One of my most favourite apps for my iPhone is iStat. It lets me monitor all my *nix servers in a beautiful interface. For my Linux clients, all I had to do was download the client, extract and compile. And since my router is running pfSense (FreeBSD 7.2) I thought I might as well get iStat on there.

Apparently, the developers edition of pfSense has all the goodies to compile stuff. Without even thinking of cross compiling, I quickly set up a VM of FreeBSD 7.1 (I know little to nothing of FreeBSD so I opted to get something near 7.2) and started to compile it. I had to get libxml2 first though and for FreeBSD 7. Anyway, logged into pfSense via SSH, fetch'd libxml2 and installed it. Now, since my router had nothing to compile packages with, I built iStat in the FreeBSD virtual machine and transfered the resulting mess to pfSense via SFTP. Now, since I couldn't have run make install in pfSense, I had to create /usr/local/etc/istat.conf and filled it in with the configuration file from another Linux client. I also edited the configuration file to fit the network interface (xl0 instead of eth0).

Looking back, I probably could have done things a little different. Either way, I got the job done. Now I'm happy that I can monitor my entire network with one app. I recommend for those that are in need of a functional server monitor to check out iStat for the iPhone. Be warned that iStat only supports one interface so far.

Since I have one Windows server I like to monitor that too. And for that, I have WinAdmin for remote RDP (great app) and Weave, which is almost a Windows version of iStat (but not). Awesome monitoring gauges in there. And, since it uses push notifications, it can alert me when the CPU usage is above 92% for example.

Another great agent-less monitoring app is Net Status. It simply pings the most comment ports on your IP of choice.

Also, see the attachment for the agent compiled on FreeBSD (i386). I can't guarantee that this will work for you.

 

So, I installed VMWare Server on my Windows Server 2003 box the other day. Downloaded a Debian Lenny image and got it running. Never dealt with VMWare Server so it's pretty neat to configure virtual machines from a convenient web interface. The web interface was having issues at first, of which I tracked down to IIS. The web UI runs on port 8333 and IIS runs on port 80 of course. Disabled IIS and the web UI was up and running.

After that it was all down hill. Set the network adapter on the VM to bridged. Got the virtual machine running and started installing packages and such. At first, it couldn't resolve names so I had to correct /etc/resolv.conf and point it to my DNS servers. 

Anyway, I decided I'd set up a syslog server. Lenny now uses rsyslog but I went back with sysklog. Edit your /etc/default/syslogd, and change SYSLOGD="" to SYSLOGD="-r" for remote logging. Still on the syslog server, I edited /etc/syslog.conf and added *.* /logs/file.log to make sure everything was working.

On the clients, or nodes, I edited /etc/syslog.conf and added *.* @192.168.0.113 (or whatever your IP is). After reboots of sysklogd on the servers and the nodes, it's finally working. Going to get lighttpd working with the logs, perhaps set up a little PHP script to read the logs.

I do really like this VMWare Server, it lets me utilize this server more. I might get it running on my other servers on that note. Plus, it's free. Can't argue with that ;)

As usual, comments are welcome.

 

^{Photo by aussiegall}

With school finished with the exception of an exam or two and my domain back, I think I'll now have the motivation to get shit done.

Sysode is nearing completion: one of my projects that looks have decent. On the bad side, it uses PTB which would make it hardly scalable if at all. I could recode it so Sysode uses SQLite but I'd rather write it from scratch than transfer it. To make it feel better, a VPS would be ideal but wouldn't solve the problem.

Anyway, with my domain back (woot!) I think I'll go about fixing some stuff on this site.

For my love of coffee, I tried cold brewing the other day. More convenient, in my opinion.

7 (or so) table spoons of your favourite coffee in a mason jar and fill it up near the top of water. Let it sit over night, or at least 12 hours. Strain that lovely juice into another jar. You now have cold-brewed coffee. Pour into a cup, add milk, sugar and enjoy :) 

For iced cappuccinos (blended ice coffee), freeze an ice cube tray of the coffee you just made (with out milk/etc). I stuck 6-7 ice cubes in a blender, with about two cups of milk (call it 450mL), some chocolate sauce and vanilla Coffee-mate (honey would do, too). What you end up with, is a delicious, higher in caffeine drink.

Yes, I purposely spelled that wrong. Anyway, the entire left of the touchscreen on my iPhone doesn't work. Plugged it in at night, then didn't work in the morning. So, I've had to suffer only using the right side of the screen for the last two weeks. Going to have to restore back to factory defaults, package it up and send it off.

Luckily, I've been somewhat productive lately. I've added some new features toSysode, the free project management app I've been working on since late August. There only needs to be a couple features added (member search, user control panel, etc.) and then it'll be mostly done (err..). And, for once, it looks half decent.

School'll be out in about two weeks; summer job then. Makin' bank...

I wish I had time to work on my projects (Torrentino.net expired a little while ago) since most of them need updating. WorkSimple is in a somewhat stable state. Good news though, I might be getting geekness.eu back. I was too lazy to renew it and lost it.

Nothing new has happened, making this a rather boring blog post (nothing out of the usual). Maybe once I get my domain back I'll get my ass to work and fix up this site (broken links and such) and some of my unfinished projects.

WorkSimple needs a complete overhaul, the main code was used in JAB (Just Another Blog) around two years ago but was using text files instead. The administration side of WorkSimple needs to improve greatly.

School's almost out, 'bout another three weeks then that's it. 

Been bored lately, so I'd thought I'd make an IRC bot in PHP. I wasn't sure how they worked, so I found this to be great: http://www.hawkee.com/snippet/5330/

I added a little more to it, using switch() instead of an if statement. So, instead of:

if ($rawcmd[1] == "!sayit") {

I changed it to

 switch(rtrim($rawcmd[1])) {

and of course everything else in between. 
See the full code here: http://pastebin.com/4F9XPkVx or here http://pastebin.org/205819
Not much has changed, but with switch() I found it easier to add more commands. Again, I didn't write most of it. Feel free to test it out though.

Blog has turned to shit, no post in almost a month now. I guess due to the loss of my domain (geekness.eu), there's less traffic and less of a motivation to do anything. Any links to this site would be using the geekness.eu domain.

Again, my work has come to a standstill. Nothing new has happened. Absolutely nothing. Guess I should start doing something. Happy that I can get Opera on my iPhone though, heh.

Yet another blog post telling my readers that I'm alive...