A large collection of tools that would be useful to a Systems/Network Admin.

Interesting landscape images from Edward Burtynsky.

Stuart sent me a cool Dancing Yoda link that seems to be doing the rounds. Very funny :-)

Last posting I forget the Ed Brill link to improving Notes client-performance - luckily he has a related followup about inbox-management in Lotus Notes.

Security - Secure computing via IBM's AXE (Assured Execution Environment). AXE loads special software into the kernel, every time the PC is booted up. It then polices every piece of software that is run on the machine, making sure that only authorized code gets used (eg virus and spyware software won't be able to run).

Google Engineer celebrates the anniversary of the first email.

Monad was the code-name for MSH - the new Microsoft Shell. ArsTechnica has a run-down on what MSH is and how to use it. Looks to be pretty powerful. The Monad also featured as some very evil entities in a 2000AD comic featuring the ABC Warriors. When Monad was announced there were a few raised eyebrows at the prospect of a GNU Monad (Gonad....).

Ed Brill links to a piece on how to improve client side mail performance in Lotus Notes. Certainly a local replica of a persons email and their address book helps alot.

Justin Williams rants about the dire state of the email client on OS X (although it could be applied to any platform. Eudora 3 Lite (before they started with the annoying ads in the Lite version) was probably the peak of email sophistication/simplicity IMHO - all email as simple mbx text files, attachments automatically detached, simple filtering, speedy launch times and low memory/cpu usage.

Incidentally it looks like you can find old versions of software (including Eudora) at OldVersions. Where else ? Their tagline is 'Because Newer Isn't Always Better'.

Looks like Google are working on a searchable file-store/database thing - Google Base.

A nice article describing PWC's use of OpenBSD to provide for a zero-cost secure infrastructure. I love the bit where they end up putting an OpenBSD firewall in front of the Windows based CheckPoint firewall to make it more secure.

I used to enjoy these but the humour aspect faded fairly quickly Mad magazine cover explorer. I even played the fantastic Spy vs Spy game on the Commodore64.

Notes from Sun Certified Solaris 9.0 System and Network Administrator All-in-One Exam Guide:

OpenBoot

View the OpenBoot release information for your firmware, as well as the system configuration:

ok banner SPARCstation 20, Type 5 Keyboard ROM Rev. 2.4, 256 MB memory installed, Serial #456543 Ethernet address 5:2:12:c:ee:5a HostID 456543

The OpenBoot PROM monitor is based on the Forth programming language, and can be used to run Forth programs that perform the following functions:

Booting the system, by using the boot command

Performing diagnostics on hardware devices by using the diag command

Testing network connectivity by using the watch-net command

The OpenBoot monitor has two prompts from which commands can be issued: the ok prompt, and the > prompt. In order to switch from the > prompt to the ok prompt, you simply need to type n:

> n ok

Changing the Default Boot Device To boot from the default boot device (usually the primary hard drive), you would enter the following:

ok boot

However, it is also possible to boot using the CDROM by using this command:

ok boot cdrom

The system may be booted from a host on the network by using this command:

ok boot net

Alternatively, if you have a boot floppy, the following command may be used:

ok boot floppy

Because many early Solaris distributions were made on magnetic tape, it’s also possible to boot using a tape drive with the following command:

ok boot tape

Instead of specifying a different boot device each time you want to reboot, it is possible to set an environment variable within the OpenBoot monitor, so that a specific device is booted by default. For example, to set the default boot device to be the primary hard disk, you would use the following command:

ok setenv boot-device disk boot-device = disk

To verify that the boot device has been set correctly to disk, the following command can be used:

ok printenv boot-device boot-device disk

In order to reset the system, to use the new settings, you simply use the reset command:

ok reset

To set the default boot device to be the primary network device, you would use the following command:

ok setenv boot-device net boot-device = net

This configuration is commonly used for diskless clients, such as Sun Rays, which use RARP and NFS to boot across the network. To verify that the boot device has been set correctly to net, the following command can be used:

