FCC chairman Tom Wheeler will be resigning next month, and this is not a good news for the proponents of Net Neutrality. Tom Wheeler was the driving force behind the reclassification of broadband internet access as a telecom service. The open internet rules that the FCC approved were a great victory for the supporters of Net Neutrality. With the chairman’s departure, the fight will still continue. The opponents of Net Neutrality, primarily cable/telecom companies, did not like the reclassification of broadband Internet as a telecom service, as that will impose more government and public oversight of the Internet.

For many people, the idea of Net Neutrality is still not clear. In its simplest form, it is the principle that all packets or network traffic should be treated equally. If you pay a monthly fee of $50 to your cable company for a given bandwidth, the cable company should not interfere with your browsing. As far as the cable company is concerned, whether you visit to site A or B, or use your bandwidth to download some media, they should treat it equally. Of course, illegal sites can be blocked per the legality of content in a given country. Basically the pipe has to be agnostic of the type of traffic, source or destination of traffic etc.

That is how the Internet is right now in practice, but the telecom companies want to change it. In my view, it is how the Internet should be. An open Internet encourages innovation at the application/content layer, as any new entrants whether start ups or a kid in a basement can launch a successful product without negotiating with the cable companies. Without Net Neutrality, the cable companies can pick and chose the winners, as they will practically be the gate keepers of content. There is no limit to the amount of control they will have over the Internet, a future with no Net Neutrality is a future of multi-tiered and multi-priced Internet. What that mean is the price as well as quality of your Internet service might vary on any of the following reasons –

1. What site are you visiting? May be Comcast made a deal to priority google.com.
2. What is your source IP address? This identifies your location, AT&T might have a deal with a certain municipality or owner of an IP block.
3. From which country are your browsing? Cable company has a deal with a foreign government.
4. What type of media or content are you viewing? text/audio/video? Cable company want to block a competitor’s streaming video.
5. What time of the day or day of the week are you browsing? Cable company has a popular show that it streams through a recently acquired media company during a certain time of the day.
6. What browser are you using? Internet explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome? Browser maker software company has a deal with cable company.
etc.

Any publicly identifiable information that the cable companies can get from your browsing can be used for pricing purposes.

This is how I analogize Net Neutrality – imagine all the Interstate roads were owned by private companies, say companies X, Y and Z. Without any regulatory rules, the Interstate owners can negotiate with car manufacturers on what types of cars take the fastest or even safest lanes. If Ford pays company X more, the “road owner” would allow only Ford cars to take the HOV lanes, or reserve more lanes for Ford cars while limiting drivers of other car types to the slowest lanes. As a prospective car owner, you won’t just pick a car based on just mileage or driving habits, you have to do extra research to find out what kind of deals the car manufacturer has made with the road owners. Travelling long distance would be a nightmare, as the various segments of the Interstate would be owned by different companies, and companies X would charge you at a different rate than companies Y and Z. So by supporting Net Neutrality, we are agreeing to the principle that the type of car you drive should not matter, we should all abide by the same rules. This does not mean that someone who can afford a high quality car can drive faster than an older car, in the same manner that if you have a lower bandwidth package with your cable company, you might not be able to view high quality movies smoothly.

Per opensecrets.org, here is the list of the top spenders on lobbying for the year 2016, surely enough the telecom and cable companies or associations are in the top list.

Support Net Neutrality at Freepress.net.

Check link below for a great resource which shows lobbying spend of 51 internet service providers (ISPs) dating back to 1998 –

How much does your ISP spend on lobbying?

Splunk offers a free version with a 500 MB per day indexing limit, which means you can only add 500 MB amount of new data for indexing per day. This might work for most home users, the only problem is the first time you install Splunk, you might configure it to injest your existing log files which most likely are above 500 MB if you consolidate your logs in a syslog server like I do. In this case, Splunk will stop indexing any data above 500 MB per day. During first time indexing, make sure your existing data or log files are below this limit. If for some reason, you ask Splunk to injest way more than 500 MB of data and you want to start fresh, run the following command to clean up the data –

 splunk  clean eventdata 

You can find the details on Splunk Free on this link.

Here is the series of commands I had to execute to clean up the event data –

[daniel@localhost]$ pwd 
/opt/splunk/bin
[daniel@localhost]$ sudo -H -u splunk ./splunk  clean eventdata
In order to clean, Splunkd must not be running.

[daniel@localhost bin]$ sudo -H -u splunk /opt/splunk/bin/splunk stop
Stopping splunkd...
Shutting down.  Please wait, as this may take a few minutes.
..                                                         [  OK  ]
Stopping splunk helpers...
                                                           [  OK  ]
Done.

