The Unexpected Gift of Incompatibility 1
Lesser Apps
Applications are like work habits or practices or anything else in life. The ones you have seem like the best when you find them. I have discovered - over and over - that my own desire for excellence is easily pleased but never satisfied. The darker side of this ambition leads to perfectionism, and the absence of it leads worthlessness. In both extremes you'll find identical results: mediocrity, insignificance and long-term failure.
Evolution
I have been using MenuMeters for quite some time and I enjoyed it. Although the software answered questions and needs since it's install, it has never advanced. In fact, according to the FAQ, nothing new has happened since January 2006. I have been displeased with the lack of new features, or improved utility, or any sort of ongoing growth in the software. However, the fact that it worked and I didn't have to answer the problem put it into the "works-even-if-it's-not-ideal" category.
Change
Snow Leopard brought out incompatibility, and with that it was time for change. I uninstalled MenuMeters prior to installing SNeopard, and therefore had no side effects. However, my O.C.D. need to bury my menu bar in seas of icons and text would not rest. Deliverance in the means on an email from a friend arrived this morning.
Answer
The interesting folks over at iSlayer have a variety of useful tools, though this is my first experience with them. I downloaded and installed iStat Menus. It's a beautiful thing. I don't know if it leaks memory, I don't know if it farks with SpotLight, I don't even know if it's going to crash when I sleep my Mac. What I do know is this.
- It has all the graphs, measures and charts which I required.
- It finally works with temperature. (Something which MenuMeters hadn't since Leopard.)
- It shows definite signs of a tool which is moving and not stagnate.
- It is free.
- It's better in every way - so far.
I can always put up a post about the horrors of pogrom and ghettos if it turns out to be an evil socialist application. (e.g. if Safari needs 500M so do I). However, the first blush indicates that i should have looked over there sooner!
Muchas Gracias Señor Piñera for your recommendations.
Snow Leopard Special
I have to say something
The most annoying feature to geek-users of Safari is the practice of uncompressing downloaded .gz files. I find the whole auto-unzip generally useful. It's a problem whenever I do things like downloading the latest pfSense. I need the original compressed tarball. It has a checksum which must match for clean upgrades. As we all know, Safari helpfully uncompresses it an leaves the tarball - a waste - for me.
Today I forgot the special right-click-Download-file step and ended up with more .tar files. There was a new behavior though. The original .gz files were in the Trash! That was good thinking. Not sure if this is a Safari change or a Sneopard change, but regardless. I like it.
Hurray for the last bastion of un-themeable GUIs and retarded iPhone Application Rejection policies. They got one thing correct.
Additional Note
I recovered roughly 14GB of disk space on my MacBookPro when I installed Sneopard. impressive. 14 gb. I just keep wondering: What the hell did it remove? I have not seen or heard of anyone else recovering so much. The best other than me was 12GB, so far. That is doing it right as well.
OpenVZ and Fedora Core
OpenVZ can have various heinous problems with udev. Most often, you cannot enter the VZ from the admin, and you cannot connnect via SSH.
beast / # vzenter 51 enter into VE 51 failed Unable to open pty: No such file or directory
In Fedora you can make a simple change to /etc/udev/makedev.d/50-udev.nodes
--- 50-udev.nodes~ 2008-01-10 16:00:08.000000000 +0000 +++ 50-udev.nodes 2008-07-30 15:44:07.223092644 +0000 @@ -1,4 +1,5 @@ # These device have to be created manually +ptmx tty1 tty2 tty3
e.g. Simply just add 'ptmx' to the file someplace. This is fairly simple and seems to work very well.
flac to mp3 1
I love flac files, and I always rip my CDs in EAC - straight to FLAC. The problem is that a couple months ago I was transfering some of my older music to my MacBook and I discovered something awful. The horror known as iTunes doesn't grok Flac. I failed to find a single plugin.
First, I sought to convert my FLACs to ALEs - because it's rad. But I gave up. I finally discovered someone already having written what I wanted - in python - w00t.
flac2mp is an awesome little script. He got it from "ogg 2mp3", and I like it.
OpenVZ vs. Scalix 2
We win again. I wanted to run Scalix for a client, inside of a VE/CT/whatever, and I tried using Fedora Core 7 to do so. I was unable to make the installer work and didn't see much in the way of help from Scalix. Here is a link to the Bugzilla page. (Login Required) Here are the important bits. Aside from discouragement I didn't get anything from Florian... Nothing except responses that was. No one else seems to give a damn if I even exist.
Whatever. The point is that with some minor extra-effort, Scalix does indeed work inside of an OpenVZ container on Linux. My host OS is gentoo, running 2.6.18-028stab053.
The Scalix package is pretty great, just up the Java memory once you have it running. The instances (two) on a system shared by two different companies work great. We migrated to Scalix from Kolab. Outlook users (all two) are happy. Thunderbird users didn't see too much of a change.
Yay for us.
inotify
We were messing w/ Postfix and Cyrus IMAPD today. Our prime goal was making a sensical approach to authenticating against a PostgreSQL-based directory. LDAP (OpenLDAP and FDS) based tools sucks for most people. Using native-box-auth is actually quite messy. The mail data cannot be easily associated with the users. You end up with data spread everywhere.
