I downloaded the latest ArchLinux Live distro from http://arch-live.isawsome.net/iso/ which at the time of writing was “20080731″. Burned the ISO to a disk and booted the computer from it. I chose the console only boot option, no need for a full desktop session as this is a quick fix.

The steps to locate the correct GRUB info and rewrite the MBR, directly from the ArchLinux wiki pages at http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Grub. Just be mindful, like always, that if you do this wrong you may make matters worse, so do your reading first! If you screw up your computer, it’s your own fault.

If you are unaware of the the location of /boot, use the GRUB shell find command to locate the GRUB files. Enter the GRUB shell by:

# grub

The following example is for systems without a separate /boot partition, wherein /boot is merely a directory under /:

grub> find /boot/grub/stage1

The following example is for systems with a separate /boot partition:

grub> find /grub/stage1

GRUB will find the file, and output the location of the stage1 file. For example:

(hd0,0)

This value should be entered on the root line in your configuration file.

Use the root command with the output from the find command to instruct GRUB which partition contains stage1 (and therefore, /boot):

grub> root (hd0,0)

The following example installs GRUB to the MBR of the first drive:

grub> setup (hd0)

Then just reboot, pop the live CD out, and you have control of your computer again!

Install the “crda” package:
# pacman -S crda

Uncomment your region in the “wireless-regdom” file:
# vi /etc/conf.d/wireless-regdom

Add “wireless-regdom” to the daemons line of rc.conf:
# vi /etc/rc.conf

DAEMONS=(syslog-ng hal dhcdbd !network wireless-regdom networkmanager rpcbind nfs-common @alsa @openntpd @netfs @crond gdm)

First thing first, backup up your database on the mythtv backend with:
$ mysqldump -u <myth_user> -p –extended-insert –databases <myth_db_name> > mythdatabase.bak
Password: <myth_password>

I created a new database on seperate server just because I new I would screw this up plenty while figuring it out. So if you do it on your live database, MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BACKUP. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! The following will create a new database from your backup (use this only if you want to create the database somewhere else):
mysql -u <root_user> -p <mythdatabase.bak
Password: <root_password>

Now I have a database with all my real world settings and information in it. The next step will be to add a user to it. I will call this new user ‘unpriv’ and want to make their permissions so that they WILL be able to do anything in the mythconverg db they want EXCEPT make changes to video metadata. Basically the default ‘mythuser’ minus the update permissions for the videometadata tables.

Login to mysql as root:
mysql -u root -p

Give the following a read: http://www.devshed.com/c/a/MySQL/The-MySQL-Grant-Tables
According to the information at devshed, we will want to give the ‘unpriv’ user no privileges at the user or database level, but set the privileges at the table level (in the tables_priv table of the mysql database).

STEP 1 -

Create an unprivileged user with the CREATE USER statement (MySQL 5.0.2+) with the following syntax:
CREATE USER user [IDENTIFIED BY [PASSWORD] ‘password’]

Here is mine as an examle:
CREATE USER ‘unpriv’@’192.168.1.102′ IDENTIFIED BY ‘easy2guess’;

STEP 2 -

Grant minimum permissions at the database level to user ‘unpriv’ with the following:
GRANT ALL ON mythconverg.* TO ‘unpriv’@’192.168.1.102′ IDENTIFIED BY ‘easy2guess’;
REVOKE DROP, ALTER, DELETE, UPDATE, INSERT ON mythconverg.* FROM ‘unpriv’@’192.168.1.102′;

That grants all privileges then revokes the ones that we want to keep the ‘unpriv’ user from having (right now anyways), ‘unpriv’ will need more permissions set up at the table level to make personal settings changes. I tried this a couple different ways and found the above GRANT ALL / REVOKE to be the easiest way. The user has to have a few permissions to even start the mythtv frontend. So I left those turned on at the database level, because you will never want to turn those off.

STEP 2a -

Try connecting to the database from mythtv with user ‘unpriv’. I had to manually change the ~/.mythtv/mysql.txt and ~/.mythtv/config.xml files with the new info, mythtv wouldn’t keep it otherwise.

Mythtv seems to quietly accept that it cannot write to the database. If you start it up and try to change themes or edit video metadata, it will look like you made a change, but if you leave that screen and go back to it you will see that the change did not take effect. Perfect. Now we are getting somewhere.

