OwlManAtt’s Blog

It is once again that time of the year at which I am forced to put up with a group of flaming idiots for nine months. I gain nothing but joy from putting up with these people for extended periods of time, and I look forward to the first class of the year.

Seriously, kids, I’ve just returned from the ‘orientation’ session. Once again, a waste of my fucking time. Nothing interesting was said, and schedules were distributed. God forbit they send us the fucking pieces of paper in the mail and not waste an hour of our lives.

This year is looking pretty bleak. I’ve got my ‘Information Technology’ classes now (Programming 1 & Microsoft Office for AOIT). I bet you all know how excited I am to be taking programming one. I’m sure I’ll learn many new thin…oh wait. That’s right. I’m employed as a fucking programmer. Haha, oops.

Nothing needs to be said on Microsoft Office class. Those of you who attended St. Aedans with me will remember my infamous EFF FUCKING ONE rant.

Other classes include geometry, English, US History (I’m told Mr. Chester is fairly decent, and if he is who I think he is, I shall enjoy the class), Spanish 2, and conceptual physics.

I am considering dropping conceptual physics, though. It may be better for me to take personal finance this year and physics next year, considering that I have to file some sort of paperwork to the IRS regarding my work for DSL.net. If it cannot be done without crapping all over my schedule, then fuck it.

In other news, I shall be staying on at DSL.net for the indefinite future. Yay me!

I spend this evening writing a webservice to display information about hosts on my LAN. Being a PHP programmer, I, of course, wrote it in PHP, using a library called NuSOAP.

SOAP is a standard for exchanging XML between a client and sever app, like XMLRPC, but a bit more complex. Basically, you send a server a specially-formated request, and it sends one back. This all happens over HTTP, so one does not have to worry about packets or anything.

After reading Scott Nichol’s great SOAP tutorials, I began tinkering around. What I came up with was a service that allows me to get my network weather, information about hosts, and the version of the webservice. I also have a ghetto-debug-client for it.

NuSOAP generated a very nice page that serves as crude documentation generated from the WSDL.

Feel free to write your own client to use the functions (don’t touch the uptime one, it’ll just give you an error), or see the one here.

You can change the URL to make calls - version for the version, info and host for the get_info, and weather (what the link links to) for network weather.

I’m going to do a few more statistics, hopefully polled live from my boxen. Once I finish OwlInfo enough for it to be useful, I’ll write a plugin for WordPress so I can show my network weather on the menu bar.

Some of you may have noticed some downtime with the fileserver, Kato, last night (which has nothing to do with the OwlManAtt.com downtime. OMA.c was down due to some technical problems at ye olde connectivity provider.). This was scheduled downtime. What did I do during the downtime?

I cleaned Kato and put a new OS on her. Like, literally, I opened the fucking box and cleaned all of the shit out. This was probably the first real cleaning Kato has ever had in god only knows how many years. And hot damn, there was a lot of dust in there.

Then I did me an Ubuntu server install. The partitioning scheme is particularly handy - 32MB for /boot on /dev/hdc, 255 MB as the first partition (physically on the outermost region of the disc), and then the rest of my 3.4 GB OS drive was turned into an LVM partition, along with the remaning 19.9 GB of Kato’s 20 GB drive.

LVM, or Linux Volume Management, is pretty cool. It allows me to dynamically resize ‘partitions’ on the fly, and have partitions span multiple physical devices.

Now, since it was a server install, I have no X and no GUI shit. So I’ve started using GNU screen and irssi. Like, really using them, not half-assed using. It’s cool.