Satya's blog - 2004/11/

Okay, there is no need for Live5 news to scroll the retirement of a football coach ("more at 11") across the bottom of the screen during Friends.
Commercials are bad enough; they don't have to be *during* the shows. Especially the intrusive ones.

So, people can use AutoCAD and other stuff that takes a bit of training, but whine about web pages being hard to use? WTF?

Okay, not the same people, but when the web site is part of your job?

After installing gkrellm on deepthot, I realised I have a bunch of settings and email folders on deepthot that aren't backed up. Enter rsync:

rsync -rle ssh /home/satyap satyap@[server]:dt \
--exclude=/satyap/.cpan \
--delete \
--delete-excluded \
#--bwlimit=400

Yeah, bwlimit is commented out. It was there as a courtesy to those who share the room, since we're all on the same router and my backup is a couple of gigs. (I don't know how! Lots of old crap and can't-throw-this-away files.) Anyway, everyone's gone home now, the screen(1) has been re-attached, and it's at full throttle now.

Note: Knowing how to "reboot with F8 in safe mode" does not make you an Air Force tech.

Since someone filled up /var on gort twice since yesterday, today I wanted to write some kind of client-server thing to monitor gort's health and display it in a terminal on some other computer like deepthot. Then I considered making it web-base,d writing it in perl, etc. Then I considered using something like Big Brother or some other server monitoring thing.

Then amblin told me about the perfect thing.

So after several months of wondering (and not losing any sleep over) what that gkrellm thing in the package list is, today I found out. It's a server/computer monitoring daemon and graphical display bar thingy. Very configurable, sometimes a little hard to read, but nice. I run two on deepthot: one to monitor deepthot, another to monitor gort (tunnelled over ssh, though it doesn't have to be. And not X-forwaded, either). This thing does client-server as well as local monitoring.

Then I came home and set up the windows version (suckier) on wintermutex. Now I can actually *see* when sysdrive starts filling up. And I can still monitor gort. I probably don't need to monitor deepthot from here. Maybe I should -- then I'd have a desktop full of gkrellm bars.