SCP is a great way to copy files from somewhere to somewhere else, but as we all know it can be slower than (insert slow metaphor here). Here’s a way you can get way speedier(really a word?) transfers using scp.
scp -c arcfour -C sourcefile desthost:
Yay! I posted.
Recently, I was looking for a way to charge my Pearl under Linux, and stumbled across this project: Barry .. Well thats nice and all (as a matter of fact I may install it when I get home to sync my BB), but right now, I just want to charge it! Barry has a small app included called bcharge that sets your USB port to 500mA (the power level that the BB expects when you plug it in).
I’ve repackaged the bcharge app and the headers, and you can get it here: bcharge.tgz
To compile, make sure you’ve got at least g++ and libusb installed, and then do:
tar xvzf bcharge.tgz
g++ -o bcharge bcharge.cc -lusb
And then just run bcharge a la: ./bcharge and your Blackberry should be off and charging!
I’ve always wanted to use some sort of phrase that I would use if I were a sandy beach hobo, living in dirt on the beach of some continent somewhere. Did you see it? Wasn’t it awesome? Well, in my own special crazy, it was. Anyway, on to the VIMPERATOR!
No, it’s not some sort of weird kitchen appliance. And no, you wont find it shoved in the back of a drawer in your sisters bathroom when you were looking for “floss” (reads: moisturizer).
VIMperator is this awesome Firefox plugin that makes Firefox act like every geek-elites favorite editor, vim. (Don’t say emacs, I’ll cut you).
From the website description: “Vimperator is a free browser add-on for Firefox, which makes it look and behave like the Vim text editor.”
Well isn’t that what I just said? Wait, it gets better.
“It has similar key bindings and you could call it a modal web browser, as key bindings differ according to which mode you are in.”
LIKE OMFG. IT IS MODAL. IT HAS THE CHANGES MODE WHEN YOU PRESSES THE KEYS.
Seriously though, it is damn awesome. Do you hate the looks from people when you use your mouse to navigate the internet? Don’t like being labelled a windows user by people who can’t see your screen? Using the ratpoison window manager? Then this plugin may be for you.
All in all, I liked it. But you have to be a hardcore vim lover to give this plugin the respect it deserves.
Vimperator can be found here.
Well, I’ve had a functional ESXi server up and going for a little over two weeks now. No apparent stability problems to be reported. The kernel itself is a memory pig though, much larger than the licensed version of ESX Server. ESXi is ~700MB res, while ESX is 200MB, ouch. So, I had to upgrade my RAM to 4GB. No big deal, RAM is cheap for that box anyway. At the peak of my testing, I had 10 windows VMs running concurrently (Don’t worry, I have collected that many XP licenses over the years. Sad, eh?). They had very little to no performance degredation when opening applications or doing interwebby type stuff, it was kinda nice. Yesterday I nuked all of the VMs, but just because no sane person would have that many windows machines in their house, virtual or otherwise. Next up, I’ll throw Gentoo and Rosetta@Home on there and see how ESXi holds up. That should be really interesting.
Never would have guessed that on-disk temporary tables are that bad for performance. Peter over at the MySQL Performance Blog shows otherwise.
So, since I’m a total hardware monger and VMWare just released the ESXi hypervisor for free, I thought I might give it a shot. This was two days ago. I have two boxes at the moment that were just sitting around, a SuperMicro 1U server with a P4 1.8 (yawn) and an HP Pavilion desktop with a dual core P4 in it. So, I gave the SuperMicro a shot. Apparently, to my dismay, the SuperMicro had ACPI problems, and ESXi barfed during the install. After that, I tried to install it on the HP, with more success. The only problem was that ESXi is very limited as to what kinds of network cards it will support (probably because engineers are lazy and don’t like to port kernel modules to VMKernel, or because ESXi wasn’t meant for a hobbyist market). I tried a Realtek 8139, 3Com 595C-TX, SMC, Via Rhine III, and a D-Link before I decided to drop into the tech support console and rummage through ESXi’s dirty laundry. Apparently, instead of the service console, they have a stripped down BusyBox console. Which is fine, I guess. I like the RedHat SC, but people have to have some reason to upgrade to ESX Full aside from VMotion and DRS. Poking around under /mod, I found that there were only a handful of mostly on board NICs supported (same driver names as linux… thats… coincidental.). One I did find on there was an e100, which I knew I had lying around somewhere. I finally braved the horrors of The Closet and found one buried next to an old DEC 10/100 NIC. Awesome. Installed, rescanned the Management Network, and away I went.
Now, when I say this isn’t a hobbyists virtualization HV, I mean it. It has decent performance I guess for the particular hardware (it is a desktop, afterall), and I’m mounting my VM store off of NFS, so thats going to slow it down a tad. Not to mention, that e100 has been around since before the world was created, so network performance is going to suffer a bit.
All in all, I like it. Its not Xen (it doesn’t have the speed), but I guess it makes up for it with the Virtual Infrastructure Client. Eventually, I may try it on some enterprise class hardware. If I can ever find any OTC.
For a while now, I’ve been using Velocix to accelerate my blog. Velocix is a sort of Content Delivery Network, much like Akamai and Limelight technologies. The difference between Velocix and the others is that the basic package is FREE. FREE as in “I just found a dollar in the street” FREE. Why use a CDN for a blog? Well, you never know, tomorrow I could have a stroke of genius and end up on Slashdot or Digg, and then my server would get hammered. Better to let Velocix take the load than my VPS, right? And besides, its always nice to see a startup that has a fresh look at older ideas. I haven’t done a whole lot of research on the subject, but as far as I know there aren’t a whole lot of CDN’s that use BitTorrent as a peer distribution protocol. That’s Neat. Neat with a capital “N” Neat. The management portal is nice and speedy, and they have log file downloads in W3C format available in case you’re a hit monger. The one thing that would be a cool feature would be an FTP site where you could pick up your log files, and maybe for the paying customer scheduled automated log deliveries to FTP and SFTP sites. I’m not sure if any other CDN offers SFTP log delivery, but if there are any companies out there going for PCI compliance, its a must (seeing as how FTP is a horribly insecure protocol). Well, I’ll go for now, but I’ll leave some screen caps of the Velocix portal to wet your whistle. Go over and sign up for the basic account. It can’t hurt to try! (no, Velocix didn’t give me incentive to post this, either. It’s unbiased.)
If you’re going to be using Drupal with mod_security, making the following changes will probably save you some frustration later 
.
<LocationMatch “/”>
SecRuleRemoveById 960010
SecRuleRemoveById 960015
SecRuleRemoveById 960032
SecRuleRemoveById 950107
</LocationMatch>
Also, set SecResponseBodyLimit and SecRequestBodyInMemoryLimit to something like 51200000 and 12288000 respectively. They may seem a bit high, but if you’re managing a lot of Drupal users and permissions I’ve run into problems with them.
Happy Drupal-ing.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the Firefox web browser. It’s the greatest thing since tacos. But Firefox 2 has some of the worst performance problems I have ever seen! On Linux, if I leave one tab open with a flash movie playing, the Firefox process will eventually grow to enormous proportions. Yes, I know this seems like a Flash plugin problem, and it very well may be. But I do know that if I open the same page with Firefox 3b5, the memory usage stays constant the entire time.
