Bend in the Weather

I've decided that each blog post will include a 'Chinese Proverb'...

These aren't actually Chinese Proverbs penned by Confucius, but rather my personal musings or reflections on life.

They serve no real purpose, but may put a smile on someones face out there... and may shed a little more light into the dark corners of my warped mind to the readership.

And on that note... this is one that has been around our household for a few months.


Proverb: "Man who farts in shower, only has himself to blame."

Dear LazyWeb,

NetworkManager appears to have become the de-facto networking tool under the dominant graphical X-Window manager environments (Gnome or KDE; which uses KNetworkManager).

As such it's heavily coupled into most Gnome and KDE desktop environments these days.
Whilst NM works well in a wired environment, it seems to trip up for many on wireless networking setups.

I'm wondering if someone who's dabbled a bit further than myself can provide me a solution?!

The Background is:

• MythTV runs on a PC in the lounge connected to a Plasma TV.
• Distro is a fresh x86-64 Ubuntu 8.04 (beta release) install. All updates applied.
  
• Automatic GDM login is enabled (no-one wants to type in a username/password just to watch TV).
• Network Manager starts, and decides it needs to get access to the Gnome-Keyring to get the WPA2-PSK key for the wireless card.
• The Gnome-Keyring password has to be entered before NetworkManager can access the actual keyring.

An example of Gnome Keyring prompting for a password so Network Manager can connect is below:

I recently blogged about a vulnerability that effected VMware's desktop products. In particular, it was in relation to shared folders, that could under certain conditions expose the host machine that the Virtual Machine ran on.

It seems that the wide-spread coverage the vulnerability generated and the release of Proof of Concept code, was enough to get VMware to get around to releasing updates.

Versions of both VMware Player (Version 2.0.3), VMware ACE (Version 2.0.3) and VMware WorkStation (Version 6.03) were released on 14^th March 2008 (Build: 8004).

If you are using any of these products and utilise the "Shared Folders" feature you are highly recommended to upgrade.

The release also doesn't just fix vulnerabilities in shared-folders, but also updates the versions of OpenSSL and libpng used on each of the products to avoid known issues.

So even those not using the Shared Folders option, it's a worthy upgrade.

Whilst I can't say the release was timely, at least it finally got patched.
I doubt this would have been the case if these products were available as OSS.

Update: Vmware Server didn't escape from the vulnerabilities either. A new version (1.05) is available as well.

Australian ISPs generally set download quotas for their ISP plans. (some like BigPond also set upload quotas as well!)

The main rationale of this is mainly due to the fact most traffic is international traffic (US, Europe, Asia, etc), and as such ISPs need to purchase international bandwidth from private companies. These costs need to be limited and are therefore passed down to the consumer.

For users that go over their allocated and paid quota there normally are some really nasty side-effects:

• Rate limiting to ~64kbps. Making the connection only a slightly more bareable than dial-up.
  
• Excess charges, which can quickly add up on some plans.

As such, Aussie Internet users have trained themselves to avoid such pain; by always keeping an eye on their Internet Usage. ISPs provide a Usage Meter normally found on their website. However this can be tedious and means every time you need to check your usage you need to login to the ISP website; that's if you remember!

Unfortunately, with large speeds under xDSL available these days, it's quite easy to chew through your usage quite quickly.

An easy way to avoid such problems is to install a Firefox extension called NetUsage. As the name implies, it keeps track of your Internet Usage.

Unlike other tools that track Internet Usage, it doesn't rely on SNMP from your router or count bytes in your browser, it actually reads your ISP usage meter and parses the information into a nice graphical representation.

This is accomplished either by screen-scraping the ISP usage website or via an XML usage data feed (preferred); if provided by your ISP - many do these days).



It's quite clever too, and will cater for plans that have peak/off-peak periods. One feature I find useful is that at a glance I can tell if I'm over quota for the time period in the month.

A quick hover over the widget and I can actually see a great breakdown of the usage, how much per day I'm able to download until the end of the period (and remain under quota).


The application is well supported, and support is generally offered via a Whirlpool forum thread. ^critter the author responds quickly and bugs and quirks are quickly jumped on.

If you're not in Australia, don't fret! NetUsage does support some non-Australian ISPs.
If your ISP isn't currently covered you can provide the developer details of your ISPs XML usage data feed and he'll happily add it.

Better yet, it's cross platform and will run under Mac, Windows and Linux flawlessly.
Current releases also support the latest Firefox 3 betas (as well as the current Firefox 2 of course).

Configuration couldn't be simpler! Right click on the graph, then select the preferences menu option.
As you can see there is a tonne of Australian ISPs catered for our of the box.



So if you want to keep on top of your usage, give NetUsage a go!
Those that want to get their hands dirty with the code, it's available via a SVN repository at: http://netusage.iau5.com/svn/