Inspirated

 
 

November 16, 2011

Useless domains, Dynamic DNS and Netgear

Filed under: Blog — krkhan @ 8:06 pm

A few weeks back I was renewing this blog’s domain name when I was given a coupon code which would grant me a 20%+ discount for orders >75 USD. Now my order was only touching 70, so grabbing a calculator and dutifully acting like a white-collar citizen made me realize that if I ordered another domain my total order would actually cost me lesser than what I already had. Classic case of “more is less” — I ended up with another domain and a total lack of ideas about what to do with it.

Until, I remembered about this picture from 2 years ago:

The Three Musketeers
“Say hello to my little friend!”
(Click on the thumbnail for larger version.)

The ineffectual Eee PC finally found some practical use. Using Dynamic DNS to point expirated.com towards it, I configured lighttpd to serve the website. As for the content I wrote a few Python scripts to monitor the status of the Tor relay and internet connection at my home. Still not terribly useful, but at least the plots for latter give me a nice idea about how my internet is doing when I’m not at home.

The internet router (Netgear DG834) did not support SSH/SCP so I used Python’s telnetlib module to log in to the router and bring back the modem stats. The results are then fed to a maze of regexes, generating values which are finally plotted via matplotlib.

How I wish I had better things to do with a domain name.

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