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 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.

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:

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.

I think possibly one of the most practical upgrades in VMware Server 2 appears to be the ability to automatically turn on virtual machines in a stagnated order. I have fond memories of turning on a server with 10 virtual machines, and when they all turn on at once, the hard disk grinds to a halt. This forced me to turn on the machines manually afterwards. +1 VMware in my books.

I needed another Python fix, and I need one pretty badly. I spent the weekend wondering why it appears to be impossible to edit the GUIDs inside an Exchange mailbox store (read: NOT the GUIDs stored in AD for Exchange). Anyways, I digress. My goals were simple. I wanted to use Python, wanted something to do with traffic, and wanted to play around with Glade/PyGTK and graphing stuff. My end result was a little app that allows you to specify a GPX file, and it plots the waypoints (and calculates the moving average!). Pretty simple, pretty useless, but pretty fun. I really do like pretty pictures.

I showed a few of my co-workers my graph and one replied – oh! that’s really cool. (I think only two of my co-workers are actually interested in my geekyness). He then emailed me tonight a .kmz file containing a colorized file of his speed. I looked at the kml and noticed it appeared to be dynamically allocated judging by the top speed. Well, as you could guess, I surely had to modify my code to include colors.

I recently have been playing with parsing GPX files and spitting out the results into a special KML file. I initially wrote a parser using minidom, yet after running this the first time – and my Core2Duo laptop reaching 100% utilization for 10 seconds – I realized I needed to re-write it using something else. I spent a little time reading the different parsers for XML and eventually read more about cElementTree. And it is included with Python2.5, sweet.

Status: ✅ You can likely tell that I’ve been having some fun with graphing and mapping recently. I was reading a few articles about GIS and stumbled upon a pretty darn cool project at Webopticon, which included cool pictures. I showed it to a friend thinking they would find it interesting, and then realized: oh! KML has an altitude attribute. That could be interesting. One of my projects is to create maps of Sydney’s traffic, so I have been experimenting heavily with Mapnik and OSM. I figured I could have some fun and finally parse some gps tracks and display the data.

My new guest VMs under Xen seem to be having issues where upon each reboot, the network interface gets incremented by 1. For instance, it starts at eth0, then goes to eth1, then eth2, and eventually ethX. There are two issues to fix: 1) get the count back to 0, and 2) stop it from counting again. I was able to get them to decrease by looking in the /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules file and removing all entries.