This shell uses the same Terminal commands that you would be happy using in Linux, but restricted to Google searches. View a list of help terms by typing “h” on the terminal interface or simply to check out your options. Visit my shell implementation by clicking the image above or visiting the link at

http://rbucky.com/shell

When you use SSL, referral information such as key words or what site you linked from are stripped from the headers . The Webmaster will not know that you came from Google (i.e. no referrers). The affect from this type of search to the consumer is that the consumer could destroy any personalized experiences from the site that they are visiting based on referrers.

Encrypted Google searches have been around for a little while. Scroogle has been offering the service for some time.

Reading:

• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/25/google_ssl_search_and_web_analytics/
• Scroogle – https://ssl.scroogle.org

Database size!

I was going to simple revert back to my previous installation using my nightly backups and then realized that the database had grown to over 670MB! That was a shocker for me.

Solution

My end solution was to reinstall Piwik all together. It meant that I had to lose all of my previous stats and replace the javascript code in the footers for counting site visits. However, the new Piwik version is spectacular. It includes ip address exclusion and a couple of new features to help smooth things out. I could have spent another “X” number of minutes to recover me previous work and start the upgrade experience again. However, when it comes down to it, I really do not care to much about my historical performance numbers. I have a mental rolodex!

View and download the code at my Code bin: http://code.rbucky.com/7

If you prefer to change the email address that is sent (by default it is sent to the local root account), add the following code to the top of your crontab.

MAILTO=""

My Opinion

Why would you want to store your personal login information to your frequently visited websites in one location on a third-party cloud server somewhere? With recent SSL certificate hacks from Versisign (http://olyurl.me/46) and others, it seems foolish to trust your login and passwords on the cloud.

The persuasion to store these data on a third party server is that you don’t have to rely on your local browser to store login and passwords. Personally, I would much rather store my data locally that on a cloud third party server somewhere.

What is your opinion? Am I missing something here?

This move by Facebook and likely many others, is very telling of the future of MySQL. My impression from the Oracle/MySQL camp is that they will continue to offer MySQL, but it will likely be out done by many of the forks that are pushing their way up (e.g.  Percona with ExtraDB or MariaDB).

I believe that eventually MySQL will drop the open-source model as others take the lead and develop a better product for users like you and me.

Further system requirements are found here: http://www.splunk.com/base/Documentation/latest/Installation/SystemRequirements

If you use this product, it is likely that you have a solid rackspace at home with more money that I have, or you manage a small IT infrastructure for your employer. Either way, Splunk is a solid product with some real genius behind it.

I guess that their is no way that the Splunk owners would be willing to upgrade my Xeon cores? Come on guys?!?!

New Features in Splunk 4.1

There are quite a few new helpful features in Splunk 4.1. Impressive…

• Real-time search and reporting

• Search, monitor and analyze both live streaming data and terabytes of historical data, all from the same interface. In other words, you can search your historical index as well as real-time datasets.
• Single sign-on for protocols such as CAS, Oracle Identity Management, RSA Passlogix, Sun OpenSSO, SiteMinder, Tivoli, etc.
• Automatic delivery of PDF reports to your inbox
• Creation of workflows from real-time data

• Event type finder

Learn more about Splunk by logging in to one of their webcasts listed below. Or, you can visit the Splunk website and read their documentation.

Webcast

Thursday, April 8, 2010 11:00 am

Pacific Daylight Time (San Jose, GMT-07:00)
https://splunk.webex.com/splunk/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=593482117

Tuesday, April 13, 2010 8:00 am

Pacific Daylight Time (San Jose, GMT-07:00)
https://splunk.webex.com/splunk/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=596394594

Tuesday, April 13, 2010 5:00 pm

Pacific Daylight Time (San Jose, GMT-07:00)
https://splunk.webex.com/splunk/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=595515388

head -15 /var/log/auth.log

head -15 /var/log/apache2/error.log

nmap <em>ip-address</em>

find /var -type f -ls | sort -k 7 -r -n | head -10

find /var/log/ -type f -size +5120M -exec ls -lh {} \;

find /home/me/files -ctime 0  -print -exec cp {} /mnt/backup/{} \;

find /temp/ -mtime +7-type f | xargs /bin/rm -f

find /home/me/music/ -type f -name *.mp3 -exec rename 'y/[A-Z]/[a-z]/

cat /var/log/maillog | grep "status=sent" | grep "May 25" | wc -l

China

The main story that you might be hearing is about Google’s redirection and relocation of their .cn (China) domain to Hong Kong, where censoring is not an option. Microsoft criticized this move by saying that Google must follow the laws of their host country. While I agree, as a privately owned company, they have the business choice whether or not to conduct their business in that location. They decided against it – problem solved.

