http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress stuff i'm working on Thu, 26 Jun 2008 08:53:52 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Over the last 3 months or so, it's been interesting to see the ROI plans on various wi-fi rollouts. For example, I just spec'd a ~$70K (retail) dual radio solution BelAir for a condo in FL. If we turn this opportunity to a MSO, then they get, say, everything ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/06/26/roi-on-wi-fi-rollouts/ One side affect of using Y! Pipes is getting duplicates (particularly this Digg/Reddit/Slashdot mashup), and I've finally found a Thunderbird plugin that deals with them quickly. After you install the plug-in, simply right click the folder with the dupes, and select "remove duplicate messages". Le voila! http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/06/21/dupe-killer/ I found this great iperf FAQ while googling and am hoping other friends / readers / associates might point me to any other custom bandwidth checking scripts they've written, with or without iperf. Any pointers in the right direction would be greatly appreciated! http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/06/16/iperf-recipes/ Two days ago, I got the dreaded "lockdown in sector 4 (failure)" gmail error when I tried to IMAP.  I suspect that this happened to be related to a Thunderbird offline folder sync I was doing shortly before getting on my plane trip to Orlando, FL. On the third day (over ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/06/16/the-google-gods-must-be-crazy/ Today while surveying some hotels, I used Xixia's qcheck to give me a "real" throughput number to jive with the instantaneous modulation/RSSI levels that my Intel program and inssider tool were giving me. Qcheck is quick, dirty, and effective, although not as feature rich or extensible as other tools, ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/06/16/qcheckity-check-yourself/ Tonight I installed the latest version of dd-wrt on my Linksys WRT54Gv3 and had some interesting glitches. In theory, it should have all been very simple.  All I did was upgraded from v23 to v24, but for whatever reason shortly after the upgrade, none of my wireless devices could use DNS ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/06/06/upgrade-u-dd-wrt/ When friends ask me to help troubleshoot their network problems, I never seem to have my laptop much, much less any powerful tools that can actually help me easily diagnose what the problem is. Lately, however, I've found myself relying on inssider (from the makers of the wispy) for a ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/05/22/fixing-home-wireless-problems-with-inssider/ Here are two freebie ideas I hope someone does something with. (1) Give all taco trucks a GPS unit, aggregate all the live data on some web backend, and then display it in some sort of a google maps mashup that's phone-friendly (e.g. SMS your address, and it SMS's you back ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/05/04/two-freebies-for-my-droogies/ It seems like shortly after learning IPtables, every command line cowboy starts slamming it on everything and wrangling each config file one-by-one. In one sense, I can understand how IPtables is a godsend, particularly in environments where network admins are slow to make necessary firewall changes or are (understandably) reticent about ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/04/27/standardizing-the-iptables-spaghetti/ Lately I've gotten lots of email from ex-clients, friends, and associates inquiring about my recent move to BelAir Networks. In some way, shape, or form, I've been following wireless for a while now. I got my amateur radio license and try to keep up with various spectrum legislation issues, particularly ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/04/19/unplugging-my-career/ For years I've used Cisco's TFTP program, thinking it was the best thing since sliced bread. I had simple TFTP needs, and whenever I'd need it, I'd simply go to Old Version .com and grab it. Today I happened to looked over my boss' shoulder while he was configuring one ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/04/18/tftp-plus-plus/ Bye-bye, PIX. You served me well, protecting me and often keeping me company during some cold nights in the data center. Remember that time I blasted you with the SmartBits because I doubted you? It seems like almost yesterday. The only rocky point in our relationship was one armed routing, but looking ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/04/12/pix-rip/ I just integrated Thunderbird with Google Calendar using Lightening and Provider for Google Calendar 0.4. It's fairly straight forward if you're somewhat familiar with GCal developments, but if you'd like a nudge in the right direction, check out this great little tutorial (complete with screenshots). Google Calendar integration with the iPhone ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/04/10/integrating-gcal-with-thunderbird-and-the-iphone/ Here is a great article explaining the 4G wireless hype in plain language. (The same author also wrote an excellent article on cellular acronyms). It will be interesting to see how 4G drives IPv6 adoption. http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/04/10/4g-hype-explained-clearly/ I was surprised not to see the BwgBurn (win32) listed as an alternative to Nero on OS Alt. I just dropped them a note, so we'll see if they add it or give a good reason why it wasn't included. Thus far, BwgBurn has done everything well that I used ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/04/10/switching-to-bwgburn-from-nero/ Those with print-protected PDFs should consider checking out the GPL'd GSView. Once you install it, start the program and open the locked PDF in question.  