Woodchucks!

keth found this on icanhascheezburger.com

I just could *not* resist

traffic measurement

I mentioned a while ago that I was still looking for a decent way to measure the amount of traffic that passes over my interface. The problem is mostly due to the fact that my ISP refuses for some reason to measure over a proper 24 hour period (hie 00:00:00 - 23:59:59), instead they have opted to measure the bandwidth, from 09:00:00 - 08:59:59. [1]

As you can imagine this gives somewhat a problem because 99% of all the programs will not adhere to that or will not allow you to change the measurement period. Now for a while I have been wanting to do something like that. It tends to give me chronic headaches when you are trying to do something and have to calculate bandwidth over three different sets of times.

Sounds like teh fun huh I used to use knemo for this, but all of a sudden, knemo started to flake out on me and to deliver outrageous results (something among the lines of 106GB over 24 hours and then a 49GB over 2 hours .. which somehow seems outside the norm of possibilities of bog standard 802.11.

So that was becoming rather useless. The second problem with knemo is, is that it only works from within KDE. So dropping X and working purely from CLI, makes it stop monitoring how much traffic passes the interface.

But thanks to the guys in ‘chucks, who took the output of vnstat and poured it into readable chunks, I finally managed to rewrite the above statement to something approaching normal bash_code

The result now, looks like this: [2]

[michiel@hades]:[~]$ vdstat
Report Generated on: Wed Sep 12 11:40:57 BST 2007
Received = 71 MB ((73440 kB)
Transmitted = 9 MB (9730 kB)
+----------------------------------+
Data usage = 81 MB (83170 kB)
Measured over a period of 3 hour(s)

So I am rather happy with that. It probably could do with some minor code cleanup in my case, as well as writing the daily results to a logfile somewhere.

But at least it is much easier for me now to keep a decent track on how much bandwidth I am actually using/spilling

[1] - No I have no idea why. It seems you need a NATO clearance higher than my current one to know

[2] - Sourcecode available on request.

Loss of service

Well, a week after my initial post that I had some minor hardware failures and my subsequently unimpressed mood seem to have failed in that weeks offering of random goatlings and virgins to $DEITY.

Result: major hardware failure across the board.

1) Whitestar .. our main and server-ish box died spectacularly. Considering this box does DHCP, NFS, local Slackware-12.0/-current mirror and much other goodness. *poof*

2) My freecycle Ubuntu box just proofed how much suckiness it really was and refused to boot up at all.

3) Kethry’s box at that time decided to fail her main harddrive.

Needless to say, there was much unhappiness not to mention I think I enriched the neighbourhood in the more colourful aspects of both the English and Dutch language.

Anyway after sitting down with kethry we had a bit of a talk about the possibilities of purchasing new hardware, which thankfully was possible due to her receiving some extra birthday money (note: must return money. need to rob some kids of their cider money )

Anyway thanks to andarius who was rather (read: extremely) helpful and patient dealing with my absolute noobness on hardware building. However: after a day of debating and looking at the various options I decided to go for a “budget-build” of a new computer, but one that actually will keep me going for the next while. I think I have not done all that badly for about £ 250,- (roughly USD$ 505,- / CAD$ 531 / € 370,- / 4,724,582.69 IDR (well if I missed any other country see xe.com))

The specs are pretty much as following:

• Gigabyte GA M61PM-S2 nForce 430 AMD Socket AM2
• AMD CPU AM2 Athlon 64 Dual Core 4000
• OCZ 1GB Kit (2×512) Platinum Series DDR2 PC6400 800MHz Dual Channel Memory And Platinum Heatspreader [1]
• Liteon 20x DVDRW/RAM Beige
• 200GB Seagate Barracuda SATA2 8MB
• 2x Ultra Quiet 120mm Case Fan (x2)
• Xilence 480W Gaming PSU
• Arianet 402TK Midi Case Silver Black

Result: A nice and exceedingly fast box, that rather outpaces my previous box. For now that box is running Slackware 12.0 .. in due time I’m looking forward to give Slamd64 a run Even though it was pretty stressful at times, I am somewhat happy that I have done it. [2] It was all in all a pretty uhm “interesting” learning experience.

So after being a week offline[3], I need to rebuild this box and keths as well. We’ve also switched away from the Babylon5 naming scheme and gone for a more classical Greek naming scheme. Her box is now named Persephone (or perhaps rather .. her)and mine Hades.

