Tue, 18 Mar 2008

Snakes! Snakes!

Some days...
I wasted an hour or two today chasing what turned out to be a bug in Python. For a few reasons (lazyness mostly) we're still using Python 2.2 at work. I'd been having fun writing a test script (well, fun...) where I needed to do endianness conversion. Python thoughtfully provides access to the usual ntoh/hton functions, so that's what I used. 

        import socket
        aNumber = 0xFFFFFFFF
        print socket.ntohl(aNumber)

See, really easy.
Except it doesn't work, at least not in Python 2.2. As it turns out Python insists on interpreting 'aNumber' as a singled long, which causes it to throw an OverflowError whenever you input (or end up) with something that has the MSB set.

As I couldn't easily upgrade Python I worked around it. I hope no children read this as this could scar them for life. 

        import socket

        def myntohl(input):
            if input & 0x80000000:
                input = input & 0x7FFFFFFF
                input = socket.ntohl(input)
                input = input | 0x80
            else:
                input = socket.ntohl(input)

            return input

Don't worry, it's fixed from 2.3 onwards.

posted at: 21:34 | path: / | [ 0 comments ]

Sun, 09 Mar 2008

Speak of the devil...

Today I complained I hadn't seen Googles bot yet. They must have heard.
A.B.C.D - - [08/Mar/2008:20:51:47 +0100] "GET /blog/ HTTP/1.1" 200 12557 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

He did follow the redirect from '/' to '/blog/'. It looks like that's the only link he followed though.

Perhaps that's because I'm an idiot and had a bad config for the blog.
I run a test version on a local system, so I can play around with any changes I want to make. Those changes are tracked in a Mercurial repository, so if they're ok I can just push those to the server and update there. Unfortunately I also commited the config file changes I needed on the test setup to the live setup. As a result most links pointed to http://172.16.0.100 instead of to the real site. For obvious reasons that doesn't work too well for everyone but me.

It's a good thing no one reads this.

posted at: 01:09 | path: / | [ 0 comments ]

Sat, 08 Mar 2008

Strange visitors

I've been keeping an eye on my log files (which is easy considering I get about two hits a week) and I've seen some strange things:

The mail server logs only have a few interesting things:

If you offer a better explanation for any of these let me know.

posted at: 12:33 | path: / | [ 0 comments ]

Mon, 03 Mar 2008

Belgian geeks and the future of the internet.

I stumbled across Scapy a while ago. I've been looking for an good place to use it since.
Today I gave up an just threw together a little script to test DNS names for IPv6 entries. The blogs on planet.grep.be seemed like a good place to start. After all, Belgium's foremost bloggers should be the first to support IPv6.

There are 69 blogs registered on planet.grep.be. Guess how many have an IPv6 address. Go on, I'll wait while you're counting.

All done? You're wrong. It's one.
One.

Congratulations to 2002:6f8:303:1::1. I'm disappointed in the rest of you. More in some than others.

posted at: 22:31 | path: / | [ 1 comments ]

Sun, 02 Mar 2008

Ethereal FSD

A while back I wrote a plugin for Ethereal Wireshark to analyze the FSD protocol.
If you don't know what FSD is you don't care about this.
Anyway, if you're interested you can get the mercurial repository or the tarball.
Feedback is welcome, as are patches.

posted at: 16:47 | path: /ivao | [ 1 comments ]

Frist posft!!

Just a placeholder until I'm calm or angry enough for a rant. That shouldn't take long...

posted at: 14:41 | path: / | [ 2 comments ]