slaptijack

If you are at all familiar with <acronym title="Simple Network Management Protocol">SNMP</acronym>, you've probably heard of "community strings". Community strings are similar to passwords. They define and grant access to a device's <acronym title="Management Information Base">MIB</acronym>. If you've used SNMP in conjuction with a …

This site has been upgraded to WordPress 2.2.3. This is a security and bug fix that addresses several issues in WordPress 2.2.2. There are two high priority updates in this release:

• Invalid RSS2 Comments Feed
  Version 2.2.2. My comments RSS2 feed was invalid because …

I've got a Class C (/24, subnet of 256 IPs) that I assign glue addresses for point-to-point links out of. Although all these little /30 subnets are in the same location, they are not guaranteed to be on the same router. So, the question is, how can I see which …

More giving credit where credit is due.

I recently had the great misfortune of opening Slaptijack in Internet Explorer. I was so horrified with how the site looked in IE, I immediately enlisted the help of Web Developer Stephen Hebert of Acadian Imaging. Generally, I prefer to figure these sorts …

This comes up pretty infrequently, but I think it's worth knowing. I specifically had a situation where I was greping hostnames out of a file. Personally, I like hostnames to appear in all uppercase, but this file was full of hostnames in all lowercase. You can solve the problem with …

Generally speaking, a route server is a network device that does not participate directly in routing, but carries an entire routing table that other devices may refer to. Often times, this is a router that carries the entire Internet BGP routing table (currently over 220,000 routes).

More commonly, a …

Without much fanfare, Slaptijack broke into the Alexa Top 1,000,000 web sites earlier this week. Although the Alexa ranking is notoriously inaccurate, it does give some gauge of a site's popularity.

Since Alexa relies on their toolbar to determine the reach of a website, I'd like to thank …

Internet Systems Consortium, Inc., makers of the popular BIND <acronym title="Domain Name Service">DNS</acronym> server and INN Usenet server, has announced the End of Life for BIND 8 . I received an email from ISC on this topic earlier in the month, but I wasn't aware that the <acronym …

Sometimes it seems like a great idea to receive updates whenever someone commits something to your Subversion repository, right? This has definitely seemed like a good idea to me, but it's only nice if you work in a small shop with only a few developers. Too many developers make this …

Somehow I managed to miss the fact that Mac OS Forge released MacPorts v1.5. If you aren't familiar with MacPorts, it's the reincarnation of DarwinPorts under the Mac OS Forge / Apple banner. For any UNIX admin, or serious OS X-er, MacPorts is an extensive collection of UNIX tools ported …

Use Cisco ip helper-address deliberately: verify the default UDP broadcasts it forwards, keep DHCP working, and restrict only the protocols your topology does not need.

Anyone that has spent any time with Best Practical's RT: Request Tracker knows that it is a leader in the open-source ticketing system market. It is both robust and highly configurable. I've used several systems for incident, trouble, and bug tracking over the last 10+ years, but RT is by …

This isn't late breaking information, but there's an interesting post in the Cisco WAN, Routing and Switching Forum regarding a particular regular expression that, when used in conjunction with the show ip bgp regexp, results in a router crash. Here is the full command.

show ip bgp regexp (.*)(_\1 …

The Camino Project has announced version 1.5.1 of the Camino Browser for Mac OS X. This update includes security and stability fixes over version 1.5.

According to the release notes, Camino 1.5.1 contains the following improvements over version 1.5:

• Upgraded to version 1.8 …

You may run into a case where you are running a name server (perhaps a caching-only name server) that is not allowed to communicate with Internet name servers. The most common case for this is a local caching name server being blocked by a corporate or <acronym title="Internet Service …