[1] - This had to be replaced as one of the memory sticks turned to be bad. Luckily after explaining the tests I had done (ie swapping memory sticks around and kernel compiles etc), they quickly swapped it around.

[2] - Andarius - a big thank you for your patience and insights

[3] - Most annoyingly, the loads of emails and rss/blogs I have to catch up with.

DOOM :: Akkregator-crash && failing hardware

The last couple of days are not good.  First my “9″ key on my keyboard fails completely, and at the same time catching some droplets of water , which seems luckily to do little harm.

The biggest problem was waiting until the water dried sufficiently enough to allow me to type my password without any problems what so ever. But right now the “9″ is playing up and there is an ugly hole in my keyboard. I am seriously peefed off and dep9sressed about this all. Yes it’s only a frigging keyboard but the brokenness of it seriously hampers my typing. And ofcourse this keyboard was a gift from my parents. So I am not a happy bunny at them moment.

I mean seriously, a keyboard like this should last longer than just five months.  I am highly unimpressed by that.

To further all joy and greatness, akregator (KDE rss reader), just pulled a disappearing act on me, and wiped out all but two feeds. It just cost me about 2 hours to sort out all my feeds, which was a slight positive, and get everything back in working order. I clearly need to make sure that this not happens again by backing this up.

So, all in all, the last 2 days have rather failed to impress me

Article: About ‘Upstream’ and ‘Keeping it together’

The following article has just been brought to my attention, which all in all made quite an interesting read: The article is called “Dealing with upstream: how KDE and the distros manage to keep things together” and is written by Troy Unrau. Of course, I am quite happy see the following text about Slackware:

Only one distribution seems to be relatively immune to this process, that being Slackware. Slackware is one of the oldest distributions in existence, and may in fact be the longest running distro of all time. The reason that Slackware is successful, but never popular to the extent of other distros, is that it leaves customization alone. Wherever possible, they ship ‘virgin’ packages which can be recompiled using upstreams’ official source packages. This makes Slackware a good development platform as you can ensure that any problems you encounter are not due to distributions making changes to the source, but also makes it a less popular choice among users who prefer a more polished, integrated experience.

It’s nice to see some more mainstream media writing about Slackware in a good and positive light

Project::Mail (small update)

Finally after some weeks of dragging myself of not doing anything really geekly worthwhile. Due to writing articles, pulling my weight in getting SlackBuilds.org ready for Slackware 12.0, interchanged with bouts of Second Life and general interviews, which left me a little bit exhausted and generally lethargic.

Anyway I have decided to finally pick up the slack a little bit and get on with my mail serving project.

To quickly recap: one of the things I have been thinking off for a while now is to set up an e-mail solution where it really doesn’t matter what MUA you use, you will always see the same mail you trust and love. Okay, each mua will probably need some minimal configuration to set up the mailboxen etc, but thats hopefully once. Then regardless of the way you log in, it should be good to run.

I have decided to concentrate on minimal the three following muas:

*- Kmail (KDE standard Mail client)

The reason for KMail is that is has been my mua for quite somewhile. It just works. This is and will probably remain my main mua for the foreseeable future.

*- Mutt (One of the best console clients around)

To have access to email when logging in remotely or for some reason, unable to run X is a nice feature.

*- Thunderbird (Mozzies renowned mail reader)

I actually quite like Thunderbird, but the fact that I can’t minimize it into the system tray is something that I find highly annoying.

As far as I can tell there are two ways to deal with the situation. One is to make sure that one all mua’s use the same mailbox format (ie. maildir or mbox). The other is to use IMAP. By having all mail centrally stored on the server it makes it a lot easier to sort out your email regardless of how/where I access my emails from.

Then there is always the point that I can always use something between solutions 1 and 2. I know already from experience that mutt and kmail can read each other mails as long as kmail writes the everything in mbox format [1]. So technically I could file away certain emails locally which probably will throw some mail clients out of the loop, but I think KMail and mutt are going to be the most important onces to deal with anyway.

So the next step is to really figure out how to get this all working. Considering I have atleast three email accounts from gmail, that need to be polled. So all in all it comes down to figuring out how to get that to work properly. I can foresee this leading to having to setup a whole emailserver solution.

I have decided to actually go into the way of running an imap server. Basically I an gonna follow Dominians MailServer Howto This means some extra figuring out that I need to do, but all in all should be fun [2].

