Category: OpenSource

My First Donation to an Open Source Project

I am glad to say that I finally donated to an open source project today. I have been thinking about donating to various open source projects over the years and have never gotten around to donating. The lucky recipient is PortableApps.com. They made a pitch for money, they were part of the group I was considering donating to, and they caught me at the right time.  Good for them!

Portableapps is one of several open source products I use on a regular basis. I like programs that do not mess with the windows registry and portableapps has a whole bunch of programs that are minimally invasive. As an old IT guy I have re-installed my fair share of operating systems due to registry problems. I even installed portableapps on some servers I care for. If you are careful you can use one copy available to several computers by using a shared network drive. Most of the portableapps applications I install are applications I use occasionally. The one exception is the portableapps version of Google Chrome. I guess I started using the portable version in response to some Internet Explorer problems and never changed. One of the nicest features of portableapps is that it is easy to update your applications.This is one of the cleanest and nicest ways to keep your occasionally used programs up to date. Nice job John!

Compiling Open Source Programs using MinGW/MSYS

MinGW, a contraction of "Minimalist GNU for Windows", is a minimalist development environment for native Microsoft Windows applications.

I was looking at an open source program(TCL/TK) recently and decided to try compiling it from source. I checked out the Tclers wiki and it had instructions for several different programming environments. In the past I had mixed success using Microsoft’s Visual Studio Express and Cygwin environments to compile open source software. Getting pre-made binaries is so much easier! Since I was feeling adventuresome, I opted for the MinGW/MSYS environment. I was looking for a lean, mean open source compiling machine.

Using the latest mingw-get-inst version the installation of MinGW/MSYS was pretty simple and quick. Then I followed the Building Tcl/Tk with Mingw instructions. Since I had already installed MinGW/MSYS, I skipped the part of the instructions that installed it. Within a couple of minutes I had a compiled version of TCL/TK. I believe I installed the MingGW/MSYS environment and compiled TCL/TK in a shorter time than I would have spent installing Visual Studion Express.Winking smile

Since this compiling test went so well I was curious whether I could repeat this feat on a slightly more difficult animal, OpenSSL. The INSTALL.W32 had sufficient instructions to compile the program but I had to do it twice. MinGW/MSYS is almost Linux. The problem I ran into was that it does not handle symbolic links very well. The note said it was essential that you use MSYS to unpack the source and they were right.  Fortunately the "configure" stage fixes the problem. Everything went well except that I got a statically linked executable and I did not see the shared libraries, libeay32.dll and ssleay32.dll.  It took me a little more looking before I figured out how to create the libraries. In my case I used the command, "perl Configure mingw shared –prefix=/c/OpenSSL", to re-create the executable and shared libraries. If you looking for a lean environment to create windows binaries from open source programs, this environment is attractive. It is fast, uses the standard GNU compilers, and is free.

Creating a Portable Padre

Padre logo

I think I was bored on a slow Friday afternoon so I started updating non-critical software.   Somehow I found a portable version of Perl, Strawberry Perl, and an IDE for Perl called Padre. An IDE is a help for someone like me who does not use Perl very often. Since I have a love-hate affair with the Windows registry, I also prefer portable applications. Since all of my portable applications are Portableapps.com applications, I prefer portable applications that fit in this framework. So I found a “portable” Strawberry Perl. However it was not in the Portable Apps framework. I found an installable version of Padre but not a portable version. I am guessing that there is a Perl/Padre version issue since they only build Padre for Perl 5.10. The “portable” version of Perl I was looking at is 5.12. So I decided to ignore the problems and create my first Portable Application. If it doesn’t work I won’t use it. Here are my steps for creating a Portableapps version of Strawberry Perl with Padre(45.7 MB).

