Firstly, anyone who looks at the structure of the script will notice that it was built to function, not to be beautiful. This tool was built so that I could get a log as soon as possible, so I took some very unusual turns in it’s design. You will see that I am storing a string for all the data that I was collecting from the web server in the database every minute. This is because at the original creation of the script I was unsure whether the router counted in a decimal (i.e. 1000K in 1M) or binary (i.e. 1024K in 1M) fashion. Turns out it’s using the latter so I could trim that out. This data is also stored because at some point I intended to add a check function that would make sure all the deltas are correct, but that will be added later.

Writing this script has allowed me to find one bug in the routers firmware. At seemingly random points (but in my own experience this occurs after an automatic reboot), the router works as intended but something occurs to cause it to return 4GB for one or both of the two figures. As there is no remote reboot feature on this router, I have to manually reset it, though I may make something that allow me to trigger a reboot on detection of this condition. If I do that, I will document it here.

Originally this script sat in my ~/bandwidth directory on my server, logged to a file called bandwidth.txt and was called once a minute, with a support script being called at midnight that read the entire file, summing up every hour/day, and emailing the summed results for the past 24 hours and 1 day. As you can imagine over time this got slower and slower. It got to a point at the end where it would take almost 2 minutes to generate the report, at which point something had to be done. Which is where the MySQL conversion comes in.

The database was added as an easier store (its easier to request the last line from the database than read in the entire file and discard old results) as well as add more flexible reporting to the script. This conversion involved adding just the previously stored file data, with optimisation coming later. I have been able to create in addition a page that shows the live reports as a webpage as a result of this page. I haven’t added this to the source yet but I will tweak it to make the code look better before adding. You can see my version running on http://home.simoncook.org/bandwidth.

My current Internet usage statistics

This is where the project is. It is functional, but not elegant, and only works with one router, though I feel that it should be easily expanded as the web page scraping is done in one function, so anyone wanting to create a modified version for their router only needs to create an output-compatible version of this function and they’re good to go. I will modify this script over time both in terms of tidying it up and adding new features that I feel are of use.

The URL for the source for this project is at https://github.com/simonpcook/bandwidth-VMNG480 and if you feel you can make use/make changes for it, feel free to fork it to meet your own needs. I will flesh out some documentation soon (and the required schema will be added to the repo). I hope you find this of use.

Disclaimer: Using this script counts as the single user who can log in. Attempting to login to the router from another computer will give an error message, the current workaround is to administer the router from the computer running the script (or some equivalent such as using a proxy so the router sees the correct source IP) or to disable the script and wait for the login timeout when you want to administer the router.

Basically I have been working on a nice WebDAV document store.  Once complete it will either be a new store or just link to main hosting for Techious Members. (Finally a use for SpcookCMS’ “Member Store Size” feature.) xD

It mounts just like a SMB share

Document storage on Techious (for an actual use for your membership)

Edit: Thanks to NetDrive, that does allow WebDAV over SSL to work easily, it all works now! Just a bit of fine tuning and we will have a new Techious Subscription feature!

Thanks to NetDrive, all works now

Then came along bitly.Pro, and all was better. It has more sophisticated tracking, allowed us to use it basically anywhere in any application. However there have been a few downsides to this. bitly.Pro accounts (from what I can tell) act just like any bit.ly account so http://bit.ly/mylink and http://tchs.eu/mylink go to the same place. This does however mean that all previous tchs.eu links are now null and void. Sorry about that, that’s the cost for progress, but I’m about 99% sure that we’ll never have to do something like that again. Unless bit.ly goes bust or something, but I doubt that would happen.

Also, this currently means that only I have the power to create tchs.eu links. The way bitly.Pro accounts work is that a custom domain can be used by only one user account, any links I create automatically become tchs.eu links, but only I can create them. Though there is a fix to that, which you will be able to see soon. Thanks to the power of the bit.ly API (well any API really), I can create a nice little wrapper that gives any user (I decide) on the SpcookCMS platform access to create links without giving them my username and password. Woot!

So that’s the story about everything that’s happened to tchs.eu lately. But rest assured, any links created since Feb 1st 2010 will still work, and should still work for the forseeable future. Oh yeah, have a screenshot

bitly.Pro Dashboard

Note: For those interested, the tchs.eu link for this blog post is http://tchs.eu/ddyB23 xD

For once I am free from having half a million and one things to do for University so I have the time to catch up on some stuff, namely my website and launching lolgasm this weekend (hopefully!)

As for things, well having so much to do means I have had no time for anything else. I know the theme is a bit borked on here at the moment. This I believe has something to do with the WordPress beta I am running all the time so for now this is something that has to be lived with, but when there is more stuff that I can post about, I will be. This weekend after the lolgasm launch has been taken for, I will be writing a blog post that I have had drafted up for a while about some Techious2 features, so look out for that!

Anyway, yeah have fun and fear the lols (could that be a catchphrase for lolgasm?)

I use a Fedora 9 server, which I can’t get to, so the normal method of putting a disc in and letting anaconda do all the work just isn’t suitable for me, so using yum I “upgraded” by telling yum to use the Fedora 10 repos and then getting the system to update from this. This method is somewhat risky, but for this case it seemed to turn out well. Previously this method has caused funny problems with X-server, but as I don’t use any x applications (everything is just command line for me) this wasnt an issue.

The steps I used to set up this system was as follows.

1. Firstly, make sure your Fedora 9 installation is as up to date as possible. This is done in the normal way, and for this, it is probabily best if you clear your cache of any repos.

   yum clean all && yum update && yum clean all

   You will notice I clear the repo cache twice, this is to make sure that when we get it to do the upgrade, it doesnt try to use any old F9 repos.

2. Remove any extra repos other than the default Fedora ones, to minimise package conflicts even further. These files can be found in /etc/yum.repos.d/
3. Run the following command into rpm to get fedora to believe it is Fedora 10 and then to update itself to it:

   rpm -Uhv http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/10/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-10-1.noarch.rpm http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/10/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-notes-10.0.0.1.noarch.rpm

4. Run another yum update, this time it will download a lot of packages as this will now upgrade you to Fedora 10
5. Reboot using the reboot command
6. Pray (a little)
7. Say hello to Fedora 10

You should now be running a proper version of Fedora 10. Note however that using an installation disc and upgrading using anaconda is still the recommended method of upgrading, but for those that cannot do that, at least this offers an alternative.

Note however that due to to some changes that happen between versions, you might notice some slight bugs running a new version upgraded in this way. I have yet to see any of these probems, but that is not to say that there aren’t any. Problems that are found will have to be fixed some other way, and I cannot be held responsible for any of these. Basically, here is a method but it is unsupported so it’s at your own risk.

I hope these instructions will come in handy to someone at some point, but basically if you need them, they are here.

Right now I am using the Planets theme, its offering me quite a good mix of image and transparency, though I think I may settle on the Shiny theme or some other theme that resembes a normal Google blank page.

Anyone else seeing this at all? To see, go to your Gmail settings page, and look for the “Themes” tab.

Edit: This is only showing on my Gmail account, not my Google Apps account at the moment, so it appears its a gradual rollout (I have give me beta stuff turned on in Apps)