Ajitabh Pandey's Soul & Syntax

Exploring systems, souls, and stories – one post at a time

Category: FLOSS

About Free/Libre/Open Source Software

  • Ansible Quirks – 3

    I was running some playbook today and realise that the command line arguments of ansible-playbook do not behaves expected.

    My playbook has the following defined –

    remote_user: root

    When I issued the following command, my expectation was that the remote user name would be considered as specified by the “-u” option

    $ ansible-playbook -u centos -i '192.168.1.192,' play.yml

    However, this does not happen and the playbook still tries to connect as the user defined in the yml file.

    So, how do we override what is in the yml file through command line. The only way seems to be possible is using the -e or --extra-vars option as follows –

    $ ansible-playbook -e "ansible_ssh_user=centos ansible_ssh_private_key_file=~/.ssh/db_hosts_id_rsa " -i '192.168.1.192,' play.yml

  • Ansible Quirks – 2

    Today I tried to upgrade my ansible to 2.2 as I wanted to use the remote_src=yes feature from the unarchive module. My operating system on this machine is Linux Mint 17.3.

    I did –

    $ pip install --upgrade --user ansible

    and lo… I got the following error –

    ImportError: No module named packaging.version

    I next tried upgrading the pip itself and that also resulted in the same error. A bit of search on the internet did not help much as different ways worked for different people. So I decided to remove python-pip package and all that was installed along with it, reinstall pip and then try upgrading ansible. In short, following sequence of commands worked for me –

    
    $ rm -rf ~/.cache/pip/*
    $ python -m pip install -U --user pip
    $ sudo apt-get purge -y python-pip
    $ sudo apt-get autoremove
    $ sudo apt-get install python-dev
    $ python -m pip install --upgrade --user packaging
    $ python -m pip install --upgrade --user appdirs
    $ python -m pip install --upgrade --user ansible
    
  • Ansible Quirks – 1

    I started on the ansible learning path about 6 months or so back and have been writing my roles for deploying / configuring various systems I manage. Today while writing a template for sshd_config, I came across a point wherein the handler failed to restart the SSH service on the target server. Fortunately I was logged in as sudo on one of the terminals, and then I checked the config file generated and pushed by ansible. I found that the line

    PermitRootLogin {{ permit_root_login }}

    was translated to

    PermitRootLogin True

    . For a while I though that the variable I defined in

    defaults/main.yml

    was wrongly having a value of True instead of Yes, but I was wrong. Looking into some of the bugs filed in ansible I realised that this is the expected behaviour. The way to prevent strings like yes/no and true/false to be converted to True/False they have to be preceded with !!str in the variable definition. So the variable definition in my case would look like –

    permit_root_login: !!str Yes
  • Expanding HardDisk of VirtualBox Guest

    VirtualBox is a beautiful piece of virtualisation software created for users, first acquired by Sun and then by Oracle as a part of Sun acquisition. I have been using VirtualBox for quite a few testing projects, however until today have never needed to expand my hard drive on a guest. I am running a Windows 7 guest for some client side related tests. I started with a 25Gb disk for Windows 7, but after applying all security patches (I like my machines patched and upto-date), I realised that 25GB is all gone.

    This is where I love virtualisation. I do not need to buy a new disk if I need more space on my virtual machine (as far as my physical disk has enough space). I can just expand the existing virtual hard disk and get all the space I need. VirtualBox does not yet have a GUI option to do storage expansion work, but fortunately VirtualBox comes with an excellent command line, so I followed the following steps in order to increase my hard drive space.

    In order to see the virtual hard disk info, following command can be used.

    $ VBoxManage showhdinfo VirtualBox\ VMs/Win764/Win764.vdi
    UUID: e2272600-df31-4dbc-a71d-56af5f5714df
    Parent UUID: base
    State: created
    Type: normal (base)
    Location: /Users/ajitabhp/VirtualBox VMs/Win764/Win764.vdi
    Storage format: VDI
    Format variant: dynamic default
    Capacity: 25600 MBytes
    Size on disk: 25502 MBytes
    In use by VMs: Win764 (UUID: 1beda97f-4222-49ad-993e-342e1d44e288)
    

    To expand this to 50GB and then verify that the operation is done

    $ VBoxManage modifyhd --resize 50000 VirtualBox\ VMs/Win764/Win764.vdi
    0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100%
    $ VBoxManage showhdinfo VirtualBox\ VMs/Win764/Win764.vdi
    UUID:           e2272600-df31-4dbc-a71d-56af5f5714df
    Parent UUID:    base
    State:          created
    Type:           normal (base)
    Location:       /Users/ajitabhp/VirtualBox VMs/Win764/Win764.vdi
    Storage format: VDI
    Format variant: dynamic default
    Capacity:       50000 MBytes
    Size on disk:   25502 MBytes
    In use by VMs:  Win764 (UUID: 1beda97f-4222-49ad-993e-342e1d44e288)
    

    Now so far we have only been able to expand the Hard disk drive, but the partition table still would say that the NTFS filesystem is still the original size. However, we can not use Windows to expand the partition table of the same partition wherein it is installed. The System Rescue CD came to help here. I attached the System Rescue CD ISO to the windows virtual machine and booted the system.

