Present Perfect

I was writing a nagios check that checks how many fd's a process has open.  Naively I wrote it as a program that checks /proc/<pid>/fd, thinking that I could just set the program suid root and things would work.

But they don't.  Apparently something in the kernel prevents a suid program to do this - I've found some posts that mention various patches and pieces of kernel.  I'm not all that interested in the why, but can anyone suggest an alternative approach to make a check like this work ?

I was writing a nagios check that checks how many fd's a process has open.  Naively I wrote it as a program that checks /proc/<pid>/fd, thinking that I could just...

Every few weeks, I have a series of days where my ADSL connection goes down, and comes back up with a new IP. Correlating with my IRC reconnections that I can see at work made by my home machine, this happens roughly every half hour. I have no idea why. This happens for a few days on end, and is hugely annoying, then it's gone for weeks.

Is anyone else that uses Telefonica in Spain having this problem ? What can I do ? Does it make
a difference to complain about it ? Are there forums or sites that discuss problems like these ? Please comment. Feel free to comment in Spanish if that's easier.

UPDATE: maybe I wasn't clear enough in the post.  The problem is not that I don't have a fixed IP, that's fine.  The problem is that my internet connection goes down every half hour for a few minutes, for days on end.  Hope that clears up the confusion for people suggesting I get a fixed IP :)

Every few weeks, I have a series of days where my ADSL connection goes down, and comes back up with a new IP. Correlating with my IRC reconnections that I...

... the twelve year old kid in me looking up dirty words in his brand new three part dictionary he got for his holy communion, but I found this particular IRC snippet this morning pretty funny:

<zbowling> this vulva is pretty neat
<zbowling> i mean vala
<zbowling> damn spell check

... the twelve year old kid in me looking up dirty words in his brand new three part dictionary he got for his holy communion, but I found this particular...

Miguel links to Mirage, which looks cool. At least, until you read the one bit of text that Miguel didn't quote in his blog, which is the list of dependencies. Sox ? mpg123 ? ogg123 ? faad ?

So you write a plug-in for a player that uses an excellent media framework that supports a lot more formats than just mp3, Vorbis and AAC, and you do it using 90's single-purpose libraries ?

Here's how Mirage could have actually been useful:

• write a simple GStreamer element that analyzes decoded audio for this similarity information
• write the Banshee playlist plug-in that interfaces with this GStreamer element

Now it's just like getting a car, then buying a nice horse that you put in the trunk to increase the horse power of the car.

 UPDATE:

the author commented that he chose mpg123 for speed reasons, claiming that GStreamer is a lot slower.  Apparently for him libmad is already 4-5 times slower than mpg123.  I did a quick comparison between mpg321 (the free version of mpg123) and GStreamer with the mad decoder, and the mad decoder is actually a little bit faster.

In any case, it seems my lowly Pentium IV 1.3 GHz laptop decodes 3 minutes of mp3 in 4 seconds.  That's about 50 times faster than realtime.  I just checked - my current Rhythmbox library is about 19446 songs, for around 58 days.  So using GStreamer, the decoding part of the analysis would take a bit more than a day.  A day or 6 hours, the difference to me is pretty much the same.  It's not immediately usable, and it's not an impossibly long wait either.

I'd much prefer the ability to use it from any application, and on any sound format supported by GStreamer.

Miguel links to Mirage, which looks cool. At least, until you read the one bit of text that Miguel didn't quote in his blog, which is the list of dependencies....

This is one of those things where I just don't understand the arguments for the opposite view.

Here's what yum does that so annoys me.

If you ask it to upgrade, and there's even one simple problem, it doesn't upgrade anything. The problem could be "I can't download this package I want". It could be "there's something wrong with my metadata". Or it could be "I don't know the key for this package".

Me, I come from a belief that things will fail and you're better off handling the failure cases if you want to make your user happy.

So today it's biting me again and I've decided to just dump it on the intarweb every time it bites me and it just doesn't make sense to me.


# yum upgrade

Apparently this package is signed with the rawhide key. So one broken package, no updates for anyone until this is fixed.

This is one of those things where I just don't understand the arguments for the opposite view. Here's what yum does that so annoys me. If you ask it to...