  1. Download Portable Strawberry 5.12.
  2. Create PortableApps folder structure for new application called StrawberryPerlPortable
  3. Create StrawberryPerl Portable Application
    1. Install Portable Strawberry in "app" folder.
    2. Create appinfo.ini
    3. Create Launcher folder and StrawberryPerlPortable.ini pointing to portableshell.bat
    4. Create Portable application using Portableapps.com Launcher
  4. Test
  5. Install Padre using cpanp. Ignore errors.
  6. Modify portableshell.bat to start padre rather than cmd.
  7. Test example scripts
  8. Final Test: Install my cidrmerge application.
    1. Install NetAddr::IP::Lite
    2. Install Net::CIDR::Lite
    3. Test cidrmerge.

Notes on Installing the Network Monitoring Appliance

A couple of weeks ago I installed the Network Monitoring Appliance using the tutorial on HowToForge.com. Prior to installing the Network Monitoring Appliance I was planning to give the latest community version of GroundWork Monitor, http://www.groundworkopensource.com/products/community-edition/index.html another trial. My network monitoring objectives were to have the Network Monitoring appliance notify me of problems on a remote web server and on my local network. Although these network monitoring objectives can be accomplished by a ping or a “HTTP ping”, I wanted to see a some network throughput graphs and I expected to eventually need a slightly more sophisticated data base monitoring in the near future. Nagios was at the core of the best solution for me since accomplished most of my needs and I was already familiar with Nagios from a previous trial of Groundwork Monitor. The primary attraction of the Network Monitoring Appliance over Groundwork was its much smaller resource requirements. In my environment it would be sharing a VMware ESXi server. I was also pleased to see that the Network Appliance used Jeos. For those unfamiliar with Jeos it is:

Ubuntu Server Edition JeOS (pronounced "Juice") is an efficient variant of our server operating system, configured specifically for virtual appliances.

Users deploying virtual appliances built on top of JeOS will benefit from:

  • better performance on the same hardware compared to a full non-optimized OS
  • smaller footprint of the virtual appliance on their valuable disk space
  • fewer updates and therefore less maintenance than a full server installation

For my installation I decided to use VMware’s 32-bit Ubuntu template to create the virtual machine. The only modification to the template was to adjust the disk drive size down from 8 GB to 1 GB. As described in HowToForge tutorial I installed the following programs.

  1. Ubuntu 8.04.3 JeOS as OS
  2. Nagios 2.11 for monitoring and alarming
  3. Smokeping 2.3 to observe latencies and packet loss
  4. MRTG 2.14.7 to observe network traffic’s tendencies
  5. RRDTool 1.2.19 as the Round-Robin Database for storing all measurement data
  6. Lighttpd 1.4.19 as a fast, lightweight web server frontend
  7. Weathermap4rrd for illustrating the network weather
  8. sSMTP as extremely lightweight MTA for mail delivery

The installation was quick. Almost all of my challenges was in configuring the programs. Fortunately I had previous experience configuring the most difficult to configure programs, Nagios and MRTG. It helps if you have a basic knowledge of PERL since most of programs use it. Here are my installation notes.