ok printenv boot-device boot-device net disk

To set the default boot device to be the primary CD-ROM device, you would use the following command:

ok setenv boot-device cdrom boot-device = cdrom

To verify that the boot device has been set correctly to cdrom, the following command can be used:

ok printenv boot-device boot-device cdrom disk

To set the default boot device to be the primary floppy drive, you would use the following command:

ok setenv boot-device floppy boot-device = floppy

To verify that the boot device has been set correctly to floppy, the following command can be used:

ok printenv boot-device boot-device floppy disk

To set the default boot device to be the primary tape drive, you would use the following command:

ok setenv boot-device tape boot-device = tape

To verify that the boot device has been set correctly to tape, the following command can be used:

ok printenv boot-device boot-device tape disk

Testing System Hardware

The test command is used to test specific hardware devices, such as the loopback network device. This device could be tested by using the following command:

ok test net Internal Loopback test - (OK) External Loopback test - (OK)

This indicates that the loopback device is operating correctly. Alternatively, the watch-clock command is used to test the clock device:

ok watch-clock Watching the 'seconds' register of the real time clock chip. It should be ticking once a second. Type any key to stop. 1 2 3 Tip Timing results can be cross-checked against a reliable timing device for accuracy.

If the system is meant to boot across the network, but a boot attempt does not succeed, it is possible to test network connectivity using the watch-net program. This determines whether or not the system’s primary network interface is able to read packets from the network it is connected to. The output from the watch-net program looks like this:

Internal Loopback test - succeeded External Loopback test - succeeded Looking for Ethernet packets. '.' is a good packet. 'X' is a bad packet. Type any key to stop ......X.........XXXX.....….XX............ In this case, a number of packets are marked as bad, even though the system has been connected successfully to the network.

In addition to the watch-net command, the OpenBoot monitor can perform a number of other diagnostic tests. For example, all of the SCSI devices attached to the system can be detected by using the probe-scsi command. The probe-scsi command displays all of the SCSI devices attached to the system. The output of probe-scsi looks like this:

ok probe-scsi Target 1 Unit 0 Disk SUN0104 Copyright (C) 1995 Sun Microsystems All rights reserved Target 1 Unit 0 Disk SUN0207 Copyright (C) 1995 Sun Microsystems All rights reserved Here, we can see that two SCSI disks have been detected. If any other disks or SCSI devices were attached to the chain, they have not been detected, indicating a misconfiguration or hardware error.

Tip If you are using a PCI system, then SCSI devices may or may not appear. Troubleshooting Booting Problems

If a system fails to start correctly in multiuser mode, it’s likely that one of the scripts being run in /etc/rc2.d is the cause. In order to prevent the system from going multiuser, it is possible to boot directly into single-user mode from the ok prompt:

ok boot –s ... INIT: SINGLE USER MODE Type Ctrl-d to proceed with normal startup, (or give root password for system maintenance):

At this point, the root password can be entered, and the user will be given a root shell. However, not all file systems will be mounted, although individual scripts can then be checked individually for misbehaving applications.

If the system will not boot into single-user mode, the solution is more complicated because the default boot device cannot be used. For example, if an invalid entry has been made in the /etc/passwd file for the root user, the system will not boot into single- or multiuser mode. To recover the installed system, the host needs to be booted from the installation CD-ROM into single-user mode. At this point, the default root file system can be mounted on a separate mount point, the /etc/passwd file edited, and the system rebooted with the default boot device. This sequence of steps is shown next, assuming that /etc is located on /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s1:

ok boot cdrom ... INIT: SINGLE USER MODE Type Ctrl-d to proceed with normal startup, (or give root password for system maintenance): # mkdir /temp # mount /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s1 /temp # vi /temp/etc/passwd # sync; init 6

STOP Commands

The STOP commands are executed on the SPARC platform by holding down the special STOP key located on the left-hand side of the keyboard, and another key that specifies the operation to be performed. The following functions are available:

STOP Enters the POST environment. STOP-A Enters the PROM monitor environment. STOP-D Performs diagnostic tests. STOP-F Enters a program in the Forth language. STOP-N Initializes the nonvolatile RAM settings to their factory defaults.

