I think I was bored on a slow Friday afternoon so I started updating non-critical software.   Somehow I found a portable version of Perl, Strawberry Perl, and an IDE for Perl called Padre. An IDE is a help for someone like me who does not use Perl very often. Since I have a love-hate affair with the Windows registry, I also prefer portable applications. Since all of my portable applications are Portableapps.com applications, I prefer portable applications that fit in this framework. So I found a “portable” Strawberry Perl. However it was not in the Portable Apps framework. I found an installable version of Padre but not a portable version. I am guessing that there is a Perl/Padre version issue since they only build Padre for Perl 5.10. The “portable” version of Perl I was looking at is 5.12. So I decided to ignore the problems and create my first Portable Application. If it doesn’t work I won’t use it. Here are my steps for creating a Portableapps version of Strawberry Perl with Padre(45.7 MB).

1. Download Portable Strawberry 5.12.
2. Create PortableApps folder structure for new application called StrawberryPerlPortable
3. Create StrawberryPerl Portable Application
   1. Install Portable Strawberry in "app" folder.
   2. Create appinfo.ini
   3. Create Launcher folder and StrawberryPerlPortable.ini pointing to portableshell.bat
   4. Create Portable application using Portableapps.com Launcher
4. Test
5. Install Padre using cpanp. Ignore errors.
6. Modify portableshell.bat to start padre rather than cmd.
7. Test example scripts
8. Final Test: Install my cidrmerge application.
   1. Install NetAddr::IP::Lite
   2. Install Net::CIDR::Lite
   3. Test cidrmerge.

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Ubuntu Server Edition JeOS (pronounced "Juice") is an efficient variant of our server operating system, configured specifically for virtual appliances.

Users deploying virtual appliances built on top of JeOS will benefit from:

• better performance on the same hardware compared to a full non-optimized OS
• smaller footprint of the virtual appliance on their valuable disk space
• fewer updates and therefore less maintenance than a full server installation

For my installation I decided to use VMware’s 32-bit Ubuntu template to create the virtual machine. The only modification to the template was to adjust the disk drive size down from 8 GB to 1 GB. As described in HowToForge tutorial I installed the following programs.

1. Ubuntu 8.04.3 JeOS as OS
2. Nagios 2.11 for monitoring and alarming
3. Smokeping 2.3 to observe latencies and packet loss
4. MRTG 2.14.7 to observe network traffic’s tendencies
5. RRDTool 1.2.19 as the Round-Robin Database for storing all measurement data
6. Lighttpd 1.4.19 as a fast, lightweight web server frontend
7. Weathermap4rrd for illustrating the network weather
8. sSMTP as extremely lightweight MTA for mail delivery

The installation was quick. Almost all of my challenges was in configuring the programs. Fortunately I had previous experience configuring the most difficult to configure programs, Nagios and MRTG. It helps if you have a basic knowledge of PERL since most of programs use it. Here are my installation notes.

1. One of the first things I needed to install to make this installation go smoother was an editor other than VIM so I could cut-and-paste from the tutorial to my SSH session. In my case I installed nano.
2. The first application I configured was smokeping. The configuraton file is pretty easy to figure out and can be found at /etc/smokeping/config.  If everything works you will see a nice graph of the the ping statistics at http://yourip/cgi-bin/smokeping.cgi.
3. Configuring Nagios is a bit more complicated. Since this is version 2 of Nagios, the configuration files are located at /etc/nagios2/conf.d. The main Nagios web page is at http://yourip/nagios2/. The Nagios QuickStart Document, http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/quickstart.html, is a good primer for the folks not familiar with Nagios.
4. The Debian logo did not appear in Nagios next to the localhost. It showed a missing image. After a little research I figured out that I needed to install nagios-images using apt-get install nagios-images.
5. For some reason I did not seem to have cron installed and running. This is easily solved by apt-get install cron.
6. MRTG is useful if you have a SNMP router to poll. I used my pfSense Firewall as the SNMP source. MRTG provides some nice graphs of network traffic and its page is located at http://yourip/cgi-bin/mrtg-rrd.cgi/
7. Configuring Weathermap4rrd is a little challenging since the documentation is sparse. Weathermap4rrd provides a clever network status graph once you figure how to configure it. It uses the same data as MRTG to create its graph. The network status page for weathermap4rrd is located at http://yourip/weathermap4rrd/weathermap.png
8. I installed apticron to nag me via email about installing security updates and Logwatch to find any problems posted in the log file by the installed programs.
9. If you plan on getting emails from Nagios when a host is down, you should test it. Duh! The easiest way to test it is to deliberately mistype the host name. If you do not get the email, you should check your Nagios configuration, sSMTP configuration, and the SMTP log file.
10. sSMTP is easy to configure and use. In the simplest configuration you point it at the SMTP server you are sending your emails to. If you are sending emails to more than one domain, you need to connect to a SMTP server that will relay emails for you.
11. I installed PHP version 5 to see how hard it would be to install under Lighttpd. I followed the instructions on the Lighttpd wiki and PHP appears to be running without problems. Most of these network monitoring programs have newer versions in PHP. Some day in the future I plan to migrate to the PHP versions of Nagios and weathermap but it is not necessary for this small network.
12. I created a simple navigational menu on the main page with links to the various network management status pages. It is much easier to use this menu then remembering the addresses of the different status pages.

