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How to check RAID status on an Intel board
May 10, 2011, 11:15 am 
I don’t want to dwell on how many hours I just wasted trying to get the status of an embedded RAID controller on an Intel S3420GP board running openSUSE 11.3. The solution is to avoid the dizzying array of software that Intel offers on their website, and instead use dmraid.
My understanding of this is a little shaky, but first you need to know where the controller is mapped. After some poking around the system, I came across this:
# ls -1 /dev/mapper
control
ddf1_MegaSR___R1__0
ddf1_MegaSR___R1__0_part1
ddf1_MegaSR___R1__0_part2
ddf1_MegaSR___R1__0_part3
I know my array has three partitions so it seemed intuitive that the device was named ddf1_MegaSR___R1__0. I was then able to get the status with:
# dmraid -s ddf1_MegaSR___R1__0
*** Group superset .ddf1_disks
--> Active Subset
name   : ddf1_MegaSR___R1__0
size   : 623046656
stride : 128
type   : mirror
status : ok
subsets: 0
devs   : 2
spares : 0
Unbelievably simple after I had waded through failed attempts at using Intel’s RAID Web Console 2, Intel’s Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), Intel’s Damn? Platform Control Command Line Interface (DPCCLI), Intel’s Active System Console (IASC), and who knows what else.
Linux had the answer the entire time in a scriptable format. I’d feel bad for all that time I spent, except I’m too excited about finally being able to add this controller to the cronjob that tells me how my RAID arrays are doing every morning.
Category: HOW-TOs, Linux  | 
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How to combine/concatenate mp4 videos
April 4, 2011, 3:10 pm 
In a project similar to the Blender Defender, I am using a Linksys WVC54GCA webcam to monitor my devious cats. The camera has built-in motion detection, and can automatically FTP video files of detected motion to a location of your choice. Unfortunately, the area I’m monitoring has a good deal of exposure to outside lighting, meaning that each day I get hundreds of little videos as light plays across the room.
While messing with the motion sensitivity settings is next on my list, my immediate reaction was to figure out a way to combine the videos. The WVC54GCA lets you use a few different formats, but I chose mp4 since that seemed like the most open format. Some Google searching told me that I needed to use ffmpeg to convert the mp4s to mpg format which is supposedly “concatenatable”.
So first I converted all my mp4s to mpgs (assuming they are stored in a directory called movie_dir):
find movie_dir -name "*.mp4" -exec ffmpeg -i {} -sameq {}.mpg \;
Many posts I found then said that all one needed to do was just cat the mpg files together and you’d end up with one long mpg. That sounded great, but in practice it produced an mp