chattr +a -V

That was the price when I went out on the route, so when I got back in town, I filled up at Creedmoor and Lynn for $2.58. Yesterday at the same time, the Sheetz was $2.45.

Last week, Shirl Kennedy, at Information Literacy, linked to one of the wizard tools at the 21st Century Information Fluency Project, one in which you type entries in several fields, and as you type, the google query gets displayed, making a helpful tutorial on some of google's less frequently used search features. The wizard is at search.

Nothing has jumped up and bit me lately, and I've been posting on in illo tempore, so this blog's been silent for a while.

With local gasoline prices over 2.50 USD, and one station I pass daily at 2.69, I've been checking raleighgasprices.com for the best price, and lately it has been the stations on New Bern Road (old highway 64) on the eastern side of town. The new Sheetz station, at 2.39, has kept prices down at the Murphy at WalMart and other stations in that area.

Kinuk's photo galleries have some lovely images from the Mazurian lakes region. The region is in the very northeast of the country ('Masuria' on this map of Poland).

I'm not sure, but I think I followed a link on Dave Winer's RSS feed to Hans van Raamt's the Music Directory, where I noticed a link to Radio Memories Podcast in the What's new section.

Excellent, fun entertainment. Though the site isn't organized very well (all shows are lumped together in one category, 'podcasts', AFAICT), they've got Westerns, Our Miss Brooks, Burns and Allen, You Bet Your Life, Amos 'n' Andy, even 'The Green Hills Of Earth' from X Minus One.

I suppose there's a word for this: that as soon as you find a solution to a problem, you'll find another solution to the same problem.

I've blogged about fail2ban here, here and here. It's a python script which monitors my /var/log/auth.log for multiple authentication failures, and if there are too many entries from one IP address, will run `iptables -I INPUT 1 -i eth0 -s -j DROP`. So script kiddies trying ssh login attacks get their IPs banned and my auth.log doesn't get filled with their crap.

Zonker writes about another python script doing the same thing in Unix Review this month: Tool of the Month: DenyHosts. Reading the article, it looks as if the only additional feature DenyHosts has that fail2ban doesn't, is that (quoting Zonker) 'you can choose whether to block all services or just SSH. The BLOCK_SERVICE variable can be set to BLOCK_SERVICE = ALL or BLOCK_SERVICE = sshd.'

DenyHosts is available as an .rpm, as a source .rpm or as a tarball, and its home page is here at sourceforge.

On the basis of 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it', I'm sticking with fail2ban.

Workers at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk (Danzig), Poland, went on strike when one of their own, a crane operator named Anna Walentinowicz, a labor agitator, was fired by the authorities (link is to the BBC story at that time, and there is a contemporary video clip of another news story at the site).


The Polish words in white are 'It all began in Gdansk'

An overview of the events in Poland is at Poland 1980-81, We've caught God by the arm.

The English site of the Independent and Self-Governing Trade Union Solidarity (NSZZ "Solidarnosc") is here. Commemorations are taking place in Poland and elsewhere of these events, including the August 31, 1980, agreement between the Government and the Inter-enterprise Strike Committee, and there is a listing here.

The Charlotte Business Journal reports that sales have begun at the Winn-Dixie stores scheduled to close, and the company is offering discounts 'of 30% to 50% ... on more than $200 million worth of food, beverages, household products and general merchandise'. Winn-Dixie offers store-closing sales

Back in NC State researchers decode rice blast fungus genome: rice's gravest fungal menace, I posted how the rice blast fungus genome had been sequenced, and mentioned that 'Scientists sequenced rice's genome in 2002'. But the BBC today says that Rice genome unravelled at last, reporting on a Nature article this week.

The relevant quote from The Korea Times article Genome on Rice Killer Unveiled isThe Nature web site doesn't seem to have the article the BBC refers to yet. (Here's the results of a search for "rice", listing by most recent.)

An interesting quote from the BBC article:

It took seven years to complete the work and the results are already accelerating discovery. Scientists have used the sequence to identify genes that control fundamental processes, such as flowering.

Rice's similarity to barley has also helped researchers identify genes responsible for resistance to barley powdery mildew and stem rust, two major crop diseases.

I don't know what the difference is between what was accomplished in 2002, and what is reported on today.

No, I'm not 'upgrading' to nanoblogger v3.2.x, at least not until it settles down. I added the Creative Commons license notice and an image of \$BLOG_AUTHOR over there on the right (for y'all reading this by loading the site in your browser versus an RSS/Atom aggregator).

Entire site contents released under a Creative Commons license




chattr, listening

There isn't much helpful in the article Customizing FVWM. Nothing on why to choose fvwm as a window manager over gnome or KDE except that it's 'light and fast' in contrast to the other two being 'heavy on memory usage'. Well, iceWM, fluxbox and xfce4 are lightweight also.

A link to Window Managers for X would have been helpful. That site has introductory pages on most window manangers and desktop environments, links to other resources and some basic feature and resource usage comparisons. It was an enormous help when I started using Linux around ten years ago.

The most helpful items in the linux.com article are the mention of the piperead command in the configuration file .fvwm2rc (which is not necessarily in ~/.fvwm/ in a Debian install: mine is in ~/) and the mention in the comments section of the fvwm forums where fvwm users discuss the best window manager and answer questions. And, starting with v2.5.11, it's no longer .fvwm2rc, it's ~/.fvwm/config, which is in the FAQ.

hdparm is a command line utility for Linux which reports on current IDE parameter pewrformance and changes and saves the parameters. Parameters are saved in /etc/hdparm.conf.

I had my primary hard drive set with `hdparm -X66 -d1 -u1 -m16 -c3 /dev/hda` in /etc/hdparm.conf, but in rereading the manpage, thought that -X69 might give me better performance.

Sure enough, changing that one digit boosted buffered disk reads from around 25 MB/sec to over 40 MB/sec. I've been running with that setting for 30 hours now, without data corruption or other drive or file problems. `-X69` sets udma5 as the default, which the Samsung 40 gig drive supports. From the manpage:Use `hdparm -i /dev/hdx` where 'x' is the device on the IDE controller, to see what your drive reports as supporting.

From some posts to the Charlotte [North Carolina, U.S.A.] Linux User Group 'discuss' mailing list comes a question whether a listmember's hard drive is failing and a helpful suggestion about determing and monitoring the hard drive's health. Briefly, one of the listmember's log files containedWhile warning the listmember to copy data from /dev/hda, another listmember suggested installing smartmontools, which in Debian is a simple `apt-get install smartmontools` away. The smartmontools page includes installation instructions for .rpm based Linux distros and other platforms.

I installed smartmontools, and read the manpages for smartd, smartd.conf and smartctl.

I needed to edit /etc/smartd.conf and /etc/default/smartmontools. Specifically, I commented out DEVICESCAN in /etc/smartd.conf and uncomment the /dev/hda line in that file, and I also chose to append '-m [my.email.account@my.domain]' to the /dev/hda line. I also edited /etc/default/smartmontools so that lines now read 'enable_smart="/dev/hda"' and 'start_smartd=yes'.

After installing smartmontools, drives' current status can be reported by doing `smartctl -A /dev/hdx' as root, where 'x' is the letter assigned to the drive. Output includes VALUE, WORST, and THRESH columns.

When I first read the output on my desktop, I was concerned because VALUE and WORST were greater than THRESH, but when I carefully reread the post to discuss@charlug.org, I saw that when VALUE and WORST are less than THRESH, failure is imminent, not when VALUE and WORST are greater than THRESH.