  1. One of the first things I needed to install to make this installation go smoother was an editor other than VIM so I could cut-and-paste from the tutorial to my SSH session. In my case I installed nano.
  2. The first application I configured was smokeping. The configuraton file is pretty easy to figure out and can be found at /etc/smokeping/config.  If everything works you will see a nice graph of the the ping statistics at http://yourip/cgi-bin/smokeping.cgi.
  3. Configuring Nagios is a bit more complicated. Since this is version 2 of Nagios, the configuration files are located at /etc/nagios2/conf.d. The main Nagios web page is at http://yourip/nagios2/. The Nagios QuickStart Document, http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/quickstart.html, is a good primer for the folks not familiar with Nagios.
  4. The Debian logo did not appear in Nagios next to the localhost. It showed a missing image. After a little research I figured out that I needed to install nagios-images using apt-get install nagios-images.
  5. For some reason I did not seem to have cron installed and running. This is easily solved by apt-get install cron.
  6. MRTG is useful if you have a SNMP router to poll. I used my pfSense Firewall as the SNMP source. MRTG provides some nice graphs of network traffic and its page is located at http://yourip/cgi-bin/mrtg-rrd.cgi/
  7. Configuring Weathermap4rrd is a little challenging since the documentation is sparse. Weathermap4rrd provides a clever network status graph once you figure how to configure it. It uses the same data as MRTG to create its graph. The network status page for weathermap4rrd is located at http://yourip/weathermap4rrd/weathermap.png
  8. I installed apticron to nag me via email about installing security updates and Logwatch to find any problems posted in the log file by the installed programs.
  9. If you plan on getting emails from Nagios when a host is down, you should test it. Duh! The easiest way to test it is to deliberately mistype the host name. If you do not get the email, you should check your Nagios configuration, sSMTP configuration, and the SMTP log file.
  10. sSMTP is easy to configure and use. In the simplest configuration you point it at the SMTP server you are sending your emails to. If you are sending emails to more than one domain, you need to connect to a SMTP server that will relay emails for you.
  11. I installed PHP version 5 to see how hard it would be to install under Lighttpd. I followed the instructions on the Lighttpd wiki and PHP appears to be running without problems. Most of these network monitoring programs have newer versions in PHP. Some day in the future I plan to migrate to the PHP versions of Nagios and weathermap but it is not necessary for this small network.
  12. I created a simple navigational menu on the main page with links to the various network management status pages. It is much easier to use this menu then remembering the addresses of the different status pages.

Quick Takes: python(x,y) – Python for Scientists

 

Python(x,y) is a free scientific and engineering development software for numerical computations, data analysis and data visualization based on Python programming language, Qt graphical user interfaces (and development framework) and Eclipse integrated development environment.

Although I would say I am conversant in Python and can see why a lot of people like it, it is not necessary for any of my job functions. In fact I recently converted the only python program used at work over to PowerShell. It was a trivial program that has been written a million times in a multitude of scripting languages. In this case it had a bug so it was a fairly trivial exercise to convert it over to Microsoft’s favorite scripting language.

Scarcely could I imagine that I would be seriously playing with python just a couple of weeks later. The trigger for this event was a blog post on SQLServerCentral.com called Python for the SQL Server DBA. In the article I was intrigued when the author said he used Python(x,y). I had not heard of it so I checked out the web site, python(x,y) – Python for Scientists, and decided to convert an Excel spreadsheet graph over to python. The graph is a fairly standard multiple line plot of time data. This is the type of graph you can create in Excel in about five minutes.

It took a lot longer to create the graph in python but I am not disappointed. Much of my time was spent learning how to manipulate Matplotlib to achieve the desired graph. Matplotlib is a library for making 2D plots of arrays in Python and looks a lot like MATLABâ„¢ . Since my knowledge of Matlab was nil, I had a lot of catching up. The flexibility of Matplotlib to customize a graph reminded me a lot of SAS/GRAPH. That is both the good and bad news. Although Excel has a lot of graphing options and I recommend it for most graphing requests, there is always some option it does not do quite right. Matplotlib overcomes those problems with lots of customization options and can be used to create some pretty exotic graphs. The bad news is there is a significant learning curve in understanding how to use those options.

Almost of all of my development for this simple graph program was done in IPython although more interactive environments like Eclipse and Spyder were available. In hindsight I would probably prefer Spyder to develop my next program. Most of my work is not very sophisticated and the lightweight integrated IDE of Spyder appealed to me more than Eclipse. Eclipse is still relatively slow at starting up. When I look at the whole python(x,y) download, the greatest contribution is the breadth of the products included in its download. You can start your work from the command line for simple programs like I did and progress all the way up to fairly comprehensive graphical user interface using QT and Eclipse for sophisticated programs. The python development has come a long way.

Adventures with iRedMail – Part II

In the first installment of Adventures with iRedMail I got it to send emails but I left the MS Exchange integration for another day. Since then I have updated my DNS zone with the DKIM information, set up local DNS information, decided on naming standards, and reconfigured Postfix several times before I got it right.

