The Harry Rosen Spring Run-Off that I registered for in February was today, and was my first race of the season. I managed 8km in 41:50. Not bad, but not quite the 5 minutes per kilometer that I've been aiming for. It was a beautiful day for a run, the temperature was pretty crisp (just above 0 I think), but the sun was shining brightly. But oh man, that last hill is a killer!

I've just registered for Harry's Spring Run Off 8km run. The run is on April 8th in High Park. I'm really looking forward to it, it's a beautiful area of the city! I hope that with this 8km run in early April, and the 10km run in early May, that I'll be well on my way to being in shape for a half-marathon later in the year!

I wrote this little script to monitor traffic on various machines at work. We use Shorewall to set up all the netfilter rules, traffic shaping, etc. It also makes it easy to set up rules to monitor traffic for different types of traffic. We use Munin to track all sorts of things over time. The script below is a Munin plugin that will create a graph with one data series for each of the chains defined in your shorewall accounting file. Put this script into /etc/munin/plugins and call it something like shorewall_accounting, and then add this in /etc/munin/plugin-conf.d/munin-node:

[shorewall_accounting] user root

The name in between the square brackets should match the name of the file you saved the script in. The script needs to run as root in order to get access to iptables. Edit Jan 20, 2006: Some minor bugfixes to the script have now been included. The shorewall accounting chains are now output in alphabetical order, and the regexp has been fixed to catch very large numbers.

#!/usr/bin/python

# shorewall_accounting

# A munin plugin for tracking traffic as recorded by shorewall accounting rules

# Written by Chris AtLee 

# Released under the GPL v2

import sys, commands, re

accountingLineExp = re.compile(r"^\s*\d+\s+(\d+)\s+(\w+).*$")



def getBytesByChain():
    status, output = commands.getstatusoutput("shorewall -x show accounting")
    if status != 0:
        raise OSError("Error running command (%s)[%i]: %s" % (trafficCmd, status, output))
    chains = {}
    for line in output.split("\n"):
        m = accountingLineExp.match(line)
        if m is not None:
            target = m.group(2)
            bytes = int(m.group(1))
            if target in chains:
                chains[target] += bytes
            else:
                chains[target] = bytes
    retval = []
    chainNames = chains.keys()
    chainNames.sort()
    for name in chainNames:
        retval.append((name, chains[name]))
    return retval


if len(sys.argv) > 1:
    if sys.argv[1] == "autoconf":
        print "yes"
        sys.exit(0)
    elif sys.argv[1] == "config":
        print "graph_title Shorewall accounting"
        print "graph_category network"
        print "graph_vlabel bits per ${graph_period}"
        for chain,bytes in getBytesByChain():
            print "%s.min 0" % chain
            print "%s.type DERIVE" % chain
            print "%s.label %s" % (chain, chain)
            print "%s.cdef %s,8,*" % (chain, chain)
        sys.exit(0)


for chain, bytes in getBytesByChain():
    print "%s.value %i" % (chain, bytes)

I registered today for the Sporting Life 10k run. The run is on May 7th, so I have some time to get back into running shape :) I'd love to be able to finish it in under 50 minutes, especially since practically the entire run is downhill! The Canada Running Series website also has a few suggestions for training clinics for preparing for the race. I've never participated in a running clinic before, but I think it could be quite helpful, particularly as a way to force myself to get out running at least once a week! I'm also going to try using the training log at coolrunning.com to track my performance over the next few months. I went jogging last night and had to quit after 15 minutes...but that was shortly after having dinner, so my stomach was upset at me for shaking it up so much.