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For those who have spent time debugging their Comcast Internet connection, we all know the frustration of trying to explain to Comcast that something on their end is the problem. In this case, more data is better: latency history, ping times, traceroutes, etc. You can run Smokeping to monitor latency between your home connection and a remote Internet IP address for example. You can also print out traceroute examples and email them if you have an astute support contact. But if you want to monitor the data your cable modem is seeing, you need to look at the signal to noise ratio of your connection. This ratio refers to how much of your signal has been disturbed by noise on the physical line (Thanks Wikipedia). Newer cable modems will use multiple channels along the same line to increase your download and upload speed, and each channel can be disturbed independently. ...

For my own lazyness, so I don’t need to hunt for this damn chain of syntax. >» time.strftime("%Y%m%d-%H%M.%S", time.gmtime(os.path.getctime("$path_to_file"))) ‘20101213-1948.58’ >»> time.strftime("%Y%m%d-%H%M.%S", time.gmtime(os.path.getctime("$path_to_file"))) ‘20101213-1948.58’

At work we have a monitoring configuration workflow where our Nagios config files are parsed and generated before they are allowed to be ‘svn commit’ed. I know this verification has saved me many times when trying to add new hosts or services, since everything might not be ready for prime time. I wanted to see if I could recreate this scenario at home using Git hooks, if only for my own interest and curiosity. ...

Compared to most other home networks, mine is a bit more complicated. I admit networking has always been an interest of mine, so I run my own OpenBSD firewall/router/vpn-endpoint, which itself runs the ISC Dhcpd v3 and BIND. With these together, I am able to run dynamic DNS. But some background first. Insert my 11-year old HP2100m printer that I have outfitted with an HP Jetdirect 610N 10/100 internal print server. This allows me to stick this printer on my network and print away, no intermediary required. What does this save? The printer is not tied to one computer’s parallel/USB port. I can shut off my main desktop, and still print over the network. ...