Since the last update, i’ve been working on PERL to test web server benchmark performance. So far, i’m able to download and print a page, using the below mechanism:

#!/usr/bin/perl

require HTTP::Request;
require LWP::UserAgent;

my $url = ‘http://192.168.50.201/index.html’;
my $request = HTTP::Request->new(GET => $url);
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
my $response = $ua->request($request);
$response->is_success or die $response->status_line;
my $content = $response->content;
print $content;

I’m now looking into developing this code by using the below mechanism from CPAN.org and building it into the code:

use WWW::Mechanize::Timed;
my $ua = WWW::Mechanize::Timed->new();
$ua->get($url);
print “Total time: ” . $ua->client_total_time . “\n”;
print “Elapsed time: ” . $ua->client_elapsed_time . “\n”;

This will allow me to test the time taken to download a web page from the web server, e.g. IIS/Apache Tomcat which is useful to my virtualization thesis.

Well its been one heck of a week – i spent Wednesday and Thursday in London which was, frantic to say the least!

After arriving into town on the Wednesday i spent about 30 minutes walking around trying to find the hotel which was hidden down some random back alley but was quite plush to say the least – £250.00 a night doesnt buy you a cheap tatty room i guess. I got into my room about 8pm and just generally kicked back for the rest of the night, except for venturing out to get some random indian food from a corner shop!

On the Thursday i got up at around 7am after a pretty dreadful night’s sleep due to the traffic and crap air conditioning system. I was on the tube at about 8.45am – which in hindsight was a terrible idea, as it was HEAVING to say the least, but i ended up making it to my interview etc on time. The interview went well and i got home into Manchester around 4pm and finally had chance to relax after one hell of a 10 days!

Tech wise, i went ahead with a crazy decision and purchased a Coolermaster Cosmos 1010 case – RRP £150.00 i managed to get one for a snippet at £95.00 – dont ask how I sold my Antec 900 for £40 to help pay for it too. Needless to say, it looks – amazing, is absolutely HUGE – do not underestimate how big this case is – you can fit 10.5″ graphics cards with at least another 8″ to spare at the end of it. Its glorious!! i coupled that with an addition of a Zalman fan controller, a Zalman VF-1000 graphics card cooler and an OCZ XTC memory cooler. I also installed my Intel Pro1000 dual port network adapter so im running on intels – quickness! Finally, i installed a HR-05 onto my Northbridge to allow better cooling – allowing me to overclock my processor (q6600) up to 3.6Ghz per core – bloody quick!

Next stage is to either upgrade to my S5000XVN as my desktop system, or leave it as it is (being fast as heck), my next stage is to upgrade my case fans to 2000RPM Sharkoon 120mm fans, install the Coolermaster clear-side panel i ordered, the UV blue cable ties and the blue cold cathodes and it should be sorted. The only thing i want to buy after that is a Intel X25 SSD, and then my system is complete for at least a year!

Well, after 3 years as www.sam-marsh.net its time for a change. Ive migrated my personal blog onto the same hosting as my technical blog, as Fasthost, my personal blog hosting provider, are terrible.

Im pretty sure they have turned the lights off, left the servers and automatic billing systems on and just f’ked off. No reply on any support lines, nothing. Its terrible – they are the worst hosting company in history. UKHost4u on the other hand, are people i have nothing but good words for – great support and response time on tickets.

So for now, sam-marsh.net is smnet.vkernel.co.uk – until i can buy the domain again on the 16th December 2008 when it becomes free for all to buy (FastHost have like a 6 week default period after it needs re-registering, after which they lose it). Once i get that domain, i’ll point it back to this blog and hey presto we’re back to how we were before! Hurrah.

Over the last 2 weeks a few things have happened which i’ll write about! I applied for a few jobs for when i move back to Manchester at the end of this month and one of them, ICT Support Engineer at a Consultancy firm actually emailed me and asked me for an interview. After a preliminary phone interview they were apparently so impressed they decided to offer me the job outright – which means they obviously see something in me This is good because it means ill be earning roughly £150 a week working 16 hours part-time, which means no being super poor! Hurrah.

