~traviscj/

So, rrdtool is pretty sweet, but it’s somewhat of a pain to set up. So… we use Cacti. It’s amazing. Supposedly it’ll integrate with Nagios as well, and then all of this data will be at our fingertips. For now, I just set it up on my server that’s probably going to go down shortly. In any case, I feel like this project is somewhat coming together. Nagios is great for what’s going on right now, cacti needs a way to know what’s going on right now–A match made in heaven, or something.

Later I’ll probably get stuff running on mouradserver1. As well as the bug-tracking setup.  As well as the gtd-php project–maybe. Or on my laptop or something.

TrueImage is… well… Quite the piece of software.

What I need it to do: Tell the check_backupdisk script that it’s actually running the backup (IE–don’t bitch on nagios) and handle all the mounting/umounting/fscking that it currently does. I think I’ll probably end up putting a wrapper script around it…. but we’ll see.

So, another day, another (minor) problem. I had connected to a server with KDE instead of our usual GNOME interface. Which probably would have been fine except that KDE had a screensaver that sucked up the CPU. Which also would have been fine, if it hadn’t been a server that everyone else used. Oops. RRDtool and MRTG would have shown a CPU spike which I could have investigated.

I have apparently been missing out. There’s a really neat little unix tool called ‘rrdtool’ that uses a fixed-size database to look at how something changes over time. I think I’ll use it to monitor server load… and possibly network traffic.

Subversion added a tag in their bug-tracking database of projects that are ‘bite-sized’: self-contained, somewhat independent fixes that should happen. I’m not sure any look very interesting at the moment, but I’ll have to come back to it at some point.
Bite-sized projects

I’d really like to find something like David Allen’s getting things done system, but more centric around students. Admittedly, most of what I do is either scheduled(classes and psych experiments) or boring and mundane(getting my car’s oil changed), large sections of my time are spent studying material for classes. Maybe it’s not so critical that GTD doesn’t really account for that, since I’m fairly decent about it anyways.

I tried setting up a bugtracker. It’s not a bad setup, because then I have what I need to do with me…. But it’s not really any better than just keeping a list–which is what DA says to do anyways.

Math 394 is kindof a drag. I’m not all that good at combinatorial analysis. It doesn’t seem like it should be too hard, but it seems like it comes and goes in waves, or that it is crystal-clear up to a certain point, and then I lose it. I probably just need to work a bunch more problems.

Or not. Ok, so… Every previous blog attempt has been a pile of crap. Well, therealtravisjohnson wasn’t always, but it kinda got stale. So, I’m not gonna bother talking about me until I have a substantial amount of posts.

I got owned on my math quiz today. It’s kinda ridiculous that we have a 60 minute quiz after 3 hours of lecture, I feel. Thank god I’ve largely gotten over the not studying well phase.

Work is going well. I read a bunch on RRDtools and Nagios, and I’m in the process of getting mouradserver1 up and running. It will be our host for the APL wiki, nagios, backups, and who knows what else.