Shlrm.org Blag

I had reimplemented some monitoring on my network and then I got to wondering if there was a revised version of the original xen-stats stuff I was using. Turns out there is. The site details instructions on how to set it up in cacti, and it works pretty well. I do wish there was a single graph to collect all for the hosts, instead of individual host graphs, but it’s not bad. Perhaps I’ll build a template that uses the data source and glues them all into one graph. But it provides reasonably accurate data, and it’s not difficult to set up.

Xen stats FTW!

(The UPS graphs I need to fix too, somethings broken in the PHP datasource it uses. So if you’ve got a reliable Network UPS Tools graphing source for cacti, other than this one, lemme know.)

Daily Spam Statistics for my email

I recently repaired the DSPAM statistics on my mail server so I can look at the ridiculous amounts of spam that I receive. I knew the number was rather high, because I kept having to train a bunch of misses. Especially when the spam format dramatically changes. It seems to take more corrective action than it used to. I wonder if perhaps I need to clean out the tokens in the database. It’s possible that I’ve got a large amount of stale tokens that are leaning higher for other emails than it should be.

These statistics are from my older email server. I’ve got a new one that has been built, but not put into practice yet. Still trying to figure out how to get the Dovecot Sieve to actually work. Then I can finally ditch procmail and use a smarter server-side mail filtration language. One that doesn’t require a shell account. It’s also possible that I could offer email accounts @shlrm.org. Not that anyone would actually want those. Heh.

Has been tagged in their Mercurial repository.

Hopefully soon it’ll go stable, and I can do something with it. I’m also hoping that fedora will have RPMs for it, even unofficially, so that it’s easier to install than building by hand. Or maybe better building documentation would help: detailed dependency information or something. Maybe the stuff exists, but it’s hard to find (or I’m looking in all the wrong places.)

Or I could install CentOS as my domain0 and use that old xen kernel. I don’t need any of the new features, I think. And I don’t think they’ve gotten in online LVM resizing, which is something I’d really want. I can’t remember if they got the USB to PV guests either. I don’t need the overhead of fully virtualized guests, but I would really like to be able to forward a USB device to a specific guest.

At work I’m dealing with this “Semantic Web” concept thingy. “Web 3.0″ it is called. Frankly I don’t see the point in it yet. The goal is to have the internet also contain data to ensure that computers can find relations in the data and such, not just pages with links that people can browse. One of our projects involves taking unstructured data and mining entities and relationships from it. I’ve picked up a book, the only book, on programming software to (ab)use the semantic web. So far, I am unimpressed. The source code in the book does not match the source code that you can download from the books website. And, the two different packages on the books website (one is just Chapter 2’s code, the other is all the code for the whole book) also had different code, and the “all encompassing” one was even missing the right files needed to run the code!

So yeah, unimpressed.

http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2009/12/02/xen-4-0-release-information/

It would appear that Xen 4.0 is due out Q1 2010. That’s not very far off. I will perhaps wait on redoing my Xen network setup until that time. I need to get it working better. I’ve been having problems suspending VMs. Supposedly this is due to the guest kernel not behaving nicely. Patches have been submitted upstream from what I’ve been told and the pull request has been made to Linus to pull it into the kernel.

There’s lots of good stuff coming in Xen 4.0 too. Remus is particularly interesting. I will have to experiment with that. Live failover of boxes. I don’t know what I’d do with that to be honest. I guess you could set up two physical boxes, with the same virtual machines on them, and have 100% uptime, well like 9 9’s of uptime. (Assuming no stupid admin errors.)