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Python(x,y) is a free scientific and engineering development software for numerical computations, data analysis and data visualization based on Python programming language, Qt graphical user interfaces (and development framework) and Eclipse integrated development environment.

Although I would say I am conversant in Python and can see why a lot of people like it, it is not necessary for any of my job functions. In fact I recently converted the only python program used at work over to PowerShell. It was a trivial program that has been written a million times in a multitude of scripting languages. In this case it had a bug so it was a fairly trivial exercise to convert it over to Microsoft’s favorite scripting language.

Scarcely could I imagine that I would be seriously playing with python just a couple of weeks later. The trigger for this event was a blog post on SQLServerCentral.com called Python for the SQL Server DBA. In the article I was intrigued when the author said he used Python(x,y). I had not heard of it so I checked out the web site, python(x,y) – Python for Scientists, and decided to convert an Excel spreadsheet graph over to python. The graph is a fairly standard multiple line plot of time data. This is the type of graph you can create in Excel in about five minutes.

It took a lot longer to create the graph in python but I am not disappointed. Much of my time was spent learning how to manipulate Matplotlib to achieve the desired graph. Matplotlib is a library for making 2D plots of arrays in Python and looks a lot like MATLAB™ . Since my knowledge of Matlab was nil, I had a lot of catching up. The flexibility of Matplotlib to customize a graph reminded me a lot of SAS/GRAPH. That is both the good and bad news. Although Excel has a lot of graphing options and I recommend it for most graphing requests, there is always some option it does not do quite right. Matplotlib overcomes those problems with lots of customization options and can be used to create some pretty exotic graphs. The bad news is there is a significant learning curve in understanding how to use those options.

Almost of all of my development for this simple graph program was done in IPython although more interactive environments like Eclipse and Spyder were available. In hindsight I would probably prefer Spyder to develop my next program. Most of my work is not very sophisticated and the lightweight integrated IDE of Spyder appealed to me more than Eclipse. Eclipse is still relatively slow at starting up. When I look at the whole python(x,y) download, the greatest contribution is the breadth of the products included in its download. You can start your work from the command line for simple programs like I did and progress all the way up to fairly comprehensive graphical user interface using QT and Eclipse for sophisticated programs. The python development has come a long way.

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Updating the DNS with DKIM information

This task was relatively easy. I copied the DKIM information in the iRedMail.tips into a trouble ticket with my web provider. About 24 hours later it was ready to test. I sent an emails to my Yahoo account, sa-test@sendmail.net, and autorespond+dkim@dk.elandsys.com. Although the email from dk.elandsys.com was the first to respond, it said it did not work. When I checked my Yahoo account the headers said the email was signed correctly with DKIM. Ironically the return email from sendmail.net ended up in my Junk Mail folder. It said that everything worked correctly. For one more test I created a Gmail account and sent an email to it, too. It said the email was signed correctly.

Local DNS, naming standards, and more Postfix problems

The next challenge was to configure Postfix to accept both local email addresses and email addresses for the exchange server under the same domain. I used PostFixAdmin to create Aliases that pointed to the Exchange server emails(e. g. myemail@mybusiness.com points to myemail@mybusiness.local). PostFix complained about the DNS records for my Exchange server so I added mybusiness.local as a relay_domain and set up a psuedo DNS so that PostFix can find the IP address for my Exchange server. In my case I decided to let my pfSense firewall act as a local DNS server to serve up the local IP addresses. At this point I can email to everyone from a local iRedMail account but I cannot get replies until I set up iRedMail as the SMTP gateway and the Exchange server as a relay domain.

