1. I’m using audacious for playback instead of xmms
2. I switched to a more recent version of lame.

After doing so, about 1 in 10 files would fail to play (either silence, or strange thumping noises) on audacious, saying one or more of the following messages:

(audacious:12805): MADPlug-WARNING **: samplerate varies!!
(audacious:12805): MADPlug-WARNING **: layer varies!!
(audacious:8645): MADPlug-WARNING **: number of channels varies!!

If I downloaded the file and played that, it worked just fine, so it was something weird about the fact that it was streaming.  My lame transcoding commandline was:

lame –mp3input -h –vbr-new -V 6 -B 320 -b 32 -S -m j $file -

The problem seems to be –vbr-new, since if I remove that option, it works great all the time.  Go figure.

In general, I think audacious sucks.  Now I also think that madplug sucks.  Oh, and by the way, all of this was precipitated by Fedora removing xmms from their repositories due to mp3 licensing issues.  Fedora sucks too.  Ugh!  It seems as though mp3 playback under Linux has taken a huge step backwards…

I absolutely despise the state of Linux audio, and I despise Fedora for mucking up what was previously a working setup.

Note: At first, I didn’t realize that mrtg would run on a remote machine. I didn’t try getting mrtg to run locally on the OpenWRT system, although this is theoretically possible. I use a secondary machine to pull data from the router.

1. Install smtpd on the OpenWRT router. This is as easy as:

# ipkg install snmpd

Once the install has completed, you need to start up snmpd. I just did this by hand, since my router has a pretty good uptime, and I was messing around. To start it by hand, say:

# /etc/init.d/snmpd start

If you want it to start automatically, then you should rename /etc/init.d/snmpd to something like /etc/init.d/S98snmpd.

2. Install mrtg on your linux box. My main webserver is a Fedora box, so this was as straightforward as:

# yum install mrtg

3. Configure mrtg using “cfgmaker”. mrtg comes with a default config, but since router setups vary so much, this default config is pretty much useless. So, I ran:

# cfgmaker –ifref=name public@192.168.1.1 > /etc/mrtg/mrtg.cfg

This created a reasonable config file with a bunch of sections (one section for each interface on the router). It needed a small tweak, and that was to define the WorkDir directory to the right place for Fedora, which is /var/www/mrtg. I then uncommented the bulk of the config sections in the rest of the file.

4. Manually run the mrtg collection scripts to bootstrap the system. You can skip this step if you want to just wait 5 minutes. I looked in /etc/cron.d/mrtg and just ran the command there, which was:

LANG=C LC_ALL=C /usr/bin/mrtg /etc/mrtg/mrtg.cfg –lock-file /var/lock/mrtg/mrtg_l –confcache-file /var/lib/mrtg/mrtg.ok

I can this a couple of times until no error messages came out (the first 2 times may produce errors).

5. Alias /mrtg to /var/www/mrtg in your apache configuration file. This was necessary for me because I have a bunch of virtual hosts. People without virtual hosts can skip this step.

6. Create a simple /var/www/mrtg/index.html that links to the pages generated my mrtg. There’s one page per router interface, so I just made a bunch of hardcoded links. You can look in /var/www/mrtg to see what the filenames are.

6. Done! Now you can view my router graphs on slacy.com/mrtg. The interesting ones are:

eth1: Shows all traffic on my wireless network.
vlan1: Shows all traffic on my external WAN port (in/out to the ‘real world’)
Also note that I’ve configured them all to have logscale on the Y axis, since my ADSL line has such a discrepancy between input and output rates.

I haven’t exactly figured out what the rest of the interfaces are, but I can tell that vlan0 and vlan1 are inverse of each other.