It’s been a while since a wrote something about Eve, and to be honest this is not a State Of The Alliance (SOTA) because… well I’m not an alliance executor and not even a corp CEO, I’m just a regular grunt, as my Twitter bio says I’m just another kender exploring New Eden.

This is not only a post about Eve, in some sense this is a milestone for me because my main character reached the symbolic objective of 100.000.000 skill points; If I sum all the skill points of all my toons I’m reaching about 400.000.000 SP, but you know… the first char is always the most beloved.

Last time I wrote something about Eve I was starting to train one of my biggest and most precious objective, the JF pilot, It was exactly 4 years ago, I reached that goal and despite all the other big objectives (dread and carrier pilots well trainer, two maxed rorqual toons, one almost maxed industrial an reprocessing toon, 6 maxed pi toons, etc etc…) that JF was one of the sweetest and maybe the most precious.

The Italian Alliance I started with died almost 6 months after I joined because of too many elite-pvp players inside, with the core group we joined CO2 back in Tribute, I was part of one of the epic siege of M-OEE8, we fought hard, we lost the first real fought Keepstar citadel and became history.
Then with the entire alliance I moved to Catch and Impass, where we suffered the biggest betrayal in the history of Eve aka “the Judgement Day”.

Thanks to some good friends (and awesome human beings) we moved to Test Alliance Please Ignore in Esoteria, one of the most remote regions of the Eve universe.
We spent almost a year in Test and I have to admit that I loved it, my time in CO2 was great, but the alliance really changed during the years, it became more obsessed on pvp and revenge, almost closed to new players, at some point CO2 became the only alliance without allies and against everyone, and honestly I didn’t like it…
Test was really different, even today I think it’s the most organized alliance I ever seen, awesome wiki, doctrines extremely well documented, very friendly for noobs, everything was great for regular grunts like me, can’t say the same thing for our CEO because Test leadeship seems quite… how can I say… tricky.

After that experience our corp moved into another historic alliance, The Initiative. I always heard about them as smaller but more pvp focused alliance, some kind of elite pvp group inside the Imperium coalition.
At first I was not sure at all and was tempted to leave my corp and stay in Test, but I decided to have faith in our former CEO (I repeat an awsome person) so I jumped into Init.
We started living between Querious (which was the first null region when I started playing Eve) and Fountain, It was tough at first because we lost our habits (we made a lot of huge industrial production in Esoteria) but then I found an equilibrium and things started to work pretty well.

After about six months into the trial alliance Initiative Mercenaries we were promoted as full members of The Initiative, and I have to admit that I was really proud of it, we were parte of one of the most skilled and active groups in the history of Eve.
With Init we made history again, we archived something that everyone in the game considered impossibile, something called the “siege of Rage” which took an entire year of work and preparation and concluded with the destruction of the first Keepstar citadel ever built in the game, we made history, again.

Living in Init is quite different from every other alliance I lived before, in Init I found great fleet commanders, awesome people always helpful and willing to do everything, but it’s a more mature alliance, you must be able to get your stuff, you must be more independent from a logistic point of view, don’t expect the alliance will run for you providing everything you need, you asked to be part of Init, not the opposite.

Now I continue to play, yesterday I lost my first capital into a huge brawl (I used them several times during the years but never lost one) that made almost 1 trillion isk in lost ships, It was awsome.
During the last year I had moments when I really never played, when I thought to leave the game, months spent mainly doing PI, putting skills in the queues and nothing else; it was not an alliance fault, nor my corp fault, it was simply the consequence of huge CCP mistakes, but that’s a different story for a new SOTA rant.

o7

Dopo tanto tempo ho deciso di scrivere uno post in italiano sperando che possa agevolarne la diffusione tra gli utenti del nostro Paese che si accingono ad aderire alle varie offerte di connettività propinate dai diversi operatori tlc.

