Sean’s Obsessions

I submitted two articles to Linux Journal in December and I’m happy to see they’re both feature articles in March’s VoIP issue.
How to configure SIP and NAT
Expose VoIP problems with Wireshark
Special thanks to Bill Reid, John Lange, and Les Bester of Les.net for letting me bounce ideas off of them, and again to Les for […]

After being reminded that Debugging sucks, Testing rocks I thought I’d go back to some PHP stuff I was working on and develop some unit tests. I looked around at a few testing packages including PHPUnit2 as recommended by Jack Herrington in PHP Hacks, but the overhead and complexity of creating classes to encapsulate […]

I’ve had Jack Herrington’s PHP Hacks around for a while, always refering to it, but never getting around to using it. There were two hacks that really caught my eye, one made a DHTML graph that did a scatterplot of data letting you choose the X and Y axes, and the colour and size […]

I’m sure there’s a million variants out there, but I had a simple need to make sure a process was running and restart it if it isn’t. I’ve done this before using one off scripts, but then I figured I may as well do one that is generic:
watchdog.sh:
#!/bin/sh
# watchdog LOOKFOR SERVICE
# will restart SERVICE […]

I’ve got ertw.com set up to accept SIP calls, so that if you dial sean@ this domain, it rings a phone here. But, how do you dial out?
It’s actually quite easy in theory, since you can Dial() any sort of address, but the trick is to integrate it with the dialplan.
A bit of research […]

I wrote an article for SearchSecurity on the subject of certification related training in Universities, specifically the ISC(2)’s CISSP. I opted for the “against” viewpoint, mostly because I think the CISSP should be synonymous with experience, and partially because it made a for a great discussion.
The article: Opinion: ‘Student’ CISSPs put cert’s value in […]

Every year I have to remember how to generate new SSL keys and remove the password.
Generate keys:
[root@sergeant conf]# cd /etc/httpd/conf
[root@sergeant conf]# make server.crt
umask 77 ; \
/usr/bin/openssl genrsa -des3 1024 > server.key
Generating RSA private key, 1024 bit long modulus
……………….++++++
……………………………++++++
e is 65537 (0×10001)
Enter pass phrase:
Verifying - Enter pass phrase:
umask 77 ; \
/usr/bin/openssl req -new -key server.key -x509 […]

IBM has posted my article on Easy System Monitoring with SAR to their eServer site. I’ve got two more coming, one on monitoring web performance with RRDTool, and one on solving problems with application tracing (ie truss, strace, dtrace)

Sun’s looking to give away free Niagara servers to bloggers looking to review them.
I put my name in, not that this blog is a huge traffic source, but because I’m doing a series of articles for IBM on Unix performance tuning, and I think it would be sweet to use one of these boxes. […]

I haven’t been posting much even though a lot of things have crossed my mind that would be interesting to write about. I’ve been pretty busy with my family and some other projects. Notably, I’m writing a few articles for IBM DeveloperWorks on Unix performance monitoring which I’ll link to here once they […]