Articles by Tyler Wagner

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Making Tarski dynamically resize, with sliding header images

2009-02-03 19:00 +00:00 by Tyler Wagner | 10 comments

Update 2011-09-18: This post is out of date. See the latest release here.

You may have noticed the slick new header images on tolaris.com. Try resizing your browser. The site’s theme and header images will resize to match, sliding apart as needed while maintaining the right depth.

The artwork was done by my talented friend Josh Smith. Several of his photographs grace the walls of my home, and his daughter – in convincing us that breeding may be pretty neat after all – is incidentally responsible for the existence of my own child. I commissioned Josh to replace the boring old header image (and its limiting static width) with a sliding array of images late last year. I am extremely pleased with the work. From time to time, I may change the command-line text (currently using dpkg to install “Hello World”), just for fun.

The resizing and sliding is accomplished by using CSS. I am using a modified form of the Tarski WordPress template. I love Tarski’s options and clean design, but fixed-pixel-width websites are dumb. So I’ve overridden many of the Tarski theme’s settings to use percentages rather than pixel widths.

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Using Internet Explorer with ies4linux and Ubuntu Hardy

2009-02-03 09:52 +00:00 by Tyler Wagner | No comments

There is a bug in the version of wine supplied with Ubuntu Hardy. This causes the version of Internet Explorer installed with ies4linux to hang when loading sites via HTTPS. I use IE for a few sites written back in the dark ages, and for testing a site’s layout before publication.

Aside: tolaris.com’s neat new automagically expanding header images look terrible in IE 5/6. I have no intention of fixing this. If you’re reading my site, you probably know better than to use IE for everyday browsing.

In October I recompiled wine from the Hardy source packages with the proposed bug fix. But I never announced it. If you missed that, you can find it in the repository.

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Frequency math, or don’t touch my local oscillator

2008-10-23 16:04 +00:00 by Tyler Wagner | 7 comments

Satellite engineers have a very poor showing on the Internet. I started writing about satellite stuff because of how difficult it has been for me to find reliable information. I’ve had to do a lot of learning by doing. Perhaps other satellite engineers enjoy their business being a black art, but like locksmiths and security alarm salesmen, they’re just waiting for the light of responsible disclosure to toss their world upside down.

And that brings me to a trend I have noticed in the satellite Internet business. There are two camps: radio guys who somehow configure a router, and IP guys who somehow align an antenna. Usually the IP guys do better in business than the radio guys. Perhaps this is because radio guys tend to be former military and unused to competition. Perhaps this is because they think all you have to do is deliver a carrier and everyone is happy. But the customer doesn’t care about Hertz, he cares about bits. And really, the space link is still a Layer 1 problem, and the harder work is above that.

On with revealing a little black magic.

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Disabling WordPress character replacements inside code tags

2008-10-13 20:34 +00:00 by Tyler Wagner | No comments

Update 2009-02-12: This bug appears to have been resolved with WordPress 2.7.1.

I noticed when reviewing a recent post that WordPress was “helpfully” replacing two hyphens with emdash, three dots with ellipsis, apostrophe with curly apostrophe, etc. It does this even between <code> tags – on the second line and beyond. I appreciate that WordPress does this when I’m writing in a journalistic style, but I’m also a programmer and engineer, which means it hinders as often as it helps.

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kgtk packaged for Ubuntu Hardy

2008-10-12 20:04 +00:00 by Tyler Wagner | No comments

KGTK is a wrapper utility that allows GTK applications to use the native KDE file open/save dialogs. I cannot stand the GTK/Gnome dialogs, and I this helps apps like Firefox maintain a consistent appearance with KDE.

I’ve packaged the latest release, 0.10.0, for Ubuntu Hardy amd64 and i386. It is available in my repository now. Source packages are provided, so any other Debian-based distro or architecture should be able to build it.

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Identifying undersea fibre and satellite links with traceroute

2008-10-09 20:07 +00:00 by Tyler Wagner | 1 comment

I frequently travel to the Middle East, which means I often find myself on the wrong end of a slow Internet link. Sometimes that is oversold undersea fibre, such as in Dubai. More often – because of my work – it is VSAT. I’m an engineer, which means I’m a curious monkey that takes everything apart just to understand how it works. Network topology is one of those things.

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Running root apps seamlessly on a normal user’s desktop

2008-10-02 18:21 +00:00 by Tyler Wagner | 1 comment

I’m a network engineer, and I run Kubuntu on the desktop. Which means I often run applications as root: Wireshark, Ettercap, Zenmap, etc. I prefer a seamless desktop experience, meaning I like my GUI customisations to apply to root applications, not just those running as my own user. Secondly, I like to directly launch GUI apps from a root terminal.

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Moving your Linux root partition to software RAID

2008-10-01 19:32 +00:00 by Tyler Wagner | 39 comments

Update 2012-01-18: This guide has been updated for recent changes, and is safe to use on current Ubuntu and Debian releases.

One of the reasons I started this blog is to write about problems I’ve solved that I can’t find answers to already on the web. Today, let’s talk about moving your linux install to linux software raid (md raid / mdadm). This post assumes you are running Ubuntu Linux 8.04, but any Debian-based distro from the past two years, or most other distros, will have similar commands.

We start with an install on a single 80 GB SATA drive, partitioned as follows:

/dev/sda1 as /, 10GB, ext3, bootable
/dev/sda2 as swap, 1GB
/dev/sda3 as /home, 69GB, ext3

We want to add a second 80GB SATA drive and move the entire install to use RAID1 between the two drives. So the final configuration will appear:

/dev/md0 as /, 10GB, ext3
/dev/md1 as swap, 1GB
/dev/md2 as /home, 69GB, ext3

Where the raid arrays are:

md0 : active raid1 sda1[0] sdb1[1]
md1 : active raid1 sda2[0] sdb2[1]
md2 : active raid1 sda3[0] sdb3[1]

Here there be dragons. As always, back up your data first. If you don’t know how to use rsync, now is an excellent time to learn.

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Making the GUI faster in Ubuntu Linux

2008-09-28 19:58 +00:00 by Tyler Wagner | 5 comments

I’ve been using some form of Unix since I was introduced to the Internet my first year at University in 1995. I switched to Linux on the desktop full time in April 2005, and I’ve been managing my company’s mid-size network of servers and desktops for the past two years.

One thing I’ve noticed about Linux, even desktop-focused distributions, is that it’s largely tuned to the most desirable behaviour for a server. But what is desirable on a server isn’t necessarily desirable on a desktop. On Ubuntu Linux (or any Debian-based distro), add the following two lines to /etc/sysctl.conf:

vm.swappiness=1
vm.vfs_cache_pressure=50

These changes will be done automatically on reboot, but let’s load them now with:

sysctl -p

Now you’ll notice GUI applications feel more responsive and filesystem browsing will be faster when the disk is busy. What we have done is instruct the kernel to prefer to keep applications in RAM (swappiness) instead of disk cache, and to prefer to keep filesystem inodes and directory entries cached at the cost of files themselves. This means reading files from disk is slightly slower (IE, copying, moving, loading big files), but browsing the filesystem will be much faster.

Rudd-o.com wrote extensively on this last year. I recommend his write-up for anyone who wants to understand the issues in more depth.

For the record, I ran the tests in Rudd-o’s article. He advised creating a big file, then displaying the entire filesystem hierachy with find, and then copying that file. In my case, I went from 2 minutes, 6 seconds for the “find / > /dev/null” to just 17 seconds. That has made browsing in Konqueror a great deal faster.

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