Eircom Quality of Service

Recent problems with Eircom broadband
The majority of the problem is with the packet loss & QoS ie: not being able to stream a reasonable amount of data.  The first symptoms I began to notice were on Friday 15th January 2010 and has continued with varying severity being at its worse after 7pm to 11pm where it sometimes becomes unusable for gaming, voice, video, and other technologies that require being able to produce a relatively stable stream of data.

Eircom have stated the exchange in North Wexford (Gorey) is due an upgrade but it's not scheduled for anytime soon 3 months was the first...

Command line ffmpeg

Split a video from x time to y time

-ss start time
-t end time

ffmpeg -i source.avi -ss 00:00:00 -t 00:00:10 output.avi

Split a video keeping original frame rate size but reducing bitrate
Amazon S3 as a local filesystem

I decided to test writes to an U.S s3 bucket mounted from an E.U ec2 instance ( ubuntu-9.04 )

dax@iota-tst # time dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/fuses3fs bs=1M count=1024

1024+0 records in

1024+0...
Disk destroyer tips and tricks

DD is an extremly usefull tool for the seasoned and novice sys-admin here are some commands I have found usefull...

Create a file xKb in size containing random data.

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/tmp/my_random.dat bs=1kb count=10...
Apache tweaks for production.

*Note: Incomplete

Here are some of the options I have found useful / acceptable in a production apache setup, please note I make no guarantee that these settings will work for your setup. that said enjoy your tweaking....