Author: Alexander Mamchenkov

Finally I got a nice laptop to work with. It is a new HP nx6110 laptop with Intel Mobile Centrino 1.7GHz, 512 RAM, 60 GB HDD and a whole bunch of stuff which is normally supplied with a laptop like wireless, bluetooth and so on.

Although this laptop does not belong to me, I can use it all the time, which is enough for me. My latest activities involve a lot of running here and there and in most of the cases I need a laptop for either having a nice repository of software nearby, connection to some tricky devices, backuping something or just to do some small tasks in the applications I run on the laptop. In addition I use it as a mobile development platform for small stuff I need to do.

I hope that one day I will buy my personal laptop, but until that this is enough.

I\’ve beet fighting with the CP1251 char encoding to work with Kopete ICQ for a while and finally I found how to enable it properly.

After creating the ICQ account withing the Kopete, edit ~/.kde/share/config/kopeterc and under [ICQ] part of the config change DefaultEncoding to 2251.

The problem is that CP1251 is a most used encoding for ICQ to talk in Russian and that was preventing me from using Kopete as an IM, since it had some problems with this encoding. Now everything works just fine.

BTW, I also seen some Skype plugin for Kopete, although it was still under early development.

I am playing around nagios now (again) and it seems that I have found the nice way to monitor most of the stuff I need.

Monitoring Linux servers in not a big deal and a lot of custom plugins can be (and already) written for watching different stuff, but monitoring Windows servers were not so easy for me until this days. Now it seems that I found the way.

It is well known that SNMP under windows really sux (I mean the standard one), the thing that really caught my attention was Performance Counter. This can do the job well.

My idea was to integrate nagios, windows performance counters and rrd graphs. For this I have set up nagios, installed NRPE plugin on windows to be able to check it and added a plugin which is able to watch performance counters. Now I have everything: performance counters are monitored, nagios updates the state of services and does all that fancy stuff it is supposed to do and in addition, the output and performance data of the plugins is written by nagios to the named pipe from where my small perl script takes it and updates a bunch of rrd databases. A simple web GUI shows me all needed graphs.

For the past few months I was thinking about implementing virtual servers on some hardware. The reason is that the hardware is too powerful to run few tasks and running many can lead to mess. In addition I have different people using different stuff and I do not want them to interfere. With virtualization I can solve all the problem and even get some more benefits.

I was looking at many solution and it seems that I found the one (thanks to by brother): OpenVZ. It is very easy to install. Guest OSes run on the same kernel (so no need to have multiple kernels consuming each its own resources) and it does the job I need.

I am in the process of installing it, so I can not tell a lot about it yet (except from what I was told and what I have already seen in the installation process), but when I finish with it, I think I will cover it here.

I have installed Fedora Core 5 on my workstation now. Looks nice. There few things that I noticed at once:

1. Improvement in speed (boot, load of apps and other)

2. Look and feel is much better than before. Nicer colors and so on

3. Very fresh software. They managed to include almost all latest stuff