packet sniffing agent
for on and off the past few months, i've been thinking about how to write an agent that measures bandwidth utilization for a network interface. i'm thinking it should make a good feature to put into my thesis, into the agent i'll be doing. i asked PLUG (Philippine Linux Users Group) about it, and someone pointed me to netdevice as a means of programatically talking with the network interface device and getting/setting its info (IP Address, subnet mask, etc). while this was really interesting, i had guessed back then that in order to measure bandwidth utilization, i'd have to capture packets on the interface. this morning i remembered to look up the topic once more, until i finally thought of looking at freshmeat for bandwidth monitoring software. i downloaded two such software and looked at their sources. in both instances, they used libpcap and actually captured packets in order to measure bandwidth utilization. so, that settles it then -- i am going to have to capture packets to measure bandwidth afterall. this should be really interesting!

just think about it -- i could create a SOAP agent that sniffs packets on a network! actually, for me to measure bandwidth, i WOULD have to sniff packets; its just that my agent should filter the packets so that in computing for bandwidth utilization, only packets destined to and coming from the network interface should be taken into account. now, take away that filter, and i'll just have a plain old packet sniffing agent! coolness!

PH33R MY L33T H4C|<|NG S|<|LLZ!

hehehehe.... got that one from reading Megatokyo. that online comic is darned funny!

anyway, i finally finished my IVR Module... sweet! the softswitch now answers something like "Welcome! Enter your PIN followed by the # sign...." and "Enter the number you wish to call, followed by a # sign". man, it works! of course, it also can actually take your pin and the number you're calling. it also validates the your call against a radius server. in other words -- IT WORKS!

once more, with more "largo" feeling:

PH33R MY L33T H4C|<|NG S|<|LLZ!

W00T!

ok so i sound like a pathetic script kiddie hacker wannabe. its just that, in the context of megatokyo, that is so funny! its not meant to be intelligent -- its SUPPOSED to be stupid, that's what's so funny about it. heck, just go browse megatokyo, willya?

alright, next on my "to do" list, is my thesis. i'll finish my document tomorrow. i hope i can still make it, but i'm not sure i can make the deadline for the defense on the 27th.

whoops! hedwig's here! time to boot to windows... *sigh*

alrighty!

i'm almost done with the IVR module for the softswitch. i think i just need to do some more stuff in the H323ConferenceSession class to accommodate the IVR module. i just haven't figured out where i'm getting this weird error... after it plays the opening greeting over the line, its supposed to collect the PIN, but it stops at sending the sound prompt for entering the pin ("enter your pin followed by the # sign" or something like that). i get this weird error that looks like a buffer overflow. hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

in other news, me and my fellow "floaties" are scheduled to have to defend our thesis proposals this January 27. i should be able to finish my proposal by this weekend, with more than enough time to spare for polishing up before the 27th.

ooooh, and i got this new book, "Unix Systems Programming" by Robbins and Robbins. it rocks! it covers every POSIX system call in existence! i know most of the calls are in C, but hey, what do you expect? the book IS all about doing Unix system calls , afterall, which are nothing more than a collection of function calls and the associated structs that go with them. maybe i can do a complete object-oriented library around POSIX someday... cool!

*sigh* as for richard, he's got his head all filled up with that "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" garbage. so much for a potential "seeker of the Light"...

i'm beginning to think that revealing my occult background to him was a mistake. ah well, if it was a mistake, its just a small one (so help me God); i didn't reveal EVERYTHING to him. all he knows is i'm some sort of a long-time occultist, thats all. he doesn't know enough to do any real damage to me, in case he turns against me.

... and i'm off to work! well, shower first... then work!

thesis update
oh yeah, i forgot to mention... yesterday i managed to fix my "hello world" gsoap web service version. turns out, i had been doing the output parameter all wrong -- it should be:

[*] & result

i was doing it as

[*] * result

it seems i got mislead by one of the compiler error messages i once got, stating that the output parameter should be * * not &....

also, using apache axis' tcpmon tool to "sniff" the xml messages between web service and client really helped with my debugging!

my next step now is to delve deeper into linux systems programming. if i could figure out how to programatically configure the routing table, for example, i could make a web service with enough functionality to replace a typical snmp agent.

good luck to me!