I've been trying to pick up some Cisco bits and pieces from various sources and came across this useful tidbit from CCNA: Cisco Certified Network Associate Study Guide.

As an aside formatting text is still a PITA on the web - I ended up settling on a combination of PRE and CODE - I'm sure there are fancy CSS ways of dealing with this stuff but I can't be bothered...

Anyways - Cisco stores config information in Hex codes within the routers NVRAM - by tweaking these config registers you can do some pretty low-level things. Its a little like messing with a PC Bios or OpenBoot/SRM console.

In the book Todd Lammle explains one of many handy use for Config Register Codes:

Recovering Passwords

If you're locked out of a router because you forgot the password, you can change the configuration register to help you get back on your feet. As I said earlier, bit 6 in the configuration register is used to tell the router whether to use the contents of NVRAM to load a router configuration.

The default configuration register value is 0x2102, meaning that bit 6 is off. With the default setting, the router will look for and load a router configuration stored in NVRAM (startup-config). To recover a password, you need to turn on bit 6. Doing this will tell the router to ignore the NVRAM contents. The configuration register value to turn on bit 6 is 0x2142.

Here are the main steps to password recovery:

Boot the router and interrupt the boot sequence by performing a break.

Change the configuration register to turn on bit 6 (with the value 0x2142).

Reload the router.

Enter privileged mode.

Copy the startup-config file to running-config.

Change the password.

Reset the configuration register to the default value.

Save the router configuration.

Reload the router.

I'm going to cover these steps in more detail in the following sections, and I'll show you the commands to restore access to 2600 and 2500 series routers.

Interrupting the Router Boot Sequence Your first step is to boot the router and perform a break. This is usually done by pressing the Ctrl+Break key combination when using HyperTerminal and while the router first reboots.

After you've performed a break, you should see something like this:

System Bootstrap, Version 11.3(2)XA4, RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc1)
Copyright (c) 1999 by cisco Systems, Inc.
TAC:Home:SW:IOS:Specials for info
PC = 0xfff0a530, Vector = 0x500, SP = 0x680127b0
C2600 platform with 32768 Kbytes of main memory
PC = 0xfff0a530, Vector = 0x500, SP = 0x80004374
monitor: command "boot" aborted due to user interrupt
rommon 1 >

Notice the line command "boot" aborted due to user interrupt. At this point, you will be at the rommon 1> prompt on some routers.

Changing the Configuration Register As I explained earlier, you can change the configuration register by using the config-register command. To turn on bit 6, use the configuration register value 0x2142.

Note Remember that if you change the configuration register to 0x2142, the startup-config will be bypassed and the router will load into setup mode. Cisco 2600 Series Commands

To change the bit value on a Cisco 2600 series router, you just enter the command at the rommon 1> prompt:

rommon 1 > confreg 0x2142
You must reset or power cycle for new config to take effect

Cisco 2500 Series Commands

To change the configuration register on a 2500 series router, type o after creating a break sequence on the router. This brings up a menu of configuration register option settings. To change the configuration register, enter the command o/r, followed by the new register value. Here's an example of turning on bit 6 on a 2501 router:

System Bootstrap, Version 11.0(10c), SOFTWARE
Copyright (c) 1986-1996 by cisco Systems
2500 processor with 14336 Kbytes of main memory
Abort at 0x1098FEC (PC)
>o
Configuration register = 0x2102 at last boot
Bit#    Configuration register option settings:
15      Diagnostic mode disabled
14      IP broadcasts do not have network numbers
13      Boot default ROM software if network boot fails
12-11   Console speed is 9600 baud
10      IP broadcasts with ones
08      Break disabled
07      OEM disabled
06      Ignore configuration disabled
03-00   Boot file is cisco2-2500 (or 'boot system' command)
>o/r 0x2142

Notice that the last entry in the router output is 03-00. This tells the router what the IOS boot file is. By default, the router will use the first file found in the flash memory, so if you want to boot a different file name, you can either change the configuration register or use the boot system ios_name command.

