Category Archives: CodeProject

fully dynamic fluxbox menu

19 Tuesday Sep 2017

Posted by in CodeProject, RootAdmin

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I needed the ability to generate a menu dynamically in Fluxbox for various things that change on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be a facility built into fluxbox to allow for this. So I spent some time and built a partially dynamic menu that updates with the click of an ‘update’ menu item at the root menu.

I was trying to come up with a good way for the menu to update on the fly. Since fluxbox simply reads a menu file (when you use the [include] function) I needed a file that when read, it returns a dynamic response and begins the process again. It’s not completely in time, but it at least refreshes on the fly. So what is a file that provides these properties?

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Execution Performance, Linguistics, Totalitarian Elitism, and of course Python: Language as a construct of action

18 Tuesday Jul 2017

Posted by in CodeProject, Development, Uncategorized

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I’m an elitist in the worst way sometimes, so this is probably the pot calling the kettle black. But I simply want to pose a question, that no doubt will spark great debate among a very divided culture:

Why does the coding style we use to imply organization of the characters in the document representing code need to be so explicitly tied to the keywords, syntax, semantics, operators, closure, and the most important part… the resulting libraries that make up the development environment we seek to develop within?

It’s always the same argument Braces and Semi’s versus Linguistic command flow.

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Debian 7 Wheezy Installation in FreeBSD 10 Jail

09 Friday Jun 2017

Posted by in CodeProject, RootAdmin, Uncategorized, Virtualization

≈ 1 Comment

I decided to collapse the multiple systems I have running various flavours of Linux and BSD into a  single system. For a long time I had been using Windows Small Business Server. Well I don’t really want to spend the money to upgrade to 2016 and since it appears Microsoft has abandoned its purist Unix roots by trading the tight and tidy SFU (Interix) for the wildly fat Ubuntu and a Linux ABI. In the advent of this change, I figured I would flip back to FreeBSD, which in my not-so-humble opinion is still the closest thing to Unix you can get. In fact, it actually derives its original sources from none other than Research UNIX, and while it’s wildly more advanced, the distribution holds it’s origin close to it’s heart.

Either way, the task: Support the ever growing number of ‘Appliance’ installs on top of FreeBSD. In this first iteration I have found several guides and worked through getting Debian 7 functional in a FreeBSD 10-STABLE Jail. No guarantees on stability, but I’ll update this if I come across any oddities. This task was performed on FreeBSD 10.3.

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Negative Overflow of 4-byte AS in Solarwinds Orion Output

27 Monday Mar 2017

Posted by in Application, Bug / Known Problem, CodeProject, Development, RootAdmin, TCP/IP

≈ 2 Comments

4-byte (32-bit) BGP Neighbor Information with AsDotNotation

A problem currently exists within Solarwinds where 4-byte (32-bit) ASNs overflow into a negative number when utilizing a portion of the private scoped ASN space specifically, the ranges 2,147,483,648 (32768.0) through 4,294,967,296 (65535.65535) overflow into -2,147,483,648 through -1 respectively.

To show the correct data, we created a custom table utilizing the following WSQL to generate the correct information. See past the snippet for an explanation as to how and why this works.

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Using TCL to provide WoL Services from a Cisco Router

29 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by in Cisco, CodeProject, Networking, TCL

≈ 5 Comments

This exceptional bit of code provided by Jónatan Þór Jónasson is a masterpiece. It provides the ability to send Wake On Lan commands out the local interfaces of a router to WakeUp a device. You will need a device that supports UDP Sockets, so you have to be running 15.0+ firmware.

Found this at ipSpace by Ivan Pepelnjak

ROUTER# tclsh
ROUTER(tclsh)#

proc WakeOnLan {broadcastAddr macAddr} {
     set net [binary format H* [join [split $macAddr -:] ""]]
     set pkt [binary format c* {0xff 0xff 0xff 0xff 0xff 0xff}]

     for {set i 0} {$i < 16} {incr i} {
        append pkt $net
     }

     # Open UDP and Send the Magic Paket.
     set udpSock [udp_open]
     fconfigure $udpSock -translation binary \
          -remote [list $broadcastAddr 4580] \
          -broadcast 1
     puts $udpSock $pkt
     flush $udpSock;
     close $udpSock
}

ROUTER(tclsh)# WakeOnLan 255.255.255.255 000f13cd80a1

Rolling a Domain Password

31 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by in CodeProject, Security, Shell Scripting

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So I get extremely frustrated having to change my password every 60 days because the security department has this belief that somehow that is going to prevent the nightmare at Sony from coming down upon our company. Without getting too deep into the politics around security I am a firm believer that it is far better for people to have a password that is highly complex and never changes or better yet high entropy and very simple to remember as opposed to forced rotations of passwords. My reasoning is simple. If I were a hacker and I got your password, I wouldn’t wait 60 days to use it. I would own you in the immediate… as in right now.  Continue reading →

Followup: DNS Lookup and Ping in Excel

17 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by in CodeProject, RootAdmin, VB

≈ 42 Comments

Steve asked on my previous posting in regards to DNS Lookup in Excel if forward lookup could be done. (Find the IP Address from the Hostname). Believe it or not I one up your request. How about DNS Forward and Reverse lookup as well as Ping!

  1. Press Alt-F11 in Excel to get to the VBA screen.
  2. Right click on the Project View
  3. Click Add Module
  4. Add the following snippet.
  5. Use: GetHostname("4.2.2.1") in any Excel cell.
    or
    Use:     GetIpAddress("www.google.com") in any Excel cell.
    or
    Use: Ping("4.2.2.1") in any Excel cell.

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Plain Vanilla SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

27 Friday Apr 2012

Posted by in CodeProject, Development, RootAdmin, Web, World Wide Web

≈ 2 Comments

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A common sense explanation and realist approach to Search Engine Optimization

I was reading through some articles on my father in law’s company blog /ebscospring/ in relation to ISO certifications. I started to leave a comment that eventually turned into an article, in reference to a post requested at the behest of the individual managing SEO for them. Even though SEO is not necissarily relevant to networking, it has come up quite a bit lately. Hopefully, my experience can provide some light in a rather conveluded maze of tactic.

SEO is a tough game. Most people get wind of the concepts and they build the following punch list in their heads:

Step 1. Build a website.

Step 2. ?

Step 3. $$$

Most people even realize you need people to look at it, and you need Top Search Order to make it easily accessible to your perspective audience. About this point is where we make big mistakes or just waste our own time.
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