Updating the DNS with DKIM information

This task was relatively easy. I copied the DKIM information in the iRedMail.tips into a trouble ticket with my web provider. About 24 hours later it was ready to test. I sent an emails to my Yahoo account, sa-test@sendmail.net, and autorespond+dkim@dk.elandsys.com. Although the email from dk.elandsys.com was the first to respond, it said it did not work. When I checked my Yahoo account the headers said the email was signed correctly with DKIM. Ironically the return email from sendmail.net ended up in my Junk Mail folder. It said that everything worked correctly. For one more test I created a Gmail account and sent an email to it, too. It said the email was signed correctly.

Local DNS, naming standards, and more Postfix problems

The next challenge was to configure Postfix to accept both local email addresses and email addresses for the exchange server under the same domain. I used PostFixAdmin to create Aliases that pointed to the Exchange server emails(e. g. myemail@mybusiness.com points to myemail@mybusiness.local). PostFix complained about the DNS records for my Exchange server so I added mybusiness.local as a relay_domain and set up a psuedo DNS so that PostFix can find the IP address for my Exchange server. In my case I decided to let my pfSense firewall act as a local DNS server to serve up the local IP addresses. At this point I can email to everyone from a local iRedMail account but I cannot get replies until I set up iRedMail as the SMTP gateway and the Exchange server as a relay domain.

PostFix domain checks get me again!

It took me a long time to figure this out. When I changed the firewall to redirect SMTP traffic to the PostFix gateway I could not get any mail. I thought I had messed up the firewall settings so I kept trying different settings. I was pretty limited with my testing tools. If I could Telnet into port 25 I could see what is happening but I could not make the connection work as long as I was located on this side of the firewall. Fortunately I found a solution on the Internet. The dnsqueries.com site provides a page, http://www.dnsqueries.com/en/smtp_test_check.php, that allows me to check my local SMTP connection using their server.  Within minutes I figured out that my email server did not like my sender’s domain. In fact it did not like anyone’s domain. This was the same type of problem I had with the Postfix recipient domain check, so I removed the sender domain check and the emails starting flowing.

What have I achieved?

  • I have a gateway that checks all incoming mail for spam and viruses. Postini offers a similar service for about $1 per user per month. We use MXLogic at work.
  • I have an alternate email server that allows me to send email that passes the SPF and DKIM checks. One of the reasons I investigated iRedMail was to use it for sending out a newsletter at work. Like many Internet retailers we get a chunk of our business as a result of our biweekly newsletter. In our case DKIM is another piece of the puzzle to improve our sender reputation. Since both Yahoo and Gmail require DKIM signing in order to set up feedback loops, DKIM is probably essential if you have ambitions of having a pristine email list. For those folks looking at ways to cut the umbilical cord to Microsoft this is one of several low cost, low maintenance migration alternatives to a local Exchange server.

Downloads: DropboxPortable Syncs Files to Your Thumb Drive

Windows only: Free application DropboxPortable makes the popular file-syncing application thumb-drive friendly, so you can access your synced bucket from your thumb drive no matter what computer you’re using.

Downloads: DropboxPortable Syncs Files to Your Thumb Drive

I finally gave this program a test run and I was pleased with the results. Recently I split up my KeePass password database into three databases, work, charity work, and personal. I kept a copy of the files on a USB dongle so I could deal with the occasional emergency at work or at home.  I used SyncToy to keep the files  synchronized but I have screwed up on more than one occasion and updated the passwords in two locations without synchronizing first. DropBox has the potential to eliminate that problem. I am slightly uncomfortable with storing a strongly encrypted password file in the cloud but I am pretty sure there are much easier ways of getting my passwords than cracking this encryption scheme.

SourceForge.net: notepad-plus » FindReplaceNewlineHowTo

Simple find/replace compared to Advanced search/replace.