Note Another way to change the configuration register is to load an IOS image from a TFTP server by using the command boot system tftp ios_name ip_address from global configuration mode. Reloading the Router and Entering Privileged Mode

At this point, you need to reset the router like this:

From the 2600 series router, type reset.

From the 2500 series router, type I (for initialize).

The router will reload and ask if you want to use setup mode (because no startup-config is used). Answer No to entering setup mode, press Enter to go into user mode, and then type enable to go into privileged mode.

Viewing and Changing the Configuration Now you're past the point where you would need to enter the user-mode and privileged-mode passwords in a router. Copy the startup-config file to the running-config file:

copy startup-config running-config

or use the shortcut

copy start run

The configuration is now running in random access memory (RAM), and you're in privileged mode, meaning that you can now view and change the configuration. But you can't view the enable secret setting for the password. To change the password, do this:

config t
enable secret todd

Resetting the Configuration Register and Reloading the Router

After you're finished changing passwords, set the configuration register back to the default value with the config-register command:

config t
config-register 0x2102

Finally, save the new configuration with a copy running-config startup-config and reload the router.

Note If you save your configuration and reload the router and it comes up in setup mode, the configuration register setting is probably incorrect.

Nostalgia - Online MULE.

Where are the women in IT ? Dave Winer wonders where the convergence would be for conferences that would attract more of a gender balance. Heres part of the answer and heres the other part. Records Management / Knowledge Management are the two key areas which combine with IT to redress the balance.

Frank Hecker has comleted the task of producing a line by line annotation of the Blosxom perl script. I use Blosxom mainly because its incredibly simple.

A good article on What to do when Apt-Get Fails.

Two excellent guides - Howto Backuo with rdiff and Howto Virtual Mail Hosting with Postfix, Courier and MySQL.

Find out how much it really costs to make a Mac Mini or iPod Nano. The service provided by iSuppli is pretty fascinating. I wonder how much reverse engineering goes on based on this information ?

Funny - Replacement 'Flapart' for your books.

Useful - Advanced Squid.

I've linked to this before but its still a great resource - Newspaper Frontpages from 48 different countries.

Fantastic clock - Clock of the long now. Designed to last 10000 years and its slowest part will cycle once every 260 years. A prototype has been built.

An emusing look into the life of ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher.

At last a Lotus Notes Community Site (that isn't notes.net) - LotusUserGroup.Org - of particular interest are the Systems Admin Tips. Notes administration tends to be one of those things that people pick up on the job as there aren't that many useful "How-To's" on the web.

Interesting link to a new Transparent Armor being developed by the US Air Force as a replacement for Armored Glass.

Jakob Nielsons - Top Ten Weblog Usability Mistakes. I'm guilty of almost all of them :-)

Looks like NZ ranks equal # 2 in the annual 2005 Corruption Perception Index.

New Apple stuff - Aperture, new PowerBooks and new multi-core G5's. Apart from the multi-core G5's (about time) its all pretty dull (unless you're a pro-photographer in which case Aperture may be handy). John Gruber comments on the new releases at Daring Fireball.

Neat - RSS feeds for Microsoft KBase Articles by product.

Came across this these yesterday - a replacement for the venerable Windows Noteapad called Notepad 2.

I should pick a different colour for updates...

Excellent - VMWare release free VM 'player'. Great boon to software companies - you can now shrink wrap VMWare demo machines as distributables for anyone to use - excellent for companies with tricky software installs on x86 based platforms.

Someone at Apple must have finally woken up and realised that managing a fleet of Mac's is a PITA - as of OS X ver 10.4 ASR (Apple Software Restore) can do multi-cast installs over the network. This is something Ghost has been able to do since for x86 hardware since 1998.