[daniel@localhost bin]$ sudo -H -u splunk ./splunk  clean eventdata
This action will permanently erase all events from ALL indexes; it cannot be undone.
Are you sure you want to continue [y/n]? y
Cleaning database _audit.
Cleaning database _blocksignature.
Cleaning database _internal.
Cleaning database _introspection.
Cleaning database _thefishbucket.
Cleaning database history.
Cleaning database main.
Cleaning database summary.
Disabled database 'splunklogger': will not clean.

[daniel@localhost bin]$ sudo -H -u splunk /opt/splunk/bin/splunk start
Checking prerequisites...
	Checking http port [8000]: open
	Checking mgmt port [8089]: open
	Checking appserver port [127.0.0.1:8065]: open
	Checking kvstore port [8191]: open
	Checking configuration...  Done.
	Checking critical directories...	Done
	Checking indexes...
		Validated: _audit _blocksignature _internal _introspection _thefishbucket history main summary
	Done
	Checking filesystem compatibility...  Done
	Checking conf files for problems...
	Done
All preliminary checks passed.

Starting splunk server daemon (splunkd)...  
Done
                                                           [  OK  ]

Waiting for web server at https://127.0.0.1:8000 to be available.. Done


If you get stuck, we're here to help.  
Look for answers here: http://docs.splunk.com

The Splunk web interface is at https://localhost:8000

Getting yourself familiar with basic programming skills is quite helpful these days. In fact, there are times when you will desperately need to automate a task for some seemingly simple job, and yet not find the right tools out there which cater your needs. It is not about writing thousands of lines of code and designing some user interface, just a dozen or two lines might serve well at times.

Here is a list of C codes taken from the book ‘C programming Language‘ by K&R and some of the codes might have been changed by me while practicing.

1. Introductory Tutorial – Input/output, characters, strings

2. Types, Operators and Experessions – Upper/lower case conversion, binary operators

3.  Control Flow – If/else, do/while, binary search, sorting, argument list

4.  Functions and Program structure – macros, polish calculator, pattern searching, quick sort

5. Pointers and Arrays – command line argument, find, sort, memory allocation

6.  Structures – self referential arrays, word key counter

7.  Input/Output – file copying, calculator, sscanf

8.  The UNIX System Interface – memory allocations, file & directory listing

Reference book –

The date command in Linux boxes is one of the most powerful open source utilities. It is not just for setting the clock on your PC or server, or showing you what the current time is, it can do amazingly more. It can virtually answer all of your chronological questions.

The simplest use case of date command is to view current time, possibly in different time formats –

$ date
Sat Dec 17 00:45:35 EST 2016

$ date '+%Y-%m-%d'
2016-12-17

$ date '+%c'
Sat 17 Dec 2016 12:45:51 AM EST

It is useful in converting time to/from epoch as well –

$ date '+%s'
1481953669

$ date --date='@1481953669'
Sat Dec 17 00:47:49 EST 2016

The most user friendly use case of the date command is the ‘-d’ or ‘–date’ options, which accepts free format human readable date string such as “yesterday”, “last week”, “next year”, “3 min ago”, “last friday + 2 hours” etc. Here is an excerpt from the man page of the GNU date command –

DATE STRING
The --date=STRING is a mostly free format human readable date string such as "Sun, 29 Feb 2004 16:21:42 -0800" or "2004-02-29 16:21:42" or even "next Thursday". A date string may con?
tain items indicating calendar date, time of day, time zone, day of week, relative time, relative date, and numbers. An empty string indicates the beginning of the day. The date
string format is more complex than is easily documented here but is fully described in the info documentation.


Let us play with it –

$ date -d '2 hours ago'
Fri Dec 16 22:51:25 EST 2016

$ date -d '2 hours ago' '+%c'
Fri 16 Dec 2016 10:51:30 PM EST

$ env TZ=America/Los_Angeles date -d '2 hours ago' '+%c'
Fri 16 Dec 2016 07:52:33 PM PST

$ date -d 'jan 2 1990'
Tue Jan  2 00:00:00 EST 1990

$ date -d 'yesterday'
Fri Dec 16 00:53:04 EST 2016

$ date -d 'next year + 2 weeks'
Sun Dec 31 00:53:27 EST 2017

To give a practical example, let us use the date command to get, on which day all the birth days of someone fall, given their date of birth. This can be for past birth days as well as the future. For this example, we will do it from date of birth to this date. Let us pick someone who was born on Feb 29, 1988. This is an edge case. The date command should be smart enough to figure out the leap years.

