An interesting post by Martin Roesch on the new architecture in the beta release of Snort.

Everyone who’s paying a visit to the Ryanair website and goes to the Destinations map will notice it … you need to install Microsoft Silverlight.

Uhmm … Silverlight only runs on Windows or Mac OS and not on Linux. I’ve not been able to check other parts of their site (registration and so on …) but surely their web development team must have been exposed to lack of oxygen?

A colleague showed me a new tool that is very useful if you need to connect to a number of machines that have a similar setup (say, a cluster of x-machines).

With clusterssh you can enter commands simultaneously in the different windows.

It’s available for Ubuntu with

Ik gebruik MythTV op een stokoude computer om tv-programma’s en films op te nemen. Alle sexy stuff wordt op een Hauppauge VCR-kaart gedaan, ‘t feit dat de pc die ‘t ding aanspreekt ‘n oude AMD op 550 MHz is, is (tot nu toe) geen probleem geweest.

Onlangs kwam er een nieuwe versie van mythtv uit. M’n “viewer” op (op Ubuntu) deed de upgrade perfect. De backend-server (onder Gentoo) peinst echter dat het tijd is om de middelvinger uit te steken.

De nieuwe versie van mythttv (media-tv/mythtv-0.21_p16944) heeft mysql-5 nodig. Geen probleem, upgrade werkte perfect. Nadien komt er bij’t starten van mythtv altijd een leuke rits boodschappen in de log (onderaan deze post).

Iemand op de developer-lijst vertelde mij dat je ook de mysql-driver die in QT zit moet upgraden. Weer een halve dag later, geen succes.

Vanop de console kan ik zonder problemen inloggen op de mysql-db (mysql -u mythtv -h localhost -p). Via phpmyadmin zijn alle tabellen perfect te gebruiken. Waarom dat “Would you like to configure the database connection now?” in de logs tevoorschijn komt is mij’n raadsel (‘k Krijg die nu ook te zien als ik mythbackend in debug modus opstart).

Help …

UPDATE
Klein detail bij het upgraden van QT. Er staan twee versies van QT geïnstalleerd, qt-3 en qt-4. Het lijkt evident dat mythtv qt-4 zou gebruiken maar dat is het niet. Het was ook handig geweest als de portage manager had aangegeven dat je mysql én qt moet upgraden. Bon, problem solved door naar de laatste qt-3, x11-libs/qt-3.3.8-r4 te upgraden.

2008-05-23 10:47:57.560 Using runtime prefix = /usr, libdir = /usr/lib
2008-05-23 10:47:57.694 Empty LocalHostName.
2008-05-23 10:47:57.710 Using localhost value of vcr
QSqlDatabase: QMYSQL3 driver not loaded
QSqlDatabase: available drivers: (null)
2008-05-23 10:47:57.847 New DB connection, total: 1
2008-05-23 10:47:57.866 Unable to connect to database!
2008-05-23 10:47:57.867 No error type from QSqlError?  Strange...
QSqlQuery::exec: database not open
QSqlQuery::exec: database not open
2008-05-23 10:47:57.923 DB Error (KickDatabase):
Query was:
SELECT NULL;
No error type from QSqlError?  Strange...
........................................................................
2008-05-23 10:48:00.581 UPnPautoconf() - No UPnP backends found
2008-05-23 10:48:00.583 No UPnP backends found

No UPnP backends found

Would you like to configure the database connection now? [yes]
[console is not interactive, using default 'yes']
Database host name: [localhost]
[console is not interactive, using default 'localhost']
Should I test connectivity to this host using the ping command? [yes]
[console is not interactive, using default 'yes']
Database non-default port: [0]
[console is not interactive, using default '0']
Database name: [mythconverg]
[console is not interactive, using default 'mythconverg']
Database user name: [mythtv]
[console is not interactive, using default 'mythtv']
Database password: [xxxxx]
[console is not interactive, using default 'mythtv']
Unique identifier for this machine (if empty, the local host name will be used):
[console is not interactive, using default '']
Would you like to use Wake-On-LAN to retry database connections? [no]
[console is not interactive, using default 'no']
2008-05-23 10:48:00.602 Unable to connect to database!
2008-05-23 10:48:00.604 No error type from QSqlError?  Strange...

Het “Opus Palladianum” project heeft als bedoeling een nieuwe veilige browser te ontwerpen.

In plaats van één monolitische geheel zal de browser uit kleine zelfstandige subsystemenen bestaan die met elkaar communiceren.

Hebben we dat al niet eens gehoord voor operating-systemen? Dat monolitische systemen niet werken?

One of the nicer options of tcpdump under Linux is the -C (that is a capital C). This allows you to write the captured traffic to a file and have the file rotated at a given size. According to the man-pages :

How long before someone adds this to the openbsd version of tcpdump?

FOSDEM, the free and open source developers’european meeting is taking place in Brussels on 23/24 February.

Their schedule is online and shows that there are going to be some interesting talks :

• The virtualization track with talks on Xen.
• Application virtualization with next-generation Klik
• Unicoding With PHP 6
• OWASP WebScarab-NG

Niet slecht als je’t mij vraagt.

A list of useful networking monitoring tools. This is not a Top 10 or Top 5 or Top whatever, the usefulness of these applications depends on your environment and what exactly you want to monitor for.

1. ntop

ntop is a network traffic probe that shows the network usage, similar to what the popular top Unix command does. ntop is based on libpcap and it has been written in a portable way in order to virtually run on every Unix platform and on Win32 as well. It’s great to use, comes with a list of plugins and has a nice web-interface. It’s an easy an inexpensive way to catch misconfigured or compromised hosts on your network.

2. snort

tcpdump is probably the best known monitoring tool, it dumps all the network traffic and comes with extended filtering capabilities.

4. atop

atop is an advanced interactive monitor for Linux-systems to view the load on system-level and process-level but it can also display the network traffic. Start it with atop -N > file.

5. bmon

bmon is a bandwidth monitor for network connections. With it you can watch a certain network card or a many of them. Bmon presents the results in ascii or ncurses.

6. nfsen / nfdump

nfsen is an open source netflow monitor. Results are presented via a webinterface and it comes with tcpdump-like filters. Invaluable tool for network analysis.

Worpress allows you to print parent menu’s with different child-menus. Implementation is easy, just add this to your themes.

In the file that creates the header of your page, normally header.php, add this code:

     <?php   $args = array(

            'title_li' => '',

            'sort_column'=>'menu_order',

            'depth' => 1

                  );

    wp_list_pages($args);

    ?>

Then in the file that creates your child menu (normally this should be sidebar.php) add this code:

   <?php

  if($post->post_parent) {

    $children = wp_list_pages("title_li=&child_of=".$post->post_parent."&echo=0");

  }

  else {

    $children = wp_list_pages("title_li=&child_of=".$post->ID."&echo=0");

  }

  if ($children) { ?>

    <ul>

      <?php echo $children; ?>

    </ul>

  <?php } ?>

The selected menus are li.current_page_parent and li.current_page_item so you should adjust their style in your stylesheet.