Amusing - Living with the Beast. A writer discusses the joys of working with Microsoft Word. On a vaguely related note MacDevCenter have a good article on the RTF format.

(bands on my big iPod Shuffle for the week ending 23 October 2005) -

Post inspired by Jesse.

Via BoingBoing - the EFF cracks code embedded into Colour Laser Printer output.

Joel Spolsky discusses the crappiness of Microsoft SQL's full-text indexing capabilities.

A nice piece on the Open-ness of the Apple II. It has to be said the old Apple IIe was a hackers dream and it was so easy to understand even your mother could wire up an interface to make it control something useful. The last PC to do something similar was the long gone BeBox and its Geekport. Probably the closest thing nowadays for the average user is a Lego Mindstorm or X10 controllers.

Nice idea for a Survival kit in an Altoid Tin. American survivalists crack me up though - where else would you find tips on gunfighting.

Paul Thurrott reviews the latest Vista version (Build 5231 (Community Technical Preview 2)).

I saw 'The Worlds Fastest Indian' - pretty good movie. Definitely one to appeal to (wannabe) backyard-tinkerers everywhere.

Doh - almost forgot that Earth have a new album - Hex: Or Printing in the Infernal Method. Wonder what my chances of it making its way to NZ are ? I need to track down some Sunn 0))) too from the same label. Might be time to dust off the Amazon account for some mail-order audio goodness ...

On a related note - this album cover is a genius Nick Drake homage. An unsuspecting folky will have his ears burnt by Boris instead.

From this graph it seems visits peaked in August. Although repeat visits were fairly consistant.

From this table it still seems like visits from the US far outnumber any other country.

Internet Explorer is the most popular browser (36%) quickly followed by Firefox (ver 1.0.6 and 1.0.7 are listed seperately with 19% and 18% respectively).

Interesting piece on the Artwork hidden in micro-chips. I think Marvin on the Mars Rover might be my favourite.

Trying out Meebo which is a web page IM interface which lets you use AIM/MSN etc from inside a firewall that would normally block IM protocols.

If only I had a small warehouse to put this stuff in. Up to Nine Thousand USD so far .... seems cheap at the price and a good way for any museum to get an instant step-up into a 'History of personal computing' exhibit.

Handy - Debian Grimoire. Useful byte-size tidbits for Debian admins. The Vserver info looks interesting as does his Cool Tools info.

Apparently Microsoft Office 12 will have a WYGIWYS (What you get is what you see) interface - or a 'results-oriented user interface'. Wonder how it will be received and if there is an option to turn it off ? Also given that people are struggling to see any real benefit in moving from Office 2000 to XP or 2003 how are Microsoft going to get this into the enterprise ?

As I'm a sad Apple fanboy it appears they've released some goodies - Video iPod, Slimline iMac with built in iSight and Bluetooth Remote Control, iTunes 6.

On the Video iPod it looks like they've completely ditched the FireWire - seems like a lost opportunity to allow direct to disk recording from FireWire capable video cameras.

Commentary on the new products from Daring Fireball.

The new Zaurus C3100 looks cool - seem to be the only PDA maker still innovating. Then again the market is getting smaller and smaller as people put their old PDA data into their phones.

Joel Spolsky on the perils of Custom Software Development. Build to order appears to be a nasty trap a developer and client can get themselves into - even if it gets off the ground as the client it means you can really only get support from the developer and as the developer you've got to be able to commit resources to keeping this custom code in a working state.

Via BoingBoing - looks like a fascinating book from a Vatican Astronomer. It'd be interesting to see what he has to say with respect to "Is Original Sin something that affects all intelligent beings?" or did humanity ruin the universe for everyone ;-)

I picked up Alastair Reynolds "Redemption Ark". Looking forward to reading it.

Ed Brill points to the Remote Control CEO. I think this would appear to be the hallmark of a mature well run organisation - getting and extracting (semi) real time information on the organisations core business. I'm still amazed someone hasn't come up with something like MRTG for businesses - something that will extract income/expenditure from the finance system and graph it in real time and allow drill down to see where the money is coming in and where its going.

