oddprocess.org

If you have a *nix workstation you have probably either seen or used GKrellM. It’s a handy dandy program to give you up to the second stats on most of the important data on your system. Disk space/activity, network traffic, CPU and memory usage, processes, the works.

If you are looking to run it on remote headless machines, ssh is your friend and makes life easier. Install GKrellM on the remote box. In a local terminal, do the following:

ssh -N -f -L 19150:127.0.0.1:19150 user@host.com

Obviously, change the “user@host.com” to your user and host. You can also change the 19150 to pretty much anything, just make sure you match that in the gkrellmd.conf file. Once the gkrellmd daemon is started, you can then connect to it by running:

/usr/bin/gkrellm -s 127.0.0.1 -P 19150

Again, changing the 19150 port to match whatever you used in the above set. Configs are stored locally and can be manually edited, or you can use the standard GUI setup. You can then run the above with different ports for different hosts.

Happy monitoring!

Thanks to Eric, I finally found mailing list management software that is not only easy to setup, but super easy to use. If you are looking for something easy yet powerful, check out mlmmj. Most of the configs as well as message storage are all flat text files, so everything is super fast and simple to configure. It only took a few minutes to get a new list setup and running, and most of that time would have been saved if I actually read the documentation.

But come on, what fun is that?

OK, so I’m sure everyone knows that I am “not exactly a big fan of Windows.” We have all heard it before, so I won’t dwell on it. At this point, I am about 90% Windows free. Most of that, however, is for work. The Novell network stuff still relies on Windows for basic management. The current version of ConsoleOne (Netware administrator) is written in Java and actually runs better on my Linux box then it does on any Windows machine I have tried. So I still run Windows XP in a VMware desktop on my Gentoo box. I’ve come to find a small warm spot in my heart for XP, almost enough to call it “not too terribly bad.” Don’t worry, that’s as good as it will get.

Anyway, enter Vista. I decided to give it a whirl in a fresh VMware session. All I can say is Oh. My. God. I gave the thing 2 virtual processors and 2.5GB of RAM and it was still awful. I personally think the way the new Windows Explorer (My Computer, etc) design is terrible and totally difficult to use. I know the argument is that “it is just different,” but I don’t think so. It made simple things that I do hundreds of times a day so much harder. It only took me a half hour of playing around before I killed the virtual machine and wiped it into oblivion. It was that bad.

I guess if you really don’t have anything important to do with a computer (like spider solitare) Vista is OK. But really, if you need to get stuff done, stick with XP.

I noticed there was an Openfire (OSS Jabber server suite) upgrade in Gentoo’s portage, so that gave me the shakes to upgrade. I don’t know why, I just like to upgrade things. I guess I like the challenge of fixing things if/when they break. Sure enough, it was broke.

So for any of you openfire users out there, here is the fix. I tried messing with a bunch of settings (backing up my original MySQL database first) and nothing seemed to help. After scrolling through all of the settings in the admin console, I noticed that the server no longer liked the self rolled SSL certificates. A quick click and the server generated new ones. Restart the openfire server and I was back in business.

I am still one small version behind (3.4.4 versus the current 3.4.5), but I was just to lazy to create a custom ebuild today…

So, as we all know, I’ve used several tools to scrobble music to last.fm via the console. The problem was that it worked, well, sometimes. The old post.fm script would work great for hours, then just outright stop submitting tracks. Other times it would never work, and then submit 2 or 3 songs out of 10. I poked through the source a bit, but the extent of my perl knowledge consists of adding the line “#!/usr/bin/perl” to the top of the script. Seriously, that’s it. So thankfully Eric (who knows a LOT more then I do about perl) was poking around trying to figure it out as well. At any rate, we were both stuck, until he stumbled upon another script that works with cmus. The new script is called shell.fm-cmus and seems to be working MUCH better then the other. So far so good anyway…

I’ve been using IPcop for years. I use it as a secondary router/firewall at work and it has been my main firewall at home for years. At home it used to run on the first computer I personally ever purchased. It was an IBM Aptiva AMD K6-2 233MHz system with about 128MB of RAM and an upgraded 20GB hard drive. After years of faithful service, I ran into some “trouble.” I walked into the basement to hear quite a loud whirring and whining from the corner where the computer was installed. The router was amazingly still working, I assume everything was running from memory and not the disk. I started searching for parts but realized that I no longer had an old ATA hard disk in my parts bin; Everything I had was SATA or too large to be wasted on a small home firewall. Luckily my main wireless access point is a more then capable Linksys WRT54GS. It took a bit of conversion, but now I am running with the Linksys alone. IPcop was really nice, I just no longer see the need for it at home. It’s served me well and I continue to use it at work and can say nothing but good things about it.