PostFix domain checks get me again!

It took me a long time to figure this out. When I changed the firewall to redirect SMTP traffic to the PostFix gateway I could not get any mail. I thought I had messed up the firewall settings so I kept trying different settings. I was pretty limited with my testing tools. If I could Telnet into port 25 I could see what is happening but I could not make the connection work as long as I was located on this side of the firewall. Fortunately I found a solution on the Internet. The dnsqueries.com site provides a page, http://www.dnsqueries.com/en/smtp_test_check.php, that allows me to check my local SMTP connection using their server.  Within minutes I figured out that my email server did not like my sender’s domain. In fact it did not like anyone’s domain. This was the same type of problem I had with the Postfix recipient domain check, so I removed the sender domain check and the emails starting flowing.

What have I achieved?

• I have a gateway that checks all incoming mail for spam and viruses. Postini offers a similar service for about $1 per user per month. We use MXLogic at work.
• I have an alternate email server that allows me to send email that passes the SPF and DKIM checks. One of the reasons I investigated iRedMail was to use it for sending out a newsletter at work. Like many Internet retailers we get a chunk of our business as a result of our biweekly newsletter. In our case DKIM is another piece of the puzzle to improve our sender reputation. Since both Yahoo and Gmail require DKIM signing in order to set up feedback loops, DKIM is probably essential if you have ambitions of having a pristine email list. For those folks looking at ways to cut the umbilical cord to Microsoft this is one of several low cost, low maintenance migration alternatives to a local Exchange server.

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Windows only: Free application DropboxPortable makes the popular file-syncing application thumb-drive friendly, so you can access your synced bucket from your thumb drive no matter what computer you’re using.

Downloads: DropboxPortable Syncs Files to Your Thumb Drive

I finally gave this program a test run and I was pleased with the results. Recently I split up my KeePass password database into three databases, work, charity work, and personal. I kept a copy of the files on a USB dongle so I could deal with the occasional emergency at work or at home.  I used SyncToy to keep the files  synchronized but I have screwed up on more than one occasion and updated the passwords in two locations without synchronizing first. DropBox has the potential to eliminate that problem. I am slightly uncomfortable with storing a strongly encrypted password file in the cloud but I am pretty sure there are much easier ways of getting my passwords than cracking this encryption scheme.

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Simple find/replace compared to Advanced search/replace.

Simple find/replace is found in the Edit menu. Its shortcut is control+H. Advanced find/replace is in the Plugins menu, in the TextFX Quick menu. Its shortcut is control+R.

SourceForge.net: notepad-plus » FindReplaceNewlineHowTo

I finally researched an issue I was having with finding tab, new line, carriage return characters at the beginning of the line. I have an automated SQL procedure to create product data feeds in a tab delimited format. One of the symptoms of a soft SQL failure is that the line will wrap. This situation can be detected by looking for a first character that is either a tab, new line, or carriage return using the regex expression ^[\t\n\r]. . The simple find/replace does not find the problem lines while the Advanced version works as expected.

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• NMAP – It kind of worked for me when I accessed it via the web server. It locked up the pfSense web server a couple of times. It worked fine for me via the command line and the Command page.
• NTOP – I had not heard of this package before but I was impressed. It had lots of information about my network. Some of the information was actually useful. I am keeping tabs on my son’s Internet usage. With all of this info I kept expecting the computer utilization of pfSense to go through the roof. It did not. Whew!
• SNORT - I did not get this package to work. It installs but the service does not start and it had problems downloading rules. I am guessing the rules issue might be related to the fact that the package was version 2.7 and the current rules are 2.8. I saw in a forum where several people were having problems running the package on pfSense. I manually uploaded a rule to see if I could start the package. It still did not start. Since I did not see any log messages, I decided it was not worth proceeding. It is hard to debug problems when you have logging turned off.
• EXEC.php - This goes under the name of Command. It gives you the equivalent of a command prompt and it is for those of us who do not want to crank up SSH for every little thing. It is not a “package” and its disclaimer says it is not supported. However, it worked better for me than the supported packages. Go figure! I used it to verify that NMAP was working. It was a helpful tool to work with SNORT, too.
• Internet Explorer - You need a SVG viewer plugin to view the traffic graph. I used Adobe’s version. The drop down navigation menu is quirky with IE. It opens and closes before you select an item. In IE the navigation menu is blocked by the traffic graph. I might try and fix this.

