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Great post by Chris Sanders on ARP poisoning for protocol analysis. Well worth a read.

Are you wanting to get into OpenNMS but are struggling to get started? OpenNMS are running a series of training courses in Europe during May. The introductory course titled “OpenNMS - A Day in the Life” will serve as an introduction to get you started with OpenNMS. At the end of the day, you should have a firm grasp on how to get OpenNMS installed, how to discover the network, basic and some advanced OpenNMS configuration options, as well as troubleshooting skills.

Just where the heck are Microsoft on the cloud computing thing? Ten years ago they wouldn’t have given their competitors years head start in a market without a response. Microsoft’s really are going to be IBM. Are they going to be the 60s IBM or the 80s IBM. At the moment it’s looking like 80s IBM. You would have thought that, of anybody out there, Microsoft would be in as good a position as anyone.

Google is the new Microsoft. Microsoft used to announce mediocre products and people went potty for it. Because Microsoft’s manifest destiny was to dominate the desktop market, it was news when they announced something that took them a little further along that path. Now Google elicit exactly the same response for exactly the same reason. If anybody else announced App Engine the obvious limitations of their offering would be leapt upon by commentators and roundly criticised.

I’ve just installed Visual Studio Pro 2008 and there’s one thing bugging me. I use the very mature and powerful open source tool called NUnit to write unit tests. Microsoft came pretty late to the whole unit testing thing. They didn’t provide a unit testing framework until pretty recently by which time a number of high quality open source frameworks were available. So what did they do? Did they embrace the existing frameworks in heavy use by many developers?

If you’ve made the upgrade to WordPress 2.5 you may have problems with image uploading. The simple answer is to disable the Bad Behavior plug-in and it works just tickety boo. 😄 Update: Michael Hampton has created a patch to solve the above problem. Upgrade to version 2.0.14 and you’ll be fine.

Thanks to Ken @ Ingenity for suggesting the Vyatta open source router. Only question mark is whether it works “out of the box” in the UK? Comes in both software only form and as a pre-built appliance. Others on the eval list are the DrayTek Vigor 2800 and Firebrick 105. One major requirement is that it must, under no circumstances, have wireless capability. We need to be PCI DSS compliant because we handle credit cards and having wireless just isn’t worth the hassle of all of the extra security we’d have to put in.

We’re busy upgrading our internal network here at the Chambers. We need to host a number of devices on our internal network so that prospects can evaluate them before they part with their hard earned cash. One of the problems we’re having is identifying a decent broadband router that’s got all of the features we want but is also easy to install. We’ve tried the 800 pound gorilla of the networking world Cisco and found them wanting.

I’m currently in the process of putting together a unit test for an open source project. I wanted to use real met office temperature data, ideally from around York or Leeds. I emailed the met office to enquire where I could find the data I require. The met office, being a publicly funded body, I naturally assumed the data would be publicly available. I could not have been more wrong. Here’s the reply I received:

Many thanks to everybody who attended the ELEX show in Harrogate last week. OPENXTRA had a stand and we enjoyed meeting you all. Denis and Annie did heroic stand duty ably assisted by Steve from JDSU. One of the big hits at the show was the cable tester demonstrator box (as demonstrated by Denis above) with various cables exhibiting a number of different faults like shorts, miss wires and the like.