I think my printing system is breaking down.

Currently, I have CUPS on one box, which connects to printers via JetDirect, lpd, Samba, etc.  All other Unix hosts send jobs to that server via lprng.  This worked fine for awhile, but now cups-lpd is buggier than ever.  Banner pages can't be disabled, and sometimes the backends randomly fail.  Printing works fine from the server all the time, though…

Do people run CUPS on every host, and then use IPP between clients and servers?  Or, are print servers going out of style, and should every client connect directly to each printer on the network?  It seems silly to run something like CUPS, which has a fairly large footprint and a number of dependencies, on every client PC, when a simple /etc/printcap file can be distributed when printers change.

Thoughts?  There has to be a better alternative.

I got sick of visually condensing networks to be put into routing tables, and couldn't find anything that would do this for me, so I threw together netsum, a small network summarizer tool.  It reads a list of prefixes via file or stdin, then spits out a condensed, or summarized, version.  For example…

Input:

10.80.226.0/24
10.80.226.1/24
10.80.10.0/25
172.16.1.91
50.50.50.50/32
172.16.1.90
66.85.192.2/24
66.85.193.20/24

Output:

10.80.10.0/25
10.80.226.0/24
50.50.50.50/32
66.85.192.0/23
172.16.1.90/31

Detects overlaps, sorts, and normalizes addresses, too.  And, urm, IPv6 support is coming soon.. yea.

Well, I didn't realize that there's a Doom port for the iPod.  I might have to get one, now.

Also came across www.itplaysdoom.com, too.

No, it's not a political campaign, it's a prolixium.com facelift!

Before:

After:

I should probably scrap the CSS2 link at the bottom of the page, since it's really CSS3...

Although both of these have been around for awhile, I only discovered them recently:

• scapy - kitchen sink packet generation system
• socat - extremely useful multipurpose relay, network/Unix sockets

I suggest keeping them handy at all times.

I finally broke down and replaced my aging Pioneer DEH-P4000.  The unit has lasted a good 7 years, but within the last couple months it's been erroring out way too often and refusing to read random discs.

I picked up a JVC KD-G720 unit and some new rear speakers (the stock Camry ones were kinda blown out by now).  I initially bought the unit since it sported the capability of reading MP3/WMA files off devices plugged in via a build-in USB port.  Audio quality is good, and it has no problem reading my USB memory sticks.

Came across a post this morning about a couple JVC models being able to read OGG Vorbis files.  Sure enough, reads 'em fine.  Kudos to the developers for that unit.  I suppose there are any number of reasons why OGG support isn't published?

Q: How do I get dhclient to stop rewriting my resolv.conf?

A: Edit /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf [Debian] and add something like this:

supersede domain-name "prolixium.com";
supersede domain-name-servers 10.3.4.6, 10.3.4.4;

The incorrect way is to hack /sbin/dhclient-script.  Avoid it.

Long time no rant^Wpost!

Last week I went to SANSFire 2006 and took the Security 615 course.  The conference was excellent, as were the presentations in the evenings.

SANS this year was held in Washington D.C., at the Wardman Park Marriott loated near the Washington Park Zoo.  I took an extra day to do some sightseeing.