Nel mio caso si tratta di Wind, operatore con il quale ho iniziato ad avere rapporti nel 2007 dopo una iniziale esperienza con NGI.
A onor del vero devo confessare di non aver mai avuto problemi catastrofici, la mia vecchia linea ADSL (seppur limitata a 4Mbps in downstream) si è sempre dimostrata stabile, affidabile e con una latenza decisamente superiore alla media.
A parte il feedback tecnico (variabile da zona a zona a causa dell’infrastruttura spesso in stato di abbandono) quello che mi ha favorevolmente impressionato è la flessibilità di Wind nell’applicare profili di connettività differenti da quelli proposti come standard, nel mio caso alzando la banda di upstream da 128Kbps a 512Kbps.

Poco meno di un anno fa scopro di avere copertura FTTC, viste la tariffe vantaggiose e il buon rapporto maturato decido di rimanere con questo operatore, tutto perfetto fino allo scorso agosto, quando noto un sensibile rallentamento nel downstream e un drastico aumento nella latenza.
Provo a lanciare qualche test con Speedtest.net utilizzando il server per me più affidabile (Fastweb Milano) e ottengo un ping aumentato da 5/6 a 25 ms e una banda in downstream diminuita da 60/70Mbps a 15/20Mbps.

Ripeto il test ogni giorno e ottengo lo stesso risultato, schedulo un test ogni 15 minuti utilizzando l’ottimo speedtest-cli da cui emerge un evidente problema di saturazione nelle ore serali, con qualche anticipo pomeridiano nel week end,  questo è il risultato, giudicate voi.

One of the best software I start using this year is goaccess, it’s AWSOME!

Basically goaccess is a web log analyzer, like awstats or webalizer, like them It’s simple, it’s quick, it’s very useful, but unlike them it produces very very beautiful reports.

Just be careful, goaccess it’s not like Google Analytics or Piwik, it doesn’t track uses via javascript and does not analyze visitors but only access logs.
That’s another reason why I love it, if you need to quickly analyze your logs to find a problem or to find the reason of a particular load spike goaccess is your tool.

Another great feature if this tool is that you can simply pipe stdout to feed goaccess, for example you can parse your logs with sed, awk and grep and get a quick analysis.

Goaccess install is really simple, it’s included in the most used repositories for the major GNU/Linux distros, but I strongly suggest to clone it from the official git repository and follow the simple compile syntax, just remember some requirements:

• GeoIP and GeoIP-devel
• autoconf and automake
• tokyocabinet and tokyocabinet-devel (for incremental analysis)

Last but not least goaccess has a very good support from its maintainer and the community, if you have a question, a problem or a request open an issue and you’ll have a quick answer from kind and collaborative people.
Recently I had a problem with some strange logs, I asked for a solution, I discussed directly with the project maintainer and he agreed to add a new feature to fix this kind of logs; if I had this problem with some sort of super-enterprise commercial software from IBM, Oracle or any other big company I will surely had to open tickets over tickets (with an active support subscription), write mails over mails, get some huge conference calls with people all over the world and *perhaps* have a workaround and the promise of a patch in the next major version of the product… :\

Here is a simple cheatsheet of goaccess syntaxes I use the most of times.

A simple analysis from command line (change COMBINED with COMMON if you want to analyze logs with common format):

goaccess --log-format=COMBINED -f /var/log/httpd/access_log*

Html output (very very beautiful for presentations or visual reports)

goaccess --log-format=COMBINED -f /var/log/httpd/access_log* -o /tmp/report.html

Parse logs from several directories

cat /var/log/httpd/access_log /var/log/apache2/request.log | goaccess --log-format=COMBINED

Exclude a pattern from the analysis

grep -v "GET \/exclude_this_path\/" /var/log/httpd/access_log | goaccess --log-format=COMBINED

Exclude several patterns from the analysis

grep -vE "GET \/exclude_this_path\/|file_to_exclude.html|gif_to_exclude.gif" /var/log/httpd/access_log | goaccess --log-format=COMBINED

Analyze only logs between two specific hours (for example 8:00AM to 9:10AM)

sed -n '/01/Mar\/2017:08:00/,/01\/Mar\/2017:09:10/ p' access_log | goaccess --log-format=COMBINED