for year in {1988..2016}; do 
  date -d "feb 29 $year" &>/dev/null
  if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
    echo -n "Year: $year   " ; date -d "feb 29 $year" '+%c'
  fi
done

Year: 1988   Mon 29 Feb 1988 12:00:00 AM EST
Year: 1992   Sat 29 Feb 1992 12:00:00 AM EST
Year: 1996   Thu 29 Feb 1996 12:00:00 AM EST
Year: 2000   Tue 29 Feb 2000 12:00:00 AM EST
Year: 2004   Sun 29 Feb 2004 12:00:00 AM EST
Year: 2008   Fri 29 Feb 2008 12:00:00 AM EST
Year: 2012   Wed 29 Feb 2012 12:00:00 AM EST
Year: 2016   Mon 29 Feb 2016 12:00:00 AM EST

A typical case would be, say for someone born on Jan 8 1990 –

age=0
for year in {1990..2016}; do 
  echo -n "Age: $age  "; date -d "Jan 8 $year" '+%A %d %B %Y'
  age=$((age+1))
done

Age: 0  Monday 08 January 1990
Age: 1  Tuesday 08 January 1991
Age: 2  Wednesday 08 January 1992
Age: 3  Friday 08 January 1993
Age: 4  Saturday 08 January 1994
Age: 5  Sunday 08 January 1995
Age: 6  Monday 08 January 1996
Age: 7  Wednesday 08 January 1997
Age: 8  Thursday 08 January 1998
Age: 9  Friday 08 January 1999
Age: 10  Saturday 08 January 2000
Age: 11  Monday 08 January 2001
Age: 12  Tuesday 08 January 2002
Age: 13  Wednesday 08 January 2003
Age: 14  Thursday 08 January 2004
Age: 15  Saturday 08 January 2005
Age: 16  Sunday 08 January 2006
Age: 17  Monday 08 January 2007
Age: 18  Tuesday 08 January 2008
Age: 19  Thursday 08 January 2009
Age: 20  Friday 08 January 2010
Age: 21  Saturday 08 January 2011
Age: 22  Sunday 08 January 2012
Age: 23  Tuesday 08 January 2013
Age: 24  Wednesday 08 January 2014
Age: 25  Thursday 08 January 2015
Age: 26  Friday 08 January 2016

Eritrean music

All day long, 24/7 Internet streaming radio

Listen to Eritrean Ethiopian Tigrigna music guayla

Listen to Eritrean Ethiopian Tigrigna music

To listen on your smart phone, download the XiiaLive app, VLC media player or any other shoutcast client online internet radio app. After installing the app, search for ‘tigrigna’ or ‘eritrean’ or ‘ethiopian’ and the station is listed as “Eritrean Ethiopian – Tigrigna“.

How do you find out the number of CPU cores available in your Linux system? Here are a number of way, pick the one which works for you –

1. nproc command –

[daniel@kauai tmp]$ nproc
2

2. /proc/cpuinfo

[daniel@kauai tmp]$ grep proc /proc/cpuinfo 
processor	: 0
processor	: 1

3. top – run top command and press ‘1’ (number 1), you will see the list of cores at the top, right below tasks.

Cpu0 : 0.7%us, 0.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu1 : 2.7%us, 1.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 96.3%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st


4. lscpu – display information about the CPU architecture. Count Sockets times Core(s) per socket, in this case 2 x 1=2 –

[daniel@kauai tmp]$ lscpu 
Architecture:          x86_64
CPU op-mode(s):        32-bit, 64-bit
Byte Order:            Little Endian
CPU(s):                2
On-line CPU(s) list:   0,1
Thread(s) per core:    1
Core(s) per socket:    2
Socket(s):             1
NUMA node(s):          1
Vendor ID:             AuthenticAMD
CPU family:            16
Model:                 6
Model name:            AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 250 Processor
Stepping:              3
CPU MHz:               3000.000
BogoMIPS:              6027.19
Virtualization:        AMD-V
L1d cache:             64K
L1i cache:             64K
L2 cache:              1024K
NUMA node0 CPU(s):     0,1

5. Kernel threads – pick one of the kernel house keeping threads, such as “migration” or “watchdog” and see on how many cores it is running –

[daniel@kauai tmp]$ ps aux |grep '[m]igration'
root         3  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Dec09   0:02 [migration/0]
root         7  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Dec09   0:02 [migration/1]

[daniel@kauai tmp]$ ps aux |grep '[w]atchdog'
root         6  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Dec09   0:00 [watchdog/0]
root        10  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    Dec09   0:00 [watchdog/1]