Network Adminstrators Tools

A few of the tools which i have come across and have been using for quite a period of time.

a ) NMIS : a network management information system. an nifty product which gives you a dash board view of your entire network. the performance and monitoring. uses rrd for data accumulation etc and done in perl.

b) MRTG : if you go to the site you will see people doing more than monitoring networks with this great tool.

c) routers.cgi : this is a kind of wrapper, which gives you some serious report on network utilisation, works of the rrd databases.

d) NTOP : a kind of a network equivalent to the top command in unix. browser based, nifty interface , running version 3.x something now.

e) NESSUS : who can live without nessus, one powerful tool to check your systems vulnerabilities.

top of the mind recall tools.. will try and build the details of usage on each of them as individuals products, latter on

a bit about gentoo

this is one of the more refined distro of linux, and possibly one variant which runs on sparc,x86,ia64,amd,alpha and god knows what else.

i am sure there are other distro's around which can do most of the same stuff.

but get it running on sparc was so easy with gentoo, ofcourse you need to go through the documentation a few times (for an old guy like me atleast)

the other names i had looked at were ultralinux,aurora sparc project, debian and mandrake were also mentioned along with the word sparc. finally i kind of settled down on gentoo.

there is this utility called "emerge" in gentoo, this is the wishing well equivalent in linux.

you just "emerge this" or "emerge that" and you have this and that installed on your box. want to upgrade mysql , emerge mysql, and voila your wish is my command,of course you would need to have a nifty internet connection.emerge downloads the required packages from repositories on the net, and ensure that the necessary dependancies are taken care of,by downloading them too.

what else to you need in life.

New Scientist Black holes, but not as we know them - Features

New Scientist Black holes, but not as we know them - Features: "Baby black holes
You don't have to go to space to find a black hole: mini versions could be created to order, right here on Earth. That's what some physicists claim will be possible using the world's most powerful particle accelerator, due to turn on in 2007.
Currently under construction at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, the Large Hadron Collider will smash protons together with a collision energy of 14,000 billion electronvolts. This might just be enough to create several black holes every second, provided some strange ideas about unknown physics turn out to be right. Each mini wonder would weigh no more than a few micrograms and be smaller than a speck of dust.
A black hole is thought to form when the core of a massive star collapses under its own weight and is crushed to a point. Vast amounts of matter weighing more than a few suns are needed to produce gravity strong enough for this to happen.
Yet the special theory of relativity gives a clue to making black holes in the laboratory. Einstein used the theory to show that energy is equivalent to matter. So black holes should also pop into existence when vast amounts of energy are concentrated into a point, and that's exactly what happens when particles smash together at extreme energies.
But there's a snag. According to our existing knowledge of particles and the forces that operate between them, the minimum energy needed to make a black hole this way is 10 million billion times more than LHC can produce. And the chances of ever building a particle accelerator that can reach such energies are virtually nil.
In the past few years though, the prospects for making black holes in the lab have improved. This is down to a theory that says gravity is actually much stronger than we think. Huge masses are needed for the force of g"

i was at the nix game

i first got my hands on linux in the year 1995 or 1996. This was "Slackware linux".

and this was the first time the song with the words "no body has seen the troubles i have seen" kinda got stuck in my head.

hey by trouble i mean the good kind.

it took me 2 days to figure out that the floppy which i was using for the boot disk was defective, everything was working, it was booting up to a point and then if i remember right "panic"ed.

did i pull my hair out that day. then the challenge of making it work took over and i got it to meow!

post this enlightenment, i had it up and running, my own first web server! wow!

in those days to get hooked on to the internet on a dialup was, to be put it diplomatically,"HELL" and for what? terminal based internet? but this helped me hone my linux/unix skills.

the box which was running slackware? a 486-dx2 with 16 mb of ram. and this was a fast machine.

kernal compiling was a breeze, i used to leave it overnight. i remember one of my major compile took about 16 hours.

things have gotten kind of better since.

then there was the linux from pcquest magazine (dont remember what flavour this was based on)

somewhere along the line, redhat came into the picture, have been tinkering around with this for quite sometime now, about 10 years now...various versions.

about a year back,for some reason, i wanted to have linux run of the sun hardware. some research on the various sparc ports of linux, finally led me to Gentoo Linux .

wow. this is one mean port.

this concludes the small note, on the background behind this blog.

the intention is to build and flesh this blog and document the intresting titty bitty stuff i have come across during my last 10 years playing for the nix.