Sean’s Obsessions

I’m doing some work with NetFlow accounting. FlowScan parses the data captured by flow-tools. However, FlowScan needs Cflow.pm which has to be specially compiled to work with flow-tools, because it’s made for Caida’s now defunct cflowd. If you don’t compile Cflow.pm using the flow-tools library, you get something like “Invalid index in cflowd flow file: [...]

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 [...]

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 my [...]

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 of [...]

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 # [...]

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 [...]

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 – [...]

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. [...]