October 28, 2008

smokeping’s whacky source

I’ll first start off by saying I think smokeping is a great program and Tobi Oetiker is a great programmer whose contributions to the community have been great and in no way could I ever create MRTG or RRDTool. But…. After downloading the source to smokeping today and trying to configure it to run, I was completely shocked at how poorly it was put together. It’s clear that Tobi did not bother with making his code easy to run on any other system but his own with constant absolute paths to his own home directories on his personal machine! His own documentation and install notes are vague at best and I can’t figure out why he did not use relative paths at all in the source. While you do have to edit most files anyway to reflect where your RRD perl libraries are and your perl location, I just find it very odd that he left the paths in like that. Even his example configuration file is catered to his machine and his network making it confusing to delete out what is not needed.

July 23, 2008

BIND zone file management

Anyone out there have any recommendations for managing zone files in BIND? It seems the general consensus is that people just end up using home grown systems. A lot of the web based projects out there are either abadoned or use strictly a database backend which is nice but it adds another layer of complexity, and a failure point. I’d like to be able to switch back and forth between using the management system and being able to do an inline search and replace if need be , on my zone files.

July 13, 2008

Instruction booklets for furniture

Since moving into the city I’ve had to assemble a lot of furniture from ikea and other various places. Today while putting together snack tables from bed bath & beyond I believe I discovered my source of why I hate putting this crap together, the instructions.

You see in order to save money on printing costs places like Ikea use picture only instruction manuals so they don’t need to translate every booklet into every language where they ship to. Ok, that’s fine , and anyway you don’t need much verbal explanation when it comes to fitting round pegs into round holes, you just need to know which is the proper hole to place said peg in.