28. 07. 09
It's at the core of any computer system. If you use any computer in the world, it is 99.9% likely to be connected to a network of some kind.
The internet is the largest network. If you want to communicate with anyone or anything then you will certainly be doing it across a network.
The technology has been around for decades and even now, with the latest layer 3 network switches, your network can be exposed to traffic jams. Keeping an eye on the traffic on your network is vital to keeping your PCs or servers working how they should.
A network monitoring tool is a must. There are numerous ways of setting about monitoring your network and I shall lay out some basics here.
A sudden drop in internet performance or commumication with another machine on your network indicates a network traffic issue of some kind. Take a look at your network device activity lights, PC, hub/switch, router, anything where the data activity lights are flashing like crazy when you're not really doing anything indicates high network activity. Try to isolate the source or target machine by eliminating potential machines, one at a time, by unpluging the network cable from each machine in turn. When the lights stop flashing you know you have just found a machine involved.
The next step is to try and identify the cause on the machine you have identified.
Identifying the process that is sending or receiving large quantities of data will get you 75% of the way to the solution.
MS Windows has the Task Manager. Processes taking up most memory and CPU are the give aways.
Linux has the "top" command which runs in a terminal session and provides similar information.
If you do not have access to other machines on your network, you are going to need a network monitoring tool, to try and identify where the problems are coming from. There are many such tools available for download. Nmap for Linux and Zenmap for Windows are free analysis tools which allow you to identify which port numbers are in use by each machine on your network.
Network.
11. 07. 09
As always with mobile use, signal quality is everything.
I lost my land line for a day just recently and thought, why hadn't I already sorted out a mobile broadband option?
I recently found that my area had fantastic reception with O2, so I have switched my mobile from Virgin to O2 - fantastic, signal is always strong and I can now hold a clear conversation.
Right, I then mistakenly assumed that O2 broadband was my obvious mobile broadband choice. Well thank goodness for each mobile company's postcode service check facility.
It turns out that O2 mobile broadband just doesn't work in my area. But "3" gives brilliant coverage.
See below
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I am now just taking a look at their scheme options.
Here are the mobile network test sites:-
3
O2
Orange
T-Mobile
Virgin Media
Vodafone
06. 07. 09
This is the simplest way to schedule tweets to Twitter. If you want to seriously start building traffic to your web site then regular tweets are essential.
First, make sure you have curl installed. cURL is often already present in Linux distros but Windows users will need to locate and install it.
The command is very simple which can be placed in a shell script (Linux) or a batch file (Windows). This can then be scheduled as you wish - I suggest you don't over do it, the same message every minute will not be posted as it will be identical to your previous one and Twitter will reject it. Keep repeated messages a few minutes apart.
Right, down to the nitty gritty.
The command is fundamentally straight forward:
curl -u username:password -d status="Lets's have a excellent ancient tweet. http://goodoldtweet.twt" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
The
username:password is honestly obvious - just replace it with your own Twitter account login details.
The text following
-d status= is your tweet message (I included my blog url).
See below
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Now, this produces output to the screen and is helpful when you want to know that the command has worked and what it did. But, this is no excellent if you want to automate the command. Screen output will cause an error in scheduled running of scripts and applications. Fortunately there is a way around this.
I shall show you how to do this in Linux as I currently don't know the equivalent in Windows (it may be the same in Windows but don't count on it).
curl -u username:password -d status="Lets have a excellent ancient tweet. http://goodoldtweet.twt" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml > /dev/null 2>&1
This makes sure that all output is cleanly dealt with without causing errors.
The shell script in which you place the command can now be scheduled as you wish.
