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Monday, August 29, 2011

Slackshow, iptraf and 3G

Yesterday I presented an Introduction to Qt Programming mini-course in Slackshow 2011. Slackshow is the annual Brazilian Slackware users meeting, which this year took place in Belo Horizonte city at FUMEC faculty. Months ago one of the organizers, Renato Gravino, invited me to present a lecture and so I did :-) People at the event was very entusiastic and I think people enjoyed the mini-course. I did not take any photos, sorry. I was entertained presenting the mini-course and talking to people.

After finishing my presentation I want to the third floor to watch the final presentation about kernel driver writing. When I am not fixing bugs in Plasmas NM sometimes I also fix bugs in the Linux kernel, one of them even required me to rewrite almost half of my webcam's driver some years ago. During the question section at the end of the presentation one of the attendees asked why iptraf (or iptraf-ng for the matter) does not work with his 3G modem. Well, I have the answer for that. For those who do not know iptraf is a ncurses program to monitor network interfaces:


iptraf is not maintained anymore. Sometime ago someone created iptraf-ng (iptraf next generation), a fork of iptraf, as an alternative to keep using iptraf. Well, the fact is that iptraf and iptraf-ng do not search for USB network interfaces, which are used by several 3G modems nowadays. You need to apply this patch I created and recompile iptraf to fix the problem. Yesterday I sent the patch to iptraf-ng's maintainer, let's seen how much time it will take for it to be applied.

iptraf also requires CONFIG_USB_MON=y in kernel's configuration to monitor USB interfaces. Probably this is the default setting in most kernel's out there, but it was not in mine when I first faced this problem.

If you still use iptraf / iptraf-ng and 3G modem enjoy iptraf working with your modem :-) And thanks for Slackshow's organizers for inviting me for the event.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi! Would it be possible to see your Qt minicourse slides online? Doesn't have to be English, code should be enough ;)

Thanks in advance!
Best regards,
Thomas

Lamarque said...

I have added a link for the .pdf of the presentation at the first post's paragraph. It is in Brazilian Portuguese, of course. Enjoy.

Fri13 said...

How did you get that coloring? I have pastel colors or no colors only and I can not get Konsole color schema to be used.

Lamarque said...

@Fri13, you need to activate the colors in iptraf -> Configure -> Color. That screenshot is not from my notebook, although iptraf is also coloured like that in my notebook.