Which ports do your servers have open right now? How did you check? Netstat? Are you really sure that it’s doing the right thing? What the host claims to be exporting isn’t always the same as what other hosts on the network see. When did your DNS server start exposing that TCP port? Has it always been there? I want a tool that keeps track of what ports a machine has open and shows me changes (and tracks when things change). Read on →

After a previous false start I’m pleased to announce the March London Perl Mongers technical meeting will actually be happening! Presenting on the night are the two main speakers - Dave Cross : "What's Wrong With ORM?" Richard Jones : "OCaml for Perl Programmers" And a Cornish handful of quality lightning talks (5 minutes each) - Alistair McGlinchy : "Net::SNMP and Cisco" Leon Brocard : "Make real things with PDF::API2" Nicholas Clark : "The Perl Foundation, their money, and how to get it. Read on →

If you want to contact me then please use the gmail address given on the About Me page. While dean.wilson3@virgin.net was my main address for a number of years (about seven) it’s been getting less and less use over the last 18 months, I now send all my mail via a different address, and it’s finally time to put it to sleep. It’s gone as of the end of February.

Update: It’s on! The talk starts at 19:00 on 2006-02-28 and is being held at the Fotango offices. For one night only Crispin Cowan, chief architect of AppArmor (and previously CTO and co-founder of Immunix) will be available to give his excellent talk on AppArmor to a lucky London audience. What’s the catch? It’s tomorrow (Tuesday 28th of Feb) or nothing! Crispin is only in London for a couple of days and has a single slot in his diary, and he’s graciously said he’d give his talk if we’re interested. Read on →

The initial release of WebService::Google::Sets is now available from CPAN.

The way that GLLUG events are organised has changed again recently and bought it more inline with how things used to be done. When I first joined GLLUG the meetings (speakers and venue) were mostly organised by a fearsome man (who was rabid about his privacy so I won’t mention his name) who had a nack for getting good speakers but no skill at organising (most meetings were announced about a week before they happened) or promoting them. Read on →

I’m not a Mac fan, I tried. I really did. After Paul Graham declared Macs supreme and the worthy of attention David Heinemeier Hansson bashed Windows developers I pulled my old iBook out of the cupboard and gave it another couple of weeks. And then went right back to my Dell Latitude running Windows (and Linux in VMWare). While this is old ground for me what’s recently bought my Mac hating to the forefront is the stupidly high number of hardware failures Mac laptops seem to have. Read on →

The frdns.pl forward and reverse DNS checking script is one of those little mistake catchers that allow you to work with a safety net. In this case it checks that your deployed forward and reverse DNS records are present and correct; it checks the results from real DNS queries, not by zone file parsing. frdns.pl accepts a CIDR range and polls each IP for a reverse DNS record. If it gets one it’ll try to forward resolve the name and compare the two results. Read on →

I needed a command line tool to ping a number of CIDR network ranges, show me the status of each IP address and give me a return time for those that responded. I now have cidr_pinger.pl. It’s not as fast as a ‘nmap -sP blah/24’ but it does give me a return time. Although it only took ten minutes work with the ever incredible CPAN I’m putting it on here so I don’t have to write it again…

Adding FireFox extensions through the GUI one-by-one is, if you ignore memory leaks, one of the browsers most annoying quirks. Fortunately, modern versions of the browser allow you to drop a number of xpi files in to your “extensions” directory and install them as a batch when you start FireFox. Of course you need local copies to do this but that’s where a little bit of perl web spidering comes in… Read on →