Tophography

I just thought I’d include a list of packages that I needed to install on my FC5 machine to get dsniff to compile.

• db4-devel : Berkeley database libraries
• libpcap : Libpcap
• libnet : (API for network packet injection)
• libnids : Network Intrusion Detection System (I got it from dries)
• openssl-devel : OpenSSL libraries

After I installed these, the configure script completed, then I got some errors with make. I later realized that I ran into some major dependency-hell. Dsniff development stopped almost 6 years ago, and in that time, libnet and libnids have changed. I tried to find some older versions of the libraries, but no luck getting them old enough. I later found a couple rpms on the following site, but should I really trust them?

http://voidmain.is-a-geek.net/files/RPMS/dsniff/

[This post was rescued from Google Cache. Originally posted 10/11/06.]

I have to create histograms quite frequently for my Digital Signal Processing class this semester. Here’s a quick gnuplot setup for a histogram. You can either type these commands into gnuplot, or enter them into a file (usually with a .gpi extension), and use ‘gnuplot file.gpi’ or ‘load file.gpi’ inside gnuplot.

example:

set boxwidth VALUE # Probably 3-5.
set xlabel "STRING"
set ylabel "STRING"
set term svg # Create an SVG image
set output 'file.svg'
set key off # Unless you really want a key
# For this next line, lw is linewidth (2-4)?
plot [XMIN:XMAX] 'myHistogramData' with boxes lw VALUE


The input is expected to be in this format:

x-value y-value
x-value y-value
etc...

Over the Christmas holiday, the server that was hosting the original thetopher.com suffered multiple disk failures. This resulted in the loss of all my blog (which was only about 5 posts), and my ugly Christmas wish list. Fortunately, a lame website only takes minutes to rebuild!

So, thetopher.com is now running on a new server, ain’t that exiting? I suppose that I’ll soon be starting to add some more things to the site, getting it a little more organized, and starting to back-up my stuff too.

So, what sort of things do we have to look forward to? Hopefully I’ll get a snappy photo album up, an easy-to-use and well-managed recipe book, and fun projects, like: “Blowing stuff up over the Internet!”