tcpsound
Posted by creining | Filed under Linux/BSD
A post to the tcpdump-workers mailing list mentions tcpsound which “forks a pseudo terminal in which to run tcpdump(8), parses that output, and plays a wide variety of user configuable sounds.” Nifty? Perhaps. Useful? Not likely.
Portable CARP implementation
Posted by creining | Filed under Linux/BSD
Frank Denis has created UCARP which is a portable userland implementation of the Common Address Redundancy Protocol (CARP) originally created by OpenBSD as an alternative to the patents-bloated VRRP. Basically, (U)CARP allows multiple machines to share the same virtual IP address to provide failover. UCARP has been tested and works on Linux kernel 2.4 and 2.6 as well as OpenBSD and NetBSD.
Installing FC1 on my new Dell 4600
Posted by creining | Filed under Linux/BSD
I received my new Dell Dimension 4600 this week. I had been looking to replace my creaky Celeron 500MHz desktop machine that I cobbled together during my junior year of college and has been my main system since then. The Celeron had 312 MB 133MHz memory, an Ensoniq sound card, a Voodoo3 3000 16MB videocard, a Mitsumi 2x4x8 CD-RW and a 24x CDROM, and a power supply that was starting to fail (frankly, the last straw). My new Dell is a P4 2.8GHz with 512MB 333MHz DDR SDRAM and has the 80G drive that came with it and an 80G drive that was in my old desktop (note: the Dimension 2400 does not have a second drive cage) and integrated sound, video (note: the Dimension 4600 has an 8x AGP slot, the 2400 does not), ethernet all based on the Intel i810 chipset. I’ve installed Fedora Core 1 on the Dell and everything has gone smoothly. I especially like yum for updating packages. I configured the yum.conf file to point to fast Fedora EDU mirrors and added FreshRPMs and Dag APT repositories. So far, I’ve been able to install every package I’ve wanted to via yum.
Creating network diagrams on linux
Posted by creining | Filed under Linux/BSD
Historically I have used Xfig to draw network diagrams. It is quite an old vector drawing program but gets the job done well. Most recently I used it to draw the network diagram in my SANS GCFW paper. I’m currently working on my SANS GCIA and want to draw a diagram that contains network device icons (I had used mainly rectangle shapes to symbolize machines in my GCFW paper) for a bit more polished look. In searching for *nix programs for network topology maps I ran into the article Creating Network Diagrams that compares four programs: Dia, Tgif, Tkined, and Xfig. The author rated the default Xfig library fairly well, and upon further investigation of the other programs, Xfig contained the most mature iconsets for everything I was looking for.
RealPlayer 8 woes on Redhat 9
Posted by creining | Filed under Linux/BSD
I was trying to get RealPlayer 8 working on my Redhat 9 workstation so I could listen to NPR and ran into a problem. Apparently, Redhat 9 uses a new threading library NPTL which does not work with RealPlayer. But, there is a solution by using the old LinuxThreads implementation by exporting an environment variable, LD_ASSUME_KERNEL. I moved the realplay binary to realplay.old and created a script called realplay containing:
#!/bin/sh LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1 /usr/lib/RealPlayer8/realplay.old $*
Workstation upgrade from Redhat 7.3 to Redhat 9
Posted by creining | Filed under Linux/BSD
I recently upgraded my desktop machine from Redhat 7.3 to Redhat 9. A few notes for posterity follow 
. First, I set up stow so my filesystem can be much cleaner than the last go-around. Stow is used in my case for the installation of compiled source programs that I have downloaded and want to install. It sets up symlinks in a common target tree (/usr/local/bin /usr/local/lib etc) from the source tree. Stow can then be used to easily remove the installed files by removing the symlinks it created or assist in upgrading software by pointing the symlinks to the newer source tree. Second, I was getting an error of no PTYs when running screen. Looking into the issue further I find that I need to mount /dev/pts. The /dev/pts is a pseudo filesystem consisting of /dev/ptmx which “hands out” pseudo terminals, which screen uses. Third, after using Mozilla 1.2.1 for an hour or so thinking for some reason it’s going to be faster than the other times I have run it I find myself at the download page for Firebird. The Firebird I download didn’t have the anti-aliased fonts Mozilla 1.2.1 had but I found the gtk2+xft tarball in http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firebird/releases/0.7/. I found that you can find out the configure arguments by throwing “about:buildconfig” in the URL box. Fourth, fluxbox-0.9.6pre9 kicks ass!
Fast Knoppix mirror
Posted by creining | Filed under Linux/BSD
I found a screaming fast (475KB/sec) Knoppix mirror.
wgets and curls
Posted by creining | Filed under Linux/BSD
CARP, the better alternative to VRRP
Posted by creining | Filed under Linux/BSD
OpenBSD has just added CARP, the Common Address Redundancy Protocol. From the email to misc@openbsd:
This protocol allows multiple hosts on the same local network to share a set of IP addresses among them. Some of the functionality it provides is similar to VRRP, although CARP differs in some significant aspects: CARP has been designed to provide greater security and be protocol independent (so we can support both IPv4 and IPv6). Finally, CARP allows for some level of load balancing in addition to it's high-availability functionality.
This is great work done by the OpenBSD folks in providing an alternative to Cisco’s patent #5,473,599 on Standby Router Protocol and it’s application to VRRP. OpenBSD might become a viable alternative to commercial firewall products for the enterprise that require certain features such as state table synchronization (OpenBSD’s pfsyncd) and clustering.
Fluxbox upgrade
Posted by creining | Filed under Linux/BSD
I upgraded my version of fluxbox, the window manager, today to the latest CVS version 0.9.6pre7. There’s some cool new features like menu transparency and some useful features such as embeddable tabs in window dressings. In my screenshot you can see that the bottom right terminal actually is 3 terminals embedded within the top dressing. I also ditched gkrellm in favor of dockapps that fit into fluxbox’s slit. You can see these docks along the righthand side in my screenshot. I start these applications up out of my .xinitrc file.