Analyze COMMON logs with X-Forwarded-For ip format (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy, zzz.zzz.zzz.zzz)

goaccess --log-format='%h,| %^ %e [%d:%t %^] "%r" %s %b %^' --date-format='%d/%b/%Y' --time-format='%T' -f /var/log/httpd/access_log

Analyze COMBINED logs with X-Forwarded-For ip format (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy, zzz.zzz.zzz.zzz)

goaccess --log-format='~h{," } %^ %e [%d:%t %^] "%r" %s %b %^' --date-format='%d/%b/%Y' --time-format='%T' -f /var/log/httpd/access_log

Keep your goaccess database open for incremental analysis (database files in /tmp)…

goaccess --log-format=COMBINED -f /var/log/httpd/access_log --keep-db-files

…and add new logs to the analysis and keep the database open (database files in /usr/local/temp)

goaccess --log-format=COMBINED -f /var/log/httpd/access_log --load-from-disk --keep-db-files --db-path=/usr/local/temp

Give it a try and I’m sure you’ll love it!

Welcome to 2017!

One of my working goals for 2016 was to get rid of old systems, old OS’s and old products.
Well, I partially reach that goal but I still have some old monsters which still run on some prehistoric hardware and software.

Recently I had problems with and old Oracle 9i instance running on RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 on a glorious IBM x365 server and IBM DS4300 Fibre Channel SAN.
We already planned to migrate this Oracle database to a new Oracle instance installed on a beautiful blade server, but some problems on the SAN caused some performance issues and pushed us to accelerate this process.

The problem is that developers are not ready for this migration so I had to think to a temporary solution to fix the performance problem while people working on the migration. The SAN problem required some spare parts that does not exist anymore (that’s the direct response from IBM) so I had to find another way: virtualize!
I already tried some Rhel 3 P2v on Vmware ESXi, and after a lot of googling I found this procedure which seems to work very well.

The only requirement is a Rhel3 boot ISO from RedHat Network or from cdrom, you only need the first ISO/CD.

Install Vmware Converter Standalone and create the vm based on the physical system, you can do a live clone, just pay attention to your services, specially if they are locking files or things like that (think about Oracle tablespaces datafiles in my case).
I don’t explain this step because it’s full of how-to on Vmware Converter, it’s basically a “next next next” process…

After P2v finished you can try to startup your vm (always pay attention to network settings to avoid ip conflicts, disconnect virtual nic) but that’s the result. :(

Change the scsi controller on vm settings to BusLogic. I know it’s labeled as old and deprecated, but hey.. are we working on an old and deprecated OS or what? ;)

Now boot the vm using your Rhel3 ISO and start GNU/Linux in rescue mode typing “linux rescue” and press enter.

Choose language, keyboard layout, ignore network and when you are at the shell prompt you have to chroot using “chroot /mnt/sysimage”

Now you have to edit your /etc/modules.conf file adding BusLogic scsi module and nic module, this is my modules.conf file before…

…and that’s after

Now you have to create a new init image with these modules using your current kernel, look at /boot/grub/grub.conf file, as you can see the line starting with “default” has a value (zero in my screenshot).
This number identify (starting from zero for the first configuration) the default configuration which is loaded by the grub boot manager, in my example the first (zero) configuration is the one using 2.4.21-52.ELsmp kernel.

Use the same kernel version you are booting on the physical server and create a new init image with mkinitrd.
I suggest to not overwrite any other image, just use a different filename (initrd-2.4.21-52.ELsmp.vmware.img istead of initrd-2.4.21-52.ELsmp.img).

Now edit /boot/grub/grub.conf file adding a new configuration, you can copy the existing configuration for your kernel version and change only the title and initrd image path to the new image you created.
You can put it on the 1st place (zero) and leave the default directive as it is, or put the new configuration wherever you want, just remember to use that configuration by default as you complete the P2V prcedure.

The final step is to reinstall the boot manager using grub-install command.

That’s all, now you can boot your vm properly and install vmware tools.
Live long and prosper!

Five years ago Steve Jobs passed away, I want to remember him with Richard Stallman’s words:

Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.
As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone."

Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. 
But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.

Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.