Eeeeerf. Not much code written in my spare time. And a crashed server. And a very long time since I posted at all. I am, however, alive and may actually get around to purchase new hardware, one of these days.

Long while of not posting. Nothing (much) programming- related to mention, but...

New job. Turns out I am not emigrating right at the moment (bit of a last-minute surprise, there, as it happens). New employer seems to be a sensible multi-national corp, though.

Managed to score a (small) writing contract. That reminds me, need to poke the editor-in-chief that I haven't seen the paper copies of the contract yet. The task is to write an article about the BESK machine, a piece of hardware I have only seen the console of, but it is nonetheless a machine that warms the cockles of my heart.

Also noticed that there's been a bit of movement in the SHA1-cracking. Apparently Amazon EC2 GPU instances are real good for SHA1-based password hashes. I don't know, exactly, what this means for SHA1-based HMACs, but I am pretty sure it's not entirely pleasant. So, need to go back to the drawing board and switch out SHA1 and switch in something else for NOCtool's network protocol.

Not managed to poke code, as such, but I've checked (one of) the monitored variables (ifOutOctets on the ethernet port of a router at home). Next step is to write some more methods on the SHOW gf, to generate prettier graphs (background, grid, some text, that sort of thing).

Would probably need to add a selector-thing to allow easy graphing of each of the things monitored, but taht's but a keyword away.

Hm, there's some odd interaction between Swank and the existing NOCTool ping monitors. Nonetheless, there's now SNMP monitoring of a single network device running. Howpefully, I'll get a chance to poke around in the code tonight or tomorrow morning, to see if it's actually doing anything interesting.

So, back to poking at the NOCTool codebase again. This time, the intent is to get some SNMP support into it, to more easily be able to monitor routers and switches. There's also some opportunity to monitor server hosts via SNMP, but at the moment unix-based hosts can be adequately monitored via SSH.

First, I created a class for "things monitored by SNMP" (with curucial details like community strings and SNMP version in it, plus slots for anything we're monitoring via SNMP; this is currently just interfaces). Then, an SNMP configuration stanza for the config reader. Inside the SNMP stanza, configuration stanzas for anything monitored by SNMP (again, just interfaces at the moment).

The intent is to let an empty interface spec is to mean "auto-discover all interfaces, then monitor them" and for anyone wanting a subset, simply naming the interfaces.

The actual monitoring starts with an snmp-walk of the ifTable.ifEntry.ifDescr sub-tree, mapping names to current SNMP indexes, then passing the resulting hash table down to each "get stuff for this specific interface" function (taking the current SNMP session, mapping table and interface object as arguments).

So far, I am happy with what I have, but it's yet to be used in anger.