Interesting software to try out for network monitoring. Hopefully it will be simpler to use/setup than some of the other software I have tried earlier.
November 2, 2005
October 31, 2005
Ajax Tutorial: Ajax What Is It Good For?
Nice Tutorial on Ajax and what it is good for. Interesting read.
Ajax Tutorial: Ajax What Is It Good For?
– Suramya
October 16, 2005
Automating Diagnostic Tests with Ant
Interesting article that explains how to Diagnostic Tests with Ant
.
Excerpt from the article:
Suppose you have developed your Java application and distributed it to your users. If all goes well, the application just works on every computer. But if there’s a problem, you have to begin troubleshooting. Users will call for all sorts of installation problems, expecting you to fix them. Moreover, the same problems will often come back: the wrong version of Java, a deleted file, too-restrictive file permissions, etc. Most of these problems can be solved by creating a checklist. However, instead of wasting time asking new users the same questions on the checklist over and over, you can create a diagnostic test that goes through the checklist, providing users with the information they need to solve the problem. If users can’t solve the problem themselves, they can show you a clear checklist, so you can take a look at what’s going wrong without asking a bunch of questions first.
– Suramya
May 5, 2005
Remove Backgrounds from images using GIMP
Newsforge has a good article that explains how to remove the background from an image using GIMP.
Article: Remove Background from images
How to use Netcat
Often referred to as the ‘Swiss Army Knife of networking,’ netcat is a tool that administrators can use to read and write TCP or UDP data across the network. In addition, it’s extremely useful for network debugging and testing. This article by Vincent Danen at techrepublic.com covers some of the uses of netcat.
– Suramya
April 25, 2005
LDAP Related sites
LDAP GUI Client: http://luma.sourceforge.net/download.html
Using OpenLDAP: http://www.metaconsultancy.com/whitepapers/ldap.htm
– Suramya
April 22, 2005
Disaster recovery tools
Everyone knows that disaster can strike anywhere and at anytime. These tools will help you recover your system from the unexpected downtime.
FAI (Fully Automatic Installation):
With fai, you configure your updated, armored, well working machine before the installation. In case of a disaster, you simply reinstall without any interaction. Fai is even capable, to leave a partition untouched.
Setting up encrypted tunnels
Sometimes its desireable to setup an encrypted tunnel between two networked computers so that you can transfer data between them without letting anyone snoop the traffic.
The following are some of the programs that enable you to setup secure tunnels:
Cryptcat is the standard netcat enhanced with twofish encryption.
Stunnel is a program that allows you to encrypt arbitrary TCP connections inside SSL. It allows you to secure non-SSL aware daemons and protocols (like POP, IMAP, LDAP, etc) by having Stunnel provide the encryption, requiring no changes to the daemon’s code.
Zebedee is a simple program to establish an encrypted, compressed â??tunnelâ?? for TCP/IP or UDP data transfer between two systems.
SSH allows you to redirect local and remote ports over a secure SSH connection. The main advantage of this is that no extra software needs to be installed on the systems in order to use it.
In you know of others let me know and I will add them.
– Suramya
April 20, 2005
Program to manage your Movie Collection
This script helps you to manage your (large) movie (DVD,DivX) collection. It ships with an intelligent voting system for many users. aviManager attempts to find the best movie to watch if you give it a list of people who are going to watch it by using their past preferences.
MS Word Clone for Linux
TextMaker is a word processor that launches lightning-fast, needs little memory, does not require complicated setup and still has the full feature set of a modern high-end word processor. It reads and writes Microsoft Word 6/95/97/2000/XP/2003 files without losing formatting or content.
The biggest advantage in my book is that it doesn’t look ugly. 
Try it out. They have a free trial available which lets you read .doc files but doesn’t let you save in it.
– Suramya