I’ve also been messing with some Dallas 1-Wire temperature sensors. They are pretty simple to mess with and get working as most of the drivers are already in the Linux kernel. There are a few software packages that allow you to interface them directly. Some work rather well, some not so well. I’ve been messing with owfs and that seemed to work the best for me. Each sensor has a hardware address and owfs allows you to query it directly to get the current temperature:

$ owread -F /10.8889C7000800/temperature
61.5875

That’s the current temperature in our basement. I have to do a little wiring to move the sensor away from our pellet stove, otherwise when that is turned on the thing will jump up to an inaccurate temperature. I’ve also been working with a few different programs to help graph the temperature trends. Once that is all working, I can get sensors for all over the house. Why? Really, why not. Because I can.

It never fails. Yes, I had a small rant about being happy that my work machine was 4 years old and still working perfectly. Then a new, Dual Core machine “fell into my hands.” I couldn’t help it, when hardware slows down long enough at work for me to grab, I don’t hesitate. It is a 64-bit system, but I didn’t feel like installing Gentoo all over from scratch. This install is my first Gentoo install and continues to be my longest maintained install to date. I first installed Gentoo 1.4 on December 26th, 2002 during that Christmas break. The system has slightly newer hardware since then, but has never been re-installed from scratch. That’s quite an accomplishment (in my book anyway).

At any rate, it’s an HP system with a AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4000+, 2.1GHz system. 1GB (so far, this needs an upgrade) of RAM. Some of the chips are ATI based, so I had to get an nVidia based video card. ATI and Linux just don’t play nice. Luckily, my old system was recently upgraded to SATA3.0 with 2 additional drives added, so I just moved that setup and added some extra drivers to the kernel. The hardest part seemed to be the Dual Core setup, but setting up ACPI in the kernel took care of that.

I finally performed the apache upgrade from 2.0.x to 2.2.x.

Apache/2.2.6 (Gentoo) Server at www.daubenspeck.org Port 80

Gentoo changed the apache config file layout, so A LOT of things changed and/or moved. Looks to be running smoothly now.

One of my favorite open-sourced tools HAS to be mutt. In my opinion, it is the single greatest mail client that has ever existed. It’s small, super fast, and so configurable that it makes my head hurt. If you need something done, mutt can do it.

I’ve since moved all of my mail to my colo server. All my personal mail has already been delivered there for years, and recently I started POPs-ing my mail from work using fetchmail. I refuse to use MS Exchange’s webmail. It’s just awful to use no matter what anyone else says.

Anyway. The last thing I needed to make work was remote printing. There is a separate muttprint package that will take the generic text mutt output, pretty it up, and send it to a printer. The problem used to be that I don’t obviously have a printer connected to my colo server. Even if I did, it would be a pain to drive to the facility to retrieve documents. After a bit of Google work along with some ssh magic, I’ve come up with the solution:


set print_command="muttprint -p -| ssh me@my_work_desktop_hostname \"lpr -P techlaser\""

That’s right, the power of the | (pipe for you window’s n00bs). Encryped printing from my colo to my office laser printer. Nice.

Not only can you play music directly from last.fm, but you can also scrobble your own tracks. Unfortunately, most of the software is (without surprise) windows based.

Nuh uh!

Download, compile, and install cmus and grab post.fm. Yes, it is perl, but it works anyway. Make the script executable and add your last.fm username and password. Next, start up cmus and type:

set status_display_program=/path/to/post.fm

Start playing tunes. Super simple and it works in the background. However, the cmus interface is a little wonky and takes some time to get used to. Again, it works and there is no need for yet another clunky gui!