Jeff Beard

I’ve had a transient issue with my Internet access randomly “going away”. It’s annoying but generally clears up within a minute or two. I came across a tool called Netalyzr by a group within UC Berkeley. Netalyzr is a Java application available as either an in-browser Applet or a command line utility. It runs a number of network connectivity tests and provides a detailed report hosted on their web site that uses a simple red/yellow/green motif to show problems and their relative importance.

While Netalyzr didn’t clearly show what was going on with my Internet connection it did raise a red flag about network buffers that might be the issue. Unfortunately, that’s a router configuration issue on the part of my ISP so I’m not hopeful for a resolution. But I can always gather data then open a trouble ticket with the vendor.

Regardless, Netalyzr looks like a great tool for troubleshooting connectivity issues.

File this with the obscure issue department…

The Prey Project looked like a nice system for tracking stolen devices and has gotten a lot of good press recently. I decided to try it out. After getting everything setup and working I noticed a lot of Cygwin bash shells running the ping command. The commands accumulated eventually degrading system performance which is when I noticed.

Prey has a partial UNIX environment (MingW) contained in it and consists of shell scripts wrapping a number of UNIX utilities compiled for Windows. I say partial because it doesn’t include the “ping” command which is a dependency for the software. And the shell scripts apparently don’t take into account the potential for a user having other UNIX-like environments installed (Cygwin also has a bash shell and the ping command but there are others as well.) So what was happening is that script (pull) naively looks at what operating system it is installed on and for a ping command and issue what it believes are the correct command line arguments. For Windows it’s this:

ping -n 1 www.google.com

This doesn’t work because Cygwin’s ping.exe doesn’t have a “-n” switch. But for some reason doesn’t fail when it encounters an invalid option. Rather, it tried to ping the IP address 0.0.0.1. This doesn’t work, of course, but the ping command tries forever thus respawning new instances of the bash shell and ping until it kills your computer.

Anyway, I hard coded a change to the script on my system and filed a bug with the Prey developers.

I also submitted an email to the Cygwin mailing list describing the Cygwin ping issue.

As a git neophyte I approve of this post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2970637

UPDATE: I also found this helpful site: gitref.org

Since I moved my personal web site from Roller to WordPress a couple of years ago, my web site had been a dog. After reading an article about a PHP-based web site configured to support 9 millions hits per day, and knowing through experience that my site should be significantly faster, I decided it was time to light a fire under WordPress.

(Note that I’ve included gists at the bottom of the article with the important configuration files.)
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This is a tip that I’ve kept forgetting to write down so here it is:

During a system’s life cycle requirements change and components are refactored. This includes databases as well and particularly as data grows. Decisions and assumptions are made at the beginning of a system’s life cycle that may or may not hold up over years of operation and it’s good practice to continually analyze how well the initial design is working.
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