    In the command prompt, I used the GNU parted to expand the partition table (partition 2 in my case)

    % parted resizepart 2 50GB /dev/sda
    

    In case you want to check which is your NTFS partition, which you want to expand use the following command –

    % parted print /dev/sda
    

    After expanding the partition table, we need to expand the NTFS filesystem on it, which can be done by ntfsresize utility as below. First I ran the utility in info mode to find out the exact size to which to expand to and then in dry run (test) mode and finally actually ran it.

    % ntfsresize --info /dev/sda2
    % ntfsresize -n -s 52294093824 /dev/sda2
    % ntfsresize -s 52294093824 /dev/sda2
    

    Finally remove the the System Rescue CD ISO file and boot the system normally in windows, a check will be force and you are done.

  • Build An MP3 Catalogue System With Perl – Conclusion

    In the last post we saw how to read ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags using perl. In this post we will continue our journey towards creating a simple catalog for the MP3 collection.

    Quickly Getting the Desired Information out of the MP3 – autoinfo()

    Usually in my catalog I am interested in the following information about an MP3 – Title, Artist, Album, Track, Year, Genre, Comment and the Artwork. However, I do not want to loop through all available information in my program to get this data. Fortunately the MP3::Tag module provides a autoinfo() function which gets almost all the information needed for us except the Artwork, which we may need to gather separately. The autoinfo() function returns the information about the title, album, artist, track, tear, genre and comment. This information is obtained from ID3v2 tag, ID3v1 tag, CDDB file, .inf file and the mp3 filename itself, where-ever it is found first. The order of this lookup can be changed with the config() command. I want to restrict my cataloging to only ID3v2  and ID3v1 tags.

    Following lines provides us with the needed information.

    $mp3->config("autoinfo", "ID3v2", "ID3v1");
    my ($title, $track, $artist, $album, $comment, $year, $genre) = $mp3->autoinfo();

    Getting Artwork Information

    The artwork information is stored in the ID3v2 tag in a frame called APIC (stands for Attached PICture). This frame has _Data and MIME Type which we would need for our purpose. In order to extract this frame and its data we do not need to loop in through all the tags. The MP3::Tag module provides us with the get_frame() method, using which we can extract any frame directly like as shown below for artwork –

    my $apic_frame = $mp3->{ID3v2}->get_frame("APIC");
    my $img_data = $$apic_frame{'_Data'};
    my $mime_type = $$apic_frame{'MIME type'};

    This $img_data can be written out in a file and the $mime_type can be used as an extension. Thus we can extract the artwork from the MP3 file. The MIME type is something like “image/jpeg” and I have used the split function to get the string for the extension of the file.

    my ($mime1, $mime2) = split(/\//, $mime_type);
    my $artwork_name = "artwork.$mime2";
    open ARTWORK_FILE, ">$artwork_name" 
      or die "Error creating the artwork file";
    binmode(ARTWORK_FILE);
    print ARTWORK_FILE $img_data;
    close ARTWORK_FILE;

    Generating the HTML using HTML

    This is a simple project so I have used HTML::Template module to generate HTML code to the standard output, which can then in turn be redirected to a file using shell redirection. For a making the table layout less cumbersome, I have used the purecss.io CSS framework. Here my HTML template code.

    my $template = <<HTML;
    <html>
    <head>
    <title>My MP3 Catalog</title>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://yui.yahooapis.com/pure/0.5.0/pure-min.css">
    </head>
    <body>
    <h1>My MP3 Collection</h1>
    <table class="pure-table pure-table-horizontal">
        <thead>
            <tr>
                <th>Album Artwork</th>
    			<th>Album</th>
                <th>Track</th>
                <th>Title</th>
                <th>Artist</th>
    			<th>Year</th>
    			<th>Genre</th>
    			<th>Comment</th>
            </tr>
        </thead>
    
        <tbody>
    		<!-- TMPL_LOOP NAME=SONGS -->
    		<tr>
    			<td><a src="<TMPL_VAR NAME=FILEPATH>"><img src="<TMPL_VAR NAME=IMG>" height="150" width="150"/></a></td>
    			<td><!-- TMPL_VAR NAME=ALBUM --></td>
    			<td><!-- TMPL_VAR NAME=TRACK --></td>
    			<td><!-- TMPL_VAR NAME=TITLE --></td>
    			<td><!-- TMPL_VAR NAME=ARTIST --></td>
    			<td><!-- TMPL_VAR NAME=YEAR --></td>
    			<td><!-- TMPL_VAR NAME=GENRE --></td>
    			<td><!-- TMPL_VAR NAME=COMMENT --></td>
    		</tr>
    		<!-- /TMPL_LOOP -->
        </tbody>
    </table>
    
    </body>
    </html>
    HTML
    my $tmpl = HTML::Template->new(scalarref => \$template);

    Complete Script

    The complete script is on github, you can have a look at –

    https://github.com/ajitabhpandey/learn-programming/blob/master/perl/id3-tags-manipulation/genCatalog.pl.