Monthly Archives: September 2016

fedora, kodi, linux, mac, ubuntu, xbmc

Correcting Corrupted Kodi Database

I’ve had several cases where one of the Kodi sqlite3 databases becomes corrupted on Coriander. It has happened to Textures, Addons and EPG at different times.  The error that manifests in the Kodi log is The Database Disk Image is Malformed, and once it happens the log is full of this and transactions in the affected database don’t take place.

Did some reading, and discovered that usually you can dump the database, and the dump will be ok.  Try this:

echo '.dump' | sqlite3 fred | sqlite3 new_fred
mv fred bad_fred
mv new_fred fred
fedora, linux, mail, postfix

Webmail

Update 2017-08-07:

I switched from using squirrelmail to a product called rainloop. Rainloop was relatively easy to install, and is far nicer that squirrelmail. But the basic idea is the same.

A next step for providing mail service for some of my users is a primitive webmail facility. For this I used a product called squirrelmail.

Squirrelmail installs, on fedora, into /usr/share/squirrelmail, with config in /etc/squirrelmail. /usr/share/squirrelmail/config contains a perl script, conf.pl, which provides a simpler configuration experience with explanation of all the somewhat cryptically named fields.

As part of doing this I obtained certificates for all the domains I am hosting – at least all of them over which I have enough control to meet the validation requirements of startssl.com, meaning either I am postmaster or the documentroot of the website is on tarragon. Without this I would have to choose between not encrypting the mail, or having the user have to put up with mail programs complaining about the certificate.

asterisk, fedora, kodi, linux, mac, ubuntu, xbmc

Caller Id in Kodi – Redux

I posted in this post about how I arranged to get caller-Id to show up in Kodi. At that time I was still using POTS, but since then I have switched to VoIP and set up Asterisk.

I did find another plugin that would connect to Asterisk and obtain information about incoming calls. But until now it was only half way working. I finally got around to paying attention to it. It was originally provided by “hmronline” and I found it at code.google.com. It was last worked on with Dharma, and I had to do some things to get it ready for Jarvis.

The source code is now in the tarragon svn repository, under the name KodiAsterisk. On coriander, where the production Kodi lives, there is a checked out directory under /Users/wmb called kodiasterisk. For Kodi to install it it has to be zipped, so the sequence is to svn update the directory, then zip the directory as script.service.dee-kodi-asterisk.zip. Then install it within Kodi.

It attaches to asterisk on cinnamon using the Asterisk manager interface.  Authentication on the manager interface uses files in /etc/asterisk/manager.d which has one file per authorized user, containing credentials.

The code has features to

  • give a notification of the caller id
  • put up a picture of the caller
  • pause a video if one is playing
  • redirect the call (within asterisk) if a video is playing
  • indicate whether there are voice mails

I have the notification running, the picture coming up, and the video being paused. I don’t use the redirect feature. Also, since my voice mail is not on Asterisk the features of voice mail aren’t being used.

I did put pictures into a folder within /Storage/Pictures/KodiPictures. The pictures here are named with the phone number, and contain a snapshot of the caller, in jpeg. If there is no picture in the folder for a particular number nothing is put up, but the notification and pausing still occur.