Some people have expressed interest in my irssi configuration, more specifically, the list of URLs that pour into my status window. Read on to learn how, but be warned that this is a serious time sink…
For after-the-fact monitoring of network usage there are various graphing frameworks such as Cacti, Munin and Serverstats. Sometimes, however, you need to use a real-time network monitoring utilities to see what is going on right now. This post shows some examples of what iftop, iptraf and vnstat can do.
This is a somewhat Debian-specific howto for backing up Gmail on Debian using isync, adapted from rectalogic.com’s Automated gmail backup via IMAP article that was directed at Mac OS X users.
It’s always a good idea to keep external system logs in case something happens to your server, for example, if it gets rooted. Privacy issues are a good reason to keep the logs encrypted. This is a quick look at how to send system logs hourly to Gmail (or some other external mail) from a Debian server. It also assumes quite a bit of knowledge from the reader, sorry for that 
I was having some problems with the laptop clock being completely wrong (and that in turn causing a lot of weirdness during boot and before ntp kicked in), but turns out Debian Etch has some problems saving the hardware clock from system time properly when shutting down. Apparently you need to manually run
hwclock --directisa --systohc
to set the hardware clock from system time (after updating the system time with NTP).
[ Apparently I'm such a lazy bum that I'll never get around to providing some real content. So I figured I should maybe start posting some of the tips I usually mention on IRC channels. Just in case this site gets indexed at some point and someone finds it useful. ]
So here’s the Debian package tip of the day:
streamripper – download online streams into audio files
This handy tool allows you to save internet radio streams as MP3s while listening for them at the same time (you don’t have to!). This is what I do in one screen window:
$ streamripper http://someserver:9000 -t -M 1024 -r # rip up to one GiB, don’t overwrite incomplete tracks, and create a relay server
And as usual, now I can listen to the stream using my favourite music player:
$ mplayer http://localhost:8000/ # default port
And yeah, streamripper can name the files properly as long as the stream provides the correct names.