Once it opens, you should be able to easily print another PDF using a PDF-making program, such as PDFcreator (also GPL). Those wanting an open ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/04/10/gsview-on-print-protected-pdfs/ Just finished using nmap2nagios to build out some cfg files for Nagios. Unfortunately, the script that I've been using builds Nagios 1.x cfg files, and that creates the following types of problems for Nagios 2.x/3.x: change contact_groups from "admin" to "admins" ("admins" is probably already your default group in localhosts.cfg) define contact_groups ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/04/01/nmap2nagios-tweaks/ From the cli, type: wget -r -l2 -t1 -nd -N -A.zip -erobots=off http://sdsickboy.com unzip '*.zip' Now play the unzip'd .flac and .mp3 files in your music player. http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/04/01/social-d-bootlegs/ The other day, I was listening to 103.1's Joe Escalante, esq do his Barely Legal radio show (where he gives "barely legal" advice to aspiring musicians), and I thought about my friend Mike Orlando in SF who, like Escalante, likes punk music, has a JD/esq (Escalante from Loyola; Orlando from UCLA), has a ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/03/30/podcasting-half-baked-legal-advice/ I am looking for a solid level 3 systems engineer who... ...can use F/OSS tools to build out crazy monitoring infrastructures (think tens of thousands of service checks). ...is wanting to work in a fast-paced integrator environment (with sales people who find monster opportunities). ...can communicate well (i.e. be able to respond to ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/03/26/wanted-level-3-foss-monitoring-engineer/ Just finished writing the article, "Is Nagios Right For Your Datacenter", for TechTarget.com. Next on my radar is a series of Cisco ASA HOWTOs (similar to the PIX series I wrote for Techsoup a few years ago). Compumentor just drop shipped me some equipment, so that should be cool...if for no ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/03/22/is-nagios-right-for-your-datacenter/ This site is the biggest time killer. Hit it at your own risk! For a while now, I've thought it would be cool to make an equivalent using sites like LightReading.com, Clay Shirky, etc. http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/03/20/popurlscom/ Ok, I admit it -- I'm an NPR podcast FREAK! I find it a refreshing alternative to traditional media, and it works perfectly with my new iPhone (well, "perfectly" as defined by Apple...which still has a lot to be desired, IMO). I was quite pleased to stumble across this OPML file ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/03/12/ompl-listing-of-npr-podcasts/ When I found out that hiring managers in my company were going to Craigslist, typing in resume keywords, and then manually searching through gazillions of URLs each morning for potential candidates, I sought to make life easier for them via CrazedList and Y! Pipes. I went to CrazedList and put in ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/03/11/y-pipes-crazedlist-badass-hr-tool/ While I don't do much with MPLS (other than just order it and have someone else deal with its complexities) and don't use Cisco's ANA Networkvision, I found this doc on fault managing MPLS neworks interesting. MPLS crapola includes: BGP neighbor down, MPLS black hole, broken LSP, MPLS tunnel down ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/03/01/misc-coolness/ I hate to admit this, but it wasn't until very recently that I've started using screen, and not until very very recently, that I've used it in any sort of productive manner. This tutorial is a good quick overview on what it is and how it makes you more productive with ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/03/01/session-management-with-screen/ This last week, I taught a Nagios class and ironed out a few more integration pieces that I will probably incorporate into my next class. I've been getting a lot of emails and interest in a "boot camp" sort of thing (similar to the CCIE bootcamp sort of thing), and ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/02/23/mo-nagios-projects/ The last several weeks, I've found myself doing a slew of things that have been incredibly dependent on DNS (e.g. Nagios host checks on hosts that would soon change IP addresses). I found fping in these situations to be the "magic bullet" to help me start narrowing down DNS problems. e.g. ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/02/16/finding-needed-a-records-with-fping/ So, the next time you need to get some work done at a crime scene and are feeling less than productive, maybe it's because you do not have a D-Link 450. From the product page: "It is ideal for off-site situations, such as crime scenes, where sharing information is critical." (Just ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/01/31/boosting-your-crime-scene-productivity/ Today I installed NRPE on approximately a dozen AIX servers, and I was surprised not to see a solid HOWTO on the net. Not being an AIX admin, I had a little difficult and had to ask others about AIX-ish way of doing things, but for those familiar with ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/01/22/installing-nagios-nrpe-on-aix/ It's good to see to see that This American Life will remain free. Thanks to Everyone Who Pitched in to Keep Our Podcast Free A few weeks back, we asked you to help our home station pay the substantial bill for offering our show as a free podcast and online stream. A ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/01/20/tal-still-free/ For several years, I have used FTP Voyager (and more recently Filezilla) for my implicit FTP encryption needs. While they 'work', having to install a big tool to do something simple is not always the best way to do things, and I began to look around for a light command ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/01/20/windows-binary-for-lftp/ I recently helped screen people for a big switching project that I'm working on. While I can fight my way out of a paper bag when it comes to simple things like VLANs and layer 3 switches, I hardly consider myself an expert. One soi-disant "expert" I interviewed kept throwing ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/01/17/red-flags-when-talking-to-subject-experts/ It's been said that when your only tool is a hammer, every problem is a nail.  And for the last few years, when mass copying Windows files from one NT box to another has been a problem, my solution has always been solved with xxcopy. (In fact, it's been so ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/01/17/friends-dont-let-friends-use-robocopy/ So, I seem to have several clients who have one or two users (usually "Someone Important" in a corner office) who always seem to have some huge disproportional amount of spam compared to the rest of the users (seriously, like a couple of orders of magnitude). Most of the time, ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/01/15/spam-kludge/ 1. Install PDF Creator from Sourceforge. 2. Download "protected" PDF from Amazon 3. Print to 'Microsoft Office Document Image Writer' image. 4. Open file.mdi file you created. 5. Print PDF using PDF Creator. 6. Lift finger off mouse, just long enough to extend middle finger. 7. Donate more money to Sourceforge. 8. Google PDF author to see ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/01/15/recipe-for-liberating-amazon-protected-pdfs/ Since we're a CheckPoint partner, we've been looking closely at their data security and security management solutions for SOX compliancy, both of which are supposedly going to be rolled up in their new VPN SecureRemote client and able to be pushed out via Group Policy. So, there's this huge push to ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/01/10/varonis-and-windows-ad-security/ Today I spoke with my friend Mike (one of the forensic dudes with whom I sometimes work), and I was happy to hear that he would soon be working at McAfee's Foundstone. I was first introduced to Foundstone's products around 2001 when I became a security engineer with Titan and ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/01/09/musings-on-forensics-trends/ I've been quite impressed with Ontrack's PowerControls' ability to recover Exchange Server mail from raw EDB files that weren't dismounted properly. It's incredibly easy and can save a lot of time, especially when you do not have time or resources to go through Exchange Server's "proper" disaster recovery methods to ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/01/08/ontracks-powercontrols-for-exchange-server/ Today I had to quickly forensically image an IBM Thinkpad for one of the forensic experts with which I work. Because of a screwy cd drive on the laptop, I couldn't just boot into the Sid / Knoppix-based Helix CD and use LinEn to image, but rather had to remove the ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/01/07/trying-to-catch-me-mounting-dirty/ An IT manager at a client of mine constantly berates others. I call him "The Seagull". Instead of really managing, he flies in your room, makes a lot of noise, shits on everyone, and then leaves. I especially love the way he talks down to people who are quite ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2008/01/05/a-department-divided/ I used to work with someone who would throw little temper tantrums. It was hilarious, and I've give my left nut to go back in time to tape record them and post them on Youtube today. After each little tantrum, I couldn't help but make a smartass comment. ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/12/30/professionals-who-throw-temper-tantrums/ Just watched the following fourteen videos CCIE lab strategy on YouTube, and their bottom line seems legit: (1) master the basics, and (2) get hands on experience. CCIE Lab Strategy - A Structured Approach                                                 http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/12/27/ccie-lab-strategy-vids-on-youtube/ A cube mate on a recent project just pulled a classic stunt that is worthy of its own Dilbert strip. Instead of sending his boss his weekly status report, he sent copy of the welcome letter from the new company with which he'd soon be starting. Pros to such a stunt: ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/12/27/all-aboard-the-failcopter/ Every time I see Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged on a coworker's desk, I can't help but think about the 'Telemachus Sneezed' parody in The Illuminatus Trilogy or that Onion article where the libertarian reluctantly called the fire department. My dear coworkers, do yourself a favor and drop Rand's "A is A" ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/12/17/paranoid-randroid/ Dynamips + Dynagen + Cisco IOSes + This YouTube Video = major coolness (Found the vid while scanning through Cisco and CCIE tags on del.icio.us) http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/12/17/youtube-howto-on-dynamips-and-dynagen-for-cisco-ios-emulation/ Poorly managed mail servers (particularly Microsoft Exchange ones) have a bad habit of getting listed on DNS RBLs, and when they do, it's sometimes very difficult to get them off. Fortunately, I found a cool Nagios plugin to help me babysit friends' mail servers. Here is a quick ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/12/16/nagios-check_bl-instructions/ Before I recommend someone for hire in a particular company (my own or another one), I like to ask them a series of questions that gives me an idea on how well they can do two things: (1) see the big picture, and (2) come through on the details Lots of people ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/12/15/more-interviewing-methods/ This review hits the nail on the head. The conclusion is the icing on the cake: To be honest there is only one conclusion to be made; Microsoft have really outdone themselves in delivering a brand new operating system that really excels in all the areas where Vista was sub-optimal. ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/12/15/upgrading-from-vista-to-xp/ Having done a lot with VMware, I was glad to find this Tech Target article from last Sept listing the companies that won Best of VMworld Awards. Some of the winners and finalists the areas of capacity planning, consolidation, performance monitoring / optimiziation, migration (physical-to-virtual, virtual-to-virtual, virtual-to-physical software), data protection ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/12/15/vmworld-winners/ Ah, a 'secret' link which you can use to quickly add all the SomaFM 128k channels to your iTunes or Winamp: http://somafm.com/all.pls. (One of the many reasons I support them by kicking them a $1/mo.) http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/12/13/secret-somafm-link/ Being a fan of Monit, I find the Ruby-based God interesting. It looks quite new, and I'm guessing that it's a little premature to put on production servers. According to its website, its features include: Config file is written in Ruby Easily write your own custom conditions in Ruby Supports both poll ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/12/11/god-like-monit-only-awesome/ Ah, very handy: a Perl module to help quickly write Nagios plugins. From the webpage: Nagios::Plugin::Getopt is an OO perl module providing standardised and simplified argument processing for Nagios plugins. It implements a number of standard arguments itself (--help, --version, --usage, --timeout, --verbose, and their short form counterparts), produces standardised nagios ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/12/10/nagiosplugin-nagios-development-for-the-lazy/ What?!? SpaceExplore isn't listed on Life Hacker's Top 10 Windoze File Wranger Programs? Ok, maybe it's not in the same league as some of the others, but it's a godsend to anyone who (like me) regularly inherits horribly fouled up Windows servers. (My favorite is still the accounting server that also ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/12/10/add-spaceexplore-to-your-list-of-windows-file-wrangling-utils/ Another question I like to ask sysadmin candidates in my interviews is, "Describe to me the Linux boot procecess?" While it's still something a little fuzzy in my mind, it gives me a quick idea on where that candidate stands on several levels: What distros does this candidate know and prefer? How deep ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/12/10/yet-another-interview-question/ Here is a cool little tool to babysit IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager. Its features are pretty fly: Supports multiples tsm servers (servername) Can be used transparently as a nagios plugin Alert notification mechanism (by e-mail) Supports new values for ok/warning/critical status in command line Bourne shell (sh) compliance Easy to add news checks Here are some more ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/12/10/tivoli-monitoring-with-nagios-friendly-tsmmonitor/ So, you've got Nagios and you need something to