/radarr.xml
/usr/lib/systemd/system/radarr.service
/usr/lib/firewalld/services/lidarr.xml
/usr/lib/systemd/system/lidarr.service
/usr/lib/firewalld/services/tautulli.xml
/usr/lib/systemd/system/tautulli.service

Along with those, there is also Spotifyd, which allows you to turn any system into a Spotify client and/or Spotify Connect speaker. Without any configuration file it just works like a WiFi speaker support Spotify Connect, with a configuration file that contains a Spotify Premium username and password you have a fully connected client that you can control with the Spotify phone app like any other client.

If the Plex server is always on and close to a set of speakers, why not use it also as a WiFi speaker? Would also be nice to have Google Cast support; so my family could also use it for listenting to Plex hosted music, but unfortunately Google locked out all APIs for casting and no open source implementation exists (as far as I know).

For example:

This list comes from my phone, and I’m in the same network of the laptop. Everything else is signed in with my account or has been playing something when I was close by, so it’s still logged in.

Also Spotifyd will eventually be available for CentOS/RHEL even if it does not have any Rust packages. The version currently in the repositories is built to also support PulseAudio as a backend, as the plan is to run this on a fully fledged Fedora/CentOS/RHEL system. The binary release offered on the Github project is built with only Alsa as a backend as it requires a considerable less amount of libraries as dependencies; making it suitable for running on a barebone Raspberry Pi.

HandBrake with NVENC support

slaanesh 5 Comments

After switching from libav to FFmpeg, the HandBrake developers quickly added NVENC encoder support to HandBrake. You can now select both NVENC for H.264/H.265 encoders in the drop down menu or with the command line interface:

$ HandBrakeCLI --help | grep -A12 "Select video encoder"
   -e, --encoder   Select video encoder:
                               x264
                               x264_10bit
                               nvenc_h264
                               x265
                               x265_10bit
                               x265_12bit
                               nvenc_h265
                               mpeg4
                               mpeg2
                               VP8
                               VP9
                               theora

With most GPUs I tried, even setting the slowest and costly preset results in the video engine not being fully utilized. Encoding times are cut to ~25%.

Awesome! No more ffmpeg command line black magic. You can now comfortably create your preset in the HandBrake gui and then use HandBrakeCLI through SSH on your awesome Plex Media Server. The build is available for both CentOS/RHEL 7 and Fedora.

HandBrake FFmpeg, no more Nvidia 32 bit drivers

slaanesh 3 Comments

HandBrake has been updated again to track the master branch, as it now uses FFMpeg 4 and no longer libAV 12. This could probably lead to other improvements, like NVENC/CUDA support, more formats, etc.

Starting with the Nvidia drivers version 396.24 there will be no more 32 bit support, the driver will be 64 bit only. The 32 bit libraries are still included, so Steam and other applications will keep on being supported.

In a few days, the updated drivers will be pushed in the Fedora repositories, and at the same time I will also remove the i386 folder from the repositories. Some i386 packages will still be provided in the x86_64 folder, as it is now for Fedora 28 and CentOS/RHEL 7. The packages that will be kept, are mostly multilib library packages.

The same will happen to CentOS/EPEL 6 at the moment a new 64 bit only driver series will be nominated as “Long Lived”.

Also the Spotify repository has already no more i386 support, upstream stopped providing updated clients. Judging from the web server logs, there seems to be almost no one using an i686 Fedora in conjunction with the repositories hosted here.

Plex Media Player is back!

slaanesh 1 Comment

Just a small post to notify that Plex Media Player package is back. Now it does not require Conan or Python anymore for building, and you can just build it using standard tools, the dependency issues between the Plex binary packages have been resolved.

Also the TV interface is now improved, on par with what Plex currently offers for other platforms, and it’s much better in terms of performance. I also don’t get anymore the weird positioning of the PIN window.

You can still install plex-media-player-session and do the minimal configuration required (extracted from /usr/share/doc/plex-media-player/README.Fedora):

If you are planning to do an HTPC installation, and would like to have Plex Media Player starting instead of the login screen the moment you boot the
device, execute the following commands as root:

# dnf install plex-media-player-session
# systemctl set-default plex-media-player
# echo "allowed_users = anybody" >> /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config

The first command installs the required files (services, targets and PolicyKit overrides). The second command instructs the system to load by default the Plex Media Player target; that is X and the player just after. The third command allows the system to start the X server as the Plex Media Player user, otherwise only users logged in through a console or root can start it.

If you want to go back to your normal installation (let’s say Gnome), then revert back the changes:

# systemctl set-default graphical
# sed -i -e '/allowed_users = anybody/d' /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config
# rpm -e plex-media-player-session

The package is available for all supported Fedora releases.