STEP 3 -

Now we need to grant DROP, ALTER, DELETE, UPDATE, INSERT privileges on a table by table basis for user ‘unpriv’ in the ‘mythconverg’ database. This would be an extremely daunting task to manually grant privileges on 88 tables. But thanks to http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/mysql/2006-q4/0372.html this can be accomplished much easier with a little script.

SELECT CONCAT(‘GRANT DROP, ALTER, DELETE, UPDATE, INSERT ON mythconverg.’, TABLE_NAME, ‘ TO ”unpriv”@”192.168.1.102”;’)
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES
WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA = ‘mythconverg’;

*note that in the above command those are ALL single quotes ( ‘ ).

This will print out the commands to grant DROP, ALTER, DELETE, UPDATE, INSERT privileges to ‘unpriv’ on all 88 tables in ‘mythconverg’. Or you can use the script here and just change the <user>, <host>, and <password> to fit your needs.

Now we want to revoke UPDATE and INSERT privileges from user ‘unpriv’ for the video metadata tables. Find them with:
mysql> SELECT TABLE_NAME FROM information_schema.tables WHERE TABLE_NAME LIKE ‘videometa%’;

And revoke the privileges with:
REVOKE UPDATE, INSERT ON mythconverg.videometadata FROM ‘unpriv’@’192.168.1.102′;
REVOKE UPDATE, INSERT ON mythconverg.videometadatacast FROM ‘unpriv’@’192.168.1.102′;
REVOKE UPDATE, INSERT ON mythconverg.videometadatacountry FROM ‘unpriv’@’192.168.1.102′;
REVOKE UPDATE, INSERT ON mythconverg.videometadatagenre FROM ‘unpriv’@’192.168.1.102′;

STEP 4 -

Start mythtv. Now you cannot edit any of the video metadata through Setup -> Video Manager. When you try to it will look like it accepts the change, but if you exit the Video Manager and return to it, you will see that the change was not saved to the database.

Perfect! Now if you have a frontend that you do not want to allow to change your video metadata, just setup their mythtv with user ‘unpriv’ instead of your normal mythtv user (typically ‘mythtv’).

By having most of the privileges set at the table level instead of user or database level, you will be able to easily control access to other parts of the database as you see fit. i.e. restricting access to music metadata.

Thanks to help from:
http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/mysql/2006-q4/0372.html
http://www.devshed.com/c/a/MySQL/The-MySQL-Grant-Tables
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Backup_your_database

I started a package mirror for Arch Linux, sure there are plenty of other ones to chose from. But this is a way I can at least do a little something to give back. Plus, there is one more thing that will hopefully help people out from time to time. I am going to try to never delete any old packages. That way if you ever need to roll back a package but don’t have it locally, there will be a good chance you will be able to find it here.

Just add the following to your /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

for i686:
Server = http://www.schlunix.org/archlinux/$repo/os/i686

or if using x86_64:
Server = http://www.schlunix.org/archlinux/$repo/os/x86_64

Some older i686 packages are still located at http://schlunix.org/arch-linux/i686

Setup the file based on instructions here http://www.itworld.com/Comp/3380/nls_unixntp3041028/

————————————————————
The top 50 lines or so of this prototype file are comments that provide information on the syntax of the operative lines. The most important line of this file is the server line. The initial server line will look like this:

server 127.127.XType.0 prefer

If you want to set up NTP for synchronization purposes only and are unconcerned with whether or not the system clocks are accurate with respect to the atomic clocks, you can configure this line to look like this:

server 127.127.1.0 prefer

The third octet in this IP address, the “1″, indicates that you are electing to use a reference clock driver of type “undisciplined local clock”. This simply means your system clock. This setting is intended for isolated networks where no external source of synchronization is available. The 127.127.1.0 IP address is a type of loopback (as are all IP addresses in the 127.127.x.x range), indicating that this NTP server will use its own clock as a time reference and will make no requests to external time sources. NTP clients using this server for time information should use the multicastclient keyword as shown below. The 127.127.1.0 loopback can also be used on networks where real time is unimportant, but synchronization is critical.

multicastclient 224.0.1.1

If you want your NTP server to obtain time updates from external servers, add server lines like these (the same as those shown earlier in the column):

server 129.6.15.28 prefer
server 216.200.93.8
server 64.236.96.53
————————————————————

Check what dependencies xntp relies on:
svcs -l svc:/network/ntp:default

If all dependencies exist then:
svcadm enable svc:/network/ntp
svcadm refresh svc:/network/ntp
svcadm restart svc:/network/ntp

This should start xntpd.

