Any luck ILO100 (DL145G3) on non-Windows JVM?

So HP DL145 G3's are nice, cheap (non-RAID), AMD-64 1U servers with Lights Out Management (they use the ILO100s built by ServerEngines) and the Java Applet KVM (which runs VNC or something like it) worked well on OSX, Linux, and obviously Windows for the eval hardware we had from HP. But whatever the version of only works with the JRE1.4.2-13 of Windows. Using any other JVM results in a NullPointer Exception and the message "General Exception: Optional Package Installation is Aborted"



Anyone else have luck? Oh well, guess I'll be dealing with HP support this week, wish me luck.

BWM-NG + Ruby for Gathering Network Stats

BWM-NG is a great tool for getting real time stats, but by using the CSV output you can capture historical data as well.

# bwm-ng -o csv -t 2500 -c 1 -C,
1186367009,em2,198.09,50.12,248.21,126,498,0.40,0.80,1.19,2,1,0.00,0.00,0,0
1186367009,lo0,0.00,0.00,0.00,0,0,0.00,0.00,0.00,0,0,0.00,0.00,0,0
1186367009,total,198.09,50.12,248.21,126,498,0.40,0.80,1.19,2,1,0.00,0.00,0,0

So to make use of this, we'll need some sort of Time/Date API to convert the etime into something useful as well as the CSV parser.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'csv'
require 'pp'
require 'date'

bytes={}
packets={}
errors={}
cmd = 'bwm-ng -o csv -t 2500 -c 1 -C,'
p = IO.popen(cmd) do |f|
   f.each_line do |g|
       h = CSV::parse(g).flatten
       $dtg = Time.at(h[0].to_i).to_s
       interface = h[1]
       bytes[interface] =  h[2..4]
       packets[interface] =  h[7..9]
       errors[interface] = h[14..15]
   end
end

puts "Date: #{$dtg}"
bytes.keys.sort.each do |i|
   puts "\nInterface: #{i} (TX/RX/Total)"
   print "Bytes:"
   pp bytes[i]
   print "Packets:"
   pp packets[i]
   print "Errors:"
   pp errors[i]
end

And the output looks like

# ./rbbw.rb
Date: Mon Aug 06 03:35:17 +0000 2007

Interface: em2 (TX/RX/Total)
Bytes:["128.88", "76.37", "205.25"]
Packets:["0.80", "1.19", "1.99"]
Errors:["0", "0"]

Interface: lo0 (TX/RX/Total)
Bytes:["133.65", "133.65", "267.30"]
Packets:["1.59", "1.59", "3.18"]
Errors:["0", "0"]

Interface: total (TX/RX/Total)
Bytes:["262.53", "210.02", "472.55"]
Packets:["2.39", "2.78", "5.17"]
Errors:["0", "0"]

Where these are obviously rate values (per second) for a very boring FreeBSD VM.

Sunbrid Recant (or searching for a browser-based iCal Replacement)

So once again I'll recant on on a previous blog.

Sunbird is crap. Events mysteriously get created and can't be deleted. Or get deleted, period. Or something weird happens with the interface. It never crashed, though. But it was annoying enough to stick with iCal.

So what I really want is a entirely browser-based iCal/Google Calendar-like tool (that means Javascript, and I'm not a Javascript programmer) tool that allows me to:

Drag (and eventually drop) activity across a daily schedule for stuff I work on.

Remember/autosuggest project names

Export events to some standard format, iCal or XML, YAML, or whatever

Summarize project activity by week/month/totoal

Yeah this probably could be done in Rails/Django but I don't want that. No databases. No webservers, but still browser based. Am I crazy? Creating a Dojo Calendar has promise, but it requires server side code. What I want is something self contained like TiddlyWiki. Where the data is all stored in the .js and can be moved around and modified.

Since I'm obviously in over my head (what else is new) this is obviously something I wouldn't want to start from scratch, but what next? Should I look at GWT or better yet pyjamas to avoid Java development? Obviously this would be (relatively) trivial to do as a traditional desktop GUI app but that is no fun.
The key is needs to be portable, lightweight, usable off line. Somebody else had to have run across this sort of problem (and solved it) before. We'll see what happens.

Early Returns: Franz: 1 VMWare+CARP+FreeBSD: 0

So running FreeBSD 6.2 CARP on VMWare Server is the subject of some confusion and struggling for me today. This closed CARP bug turned out to be a red herring and this VMTN thread made it seem that it was only possible to use CARP on ESX (if you enable promiscous mode on the virtual switch) and/or possibly with VMWare workstation with teaming. But I don't have admin privs on the ESX cluster. And I want to be able to do development and testing on my laptop and our VMWware Server.

On the drive home I remembered similar battle battle I faced a year ago working with the SCADA Honeynet where broadcast traffic (ARP Requests) were being forwarded to a virtual interface but the unicast was failing. Today pings to the CARP interface were failing even though I had an ARP entry on the host I was pinging from and of course the ICMP Echos were going out--but not making it to the virtual interface.

So it looks like once again loosening permissions on /dev/vmnet[0-9] is the solution to the problem.

Why AWS S3 is Cool

So I've been using Amazon S3 (which I heard about when I interviewed for security position with AMZN back in August) to store various stuff like most of Seasons #1 and #2 of the The Office.

Greetings from Amazon Web Services,

This e-mail confirms that your latest billing statement is available on the
AWS web site. Your account will be charged the following:

Subtotal: $1.24 (plus applicable taxes)

OpenRecord: Your next wiki?

I'd run across JavaScript browser based wiki's before (I remember a GTD one in particular), but OpenRecord is incredible.

The current wiki you know and love (for me, it is MoinMoin) is primarily suited for text with a little perhaps a little graphics (but ultimately unstructured content). If MediaWiki (used by Wikipedia) is suited for Encyclopedias, OpenRecord is meant for Almanac-style data such as the CIA World Factbook. OpenRecord targets tabular, statistical, more structured data as well as graphical views of that data (plots, graphs, etc.) that all can be created with a WYSIWYG interface.

Beyond the different use case, these folks are also addressing some of the inherent problems with wikis you bump your heads against: offline view, forking/merging, concurrent editing and much, much more.

Now this is still pre-alpha but of course there is a demo where you can create your own pages, etc. And since I haven't done this project justice, be sure to check out the screencast if you don't have religion.

Beyond FreeMind: Check out CMAP Tools!

For those folks addicted to FreeMind, you should definitely check out Cmap

The CmapTools program empowers users to construct, navigate, share and criticize knowledge models represented as concept maps. It allows users to, among many other features, construct their Cmaps in their personal computer, share them on servers (CmapServers) anywhere on the Internet, link their Cmaps to other Cmaps on servers, automatically create web pages of their concept maps on servers, edit their maps synchronously (at the same time) with other users on the Internet, and search the web for information relevant to a concept map.

The CmapTools client is free for use by anybody, whether its use is commercial or non-commercial. In particular, schools and universities are encouraged to download it and install it in as many computers as desired, and students and teachers may make copies of it and install it at home. (Commercial companies that install their own CmapServer do need to get a separate license for a CmapTools client that will talk to the commercial version of the CmapServer).

Freemind and Attack Trees?

Anybody else tried/trying to use Freemind for building threat models or attack trees?

Obviously not ideal, but it is the only decent starting point. To me the Microsoft Tool is too restrictive and Trike is too clumsy.

Several weeks ago, end I created Threatmind on Sourceforge to explore the possibility of making modifications to Freemind to make it more useful for representing threat models.

Any takers? If so, subscribe to threatmind-talk lets throw out some ideas!