New work laptop

Thu, 11/01/2007 - 20:38 — Michael

Recently I changed jobs. With the change came the opportunity to configure and have the use of a laptop.

Given the company standard was to use Dell, I ventured to the Dell website and spec'd myself up something that would give me the scope to do pretty much anything that could be thrown at me in terms of technology.

I got myself a 4Gb RAM, Intel Core 2 Duo T7100 @ 1.80GHz with 250Gb HDD and 512Mb GPU GeForce 8600M GT (G84). Awesome little machine to use!!!

I immeadiately threw F7 onto it without a drama and here is the smolt profile to go with it.

http://smolt.fedoraproject.org/show?UUID=72deca2d-457d-4ee8-8cd9-7e0eb80...

Calculating the volume of email delivered through Postfix

Sat, 10/27/2007 - 06:40 — Michael

Here is my quick and dirty way of running a couple of simple command across a Postfix log to determine the volume of email delivered on any one day.

Of course it could be more effecient than parsing the log file in full three times, but hey I needed it in a rush and it works.

What I would like to do (and most probably will) is have this logged to a database or something so that I can grab stats quickly and produce some reports. That will come in time. :-)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

#!/bin/bash
count=0;
today=`date +"%b %d"`;
final=0;
sizes=`grep -B 1 -iP "^$today.*message accepted for delivery" /var/log/maillog|grep -ioP 'size=\d+' -| cut -f 2 -d '='`;
for size in $sizes; do  
let final=$final+$size;
let count=$count+1;
done; 
spam_emails=`grep -ciP "^$today.*identified spam" /var/log/maillog`
unknown_users=`grep -ciP "^$today.*User unknown in relay recipient table" /var/log/maillog`
echo Date \: `date +%A` $today `date +%Y`
echo Server \: hostname.domain.name
echo Total emails received \: $count 
echo Total Size of accepted emails \: $[final/1024] Kb
echo Spam emails \: $spam_emails
echo Attempts to deliver to unknown recipients \: $unknown_users

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Whats been happening

Thu, 10/25/2007 - 14:21 — Michael

Well I must admit that it has been much longer than I had hoped in between posts.

I have no real excuse although there has been a lot going on.

  • I have changed jobs
  • We have been to Queensland
  • David has turned one!!!
  • Cathy has signed up for teaching relief days and has done 4 or 5 ( I can't recall exactly)
  • I am still playing squash on Monday nights and am now also playing touch football on Wednesday nights
  • David is noe waking at night again - wish he would stick with sleeping through.

So now I am commiting to be more active and post about day to to day activities which I am participating in or topics which are related to the things that I am doing.

News aggregation, feed readers and RSS

Wed, 10/24/2007 - 20:22 — Michael

I really think RSS feed readers (my favourite is Liferea ) are an under utilised resource in the worklpace as news gathering systems. I see far too many users relying on one or two web sites to gather news from. These sites are only reporting on a small subset of the news which is going on globally or in any one particular field.

Using the basic features of RSS and feed readers would allow them to aggregate information from 10 or more industry or topic specific sites into one place and browse through them locally would be much
more efficient. The information is in one place which is more accessuible and faster to filter through. It is classified by content provider in order of release date. What better way to stay in touch and informed about any topic.

In terms of infrastructure load and Internet usage the effect is minimal. When used in conjunction with a properly configured web caching proxy the bandwidth usage is almost neglible. There are productivity gains from the employers point of view. Staff will spend less time surfing aimlessly and more time reading relavant content and gaining information.

Now all I need to do is test some WIndows based feed readers and select one for deployment at the office. Following that will be some training and info in what the product does and how to use it.

RSS readers on the corporate desktop here we come!!!

Moved to a hosting provider

Sun, 08/26/2007 - 04:13 — Michael

I have always hosted all my websites and email using my humble little home Internet connection. In recent times we have upgraded the home Internet connection from a cable provider who's speeds and pricing were once but no longer competitive to a ADSL2+ service. This has opened my eyes to a couple of things.

Firstly, having one national provider for the hardware and lines to your home can make them a little complacent. Ranging from the advice I was given when I first enquired about moving our telephone and Internet service across right up to the physical switching of lines and connection. We have just come through a process which took 4 weeks and in the final week took 5 house calls in 8 days to get it right.

Secondly, I have found that the quality of the techincal infrastructure and thus the connection reliability using this technology is far lower than the privately owned and maintained cable connection which we moved from. During the past 4 years of cable we had one outage, which was due to a lightning storm which took out a piece of hardware nearby. That is literally one Internet outage in 4 years. Compared to the daily drop outs and connection timeouts which we get with the new provider I am really surprised.

All this may be due to the distance from the exchange or the quality (or lack of) of the lines to our house. Anyway I am still yet to be impressed with the uptime and will keep monitoring it to see how it pans out.

So in a nutshell, all this caused me to look for alternatives to hosting everything here and move it out. I have settled for a midrange package which provides some customisation with all the standard features. One thing which I did not get and I am going to try and do without is shell access. I always thought I would need it, but I figure I can use a simple hosting provider for general purpose stuff and do any funky development and testing from home.

Now all the main sites can be found at the following URLS's :

http://blog.michaelmanning.org/ - the main blog

http://blog.michaelmanning.org/gallery2/ - our family photo gallery

http://www.michaelmanning.org/ - this site, my personal blog and articles.

PHP 5 should be moving to mainstream

Tue, 07/17/2007 - 14:16 — Michael

As a web application developer and believing that high quality, interactive and easy to deploy web sites are the way of the future for service delivery and information management I am fully behind the adoption of PHP 5 as the default for PHP applications and hosting providers.