Aside from the employment, it was my 21st birthday! I went home on the weekend before my birthday for a huge family party. On the Friday, me and Fran went to the rugby to see Wigan vs Hull (her first game EVER of rugby!) which we won 66-6 – so smiles all round! On Saturday we had a big family party to which about 40 people turned up – family and friends! On sunday, i took my birthday money and a bit of my own and bought an Xbox 360, games, extra controller etc and ive been addicted to it ever since

We came home on the Monday night and had a fairly quiet one. On Tuesday i went for a meal with Fran to Frankie and Bennys which was great fun followed by a few drinks etc afterwards and other stuff

Rest of that week and this week ive generally just been wrapping up loose ends in Swindon – i packed up and sent home 40% of my stuff when we went back up to Manchester, and the rest of my stuff is gradually being torn down and packed up. I lost internet connectivity on the 10th August as we didnt want to pay another £20 for an extra month worth of internet, it just means i dont have much to do on my PC anymore – lack of internet and Xbox 360 has led to that! On a side note – Fight Night Round 3 is arguably one of the best console games ive played in YEARS – so addictive in Career mode lol.

As far as life goes, im just getting ready to leave Intel and Swindon, move back up to Salford – start my new job, and wait until October when i start my final year of my degree again. Its very exciting times in the world of Sam Marsh – stay tuned!

VKernel is now live with its first post, comparing Para-virtualization. I had a bit of a ‘mare, whereby i overwrote the SQL DB by accident and lost 3 hours worth of work… but oh well. Its up and running now and all linked in. I set up email etc and ive just finished configuring Google Analytics (c) so that i can monitor the hits i get.

Also, got 2 x 2GB PC2-5300F on eBay, for a sum total of £35! Bargain or what, it arrived today so im eager to get it in my system and test the crap out of it! Fun fun.

Evening all.

Not a bad weekend so far – spent today in Lydiard park chilling out in the sunshine with everyone, playing rugby with raj, broom, andy li etc. Came back to mine, had chinese and now were just watching a film (too skint to go out!).

Had a technological thought (not sure if its already been done) to allow better quality (possibly HD) video/audio to be streamed over a network using up less overhead than a standard stream at the moment.

Broadcast a low-res, low quality version of the stream and installing upscaling/Codec software on the client recieving the images, which then process the low stream images into high def media in seconds. If this can be done, then you can get HD content on a 1mb internet connection!

Well, decided to install “Ultimate Ubuntu 1.8″, based upon Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04), as i had a LOT of problems with my Nvidia 8800GT and Ubuntu – mainly Twinview having issues. Nvidia-config has trouble saving X to config, saying i dont have permisson, which is rather strange as i assumed i wouldnt need SU permission as it was in “Preferences” not “Administration” in the GUI.

When i installed UU1.8, the first thing that came to my mind was – good god this distro looks terrible. Wordart style headers, you name it. The default graphics sucked. However, like most things you need to dig a little deeper. Once it installed and i configured GRUB to dual-boot with my XP etc, i logged in. Again, the login page is visually awful, but after 5 mintues of changing i made it all pretty so i could actually use it.

Now, to recap, the main 2 gripes i had with Ubuntu 8.04 was dual screen spanning with applications, and mounting samba shares. I couldnt configure, via Xorg.conf or GUI, the application to NOT span across 2 windows using TwinView – when i double clicked it. Which is annoying. Whenever i tried “seperate X ..” it wouldnt work, even with Xinerama enabled.

Now with UU1.8, i was able to enable seperate X screens, allowing me to double click an application and it wouldnt span across 2 screens.

Regarding samba shares, at the moment i have RHEL 5 on my Server, running SAMBA. Whenever i tried to “mount -t cifs -o user=…”, i couldnt navigate to the folder i mounted it to – due to the fact the owner user and group where “500 502″, which really annoyed me. Doing a chown worked but it changes the permissions on the host server too which isnt desirable. After much googling, i found out that you need to download “smbfs”, via apt-get install smbfs. Once this is done, use “smbmount //192.168.1.2/Music /home/dbott/music -o username=dbott,password=mysecretpassword,uid=1000,mask=000″, where UID is the userid of the user owner in Ls -la on the actual server. If you do this as your user, and NOT as root, it will work fine, just remember the UID as it is key.

Now that i have my 2 main gripes fixed, i found the linux based desktop quite refreshing – however, unfortunately the lack of support for key applications such as VMWare ViClient 2 to run my ESX Server, or Football Manager 2008, COD4, etc, just meant it wasnt feasible as an all-year-round desktop. The way to get round this, im thinking, is to install VMWare Workstation and create a Windows XP VM, install all the Windows apps you need to run on that VM, and just power it up whenever you need that Windows loving. If anyone can comment on how to get said applications ^^ working i’d be more than grateful.