• Si co­­­no­­­ces qmai­­l-s­­pp, en­­to­n­­ces tal vez mi co­­­le­c­­ción de plu­­gins te sea úti­­l.

• Mi plu­­gin más útil es pro­­­ba­­ble­­men­­te ip­­th­­ro­­­ttle, que pue­­des usar pa­­ra ha­­cer que IPs an­­sio­­­sos no se co­­­ne­c­­ten tan se­­gui­­do.

• La ve­r­­sión ac­­tual en SVN pue­­de au­­to­­­blo­­­quear es­­tos IPs por un pe­­río­­­do co­n­­fi­­gu­­ra­­ble si usas ip­s­vd, que es co­­­mo tcp­­se­r­­ve­­r, pe­­ro mu­­cho me­­jo­­­r.

• Rea­l­­men­­te ne­­ce­­si­­to ayu­­da pa­­ra pro­­­bar la ve­r­­sión en SVN, que de­­be­­­ría ser mui­­cho, mu­­cho, mu­­cho me­­jor que los re­­lea­­ses ac­­tua­­le­s.

• El re­­po­­­si­­to­­­rio SVN es­­tá en google­­co­­­de

Y em­pie­zo con uno de los pe­da­zos gran­de­s: con­fi­gu­ra­ció­n.

Par­te I de una se­rie lar­ga (es­pe­ro que sean por lo me­nos 5 par­tes).

grep 23/Nov/2007 /var/log/httpd/lateral-access_log |\
grep html | cut -d" " -f1 | sort |uniq |\
while read IP; do host $IP; done

Pa­ra ha­cer que sea real­men­te úti­l, sin em­bar­go, ne­ce­si­to un pro­gra­ma­dor C que con­vier­ta es­te pro­gra­ma py­tho­n:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import sys
from socket import *
serverHost = 'localhost'
serverPort = 1999

s = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM)
s.connect((serverHost, serverPort))
print "Sending: ",' '.join(sys.argv[1:])
s.send(' '.join(sys.argv[1:])+"\n")
data = s.recv(1024)
sys.stderr.write(data)
sys.stderr.flush()
sys.exit(int(data.split(' ')[0]))

En una lin­da fun­ción que nun­ca fa­lle y nun­ca pier­da me­mo­ria (por su­pues­to de­be re­tor­nar en vez de salir del pro­gra­ma, es­to es un ejem­plo ;-)

Si ten­go eso, pue­do li­be­rar ra­ter co­mo una he­rra­mien­ta úti­l, que de­be­ría en­con­trar un ho­gar en mu­chas ins­ta­la­cio­nes de qmail (y tal vez tam­bién ten­ga otros uso­s)

Dear fictional character that oppreses the workers of
the North Pole:

This christmas, I want an Asus eee PC, an Everex gPC,
and some bare white box with a nice Phoenix PC 3.0 BIOS.

Why am I ask­ing the red men­ace from the north for these item­s?

Well, they do have one thing in com­mon: Lin­ux. An­oth­er is that they are con­sumer box­es, not server­s.

For many years, one of the huge ad­van­tages win­dows had was that it came pre­loaded with most PC­s. This en­abled peo­ple to turn a blind eye to win­dows in­stal­la­tion and con­fig­u­ra­tion since it was done by Some­one Else (T­M).

Since get­ting Lin­ux has be­come much eas­i­er in the last 10 years [1] this has been very frus­trat­ing. Imag­ine you had some­thing you gave away for free, but peo­ple kept us­ing some­thing more ex­pen­sive be­cause they had to pay for it any­way!

That itch­es. If Lin­ux was not cho­sen be­cause it was in­fe­ri­or for the task at hand, that's one thing, but not even be­ing able to be test­ed be­cause the oth­er prod­uct was bun­dled and paid for? An­noy­ing.

Of course on servers this worked dif­fer­ent­ly. The OS was not the ex­pen­sive part, and was pre­loaded less of­ten. Cor­po­ra­tions have pre­ar­ranged li­cens­ing terms, and adding things to the mix is sim­pler.

