http://www.systhread.net Systhread is a Free journal about BSD, Linux, and Unix Hobbyist, Programming and Administration en-us Sun, 13 Jun 2010 13:10:00 EST http://systhread.net/#book0613 Last year I put together a book with selected texts from the site and some new material. The topic is basically the same as most of the site content regarding programming. After peddling the draft around I finally decided I didn't have the energy to keep packaging it up along with supporting materials anymore. Instead I decided to just give it away under a Creative Commons license. If there is any interest in the book (and that is a big if) I might do another one packaging up all of the site material as a sort of reference/history. The working title is simply System Utility Programming. Sun, 13 Jun 2010 13:20:00 EST http://systhread.net/#netreconn177 A new version of netreconn is available. The two wrapper scripts have been deleted. nstrobe is now scanlan. All of the sniffers/readers have been collapsed into a tool called wiretraf. Both utilities are still under or at 20K in size but rather powerful. Sun, 16 May 2010 18:30:00 EST http://systhread.net/#news201005 Of course expect this entry to be deleted soon. Over the next month I might be taking a break from writing to perform some content maintenance. This is what happens when one does not use a database. They have to clean stuff. Specifically the news needs 2008 and probably most of 2009 compressed into simple lists (which has to be done manually... great). Also the texts index page needs some new series lists put together and in of itself might need to be split (I haven't really decided yet). No fear, I do have some interesting content on the horizon (in the form of notes) I just need to sit down and actually, you know, write it. In the meantime, I have noticed a marked spike in traffic to the site which is good (for me because traffic is always cool) and bad (in that I will be very skeptical of my own new material). Call it yin-yang traffic. I think the about stuff could use a punch in the arm as well but we shall see. I do not plan on changing the design, just content whereabouts, lists and so forth. Honestly the design took me so long to settle on and is so complex at this point, I am kind of scared of it. Fri, 07 May 2010 20:45:00 EST http://systhread.net/texts/201005nagmeta3.php In part one of this series the basic trusses needed by the Nagios check_systemhealth script were put together. In part two the actual checks themselves were coded. In this the third and final part of the series compulsory checks are added, the main loop is constructed and the finall full source listing produced. It is worth noting that this is only one of many methods to achieve the same goal. There exists at Nagios exchange plugins and scripts that can do similar actions such as aggregate groups of checks, services and so on. The code presented in this series is just a touch upon a single idea designed to make the reader think about their monitoring deployment. Fri, 02 Apr 2010 11:36:00 EST http://systhread.net/texts/201004txtonly.php Yes I posted this today to avoid the April Fool's joke wonderings. Recently during a short period of severe boredom I decided to try and change my habits a bit by using - when possible - nothing but command line tools. I did allow for the use of curses based tools too, so I guess console or terminal only tools would be a more appropiate way to state the "experiment." Many of the tools I already did use but I wanted to see if I could use exclusively console commands/tools/utils for a week or so. The result was pretty surprising, excepting Firefox (which I found a retro skin theme for) and audacious (for streaming internet music stations) I still use nothing but console utilities in my Xsession and am still using the window manager I setup. Note this is not a review of tools or anything like that, just an experiment that had some unexpected benefits. I am thinking about trying the opposite but I fear it won't be nearly as interesting. Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:42:26 EST http://systhread.net/texts/201003nmf.php An article that details an occurance when Nmap was used not just to aid in troubleshooting but to temporarily fix a network issue. Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:10:31 EST http://systhread.net/news.php#netreconn176 Version 1.76 of the netreconn utilities have been released. Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:30:00 EST http://systhread.net/news.php#mmw2 Version 2 of the micro memory watcher has been released.