I found VMWare Server to have very slow I/O, and sought to improve it. Below are a list of tests I performed, the change, and the results. ### Host OS ### /dev/sdb1: Timing buffered disk reads: 220 MB in 3.05 seconds = 72.17 MB/sec kelvin@gorilla:~$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdb1: Timing buffered disk reads: 266 MB in 3.01 seconds = 88.33 MB/sec kelvin@gorilla:~$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdb1: Timing buffered disk reads: 310 MB in 3.01 seconds = 102.99 MB/sec ### Before Changes ### /dev/mapper/openfiler-data: Timing buffered disk reads: 8 MB in 3.36 seconds = 2.38 MB/sec [root@files etc]# hdparm -t /dev/mapper/openfiler-data /dev/mapper/openfiler-data: Timing buffered disk reads: 24 MB in 3.63 seconds …

I’ve been a little delinquent in sharing my life stories, so hopefully this weekend will make up for the past few months. I decided it was time to go camping again, so on Friday night I met Remko and Daisy and drove north towards Colo: the middle of nowhere, yet only 45 minutes from the outskirts of Sydney. I set up my tent and started cooking dinner: curry! That’s right, I was not exactly roughing it. Soon after dinner, I curled up in my new two-person tent and quickly fell asleep.

I rank OSSEC as one of my favorite pieces of open source software, and finally decided to play around with it more in my own free time. (Yup, I do this sort of stuff for fun). My goal was quite simple: send syslog packets from my Cisco to my “proxy” server, running OSSEC. I found that, although OSSEC supports Cisco IOS logging, it didn’t really work. In fact, I couldn’t find any examples or articles of anybody actually getting it to work.

As you can tell from reading some of the other pages, I like Linux and open source. But I also like to answer the question “what if…” This post is my [brief] run down of answering “what if I could run Django on Server 2003 with SQL Server and IIS.” Why, you may ask? To be honest with you, at this point, I don’t really know. One of the deciding factors was seeing that the django-mssql project maintains support for inspectdb, which means I could take a stock 2003 server running SQL Server, inspect the DB, and build a web app on top of it. The Django docs offer a lengthy howto for using Django with IIS and SQL Server, but the website for PyISAPIe seems to have been down for the …

I’m always forgetting the exact string to enter at the CLI for updating the IOS on a wireless Cisco AP, so I’ll just put it here to end my future searches: Chimp# archive download-sw /force-reload /overwrite tftp://192.168.83.150/c1100-k9w7-tar.123-8.JEC1.tar 192.168.83.150 obviously being your tftp server, and the .tar file sitting in the root of the tftp server. I suppose if you wanted to backup your IOS you could do something along the lines of:

Backing up your Openfiler box to S3 While I don’t think most pople would expect to backup their entire NAS/SAN to Amazon’s S3, there might be a few very crucial things you need to backup. I’ve seen an implementation using Ruby and s3sync – something that I do on my server – but I’m trying to migrate everything to Python. Although there are a lot of great tools out there for S3, many of them Python-based, I wanted to do one thing and do it well: have one complete full backup available, and using as little bandwidth as possible. In these regards Duplicity would work well, except I wanted the ability to browse the S3 store using any other tool.

Using TimeVault with a shared drive as a backend is actually quite easy, but it does require a few special things setup. Note: this is gonna be a brief summary. Install samba-tools, smbfs… sudo apt-get install samba-tools smbfs A lot more other stuff may install as well. Create a script that mounts your samba share. You could also do this in fstab, but I tend to suspend my laptop when I come home, and I like clicking buttons.

I’m writing down these quick notes so I can remember the steps for getting py2exe to work with GTK. Download the GTK+ runtime Download py2exe Copy over your project into the windows box Create a setup.py file (see below) Run “c:\Python25\python.exe setup.py py2exe” Copy over the lib, etc, and share folder from C:\Program Files\GTK2-Runtime into the dist folder Run app! setup.py: from distutils.core import setup import py2exe setup( name = 'ploteq', description = 'Bunnys Plotting Tool', version = '1.0', windows = [ { 'script': 'ploteq.py', } ], options = { 'py2exe': { 'packages':'encodings', 'includes': 'cairo, pango, …

I’ve lived in several different parts of the world, and they all do internet differently. Back in the US I had 8Mb/sec cable (leaving just before Fios was really an option, darn!) In New Zealand, for instance, I was paying for “high speed ADSL” rated at 1.5Mb/256k. Vrooom. Up in Taiwan I was paying 1/2 what I paid in New Zealand, but for 12Mb/1Mb. Down to Sydney and we have a rated 24Mb/1Mb.

This is the laundry list of things I did while creating a mod_tile VMware appliance based on Ubuntu Server 8.04. I’ve kept descriptions limited but left all the commands in. Let’s start installing things… Useful goodies for compiling source sudo apt-get build-essential More goodies for Mapnik + Friends sudo apt-get install libboost-dev libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-filesystem1.34.1 libboost-iostreams-dev libboost-iostreams1.34.1 libboost-program-options-dev libboost-program-options1.34.1 libboost-python-dev libboost-python1.34.1 libboost-regex-dev libboost-regex1.34.1 libboost-serialization-dev libboost-serialization1.34.1 libboost-thread-dev libboost-thread1.34.1 libicu-dev libicu38 …