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1. Install Apache HTTP server if not already installed. I prefer installing Apache via XAMPP.
2. Install Subversion and let it update your Apache configuration. In my case I was updating to the latest version. Here is my file layout:
   1. Install directory – c:\Program Files\Subversion
   2. Repositories – c:\svnrepos
   3. Apache conf file – c:\Program Files\xampp\apache\conf\httpd.conf
3. Since my repositories are not accessible from the network, I did not create a Users authentication file or Acesss – rights file. I can do this later if I need it.
4. In the directory, "c:\Program Files\Subversion", create a etc directory and place another file called subversion.conf with the following data.

   <location repos>
     DAV svn
     SVNPath C:/svnrepos
   </location>
   

5. Add Include "C:/Program Files/Subversion/etc/subversion.conf" to the Apache conf file.
6. Restart Apache and test the repository access.
   1. I cranked up my favorite browser and went to http://localhost/repos. I saw my project directories.
   2. I created a new directory in the My Documents folder and checked out one of my projects using TortoiseSVN and the http://localhost/repos/project1 URL. It worked.
   3. Next I created a test file and added it to repository. It worked, too.

Installing Subversion? Just follow this 7 Steps « Lijin’s Localhost

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Auto-Type-Window: Sign In to Yahoo*
Auto-Type: {USERNAME}{TAB}{PASSWORD}{ENTER}
Auto-Type-Window-1: Yahoo! Mail*
Auto-Type-Window-2: Connect to workspace.office.live.com*

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I’ve been using Windows for nearly two decades, and during that time I’ve tried hundreds of programs. Most come and go, but a handful have stood the test of time for me by solving a particular problem particularly well.

In this article and accompanying gallery, I list 10 Windows programs I use every day. Every one adds a feature that makes Windows easier to use or can help make you more productive. Each one comes from a company that has proven its ability to support the product and improve it over time. I’ve been using every program on this list for long enough to recommend it without reservation.

Most of the programs in this list are free; for those that aren’t a trial version is available. All of the programs in this list run on Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Windows Vista (and most run on other editions as well). I’ve devoted one full page to each program, with info and download links and enough details to help you decide whether it’s something you want to try. I’ve also provided screen shots for each program to help you see what I’m talking about.

My 10 favorite Windows programs of all time | Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com

I like to look at programs that people like to see if they have found the better mousetrap. Here is my take on his choices.

• Process Explorer (Sysinternals/Microsoft) This is a great debugging tool but I rarely use it.
• RoboForm (Siber Systems) I use the open source program KeePass instead. The Windows version of KeePass has an autotype feature works for most login pages. There is Linux version with a few less features. Recently I created a script to login into sites that have the login split between two screens(e.g. Banks). KeePass is free and it works.
• Keyfinder (Magical Jelly Bean Software) I downloaded this program to check it out. I still like the tip someone wrote for KeePass. They recommended saving your product keys in KeePass. I still think this is the smarter practice. Keyfinder does not list the keys for some programs like QuickBooks.
• ClipMate Clipboard Extender (ThornSoft Development) I guess some people like fancy clipboards and use them regularly. Some people do not care. I fall in the second group. I have used Yankee Clipper in the past but I rarely used it.
• FeedDemon for Windows (NewsGator Technologies) This is a very good RSS Reader. I use it and it is free. Some people prefer the browser based readers like Google Reader.
• Windows Live Photo Gallery (Microsoft) This program was somewhat interesting while I had it working. Somehow I mucked it up and re-installation did not fix the problem. I do not miss it. Flickr has more uses for me.
• Allway Sync (Usov Lab) I use Microsoft’s SyncToy. It’s free and it works for me.
• SnagIt (TechSmith) There are a lot of people who like this program but I do not use screen captures that often. There are a lot of free alternatives that work reasonably well if your use is occasional.
• IE7 Pro I downloaded this program and I liked it! I think it is likely I will use its enhanced features for IE7. I had to disable the proxy to get the download manager to work.f you use IE7, you need this free add-on, which provides ad blocking, tab management, inline search, crash recovery, and all the other features Microsoft left out.
• FinePrint (FinePrint Software) I tried Greenprint on my laptop. It seems to have the some of the features of this program. It is supposed to help you avoid printing extra unwanted pages. It does not help me. I bypass it most of the time since I either want to print everything or create a PDF with PDFCreator. Greenprint is an extra step without added value for me so I am removing it.

Some free programs that did not make the list but I use often are TrueCrypt, Notepad++, and Windows Live Writer.

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