Got my Neuros

After playing with Russell McOrmond’s Neuros on Sunday, I ordered one on Monday from ThinkGeek. ThinkGeek was the only company that had stock and would ship to Canada. I elected for the UPS option, since DHL almost always screws up.

UPS delivered without even collecting duty, and then an automated recording called me to bore me. The UPS fee for brockage was going to be $0.00, so I hope they will just invoice me.

I wanted to NFS mount my file server, where for some time I’ve had a 225G partition waiting for me to setup the hauppage card in my wife’s old desktop. (That machine is now a Pluto@Home, and it’s mounted on a wall in basement. I might actually use the security system in it as well as the PVR stuff. We have a second Satellite/Starchoice receiver in the basement)

After telling my dhcp server to give the neuros a constant IP, and putting that IP in DNS, and letting DNSSEC resign my zone (it needs randomness and I don’t know why. It should be using RSA…), I added the new name to /etc/exports on the file server, and did a mount.

The mount took awhile on the neuros. I had telnet’ed in as root, and the Neuros doesn’t have a lockd running. I went into IRC, and learnt that I should add “-o nolock” to my mount line. I wondered how to make it mount each time it booted, and learnt that it runs

/mnt/OSD/rc.user

if the shell script exists. Mine is:

sh /mnt/OSD/ssw.sh

and /mnt/OSD/ssw.sh

mkdir /mnt/tmpfs/media/aragorn mkdir /mnt/tmpfs/media/aragorn/cadillac mkdir /mnt/tmpfs/media/cadillac mkdir /mnt/tmpfs/media/new mount -o nolock aragorn:/cadillac /mnt/tmpfs/media/cadillac mount -o nolock aragorn:/cadillac/movies/Den /mnt/tmpfs/media/new

The second mount was necessary so that it would be willing to accept that location as the default recording location. It didn’t seem to like being told to record to a sub-subdirectory.

It recorded some ads from TV to “osd.mp4” in that directory.

I then wondered what happens if I hit the red record button again. It felt that it hasn’t been configured as to a location to record to, so I told it the same location, and told it to default to 30 minutes. It now recorded to:

aragorn-[/cadillac/movies/Den] root 35 #ls -l total 226320 ---------- 1 root 1002 49152 Jan 16 23:35 .rec_SCA_1466957263_852.bin ---------- 1 root 1002 49152 Jan 16 23:35 .rec_SCV_1466957263_852.bin ---------- 1 root 1002 0 Jan 16 23:26 .rec_SS_1466957263_852.bin ---------- 1 root 1002 0 Jan 16 23:26 .rec_TSA_1466957263_852.bin ---------- 1 root 1002 98304 Jan 16 23:35 .rec_TSV_1466957263_852.bin -rw-r--r-- 1 root 1002 34338611 Jan 16 23:09 osd.mp4 -rw-r--r-- 1 root 1002 197132288 Jan 16 23:36 osd_06.26@1607_01.mp4

(aragorn is a NetBSD XEN guest file server)

I was puzzled by the new file name, until I ran date on the OSD:

/mnt/OSD $ date Sun Jun 26 16:10:37 UTC 2016 /mnt/OSD $ rdate istari Wed Jan 16 23:21:45 2008 /mnt/OSD $ date Wed Jan 16 23:21:46 UTC 2008

An rdate cleared that up. I stuck the rdate into the rc.user just for luck.

So far, we are very happy. Liam likes it too.
Next step is to transfer all his Thomas videos to soft-copy before they VHS tapes completely wear out.