John Hobbs

I recently set up a VirtualBox VM to test BlankSMTP locally, but it’s annoying to have the GUI up all the time when I’m just SSH’ing in. To get around this I set it up to work headless.

The biggest hangup is networking. I had to switch it to Host-Only so that the interface would remain consistent. Other wise with bridged I would get new IP’s all the time, and even then only when the networking init script got triggered somehow.

After that was set I just wrote two quick bash scripts to start and stop. An init script would also be an option if I wanted to make sure it shut down when I power off the laptop, but I decided it wasn’t worth the trouble.

The key commands are VBoxHeadless -startvm [vm name] and VBoxManage controlvm [vm name] savestate

blanksmtp-start

#!/bin/bash
 
COUNT=$( ps aux | grep 'VBoxHeadless -startvm BlankSMTP' | grep -v grep | wc -l)
 
if [ "$COUNT" == "0" ]; then
        echo "Starting BlankSMTP..."
        nohup VBoxHeadless -startvm BlankSMTP > /dev/null 2>&- &
else
        echo "Found a running instance!"
fi

blanksmtp-stop

#!/bin/bash
 
COUNT=$( ps aux | grep 'VBoxHeadless -startvm BlankSMTP' | grep -v grep | wc -l)
 
if [ "$COUNT" == "0" ]; then
        echo "No running instance!"
else
        echo "Shutting down..."
        VBoxManage controlvm BlankSMTP savestate
fi

Works like a charm!

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“If you are afraid of your program, you have to break it until you are not afraid of it anymore.”

- C. Scott Andreas
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So I’m working on a little admin interface and I decided to tail some logs. It’s in PHP and Google came up with some stuff, but they were all a bit finickey and not well documented. So I wrote my own!

Here’s the basic concept:

1. Open File
2. Seek To End
3. Loop:
   1. Seek Back By Chunk Size
   2. Read Chunk
   3. Count Newlines
   4. Stash In Buffer
   5. Break If Enough Newlines Total
4. Trim Extra Line & Cruft
5. Done!

Here’s the code:

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function tail ( $file, $lines, $max_chunk_size = 4096 ) {
 
  // We actually want to look for +1 newline so we can get the whole first line
  $rows = $lines + 1;
 
  // Open up the file
  $fh = fopen( $file, 'r' );
 
  // Go to the end
  fseek( $fh, 0, SEEK_END );
  $position = ftell( $fh );
 
  $buffer = '';
  $found_newlines = 0;
 
  $break = false;
  while( ! $break ) {
    // If we are at the start then we are done.
    if( $position <= 0 ) { break; }
 
    // We can't seek past the 0 position obviously, so figure out a good chunk size
    $chunk_size = ( $max_chunk_size > $position ) ? $position : $max_chunk_size;
 
    // Okay, now seek there and read the chunk
    $position -= $chunk_size;
    fseek( $fh, $position );
    $chunk = fread( $fh, $chunk_size );
 
    // See if there are any newlines in this chunk, count them if there are
    if( false != strpos( $chunk, "\n" ) ) {
      if( substr( $chunk, -1 ) == "\n" ) { ++$found_newlines; }
      $found_newlines += count( explode( "\n", $chunk ) );
    }
 
    // Have we exceeded our desired rows?
    if( $found_newlines > $rows ) { $break = true; }
 
    // Prepend
    $buffer = $chunk . $buffer;
  }
 
  // Now extract only the lines we requested
  $buffer = explode( "\n", $buffer );
  return implode( "\n", array_slice( $buffer, count( $buffer ) - $lines ) );
}

You can give it a try on some junk data here: http://static.velvetcache.org/pages/2010/12/03/tail-in-php/

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“My problem is that all things are increasingly interesting to me.”

- William Gibson
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