RND(tech)

Firefox 3 RC1 was just released and boy is it snazzy. So far, I can only see a small increase in page rendering times. Hopefully, after running it for a few more hours, it won't wreak havoc on my RAM and stay at a lean 79MB.

Anywho, it disabled my delicious bookmarks plugin, but you can get one that works with Firefox 3 here:

http://del.icio.us/extensions/firefox/delicious.xpi

I've been using MRTG for years to graph traffic on switch ports, but only recently started using it to graph other fun things.

Recently, I've started using it for latency.

/usr/local/bin/ping-host.sh:

#!/bin/sh
PING="/bin/ping"
ADDR="172.16.0.100"
DATA=`$PING -c10 -s500 $ADDR -q `
LOSS=`echo $DATA | awk '{print $18 }' | tr -d %`
echo $LOSS
if [ $LOSS = 100 ];
then echo 0
else
echo $DATA | awk -F/ '{print $5 }'
fi

Then in your mrtg.conf file:

Title[ping-host]: RTT to host
PageTop[ping-host]: <H1>Host Round Trip Time</H1>
Target[ping-host]: `/usr/local/bin/ping-host.sh`
MaxBytes[ping-host]: 2000
Options[ping-host]: growright,unknaszero,nopercent,gauge
LegendI[ping-host]: Pkt loss %
LegendO[ping-host]: Avg RTT
YLegend[ping-host]: RTT (ms)
ShortLegend[_]: p/s

You can also execute remote commands over SSH. I use that for load averages. You'll have to figure out how to set up authentication keys. Otherwise, the automated script will be prompted for a password on the console, which you won't be attached to. I might post later about setting up authentication keys for password-less login, but for now, here's my load average script, to be run on the remote host:

loadavg.sh:

#!/bin/bash
awk /proc/loadavg '{print (100*$1) "\n" (100*$2) }'

Then on your MRTG host do something like:

Target[Mail-LoadAvg]: `ssh -l mailnull mail.host.tld ./loadavg.sh`

A few months back I wrote about how I wanted to replace my iPod with my PocketPC. Alas, I've conceded to the mainstream. The iPod has won out for it's end-user experience. There's simply too much work involved in the PocketPC and the user interface is still stuck in its old roots. The stylus is still the primary form of "interface" and in the car, that just doesn't work. I'm sure it'd be fine for someone else, but I spend a lot of time in the car. I'll still use the PocketPC for phone, email, browsing, etc. Also, I actually really like iTunes. The interface is exactly how I like to manage my 40+GB of music and the podcasts just sync. The podcast client (Egress) I was using on the PocketPC was just too clumsy, never seemed to really "sync" the right way, and then of course there was that pesky ease-of-use issue. Once in Egress, there was little integration with Windows Media Player. Granted, it was functional, but it just wasn't easy to swith between podcasts and know which I've already listened to or not. Since my music library is also in iTunes already, I just didn't have the necessary investment in Windows Media Player. Back to iTunes for me for now.

On a similar note, I have iTunes running on a fairly new Mac Book. Since I have a large library, which I also like to access remotely, I put the whole thing on an NFS share from my MythTV box. The MythTV box is currently openSuSE 10.2. Everything was running great on Mac OS X 10.4, but I decided to upgrade to 10.5 this weekend and finally throw on Office 2008. Everything runs a bit slower than it used to, but I suppose that's to be expected with new OSes. OS X is probably suffering from Vista-style bloat. One thing that did improve was Quicken 2007 (PowerPC) stability, but that was a minor issue for me. At work, I've been running 10.5 and setting up a 10.5 server for ActiveDirectory integration and I've had nothing but issues with network mounts and network integration in general. So, when I found out last night that my iTunes library wouldn't open over NFS, it didn't surprise me. The issue was that the Mac had no problem mounting the NFS volume, but once you started clicking on files in Finder, they'd show up as zero length files and then they'd disappear. In the terminal, they showed as normal files, but of course, I was just doing directory listings, not actually opening the files.

Apparently, OS X 10.5 changes the NFS client behavior. However, there is a "fix" that I've implemented on the NFS server side, since I don't care enough to debug OS X in my personal life. I deal with it enough in the work environment. On the server side, I kept seeing these errors:

lockd/statd: failed to create /var/lib/nfs/sm/: err=-21

The problem there is that there's no hostname at the end of that path. For whatever reason, the OS X 10.5 is either not reporting the hostname, not the way openSuSE 10.2 expects it, or openSuSE 10.2 has an issue. Since I didn't have this problem under OS X 10.4, I'm guessing the first two options are the reason, not the third. Anyway, change the following value in /proc. I'm going to throw it in boot.local to survive reboots probably.

echo "0" >/proc/sys/fs/nfs/nsm_use_hostnames