Posted by Ian Holsman
Mon, 10 May 2004 14:16:15 GMT
Ben mentions in his weblog that VOIP is getting easier, and indeed it is.
I've been using switching between using 2 different VOIP providers, and a cheap calling card as my main method of calling my main office in SF (I live in melbourne) over the last 6-7 months.
some points:
- latency is a bitch. There can be a gap of 1 second before I hear the conversation. while this might be ok on a 1:1 conversation, for a conference call it sucks big time.. this is mainly caused by me having a 200ms RTT
- drop outs. I've have the FWD service drop me out after half an hour of a conference call.. very annoying
- Clarity is good most of the time. (providing I'm no one else is using my bandwidth to do something else)
- you can get your self a UK and a Washington local #. very handy if you have bandwidth deprived friends over in those places
my rule of thumb is if I have to talk alot on the call, or the call is important I will use the cheap calling card (2/5c a minute for a cross-pacific is pretty good IMHO).
otherwise I hook up X-Ten, or my shoreline softphone and use that.
I'm still waiting for my Cisco powered office VPN, and when that comes I'll be able to use a real IP-phone which might help with some of my problems.
The other thing to look at is asterisk (a different protocol to SIP which is inter-operable), and if you don't have any friends without XP boxes .. skype.
my number is 253297.
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Posted by Ian Holsman
Wed, 05 May 2004 15:30:14 GMT
"I love my Mummy because I like when she reads books with me. I like to draw with Mummy. Mummy has a little baby in her tummy. In my new house Mummy is going to paint pink walls in my room"
--by Amelia Aged 3 1/2
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Posted by Ian Holsman
Thu, 29 Apr 2004 07:46:12 GMT
I feel so 31337.
I have my own gmail email address.
it's "kryton"
now.. what mailing lists do I want to have going there?
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Posted by Ian Holsman
Thu, 29 Apr 2004 07:42:51 GMT
We are now officially homeowners.
after renting for the last 5 years in the USA it will feel great to finally call something "ours" again.
Oh.. BTW I decided not to implement TDMA, and am using a very simple rule in mail.app. If you are not in my address book, and I haven't sent you an email before you go into a special folder...
For the last two days this seems to be effective
this is on top of spamassassin, junkmatcher, and mail.app's junk mail rules.
I'm probably spending most of my CPU time scanning mail messages now.
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Posted by Ian Holsman
Mon, 26 Apr 2004 06:39:41 GMT
Just like to go on public record to give a shout out to joe, jim, jason, greg, and linda at music downloads for a great job, in a really short amount of time.
go download music and give it a try.
disclaimer: I work for CNET and the download team rocks! (sorry if I missed anyone)
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Posted by Ian Holsman
Fri, 23 Apr 2004 16:35:04 GMT
Is email dead?
I just saw this auto-responder, and it kinda sums it all up.
Hello and thank you for your e-mail. I will be on vacation until Monday, April 26, 2004. Due to the volume of legitimate e-mail and spam, I unfortunately have no choice but to automatically delete all inbound mails while I'm on vacation. Otherwise, my inbox reaches its storage limit in a couple of days and instead of getting this friendly message, you'll get some sort of cryptic thing that makes it look like I don't work here any more, or something like that. So, to keep my inbox clear and to minimize my workload when I return, I'm just deleting all inbound messages. If you really want me to get your message, then all you must do is resend it after April 26th and I'll be happy to consider it then. Please accept my apologies for the inconvenience.
I know when I get online every morning only to be greeted to 100 unread messages, of which 50% are spam, on my work mail (this after spam-assassin and junk matcher has gone through them)
Oh.. and I just got a fax machine number @ work. I don't even know the number of it yet, but I still receive junk faxes every day on it.
anyone know of a greylisting type services which works at the mail-account level, not at the SMTP server one?
