Archive for September, 2006

Capturing and Viewing Flows with Ethereal

September 23rd, 2006

Ok, so first, I don’t know if Ethereal is still called Ethereal or not… I heard there was a lawsuit and they call themselves WireShark now or something. I can tell you that the version I run on my SLED 10 box is still called Ethereal…

So I have been monkeying around with Ethereal lately, and found a couple really cool tools, especially cool for me, because I do a lot of documentation. A couple years ago, I had to do a matching bounce diagram for some docs I was doing on EAPOL and I hand-created a spreadsheet with matching Ethereal and Cisco router debug showing flow direction, protocol and source/destination… it took me almost 40 hours to complete, but it was worth it because I still have some people asking for it so they can understand how the switch functions in an 802.1X environment.

Anyways, so here’s a quick way to do a bounce diagram:

First, (and I am not going to go into the operation of Ethereal) I performed a capture of my browser hitting its homepage at news.google.com. I started Ethereal, launched the capture session, and then popped the browser open. Once this was done, the fun started…

Since my browser has a bunch of live bookmarks and web-extensions, I ended up capturing a bunch of stuff… but I only want to see my conversation with Google News… so I used a display filter.

Ethereal Capture

Then I selected the Statistics Menu, and chose the Flow Graph item. The following dialog appeared:

Flow Graph Settings

I hit the OK button and received the following output:

Flow Graph Output

Now, that is pretty cool… but it gets better… and this is the part I got excited about… I hit the Save As button, and it dropped the whole thing out as a text file, ready to put into my document. I am hoping they will be able to drop it out as a PNG or something later on, but just being able to drop it out as a text file is going to save me hours.

Comments Off »

Posted in Applications, Technology

Desktop Dressings with Kiba Dock

September 3rd, 2006

So… installed SLED 10 the other day. XGL/Compiz is working very stable under Gnome. I added this tool called Kiba-Dock. Kiba-Dock is a kewl little applet for an XGL-enabled desktop that gives you a really fun way of organizing your icons. Unfortunately it is a little hard to configure. There is a Novell Cool-Solution out there, but it wasn’t written as clearly as it could have been, so I am going to put a few notes about how to install it here.

First, download and install the packages. You’re going to need a new verison of glib plus the package for Kiba-Dock. Here’s where you get the packages.

http://software.opensuse.org/download/Compiz-Quinn/SUSE_Linux_10.1/i586/

You need the following packages:

glib2-2.12.0-4.1.i586.rpm
glib2-devel-2.12.0-4.1.i586.rpm
kiba-dock-060818-2.1.i586.rpm

Once you install these, you have to configure it (this is where I got confused from the instructions on the Cool-Solution).

Find the .desktop shortcut files of the programs you want to add to the dock. I copied mine from a couple locations into the ~/.kiba-dock folder in my homedir; the /opt/gnome/share/applications folder, and I also copied some of the links from my Novell start menu onto my desktop and then just moved them into the kiba-dock folder as well.

Once these are all in the same place, issue the following commands for “each” icon you want on the toolbar:

/opt/gnome/bin/gconftool-2 –set /apps/kiba/launchers/14/file –type string /home/a447459/.kiba-dock/seamonkey.desktop

then

/opt/gnome/bin/gconftool-2 –apply-schema /schemas/apps/kiba/launchers/file /apps/kiba/launchers/14/file

The 14 in both commands represent the 15th icon I added to the bar… so I started with 0 and incremented up one number for each new application… issuing each command once for each application I added to the dock.

Once you’re done, create a shortcut and add it to your startup folder (~/.config/autostart). The name of the application is /usr/bin/dock. That’s it… I have attached a couple screenshots so you can get an idea of what it looks like here and here.

Comments Off »

Posted in Applications, Operating Systems, Technology

Political Computing Statement

September 3rd, 2006

This was on the main page here at Labyrinth… I moved it off when I rewrote it but thought it was important enough to save.

I am running this site off my own server these days. Sysadmin stuff is kind of cool, and I am always into learning something new. It amazes me how many people have no clue what they’re doing tho, when it comes to anything technical. I have people beating on my webserver all the time, infected with code-red, even though this was 4 years ago. PATCH YOUR DANG MACHINES PEOPLE!!! It is getting old.

I read the other day about how there’s over a million zombie machines out there now, all because people who have no business owning computers, have them, and a company named Microsoft has sold every one of them a drug called Windows. This drug makes people feel good while they use the Internet but makes them give up their financial, personal, and other confidential information in exchange for that “good surfing experience”.

The funniest part of the whole thing is that Microsoft has gone through the effort of snowballing a bunch of really big companies into using their drug too. So, now when you use these company’s websites, your information is shared with all sorts of people you have no intention of giving it to. Isn’t that just great?

The worst part here is that the PC hardware manufacturers have been controlled by Microsoft for so long they don’t develop for anything else. So, chances are, if you’re an average joe trying to use the Internet, you’re not going to bother loading anything other than Windows (such as Linux) because he’s not going to be able to figure out all the little tricks to get something else working.

If you haven’t figured it out yet people, there is a monopoly here, and we’re the victims. Write your representatives, take a stand, make some noise, choose not to be a victim, and break the monopoly! If enough of us make noise about this, something will happen!

Comments Off »

Posted in Technology