Simple find/replace is found in the Edit menu. Its shortcut is control+H. Advanced find/replace is in the Plugins menu, in the TextFX Quick menu. Its shortcut is control+R.

SourceForge.net: notepad-plus » FindReplaceNewlineHowTo

I finally researched an issue I was having with finding tab, new line, carriage return characters at the beginning of the line. I have an automated SQL procedure to create product data feeds in a tab delimited format. One of the symptoms of a soft SQL failure is that the line will wrap. This situation can be detected by looking for a first character that is either a tab, new line, or carriage return using the regex expression ^[\t\n\r]. . The simple find/replace does not find the problem lines while the Advanced version works as expected.

Picks and Pans for pfSense packages

Recently I installed the pfSense firewall and now I have started to check out some of the packages that make pfSense such an interesting firewall platform. Without going into too much detail here is my impressions on several packages.

  • NMAP – It kind of worked for me when I accessed it via the web server. It locked up the pfSense web server a couple of times. It worked fine for me via the command line and the Command page.
  • NTOP – I had not heard of this package before but I was impressed. It had lots of information about my network. Some of the information was actually useful. I am keeping tabs on my son’s Internet usage. With all of this info I kept expecting the computer utilization of pfSense to go through the roof. It did not. Whew!
  • SNORT – I did not get this package to work. It installs but the service does not start and it had problems downloading rules. I am guessing the rules issue might be related to the fact that the package was version 2.7 and the current rules are 2.8. I saw in a forum where several people were having problems running the package on pfSense. I manually uploaded a rule to see if I could start the package. It still did not start. Since I did not see any log messages, I decided it was not worth proceeding. It is hard to debug problems when you have logging turned off.
  • EXEC.php – This goes under the name of Command. It gives you the equivalent of a command prompt and it is for those of us who do not want to crank up SSH for every little thing. It is not a “package” and its disclaimer says it is not supported. However, it worked better for me than the supported packages. Go figure! I used it to verify that NMAP was working. It was a helpful tool to work with SNORT, too.
  • Internet Explorer – You need a SVG viewer plugin to view the traffic graph. I used Adobe’s version. The drop down navigation menu is quirky with IE. It opens and closes before you select an item. In IE the navigation menu is blocked by the traffic graph. I might try and fix this.

Installing Subversion? Just follow this 7 Steps « Lijin’s Localhost

Great post Lijin! Sometime ago I struggled to figure out how to install subversion on my WinXP box. The biggest difficulty I had was to understand what the folder layout for Windows box should look like. I ended up using svn1clicksetup to get a standard layout. Due to issues between Subversion and Apache 2.2, I avoided using Apache for Subversion. SVNService worked just fine for me. Recently Subversion has been supporting Apache 2.2. With a slightly modified version of Lijin’s instructions I modified my XAMPP installation to support accessing my existing repositories via Apache. Here are my steps:

  1. Install Apache HTTP server if not already installed. I prefer installing Apache via XAMPP.
  2. Install Subversion and let it update your Apache configuration. In my case I was updating to the latest version. Here is my file layout:
    1. Install directory – c:\Program Files\Subversion
    2. Repositories – c:\svnrepos
    3. Apache conf file – c:\Program Files\xampp\apache\conf\httpd.conf
  3. Since my repositories are not accessible from the network, I did not create a Users authentication file or Acesss – rights file. I can do this later if I need it.
  4. In the directory, "c:\Program Files\Subversion", create a etc directory and place another file called subversion.conf with the following data. 
     
<location repos>
  DAV svn  
  SVNPath C:/svnrepos  
</location>
  5. Add Include "C:/Program Files/Subversion/etc/subversion.conf" to the Apache conf file.
  6. Restart Apache and test the repository access.
    1. I cranked up my favorite browser and went to http://localhost/repos. I saw my project directories.
    2. I created a new directory in the My Documents folder and checked out one of my projects using TortoiseSVN and the http://localhost/repos/project1 URL. It worked.
    3. Next I created a test file and added it to repository. It worked, too.

