conky : integrating rTorrent downloads monitoring

Conky is a lightweight system monitoring tool. It has many built-in probes (processor load, memory usage, temperature sensors, etc), but it is still pretty easy to extend it if you don’t find the feature you need.

In this post I’ll describe my Conky setup and explain how to extend it to monitor your rTorrent downloads.

rTorrent is a great BitTorrent client which offers an XML-RPC interface to its core functions, making it easy to get the downloads status through scripting. You can read more about that in this previous post.
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rTorrent : Probing downloads status through XML-RPC

rTorrent is a very efficient BitTorrent client for linux. It has a very small memory footprint, a very customizable configuration file, and exposes it’s internals through XML-RPC. This is convenient to implement 3rd party GUI or web interfaces.
Let’s see how to setup and use XML-RPC to probe rTorrent downloads.
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Linux : SATA hot plug / unplug

I have 3 hard disks in SATA-to-eSATA external enclosure which I occasionally need to plug to perform backups and to unplug when done. I found it annoying to have to restart the whole computer at every turn, especially when SATA is supposed to bring hotplug abilities. If you mainboard / SATA chipset and disks support hot plugging and unplugging, you can do this by following those instructions.
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Linux : Configuring a network bridge for your Virtual Machines

My new center of interest those days being virtualization, I tried quite a few software starting with Xen, then QEMU, then KVM, and finally VirtualBox. But as far as giving a network access to the VM is concerned, I’ve always sticked to a network bridge for the reason that this makes the VM appear on the network just like any other computer of your network.

This post provided a sample script to setup a bridge suitable to use with all of the named virtualization softwares.

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Linux + Amarok 1.4 : Setting up proxy configuration

If you access the internet through a proxy, you need to set up Amarok to use it to enjoy some of its amazing features such as automatic downloading of CD covers or fetching of the lyrics of the song you’re listenning to. Amarok is really a great media player. if you don’t know it you should definitely give it a try !

Setting up proxy parameters for Amarok 1.4 could be a little confusing if you don’t use the full KDE environment. In this post, I’ll explain how to manually edit KDE configuration files to fix proxy settings.
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Xen : OpenSolaris 2008.11 DomU running on a Linux Dom0

This post is a step by step explanation about how to get an OpenSolaris 2008.11 run as a Xen DomU on a Linux Dom0.
To follow this, you’ll need a Linux machine ready for Xen (I run Xen 3.3.0), with vncviewer installed.

This post doesn’t explain the basics of Xen, so you might want to start by learning Xen if you don’t already know a bit of it.

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