The Tech Teapot

I was interested to see a blog post discussing the benefits of the new 4G wireless standards currently in development. It struck me just how long it really takes for a technology to be in use by the majority of people. Here we are at the dawn of the 4G world and yet 3G isn’t widely deployed. The 3G licences were auctioned in the UK around ten years ago.

I’ve had an Apple iPhone 3G for a few months now and I am able to use a 3G signal for a small fraction of the time. In fact, outside of major cities, you’ve very little chance of getting a decent 3G signal. Most of the time I’m stuck on GPRS speeds or worse. If 3G hasn’t spread outside of the main metropolitan areas ten years after the original spectrum auctions, then it seems likely that there is no business case for ever doing so. If it isn’t commercially viable to implement 3G then what hope is there for 4G?

I wonder if the auction process itself could be to blame for the patchy deployment? Whilst the government in the UK did very nicely out of the auction, the bidders did pay very handsomely for their spectrum. Perhaps a better solution would have been to cap the auction price but place a service guarantee onto the bidders to ensure a more even deployment.

A broader implementation of 3G technology I’m sure would be a boon to the hi tech sector in the UK and would have had the effect of increasing economic activity. Whether the increased economic activity would have made up for the shortfall in the spectrum auction revenue is hard to say. But, the auctions were one off events and the increased economic activity would keep paying year after year.

Will the areas that don’t already have 3G never benefit from high speed wireless internet access? It isn’t looking promising…

Popularity: 1% [?]

Highlights from Planet Network Management + Planet Sys Admin for Week 5.

• Running Wireshark as You – how to run Wireshark whilst not logging in as a super user
• Free Tool and Free Tips for Network Configuration Management – Josh Stephens introduces Network Config Generator, a new tool from Solarwinds, network engineers can create a change template to re-use for future configurations, saving time and frustration as well as ensuring consistency in configurations across devices
• Improving Network Discover by using SNMP OID Includes/Excludes – an investigation into finding the device needle amongst your network haystack all using SNMP
• Using a Weather Map as your Background for your Maps – using a network weather map as the back ground for your maps in Solarwinds Orion
• Which virtualization platforms will matter in 24-36 months time? – Groundwork Open Source ponders the future of virtualisation platforms
• Opsview 3.5.2 released!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Highlights from Planet Network Management + Planet Sys Admin for Week 4.

• Orion Additional Polling Engine and Modules — What do I buy for modules…Nothing because it’s now free! – Solarwinds start giving away extra polling engines…
• Red Hat Launches opensource.com – Tarus Balog ponders what Red Hat will do with the opensource.com web site
• CACE Technologies Launches SDMS Product Family – CACE announce the release of the SDMS product family which delivers a complete, end-to-end, enterprise-wide solution for line-rate network recording, monitoring, and analysis.
• WhatsUp Gold Acquires Dorian Software Inc. – Ipswitch announce the purchase of Dorian Software, Inc makers of log file analysis and consolidation products.
• New Nessus Videos – Scanning With Credentials
• Wireshark 1.2.6 and 1.0.11 Released
• New SolarWinds Free Tool – Network Config Generator
• Release 6.1 – now with 105% more customer goodness
• Network Janitor – Wrapping it Up (by Tony Fortunato)
• Nagios RPMs bundled with Novell’s SLES

Popularity: 2% [?]

Ipswitch, the people responsible for creating What’s Up Gold, have acquired Dorian Software Creations. Dorian Software are publishers of event log management software.

Dorian’s event log management solutions for Windows and Syslog environments include:

• Event Archiver for automated collection, centralization and secure storage of log data;
• Event Analyst for event examination, correlation and comprehensive reporting for audit and compliance;
• Event Alarm for monitoring, alerting and notification on key defined events;
• Event Rover for on-the-fly forensics and log data mining.

Dorian products are scheduled to be available from Ipswitch in March.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Highlights from Planet Network Management + Planet Sys Admin for Week 3.

Starting a Journey at BSM Review Portal – Doug McClure announces his first contribution on the BSM Review site

CloudCamp to Hold First OpsCamp for Cloud Operations and Development Professionals – John M Willis announces the first OpsCamp CloudCamp in Austin, Texas

Ubuntu Support and the iPhone App – Groundwork Open Source annouce support for Ubuntu and an iPhone application

IPv6 – When DOES IT Cause Network Problems – post outlining the problems deploying a IPv6 network

Putting OSVDB to work for Nessus Vulnerability Management

Under the Hood: Capture Filters, Display Filters – Part 2 – part 2 of Ray Tompkins Wireshark Display filters tutorial

Managed Services in 2010 – the future of managed services in 2010 according to Bill Cannon at Monolith Software

CACE Pilot and WiFi Pilot 2.2 Released – new versions of CACE Pilot & WiFi Pilot is release, both from the creator of WireShark

Kicking the tires on the Peer Monitor tool – a tool to quickly and easily visually monitor uptime of hosts on a network

Popularity: 2% [?]

Highlights from Planet Network Management + Planet Sys Admin for Week 2 2010.

How Much is Downtime Costing You? Find out How to Reduce Downtime by 85%…

Troubleshooting the Not-So-Obvious (by Tony Fortunato)

Looking Back at Business Service Management (BSM) in 2009 – a review of 2009 from a Business Service Management perspective

Data Centers understaffed, says Symantic poll – not enough people manning data centres according to a poll by Symantic. Maybe the downturn has meant companies have cut a little too deep?

Rackwatch and OpenNMS – how OpenNMS has been integrated into RackSpace’s management systems

Well, that was a thrilling exercise… – Matt’s trials and tribulations trying to restore his company’s historical email archive

BSD Mag is Now Free – title pretty muich says it all really

Ransomware: Extortion via the Internet – the menace of trojans that extort money out of unwitting people when it encrypts your PC’s data

Popularity: 3% [?]

