Crazy Days

FOSS and me

Education is a fascinating thing, for some it is their only salvation, but some time it can ruin your life too...that might be where I'm getting right now. Anyway even without that step still my life is gonna rot, so I have no choice in this case. When you come to think of it, a UNIX sysadmin + DBA + partly developer + Project manager, would not have any other option but to expand his scope (hardly think of the scale), this must be the only option left for me. I think it is high time for me to decide which way I'm gonna walk, it is not a choice, but a must.

Recently I started thinking what type of impact FOSS/FLOSS had in my life style. About 10 years ago I was a DOS platform programmer who loved the lower level hardware programming, specifically game development. Then my life changed when I decided to linger on M$ products, just because of there ease of use (I guess, anyway I'm a lazy personality). That wasted half of my life (computer life), and the worst part is that was the most productive time frame of my life. Learning ASP before PHP could be one big mistake I made at one point. Anyway both were equally easy to learn :).

After joining university (working) was the first direct involvement with Linux usage. I think anyone can guess what happened after that...so how on earth I fall in love with big boxes (yes I still love them), AIX in particular. In a certain angle AIX is no better than Windows or any other proprietary software. You hardly get to know about the internals of the OS, still I like it.

Could my affinity for UNIX is because of my affinity towards FOSS counterpart? prbably.

Hmm....so FOSS and me, how suitable are we together?.....better let time decide that.

NetProf is working

NetProff consumed me....if I put it that way. Finally I came up with a working version...still hoping to publish on my web site. Well too bad time is not standing still, exams are over and back to my busy life. Things are getting worst, we are about to start the final research project and now that is consuming me. Ohh brother what a killer.

now I'm thinking in diferent directions for netprof. Rather than handling typical network settings want to go lil bit beyond with multiple IP's and alternative route....hmm...and firewall settings. This will be a never ending journey I guess, anyway for the moment this is serving my purpose....if somebody request me I might consider adding these fancy features. But alternative routes and alternate IP's are quite useful. Lets hope I'll find time to tell more stories on this.

Far more interesting thins yet to come....:)

Freedom as in NO EXAMS...

I always thought life is a funny joke someone playing on us (god?....nahhhh). After attending clases for three months (very painful process...believe me) MBA administration decided they should not let me sit for the exams of this semester, why I had only 75% attendence where 80% is required. Hmmm what a blow. In a way it is good. It seems my exams for this semester are always over, unless they accept my second apeal and let me do next sunday paper (which I don't mind stting for)....I'm so happy.

With the limited time available, I get to work on my next obsession...which I call 'netprof', network profiler a problem I face with my laptop. Most of the cmpanies bit reluntant to use DHCP for there networks. If you publish IP addresses in a DHCP it will be a threat to the company network. So whereever I go I need to change my IP settings mannually, so why not have a profiler. So we can keep all the network settings profile wise. I guess this will be useful to crazy people like me.

One problem is solved....how to check whether entered IP Addresses are in the correct format, I thought bash script with 'egrep' can do it, but to amaze me it would be very difficult to do it in regex. I tried using '^[[:digit:]]\.[[:digit:]]\.[[:digit:]]\.[[:digit:]]$' which amazingly passes the proper IP addresses including 256.256.2256.256 which is one problem and 1.11.1.1 will not get pass for some reason I couldn't justify. Still I'm looking for the pocket reference for regex (which I saw Anuradha carrying), which is not in the market.

As a solution I came up with AWK, wierd UNIX program, still I couldn't figure out why they designed such a thing. I've used awk before but only for simple things like printing the 8th word in a sentence and things like that, but programming with awk is pretty comprehensive, I'm officially impressed. Parsing a IP address using awk is a piece-of-cake, but to parse a subnet mask (without binary support...1/0) is a difficult task (at least my stupid brain is still trying to figure out a escape plan). The escape route I think of might get me killed, but stll intend to give a try. If I post again....that means I'm through...:)