I’m posting this from Hyderabad India, where I’ve come to interview network engineers for one of my customers.
So, what do you do when you’re in India, all the food is hot, your stomach is rebelling, and the toilet rolls come in these ‘denominations’?

(toilepaper image missing)

(rickhshaw image missing)

The little yellow things are called “auto-rickshaws, or 4-in-all’s – only 4 people allowed, or six schoolchildren. I took a ride in one.

I simply call them deathtraps now. Cause that’s what they are.

I’ve spent most of December hacking on an Intel IXP425 device, and I must say, I’m rather amazed at the performance these little things pump out. Mikrotik needs to forget about the Mips architecture. It’s outdated and performs crappily. I’ve tested this little board clocking over 80Mbps ROUTED traffic between interfaces.

When will commercial software vendors start owning up to their “free” roots? I just installed some software tonight, that’s well over two years old, using PPPoE to communinicate with a modem, and it conflicted with my installed version of WinPCAP.

Of course, WinPCAP is not mentioned as a component in the orignal software, WHATSOEVER.
Way to stick to the licenses guys! I will quote from the WinPCAP license documentation:

1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.


Total disregard. And in this case, it’s the THIRD PARTY SOFTWARE PROVIDER to the actual Hardware vendor provider who is in breach.

Man. The Software world is screwed.

o, I have to run a T:V server at a service provider that’ll only let me use FTP to administer my T:V server. This is a problem, because it becomes difficult to restart the server using FTP only 🙂

So I pulled out the good old Borland C++ compiler and started coding.

“Hah”, I said after a day or two to the service provider. “Please install this executable.”

TVSpawn is similar to the ISpawn of T1, and T2 except it’s a bit more clever. It will restart the Tribes server, and itsself (TVSpawn) if it detects a change in it’s “.ini” file. This means that you can restart a T:V server running remotely by simply uploading a new .ini file with a new date/timestamp.

TVSpawn will also apply the settings inside the new .ini file upon restart, allowing you to change the server’s startup commandline on-the-fly. That’s the neat part.

The mediocre part is that it basically does the normal stuff that T1/T2’s ISpawn did, which is monitoring the server on it’s query port (typically port 7778) to see if it’s still responding. If the polls to port 7778 fails a predetermined number of times (maxfailures in the .ini) it will assume that the server died and respawn it.

The program and and an example ini file is available  here: https://rodent.za.net/files/tribes/tvspawn/

 Installation:

• Drop the .ini, and .exe into our tvprogrambin directory.
• Edit the .ini and fix all the paths/settings to your liking.
• Run it.

What it does:

• Uses a .ini to read it’s configuration
• Will restart the T:V server, and itsself if the configuration file changes (date,size, etc…)
•  Polls the T:V server on it’s GaySpy port, to ensure it’s alive.
• Restarts the T:V server if it stops responding to polls (maximum failures configurable in the .ini)
• Restart the T:V server if it exits
• Applies a “startup delay” (spawnwait in .ini) whenever the process is restarted to prevent insane respawning.
• Has mostly all options configurable in the .ini file

 Hints:

• tvspawn.exe will take a single commandline argument. The name of the .ini file. Thus, if you want to run multiple servers, with different configurations, run “tvspawn.exe myserver.ini” to have it use a different .ini file. By default (if no commandline arguments are specified) it will look for tvspawn.ini in the current directory.
•  Set “hidelog=1” in the .ini file to have a “slim” version, minus the log window started up. You can always review the log by clicking on the “Show Log” button.

 To Do:

• Make it a configurable, and installable service, with a service name for each .ini
• Get an icon that isn’t a Llama.
•  Include a small socket server that’ll accept remote commands, such as “reset”, “status”, and “booyah!”.

Mail me at rodent at rodent dot za dot net, if you have tips, suggestions etc…

I ran TheFridge (as a partner) for a number of years. Some of us a little “older” in the teeth, and with a taste for Gothic/Industrial music, might remember the club.

I will finish ranting about this at some stage, but let me tell you: being a Nightclub Owner really just isn’t worth it. It sucks your will to live.

The Fridge, is located here http://thefridge.co.za