I have a confession to make: I’ve developed a failed open source project! There I’ve said it, it’s now public knowledge and I can hang my head in shame… lead me to the village stocks so you can all throw rotting vegetables at me.

Happily, I don’t feel like that. Failure is, well, no big deal. Of course it does sting a little bit that I wasted an awful lot of time developing the software. What could I have done with the time had I not written the 11,184 lines of code Ohloh says I wrote? Well, I’ll never know, but…

After having a failure, any failure, it is quite healthy to take a look at it and try to figure out what mistakes were made and see if there are any lessons to be learnt.

The main mistake was to write TimeTag at all. Perhaps it would help to explain why I wrote TimeTag in the first place.

TimeTag was intended to kick start an open source network management / systems administration software ecosystem based around the PowerShell environment. (If you don’t know what PowerShell is, there is a good explanation here.)

If you want to build an ecosystem like the Linux network management / sys admin toolset, you are going to need the basic tools available to build upon. The Linux ecosystem has a few hub projects upon which most of the rest of the ecosystem build. It stands to reason that if you don’t have the hub tools, the ecosystem won’t take root.

So that’s where TimeTag came into the picture, it was my feeble attempt to build one of the hub tools for the PowerShell environment. The problem is that the Linux ecosystem didn’t develop in the way I envisaged the PowerShell environment developing.

RRDTool is the considerably more successful cousin of TimeTag. RRDTool was not written before the tools that depend upon it. Tobi Oetiker, the original author of RRDTool, also created the MRTG project. MRTG is, if not the first, then pretty close to the first, open source network monitoring application. The MRTG project originally had a very simple time series database (a mechanism for storing readings). As time went by, and MRTG was used on ever larger networks, the simple time series database didn’t scale well. RRDTool was written to provide a scalable time series database to cope the ever increasing demands placed upon MRTG.

So, rather than building one of the hub projects (a RRDTool equivalent) I should have started by building a MRTG equivalent for PowerShell instead. Then, if that had been successful, I should have written TimeTag. Instead of founding a project it would probably have been better to join the PolyMon project as a developer and then extracted the time series database into PowerShell.

Ain’t hindsight a wonderful thing?!

Popularity: 3% [?]

Doug McClure has done a very good round up on the Business Service Management market in 2009.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Highlights from Planet Network Management + Planet Sys Admin for Week 1 2010.

• Working with check_http and check_bigip_pool to monitor web sites – a tip on how we used the check_http and check_bigip_pool Nagios plugins to eliminate the need for WebTrends
• Reflecting on a Year of Growth for WUG – a summary of the happenings to the What’s Up Gold product during 2009
• Pandora FMS 3.0 is finally here ! – Pandora FMS version 3 has been released after a number of delays
• The 2009 Cloudies Awards – John M Willis hands out some cloud related awards
• Heisenberg & Monitoring – how measuring the performace of computer systems changes the system itself making highly accurate measurements very difficult
• On living as Root – the temptations sys admins face given their elevated access to computer systems

Popularity: 3% [?]

Wireless networks, as we all know, are everywhere today. All the way back in 2004 Denis did a wardriving exercise to check how widespread the use of encryption and other security measures were in wireless networks deployed in and around Leeds. The results were summarised in the article Open all Hours – Wardriving in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England.

The arrival of the new JDSU ValidatorPRO-NT NT1155, which includes a wireless detection module (including 802.11n networks), gave me the opportunity to repeat the exercise and see how the situation has changed over the intervening period.

Well, nobody will be surprised to discover that there are even more wireless networks around today. Within 300 metres of our office in a quiet market town ten miles outside Leeds I detected 27 separate networks. Most shops and offices have them and many apartments and homes, thankfully though no banks.

The good news from a security perspective is that most now have some kind of security enabled. This is a big step forward, though I would wager it is in large measure due to manufacturers’ configuring security on by default rather than expecting their users to configure their access points themselves.

All but one network was broadcasting its SSID the vast majority were using the manufacturer default SSID. Strangely most shops and businesses that changed the default seem to view the SSID as an advertising opportunity, making the SSID the business name. I’m not entirely sure this is a good thing, though it must be said that hiding the SSID is hardly the greatest security measure you could take and makes configuring wireless enabled devices that much harder for very little real gain so far as security is concerned.

It would appear that most access points are set to the default channel,  9 of those detected were using channel 11, 7 used channel 1, and 4 were on channel 6. I expect with all this interference on the same channels that the effective throughput may not be as good as it could be.

WPA was the most commonly used encryption, which is also good news and fine for most users. Only one network used WPA2, presumably a new access point/router. Reasonably enough most users will accept whatever security comes preconfigured in their access point.

So judging by this quick test, the situation today is much better than the snapshot taken in 2004. Security is being taken more seriously, at least by the manufacturers. Most new access points come with WPA enabled. It probably always was too much to expect users to configure security for themselves. However there are still plenty of unsecured networks around so using someone else’s bandwidth is still a possibility for those that way inclined.

An easy way to increase your available bandwidth would be to check for other networks close by and ensure that you are not using the same channel. Clearly though very few of the user of wireless around here take the time to configure their wireless at all.

As for the NT1155 Validator it could hardly be easier to use for wireless detection, just select the menu option, let it scan and watch the networks appear. Press the Save button to record the results onto an external USB memory stick in CSV format. It’s a very useful addition to the Validator for those installing and maintaining networks.

Wi-Fi Scan Result in Excel

Popularity: 3% [?]