Check to see if the ntp daemon is running:
svcs | grep ntp

should give something like:
online Nov_10 svc:/network/ntp:default

blastwave.org to the rescue: http://www.blastwave.org/docs/step-152.html

To get the networking setup to be able to access the internet I needed to edit /etc/defaultrouter and put my router’s IP in there. This file was already correct from when I first setup Solaris.

I had to create the file /etc/inet/resolv.conf which is setup just like the Linux /etc/resolv.conf. Just add nameservers to it, one on each line:
nameserver 192.168.1.1
nameserver 22.33.44.55

chown the resolv.conf file with ‘chown root:sys /etc/inet/resolv.conf’

Then make a symlink from /etc/inet/resolv.conf to /etc/resolv.conf with: ‘ln -s /etc/inet/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf’

Edit /etc/nsswitch.conf and add “dns” to the “hosts” line.

Make sure /etc/inet/hosts and /etc/inet/ipnodes are setup correctly. Hosts should have the loopback and your network IP with your hostname and ‘loghost’ on that line:
127.0.0.1 localhost
192.168.1.110 sunfire loghost

ipnodes is very similar:
::1 localhost
127.0.0.1 localhost
192.168.1.110 sunfire loghost

And thats it. Didn’t have to restart networking or reboot the machine or anything. A simple ‘ping -s google.com 56 10′ confirmed that the machine could resolve an IP and hit google.

I set up C shell on the Sun server. Much nicer than Bourne. It has history and a nice looking prompt and everything. Can even use the arrow keys.
As a non root user to change your shell:
passwd -e

It will prompt you for your new shell, you want /bin/tcsh

In your home directory, make/modify ‘.login’ so it contains:
#—–start of file
stty erase ^H
#—–end of file

make/modify ‘.cshrc’ so it contains:
#—–start of file
set autolist
set notify
set correct=cmd
set prompt=”[%n@%m][%c]$ ”
set savehist=7000
setenv PAGER ‘less -s’[/code]
#-----end of file

As root you want to keep the Bourne shell, but if you want, just use it once you are logged in by typing /bin/tcsh at the command prompt.

I copied the .login and .cshrc files to root's home and changed the '$' in the prompt to a '#'

I also copied both of those files to /etc/skel so they can be put in all new users home folders and will be useful if I set their default shell (or they set it) to C shell.

Just had to put this in my .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
#Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^sunfire\.mydomain\.home
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.sunfire.mydomain.home [R=permanent,L]

Notice I don’t need the +FollowSymlinks in .htaccess because I put that in my httpd.conf

Of course I managed to screw it up somehow and had some sort of redirect loop going on. I just redid everything and it seems to be working now. I had been playing around with RedirectMatch and different configurations in httpd.conf and think I had some conflicting info somewhere, so resorted to a backup and stepped back through setting up the virtual servers. Used this site http://www.megalinux.net/archives/649.html as my guide.

To make the virtual servers work really nicely and not have to set multiple ones up in apache do it like that site says:
These are the steps from the site but subsituted with what I needed to use.
Step 1: Configure wild-card DNS, so that *.sunfire.mydomain.home is a CNAME to sunfire.mydomain.home

Step 2: Configure apache. Create a new virtualhost section for *.sunfire.mydomain.home, like:

VirtualHost *
ServerAlias *.sunfire.mydomain.home
CustomLog /www/logs/subdomains.sunfire.mydomain.home-access_log combined
ErrorLog /www/logs/subdomains.sunfire.mydomain.home-error_log
VirtualDocumentRoot /www/%0
VirtualScriptAlias /www/%0/cgi-bin/
/VirtualHost

Step 3: Restart apache to activate the new configuration

Step 4: Now, say you need blog.sunfire.mydomain.home, all that is required is to create these two directories
/www/blog.sunfire.mydomain.home/
/www/blog.sunfire.mydomain.home/cgi-bin/

Put the pertinent files in them and you can access them without having to restart apache

To do: Setup a redirect from domain.com to www.subdomain.com.