Counterproductive Productivity

After a discussion with a co-worker today, I got to thinking about the artificial walls we're building as we outsource while technology continues to get more integrated. It seems counterproductive.

Programmability and "software-defined" are the latest buzzwords, with vendors providing Application Program Interfaces (API) for integration. But integration points expose only the bare minimum for stable operations. This cause is two-fold: to protect their internal systems as well as limit the non-standard use cases and allow the provider economy of scale. The effect can dramatically limit the options for creative, innovative interoperability.

Can a VoIP vendor offer third-party instant messaging integration; "yes". Will a provider reselling that vendor's system as a service permit third-party instant messaging integration? Maybe not, if their model doesn't include that third-party or they can't measure and thus charge per IM. And that limits what the consumer can due with the service.

I always say the technology is not the limiting factor; we can do anything with technology. Especially someone like me - tenacious, wide skill set, master of none, but I have enough tools in the toolbox to figure something out. If I can't find a hammer I can use a crowbar creatively to pound something into place.

But with a managed service where the vendor is providing the toolbox, maybe all they offer you is a hammer, and then you know, "everything starts to look like a nail."

Remote Send from the Comfort of Your Packet Crafting Shell

I've been spending a lot of time updating the Perl Packet Crafter to a new version - a complete rewrite with lots of new features and plugins.

During the course of testing, I thought about remote sending and remote capture, that is, using the shell to create the packets and passing them to an agent on a remote machine for sending. Like a the old Network General / Associates distributed Sniffer concept, but distributed sender in this case.

Low and behold, WinPcap and Wireshark have the remote capture functionality, but remote sending? That required some research.

DMVPN IPv6 Easy

I needed to test IPv6 overlay on DMVPN. Easy enough; there are plenty of DMVPN configuration guides out there and even some on IPv6. I tested on a version of 12.4T on 7200-series routers in GNS3 and the config was really as simple as taking my working IPv4 DMVPN setup and adding the same commands with an "ipv6" prefix, using IPv6 addresses and adding IPv6 EIGRP.

Perl Automation Saves the Day - 6 of them in fact!

How does one analyze 182,000+ lines of Excel looking for correlations? I suppose there may be some Excel magic, but when IP addresses are involved - and I know Excel hasn't had an out-of-the-box IP network sort order, methinks I'm in for a long slog.

The background: I have an export from a customer IP address management tool and we needed to verify the block type assignments were correct. To do this, I needed to understand the top-level aggregates (IP network and mask) for each top-level container (site). There were around 50 aggregates in each of 6 containers. I then needed to verify if the 30,000+ subnetworks in each container did or didn't fall within the 50 associated aggregate blocks.

Where to begin? Looking at, analyzing and deciding on 1 line per second would still take almost 6 and a half working days (8 hours / per day); and 1 per second is a gross underestimate of the actual time required. I needed to automate this somehow.

Notepad++, DBGP and ... Python!

My recent work with Notepad++ got Perl debugging working with the DBGP Plugin. Originally written for PHP debugging, I did a little tweaking on the Perl side and got it working.

I don't know a lick of Python, but could I get Python to work with the DBGP Plugin too? Worth a shot!

++ for Notepad++

I've been doing some work lately with Notepad++ to get Perl debugging working. I used NppExec to automate a debug command from the Macro menu. But why stop there?

I dove headfirst into customizing Notepad++ into a full fledged Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for coding. I mainly do Perl, but also some C work and lots of Windows batch files. I added an NppExec script to "Compile", "Compile and Run" and "Clean" in build directories. It points to a pretty complex and branching Windows batch file that determines the correct action based on provided arguments and the current file extension.

How does this all work?

Debugging Perl Debugger: Part 3 - Automation

We have Perl debugging integrated with Notepad++. We fixed variable values so they show up in watch lists. Now we want to automate the use of Perl debugging directly from Notepad++ while editing a Perl script.

NppExec is a plugin with powerful automation features for Notepad++. The documentation showed it had all I needed to get this to work.