babysit your log files. Nagios' check_log 'works' (well, sorta...), but gives you too many false alarms, and you don't have the time or patience to integrate Swatch or SEC. Check out the Nagios plugin, check_logfiles. From their website: MotivationThe conventional plugins which ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/12/10/making-sense-of-logfile-madness-with-check_logfile/ Lately I'm been amassing cool *nix-y resources for some of the new members of our Linux user group, particularly in the areas of shell scripting. Here are two very cool resources my buddy Brandon just referred to me: Awk one liners Sed one liners http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/12/10/sedawk-one-liners/ So, lately I've been coming up with little questions to separate the "men from the boys" (sorry, ladies) when it comes to interviewing people for network and systems administration. One great question, I think, is asking someone what TTL stands for in traceroute. Since traceroute is ICMP, and ping ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/12/10/a-good-interview-question-for-network-engineers-what-is-ttl/ I recently applied for a SRE (Service Reliability Engineer) position at Google, and one of my questions was on mass changing all the files in a directory from html to htm and vise versa. I don't remember what crappy answer I gave, but here is what I worked out ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/12/09/google-sre-question-on-mass-changing-file-extensions/ With check_generic, one can easily on the fly executes any command and compares the output against arbitrary numerical or string expressions. Between the Linux examples and tutorial, once can get up-to-date rather quickly. (I'll most likely use this in conjuction with 'nagiostats' and sed/awk to help me determine when Nagios ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/12/09/insane-nagios-flexibility-with-perl-based-check_generic/ In my constant search for high end monitoring tools, I have been stumbling across Akorri's BalancePoint quite frequently. The marketing mumbo jumbo: BalancePoint's Cross-Domain Analysis™ technology collects information from servers, storage, and infrastructure software, and automatically correlates application performance across these domains. By providing a single view across IT silos, ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/12/04/akorris-balance-point-virtualization-aware-monitoring/ As companies rely more and more on a Nagios server (or Cacti, SEC, Splunk, etc) the question becomes, "What monitors the monitoring server?" Two popular ways are to just build another Nagios server or use the check_nagios plugin. When that's not feasible, I just quickly Monit. As you can see from ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/12/03/sed-quis-custodiet-ipsos-custodes-monit/ Shortly after I posted my last blog entry, a http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/12/01/yet-another-gpl-windows-monitoring-program/ When my Windows NT customers hear that I do "monitoring" for other clients, the first question is always (something like), "Can you monitor the event logs of all of our servers?" Up til now, the only real option I've known off the top of my head is using Nagios' ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/12/01/nt-event-log-monitoring/ Tonight after work, Brandon, one of the sysadmins at Community Loans of America, told me about an interesting DNS solution called Men and Mice that helps you easily manage your DNS and DHCP infrastructure. Not sure if I'd ever need it (as I tend to rely on Windows for internal ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/11/28/men-and-mice-yet-another-cool-meta-infrastructure-tool/ One of my clients is looking to standardize a distribution for (I'm guessing) around 50 servers, and I've been tasked with formulating compelling reasons for them to do so. I'm strongly leaning towards CentOS, and here are my reasons: Binary compatible (at least, in theory) with RHEL. Quite stable (the only ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/11/28/centos-best-suited-for-businesses/ With the recent purchase of my 160 GB iPod classic, I've started getting more serious about my podcasts. The "problem" with them is that some of them don't let you subscribe back too far, and picking through their archive and downloading things one-by-one can sometimes be a chore. To ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/11/23/mass-downloading-2600s-off-the-hook-radio-show/ I am looking for solid ways to screencast my user group's speakers' laptop presentations (e.g. some sort of an open source version to GoToMeeting or maybe a video equivalent to Shoutcast / Icecast). Since I'll be using my company's conference room, I'll have a decent speaker phone. But since my company's ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/11/18/cross-platform-way-to-broadcast-speakers-laptop-sessions/ I'm always on the lookout for tools that will help me babysit servers and was delighted to find this well-written article comparing Cfengine and Puppet. From the article: Cfengine is a great way to scale common administrative practices -- you can move from using SSH and a for loop to using ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/11/16/cfengine-vs-puppet-for-policy-management/ http://www.dpstele.com/layers/l2/snmp_tutorials.php From the page: SNMP Tutorial Part 1: An Introduction to SNMP The first part of our SNMP tutorial series introduces SNMP with a brief history of the procotol. In this lesson, you will learn about SNMP network architectures. You will also learn about how the various parts of an SNMP system interact ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/11/15/snmp-tutorial/ Bouncing around southern California with fellow LUG hoppers Charles Wyble (LiLAX) and David Kaiser (SoCal Linux), I've met lots of other Nagios aficionados and figured it was time to create a real life SoCal Nagios group. Since several of us already collaborate together on various projects, we thought it made ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/11/15/socal-nagios-ug/ Today I just added the following extra checks to the commands.cfg file on my CentOS 4 / Nagios 2.9 box (your syntax may vary). I also posted them on NagiosWiki, in case anyone else wants to hack on them **************commands.cfg****************** #DHCP – Queue Length due to conflicts define command{ command_name ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/11/14/misc-windows-checks-for-nagios/ I'm constantly striving to find ways to cope with limited bandwidth. QoS in all its forms has its place, as do replication of data, managed telco services (e.g. MPLS), and dedicated hardware appliances (e.g. Juniper Peribit); but I'm ultimately looking for devices that one can use in given situations to automagically ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/11/10/wan-acceleration-sweet-spots-and-gory-details/ This site lists free online computer science, engineering and programming books, textbooks and lecture notes, all of which are legally and freely available over the Internet. http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/11/09/freetechbookscom/ network aggregation calculator (very helpful when calculating CIDR boundaries) subnet calculator http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/11/09/network-calculators/ Here is a handy little tool for just about any PC tech. SIW is a System Information tool that gathers detailed information about your system properties and settings. A utility that includes detailed specs for Motherboard, BIOS, CPU, Devices, Memory, Video, Drives, Ports, Printers. It displays information about Operating System, Installed ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/11/09/gathering-software-and-hardware-info-on-ms/ Need a live cd? Check this BartPE-based one. It has great NTFS support and has several other famous live cds (e.g. Hiren and Ultimate Boot CD) all packaged in quite nicely. More copies of it can be found here. http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/11/09/dubcd_20-awesome-live-boot-cd/ I've only used a small percentage of these penetration testing tools, but what I've used, I've been quite impressed with. Lots of vids on sites like YouTube give great demonstrations on how to use them. http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/11/09/pen-toolz-galore/ I've used Swissknife countless times to format large hard drives with FAT32 (and get around various FAT32 partition size limitations), but I always have problems when I try to mount these drives in either OS X or Linux. From their website: If you are looking for an external hard disk drive solution ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/11/09/swissknife-cool-if-you-only-live-in-ms-land/ GISS.tv looks interesting. From the website: free streaming services for free media. free as in cost, free as in software. stream setup :> to use giss for streaming (video &/or audio) you need to create a channel. this is the address that you stream to and where others can receive. * Create ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/11/08/gisstv-free-streaming-services-for-the-world/ This is cool: How does Bomgar™ remote access software enable you to provide PC, Linux, and Mac support for your clients remotely? Although firewalls block incoming traffic, they do allow outbound traffic. Bomgar™ remote support software enables remote computer access when both the support rep and the end-user send outbound traffic ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/11/08/bomgar-x-platform-remote-desktop-for-enterprises/ I'm trying to cobble together a free and open source version of Zenprise for Microsoft Exchange Server. From Zenprise's website: "Zenprise automatically resolves such complex-email problems in real-time.With Zenprise, Exchange Administrators can: » Immediately target the problem system and » Use the detailed resolutions to fix the problem Here is a general demo of what ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/11/06/foss-equivalents-to-zenprise/ Nagios' documentation (online, books), community (listserv, wiki, dev), and ROI (especially compared to the likes of Tivoli, OpenView, etc) make it an absolute godsend for any environment with uptime needs. If you have a question, join the listserv and cc: me (Roger @ Hack My Idea . com), and hopefully one ... http://www.hackmyidea.com/wordpress/2007/11/06/monitoring-coolness-with-nagios/