Category Archives: Other

Networks, Other

Dia – diagram creation program

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In case you need to draw a diagram from time to time, you should think about Dia. Dia is a GTK+ based diagram creation program for GNU/Linux, MacOS X, Unix, and Windows, and is released under the GPL license.

It is a very nice replacement for Visio which is commercial product. It can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams. It currently has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other diagrams. It is also possible to add support for new shapes by writing simple XML files, using a subset of SVG to draw the shape.

It can load and save diagrams to a custom XML format (gzipped by default, to save space), can export diagrams to a number of formats, including EPS, SVG, XFIG, WMF and PNG, and can print diagrams (including ones that span multiple pages).

I almost bought LanFlow for 99$ but then I found Dia :). The next step is donation to this project 🙂

Here is the link http://live.gnome.org/Dia

Linux, Other

UnixStickers project

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I usually don’t like a stickers on the notebooks. Especially the large one which after some time became dirty and ugly. Also, it isn’t very nice to open your laptop on the presentation in front of the 200 attendees while the laptop looks a like teenage room with posters on the wall.

That is the main reason why I always keep my laptop nice and clean.

But I changed my mind a few days ago when I heard about unixstickers.com project. The main idea behind this project is to test the Linux user’s interest in customizing pc and notebook case with a sticker of a favorite distribution.

The stickers are small and nice so I didn’t wait to much before I decided to create an order. Two days ago I received them

Sorry for the bad image quality (the image is made with my phone because the Canon camera is not at home 🙁 ). You can see that stickers are very nice and small so they fits perfectly. Another good idea behind this project is that every time when someone buys Linux Mint sticker, they donate 0.10€ to Mint Linux project.

Very very nice idea

I forget to say that price is very nice – only 0,45€ for one sticker. The link is HERE

Other, Tips & Tricks

Disk usage analysis

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Taking care about disk usage is a very good habit. There are several options for this and now I will only describe df and du commands.

The df utility displays the disk space usage on all mounted filesystems.

[root@abc ~]# df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
                      35772016  20297132  13628408  60% /
/dev/sda1               101086     17692     78175  19% /boot
tmpfs                   513044         0    513044   0% /dev/shm

Adding the -T option (type) will print the filesystem type. Also, the good idea is to add -h option because df measures the size in 1K blocks, which is difficult for a desktop user to recalculate.

Now we have

[root@abc ~]# df -h -T
Filesystem    Type    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
              ext3     35G   20G   13G  60% /
/dev/sda1     ext3     99M   18M   77M  19% /boot
tmpfs        tmpfs    502M     0  502M   0% /dev/shm

As you can see, it is much easier to understand.

You can use the du command to determine which files or directories need to be deleted or reduced. A simple du will print usage for the present working directory and its subdirectories, along with the size of each directory.

du directory will print the size of an particular dir.

Avilable options:
-h – print the size of the podcasts directory in a more readable format
-c – prints the grand total size of the directory at the end.
-a – displays the file names along with directories
-s – display a summary, without showing all of the subdirectories.

For example, du -ch | grep total prints just one line with the total size of the directory.

Linux, Other, Windows

Switching from Windows to Linux – is it possible ?

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Few days ago I had a failure with my computer. The Windows installation on C partition decided to die. It was impossible to recover it and the only solution was to backup my emails, desktop and my documents, then format.

Luckily I had a dual boot with Mint Linux and it was extremely easy to backup my files… Also, like I said a few days ago, I became a father and the whole day was like the days before… Tea is very nice baby and she had a very nice schedule (eat, sleep, dump) and yesterday was the same. While I was in “the father loop” I decided to abandon Windows XP.

The reasons:

  • it is an old OS and Win 7 works much better
  • I’m lazy and I don’t have enough time to reinstall it. I will keep the Win XP license sticker just like a note that I had a Win XP on this notebook.

What exactly do I need from my computer:

  • LAMP (done)
  • Winbox (done via Wine)
  • Netbeans, Eclipse (they work better on Linux)
  • MySQL workbench (it works perfectly on Linux)
  • Putty, Pidgin, Skype, XChat, Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird, … (done)
  • Photoshop (Gimp can be used for the basic image manipulation. I already gave up from my professorial photography career so I can live without Photoshop)
  • Corel (maybe Inkscape can be a replacement… I’m still not sure…I didn’t use Corel for years and I don’t need it at all.)
  • TrueCrypt (it works fine)

Three days after I switch to Linux, I’m still trying to forget on Windows. For now, I’m doing well.

Don’t worry… I still didn’t forget on FreeRadius howtos. I’m working on the next post about Freeradius and MySQL. Also, I have a few tricks which you should consider in case you want to tune your MySQL and FreeRadius.

Best regards

Edit:

Ten days later, I’m still struggling. 🙂

Other

Time out

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This post won’t be long… Actually I became a father 20 days ago and this blog will be “on hold” until I find some time.

This is my first child and the feeling is GREAT. The baby girl and the mother are fine and all we’re actually doing is a some kind of loop “eat-sleep-dump”..

See ya later fellas…

Other, Red Hat/CentOS

kipmi0 problem

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Few days ago one client called and asked about high CPU load on his Fedora server…
It was very easy to detect that CPU is consumed by kipmi0 process. Unfortunately classic commands kill, pkill, kill -9, … didn’t help.

The problem was in loaded modules (lsmod command)

ipmi_si 38349 0
ipmi_msghandler 32665 1 ipmi_si

I didn’t have enough time to investigate about this but simple rmmod ipmi_msghandler and rmmod ipmi_si was enough to solve this problem. Well I was wrong that this will solve the problem… After reboot it was all like before… The modules are still here and kipmi0 process was too aggressive…

Searching on Google about this problem didn’t help a lot. After some digging, I found out that the lm_sensors is responsible for loading these modules.

nano /etc/sysconfig/lm_sensors gave me the answer. At the end, there are few lines

MODULE_0=ipmi-si
MODULE_1=ipmisensors
MODULE_2=coretemp

Commenting those lines was enough to solve this problem. I suppose that this server is too old (Fedora 6) and some incompatibility exists between hardware platform and those modules…

If you have any info about this problem, please drop a comment so we can all learn something…