Today I’ve been playing around with iSync, trying to get it to sync my Mac’s addressbook with my Nokia 6086 mobile phone (a little bit old, I know, but it’s small and it works). After trying with several methods, the two that have given me the best results are:
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I’ve just upgraded the laptop I use at work (a Dell Inspiron 6400) to Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04. The upgrade process in itself went like a breeze, but after rebooting I’ve had two issues:
- The touchpad wouldn’t work. In the end I’ve commented out all the Synaptics configuration from the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, both the “InputDevice” block and the line on the “ServerLayout” block. I’ve left only the “standard” mouse driver config pointing to /dev/input/mice, that gets all the Touchpad events too (the scrolling wouldn’t work but at least the touchpad itself does… I’ll have to further look into this).
- The wifi card didn’t work either. I’ve been using it with ndiswrapper, as the old bcm43xx driver gave me problems with some wireless networks. Now neither driver was working, and there were lots of messages from a new “b43” driver complaining that I should go to the LinuxWireless site and download a new firmware from there. So I’ve done it, following the firmware installation instructions there, and now the wireless interface is working again (I still haven’t tested it against some of the networks that gave me problems in the past with the bcm driver).
…hello rTorrent!
In the end mldonkey was too heavy for the slug. While downloading just one or two torrents it behaved quite well, but with some more and one of them big (>1Gb) it started eating up more and more memory and the slug became… sluggish. X-D
So I’m trying with different alternatives. Right now I’m running rTorrent on the server and nTorrent as a GUI on my Mac. Looks promising. 
Ladies and gentleman, let me please introduce you to my new server, the one I’ve been blogging about lately:
What? You don’t see it? Yes! The small grey box on top of the iomega disk, slightly bigger than the Fonera…
In case you don’t know it yet, it’s a Linksys NSLU2, a small device around $100 that comes with two USB2 ports and an ethernet connection. Plug an external USB hard drive to it and it’ll become available over the network like a NAS share. And the best part is: you can flash its firmware and install Debian!! 
It’s not that powerful, it has an XScale (ARM) processor at 266Mhz and only 32Mb of RAM. There are pages explaining how to install up to 256Mb. Nevertheless, it works and is small, doesn’t make noise, and has a small electrical consumption.
Up to now I’m running the following on it and it works quite well:
- djbdns
- netatalk
- mldonkey!!!
- samba, so that I can watch movies directly on myh XBox with XBox Media Center
# cat /proc/cpuinfo Processor : XScale-IXP42x Family rev 2 (v5l) BogoMIPS : 266.24 Features : swp half fastmult edsp CPU implementer : 0×69 CPU architecture: 5TE CPU variant : 0×0 CPU part : 0×41f CPU revision : 2 Cache type : undefined 5 Cache clean : undefined 5 Cache lockdown : undefined 5 Cache format : Harvard I size : 32768 I assoc : 32 I line length : 32 I sets : 32 D size : 32768 D assoc : 32 D line length : 32 D sets : 32 Hardware : Linksys NSLU2 Revision : 0000 Serial : 0000000000000000 # free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 29988 28988 1000 0 404 4808 -/+ buffers/cache: 23776 6212 Swap: 979924 41164 938760 # uname -a Linux eliza 2.6.18-6-ixp4xx #1 Tue Feb 12 00:57:53 UTC 2008 armv5tel GNU/Linux # pstree init-+-afpd—afpd |-atalkd |-atd |-avahi-daemon—avahi-daemon |-cnid_metad |-cron |-dbus-daemon |-events/0 |-getty |-khelper |-klogd |-ksoftirqd/0 |-kthread-+-aio/0 | |-kblockd/0 | |-khubd | |-3*[kjournald] | |-kmirrord | |-kpsmoused | |-kseriod | |-kswapd0 | |-2*[pdflush] | |-scsi_eh_0 | `-usb-storage |-mtdblockd |-nmbd |-papd |-portmap |-rpc.statd |-slpd |-smbd—smbd |-sshd—sshd—sshd—bash—su—bash—pstree |-svscanboot-+-readproctitle | `-svscan-+-supervise—dnscache | |-3*[supervise—multilog] | |-supervise—tinydns | `-supervise—mlnet—mlnet—mlnet |-syslogd `-udevd
After recompiling netatalk the other day in order to get it to work with Leopard, the next step was getting Time Machine to make backups over the network (and a wireless one by the way).
Problem is: despite the netatalk-powered network shares worked great for “regular” files, when Time Machine started preparing the backup it always gave me an error.
Googling about it I’ve found several stories with different soluctions, some of which worked for some people, some others didn’t. The one that did it for me is this one:
Basically it consists in creating a “sparse bundle” disk image on the local hard drive using MacOS X’s Disk Utility, giving it a specific name, moving it to the network share and then configure Time Machine to use that share.
Worked for me.
I’m installing a new fileserver at home (more on this one of these days…) and after installing the netatalk package I wasn’t able to connect to it from MacOS X Leopard, it returned an error after the user/pass prompt.
Googling about it I’ve found that you need to recompile the netatalk package, more info on this and a detailed step-by-step here: Make Netatalk talk to Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5)
A reverse cat!
# cat file 1st line 2nd line 3rd line # tac file 3rd line 2nd line 1st line
Sometimes you need to process a file starting at the end, case in point a log file and you want to go from the last lines up. I remember programming something like this in C some years ago because I didn’t knew this command existed…
Everybody knows the rsync command. It’s very useful when you need to keep two machines in sync over the network, minimizing the bandwidth used.
The only problem lies when running it for the first time, or when a new file appears and it’s newly uploaded to the other end: if the network connection is unstable and goes down, rsync deletes the partially uploaded file and it needs to be uploaded again. In other words, when copying new files instead of syncing existing ones, rsync only copies full files.
Luckily there’s a command line parameter to avoid this behaviour and, in the event of a network failure, force rsync to leave the partially-uploaded file as-is and continue syncing it from there on the next run:
# rsync –help … –partial keep partially transferred files
Many times the reason because a web server is slow and unresponsive is that it’s under “attack”, on purpose or not, by a bot. I’ve seen cases where Google Bot, bots from research engines from universities or some other kind of indexer were responsible for more than half the traffic of a site. These cases are not real DoS attacks, this traffic can be considered legitimate, but the result is that it brings the service down. You can instruct some of these bots not to visit your site so often, like Google Bot using the Google Webmaster Tools and the sitemaps and/or robots.txt files, but usually you can’t and have to consider filtering all this traffic at the firewall. But in any case, the first step is realizing that a single IP (or a couple of them) is responsible for most of your traffic, identifying this IP and using whois learn who it belongs to.
You can run something like this to list the top five IP addresses on your Apache’s access.log:
cut -d” ” -f 1 access.log | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n 5
The tar command, like many other UNIX commands, can use stdin/stdout as its input/output target by using “-” instead of a real file.
What’s this useful for? For example, copying a full directory tree while keeping dates, ownerships and permissions, locally or remotely with ssh.
$ tar cf - . | ( cd /some/other/dir ; tar xfv - ) $ tar cf - dir | ssh usr@srv “tar xfv -”
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