This week has been a boring week, it's mostly waiting for vendors to give reponses or activate ports.

I've been waiting almost 10 business days now for NL-IX to activate our port on there switching platform. I've had the circuits all ready within 2 business days. But activating the port seems a little hard for them.

Well I'll keep you posted, off to finding some coffee here. Maybe I should go and reorganize racks or so ;)

So, After last nights SARA outage I am looking for another network monitoring system. We've been using Smokeping as a fairly basic tool. But hey the types of notification are only email. And actually only to one email address. Now it's broken for unknown reasons. There is a list of tools I have in mind we could implement:

• NAGIOS - In use by a lot of folks, many notification types, many monitoring types and opensource. Probably my best choice if I want to do this.
• JFFNMS - I installed this once, but it seems very bloated and targetted specifically to monitoring routers. But I like to monitor a little more with less bloat
• DIY - A do it yourself monitoring tool, obvious the most work, but also the solution that will most fit my needs

It would be nice if any of these tools could catch SNMP traps for me. Obvious a DIY solution would do this.

Good network monitoring also takes an external view from your network monitoring services from there. But I will first start an internal network monitoring box which will sit on a non-privileged box (thus no direct SNMP access to routers or boxes firewalled). It will monitor all public services and connections to the outside world. If it also can get the SNMP traps I mentioned about it truly can be totally outlawed of doing SNMP monitoring itself. Which is actually what I want :)

Update: We just installed NAGIOS as the monitoring tool of choice. Currently it monitors all servers and all services we offer. Monitoring of vital network equipment will be implemented in the coming weeks. More work to do besides building monitor software you know :)

Ah finally the big hog is gone! Yes, I have dumped MT and switched to Pivot! I just discovered Pivot can import movable type blogs! So I did. There is only one bug in the importing process and that is it will not take categories with it. A shame, but soooo much faster is pivot then MT.

Altough Pivot does not comply with the two prerequisites I set out, it actually works out just fine. My prerequisite of 'postgresql required' actually should read 'absolutely no mysql'.

Another disadvantage is that people that have been linking to my weblog will have an issue. Well bad for them, there is a search and I'll rewrite engine the archive links to this post so people know why it isn't working anymore!

Update: At the moment I'm RewriteRule'ing all articles that are linked a lot and are indexed by the search engines and actually get referenced.

Some people where asking me how to enable SSH on a IOS based Cisco device. As I've never used this before I decided to find out and write a little entry about it :)

All testing has been done on a Cisco SOHO 97 router with IOS soho97-k9oy1-mz.123-2.XC.bin. I have reports coming in this will not work with a Cisco SOHO 97 with IOS 12.2(8)YN. Possible because aaa new-model is only supported in IOS 12.3

Update: Arjen Halma informed me that an domain-name has to be specified before generating the RSA keys
ip domain-name $domain

Step 1: Generating RSA keys (This will take a while on a slow device)
conf term
crypto key generate


Step 2: Enabling aaa new-model
aaa new-model

Step 3: Defining username
username $username password 0 $password

You should be now allset to SSH to your router :)

CNN reports that Atlantis has been found. I've written about this a couple of months ago, and it seems there is even more proof on the existance of Atlantis.

Deep-sea diving has to unveil more evidence of the existance. I'm really interested if this will surface, and because of the location near cyprus who will try to take ownership if it really exists. (more)

Recently I acquired a Palm Tungsten T as a replacement for my old M500 (which doesn't sync anymore, and sometimes freezes for two weeks :). I reinstalled all the stuff I had on my m500 but are looking around on what apps I really really need.

Currently I use:

• Agendus
• Palmwijzer
• Electronics
• pssh
• Pocket Tunes
• HanDee Spectrum Analyzer
  

There are a lot more games and stuff installed, but they are not for need, they are more the kind of entertainment or fun. So if you folks have some Palm App in mind that a Networking/UNIX geek should have on it's palm please leave it in the comments.

So I got MT 3.121 combined with MTB 2.01e back in the running. I had to do the following things to fix it:

1 - Clear out the blacklist entries on postgresql as the Storable version changed.
2 - Inaccidentely I wiped the plugindata configuration, and MT-Blacklist could not fix it by it self (the activation issue). So I just modified Blacklist.pl to be active always (commenting the check).

While I was busy doing this I also changed something in the leftbar. It is now generated ONCE and is SSI included in the archive files and normally generated in the index file. This should stop MT from regenerating all archive pages after a single post. (Should speed it up).

Also the DB is quite a lot faster since i dumped mnogosearch for indexing the website and just went back to MT's own search feature.

Last year I built my self an Cisco/Foundry BGP config to RPSL generator to create RPSL for in an routing registry (I primarily use the RIPE database). I did this because there where only tools that could do the other way around, generate a config from your RPSL entries in the routing registry database. As I currently can't find any tool in the wild that can do this I'm hereby opening it to the world.

It's written in perl and is focused on the RIPEdb. It can be found here. It has some examples incorporated for it.

It currently defines it preference and as-set we announce by peer-groups in the router config. I was busy rebuilding it so it can figure this out by it self and only needs the router config to be fed by stdin and automatically find out which AS-SET is being used and which preferences and metrics are going to be used.

Feedback is very welcome as well are updates, patches and bugreports. There is still a little todo list to add to the script which includes communities and metrics.

Notice that it only builds import/export and remarks line, the rest of the aut-num object has to be build around it.

Update: Version 20041127-2.pl has been released. This version incorporates automatic localpref, metric and community setting in the rpsl object. Unfortunately AS prepending does not work. The RFC2622 describes it, but the RIPEdb (which I test on) does not accept it.
The next step for updaterpsl.pl will be automated local interface detection. In the far future also announcements can be auto generated from the configuration. Currently this is hardcoded in the file.

Update: I just found a tool that does about the same but is less portable because it relies on SNMP to do the trick. You can find it here