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With no line

Original date/time: 2005-09-29 21:16 CEST

Okay this is a blog entry wrote in Kate, as I’m currently without a net connection right now. The reason? Seems like my ADSL provider forgot that what they should do is providing an ADSL, not counting on users that exchanges IP packets over pidgeons. I can count at least three people in the neightborhood that are without ADSL access, and probably this is extended to the rest of the users, as they closed the tech support line at about 16:00 while they should respond till 22:00.

I haven’t wasted the time without line, though. I continued my work on ATMOSphere, a network monitor for KDE, that uses kioslaves and other KDE component features to provide a functional network monitor without using any external interface but Konqueror, KControl and so on. I also wrote what I think about Gentoo/OSX lead needing. And finally, I’m watching “House, M.D.” episodes, in english, trying to improve my speaking.

I also got some old, probably broken, computers today, I hope I can get at least a Pentium box working as I’d like to use it as my router, putting on it OpenBSD, so maybe I can get IPv6 Working here, to assign different IP addresses to my local boxes. There’s nothing big enough to run a decent Gentoo installation and I have no harddrives, so I’m quite limited in what I can do with those boxes, but something can be found, I hope, with a couple of extra cards I have at home.

I must say that Inkscape is a quite interesting tool, also for someone like me that can’t draw and does not like doing so. I used it to get a couple of icons for ATMOSphere, so I can at least have a decent look’n’feel, as I’m using mainly the same interface of the rest of KDE.

About ATMOSphere, I should probably say that right now I’m able to wake up a box using the wol command, aliased to a simple menu functions, right mouse button click on the box to wake up, and then select “Wake up”, simple, eh?
Unfortunately, I’ll have to use SNMP to get other data from the boxes, such as statistics about the interfaces and so on. I hope I’ll be able to get them in a decent way. The idea was to show the data as HTML pages, but I’m not sure about this, as it can be a bit of a problem to get automatically data about them.
The structure of this version of ATMOSphere (2, or NG, or whatever you want it to call, it’s a from scratch rewrite, with different needs in mind actually), it’s actually completely different respect anything I’ve done before. Most of the code resides in a general atmosphere application that runs on the background (I still have to find a way to start it automatically.. there’s KDED but I’d like to avoid that if possible as it requires to reload completely the daemon to change its versio, as it caches in memory the library; I should probably restart the work on the kdedtester thingy to allow to start a kded module as a single process), both the kioslaves and everything else that would access to the data about the boxes controlled by atmosphere access their data with DCOP calls, that explicitely name the box to get the data for. Using stubs and skels to sue with DCOP makes this quite simple to achieve, as it’s just a normal call in the client.

I’m still thinking if i should integrate things like WakeUp on Lan with the code to send the packets, or I should just call an external tool (right now, “wol”) to do the job. I anyway have to use external “ping” command to get the pings, but I’m looking for something more reliable to see if a box is up or not.

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