This blog is not a busy one, but it seems to attract at least a little traffic via search engines.  Here’s the latest of my infrequent analyses of my web server logs, brought to you by our good friends at awstats…  but before I begin I’d like to humbly apologise to anyone whose search has brought them to this blog item: this item is a content-free zone if ever there was one!

For the first two months of the year, not very much.  Someone who searched for “mediawatch today tonight knife flight” found me in January, and in February someone (hopefully) found my experience with setting up S/Key authentication in OpenSSH useful.

March was interesting.  We went from on average 7 searches hitting us to, in March, 42 distinct keyphrases.  There seem to be as many people as upset as I am about Linksys and the IE-only web management interface on the SRW2024, with a number of searches finding that, but the standout would be people looking for Caller ID sources in FreePBX.  Again, I hope that folk found my post at least a little useful — this is the kind of feedback that makes me think I need to make these things I write available.

April saw another huge jump: 93 distinct keyphrases — on average three a day (if that’s a meaningful distillation).  Trixbox was the most common search word, and Caller ID lookup was again popular.  Problems with kwlan also brought people here, which is surprising as I don’t recall using kwlan let along blogging about it…  Top search phrase for the month though was “xbmc ethernet into wall bypass router”; not sure what this person was trying to do, but it sounds tough.

May saw 102 keyphrases, and again permutations of “ldap caller id trixbox” were plentiful.  Top two were “trixbox ldap” and “freepbx ldap” –  I really need to get some material out there.

To round out the review, I’d like to mention some of the more unusual searches that found their way here:

* “places to get married qld dicki beach” — good luck with the nuptials!

* “how does cifs work hummer” — err, okay… every Hummer needs a CIFS server, I’m sure

* “angiogram recovery time” — I hope it went well…

* “vic s blog” — I see Karl Malden: “Ask for it by NAME.” (gee, does that show my age?)

* “wedding transport services sunshine coast hummer” — the Hummer is back!

* “bacula volume frustrated” — yep, Bacula can be frustrating; stick with it though, it’s good gear!

* “bluetooth in hsv grange” — I have NO idea how that got here!

* “wedding venues dickie beach” — not sure how these wedding nights are going to run if these folks can’t spell Dicky…  :)

* “laporte telephone voicemail system virus” — at a guess, someone’s looking for something Leo might have said about a virus that spreads through voicemail…  only the Great GoogleBot could find a way to send that to me!

One thing is clear to me though — I spend a bit too much time blathering on about things I’d like to do, or haven’t gotten round to doing, or whatever…  I know when I’m looking for stuff I hate getting sent to some waffly blog that tells me nothing.  So from now on there’ll be more content, or at least references to where I keep more tech stuff.  Who knows, even a separate tech blog.

Thanks for reading, and if you’re a visitor who’s found this site via the wonders of the modern search engine: perhaps it’s exercising Zen Navigation (As described by Dirk Gently in Douglas Adams’ “The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul”)… the art of navigating by finding someone who looks like they know where they’re going, and following them…  in doing so, you rarely end up where you wanted to go, but often end up where you have to be!

Our rainwater tank installation was completed today.  Two 2000L slimline tanks to help us do our bit for water usage.  The installation was fantastic, the installer even re-hung a gate that we had to relocate due to the position of the tanks.  Now all we need is some rain…

A little tale of “you never know until you try”.  I have been wondering for ages what to do about having to separate media serving solutions in the house — XBMC on the hacked XBoxes for doing music and transcoded movies, and MythTV for TV shows.  I wasn’t exactly losing sleep over it, but I couldn’t help thinking that at some stage I would have to switch to one system for everything if the concept was going to gain wider acceptance with other members of the household.  :)

I had played with the MythTV frontend for XBMC a few times, but each time there seemed to be something wrong with it.  Either dodgy config, Samba problems, or insufficient bandwidth over the wireless.  So I figured that conversion to MythTV and plugins like MythVideo and MythMusic would be in my future.

Then, I realised something wonderful.  All the files I was creating on MythTV had an extension “.mpg”.  On a whim, I set up ccxstream (the XBMSP streaming server) on the MythTV box (sometimes it’s good to run Gentoo for this stuff) and pointed my XBMC at it.

It played.  IT PLAYED!!!  XBMC saw that it was MPEG2 (and good) and Just Played It.

Now I’m sure many readers are looking for a virtual wet fish to poke me in the eye with.  I don’t know why I never thought to try it before, especially after I set the “Transcode” option on all my recordings in MythTV.  But with Mythrename set up to give the recordings sensible filenames, I’m happy — most importantly so is Susan, who took the opportunity to watch some of the episodes of her soap using the XBox.

There still is the issue of XBMC freezing occasionally (nothing to do with the MPEG2 stuff from MythTV as it does it with MP4s too, probably something thermal), and the nagging question mark over network bandwidth, but I get the feeling that my mythical killer home entertainment platform is within my grasp.

One of these days I’ll write something positive here about some hardware…  but I’ll have to wait until I have a positive experience with some hardware!  :)  I tried once again to get a Netgear router I bought a couple of years ago into useful service, but had to back it out after a week.

I found some info on the ‘net about how to get a Netgear DG834 to just be a router rather than being a total PITA firewall.  The link that got me going is here.  I thought I had done this on my previous try with the router, but perhaps it needed the firmware upgrade I did this time out.

So with these firewall rules in place, I was up and away.  There was a problem with connecting to MSN via the Jabber PyMSNt transport (yes, I MSN, but only because my family does, and I can’t get them off it because their friends MSN…  see why Open Communication Day is bound to fail?  But I digress.), but I had changed other things (like doing an emerge -uav world on the Jabber box that pulled in a glibc update, which I’ve found always results in a few days of fighting little problems).  A week later I still couldn’t MSN, and after re-emerging everything I could think of on the Jabber box I thought “maybe it’s network-related”.  Sure enough, exact same problem using Kopete to connect direct to MSN.

The Netgear DG834 is one of the many devices using an embedded Linux distribution (yay Netgear), and it provides a hacky way of getting a shell prompt.  Getting this shell prompt and running a few iptables commands told me what the problem seemed to be — a rule to redirect all MSN and AIM/ICQ traffic to a local port on the router.  The router comes with a bunch of Trend Micro security crap pre-installed, for which you have to subscribe to keep up-to-date (boo Netgear).  It seems that without this security rubbish activated, there is no process active to be able to handle the redirected traffic.

I think it’s a bug that they give you an option to disable their security rubbish, but leave firewall rules in place that result in traffic being killed if the stuff isn’t running.  I could have worked around it though: using the shell I could have just deleted the rule.  Then I’d have a problem of having to do that every time the router decided to update the rules.  Could I hack the firmware and remove the rules from the image?  Possible, but the stuff is probably signed and a hacked one might not run.  Maybe one of the free/open replacement router firmwares will run on the DG834?  Haven’t looked at that.  Of course, given that I think it’s a bug, I could also file a support request with Netgear too…

I had originally titled this “Netgear: strike three, you’re out”, but given that I have a few options available I can give the thing one more chance.  But it’ll be another day; I’ve stuffed around with the thing too long this time out.  There is a bit to like about the Netgear, so I admit to being tempted to persist with it; the built-in switch lets me think about upgrading the Linksys WRT (running OpenWRT) that I have as DMZ router and wireless access point to something that is 802.11n but won’t be able to do the DMZ routing.

For now though it’s back to the trusty old Alcatel Speedtouch, that I’ve had since my first ever ADSL service.