Posted by lone_geek at 12:54 PM WST

Updated: Tuesday, 6 January 2004 12:56 PM WST

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i managed to convince kabo to change his snmp management console so that it just uses "create and go" to tell my agent to create a new row in a table. shortly afterwards, i figured out what was actually going on in my code, why it always messes up the config file when rows are added via "create and wait". fixed it all up this morning and now my agent can work with either "create and wait" or "create and go" requests.

after this i'll be doing that IVR module for the softswitch. and after that, i'll be doing the fax support module too.

this all reminds me.... i wonder when that new C++ guy will report to work? i would have thought that he should be here by now.... ???

HAPPY NEW YEAR!
and what a way to start the New Year by building my very first Zoid! i bought a Liger Zero Phoenix yesterday and i finished the Liger just in time for 12 midnight! YAY! i'll try to post some pictures soon!

on another note... i now consider my brother a lost cause. he's gone and become a born-again zealot. he's now one of those "chosen by God above all others" who think that everybody else is in a poor, pitifully bad way. ah well... i guess i'll have to warn our mother about this sooner or later...

speaking of mother, i lent my mother a copy of "Blessed Among Women". ok so all this isn't so geeky, but its the new year, there's no work today, and therefore theres nothing geeky to write! anyway, my mother seems a bit incredulous... she's already started reading it but she asked if this book wasn't a work of fiction or something... naturally i said, no, and that it isn't published under the category of "fiction" . i hope she reads it through and through. and i hope she really likes the book in the end.

i also hope my finger heals okay. of all the gosh-darned things to happen on new year's eve -- i cut my left middle finger while working on my new Zoid! i wont describe it in detail here; its too gross even for me to just remember it! suffice to say, typing on the keyboard now feels kind of funny.... *sigh*

ok, things to do this year... (or, if you really must put it this way, "new year's resolutions")...

number 1: sleep early! i really have to will myself to get rid of this insomnia!

number 2: be good! ok maybe that sounds like a tall order, but so help me God, i sure as heck will try not to entertain thoughts and feelings of criticism, condemnation, judgement and blame. there's a perfectly good explanation for this, but i don't think this is the right blog to put it in. i'll probably have to put up a "spiritual" blog for this if i really want to...

number 3: actually number 2 already pretty much sums everything up, so there IS no number 3!

looking ahead, i hope to finish my Master's Degree by May this year. i also hope to get into my sister in-law's fashion jewelry business later this year, and try to help out any way i can.

now beyond all this, i can't really look that far ahead so i'll just end by saying all in all, i feel good about the past year and i feel good looking at this new year and the months to come.

HAPPY NEW YEAR! PEACE ON EARTH AND GOODWILL TO ALL MEN!

got my paycheck today. i got docked one day and a few hours pay -- i timed out before my 8 hrs were filled in to go to our own xmas party and then i was absent the next day due to horrendous traffic. how's that for getting a formal timecard-bundy clock system implemented? since we're now into the timecard business anyway, i think we might as well implement formal leave policies -- such as leave forms and sick leave, vacation leave, emergency leave, etc. i think i'll email jaime about it in a polite way tomorrow or later this evening.

ah well. happy new year to you too!

of course i could say that at my pay level i ought not to have any real attendance requirements anymore, like most managers. but then bringing that up would open up a whole other can of worms, which i'm not quite ready to tackle yet.

anyway, when i email good ol' umbridge; i'll try not to wear my rebel bandana and take out my trusty .45 and my good ol' M4A1 while i'm at it. i'll just be a civilized person talking to another civilized person. i hope!

LOTR
*sigh*

i just finished reading Fellowship of the Ring. its not... what i... expected it to be. after all the "ooohh"s and "aaahhh"s i'd heard about the whole trilogy for so long, i was kind of disappointed when i finished this first book.

in a word: DRAGGING.

it much more than half of the book before the story really started to roll along, and even then it didn't roll along at a good pace! much time was wasted describing the scenery and describing the exact route frodo and company takes on the way to Rivendell. with all due respect to the high and mighty JRR Tolkien, he could have just cut to the chase and said that, ok, Black Riders were after frodo, ok they got lost in the Old Forrest, and then two of his companions were swallowed by Old Man Willow, then Tom Bombadillo comes along and rescues them, then the set out again after resting at Tom's place, then they get lost again and run afoul of the Barrow-wights, then the got rescued by Tom again, then they went on up to the Prancing Pony at Bree, where they meet Strider. Only after then does the story move forward at at a better pace where there are actual events in the lives of the characters to describe, rather than just boring scenery of some hill or mountain. The overly detailed description of the scenery just didn't serve to move the story forward -- the only time it seemed appropriate was when they finally made it to that Elvish kingdom, Lothlorien. Now there, since the scenery was new and Frodo and the rest genuinely seemed interested in the place, there the description of the scenery served to move the story forward.

