Category Archives: Linux

Monitoring network traffic: pmacct and Graphite

Recently at work we’ve needed to gain visibility on traffic flows across a global MPLS cloud. I would have explored open source solutions anyway but we didn’t have any budget so I was pushed that way regardless. The first part of the puzzle came in the form of pmacct, a daemon that uses pcap to […]

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Fail2ban monitoring itself recursively

I use fail2ban to monitor brute force login attacks on my server. However it was quite clear that the short bans intended to deter bots but not real users with fat fingers weren’t actually deterring the bots. As soon as the ban was lifted a lot of bots come straight back and keep trying, only to […]

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Forking for fun(pidgin) and profit!

So we use Jabber a lot at work for internal communication. I’ve always used Gaim^WPidgin but with the upgrades flowing through from Ubuntu Hardy I came across what I thought was a bug to do with size of (and ability to resize) the text entry window. But no, it’s a “feature”! The Pidgin ticket has […]

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Reading something into your bash history…

An interesting idea from jimmac via jdub. At home: (marty@merboo)-(03:42:46 Fri Apr 11)-(~) $ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head 106 screen 96 ssh 48 sudo 43 vim 25 ifconfig 25 cd 17 make 12 ls 12 cat 10 iwconfig …and at work: marty@boober:~ $ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in […]

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Ubuntu Hardy unlikely to have working Ralink drivers…

So I’ve been persisting with using the rt2x00 drivers with 2.6.24 on Ubuntu Hardy but it wasn’t only slow (interface was quite often at 1Mb/s rather than 54Mb/s) but unreliable, dropping out every 15-20 minutes. A quick bounce of the interface brought it back but it’s just un-acceptable to do that indefinately. I’d been booting […]

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Bankwest feedback falls on deaf ears…

$better_half was trying to login to Bankwest the other day and it didn’t work from the desktop. Tried a few different things and eventually tested it from the laptop which worked. The only difference between the two is that one is amd64 and the other is x86. I had a look at the source but […]

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Wireless interface renaming fun on Hardy…

As I mentioned in in my last post I was having problems with wireless. As the drivers for the rt2500 chipset have been a problem in the past, I assumed it was the same issue rearing it’s ugly head again. I was wrong. My system had a wlan0_rename interface as well as the expected ra0 […]

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Trackerd makes Mutt a sad MUA…

I recently upgrade my home machine to Ubuntu Hardy. Lots of teething issues including the rt2500 based wireless card not working with 2.6.24 kernels. However the one thing that caught me by surprise was Mutt stopped seeing new mail in folders other than $MBOX. After checking that I was receiving email fine, my attention turned […]

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Corner cases make me a sad panda

At $work[0] we’ve had issues with a server that has a Nvidia SATA controller. The errors look a little something like: ata2.00: cmd 60/08:78:3f:8f:3b/00:00:00:00:00/40 tag 15 cdb 0x0 data 4096 in res 40/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout) ata2.00: cmd 61/00:80:66:32:77/01:00:00:00:00/40 tag 16 cdb 0x0 data 131072 out res 40/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout) ata2: soft resetting port […]

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