Small Dropbear

itools is back

My last post I said that I had to remove my internet query tools due to some bugs that were a concern. Some of the code was hard to maintain and probably had holes and I had noticed that it looped at times. I’m happy to say that I have restored some of those tools now, still located at http://enc.com.au/itools This code is completely re-written in Python using the TurboGears toolkit which means it is a lot cleaner in how it works and how it looks. Some of the lookup tables use a database rather than an array for ease of updating and querying. The downside is the backends will take time. It currently only does nslookup queries and whois only works for IPv4 addresses. The domain name queries will be a while off as these are the most complicated

Removing itools

Update: The newer code is now running, though still needs some testing. For very many years I have been running a set of tools on my website that basically runs whois or nslookup queries and presents them in a standard format. I have decided today to shut this part of the website down as the code running those components is very old and I’ve not maintained it for years. Back when I initially wrote the tools, in 1995 or so, there wasn’t many alternatives to this site but that has long changed. So thanks for those who emailled me over the years; its been an interesting journey.

Pie Charts in TurboGears

You might of looked at Ralph Bean’s tutorial on graphs and thought, that’s nice but I’d like something different. The great thing about ToscaWidgets using the jqPlot library is that pretty much anything you can do in jqPlot, you can do in ToscaWidgets and by extension in TurboGears. You want different graph types? jqPlot has heaps! My little application needed a Pie Chart to display the overall status of attributes. There are 6 states an attribute can be in: Up, Alert, Down, Testing, Admin Down and Unknown. The Pie Chart would show them all with some sort of colour representing the status. For this example I’ve used hard-coded data but you would normally extract it from the database using a TurboGears model and possibly some bucket sorting code. I’ve divided my code into widget specific, which is found in myapp/widgets/attribute.py

procps-ng 3.3.7 Released

procps-ng version 3.3.7 was released today. It has some new and interesting features in the top program that Jim has been busy working on. There is a new filter feature which can exclude fields that match a value for example. The remainder of the changes are small bug fixes and getting the compile warnings count down with -Wall enabled. The library revision was updated but this did not involve an API or ABI change. procps-ng can be downloaded off the sourceforge page which has the current and previous releases stored there. Alternatively you can visit our gitorious page if git fetch is more your thing. Debian packages will be going into experimental until the freeze is over and we get things unblocked.

python and rrdtool

RRDTool is a neat utility for collecting and graphing statistics such as server loads or network traffic. There are two main modules for interfacing with RRDTool files within python; rrdpython and pyrrd. rrdpython is the basic bindings of the rrdtool library within python. The API is very familiar for people who program in C or use the command line tools which for me is both so it works well. However if you were expecting a “pythonic” API you will be disappointed. As there is the direct binding, you have to have either a pre-compiled module or compile it yourself with librrd-dev package installed. Depending on your setup this could be trivial or a real pain. pyrrd initially looks good as it is a object-orientated style and (supposedly) a pure python code, so no trying to compile things… but! Well, the