I have the impression that at the beginning, the author was still self-conscious of his writing. He had to show off his mastery of English and of Writing by describing in every little detail things that had no direct bearing on the story. I think even giving a history of the Shire was a waste of time -- if he wanted to give the reader a good background of the history of the Shire, he should have did it through the point of view of a character in a story, not through direct encyclopedia-like descriptions. The factual descriptions again only served to draw attention to the author's mastery of his art and not to the story itself.

at any rate, after Frodo's arrival at Bree and then at Rivendell, the story moved along a bit better. it was only then that the story really began to move forward. I feel that the book should have been shorter than it was, or, if you want the book to be of the same size, then the whole thing should have been combined with the second book, to make one big book. if you take out all the "fat" from the Fellowship of the Ring, then it would have served as several good introductory chapters in the second book.

The Fellowship of the Ring lacked so many things in so many points -- there was little drama, and little action, and certainly very little magic. it read as if it were some ordinary, dull, fiction that just so happened to be set in the middle-ages. When I read it, i felt like i was trying to chew a really old, really stale and "MAKUNAT na" cookie. Sorry, but the author can't hold a candle to the likes of Arthur Clarke, or Isaac Asimov, or Robert Heinlein. ok so these guys are all into Sci-Fi, not Fantasy, but they all know how to pace their stories and not get bogged down in detailed descriptions of environments that are familiar already either to the characters themselves and to the reader. I mean, if the character can't have a sense of wonder about his environment, how can a reader feel any sense of wonder himself?

I think i have even fonder memories of the Riftwar Saga by Raymond Feist! I remember that I couldn't put his books down and I had to finish each book in one or two days. But then that was more than 10 years ago; who knows how i might find them if i re-read them now...

Maybe Fellowship of the Ring was already good for its time. It was written sometime from 1936 onwards until its publication in the 1950's. And maybe back then, standards and tastes were different from today. (Although I can't help but think of Robert Heinlein, who started writing his greatest works in the 1940's i think). In any case, I rate the Fellowship of the Ring three stars out of five, five being the highest.

nothing like the proximity of christmas and new year to drive down office productivity.... :-)

right now, all i can think of is just curling up in bed and sleeping the day away. its the really cool weather we're having. it feels like the peak of february already! even colder! that, plus the fact that its our christmas party later today....

i think i should have uploaded the web service i did at home, up to my pc here at the office. i dont want to work on my office projects, but i'm still kind of keen on trying out stuff for my thesis.... but then, the lazy haze i'm feeling right now is preventing me from re-creating the web service i did at home, simple as it was.

hmmmmm.

what to do...

i got to do a web service in C++ last night, using gSOAP. it took me forever to figure out because the tutorial that came with gSOAP had the service method implementation signature all wrong; apart from its regular input and output parameters, its supposed to have a parameter for the gsoap environment variable out in front first. still, though, at least i got the thing working. also, i figured out it isnt so hard to make use of C++ strings in gSOAP afterall; its practically the same as using the regular strings in C++ except i dont need to import the string header file. although i can't be sure until i actually try it, i suppose using vectors is that simple as well, without having to import any special header file and just using the std:: prefix or some such prefix on any vector declaration.

personally i find the Axis C++ documentation a bit lacking and using it involves some steps that are just a hassle to do. compare this to gSOAP, which is very C/C++ centric and therefore doesn't require the developer to learn too many new techniques to get his web service to compile and run; gSOAP is much simpler to use than Axis C++. i was hoping Axis C++ would implement the equivalent of JWS on java, where you just drop a java source file into a special directory and just like magic, axis makes that class available as a web service. alas, this isn't the case and Axis C++ turns out to be far more complicated to use than gSOAP.

anyway, with those issues out of the way, i'm now ready to proceed with actual implementations of my ideas for my thesis, using only gSOAP.

meanwhile i have to get ready for work! i'm already way late as it is!