All entries for Wednesday 06 July 2011

Camping time!

It’s summer time, and that means it’s camping season again. Camping is ace, and it’s doubly ace if you have kids. Almost without exception, kids love weaselling about in the countryside, so once you’ve got them onto the campsite, they’ll amuse themselves and you can get on with the serious business of drinking beer, talking rubbish and playing with fires. What could be finer?

There’s a curious kind of Moore’s Law at the moment, as far as tents are concerned.
Every year, technology trickles down from the top-end, so low and mid-range tents get better and better. My first tent, long long ago, was pretty much bottom-of-the-range and cost about £50 (which was a lot of money for a fourteen year old in ninteen-eighty-something). It weighed approximately a tonne, leaked like a sieve, and stood me in good stead for a few years worth of adventures. Now, for half of that price you can get one of these pop up tents

You don’t so much “pitch” it as just take it out of the bag and stand back. It sleeps two close friends, or one with too much gear, it’s pretty waterproof, and if you peg out the guy-ropes it’s surprisingly sturdy in the wind.

Downsides? It doesn’t pack down small, and I’m not sure it would be my first choice for a week in the Lake District in November – in cold, wet conditions the single-skin design means you’ll end up damp from condensation on the inside of the tent – but for summer weekend trips it’s brilliant; fun, easy, and it costs roughly 1/25th as much as an Ultra Quasar (though if you do have £600 to spare, I can highly recommend one of those as an alternative!).

ProTip: If you want to extend the range of weather you can use this in, get a tarp and pitch it over the top of the tent, overhanging the front by a meter or two. You get an extra layer of waterproofing, and a porch so you don’t have to bring your soggy boots into the tent.

Chris May : 06 Jul 2011 22:14 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

one–liner of the day: quick–and–dirty network summary

If you’ve got a solaris box with a load of zones on, you might sometimes have an issue whereby you can see that the box is pushing a lot of traffic over the network, but you’re unsure which zone(s) are responsible. Here’s a super-hacky way to get an overview:

 snoop -c 1000 | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

basically, catch the first 1000 packets, find the source for each one (assuming most of your traffic is outbound; if it’s inbound then print $3), and then count the distinct hosts (i.e. your zone names) and list them.

If you have a slow nameserver you may want to add “-r” to the snoop command and then map IPs to names afterwards.

Chris May : 06 Jul 2011 13:12 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem