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Here’s hoping this vision becomes a reality, but I think there’s actually a fair chance on this one!

I found this article today about a Wearable Flexible OLED screen that has been developed by an American company.

Now my imagination combined that with the functionality and power of the fantastic Apple iPhone 3G which I’ve been a very happy user of for a month or so now.

Imagine the sheer power of a fairly thin and flexible band around your wrist that encompassed the functionality of your Watch, your Phone, your PDA, and gave you Mobile Internet etc too?    It sounds very Scifi, but looks like it might just be entering the realms of possiblity now!

What more can I say, apart from “I WANT ONE?”!

Good old Ivan Pepelnjak has collated an MPLS Cheet Sheet over on the IOS Hints & Tricks Blog, which may well come in very handy!

Or go straight for the PDF Download here: http://wiki.nil.com/wk/images/b/b1/MPLS_VPN_cheatsheet.pdf

I could think of one or two engineers at a certain large Telco that might find that quite handy…

… how to create a “Free” TFTP Server under Windows 2000. (Haven’t tested this under Windows 2003 Server yet)

Using a fairly standard Windows 2000 install (tested under server, not sure about workstation)

Copy “tftpd.exe” from “c:\winnt\system32\dllcache\tftpd.exe” to “c:\winnt\system32\tftpd.exe”

Get a copy of “sc.exe” from the c:\windows\system32 folder on any windows xp box and place it in “c:\winnt\system32″

Open a command window and type “sc create tftpd binpath= c:\winnt\system32\tftpd.exe ”

The service “tftpd” is now available in the service control panel. Either Open the control panel, find the service, and start it. (If you want it to start automatically, you can set it to do so from the control panel.) or type “net start tftpd”

Open the registry to the following key. \\hkey_local_machine\system\currentControlSet\services\tftpd. Add a subkey “parameters” to the tftpd folder. Add a string value “Directory” to the “parameters” key. Give “Directory” the path location where your boot image file is located. (example c:\tftpd).

Remember to stop/start the tftpd service to persuade it to create the necessary registry keys.

I’m a fairly big MSN Windows Live Messenger user, but I’m starting to think that might change fairly soon.

I started to experience some annoyances with the current 8.5 version of WLM.  It started to “jump” to focus, if I was merrily doing something in another application like Word, Excel, or even Notepad, and someone sent me a message it’d pop up and change the input focus to the chat bar, so if I was (as I regularly tend to do) typing away without looking at the screen to see what was going on, I could mistakenly send whoever spoke to me some totally irellevant and boring drivel!

So, I tried upgrading to the beta of Version 9, in the hope that particular problem would be fixed, and sure enough it does seem to have gone away, only now WLM itself seems to be exceedingly flaky.

Quite regularly I can be on line and in mid-conversation with someone when my messages start to bounce back as undelivered.   Sometimes WLM decides to e-mail them to my recipient rather than using the Chat window.  For no apparent reason the chat service will sign out and refuse to sign in again, and according to the “Service Status” pages there’s no problem, and everything is running normally.

Anyway, I decided to uninstall the Beta of WLM 9, and go back to 8.5 which was reliable for the most part even if it was damned annoying, only to find that the bouncing messages and e-mailed chats aren’t limited to v9, it’s going on with v8.5 as well.

I assume it’s because MS are preparing the back-end for the rollout of v9, but I hope to god they get it all sorted out soon, It’s driving me mad!!

Yes, you read it correctly!That’s one of many clever tag lines used by Splunk’s Marketers!  And it’s not half as clever by far as the Application!

It’s another free product!  Amazingly, the basic version of Splunk is gratis!  and can be downloaded from www.splunk.com

It’s at it’s most basic level a log crunching tool, but it can do so very much more!  It’s one of those concepts that seems really simple, but the mind boggles at the complexity behind it.

I’ve been in a situation where I’ve had to wade through hundreds of Mb’s of SYSLOG’s grepping (looking!) for a particular IP address or two, and thought to myself “there has to be an easier way than this!”  and there is!

I’ll have to explain a little about what I did to make it work, but after no more than half a day’s tinkering, I was up and running with an amazingly powerful tool.  And the half day included messing about setting up VMWare ESXi Server and a Virtual Machine running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 to host it on!

Anyway, I had to do a bit of messing about from the base RHEL5 Webserver build to get it up and running, including tweaks to SELinux for the Security (yes, I ended up turning it OFF!) and installing a few PERL packages that I needed for some of the plugins, and installing the SYSLOG-NG package so I could do some clever filtering (More on that another time!)

Anyway, I set up SYSLOG-NG to filter different types of device identified by IP Address to different SYSLOG files.   I identified 2-3 specific categories of device that I wanted to filter;

• Cisco PIX Firewalls
• Nokia IP Security Appliances
• Windows Boxes (using the SNARE Agent to convert Windows Event Logs to SYSLOG!)
• Cisco Routers & Switches

I started with these for reasons that should become apparent as I explain further.

I then used good old “mkfifo” to create fifo handles for these Syslogs.

Then having installed Splunk, which was as simple as downloading and installing the RPM, and tweaking the RC files to ensure SYSLOG-NG and Splunk started automagically, I was in business.

Connecting to the server using a Web Browser on Port 8000, and added each of my FIFO’s as an Input Source and I was ready to go!  Splunk has a number of free packages that you can install that can influence it’s understanding of various different types of log, (this is why I separated the types of log to different pipes), so by appying these filters to the different input sources from SYSLOG meant that Splunk understood much more about the data it was actually receiving.

Then I simply swapped the Splunk Box for the IP Address of a UNIX box that sits there gathering SYSLOG’s all day, rather than revisit hundreds of Network Devices and tell them to send their SYSLOG’s somewhere else!

Bearing in mind you can send it just about any sort of textual log file, and can use Netcat, Nessus Scans, even TCP Dumps, or LEA Exports from your Checkpoint Firewalls (more on that in another post!), and the data actually starts to accumulate and flow.

This is where the sheer power of Splunk comes in to it’s own.  The best thing I can really do is point you at one of the Live Demo’s so you can play for yourself… so here:

• Splunk & Network Security

Anyway, one day, a little tinkering and one “Enterprise Evaluation License” later, I’m wanting to reach for the proverbial Cheque book and buy licenses!  My colleagues have actually been using the tool to troubleshoot and fix real live problems on the Network, and they all love it too.

The three problems I have right now tho are that:

1. It’s installed on a Virtual Machine, so the CPU and Disk Use are a concern!
2. The Free Enterprise Eval License won’t allow me to index more than 5Gb of logs in a day
3. I want it NOW NOW NOW!

Good old VMWare has come a long way from the days when it used to run under a Guest Operating System (normally Windows or Linux) and allowed you to create a Virtual Machine with it’s own independent OS and footprint in a self contained virtual instance on your Desktop PC.   Originally the VMWare product was a purchasable item, but VMWare released it for free at about the same time as Microsoft released their Virtual PC offering (also gratis).

VMWare ESXi Server probably grew out of the Linux based implementations of VMWare Server, (but don’t quote me on that), ESXi Server is now also available for free, and is absolutely fantastic for Geeks like me who love to dabble!  The “Grown Up” and licensed version of EXSi Server is that which enterprises use to operate their “Virtual Infrastructure”, but of course the free version doesn’t support all the whistles and bells including Clustering, or the ability to “migrate” servers from real to Virtual, or to move them about while actually “live”  etc.

You can download it from http://www.vmware.com/go/getesxi/

It’ll be a bootable CD .ISO image so you’ll need to burn it to disk with Nero or some such, and that will give you a CD that will allow the installation of the bespoke VMWare Hypervisor OS which is predictably enough based on Linux.  This is great because it takes much of the headache and bloat out of running it under a Guest OS, and once up and running will allow you to connect to the server using a Web Browser to download the management tools that will facilitate the creation and maintenance of the virtual machines.

I’m not going to harp on any longer, the main purpose of this post was to tell you that you could download EXSi for free!  yes, that means a free full uncrippled version of the basic product for you to use or abuse more or less as you choose!

What you do afterwards is up to you!