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Archive for the ‘Networking’ Category

Don’t touch that dial!

Friday, June 18th, 2010

VideoLan (or VLC as it is otherwise known) is a great piece of software. It’s capable of playing a plethora of video and audio file types. It’s also capable of converting files, streaming files over the network, and viewing live TV via any TV cards you might have.

Because of the way it works, it’s possible to take any input, and spit it out in any way pretty much. Some time ago I’d seen a discussion on a mailing list about using VLC and a digital TV card to broadcast live TV over the network (using multicast). I’d had a quick play, but never got it working. A discussion popped up on the Multiplay forums, so I thought I’d try and get it working again. Last night I was successful, so I thought I’d blog it up in case it’s useful for others. VLC is documented, but the documentation is a bit hit and miss in places – always the problem for many Open Source projects.

Read more after the jump.

Continue Reading…

Posted in Computers, General, Networking, TV, Windows | 2 Comments »

Bridgedy-doo-dah

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

At work we often have a requirement to test out things on our network, as if we were an external user. It’s useful to check that firewall settings are right, or to check access rights. We recently had an ADSL connection installed which serves that purpose.

Via some spare fibres and various spare switches, we’ve got access to it in various switch closets. I wanted to be able to access it from my desktop. My preference was to use a virtual machine, which I could set up with all the software I needed and test. This would mean bridging said virtual machine to that network.

I added a second network adapter to my PC, unbound it from all the local protocols (so my PC doesn’t touch that network) and set VMware Player to use bridged mode. With VMware workstation, you can use the virtual network tool to configure which NIC bridges to the virtual machines. However, that tool is missing with VMware player. By default, it was bridging to my first NIC, which was no good, as it was on the uni network.

A little bit of clicking around, and I found that there is a protocol bound to all the network cards called VMware Bridge Protocol. By default, it seems to bind itself to all the NICs. I simply unbound it from my main NIC:

And left it bound to the NIC connected to the ADSL network:

I restarted VMware Player, and my virtual machine nows bridges to the ADSL connection.

Posted in Computers, General, Networking | Comments Off

Cisco Useful thing: Why isn’t this on by default?!

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

If you’ve ever worked on a Cisco IOS device, you’ve probably encountered the joy that is the terminal monitoring of events. IOS will happily dump bits of information onto the screen (very useful) but it’s also horribly disruptive if you’re typing in a command. Everything disappears into this sea of debug output or other info.

In my case, I often do ISDN Q.931 debugs to find out what’s going on on my voice gateways. I’ve gotten used to it now, but typing ‘undebug all’ whilst a ton of information whizzes by is less fun than it sounds.

Today, I found this useful command:

“logging synchronous”

If you enable that on your vtys or con (or aux) ports, it basically causes IOS to dump the debug still, but it’ll do it on all other lines EXCEPT the one you’re typing on, leaving it alone. I imagine it could cause some slowdowns as it has to draw your command in the same place, whilst interleaving other junk, so it could potentially cause problems on a direct console, but if you remotely telnet (I really should enable SSH one day), it’ll be a lot easier to see what’s going on.

Here’s the gist of what you need to do:

  Router(config)#line con 0
  Router(config-line)#logging synchronous
  Router(config-line)#line vty 0 4
  Router(config-line)#logging synchronous

Then wr mem as usual.

Easy!

Posted in Computers, General, Networking, Rave | Comments Off