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.

16:30: Now with Levels! And now I’m going to go and get dinner, I’ll be back in about 2 hours, ready to program the next stage of the wrapper.

20:40 Version Beta 1 is being used on the server, hopefully it works fine! I will release the source code once complete.

What it does is to take a copy of the Minecraft map and copy it to a folder for people to grab (also good for backups when someone TNTs the hell out of your map). If you have any suggestions/improvements, feel free to comment.

(To stop the spamming of rubbish your RSS reader won’t understand I’ll put the code under the break.)

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#!/bin/bash
# Minecraft World Snapshotter
# Version 1.0
# Created by Simon Cook (simon@simoncook.org)
 
## CONFIG START
 
# WORLD contains the name of the directory the Minecraft world is in
WORLD="world"
 
# FILENAME contains the name that will be appended with the date
FILENAME="world2-"
# DATE contains the date formatting to be used for a file name
DATE="%Y%m%d-%H%M%S"
# TYPE defines the file type to create (valid: tar bz2 7z zip)
TYPE="7z"
 
# DEST if valid, the snapshot will be copied or moved to this directory
DEST="/var/www/simoncook.org/web/static/minecraft/"
# CPMV is whether to move or copy if DEST is valid (valid: cp mv)
CPMV="cp"
 
## CONFIG END
## DO NOT EDIT UNDER THIS LINE
 
FILENAME=$FILENAME`date +$DATE`
 
if ! [ -d "$WORLD" ]; then
    echo "Sorry, World \"$WORLD\" does not exist!"
    exit 1
fi
 
if [ "$TYPE" == "tar" ]; then
    FILENAME=$FILENAME.tar
    tar cf $FILENAME $WORLD
    echo "Snapshot created as $FILENAME"
elif [ "$TYPE" == "bz2" ]; then
    FILENAME=$FILENAME.tar
    tar cf $FILENAME $WORLD
    bzip2 -9 $FILENAME
    FILENAME=$FILENAME.bz2
    echo "Snapshot created as $FILENAME"
elif [ "$TYPE" == "7z" ]; then
    FILENAME=$FILENAME.7z
    7za a -mx9 $FILENAME $WORLD
    echo "Snapshot created as $FILENAME"
elif [ "$TYPE" == "zip" ]; then
    FILENAME=$FILENAME.zip
    zip -9rq $FILENAME $WORLD
    echo "Snapshot created as $FILENAME"
fi
 
if [ -d "$DEST" ]; then
    if [ "$CPMV" == "mv" ]; then
        mv $FILENAME $DEST
        echo "File moved to $DEST"
    elif [ "$CPMV" == "cp" ]; then
        cp $FILENAME $DEST
        echo "File copied to $DEST"
    fi
fi

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Note on using /dev/random: as usual, using this source for entropy will give you pure randomness, though due to the nature of the random source (see Wikipedia entry on /dev/random) the script may sometimes lock up and fail to generate a complete output, as it has run out of randomness. If you are intending to use this alot, then it is advised to use /dev/urandom that doesn’t block, although that comes at the cost of a small bit of entropy.

#!/bin/bash
# Script for pulling x characters from a random source
#   and prints them out to stdout
# Version 1.0.0
# By Simon Cook (https://simoncook.org)
 
# Fill in the two variables below
#  "entropy" is the source of randomness
#  "chars" is the number of chars we want
entropy=/dev/random
chars=5
 
# Pull x characters from source
i=0
while read -r -n1 char
do
    echo -n "$char"
    (( i++ ))
if [ "$i" -eq "$chars" ]; then
   echo ""
   exit 0
fi
done < "$entropy"

Licensing: This small script is released under the CC-GNU GPL licence.

.

Now I’ve just put text here, but soon I intend to mix these elements with the spage system, but hopefully you can see my genius . Comments appreciated

Now for a small introduction. Techious2 is (obviously) the new version of the Techious Website, as developed myself and tested by my crack team of testers when it gets to that stage. Originally it was going to be a private thing, but things leak too quicky so I have decided to make it a bit more public. Currently the only information you can know is what I post here at the moment, and also what I also post in the future with more blog posts and stuff.

In this blog I will aim to put updates to the websites along with screenshots for those that think they are worthy enough. I aim to have the website done by the middle of 2009, but we have no idea how long things actually take these days, so it could just be another summer break rushsite

For keeping up to date with things, you can either use the category feed that will only show the Techious2 posts, or if you currently subscribe to my main RSS feed, you already have all you need to keep up todate.

One final thing, should I make this a seperate blog or use what I intend to?

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

That is all, as I have to actually develop stuff for it to be readworthy, so heres to the Techious2 project!

The URL to play with the converter is http://www.spcook.co.uk/projects/vat1715/

For those of you who broke it, or want to suggest improvements, the Project Forum is available at http://www.spcook.co.uk/forum/forum/vat-converter

I hope you enjoy this, and possibly find a good quick use for it.

Disclaimer: I take no responsibility for any results you get form the calculator, it is only a calculator and should only be used for own personal interest.

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#include <stdio.h>
 
int main(void){
  printf("Hello World\n");
}

Yup, that seems to work