Simple - TextRider is a simple PHP based blog-engine. Uses text files instead of a database back end. Similar to Blosxom.

From the ever brilliant Arstechnica comes a definitive History of gaming through the various genres. Pretty interesting stuff. Whats amazing is that fundementally little has changed in each genre apart from snazzier graphics and added complexity. I also have to take issue with the ommission of Mule (in the Real Time Strategy section) and Boulderdash (in the Platform section). Or Wizball, Sentinal or Mercenary - each of which would need to go into a final 'Truly Original' category.

And just for the sake of nostaligia - check out these remakes - Paradroidz (Paradroid in 3D Java), Head Over Heels via Retro-Remakes. For those of us that remember gaming on an Apple II, Spectrum or Commodore64.

And I've just discovered Wikipedia has articles on most of them too (try finding that in Brittanica) - Boulderdash, Mercenary, M.U.L.E., Elite, Wizball.

Interesting - Lateral Thinking Puzzles. Most of them seem to be more about inventing stories to fit the situation rather than a plausible explanation.

Security - Proactive Wireless with hostapd for OpenBSD. Looks interesting but theres so much jargon buried in there its hard to work out what it would be good for.

Presentation Techniques - Beyond Bulletpoints. Some sound advice in here about creating presentations people will actually pay attention to (which is much harder than it sounds).

Networking - Netem lets you simulate various networking conditions such as packet loss or packet re-ordering.

Music - along with Popmatters and Pitchfork I've discovered Sylus which has some great reviews of movies and music.

Purely for reference - How to knot a tie. I favour the simplicity of the 'Four-in-Hand knot' although I'm sure it conveys an unprofessional air of laziness (after all if you can't do a decent knot how can you be trusted to do anything else ;-)

It looks like Microsoft have Windows XP SP3 on the horizon.

Interesting - The Origins and Usage of Common British Swear Words. From the BBC's Hitch-hikers Guide site.

Security - Protecting Files Using Encrypted Containers. LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup) mentioned in the article comments looks interesting too.

Check out the 11th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition. I still haven't come anywhere near finishing my old Infocom games.

This is a great idea - Open Advantage is a UK based company which provides free consultancy on open-source tools.

(On my iPod Shuffle for the week ending 09/10/05)

Anyone would think I never listen to anything outside of the 1980 to 2000 period :-)

With this NetBSD Restore CD I managed to shoe-horn NetBSD 2 onto my MIPS based Cobalt Qube 2.

Details on the NetBSD Cobalt port are here.

Now I just need to dig up a serial cable or setup a dhcp server so I can assign the thing an IP address and start messing around with it.

Its certainly quite a leap from the standard Qube 4Gb disk containing the old Cobalt Redhat-based Linux Kernel v2 (current in 1999 maybe) to the 40Gb disk containing NetBSD 2 (which is current as of 2004/5). Cobalt stopped updating their MIP's based OS when they moved their line of Qube and RAQ hardware to x86 which was much easier to keep in synch with advances in the Linux kernel.

For now it will probably go back into its box and storage until we get our study sorted out.

Looks like a great Gmail type AJAX application - Zimbra. Open source too. The demo and flash-demo look very promising. One thing I did notice was it was http and not https which was a little disconcerting.

Another What is Asterisk article. Nice introduction to this open source VOIP PABX solution.

Found via Tinyapps is a Review over at Newsforge of DemoStudio. DemoStudio is an open source screen movie capture tool useful in creating AVI or Shockwave recordings of screen activities.

The Evolution of the Word GUI from v1 to v97. Back in the day when Word actually had competition from WordPerfect (although I remember Xywrite, AppleWriter and Wordstar too).

I made my first Wikipedia contribution by fixing a typo in this article on Richard Dawkins. Its so simple to change stuff its almost frigtening.

I've never used Ubuntu but judging by this FAQ from one of its prime movers (Mark Shuttleworth) it seems like a well-grounded and fun distro to use.