Parazoid.net

I’ve got a list of tools I think are cool or useful, so I’m going to start sharing my thoughts of them here….isn’t that the point? So today’s tool is iftop. It can be used to display bandwidth usage on an interface. If you can’t figure out what it does based on the name, their description of the tool lays it out well:

iftop does for network usage what top(1) does for CPU usage. It listens to network traffic on a named interface and displays a table of current bandwidth usage by pairs of hosts. Handy for answering the question “why is our ADSL link so slow?”.

Small and simple tool, what’s not to like. Real good for those times that you know something is eating traffic but don’t know what. Check out screenshots of iftop at http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pdw/iftop/.

Update: While perusing through logs it is clear that people find this page because they are looking for information on how to read iftop output. Looking back at this post I clearly stiffed everybody on that aspect of things, and have wanted to post an update on how to interpret what’s going on in iftop. Luckily Techthrob.com took care of that far better than I would be able to do, so go check out his article How to Monitor Network Traffic in Linux.

Have you ever have one of those weeks where at the beginning you thought everything was going to be reasonable and time would just pass quickly, but then you run into a wall and everything falls apart? Why can’t this week just end? To make it worse, I was on the way home I was thinking about how it is supposed to snow late this afternoon and how that might mean not going to Poughkeepsie Friday, but now I don’t see how that helps at all.

On a brighter note, here’s a great reference for any How I Met Your Mother fan.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/How_I_Met_Your_Mother

Doing these quizzes isn’t my normal thing, but this had some odd questions and pegged me pretty well. It helps that I did not feel like even attempting to catch up on anything tonight.

Find your own pose!

What’s this? Another post? That’s right, 5 this year. There are reasons for tonight’s post. Here is what’s going on:

• Moved to WordPress. I finally did it. I had planned on doing a lot of testing and making the whole thing smooth…didn’t happen. I can say that the Serendipity (s9y) to WordPress Importer I got here worked well. I found out while testing the RSS feed however that the import task set the guid in the database to the test domain I was using which led to problems. Over all I’m liking WordPress, I just need to find a theme I like.
• Post #100! Evidently this is post number 100, nothing too special. However with #100 marking my fifth post of the year and noticing that Bruce only has four, I’m declaring war. I kind of wanted to participate National Blog Posting Month (NoBloPoMo) just to get me to post more often, but challenging Bruce is a more obtainable goal.

I had more to post, but between problems upgrading and watching BSG: Razor I have forgotten what I had to share. Oh well, I need to stop with the mega posts anyway.

..I guess. I figured now that we are almost done with September, I’d make my fourth post of the year. Nothing really to report. I wake up, go to work, get annoyed, go home to watch TV, sleep. Occasionally there are drinking sessions which leads to fun, but life is fairly routine. But just to recap:

- Free conferences are great.
- The Space is being shutdown. Parazoid.net is now hosted virtually in Atlanta.
- I want to get back into PHP and doing development work. I have to thank having to do perl work at Marist for getting the programming bug back into me. I have a couple of small ideas of things to do once I get some updates/upgrades done.
- I’m starting to get back into the Internet again. For some reason, every time Summer comes around I stop paying attention to the Internet and stop reading email and news and completely ignore my feed reader until it is so large that it crashes my machine (+45k unread messages isn’t enough). But I am cleaning up and getting back into things, so hopefully I’ll start posting random stuff again, especially fun tips and tricks that I see. So many things to share. I am playing with WordPress and plan on switching soon. Does anyone have any suggestions on good plugins and/or themes?
- I live in Red Hook. Moved up in June with Dave and Sara.
- Have I said free conferences are great? Free food and an excuse to not be at work and not use up vacation day, wow!

Alright, I’m out of random points, and this session is almost over. I do feel bad not pointing to a cool tool or something, so go to xkcd and read through the entire archive. I’ve probably plugged it before, but my god is it good.