Our basic tenants are:
- Simple Database Schema - there is no need for a highly relational approach for something so simple.
- Embedded procedures where possible.
- Simple front-end.
My esteemed colleague John implemented our thoughts. He ended up with a few PGSQL functions, a couple views and a very straight-forward process.
The actual setup for IMAPD and Postfix is nearly as simple. He will be documenting it at his site later. For now, we wanted to verify the actual behaviour of postfix and imapd during SASL auth in realtime. We turned to inotify. I install pyinotify, and used thier Quick Start script. This ended up leaving me a simple script which monitored the directories which I wanted.
This will not show you files which failed to open. But it does good enough.
import os
from pyinotify import WatchManager, Notifier, ThreadedNotifier, EventsCodes, ProcessEvent
wm = WatchManager()
mask = EventsCodes.IN_DELETE | EventsCodes.IN_ACCESS | EventsCodes.IN_OPEN | EventsCodes.IN_CREATE # watched events
class PTmp(ProcessEvent):
def process_IN_CREATE(self, event):
print "Create: %s" % os.path.join(event.path, event.name)
def process_IN_DELETE(self, event):
print "Remove: %s" % os.path.join(event.path, event.name)
def process_IN_ACCESS(self, event):
print "Access: %s" % os.path.join(event.path, event.name)
def process_IN_OPEN(self,event):
print "Open: %s" % os.path.join(event.path, event.name)
notifier = Notifier(wm, PTmp())
wdd = wm.add_watch('/etc', mask, rec=True)
wdd = wm.add_watch('/usr/lib/sasl2', mask, rec=True)
while True: # loop forever
try:
# process the queue of events as explained above
notifier.process_events()
if notifier.check_events():
# read notified events and enqeue them
notifier.read_events()
# you can do some tasks here...
except KeyboardInterrupt:
# destroy the inotify's instance on this interrupt (stop monitoring)
notifier.stop()
break
Ahsay Backup Behind Nginx (w/ SSL Proxy)
In order to get Ahsay working behind and SSL proxy which passes traffic to port 80, you have to modify your conf/server.xml and set a few settings on ol' Nginx.
Add to your server.xml, non-SSL connector declaration
scheme="https" secure="false" proxyPort="443" redirectPort="443"
nginx config section
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:9080;
proxy_redirect http://archive.myisteam.com https://archive.myisteam.com;
proxy_redirect http://archive.myisteam.com:80 https://archive.myisteam.com;
proxy_redirect https://archive.myisteam.com:80 https://archive.myisteam.com;
.....
Apart from that, it's perfectly normal
Special thanks to Cliff Wells. For Tireless effort in the face of java.
Thanks as well to the Apache Documentation efforts. Tomcat Connector Docs
MSDE, SQL2005 Express, Memory Tuning 4
If you have to work in networks with any Windows products, coupled with MSDE or SQL Express you will eventually run into memory consumption problems. Apparently no GUI interface deals with it. I have seen numerous complaints on the Internet for sqlservr.exe consuming loads of memory. Some psychos recommend "uninstalling and re SBS Diva has a great article which I will here condense:
osql is the command-line tool for monkeying with MS-SQL200*.
c:\> osql -E -S MYSERVER\instancename 1>
So, first add the "Process ID" column to Task Manager. Note the PID of the offending SQL process. Next, open command prompt, and run tasklist /svc. Locate the PID matching the process, and find the name you want:
sqlservr.exe 1972 MSSQL$SBSMONITORING sqlservr.exe 2020 MSSQL$SHAREPOINT
The part after the '$' is the instancename. (Hopefully you already know your machinename.)
Once you have the instance, run osql as shown above.
c:\> osql -E -S MYSERVER\instancename 1> sp_configure 'show advanced options',1 2> reconfigure 3> go 1> sp_configure 'max server memory',128 2> reconfigure with override 3> go
max server memory: this option is in megabytes. This will change the 'MSSQL$INSTANCENAME' to operate at 128 Megabytes. (When set this way, most of my instances reported between 160M and 180M when in use.)
Notes
It's simple to list all of the configured parameters for the server, simply load osql, as shown above, and run:
1> sp_configure 'show advanced options',1 2> reconfigure 3> go 1> sp_configure 2> go
That will dump all the configured options. It of course enabled advanced options.
Port Forwarders
Everyone needs a decent IP port forwarder, once in a while. Here are three great ones:
- Thread-based, this is my most frequently used.
- Async-Core - recently used when the threaded model wouldn't forward an ssh session (???)
- Pinhole - another threaded implementation.
The Async-core version is clearly the hottest. It runs as slick as can be, and (at least for low-b/w) it was staggeringly quick.
VMWare Server and NAT. 1
User Setup
gpasswd -a vmadmin vmwareRun the vmware-config.pl - Note the network numbers.
Network Setup
e.g.- Host-only: 172.16.42.0/24
- NAT: 10.51.1.0/24
- vmnet0 172.16.42.1
- vmnet8 10.51.1.1
--- vmware-authd~ 2007-10-13 13:26:18.830128814 -0700
+++ vmware-authd 2007-10-13 13:36:42.833942428 -0700
@@ -10,5 +10,5 @@
user = root
server = /opt/vmware/server/sbin/vmware-authd
type = unlisted
- only_from =
+ only_from = 0.0.0.0/0
}