Jason Antman’s Blog

I’ve been working on the design of a town council campaign site for a friend – www.mikennick08.com. It’s hosted by an additional Apache vhost on my personal server (and running off of port 10015 – ugh). I setup Webalizer for him, so I figured I’d give my own webalizer installation a check. Wow – 30,215 hits this month alone. That reminded me of a problem with my ignored hosts – 17,600 of those hits were Googlebot, and another 2,065 were Yandex (a Russian search engine).

Amazingly, though, it seems like Google is only indexing my blog. My precious wiki seems out of whack, not to metion my CVS repository.

So, this reminded me of two long-overdue tasks:

Get webalizer to properly ignore the common bots.
Get sitemaps of my entire site.

So, off to the races!

First, I added Googlebot, Yandex, and a few others to webalizer.conf with IgnoreAgent directives. Then, after clearing out my entire output directory – and waiting a LONG time for it to run – bingo! Real stats. Down to about 8000 hits for the month, which seems more logical, even including the ~2,000 hits from Google feedfetcher.

Next stop was sitemaps. It tooks some PHP magic to hack apart the MediaWiki sitemaps, put in the correct URLs (it was showing an internal-only hostname), and drop all that and my Blogger rss.xml in an index file. It’s now 2 AM, and it just crashed and burned – the PHP script worked fine, but for some reason my entries in sitemaps_index.xml – which pointed to sitemaps in a subdirectory – came back with errors. Well, something to work on tomorrow.

This morning I checked my backups and noticed that nothing had run in 3 days. It turns out I just had one failed job holding everything up. And I screwed up – I was home this weekend and forgot to swap tapes. It’ll be another 2 weeks before I can. But, I took the time to setup a backup status box on my administrative portal (more on that later) and will also be revising my apparently ineffectual Nagios check script.

On a few side notes: First, I’m seriously thinking of dumping Verizon FiOS. While I really like the service, their static IP (business) variant is $100/month for 15 Mbps down / 2 Mbps up, whereas Cablevision’s Optimum Business with static IP is $55/month for 30 Mbps down / 5 Mbps up!

Most of the previous projects have been put on hold for the time being (mainly because of impending final exams at school) – the new Gigabit Ethernet switch for backups, testing Zenoss and upgrading monitoring (to a new product or Nagios 3), etc.

Projects bacula, bandwidth, connectivity, ISP, Nagios, webalizer

Centralized Storage via SFTP

April 21st, 2008

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For quite a while, I’ve been planning on centralizing a lot of my personal storage (documents, miscellaneous stuff) on one machine at home. The biggest problem that I have is that, while a VPN would be a good solution for my apartment (if I could get IPcop to do VPN between two dynamic IPs), it doesn’t really work for my mobile life. My laptop is often connected to untrusted wireless, and unknown firewall configurations, so VPN isn’t always the best (and definitely not the easiest) option. Given road warrior use, NFS is obviously out of the question.

After a little searching, I found the SSHFS module for FUSE, which allows userspace mounting of a SFTP filesystem. Despite some initial hiccups, I managed to get it setup on two machines – my laptop and a desktop in the apartment. This week I’ll finish working on the rest of the machines – and eventually replace my aging SSH gateway machine (currently a 10-year-old Gateway mini tower) with a Soekris box.

The setup was pretty easy:

Make sure you have public key authentication setup for ssh between the machines, using RSA keys.
Make sure fuse, libfuse, and the related packages are installed.
Install the sshfs package.
Make sure your user is added to the “trusted” group (for OpenSuSE).

After that, just give it a spin, as the user that you want to mount the filesystem as:

sshfs hostname:/path/to/mount /path/to/local/mountpoint

Once that worked pefectly, I added the following to my .bash_profile:

# this handles SSHFS mount of the central-home dir if [ -a/path/to/local/mountpoint]; then echo "HOSTNAME home is mounted at/path/to/local/mountpoint" else echo "Mounting HOSTNAME home at/path/to/local/mountpoint..."hostname:/path/to/mount /path/to/local/mountpoint
fi

Tech HowTos fuse, sftp, ssh, sshfs, storage

Mac to TTF font conversion

April 16th, 2008

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I know i haven’t posted in a while.

I’m working on a friend’s web site, and needed a specific font for the title graphic. I couldn’t find it *anywhere* as a free TTF download for my Linux machine. However, after asking a friend who’s a Mac user, I got a .dfont file as an email attachment.

After some quick Googling, I came by the fondu project on SourceForge. I didn’t look into it in depth, but I just grabbed the i386 RPM, installed it, and – magic! The in the directory with my .dfont I now also had .ttf fonts for all of the variants!

Tech HowTos font, mac