Archive for General
08.23.05
Posted in General at 1:07 am by jw
Sometimes when you’re downloading a big file you just don’t want it lagging out your gaming. Well, this is where the traffic shaper (tc) in Linux comes in really handy. Using some scripts I snarfed from the net, I came up with a nice 4 tier system of traffic priority:
- Everquest or Everquest 2 traffic (determined by server IP address)
- ssh or other interactive traffic, as well as ‘ack’ packets to avoid retransmits.
- Normal traffic
- Bulk downloads (ftp etc.)
To make sure things all worked smoothly, I throttled the line to a total of 150kbps (about the maximum it seems to support) for the top tier and took off 10kpbs for each tier below it to leave ample breathing room for when traffic was needed “right now”. It really is amazing the difference it makes, especially to ssh traffic when I’m accessing the network remotely – all of a sudden I just don’t notice the other activity on the line!
My ‘tc’ script is pretty ugly, but here it is in all its glory
Now, of course, I want to monitor what things are looking like so grabbed the polltc script which uses rrdtool to generate pretty graphs for me! It does tell me that I need to work on my filtering script as the detection of bittorrent downloads doesn’t seem to be working too well. Next project I guess is to figure out getting iptables involve in the filtering which will make things work a *lot* better (and clean the script up a lot too). I just can’t go bringing iptables up and down while my wife is playing EQ – she gets upset at going linkdead all the time!
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08.20.05
Posted in General at 7:48 pm by jw
I’ve been reading Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odysesy” series (2001, 2010, 2061, 3001) lately so I thought “what the hell” and decided to watch the movie of 2001 again. Well, my opinion hasn’t changed. Compared to the book, it’s totally and utterly boring. It does absolutely nothing aside from self-indulgent effects. When jogging around a spaceship is the most interesting part of a movie that runs over two hours then it really does say something about the quality. While reading the book makes it slightly better (you can understand the huge gobs of stuff that comes from left field that the book explains but the movie doesn’t), it’s still a rather painful experience. Definitely on my “don’t bother” list.
I will say that one scene gave me a chuckle for the wrong reasons: HAL’s monitor screen displays “OMG” at one stage.
Changing subject totally – I went to Radio Shack to buy a DVI cable the other day for my flat panel monitor and saw the $100 offering from Monster for a single channel cable with the following recommendation:
Most ordinary DVI cables are prone to impedance variances and loss of signal strength, while poor shielding causes the cable to radiate radio frequency and electromagnetic interference out to the rest of your system. As a result, you’ll notice blurred images, and a loss of color fidelity and image detail.
I can’t help it. I have to laugh at exactly what sort of morons they think their customers are. It’s a DIGITAL video interface (you know, what DVI stands for?). You don’t get signal loss short of static. You don’t get blurred images. You don’t lose high color fidelity. A bit is either ONE or ZERO. It’s not somewhere in between. I guess if you’re not technical you could be fooled, but wow, someone sue them for false advertising already!
Best Buy got my business – they had a perfectly good dual channel DVI cable for $30. I have perfect picture, zero blurring and zero color fading.
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08.19.05
Posted in General at 1:52 pm by jw
It took 48 hours but it finally finished. Updated the kernel to 2.6.12–gentoo-r9 and messed with the config some then rebooted. Splat – nothing worked. Always helps to do “make modules_install” before you try to reboot or it can’t load device drivers for ANYTHING! Oh well – reboot again and things are back and running as good as new.
A couple of things I learned:
- “screen” is really good for doing huge long compiles on a headless machine. Having the compile terminate because your connection dies is a pain.
- “emerge —resume” is good when things break, especially when I remember it’s there.
- always remember to “make modules_install” or things die horribly on reboot.
- building 300+ packages on a Duron 750 is sloooow.
In other news, I’m still playing Dungeon Siege 2 when I’m not playing EQ2. Still reminding me more and more of a Diablo 2 sequel. Lots of fun!
I’m also working on compiling my game collection. I own a lot of junk!
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08.18.05
Posted in General at 3:08 am by jw
Went out to Best Buy and picked this game up today. It’s been a lot of fun so far – much more depth to it than DS1 or DS1:LoA. If anything it seems a lot like a sequel to Diablo 2 than a sequel to DS1 with a skill tree for each character, items with “slots” to embed augments in, automatic targetting of the main character off by default, significant storyline and all the other things that made Diablo 2 fun seem to be in there.
Even though I’ve only gotten a few hours past where the demo download left off, it’s still just as high quality as that first little show-off piece was. Definitely going to play this one to the end.
(And in other news, my Duron 750 is *still* rebuilding the Linux system – onto package 160 of 320ish)
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08.16.05
Posted in General at 10:48 pm by jw
Changing the USE flags on Gentoo can result in massive rebuilds. Changing the C compiler flags rebuilds everything. Normally this would be an overnight thing on my main PC but when it’s my 750MHz Duron it becomes a real ordeal. So, to ease this pain I figured I’d enlist the help of distcc to allow me to use the CPU power of the 4 other 2GHz+ machines I have in the house in rebuilding the system – sounds easy, right?
Yeah, thought so. Well, first attempt was using the 64 bit Gentoo installation I did on the weekend to cross compile for the x86 system. I set up the cross compiler without too much of a problem but unfortunately for me, it just didn’t seem to work well with distcc, even on a quick “Hello World” test app. I’m not about to rebuild my entire system unless I’m sure that the compiler is working properly, so on to the next thing to try.
I found a wiki article on how to cross compile on cygwin with distcc. Again, I went through the steps of getting it working and got stumped at the “look through the ebuild file for XXX” and to my great surprise, XXX didn’t exist! Oh well… on to the next thing to try!
For my next trick, I installed Gentoo onto a vmware image and worked at getting distcc set up with that image. I even tried to get the same compiler options going, and 6 hours of installing Gentoo later, I was getting weird errors in the build about libraries suspiciously moving! Well, that was no good so I’m now just falling back to the good old “build the whole thing on the slow computer” trick. Should be done sometime next week I guess…
Well, lesson learned I guess. Don’t mess with things that you haven’t tested trying to get a “quick fix”.
(Yes, I’ve been geeky lately on this blog. I’ll write something interesting one day soon I promise)
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