Also, on a side note, HandBrake has been updated again to track the master branch, as it now uses FFMpeg 4 and no longer libAV 12. This could probably lead to other improvements, like NVENC/CUDA support, more formats, etc.

CUDA 9.0, cuDNN 7.0 and Wayland support in Fedora 27

slaanesh 39 Comments

The Nvidia repository now contains packages for Fedora 27. This is with the release candidate of CUDA 9, and it contains also cuDNN at version 7.0, which is the only version supported with CUDA 9 at the moment of writing.

The updated cuDNN 7.0 library has been added also to the other branches, this means it will be automatically upgraded from version 6.0 to 7.0. If you still need one of the previous versions, just remove it and install one of the compatibility packages:

# dnf list cuda-cudnn*
Installed Packages
cuda-cudnn.x86_64                   1:7-1.fc26         @fedora-nvidia
Available Packages
cuda-cudnn-devel.x86_64             1:7-1.fc26         fedora-nvidia 
cuda-cudnn5.1.x86_64                1:5.1-2.fc26       fedora-nvidia 
cuda-cudnn5.1-devel.x86_64          1:5.1-2.fc26       fedora-nvidia 
cuda-cudnn6.0.x86_64                1:6.0-1.fc26       fedora-nvidia 
cuda-cudnn6.0-devel.x86_64          1:6.0-1.fc26       fedora-nvidia

CUDA 9 supports GCC 6.x and CLANG 3.9, so when it will be officially released, it will cover Fedora 25 and RHEL/CentOS compilers. With Fedora 27, there will be the usual need for a GCC compatibility package (like the compat-gcc53 package currently in the repository) as GCC is at version 7 and CLANG is at version 4.0.

I will try to provide a compat-gcc64 for Fedora 27+ at the time of the official CUDA 9 release.

Regarding the drivers, on Fedora 27 where Mutter 3.25+ is available, the modesetting part of the Nvidia drivers has been enabled by default, this means that at the login you can just select “GNOME” to run Gnome on Wayland. Please note that X 3D programs running on XWayland might not work properly.

CentOS 7.4 package rebases

slaanesh 5 Comments

As many have requested, I’ve enabled the updates for CentOS 7.4. As of this very moment, you need to enable the Continuous Release repository, which will get emptied when the final CentOS 7.4 images will be released. This means all the temporary packages I’ve put in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 repository are now mainline.

If you are on CentOS 7.3 please proceed as follows:

# yum clean all
# yum-config-manager --enable cr
# yum update

You can then disable the cr repository (if you want) once CentOS 7.4 is out.

If you are on RHEL 7.4, you need to remove the temporary repository:

# yum clean all
# rm -f /etc/yum.repos.d/rhel74-temp.repo
# yum update

All Gstreamer packages are now at 1.10 as well as some other updates that have been already pushed into the Fedora repositories, like x265, HandBrake, etc..

RHEL 7.4 multimedia packages and Skype repository removal

slaanesh 4 Comments

The upgrade path from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3 to 7.4 is a bit of a pain if you have the multimedia repository configured. This is because I’m rebuilding a few components for an upgraded libwebp package and because a lot of stuff has been rebased to versions that are in Fedora. Judging by the logs, I see that most of the downloads come from CentOS systems, so I just decided to hold on some updates that are required for the various package rebases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4. So until also CentOS releases version 7.4, I can’t make everyone happy and something (like Gstreamer plugin updates) will be stuck with 7.3 versions. Hopefully the new CentOS release will come quickly enough.

Also, I decided to stop rebuilding the base packages to use a newer libwebp version. This really had very few benefits and just a lot of pain due to the huge amount of packages involved in both x86_64 and i686 variants. The amount of packages affected by this weigh at around 3 gb.

In RHEL 7.4 there are additional WebKit variants that also would require a rebuild. So, as of today, to update the packages from the EPEL 7 multimedia repository you should run this command:

rpm -e --nodeps GraphicsMagick && yum distro-sync && yum -y install GraphicsMagick

Hopefully you would get an output similar to this:

Dependencies Resolved

==============================================================================================
 Package                         Arch        Version                  Repository         Size
==============================================================================================
Updating:
 compat-ffmpeg-libs              x86_64      1:2.8.12-2.el7           epel-multimedia   5.6 M
 ffmpeg                          x86_64      1:3.3.3-2.el7            epel-multimedia   1.5 M
 ffmpeg-libs                     i686        1:3.3.3-2.el7            epel-multimedia   6.1 M
 ffmpeg-libs                     x86_64      1:3.3.3-2.el7            epel-multimedia   6.3 M
 gstreamer1-plugins-bad          x86_64      1:1.4.5-5.el7            epel-multimedia   1.8 M
 libavdevice                     x86_64      1:3.3.3-2.el7            epel-multimedia    63 k
Downgrading:
 leptonica                       i686        1.72-2.el7               epel-multimedia   881 k
 leptonica                       x86_64      1.72-2.el7               epel              928 k
 libwebp                         i686        0.3.0-3.el7              base              169 k
 libwebp                         x86_64      0.3.0-3.el7              base              170 k
 lz4                             x86_64      1.7.3-1.el7              epel               82 k
 python-pillow                   x86_64      2.0.0-19.gitd1c6db8.el7  base              438 k
 webkitgtk                       x86_64      2.4.9-1.el7              epel               12 M
 webkitgtk3                      x86_64      2.4.9-6.el7              base               11 M
Installing for dependencies:
 libwebp0.6                      i686        0.6.0-1.el7              epel-multimedia   255 k
 libwebp0.6                      x86_64      0.6.0-1.el7              epel-multimedia   250 k