Installing Subversion? Just follow this 7 Steps « Lijin’s Localhost

Favorite KeePass Trick

Keepass is a neat password management program but the documentation is not clear on how to set up an entry so that it will work use the same username and password with multiple web pages. As an example with the following entry, KeePass will autotype the username and password on the login screens for Yahoo, Flickr, and Office live.

Auto-Type-Window: Sign In to Yahoo*
Auto-Type: {USERNAME}{TAB}{PASSWORD}{ENTER}
Auto-Type-Window-1: Yahoo! Mail*
Auto-Type-Window-2: Connect to workspace.office.live.com*

My 10 favorite Windows programs of all time | Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com

Here is a post from ZDNet about some useful Windows programs that are low cost or free.

My 10 favorite Windows programs of all timeI’ve been using Windows for nearly two decades, and during that time I’ve tried hundreds of programs. Most come and go, but a handful have stood the test of time for me by solving a particular problem particularly well.

In this article and accompanying gallery, I list 10 Windows programs I use every day. Every one adds a feature that makes Windows easier to use or can help make you more productive. Each one comes from a company that has proven its ability to support the product and improve it over time. I’ve been using every program on this list for long enough to recommend it without reservation.

Most of the programs in this list are free; for those that aren’t a trial version is available. All of the programs in this list run on Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Windows Vista (and most run on other editions as well). I’ve devoted one full page to each program, with info and download links and enough details to help you decide whether it’s something you want to try. I’ve also provided screen shots for each program to help you see what I’m talking about.

My 10 favorite Windows programs of all time | Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com

I like to look at programs that people like to see if they have found the better mousetrap. Here is my take on his choices.

  • Process Explorer (Sysinternals/Microsoft) This is a great debugging tool but I rarely use it.
  • RoboForm (Siber Systems) I use the open source program KeePass instead. The Windows version of KeePass has an autotype feature works for most login pages. There is Linux version with a few less features. Recently I created a script to login into sites that have the login split between two screens(e.g. Banks). KeePass is free and it works.
  • Keyfinder (Magical Jelly Bean Software) I downloaded this program to check it out. I still like the tip someone wrote for KeePass. They recommended saving your product keys in KeePass. I still think this is the smarter practice. Keyfinder does not list the keys for some programs like QuickBooks.
  • ClipMate Clipboard Extender (ThornSoft Development) I guess some people like fancy clipboards and use them regularly. Some people do not care. I fall in the second group. I have used Yankee Clipper in the past but I rarely used it.
  • FeedDemon for Windows (NewsGator Technologies) This is a very good RSS Reader. I use it and it is free. Some people prefer the browser based readers like Google Reader.
  • Windows Live Photo Gallery (Microsoft) This program was somewhat interesting while I had it working. Somehow I mucked it up and re-installation did not fix the problem. I do not miss it. Flickr has more uses for me.
  • Allway Sync (Usov Lab) I use Microsoft’s SyncToy. It’s free and it works for me.
  • SnagIt (TechSmith) There are a lot of people who like this program but I do not use screen captures that often. There are a lot of free alternatives that work reasonably well if your use is occasional.
  • IE7 Pro I downloaded this program and I liked it! I think it is likely I will use its enhanced features for IE7. I had to disable the proxy to get the download manager to work.f you use IE7, you need this free add-on, which provides ad blocking, tab management, inline search, crash recovery, and all the other features Microsoft left out.
  • FinePrint (FinePrint Software) I tried Greenprint on my laptop. It seems to have the some of the features of this program. It is supposed to help you avoid printing extra unwanted pages. It does not help me. I bypass it most of the time since I either want to print everything or create a PDF with PDFCreator. Greenprint is an extra step without added value for me so I am removing it.

Some free programs that did not make the list but I use often are TrueCrypt, Notepad++, and Windows Live Writer.

