I was playing with the WebEx recorder and wondered if I could do something similar with VNC on Win32. It turns out that RealVNC 3.3.7 libvncauth and rfbproxy compile under Cygwin and can be used to capture a VNC session’s video pretty easily. But, what do you do with the recorded file and its non-standard format? Google didn’t turn up much help, so now that I’ve figured out how to convert it, I figured I’d share what I learned with everyone.

I’m going to assume that you can figure out how to compile and install stuff under Cygwin. If you don’t, it’s probably too difficult for me to explain in a general manner. To get started, you’ll need the following packages installed:

• mjpegtools (for ppmtoy4m)
• ffmpeg

First, capture your VNC session with rfbproxy. I saved mine to a file called test.rec. Once you’re done, you’ll want to convert it to YUV4MPEG format:

$ rfbproxy -x test.rec | ppmtoy4m > test.y4m

Then, you want to convert the YUV4MPEG to MPEG format:

$ ffmpeg -i test.y4m test.mpg

There you have it! Simple as that … if, you can get all the necessary prerequisites compiled, which is definitely the hard part on Cygwin/Win32. It’s a lot easier on Linux, where you should be able to just pick up the binary packages for your distribution and install them.

Tags: Win32, Cygwin, VNC, rfbproxy, MPEG

Last night I attended the March
2007 LOPSA North Jersey cluster group meeting at the Park Wood Diner in
Maplewood, NJ. LOPSA-NJ is what was formerly known as $GROUPNAME, an
organization for system administrators. There were eight of us there and you
can see us in these photos that were taken:

(Click to enlarge.)

(Click to enlarge.)

The meeting started in typical geek fashion: a bunch of us exchanged contact
information by IR beaming and Bluetooth sending them between our phones. We
then moved onto the agenda of discussing key tools that we find valuable which
started a quick discussion of screen, a tool that no
Unix-based sysadmin should be without. The conversation then shifted focus to
issue and bug tracking systems and their role in managing work queues. It
seems that the preferred system for issue tracking is RT. The awful monstrosity known as Remedy was maligned by everyone who had
the misfortune of having it inflicted upon them.

Tom Limoncelli wrote up his own notes for the Maplewood cluster group, as well as William Bilancio for the Princeton cluster group.

If you are a system administrator in the New Jersey area and are
looking to meet others for socializing, networking or to share your
experiences, you might want to consider joining us at our next meeting.

Tags:
LOPSA,
$GROUPNAME,
New Jersey,
system administration

My poor Dell laptop has been surviving with less than 2 GB free out of its 40GB disk for months. I’ve tried to trim things down, deleting whatever I could and archiving the rest to DVDs. But, this nonsensical activity is nothing more than diminishing returns: the space will get used up again and the time, effort and aggravation of having to identify things to remove is so not worth it. So, for a mere $219, I’ll be adding an additional 100 GB capacity. What’s not to love?

In case you were wondering what that beautiful enclosure is in the picture, it’s an OWC Mercury On-the-Go (OWCMOTG800U2), $79.99. It’s a FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 enclosure for 2.5″ PATA HDDs. It’s a transparent plastic enclosure, for maximum geek value–yes, it’s sexy to show off what you’ve got inside the enclosure.

Two snags: my laptop’s crappy USB 1.1 isn’t studly enough to bus-power the drive and enclosure, so I need to now go and order the (not included!) OWC Mercury On-The-Go AC Power Adapter (OWCMOTGPWR), $9.95. Also, I need to get a FireWire 800 1394B 9-pin to FireWire 400 1394A 6-pin cable, too. So much for “immediate gratification” … grr!

Tags:
computer hardware,
geek,
enclosure,
FireWire,
USB