But for con­sumer­s, preload­ing has been a huge prob­lem [2]

So, if the jol­ly tres­pass­er brings me what I or­dered, I will find the fol­low­ing:

• Asus eee: A cheap sub­­note­­book with Lin­ux and KDE pre­load­ed.

• Ev­erex gPC: A cheap Desk­­top with Lin­ux and En­­light­en­­men­t(!?) pre­load­ed.

• Phoenix PC 3.0 BIOS: an em­bed­d­ed hy­per­vi­­sor and Lin­ux OS.

The eee is prob­a­bly the most ap­peal­ing. It's ide­al for many us­es:

• Sales­­men who are now us­ing some un­­god­­ly Black­­ber­ry app (or worse)

• Sys­tem and net­­work ad­min­s. Re­al­­ly. I would love to have a cheap note­­book I won't hes­­i­­tate bring­ing to a roof, a bar, the beach, what­ev­er. It would live in my bag. My cur­rent note­­book? Be­­sides weight­ing 8 pound­s, it's ex­pen­­sive and large. All I need are we­b­­pages email and SSH ses­­sion­s!

• Kids and stu­­dents (it's cheap! You can buy a re­­place­­ment if he drops coffe on it!)

• Ba­sic users and old peo­­ple. Re­al­­ly, an of­­fice-­­like thing and a web browser? And I can use it wher­ev­er there's wifi? Neat.

And it is go­ing to get a lot cheap­er, and it's go­ing to get a lot bet­ter. I ex­pect there will be a 32G­B, 10" mod­el by the end of next year for $350, and the cur­rent mod­el avail­able for $250 (after al­l, half the com­po­nents are cheap as dirt al­ready, on­ly flash is ex­pen­sive, and that's a fluke)

And so on and so forth. If Asus cre­ates a de­cent dock [3] and a nice rdif­f-back­up-based back­up so­lu­tion (it should be at least as nice as Ap­ple's Time Ma­chine), this box turns in­to my main com­put­er when­ev­er I am at home, and is a use­ful tool on the road. I re­al­ly can live with those spec­s.

The gPC is a bit hard­er to grasp.

First, it's even cheap­er. $200 is cheap. The CPU is slow­ish, but there are a whole range of tasks that are not CPU bound. I re­al­ly want one of those as a home serv­er. This is the first time I can see one of these ITX box­es as ac­tu­al­ly cheap not just small (in fact this one is not small at al­l).

• I have a TV cap­­ture card, I could make a PVR out of it us­ing Lin­uxM­CE? It does have enough CPU for that (s­ince I am do­ing it with a slow­er box al­ready)

• A file server? More than good enough for that.

• A house­­guest com­put­er?

• A MPD server?

• All of the above?

And do all this while be­ing qui­et and pow­er-­ef­fi­cien­t? Neat!

And the Phoenix PC 3.0 BIOS sim­ply would be cool be­cause I can vir­tu­al­ize with­out jump­ing through any hoop­s. This one is still fuzzy for me, but I on­ly found out about it to­day. I need time for things to grow.

Why do I think these box­es mark a trend? Be­cause they are def­i­nite­ly low-end prod­uct­s. These are meant to be made by thou­sands and hun­dreds of thou­sand­s, and make small mon­ey on each.

The mak­ers are be­ing smart about pro­vid­ing as lit­tle func­tion­al­i­ty as they can and mak­ing them sim­ple, niche, con­sumer prod­ucts in­stead of mon­stru­osly pow­er­ful Lin­ux mon­sters (sor­ry for how ug­ly that sound­s).

An­oth­er fac­tor is the huge growth of web apps that work well on non-IE browsers. This is mak­ing the OS ir­rel­e­vant just like Net­scape hoped in 1996. If the OS is in­vis­i­ble, Lin­ux won.

So, Santa, for this christmas I ask for all these toys,
and if it has to be only one, please make it the Asus eee.

                                            Roberto Alsina

PS: and if you don't do your part, the raindeer's a goner!