I’ve recently upgraded to nmap 5.21 on my Fedora 12 box, and it turns out that the RPM’s distributed by Fyodor can’t resolve hostnames (even localhost, uname or /etc/hosts entries) apparently due to his build environment being CentOS 5.3 which has a difference glibc and gethostbyname() implementation. A “fix” is to start the nscd service. The problem seems to exist in at least 5.00, 5.20 and 5.21 RPM’s of nmap, however ncat works fine.

As BT don’t seem to publish this information, or at least without major trawling of this, I thought I’d make a note of it. For STMP you have to use authentication (not secure-auth) that is your username and password must be sent. The username is the bit before the @btconnect.com of your email address, not the whole address as the BT docs say. Its your account credentials, not your router credentials which are btclick.

I received the 2nd hard disk bay for my work laptop today so installed the 160Gb drive and installed 64-Bit Fedora 12 using my instructions in this earlier post. Well it all went well except that I selected the optional repositories at install time, so the install took about three hours, and it seems that ALL of the available software for Fedora got installed – over 5000 packages, which had the knock-on effect of making any yum/rpm transaction hideously slow.

I had a lovely Christmas, spent most of the time over at M&D’s eating and drinking too much! I think they’re coming over for New Year’s Eve. We all went out for Chinese on Xmas Eve and I went over to PP’s afterwards. I got lots of presents including a Senseo coffee machine which I have in my computer room as well as an electric toothbrush, clock radios, toiletries and booze.

I’ve recently been writing some auditing scripts for IOS switches, so have been trying to test it on as many devices as I can, well that’s a lot of work setting up routing etc; so I’ve installed Dnyamips and Dynagen, the Cisco emulators. They’re not as polished as QEMU for example, in that there’s a bit of a naff command you have to run as root to start a daemon which isn’t particularly stable, the CPU usage goes through the roof until you manually tweak it and IP doesn’t work on localhost unless you set up a tap interface.