FileZilla Portable 3.0.6 Released

Filezilla logoFileZilla Portable 3.0.6 has been released. FileZilla Portable is the popular FileZilla FTP client packaged as a portable app, so you can take your ftp client, server list and settings with you. This new release updates FileZilla to the latest version, works with Notepad++ Portable and other portable editors when moving between PCs, has an improved installer and launcher and assists users with updating their settings from FileZilla 2. It’s packaged in PortableApps.com Format for easy use from any portable device and integration with the PortableApps.com Suite. And it’s open source and completely free.
Read on for more details…

read more

FileZilla Portable 3.0.6 Released
John T. Haller
Mon, 11 Feb 2008 18:21:08 GMT

I updated FileZilla yesterday. I was using version 2. I manually fixed my site profiles since it did not import the entries I had for the default local and remote directories. Everything is working and it looks great!

Truecrypt 5.0

We are pleased to announce that TrueCrypt 5.0 has been released. Among the new features are the ability to encrypt a system partition or entire system drive (i.e. a drive where Windows is installed) with pre-boot authentication, pipelined operations increasing read/write speed by up to 100%, Mac OS X version, graphical interface for the Linux version…

Article about Truecrypt 5.0 at msfn.org
More info about Truecrypt can be found at their web site, www.truecrypt.org. 
Wed, 06 Feb 2008 19:38:13 GMT

I did not have any problems with the previous version. I has been rock solid for me. One of the new features is the capability to encrypt a system partition/drive (i.e. a partition/drive where Windows is installed) with pre-boot authentication. Like BitLocker that is included with some versions of Vista, this feature can greatly reduce the liability to a business stemming from a lost or stolen computer. This new feature along with some promised speed improvements make this update pretty interesting.

Nimble Method: Garbage Collection is Why Ruby on Rails is Slow: Patches to Improve Performance 5x; Memory Profiling

 

  • The News: Ruby on Rails performance is dominated by garbage collection. We present a set of patches to greatly improve Rails performance and show how to profile memory usage to get further performance gains.

  • What’s at Stake: Rails is slow for many uses and did not lend itself well to optimization. Significant performance gains could only be achieved at application level at large development cost.

  • The Upside:

    • 5x potential performance gains;
    • easy way to identify whether GC is a bottleneck;
    • deterministic process to fix memory bottlenecks;
    • set of canned patches to solve the biggest problems;
    • you can help

Nimble Method: Garbage Collection is Why Ruby on Rails is Slow: Patches to Improve Performance 5x; Memory Profiling
arunthampi
Sat, 02 Feb 2008 05:30:00 GMT

Okay, a couple of weeks ago I installed Ruby so that I could run Metasploit. Installing Ruby was a challenge since I needed to install several dependencies so that I could install RubyGems. Fortunately Simon had the answer. When I cranked up the GUI version of Metasploit, the GUI seemed slow and the console messages showed Ruby to be busier than I thought it should be. I hadn’t asked it do anything yet.  Maybe this will help! Then again maybe if I upgrade to the latest version of Metasploit(3.1) will help.

KeePassX – The Official KeePassX Homepage

KeePassX – The Official KeePassX Homepage

KeePassX saves many different information e.g. user names, passwords, urls, attachmets and comments in one single database.

Yesterday I got around to installing KeePassX on my Centos server. The rpm version worked fine but I had to manually create a menu item. For fun I downloaded the new versions of the KeePassX icon. For a very brief time I thought about compiling KeePassX from source code but it looks like I will have to do a lot of work. It uses the QT library and Qmake. I would prefer if I could set it up in Eclipse but that looks complicated.

KeePassX is a port of KeePass and it read the KeePass database on my USB stick without a problem. It maintains the same look and feel as the original program so that is a big advantage on the learning curve for me. KeePassX has everything I use except for the global auto-type hot key and the plugins.

Garry’s Bit Patterns: TortoiseSVN and Visual Studio Integration – Visual Studio 2008

Finally, I am getting around to an update to the TortoiseSVN Visual Studio Integration. The catalyst for this is the release of Visual Studio 2008 (formally codename Orcas) Beta 2, and making sure I can still play with Subversion through the IDE.

