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Canonical developer Jamie Bennett announced in his blog post The New UI for ARM Based Ubuntu Devices how Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) enabled rich graphical user interfaces even on non-3D-accelerated ARM devices. Enlightenment Foundation Libraries were conceived and developed with performance in mind. Started in 2000, the current incarnation was designed based on previous experience with Imlib and Imlib2, libraries known to be quite fast. Over the past 10 years, the API changed a lot to be easier to use, but the performance impact of each and every change was carefully considered and benchmarked using the Expedite tool.

Happy new year, everyone. I'm happy to announce Nmap 5.20--our first stable Nmap release since 5.00 last July! It offers more than 150 significant improvements.

In the previous parts of this series writing a simple program to see if a port is available was covered, in this the final text the last three points from the previous text are discussed: migrate the pre-check into its own module entirely, add in more descriptive error handling locally and for the connection errors and lastly any last thoughts about the program itself and where it could go. it is worth noting that this example is very primitive but can easily be expanded upon.

Ironically there has not been as much crossover in my current environment (at least as of this writing) and my hobbyist/home coding/administration life in quite some time. For once I have found something I wrote at my job that has a direct translation into something other admins would find useful; a script that performs and reports multiple checks at once. In this the first part of the series a look at the motivation, helper functions and some core generic functions of the script. I provision a lot of systems, a lot of them; almost 1/week (although not at that frequency - the frequency varies) - some of these systems are virtual machines, some are cloned virtual machines, some are physical servers while in the rare instance some are just devices of some type (or really dumb servers). Part of the post installation setup is adding systems to the appropriate Nagios monitors.

The free vmware product, vmware-server (formerly GSX) does not have auto power on for certain guests. A simple workaround for not being able to auto power on guests using the vmware interface is call the vmware command line utility at boot up using the local init function. A better way is to write an init script to handle the start up and possibly other functions. This text will examine a simple method to create a control script for managing power functions in vmware-server.

Sep 2009 Port Check Program (in C) Part 4 In part 1 an examination of creating an ultra simple single port single host port check program was done. Part two of the series the code was broken out between a header file and source file, input validation added, a usage message defined and a Makefile was setup for simple recompiling. The most recent installment added a timed host pre-check component to ensure that a connect() would not potentially "sit and spin" when a host is not available.

Many Linux distributions ship with the heartbeat suite of software for setting up High Availability Linux. The Linux HA project has details and downloads for those who do not have it available for their system. This text addresses setting up a very simple HA Linux configuration using the configuration files versus a GUI or the XML definition files. The example setup will have two servers that serve up an apache webserver. One can have many other services assigned as well and shared data over NFS for example. Similarly a common mysql db backend could be available or even more exotic tiered mysql dbs - basically whatever the needs are. What Linux HA can do is using a shared IP it can host the same IP from any server in the cluster list. For demonstration purposes, however, the apache servers root will have an index file with the actual hostname of the system - what should be observed is the index file contents will change after a failover but still be accessible via the shared IP.

In part 1 an examination of creating an ultra simple single port single host port check program was done. In the second part of the series the code was broken out between a header file and source file, input validation added, a usage message defined and a Makefile was setup for simple recompiling. In this part of the series one of the items of the TODO list will be tackled: smaller timeout value for connection test by way of a host pre-check. Which leaves the program with two final TODO items for the next installment:

1. Breaking up the program functionally
2. Detailed error handling
3. Hostname resolution (or not)
4. Any last minute details...

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Made some improvements and found some new bugs in gnetscan; the tiny C network scanner that could. Cut an interim release; I am using the tradition of odd numbered releases are testing/unstable while even numbered ones are stable. This release has some bug fixes, better input handling and still has some unresolved issues. In any case for those tracking it enjoy.

In Part 1 of the series we looked at the early X window managers that ran on X display protocol based systems. The scale and range of them was from the very beginning where a user was presented with a menu and windows and little else. In Part 2 of the series we delved into desktop window manager environments, the area in between a full desktop system and a simple window manager; these were window managers which provided things like application bars, icon management of some sort and flexible interfaces to create modules or widgets for the environment but did not include (a lot of...) inherent applications. In the third part of the series we will examine the two main desktops in the X world, a look at the two newer desktop environments that are blurring between application centric/environment centric window managers, some core X technology that can enhance the X experience and finally a look ahead.

This is the 10th year I have been writing regularly in some fashion about hacking around with Open Source systems and software. So to get things started first off a quick digest recapping the history of how this "thing" came to be, some of the great stuff along the way that resulted and of course the most important thing about the site....

In part one we wrote a basic bare bones port check program, in this part of the series we take the next step and fixup a few issues plus begin breaking out the code. This small program is a decent introduction (but definitely not definitive) to network programming.

In part 1 of the series we looked at the early X window managers that ran on X display protocol based systems. The scale and range of them was from the very beginning where a user was presented with a menu and windows and little else (perhaps a clock or loadmeter) up to what could be considered the first window manager that went beyond providing the basics to providing more of an environment and extensibility through modules that allowed other hackers to "join in the fun". In this part 2 of the series two more distinct groups of window managers will be peeked at; first a look at the evolution of that first "more of an environment than just window managing" software; many of which cropped up right around the same time (within a few years of eachother). Second the kickback against large scale environments with an examination of a breed of window managers designed to be ultra light/fast while still preserving good looks.

Almost one year later the first release of "a program kinda like portsentry" is here. It would have been sooner if I had not made the mistake of trying to adopt someone else's program wholesale. Writing from the ground up proved to be the right thing to do for a change. Anyhow here it is netward-1.0; a small bit of software that one can apply pcap filters to for monitoring and logging. I plan on adding a few alerting and similar capabilities later but netward is a good first line of defence

It happens at some point whether you are a sysadmin, server programmer or even the generic application developer: you will have to connect to another system somewhere and pass data. On the off chance that one has to really get into the dirty details of network connections there is a way out; connect and select. In this text a look at getting the action of connection testing off the ground to a solid host/port connect check .

For fun a few interesting screenshots of e17 rigs that readers might like. Note that the resolution is by todays standard primitive but on purpose: it shows the power and configurability of e. So enjoy this little side tripe and if well received perhaps more will come with other environments or just plain window managers.

The netward program, a simple hey why are you connecting to that program has entered beta stage. The program uses libpcap to detect when a port should not be accessed and logs. Currently plans for the program are to add one more tweak to cut down on noise for admins and possibly add an event handler script.

It is interesting that a time has actually come to pass that a lot of Unix users do not know of other "desktops" outside of a visual tour of older (yet still oft used) window managers and how they were built up from one to the next to reach the first X windows environment.

It has been awhile since anyone has posted any updates about e17 (myself included). The enlightenment project is still moving along at good speed. The window manager for enlightenment - simply called e - is stable. I have been using it constantly since 2004 as my X desktop on both Linux and FreeBSD without any issues. What many users may not know is how much over the last year or so has risen up around enlightenment.

Scanning and packet sniffing software; specifically network mapper (nmap) and tcpdump are tools I now use almost daily in some capacity. The underlying software of tcpdump - libpcap (packet capture library) - I have on three occasions needed to leverage pcap libs for various tasks. In the final part of the libpcap series the full source listing of the pieces from part one and part two are cobbled together into a single program. The Makefile is also constructed in addition to a small barely functional packet injector program which shows another side of libpcap; packets don't just have to be read they can be written as well.