2008-12-05

Network monitoring tools

Sometimes I am in the need to watch the network traffic and for these occasions I fit to console based tools.

The first application I found – years ago – was iftop. It does a nice job, printing the average bandwidth upwards and downwards transferred for the past 2, 10 and 40 seconds for each connections.

Recently I found out two other tools like iftop, and both of them have their intrinsic advantages:
  • nethogs displays the bandwidth per process. Very nice when you want to monitor applications that doesn't provide this information in their interface. Quick note: press 'm' to switch between the display modes.
  • iptraf is the most complete tool than the above mentioned ones. It is also NCurses based however fully interactive with colors and menus. The tool states itself as a "Statistics Utility", which it is, as it allows to visualize the network traffic based on a dozen possibilities.

I also found out a very complete – for nowadays – web-based application which is ntop. It can be run as a daemon and will gather all information inside databases. You can connect to http://localhost:3000 to display graphics (rrdtool based) and zillion of information. I'm giving a try to this tool with at least a per month review.

2008-11-13

Prospective work on Xfce

As Xfce 4.6 is coming it might be good to throw updates for the panel plugins I maintain at the same time.

The panel plugins I maintain are:
  • The notes plugin
  • The FS guard plugin
  • The clipman plugin (this one is prolly the most wanted)

For the notes plugin I got already most features I was thinking of in, except formatting (which I doubt that I will work on), so the release going on here will be minor.

For the FS guard plugin I was asked to reverse the progress bar so that it shows the capacity remaining and not the free space... well something like that :-) Now I'm confused and don't remember what it really displays.

The clipman plugin needs a rewrite. To my taste it features too many options, and I will split most none-obvious options to an "Advanced..." tab. The first release will most probably be the rewrite, than will follow another release for a long asked feature that is action on pattern matching — open a web page automatically, display a menu, and so forth.

Other than plugins I maintain applications.

The applications I maintain are:
  • Xfmpc
  • Eatmonkey

Sadly for Xfmpc — a client for MPD — I no longer run MPD to listen to my music, so this hacking is freezed at the moment. My current favorite player is Audacious.

Eatmonkey is a small application where I learn to use new frameworks. There won't be an official release before very long.


Hopefully I will get the clipman plugin out before end of December!

2008-09-23

All my day from Sept. 22

Morning, 9 o'clock, I get up and turn on the computer, work starts.

11 o'clock, I finish my work stuff from the morning to jump into another priority, getting at the office, which is 110+KM far away. I was a bit doubtful if I had everything, looking and re-looking, my pants are on, my data is in my USB key which is in my carry-all.

Still, that day I learned a lesson: never ever pretend to have your wallet in your usual pants! Never. Never.

I drove around 50-60KM before it took my attention that I forget my wallet. No credit card, no licence, no money, that means a lot of trouble at the toll… I had a coin of 1€ in my pants, which means I was missing 6€40!

I stopped by at a filling station and asked random people for a coin and it took me 20 minutes :-) I love you people out there. You saved my day.

2 o'clock in the afternoon, I was at the office.

2008-09-04

Mount remote file systems (Tape #2)

I once wrote about sshfs.sh, a shell script to mount a remote file system with sshfs. This is now deprecated!

Now I'm giving a try to gvfs-mount. Currently I can mount a volume and list it with gvfs-mount --list, but I cannot browse inside it because it isn't mounted. I played with the --mountable argument, but it must be a joke. I think I need a something fuse daemon from gvfs... I'll keep this up to date.

Update: Everything is alright now. The output of ps ax | grep gvfs shows the following process: /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfs-fuse-daemon. All your mount operations will be available at $HOME/.gvfs.

The recent GTK+2.14 release introduces a widget to ask a password thats called GtkMountOperation (have a look at the GTK+ blog). It might be interesting to start a Thunar plugin, and release it officially with Xfce 4.8.

Update 2: And on a fresh Debian install (or in general anyway) don't forget to install the fuse-utils package (/usr/bin/fusermount)!

2008-09-03

Google Chrome

Is O.K.. I just tried Google Chrome, and it kicks the ass! I can already dump it against I.E. Firefox or what else there is out there.

Its design is brilliant ;-) I like using the browser as the GUI to do everything, having a simple toolbar and tabs, displaying the messages of the status bar by fading it in and out, and there is not even a heavy preferences dialog. Everything is fine.

You did a browser that is gonna rock, you three people on that comic ;-) I guess there were more than just you, isn't it?

And you, you have to try it out. I hate using Internet Explorer or Firefox when I'm on a friends machine, so now I can use Chrome that just takes a minute to be downloaded and installed and ... ready!

2008-08-31

... and moving on

Hum, yeah well my server is crap. That I already knew. But with a storm hitting the power supply (+ I fired my UPS because of that) it is really crap.

Massonnet.info is off, massonnet.org is sold, my laptop is no more (there is a post in my local git about my crappy laptop, and I guess it will take me a month or two to get it online)... And that was already too much about something related to crap.

I don't know exactly what is wrong with my server but I already found a replacement of the motherboard+RAM+CPU for a total of 149€. I'm not yet sure I want this replacement!

I still need to refer to crap. So I was looking into the Google apps a little more recently, and I tried Picasaweb. When I saw a completely unrelated album in it I dropped it... I was wrong doing that, it was the images from this blog. Sigh!

So long for the last post.

2008-03-08

Moving on

Things are moving on. I'm dumping my homepage and this blog against a new personal website powered by ikiwiki. It is already online at mmassonnet.info.

I really like the ikiwiki way, it is what I was used to do with my old homepage. I wrote to files inside directories, tho they were PHP files which gave me full power to dynamic the different pages, and I was able to use common modules inside the pages (to not reinvent the weel).

Now with ikiwiki I just wite text files with the Markdown syntax and it compiles them to HTML.