Garry’s Bit Patterns: TortoiseSVN and Visual Studio Integration – Visual Studio 2008

Adding some TortoiseSVN integration is pretty simple using Garry’s settings file. I used the SubversionMenuToolbarContextsVS2008.vssettings file.

nabber.org – Appupdater

 

Appupdater provides advanced functionality to Windows, similar to apt-get or yum on Linux. It automates the process of installing and maintaining up to date versions of programs. It is fully customizable for use in a corporate environment.

nabber.org – Appupdater

I have been playing with this program this week. It looks promising for those of us who use open source programs On Windows PCs and like to stay up to date. I think I have found a few problems. The GUI version looks a little raw so I opted to use the command line version(0.8.1).

  1. I have Autoit, Notepad++, Synctoy, and Winmerge on my PC. Appupdater says it supports these applications but it did not find them during the update process.
  2. My first “upgrade” recommended upgrading QuickTime, Flash Player, and Powerpoint Viewer. I let it install all three updates. The QuickTime installation installed some shortcuts but it did not install the program. When I clicked on the shortcuts it told me QuickTime was not installed. I ran the QuickTime update from the cache and it is working now.
  3. The Flash player update installed the player but not the ActiveX component. I found this out when I went to the Adobe site to confirm the installation. I ran the ActiveX update from cache.
  4. I get a downloading versions.xml warning during the update process. I guess this is normal since this is a warning and everything else works.
  5. When I perform the list process, I get duplicate program entries for Java, Windows Media Player, and Windows Messenger. I guess I am a little surprised that Windows Media Player and Windows Messenger are on the list since I think they are supported by Windows Update.

Update on GroundWork Open Source Installation

I do have a problem putting things down. Yesterday I wrote a post about updating to the latest version of GroundWork Monitor Open Source and the problem I had with resolving three service checks, local_mysql_database_nopw, local_process_gw_feeders, and local_process_snmptt. Today I fixed them and here’s what I did:

  1. To resolve the local_mysql_database_nopw alert I went to Nagios resource macro, USER6, and made its value null. This service check uses the value of USER6 as the mysql password. The mysql password is not set in the vmware appliance version so the correct answer is null.
  2. To resolve the local_process_gw_feeders alert I fixed the nagios2collage_eventlog.pl so that it would find the included files. Then I ran the perl file in the background. My final fix was to modify the run script in feeder-nagios-status folder to start up the eventlog.pl when the service is started. I think this is right place changed the service check parameters to allow 1 to 3 processes to be running. The eventlog process is a Pro feature.
  3. To resolve the local_process_snmptt alert I installed net-snmp and snmptt. Then I modified the parameters for this service check for this host so that it was happy with 2 to 3 services running.

The GroundWork server has been running for a couple of hours without alerts. Yea!

GroundWork Monitor Open Source

 

GroundWork Monitor Open Source 5.1

A complete availability monitoring solution that ensures IT infrastructure uptime while identifying issues before they become real problems. Unifies best-of-breed open source tools – Nagios, Nmap, SNMP TT, PHP, Apache, MySQL and more — through PHP/AJAX-based components and an integrated user interface to deliver the extensible functionality you require.

GroundWork Monitor Open Source

I finally got around to migrating my old version of GroundWork to the newest version, 5.1. GroundWork is a nice repackaging of Nagios and the 5.1 version includes some basic graphing in the free version via RRD. The paid support version has more sophisticated graphing and reporting and does a better job of interfacing with SNMP. I use the VM appliance since I am using this package to monitor a few web sites. It sends me an email when it sees a problem.

I was planning to write this post after I fixed three alerts, local_mysql_database_nopw, local_process_gw_feeders, and local_process_snmptt, on the local Linux server but I am going to turn these alerts off instead. I found the problems with the feeders(missing perl library) and snmptt was not installed but my fixes did not seem to hold. The system is running fine.