Laney's blog

Stealing the idea from Theory, I spent a little bit of time today hacking up some scripts to generate some nice graphs of my firewall statistics. The data is parsed out of ulog and fail2ban log files. Still could do with a bit of work, but overall I'm quite pleased with it.

I had originally planned on using the Google Charts API to draw all of the graphs, but it couldn't handle the pie charts; producing output with all of the labels cut off. Shame.

Code can be viewed here, and downloaded either at this tarball or by using darcs with darcs get http://darcs.orangesquash.org.uk/darcs/firewallgraphs/. darcs send any patches my way!

Edit: Fixed a couple of bugs that stopped it from working at all; now we actually have working scripts

And the chance to get myself a VPS came sooner than I thought. Today a message came out on the bitfolk mailing list, saying that there were some 120M servers available. I quickly snapped one up and, as of next Monday, will be the proud owner of my first VPS. Let's see how quickly I can fuck that one up.

It'll just be running httpd and irssi at the start, although I may get brave and decide to host my email. Fun!

In other news, the dissertation interim report is nearly done. Only a gantt chart and "roadmap" to write then I can lay this to rest. Knocked up some nice diagrams in Inkscape, which I must say I'm growing quite fond of (even if the connector tool is currently a bit wonky). I've a presentation on it next Tuesday (11th), which I'm quite nervous about, not being a confident speaker and all. Ah well, it's only 10%; sure it'll be fine…

I managed to get Apache and WordPress installed on my shiny new Ubuntu PC, joy. Actually it's a bit weird; I ran the wordpress script to generate a configuration file for a mysql user wordpress, but never actually created the user on mysql. Then when I installed wordpress, the user was mysteriously already there. I wonder how it got created. Anyway, I'll hopefully be able to keep this up most of the time, but do bear in mind that it's my workstation so cannot be up constantly. I do have to reboot to Windows sometimes to play games y'know. When I get the chance I'll be grabbing a nice VPS at bitfolk, which should make things more stable.

Anyway this is mainly a test post. Soon I'll have my shiny Haskell blog which I'm writing for my dissertation up and running, and it will be able to take over from this. Yeah. It will.

In the meantime, expect more inane chatter.

Out.