Getting distributed DNS in a LAN

If you are running a Debian-based distribution, just run the following command:

apt-get install avahi-dameon

Once you have it installed, you can ping machines on your LAN by their hostname and the .local suffix, for example:

ping hostname.local

Red-Hat based distributions usually have a firewall enabled, remember to allow port 5353 (mDNS). (system-config-firewall on Fedora)

You now have a distributed multicast-based DNS service on your local network based on Zero-Conf technology. You can find more information at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avahi_(software)
http://avahi.org/

I use two blogs

I have been using two blogs for a few months now as most people do. One for serious stuff (I guess) and one for my ramblings. The other blog is at http://ptony82.blogger.com. I am realizing that it’s good to put my ideas somewhere that is easily accessible; hence, the internet is the best place for it. This wordpress blog will be used for deep thought (if I ever get any). On other news, SocialVPN is coming along great, I have been reading more so that I could do some true improvements and more importantly so that I can defend it when the time comes. Live long and prosper.

Understand the computer through Bash

Over the past few weeks, I have been writing various bash scripts to automate the various tasks I have to perform to maintain a Planetlab slice and run tests for my experiments on Amazon EC2. As a novice in bash scripting, I have spent a good chunk of time reading the bash manual (easily available through ‘man bash’). Through reading the manual, I began to understand how powerful the shell really is. As a child of the graphical UI era, where everything is done through mouse clicks, noone took the time to tell me how much more effective one can be by simply interacting with the shell. The shell gives you so much more control and understanding for process management, file access, and networking. Overall, the shell has helped me gain a much greater appreciation for the operating system and for the many tool available for decades such as grep, awk, sed, find, join, cat, lpr, screen, vim, cut, just to name a few. The sad part is that it took me this long to realize this, but as they say, it’s better late than never.

TTYL, Internetland

Microsoft is going to do well

I just had a thought today about the future of Microsoft and I decided to blog it. Overall, Microsoft is going to do well in the coming years. Three things are going to help Microsoft: economy, netbooks, and multicore systems with a lot of RAM. With the bad economy, Microsoft was finally able to come up with an effective ad campaign. Basically, Microsoft says that Macs are too expensive and they are not worth the price. With multicore laptops with over 4GB Ram for less than $500, who needs a Mac. Secondly, they are netbooks, they are light, small, cheap, and they run Windows. Recent numbers have shown that netbook users are not ready for Linux, as a result, Windows is the predominant netbook OS. With Mac out of the game, Microsoft is unchallenged in that space. Since, netbooks are getting the fastest growing sales numbers, Microsoft is having a good time with that. Finally, incredibly powerful desktop machines. I am amazed at how cheap Quad-core machines with amazing amounts of memory have gotten. As a result, with Windows 7 coming out, the Microsoft OS can be as bloated as possible, and still run fine. Applications do not have to be light anymore, with the availability of powerful video cards, 4-core CPUs and 6 GB ram, any OS should be able to run smooth with room to spare. Overall, these combinations of things will probably help Microsoft in the long run. Too bad, I don’t invest in the stock market. Once again, Internet land, I’m out.

The Small Programs that mean a lot

Today I came to the realization that I have been using Putty for about 7 years now with no problems. Putty is a lightweight ssh client for Windows. I’ve been using it ever since I started programming in 2002. It works great and it’s standalone. It’s these little open-source programs that usually stay true to the spirit of programming. You sit down, you write some code that you love writing, and you offer it to the world and hope that they come learn from or you learn from it through criticism. Either way, it’s not tainted by ambitions of wealth, just fueled by a desire to help others. That’s what I aspire for, writing code that could help the world and not motivated by foolish dreams of recognition. But as they say, I guess I’m still young and life has not hardened me yet.