Il blog di Gas

A friend of mine, Christian, has released PixieLive, a slax based live linux distro build with gentoo.
It’s one of the few live distributions that support Intel GMA500, popular on netbooks like some Asus EEEPC.

PixieLive

A proper transcode must have a lossless audio format as a source, a good one is flac ,stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, because it does the job well and has a good licence ( BSD and GPL ).

If you have some flacs and want them in mp3 format (you need lame and flac) you can use this one liner:
for FILE in *.flac; do flac -cd "${FILE}" | lame - "${FILE/.flac/.mp3}"; done

the above line decodes every file that ends in .flac to the standard output (screen) and pipes it to lame that will encode it. “${FILE/.flac/.mp3}” will be the output file, in bash that means: take the variables “$FILE” (that is the original filename), remove “.flac” and substitute “.mp3″.

Nowadays I transcode quite often to 320 kbit/s constant bit rate (CBR)

• achieving the best quality for an mp3 and still being highly portable, some players don’t like variable bitrate of high quality ( like the V0 preset)
• doing something unefficient since mp3 is not a good codec for that quality but if your stereo reads just mp3 you don’t have any choices

I simply need to use lame with the proper switches , the above one liner becomes:
for FILE in *.flac; do flac -cd "${FILE}" | lame --cbr --preset insane - "${FILE/.flac/.mp3}"; done

To rip my compact discs and encode my music in flac I use a program for windows called Exact Audio Copy (EAC), my Wine build doesn’t like it for some reasons and Virtualbox has historical problems in handling cdroms correctly, the solution was VMWare. The native solution is RubyRipper

Today I found the usual chinese trying to get in my smtp to send his spam to the world and I realized that fail2ban wasn’t working because the regexp used to match the offender is wrong.

This is the log entry (/var/log/mail)
Aug 21 22:45:30 myserver postfix/smtpd[12071]: warning: unknown[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]: SASL LOGIN authentication failed: authentication failure

and this is the regex that work , just remove the part after “authentication failed” (/etc/fail2ban/filter.d/sasl.conf)

failregex = (?i): warning: [-._\w]+\[\]: SASL (?:LOGIN|PLAIN|(?:CRAM|DIGEST)-MD5) authentication failed

Test it:
fail2ban-regex /var/log/mail.log /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/sasl.conf

if you are on a slow server or on a big mail server use /var/log/mail.err instead