Invasion Plans

Evolution Bot 1.3 - An MSN bot by Dazzy. This may be a bit outdated.

Current statistics now say YouTube takes up 10% of all net traffic, that’s …crazy. One could argue that it was inevitable that video would be one of the primary media components of the net. Now that speeds and technology have reached a point where reliable video can be seen online, it’s going to start gobbling up the bandwidth.

So along with spam, which current estimates are around 80% of all mail traffic, videos posted by millions of morons doing things they think are video worthy is clogging up the pipes, man! Stop the insanity!

Andromeda - The popular Andromeda Perl MSN bot.

AIMLbot 1.1 - A .NET based AIML interpreter from Nicholas H.Tollervey http://www.ntoll.org/, although I think it’s been rewritten, so look for a newer version ..unless you like this one for some reason.

AIM Echobot - The original basic AIM echobot. Use it as a template to build your own. Requires Perl and some brains.

Acrobot 2.3.2 - The Perl based IRC bot is FINALLY one of the first of the old bots from Botworld I’ve gotten up here. This is a popular one among IRC botmasters although you should probably check for newer versions, this one is pretty old I imagine.

A Girl Called Amanda

Finally, my second piece of the Case of the Backup Lemon. This one is about a piece of open source software that makes a handy little backup utility on the right equipment. As mentioned in Part 1, I inherited a decent machine and a horrible backup application at my new job as a System Admin. Faced with a vendor that had pretty much chucked us to the wind, I did some research and found Amanda by Zmanda. I had a tight budget and the need for critical data backup as well as a viable disaster recovery plan in a reasonable amount of time, it was exactly what I was looking for – It was free and ran on Linux. I had a nice machine with a 1.5 TB RAID array to run it on too w00t! (yes, I’m dropping the word of the year here…it’s all about the page rankings muhahahah.)

My first step was prepping the system, a solid yet older machine with an Intel Celeron 2.5ghz chip, 512MB of RAM, and a 1.5TB RAID 5 SCSI array. I installed Fedora Core 7 and configured it, which is like, way beyond the scope of this document. When it was ready, Zmanda has an excellent tutorial called “The 15 Min Backup Solution” you can check out here http://www.zmanda.com/quick-backup-setup.html .

Following this simple guide, I had Amanda up and running- although it took a lot more than 15 mins. There were a few hurdles, including initial problems with contacting servers in other subnets, adjusting the firewall for the ports Amanda tended to use and a couple of other things. All in all, things one would expect to see when introduced to your own network environment, but the configuration tends to need tweaking when faced with problems. The user forums were a help too when connections between the server and clients kept dropping, which turned out to be a configuration issue.

The initial server configuration is somewhat simple although the config file is fairly large with a ton of options. This can be a bit overwhelming to the novice user, but Nix dogs should have no problems. You can set it to backup to tape or a holding disk, which can be any piece of storage the system can see. In my case I of course used the 1.5TB array. With a small amount of it being used by the Linux OS, I had plenty of room on it.

Configuration of the client was a simple package install, and then setting up configuration parameters. The server and clients both need to be configured with a special amandahosts file and a few regular host files, as well as a few other system and config settings. Following the guide is the best bet to success though. You also setup a disklist on the server, which is a master list of all the servers/directories you want to backup. Backing up other Linux machines works well since Amanda will use the native client installed on the target machine.

When faced with backing up Windows machines you have two options. One is just to share the drive or directory on the Winblowz box and then give a backup service account admin rights over it. This is limiting a bit because it won’t backup open or system files. You could get around that by backing up a Shadow Copy volume though, another thing I’ve been meaning to implement. The other Windows option is a bit more elaborate involving a client and Cygwin. I decided not to bother with that part since a large part of my Windows data was static and I didn’t want to run Cygwin on every Windows system I wanted to backup.

Amanda can be configured to email reports of your backup jobs, so I have it set to send me the daily reports as soon as they’re done in the wee hours, that way when I get to my desk in the morning the report is waiting with all the shininess of a new email message. All that’s needed to run the backups is a cron job on the server that kicks off the amdump program. This allowed me to get some reliable backups on a zero buget, which is what this article has been all about. You can learn a whole lot more over at the Zmanda site, however I’ll soon be sunsetting Amanda possibly due to a new backup system and tape drive in our 2008 budget. It’s one kick ass free backup solution though. Till next time or my ride gets here, later.

Novamente LLC, an AI company in San Fransisco has developed a product that will “learn” in a virtual world, avoiding the expense and time on creating a real physical body. Interesting concept. You can read more about it here.

So New Found Glory had their entire new cover album, From the Screen to Your Stereo, Pt.2 up on their myspace page. From The Screen to Your Stereo Pt.1 was one of the group’s masterpieces, so I decided to give it a listen. On both albums the band covered songs from movies, usually from the 80s. But while Pt.1 was amazing, Pt.2 comes off very weak. Any fan of the original will definitely miss the energy and passion the group had on it.

What at first seemed to be some intriguing covers, like Don’t Forget About Me from the Breakfast Club and Iris by Goo Goo Dolls turn out to not even hold a candle to the original versions. Don’t Forget About Me is absolutely ruined and the original is way better, do your ears a favor. Same goes with Iris. These songs are such classics that if you cover them, you should probably be able to at least make it sound better. I’ve always liked some of their music, but NFG seemed to be way off either in their choices of songs or their performance of them. The only real standout on this CD is Stay by Lisa Loeb, and that’s mainly because she sang on the track. By the way Lisa should you ever read this…if you were an explosive you’d be fineomite.

It seems NFG has gotten a little soft in their old age, because alot of the energy they once had is gone. Even the lead singer, who used to have a voice that was so high and whiney you’d get sick of it comes off almost soft spoken on some of the tunes. What a shame, guess I’ll go listen to Pt.1 instead and remember the good times. I guess it’s true, nothing gold can stay….

If you came here looking for Botworld, you’ve found it although it is no longer forum-based. You can post comments if you register, but this allows me to devote time to a single website instead of multiple ones. I’ve redirected Botworld to the Bots category here in my blog. I don’t have the time to maintain a forum based site anymore due to a thing called life, and the lack of posts didn’t help. I will eventually put up the old downloads and any original content on the old site will appear here, such as the bot related articles.