Transaction Summary
==============================================================================================
Install               ( 2 Dependent packages)
Upgrade    6 Packages
Downgrade  8 Packages

Total download size: 47 M
Is this ok [y/d/N]:

Basically libwebp should come again from the main CentOS/RHEL channels and the libwebp0.6 package should come from the multimedia repository. All the packages which were rebuilt for the previous libwebp 0.5 update should become synced again to their proper versions.

If you don’t get this output, but still get some dependency errors you have to do some debugging. For example, ffmpeg-libs.i686 requires libssh.i686, but the version of libssh in CentOS extras is different from the one in EPEL (it really depends on what kind of packages you have installed and with which repositories enabled) so I’m providing here the same version that is in CentOS extras but in both variants.

Update 16th August 2017

If you get many qt5 errors during the transactions, keep in mind that RHEL 7.4 has been rebased massively, and everyone else (including EPEL) is catching up. As of today, if you have the following errors (trimmed down) in a Yum transaction:

Error: Package: gvfs-1.30.4-3.el7.x86_64 (rhel-x86_64-server-7)
Error: Package: qt5-qtwebkit-5.6.1-3.b889f46git.el7.x86_64 (epel)
Error: Package: qt5-qtquickcontrols2-5.6.1-2.el7.x86_64 (@epel)
Error: Package: qt5-qtquickcontrols2-5.6.1-2.el7.x86_64 (@epel)
Error: Package: GraphicsMagick-1.3.26-3.el7.x86_64 (@epel-multimedia)
Error: Package: kf5-kdeclarative-5.36.0-1.el7.x86_64 (epel)
Error: Package: qt5-qtquickcontrols2-5.6.1-2.el7.x86_64 (@epel)
Error: Package: qt5-qtwebkit-5.6.1-3.b889f46git.el7.x86_64 (epel)
Transaction check error:
  file /usr/lib64/gstreamer-1.0/libgstopus.so from install of gstreamer1-plugins-bad-1:1.4.5-5.el7.x86_64 conflicts with file from package gstreamer1-plugins-base-1.10.4-1.el7.x86_64

You can do the following. For this:

Error: Package: GraphicsMagick-1.3.26-3.el7.x86_64 (@epel-multimedia)

Do:

rpm -e --nodeps GraphicsMagick && yum -y install GraphicsMagick

All of the QT7KDE 5 stuff:

Error: Package: qt5-qtwebkit-5.6.1-3.b889f46git.el7.x86_64 (epel)
Error: Package: qt5-qtquickcontrols2-5.6.1-2.el7.x86_64 (@epel)
Error: Package: qt5-qtquickcontrols2-5.6.1-2.el7.x86_64 (@epel)
Error: Package: kf5-kdeclarative-5.36.0-1.el7.x86_64 (epel)

Are in EPEL testing updates, so:

yum --enablerepo=epel-testing update

These:

Error: Package: gvfs-1.30.4-3.el7.x86_64 (rhel-x86_64-server-7)Transaction check error:
  file /usr/lib64/gstreamer-1.0/libgstopus.so from install of gstreamer1-plugins-bad-1:1.4.5-5.el7.x86_64 conflicts with file from package gstreamer1-plugins-base-1.10.4-1.el7.x86_64

are some of the packages that are rebased in RHEL 7.4. I’ve created a temporary repository for those, it will disappear once CentOS 7.4 is released as the packages will be integrated in the main multimedia repository. You can install it through:

yum-config-manager \
  --add-repo=https://negativo17.org/repos/rhel74-temp/rhel74-temp.repo

With the above repository it is possible to install all the other multimedia packages.

Skype repository removal

Skype 4.3 is 32 bit only, is now obsolete and has been superseded by a package that actually lists proper dependencies. It is also one of the packages that required one of the above WebKit rebuilds in i686 form for RHEL/CentOS 7 x86_64.

If you have it installed, just remove it with:

yum remove webkitgtk.i686

The repository has been deleted; to install the new Skype provided version, just head to the following official link.