February 2013

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Cacti is a wonderful tool, but many of the default graphs are ugly. Worse, the “ucd/net Memory Usage” graph is totally useless. It displays memory which is free, or dedicated to cache or buffers. But it doesn’t display the actual used memory or total. And it uses the wrong base, assuming there are 1000 bytes in a kilobyte of memory. I can’t imagine why this graph template is even included with Cacti by default. So, I set out to make a better one.

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My friend Soren recently gave me a Super Power Bank, a nifty portable Lithium battery pack with two USB ports for charging devices on the go. The Super Power Bank has a 6600 mAh battery with two USB ports for charging devices; one providing 1.0 A, the other 2.1 A. He asked me a question: do my devices charge faster on the 2.1 A port? Down the rabbit hole I flew.

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I recently upgraded to Linux Mint 14 “nadia”, which is based on Ubuntu 12.10. I use dnsmasq as a local DHCP server and DNS resolver for virtual machines. Installing dnsmasq on Linux Mint 14 broke host DNS resolution. The issue is easily reproducible: stop dnsmasq, DNS stops working. Start dnsmasq, and it works again.

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