Here are my experience with the Bubba Two NAS so far. Below are some performance numbers.

Write locally:

lks@bubba:~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile bs=1M count=1K

1024+0 records in

1024+0 records out

1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 96.8614 seconds, 11.1 MB/s

Testing raw network traffic:

lks@bubba:~$ iperf -c 192.168.1.10

------------------------------------------------------------

Client connecting to 192.168.1.10, TCP port 5001

TCP window size: 16.0 KByte (default)

------------------------------------------------------------

[  3] local 192.168.1.3 port 54697 connected with 192.168.1.10 port 5001

[  3]  0.0-10.0 sec  76.4 MBytes  64.1 Mbits/sec

Write over NFS (exported with UDP):

root@titan:/mnt/lks# dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile bs=1M count=1K

1024+0 records in

1024+0 records out

1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 174.882 s, 6.1 MB/s

During the test, the CPU clocks in at about 70%. Since the disk can deliver almost the double of that, I guess the bottleneck is the bus.

Downloading over ftp give around 7-8MB/s (~55-65Mbits/s). Samba around 5-6MB/s (~40-48Mbit/s).

These numbers are more than adequate for most of my multimedia needs. A 720p HD film encoded in MPEG2 needs around 20Mbits/s (~2.4MB/s). But since most films are encoded using MPEG4 (or similar) - a proper encoded 1080p movie will only use around 2-3MB/s.

My balcony server finally died on my the other day. It has been running 24/7 for four years in all kinds of weather. I wasn't very surprised - in fact I've been waiting for it to happen. The motherboard had died. I've replaced the motherboard, and its back up. But for how long before a disk or something else fails?

I have backup of (mostly) everything here and there, but I would like to have everything on a separate NAS box. One of the most exciting NAS boxes on the market right now is something called Bubba|Two.

Some time ago, I needed an updated resume (and no, I could not "just send a linkedin link"). I started editing it in OpenOffice, and was (again) struck by how terrible it is to edit, format and align a nice layout. I wanted to use something else - something like Latex.

I've been trying out some Latex resume templates, but none have been good enough (they often have terribly layout). I stumbled across the resume to Martin Michlmayr, and immediately spotted that it was created using Latex. It was nice, clean and looked professional - just what I was looking for. One email later, and he sent me the template he used. He has used and modified res, originally developed by someone else (Michael DeCorte in 1988 according to the header).

If you're interested, you can find the files here:

• Latex template from Martin: http://www.nr.no/~strand/CV/res.cls
• Latex resume (slightly modified): http://www.nr.no/~strand/CV/LarsStrand-resume.tex
• The compiled resume in PDF: http://www.nr.no/~strand/CV/LarsStrand-resume.pdf

The only thing missing now is to include a profile picture. I tried a quick and simple includegraphics, but the picture did not float where I wanted, so I have to look into this later.

In my last post I used MRTG to monitor the network equipment. MRTG works great with SNMP, but it only present a graph per network port of the switch/router. So, unless you are the network guy, these graphs do not make much sense.

It would be nice to plug in the data from MRTG into a Network Weathermap of some sort. After searching around and trying different weathermaps, the choice fell on "PHP Network Weathermap". It is actively developed, has good documentation and works great for small/medium-sized networks (the map is hand crafted).

If you work with any kind of networks, the chances are you've heard of, or even used, MRTG. There are not active development of MRTG today, but bugfix patches are still being added now and then.

So why are we still using it? MRTG just works. It stable and robust. And it does what it is supposed to do and nothing else. This makes MRTG still king of monitoring network equipment over SNMP. Well, that is, until Munin 1.4 is released in a couple of days. Munin 1.4 have greatly added SNMP support and aiming at MRTG.

Slackware 13 was released yesterday. It's the oldest currently maintained Linux distribution out there, and with good reason. It is clean, simple and without the "bells and whistles" that clobbers up so many other distributions.

Slackware was for myself (and for many of my friends and colleagues) my first encounter with Linux. I used Slackware for many years, and still do on occasions. Its a great distribution to really learn Linux and not learn a Linux distribution. I will say that if you really know Linux (and Slackware), you will know most Linux distributions as well.

You would think Slackware was abandoned for other more popular distributions nowadays, but there is still a large active Slackware community and user base out there. It is in fact, one of the most downloaded Linux distributions (in both MB and number of hits) for Norway's largest ftp-site:

http://ftp.uio.no/stats/usage_200907.html#TOPURLS

Me and my girlfriend are staying in a hotel here in Sha Tin, Hong Kong. Since the hotel only allow one computer per room connected to the Internet at the time - I found out it would be a nice time to look into Internet connection sharing over bluetooth.

I'm out traveling and I forgot to change the timezone on my camera again. So the EXIF time stored in the pictures are all wrong. My first though was to write another Perl script to fix this. But I found out that the program jhead can do all sort of magic EXIF manipulation.

A short little script I stumbled across when cleaning my $HOME. I do not think I wrote it myself - at least I can't recall that I did. Quite handy and it's small and compact using the commands ps, awk, sort and head:

The first request for comments (RFC 1) was published 40 years ago today (7. April 2009). RFCs are standard documents published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Today over 5000 RFCs have been published by IETF. Stephen Crocker, the author of RFC1, recollect some thoughts of the early days:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/opinion/07crocker.html