Facebook

This story surprised the hell out of me. Concluding the week of March 13, 2010, Facebook overtook Google as the most frequently visited web site. That week, Facebook and Google accounted for 14% of all United States web traffic. (source (tb)).

YouTube

Websites go down from time to time, but these last two days have been tough. Yesterday, I blogged about some Google server and sign-on errors that I was experiencing. This morning, YouTube is pushing a 500 error.

• icecast2 – streaming server
• darkice – live audio streamer and encoder
• jackd – audio server daemon
• libogg0 – library
• libvorbis0a – library
• libvorbisenc2 – library

The literature that I read indicates that Darkice is compiled without mp3 support. You must compile from scratch, versus installing from the repositories if you want mp3 support. Once you compile from scratch, Darkice will stream .mp3. Then, you can use software such as Wimpy Media Player to embed it into your site.

If you are installing from scratch on Ubuntu Server 8.04, here are the steps to get you streaming and online. I start this install regimen assuming that you have at lease one functioning domain name on your server. Icecast will not interfere with your Apache installation as it operates on port 8000.

sudo apt-get install icecast2

sudo apt-get install jackd

sudo apt-get install darkice

sudo apt-get install screen

sudo apt-get install libogg0

sudo apt-get install libvorbis0a

sudo apt-get install libvorbisenc2

# sample DarkIce configuration file, edit for your needs before using
# see the darkice.cfg man page for details
# this section describes general aspects of the live streaming session
[general]
duration        = 0        # duration of encoding, in seconds. 0 means forever
bufferSecs      = 5         # size of internal slip buffer, in seconds
reconnect       = yes       # reconnect to the server(s) if disconnected

# this section describes the audio input that will be streamed
[input]
device          = /dev/dsp  # OSS DSP soundcard device for the audio input
sampleRate      = 11025     # sample rate in Hz. try 11025, 22050 or 44100
bitsPerSample   = 16        # bits per sample. try 16
channel         = 1         # channels. 1 = mono, 2 = stereo

# this section describes a streaming connection to an IceCast server
# there may be up to 8 of these sections, named [icecast-0] ... [icecast-7]
# these can be mixed with [icecast2-x] and [shoutcast-x] sections

# this section describes a streaming connection to an IceCast2 server
# there may be up to 8 of these sections, named [icecast2-0] ... [icecast2-7]
# these can be mixed with [icecast-x] and [shoutcast-x] sections
[icecast2-0]
bitrateMode     = abr       # average bit rate
format          = vorbis     # format of the stream: ogg vorbis
bitrate         = 16        # bitrate of the stream sent to the server
server          = wacomputing.com
# host name of the server
port            = 8000      # port of the IceCast2 server, usually 8000
password        = your-password    # source password to the IceCast2 server
mountPoint      = olypd.ogg  # mount point of this stream on the IceCast2 server
name            = olypd.ogg
# name of the stream
description     = This is only a trial
# description of the stream
url             = http://www.wacomputing.com
# URL related to the stream
genre           = scanner    # genre of the stream
public          = yes       # advertise this stream?

# this section describes a streaming connection to a ShoutCast server
# there may be up to 8 of these sections, named [shoutcast-0] ... [shoutcast-7]
# these can be mixed with [icecast-x] and [icecast2-x] sections

Starting the Services

The great thing about darkice is that you can run the configuration file from anywhere on your system. It does not have an init.d script. However, the only downside from Darkice is that when you initiate the script, it has to be running – unless there is a better way. That is where the program screen comes into play. Once you start Darkice, you will see the:

Your terminal will be unusable at this time. This tutorial (http://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/Live_Audio/Ubuntu_Darkice)provides a script to use screen to create a virtual terminal so that Darkice can still run while you have use of your Terminal. The process to start your stream is below:

sudo /etc/init.d/jackd start

sudo /etc/init.d/icecast2 start

darkice -c /etc/darkice.cfg

Listening to your stream

Once you get this going, it should be available on the parameters you stated in your darkice.cfg. My stream is located at http://wacomputing.com. If you have questions, I can try and help you to the best of my abilities. Leave a comment…

Many thanks to RenoScanner.com for the help in this configuration process.

Troubleshooting

arecord -l : lists sound devices; you might need this to detect which device to place in the darkice.cfg

Resources

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=8978773