How to Fix a Broken Sector of Your Hard Drive

First you should really backup the whole drive. Because unreadable sectors mean that the drive will fail soon:

("Add. Sense: Unrecovered read error - auto reallocate failed

sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] CDB:  ... end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 3459933711 ...").

You may be able to solve the issue temporarily but you should expect the drive to fail completely at any moment. So ddrescue to another disk of the same size. First, only rescue good parts:

ddrescue -n olddew newdev ~/logfile

Then try to rescue the rest:

ddrescue olddew newdev ~/logfile

Then try to manually read the sector with hdparm. In your example, the marked sector above. This probably won't work.

hdparm --read-sector 3459933711

Then you can overwrite the sector with zeros so it won't cause repeated hangs:

hdparm --write-sector 3459933711

And now you order a replacement drive and wait for the drive to fail entirely.

How to Efficiently Replace a Broken Disk from a Linux Software RAID 5

1. ddrescue the broken disk to a new, completely empty disc. At least zero the former raid superblock... (ddrescue -n faileddev newdev logfile; ddrescue faileddev newdev logfile)

If successful (if you have bad blocks that couldn't be rescued, you should preferably rebuild the raid.)

2. add the disc to the raid and remove the failed disc from the raid

3. go to the sysfs folder of the raid device, e.g. cd /sys/block/md0/md/.

4. put the new disc into the slot of the failed old disc:, e.g.  echo 2 > dev-sdc1/slot.

5. check the raid to be sure if all worked out well: echo check > /sys/block/md0/md/sync_action.

TVHeadend with Transcode Support in Ubuntu 14.04

Unfortunately the packages from the repository no longer support transcoding recently. You have to build your own package.

sudo apt-get install build-essential pkg-config libssl-dev git libavahi-client-dev libavcodec-dev libavfilter-dev libavformat-dev libavutil-dev libswscale-dev libavcodec-extra-53 liburiparser1 liburiparser-dev debhelper libcurl4-gnutls-dev a52dec

git clone https://github.com/tvheadend/tvheadend.git

AUTOBUILD_CONFIGURE_EXTRA=--enable-libffmpeg_static ./Autobuild.sh -t trusty-i386

or

AUTOBUILD_CONFIGURE_EXTRA=--enable-libffmpeg_static ./Autobuild.sh -t trusty-amd64

Finally, the transcode setting is no longer in the general tab. Rather, you can now enable transcoding by selecting special profiles you can set up under Coniguration, Stream, Stream Profiles. Unfortunately, most the Android apps don't support this at the moment. You may want to try to checkout the version before committ c4089cc7a378abc2d8912d86d6440aab6230967a.

HTSP Plugin for Ubuntu 14.04

After trying to find a package for a long time I ended up compiling it myself. This is a link to my library file: libhtsp_plugin.so (AMD64). You can check with ldd libhtsp_plugin.so. If there are missing libraries, it won't work for you.

OpenVPN on Android only supports 4096 bits private key

If you run into the error

"OpenVPN core error : PolarSSL: error parsing config private key : PK - Bad input parameters to function."

with OpenVPN on Android you'll have to change your private key. It has to be supported by PolarSSL / ARM mbed. In my case, reducing the private key size to 2048 bits solved the issue.

Panbox missed an important library: no unix-java in java.library.path

The solution is simple. You need to install the libraries listed in the readme.txt file.

E.g. for Ubuntu or Debian:

sudo apt-get install dbus-java-bin python-appindicator python-nautilus libbluetooth-dev python-notify python-gtk2 python-dbus