So far I am still trying to get my head around about what I need to do first. But it seems to be heading this way:

1) Setup smpt and imap server
2) Setup getmail to download the email
3) Make sure getmail delivers them to the imapserver boxen
4) Other misc magic(tm) [3]
5) Hope it all works

Anyway back to more googling and reading and understanding .. which hopefully at some point will lead to enlightement

[1]: The biggest problem is that KMail doesn’t adhere standarly to the ‘purer’ definition of mbox format. In short, KMail allows “Mbox folders” which isn’t technically correct and mutt will have problems with that. It would be better if KMail would just create folders. Although I can understand that it may be harder to implement than I imagine.
[2]: For weird/geek definitions of fun ofcourse.
[3]: This ofcourse involves praying a lot to $DEITY and usual offerings of goats and virgins.

Happy Birthday for Slackware

14 years ago, Patrick Volkerding release Slackware-1.0.

 

14 years later, we are on version 12.0

Thank you Patrick for all the years of hard work and dedication for bringing us a great Operating System.

HAPPY 14th BIRTHDAY SLACKWARE!!!

Slackware-12.0 Review

Well after a week of struggling with words and formats (more on how to write about Slackware-12.0 than layout), I think I finally managed to crack it down.

The biggest problem with Slackware-12.0, the newest flagship, is there is a whole lot of new and goodness included, too much to tell about and not sounding like some stuck and broken record.

It took me some while to get it right and written down. But thanks to kind folks over at Slackworld (especially Mikhail Zotov) and Robby Workman, who asked me if I wanted to write the review in the first place:

So in short, I got to write a review of Slackware-12.0 that got published at slackworld.

It took me a bit of doing as this was my first review, but I hope that all in all it is not too bad an article. I know for one, I am rather proud of it.

and of course, thanks to kethry for helping me root out my spelling mistakes and proofreading, the many pots of tea and her patience

Teh fun with bash code

Everyone who knows me, knows I need caffeine before I am atleast partial human. Sometimes however my brain throws me some fun and interesting (read weird and twisted) ideas before I am really properly caffeinated [0].

A good example of that is this: [1]

mirror=/usr/local/src/slackware/slackware-current
changelog=$mirror/Changelog.txt

cat $changelog | head -$(grep -n "^+" $changelog | head -1 | awk -F \: '{print $1}') | grep -v "^\+\|^\ \|$(date +%a)" | grep tgz | awk -F \: '{print $1}' | sed -e 's#^#upgradepkg --install-new #'

Basically ‘all‘ this does is to go through the Slackware-current ChangeLog.txt (of my local mirror), and figure out more or less the latest updates and parses them to a file. The output of the script more or less looks like this:

upgradepkg --install-new a/pkgtools-12.0.0-noarch-4.tgz

 upgradepkg --install-new kde/kvpnc-0.8.9-i486-1.tgz

 upgradepkg --install-new l/gd-2.0.35-i486-1.tgz

 upgradepkg --install-new l/gmime-2.2.9-i486-1.tgz

 upgradepkg --install-new n/pssh-1.3.1-noarch-1.tgz

 upgradepkg --install-new n/samba-3.0.25b-i486-1.tgz

 upgradepkg --install-new x/xf86-video-savage-2.1.2-i486-2.tgz

[1] When orginally writing the code, I didn’t use $mirror and $changelog. It made it just slightly more readable and I used it later in the full script.

[2] Please note that this script at the moment does NOT make any distinction between what packages are upgraded or removed or what else. It just looks for any tgz lines in the latest updates from the ChangeLog file.

Slackware-Current –> Slackware 12.0 RC1

While you read this, mirrors are updating themselves slowly.

Me? I am gonna wait a bit (probably until tomorrow) so the mirrors can balance themselves a bit. But yeah from todays -current ChangeLog.txt

Thu Jun 14 16:39:01 CDT 2007
It's that time again, and here we have Slackware 12.0 release candidate 1!
If we're lucky, we got it all right the first time. Big thanks to the crew.

All I can say is: woot!!

Even this last moment there are some really nice gems added to slackware. I can’t wait till this goes gold.

For everyone wanting to upgrade. I can’t stress this enough:

READ the UPGRADE.TXT

If you follow that, you can’t go wrong. and DO NOT use swaret/slaptget or whatever. If you are desperate to use a packaging tool other than upgradepkg(8) use slackpkg.

[Note]:: For those wishing to read how to upgrade the right way