Back home in the US

Yes. After 2 weeks of traveling in Europe I'm back home. Back in the US. Every time I get back here I feel more and more at home. I've finalized my extension of my contract through 08. Hopefully I'll stay here even longer.

Yes, I'm alive

So I've been kinda away from here, not that I know why but I haven't really had anything to talk about. So as usual I've been working my ass off. It's getting tiring but as usual I still enjoy it.
This weekend I went up to Boise with Jason to do some networking. Most things went well things are working and there isn't really any complaints...

HDTV for Linux

Yes!

I finally found it! A HDTV card that works with Linux, ONLY! :D
So since I haven't gotten any firm commitment on how long I'm going to stay in the US I'll just wait until I know. Hopefully I'll end up staying the whole 2008, and it that case I've decided to get some stuff, just to pass time.



                pcHDTV HD-5500                   Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 1080

Yes it's going to be pricy but hey. Who doesn't want to watch HDTV on a 100" screen or rock some Wii games for that part?

Making some music

So I don't know why but I ended up trying to write some music. Surely I haven't been able to finish any and I'm just doing it to pass time.
Personally I don't like to hear myself singing and I don't expect someone else to, so I've warned you!

Anyways, I've uploaded the stuff I've made so far to my server at home. You can access it at:
music.garnser.se

Dynamic updates of DHCP

So as I came to the office today I thought, wouldn't it be great if there was a tool that re-wrote the dhcpd config file based on a perl script?

Obviously I thought of doing this myself (as the programmer I am). But to make life a bit easier for myself I made a lookup at Google for dynamically updating ISC DHCP.
And woho! There's a pre-built API called OMAPI and someone built a tool on top of this called OMCMD.

After a couple of hours trying to get the stupid key to work (TSIG hmac-md5) I finally got it working.

For those of you who're used to update the DNS dynamically the syntax is about the same:

omcmd [-K keyfile | -k keyname key] [-s server] [command]


Adding to DHCP
omcmd -K keyfile -s 10.1.32.10 create host name=test ip-address=1.2.3.4 hardware-address=ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff hardware-type=1;

What OMAPI does is to write the new config to
/var/lib/dhcpd/dhcpd.leases, it looks a bit funky to me

hostname {
 dynamic;
 ip-address 1.2.3.4
 hardware-address ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff;
};


But it works.

The script that I'm using looks like this:
HOSTNAME=hostname.domain.com
IP=1.2.3.4
MAC=FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF

omcmd -k keyname md5hash create host ip-address=$IP name=$HOSTNAME hardware-type=1 hardware-address=$MAC


An issue that comes with using omcmd (I don't know if this is part of the IMAPI API) is that you cannot add DHCP entries pointing at hostnames rather than an IP-address.