Read more about the movement here

Using KVM to run Windows now on my laptop

Sat, 07/07/2007 - 21:00 — Michael

Previously when I needed to run Windows for testing or development at work I would run Windows under VMware. This was great and VMware is truly an amazing ground breaking piece of software. Even the model of providing VMware Player, and VMware server for free are brilliant business and marketing decisions.

All that aside I have been experimenting with the Open Source vitrualisation technologies quite a bit lately. For personal (desktop and laptop) vitrtualised services, testing anf development I have found KVM to be more than adequate. Recently I have moved my own PmWiki, Drupal, and other development websites and databases into one KVM machine and also started using another Windows KVM machine for any Windows testing required.

To do create and manage both of these virtual machines I have been using the default Fedora tool virt-manager. For the Linux install I found this to be a breeze. The Windows install was a little less smooth as I needed to pass in the "-no-acpi" parameter during the initial image creation. So to do this one I had to resort to the command line and as the root user issue this command

qemu-kvm -no-acpi -m 384 -cdrom /dev/scd0 -boot d -M pc winxp-pro-kvm.img

Following that when prompted to install any other drivers necessary to boot I had to hold down the "F5" when Windows started. This allowed me to pick from two options. Use a "Standard PC" or "Other". I picked "Standard PC" and the install continued fine. This tip came from the Ubuntu forums.

N ow all I need to do is fire both images up from the virt-manager GUI when needed.

Virt-manager automatically sets up the networking for you, including a DHCP server running on the host virtual networking interface. There was only one more thing I needed to do in order to get the machines fully connected to the Internet just like a normal host. Enable TCP/IP forwarding on the host. That was as simple as adding it to the /etc/sysctl.conf so that everything would be fine for next boot and to get it working straight away, just type this as root.

echo "1" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

Home and hosed, and now I can do all my work and dev in vitrual machines using completely open source software.

I will let you know how it is all going aftera few weeks.......

Things that are truly cool

Tue, 06/26/2007 - 14:54 — Michael

I made a decision about our home internet connection about 2 months ago and went from cable to the house (cat 5) which is provided by a local company to the standard ADSL connection which comes in over the copper telephone wire. Reasons were pretty simple, because the speed was greater and the cost lower.

I also wanted to install Asterisk and run all our home phones using this and through a VOIP provider.

Cutting to the chase. The Internet connection has been anything but reliable. We would be lucky to get one connection session of around 5 hours in any one day. The rest of them more than likely will average at around 30mins before the connection drops out. I have made numerous calls and sent many emails to the helpdesk and support forums and acheived very little.

Until tonight when I got the connection problems escalated. But the really cool thing.....

I called the helpdesk using the VOIP phone and troublesome Internet connection. While I was on the phone to them they perfomed some testing which dropped the Internet connection twice. The phone went dead and the router status pages went through the disconnected, initialising and connected again, TWICE. The on hold music came back and the when the helpdesk operator returned the phone conversation continued uninterrupted.

What do you credit that too?? Asterisk, SIP or who knows what, but if I had not seen and experienced it myself I would have said it could not happen. I think I need some rest ;-)

I also just reinstalled the webserver_auth module into my other home Drupal installation which I use to keep all sorts of stuff, and jeez I should have done it long ago. If you are going to install it into Drupal 5.1 then this yet to be commited patch works a treat.

Virtualisation on Fedora 7

Tue, 06/26/2007 - 13:17 — Michael

Following on from an earlier entry I have been playing with Xen and KVM on Fedora 7.

All I can say is that whole system has progressed so far in the last 2 releases that it is mind blowing. You have the same GUI interface for configuring the Xen machines as you do the KVM ones. They are both seamless with about 5 screens and about 12 settings to tweak before you jump into the install. You then have the Virt-Manager GUI to manage the starting and stopping of the machines with status information about the resources each of are using.

If you boot into a Xen kernel then you get to pick if you want to run fully virtualised or paravirtulised from the first screen. When you are running the default kernel you can only run fully virtualised machines at this stage, but get to pick if you want to enable the hardware acceleration for KVM that is available if you have the instruction extensions on your CPU.

I initially played with the Xen machines and then flipped back to the hardware accelerated KVM machines. I am having trouble getting the Win XP image to finish installing as I get teh blue screen voper and over. I have tried teh F7 key trick durig the initial boot and configuration but that seems not to work. On the other hand I have two other machines which I use every day on my laptop. One machine is my dedicated web and database server and the other is my local Asterisk machine which connects to my home machine allowing me to call home for free from anywhere at anytime. Now that is cool !!!

The real cost of road works

Thu, 06/21/2007 - 14:36 — Michael

I have never really thought about it, but I have now had time ( while sitting in the goddam traffic every morning for the past fortnight) to really contemplate the real cost of road works.

On my way to work lately I have been having to either go through, or use an alternate route to a client office. Now the road works started in early December last year. That is more than six months again now. What used to be about a 20 minute trip has turned into around 50 minutes. It doesn't matter which way I go, the alternate one or right the middle of the road works.

Ok here comes the

<rant>
Granted that the development needs to go ahead and granted that the infrastructure improverments are going to he great, but did the government really cost in the fuel and time that was being spent in the traffic jams. This does not include the personal injury and vehicle costs of the three accidents which I have seen and who knows how many more I have missed. Hypothetically speaking, even if there were 5 thousand people late for work every day by 2 mins for the past six months, that equates to about 1.2 million minutes, about 20000hrs, or about 2500 days of lost working hours. Considering that is about 500 weeks of work which is just more than ten years on the average australian weekly wage of $1070.40, that equates to a wage cost of about $535200. Now who is going to answer for that half a million in the next budget for one lot of raod works, and don't forget that is just the time, not fuel and other incidentals.
</rant>

Maybe that is the price we pay for being a growing economy? My too bobs worth anyway

The numbers here may be wrong and please correct me if they are.

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