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?

Testing. Testing. Are we on the air? I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 today. It was listed as a “major upgrade” and boy were they right. The entire admin section was completely re-written. So far I like it. It hides a lot of the stuff that I rarely or never use, and that is always a plus. So far so good!

Thanks Penn State. It’s about time I have a team to cheer for that actually wins something.

I also upgraded all of the WordPress installs on the server to 2.3.2. As always, it only took a second and worked flawlessly.

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.

I had some server upgrades today. I upgraded MySQL to 5.0.44 and PHP to 5.2.3, both of the stable versions in Gentoo’s portage. So far so good!

Once again, it was time to upgrade all of the wordpress installs on the server to the newest, 2.2 release. I can’t express enough how easy this is. Untar the new tarball right over the current install, login to the admin interface, let the system upgrade the database for you, and done. I’ve never [knocking on wood] had a problem or a failure. You gotta love wordpress.

More upgrades! Upgraded the server to PHP/5.2.1-pl3-gentoo as well as went through all of the gallery upgrades. Gallery’s upgrade process really can’t be any easier. I’ve yet to have a problem, even with all of the user galleries I have installed.

I also upgraded my truck. My 1999 Dodge Durango is starting to show its age, and I’m just about to turn 125,000 miles. Mind you, I never had to replace a single (large/major) thing since the day I bought it. That’s pretty good if you ask me, since I tend not to take care of vehicles very well. I searched around and priced out a new Dodge Ram 1500 with a 5.7-Liter HEMI® Multi Displacement Engine. That should really help my gas mileage.

Oh well, I want a truck with some extra juice. This should do it.

The dealer that I went to could not locate the exact model that I wanted. They searched the nearby dealers and came up with zilch. So, I am going to have to wait for 6-8 weeks to have one custom built. Such is life, at least this way I get exactly what I want.