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Posted by Ian Holsman
Thu, 15 Apr 2004 15:27:01 GMT
the cd's were burning a hole in my pocket, so I thought why not waste 5-6 hours upgrading my webserver to using the latest fedora Test 2 RC2, and enabling SE linux..
selinux is not for the faint of heart.. I gave up, and am just running it in permissive mode
Wow.. what a ordeal.. first the CD-rom drive in the box didn't boot, not taking this as a 'warning' I decided to copy the boot.iso off it onto a unused partition on the drive and let grub boot it. a VERY neat trick if you want to upgrade linux/whatever from and don't want to be standing in front of the box. (and you have a serial console)
I managed to get it installed, and move the data over.. but like usual I didn't RTFM and just did what I would normally have done as if it was a normal upgrade/restore.
well.. after struggling to get my web/mail/news server up, and reading the SElinux FAQ
I threw in the towel and just enabled 'permissive' mode, which means no enhanced security. (I mean .. screen didn't even work.. )
selinux sounds great, and I did get a better understanding of how it works and I recommend people install it on a test box and have a look at it, but DON'T stick it on a box you need without going through some training/playing first.. it isn't a pop in the CD and it works (yet)
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Posted by Ian Holsman
Thu, 08 Apr 2004 15:16:00 GMT
Jeremy Zawodny compared some timings of bzip2, gzip, and rzip to compress his mail folder (which I'm assuming is 90% text)
I thought I would do it on one of our largish indexes (which we have to copy around to different places several times a day) and see if it would help.
it's original size is 1.1G and is mainly binary data.
Machine stats:
OS: RH ES3.0
2x 2.4 P-IV xeons with hyperthreading
Mem: 6G
| command | compress (r/u/s) | decompress (r/u/s) | new size | ratio |
|---|
| gzip |
2m3 | 1m58 | 0m5 |
0m33 | 0m18 | 0m7 |
566m |
47% |
|---|
| gzip -9 |
3m45 | 3m39 | 0m5 |
0m35 | 0m17 | 0m8 |
563m |
47% |
|---|
| bzip2 -9 |
11m16 | 11m9 | 0m5 |
4m38 | 4m24 | 0m13 |
538m |
45% |
|---|
| rzip |
9m6 | 8m47 | 0m19 |
5m3 | 3m27 | 1m35 |
474m |
39% |
|---|
basic summary:
when you have a 1G card in machines don't even bother compressing it, unless you have to distribute it to >20 machines.. and if so.. any of these will do ;(
If you have to use a slower link, then I still think any of these will do.
on the plus side.. I watched The Adventures of Seinfeld & Superman while waiting for the tests to run.. very funny.. the macromedia streaming via flash is a VERY cool idea and seem to work quite well.
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Posted by Ian Holsman
Mon, 29 Mar 2004 15:04:00 GMT
After suffering through 400ms latency times to work. (I live in Melbourne Australia, and work in San Francisco) I installed
Smokeping Something I can look at while waiting for my terminal to respond.
It isn't all that bad, as I can do most of my development type work locally and just push it over.. thank god for portability between my Mac & the Linux boxes.
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Posted by Ian Holsman
Mon, 22 Mar 2004 10:48:17 GMT
I was sick of keeping diffs between my workstation & the main server so I created a local repository.
I've used Subversion to hold this, and that gives me the handy ability to keep the CVS information intact as well.
so when the core nagios developers make a change, we get it too.. pretty neat eh.
Installing SVN was relatively painless, The SVN Book has a handy walkthrough for it.
The only 'gotcha's' were
- upgrading all the requisite libraries were a pain, especially starting with a REALLY old distro
- me forgetting to load mod_dav.so (and it generating a REALLY wierd error about being unable to load another module)
- and not reading chapter 6 of the manual properly causing the file permissions to go whacky when I tried using SSH to update the repository (as they it would in the docs .. /me kicks myself
anyways.. feel free to download it from the site..
svn co http://svn.webperf.org/nagios/
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