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Saturday, May 31, 2008

Recent Web Site Updates

I finally got a couple of pages up I'd been wanting to
despite a bunch of interruptions. One is on installing
and configuring Conky to display system info on your
desktop. It also shows how to pull in other information
like weather reports and some system info that I couldn't
get with Conky's regular functions, due to either my own
misunderstanding of the instructions, or else something in
my chipset that's incompatible with the program. Probably
some of both.

ADDENDUM: 2008-06-06
Pertaining to Conky above, I've added some info to the page
that shows how I'm now getting stock market data to display.

ADDENDUM: 2008-06-13
Again, pertaining to Conky above, added some info on how I
kludged together a script to filter out my daily Accuweather
forecast email message, format it and scp it from that box to
the box I'm using conky on to be displayed below the current
conditions feed I get from NOAA's weather site.

The other write up is on creating a file to be used as a
persistent table for OpenBSD's PF packet filter firewall,
how to automatically concatenate IP addresses of would
be intruders to the file using scripts that run on a schedule
from a cronjob, and then flush the one table that does the
collecting and reload the persistent file back into its own
table. This makes it truly persistent, since rebooting has no
effect. You don't have to start back all over again with loads
of intrusion attempts in your logs.The pages are at:

Conky
PF with a Cumlative Table

ADDENDUM: 2008-07-04
Again I've added some more to the conky article above.
This addition describes how I run 2 instances of conky
and change one of them depending on the time of day and
the day of the week, since one configuration uses stock
market data and weather, while the other for the times
when the market is closed just displays the weather.
The change is accomplished using 2 short shell scripts
and 2 cronjobs. The last part of the entry shows how I
clean stale values from the environment in case I close
X but don't log out of the system, and then restart X.
From the value that gets exported from .xinitrc conky
determines which configuration file to use by comparing
that value with a small text file containing appropriate
times to load the file with stock market data. If it's
after hours or on the weekend when X restarts, it loads
just the weather version of conky on the one side of the
screen. The other conky running on the right side of the
screen doesn't change. It always shows system information.

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