Found this neat trick in Brendan Gregg's Blazing Performance with Flame Graphs talk.

Switching to LANG=C improved performance by 2000x

In a quick test I directly got a performance gain of factor 50.22.
This is quite an achievement for only changing one environment variable.

real:~# du -sh /var/log/querylog 
148M	/var/log/querylog
real:~# time grep -i e /var/log/querylog > /dev/null 

real	0m12.807s
user	0m12.437s
sys	0m0.068s
real:~# time LANG=C grep -i e /var/log/querylog > /dev/null

real	0m0.255s
user	0m0.196s
sys	0m0.052s

I suspect that the performance gain may vary quite a lot depending on the search pattern. Also, please note that this trick only works when you know that the involved files and search patterns are ASCII only.

(via Standalone Sysadmin)

Another nice discovery from Metropop: WOODKID

Woodkid - Run Boy Run

Major Look - Too Late

(via blog.quux.de)

After receiving yet another 'please login and click through our captcha for no reason' e-mail from a DynDNS provider, I decided to run my own DynDNS server.

As I already run my own DNS servers, this was just a matter of adding a dynamically updateable zone and writing a script which receives the IP change request via HTTP and sends out a DNS update.
Luckily the DynDNS API is quite well documented and I quickly came up with the PHP code below which performs the task well enough for me. Feel free to use it to run your own DynDNS server.

PS: to any friends reading this and looking for a DynDNS service: drop me a message and I'll set you up with an account.

Get the glue records for a given domain:

Update the serial number in BIND zone files with the current unix timestamp.

For a long time it annoyed me every time that less only showed ASCII codes instead of colors when piping some 'color-enabled' output into it.

Turns out there is an easy fix for that:

colordiff a/foo b/foo | less -R

Thanks to Major Hayden for this very useful tip!

openssl gendh -out dh4096.pem 4096

I did another test of the Orange Routing.
Running a traceroute to my server in Zurich and one to my vhost in Frankfurt.
First another version of the already familier traceroute to my server in Zurich:

HOST: Andreass-MacBook-Pro.local  Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
  1.|-- 172.20.10.1                0.0%     5    8.0   3.7   2.1   8.0   2.5
  2.|-- 10.8.8.67                  0.0%     5  174.8 114.9  56.7 205.6  69.8
  3.|-- 10.8.12.10                 0.0%     5  126.8 108.4  67.7 171.3  42.8
  4.|-- 192.168.249.201            0.0%     5   73.4  82.7  61.9 111.5  20.5
  5.|-- 192.168.253.191            0.0%     5   54.0  64.9  54.0  75.9   9.3
  6.|-- 192.168.250.203            0.0%     5   64.7  69.2  57.3  79.2   8.4
  7.|-- 10.10.10.10                0.0%     5   56.8  65.5  56.8  72.1   7.7
  8.|-- 10.255.200.1               0.0%     5   65.9  87.3  60.1 146.6  35.1
  9.|-- pos0-1-1-1.gencr1.geneve.  0.0%     5   84.8 117.1  76.4 162.5  36.9
 10.|-- pos14-0-1.pascr4.paris.op  0.0%     5   88.1 118.0  88.1 168.3  36.7
 11.|-- ge6-0-0.br2.par2.alter.ne  0.0%     5   76.5  90.5  76.5 109.1  12.0
 12.|-- so-2-3-0.xt2.zur3.alter.n  0.0%     5   76.8 109.1  76.8 203.2  53.1
 13.|-- pos2-0.gw4.zur4.alter.net  0.0%     5   88.8  98.7  84.3 143.4  25.2
 14.|-- uch200193-gw.customer.alt  0.0%     5   90.7  85.3  74.1  93.5   8.0
 15.|-- whale29.open.ch            0.0%     5   88.9  97.7  88.9 104.7   6.3
 16.|-- orca8.open.ch              0.0%     5   90.8  94.8  90.8 102.8   4.9
 17.|-- real.jaggi.info           20.0%     5  234.8 130.0  92.8 234.8  69.9

Now the traceroute to the vhost in Frankfurt:

HOST: Andreass-MacBook-Pro.local  Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
  1.|-- 172.20.10.1                0.0%     5   15.2  13.1   1.9  44.5  18.4
  2.|-- 10.8.8.115                 0.0%     5   72.6  74.0  67.2  81.3   6.8
  3.|-- 10.8.12.10                 0.0%     5   80.7  75.0  64.0  89.6  10.3
  4.|-- 192.168.249.201            0.0%     5   65.1  78.9  65.1  94.0  12.3
  5.|-- 192.168.253.191            0.0%     5   73.1  70.4  66.5  73.3   2.8
  6.|-- 192.168.250.203            0.0%     5   69.5  73.9  66.3  86.6   7.7
  7.|-- 10.10.10.10                0.0%     5   67.0  72.7  67.0  80.0   4.9
  8.|-- 10.255.200.1               0.0%     5   70.9  74.4  69.7  86.4   7.0
  9.|-- pos0-1-1-1.gencr1.geneve.  0.0%     5   77.2  83.4  75.9  99.4   9.4
 10.|-- pos3-1-0.zurcr1.zurich.op  0.0%     5   83.8 103.2  83.8 146.9  26.3
 11.|-- pos0-9-4-0.ffttr1.frankfu  0.0%     5  102.9 103.6  98.7 108.8   4.9
 12.|-- leaseweb-9.gw.opentransit  0.0%     5   87.6  88.8  85.3  93.2   3.0
 13.|-- te3-1.core-2.fra.leaseweb  0.0%     5   85.4  91.5  85.4 106.1   8.5
 14.|-- hosted-by.leaseweb.com     0.0%     5   90.2  94.1  84.7 112.5  11.0
 15.|-- ???                       100.0     5    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0
 16.|-- 0.jaggi.info              20.0%     5   89.9 117.5  86.3 205.5  58.7

As you can see, the RTT is higher for the server in Zurich than for the vhost in Frankfurt! (keep in mind that source of these measurement is my laptop in the train 8 minutes away from Zurich now)

So Orange has higher latency to hosts in the same region/city than to hosts in another country which are more than 350km away. :-(
The next time I choose a mobile provider it might be good to analyse its BGP peerings and routing policies first...