Thanks to Jon Udell for reminding me what s l a m stands for :-)

He's right of course, I've always been fascinated by outlines, and he's the one responsible for exposing me to Radio Userland and its semi-hidden outliner.

Just when I thought I had got over my addiction - I spent a lot more time without More than Dave has spent without smoke - bam, I relapsed :-)

Well, it's comforting to know that, according to one of the Surgeon General's lesser known warnings, outlining can seriously increase your productivity.

As for logging and monitoring, I'm still and always doing a lot of it, I even use all kind of DHTML, RSS and XSLT tricks for that, but it'll take some time before I'm available to publish anything about it.

Take a look at these two screenshots.

The path name for the browser's bookmarks file is initialized automatically, clicking the Browse buttons launches file chooser dialogs.

Interop quizz: how did I manage this ?

Hint: No Java code necessary.

Here is a pointer to a small SNMP resources directory, available both in HTML and OPML.

I've extracted most references from John Sellens' System And Network Monitoring Tutorial at Usenix 02.

A follow up on David Blank-Edelman Perl for System Administration tutorial on Tuesday.

David emphasized the 3 rules a sysadmin should respect when programming some script that reports by email to its master:

• Beware of overzealous message sending: you don't want your mailbox to be flooded by the same message repeating itself
  • Build delay functions into the code.
  • send aggregate messages
• Do not waste the subject line of the message: it is made for quick, to the point, if short information.
• Make sure the message body is relevant: include the answers to following questions - who, where, when, what, why, what next.

I think we should add a fourth rule these days, that mitigates the third one some: do not assume you'll be the only person reading the message.

All SMTP traffic goes out in the clear, and is a prime target for any network sniffer. This is not paranoïa, this is renewed experience.

If your script report includes sensitive or revealing data, encrypt it (with GnuPG for instance, and Ashish Gulhati's Crypt::GPG module) before sending it, or store it on some restricted access web server, and include a link in the body of the message.

I'm currently attending David Blank-Edelman's Perl For System Administration tutorial at Usenix 2002.

David is a gifted and experienced teacher, listening to him the whole day is a priviledge.

The first part of his tutorial largely draws from his O'Reilly book. I love the part about 'safe scripting'.

This afternoon's part is even better, David just calls it story telling, but he manages to transmit a lot of his own experience in it.

The other nice thing in this tutorial is that it's full of very accurate and useful Perl sample code, that addresses almost any concern of a regular sysadmin.

My laptop's disk let me down yesterday. It's now full of bad blocks. This prevented me from posting for most of yesterday's afternoon. I've managed to keep current bad blocks in check, and restored a working system partition, but this may not hold for long.

Once they have gained a large enough beachhead, it gets difficult to repel a bad blocks invasion.

Anyway, the second part of yesterday's System And Network Monitoring tutorial at the Usenix conference was focused on monitoring packages such as MRTG, Cricket, BigBrother and their ilk, plus what John Sellens call a case study. More on those tools in my upcoming SNMP OPML resources directory.

John is a real SNMP-head. He's written a very simple open source utility, Thresh, to leverage SNMP for system monitoring. I like Thresh because you can see John's experience as a sysadmin through it. It is very 'real world' oriented.

What I think John's presentation lacks is proper focus on security: to my liking, he is not paranoïd enough. More on this subject in my next post.

John covered a number of basic SNMP tools this morning. The most impressive seems to be Net-SNMP

The Net-SNMP project is hosted at SourceForge. The Net-SNMP agent implements the standard MIB-II, more interestingly for host monitoring, it also implements both the 'ucdavis' Enterprise MIB and the Host Resources MIB. Net-SNMP is mostly a Unix based subsystem.

MacOS X admins should refer to the Net-SNMP for MacOS X site.

Windows 2000 server has pretty good support for SNMP built-in, even though there have been recent vulnerability issues.

Garth William's site points to a host of PC/Windows SNMP resources.

For low-level SNMP programming in Perl, Simon Leinen's BER.pl and SNMP_Session.pm modules, avalaible through CPAN, seem good enough. No implementation of MIB vocabulary though. A Perl module is also part of Net-SNMP.

Scotty is a TCL shell that is cool to query MIBs if you're into TCL.

Jürgen Schönwälder, Scotty's author, has also released scli, the SNMP Command Line Interface, for less TCL minded sysadmins.

Python lovers should check the PySNMP project on SourceForge.

I'll probably set-up an OPML based directory for SNMP resources based on the tutorial later today.

Good news while checking my email this morning, Paul Kulchenko 's notice that a new 0.55 version of SOAP::Lite is available for download, both in Unix and Win32 attire.

According to Paul, the new version fixes security vulnerabilities that affect SOAP::Lite servers, as described in Phrack Magazine.

I'll have to wait until tonight at best to take a look at the updated code.