All of the blog posts contained within The Tech Teapot with the most recent at the top.
WinPCap is a great Windows based, open source driver for packet sniffing wire-based networks using a bog standard network interface card. WinPCap is licensed under the General Public License (GPL).
From a commercial software developers perspective, the GPL can be quite intimidating. Consequently, a lot of commercial developers won’t touch GPL’ed code with a very long barge pole.
Fortunately, the developers of WinPCap have come up with a commercial developer friendly version of WinPCap, WinPCap Professional.
Tools like the Test-Um Wi-Net are great for trouble shooting wireless networks. But, Wi-Net falls a long way short of giving you real low level technical insight into your wireless network. What do you do if you need more? Say, you need to capture packets and the like.
Wireshark Capturing Wi-Fi traffic using AirPcap One solution is to use the WireShark + AirPcap combination.
WireShark I’m sure most of you have heard of.
I am surprised that no network monitor manufacturer has jumped onto Windows PowerShell in a major way. Whilst tools like PowerGadgets use the full power of PowerShell, it isn’t really aimed at the network manager. It is more of a general IT visualisation tool.
A tool that combined the power and extensibility of PowerShell, with the reporting, graphing and mapping capabilities of a major network monitoring tool would be formidable.
CRN Tech put network management solutions up against one another and gave Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold Premium v11 first-place for its robust features, strong troubleshooting capabilities and comprehensive reports. Engineers were particularly impressed with its feature set, price/performance and integration capabilities, giving it top marks across those three categories. SolarWinds LANSurveyor 10 came second, with AdRem Netcrunch (personally I’ve not heard of this) third. The full article puts these solutions through their paces and is well worth a read.
More and more companies have systems that are in operation 24/7, that cannot in any circumstances be switched off. Sometimes the data centre cabling is poorly documented.
Regular toners and tone generators are absolutely fine if you know the cabling is not live. Like identifying cables prior to the network cabling being hooked up to the network infrastructure or even to identify cables before the cables have been terminated.
One of the tools recommended in Chris Sander’s Practical Packet Analysis book is called Rumint.
Rumint is a free, open source packet visualization tool available for Microsoft Windows (written in Visual Basic.)
Roomint’s author, Greg Conti, has a book to be published by No Starch Press called Security Data Visualization.
One problem I’ve run into with Rumint is that it doesn’t work on my setup. I run Windows XP and I’ve got WinPCap 4.
Summer is nearly over so I thought I’d share our summer holiday destinations with you. Please feel free to leave a comment saying where you went for your summer hols with an appropriate link to Wikipedia or whatever.
Denis managed a couple of weeks in Croatia, including the beautiful town of Dubrovnik.
Annie escaped for a week to the beautiful Mediterranean isle of Mallorca.
Andrea is currently finishing her PhD so she only managed a few days camping in the Lake District.
I need to create a CSV file using pipe (|) field separators and caret (~) field delimiters to feed some data into our e-commerce system. The format of the file is not under my control.
Excel is of no use whatsoever. Whilst I can use pipe field separators, I can’t use caret field delimiters. Excel only supports single or double quotes or no field delimiters at all.
What are the alternatives?
I was thinking about Jim Forbes post, and my reply to it. The more I think about it, the more the Windows vs OSX battle really is getting kinda irrelevant.
It’s just coming up for 11:30 in the morning and I have a confession to make. I have only used two applications so far this morning: Firefox & Thunderbird, a web browser and email application respectively. I’m pretty sure I didn’t use anything else yesterday either.
When is the phone going to come in from the cold? How much of our lives do we spend continually giving the same information to the same companies time and again down the telephone? Only for those companies to spend even more time typing the same information into their systems.
When are phones going to be integrated into our PCs so that you can send your contact details with the press of a button.
