End of November Random Links

A good site to find out what the rest of the networking industry is doing for operational best practices:

IP Best Current Operation Practices

Interesting piece on 21st century computer architecture from the  Computing Community Consortium (CCC). Direct pdf link to the white paper:

21st Century Computer Architecture 

GPS based NTP server

Inexpensive, small form factor NTP server with GPS receiver: NetBurner's PK70

Also useful for an embedded system or where a small machine is needed.

Doing a background check on yourself

The Consumerist has a good collection of links on how to run a background check on yourself.
The usual suspects are there, the three credit reporting agencies.  There are also a number of surprising places where information about your is warehoused, such as :

• The Retail Exchange (tracks your return activity with retailers)
• A number of sites keeping employment history
• A number of sites keeping tenant history 

someone is always watching

Submarine Cable map

A comprehensive inventory of undersea cables: Submarine Cable Almanac.  Its a 40M .pdf

Telecom dictionary

A bit dated, but still useful, this Federal Standard is one of the most comprehensive dictionary of telecommunications terms I've seen.

tcpdump & tee

This is something I always forget how to do: run a tcpdump while both looking at the packets AND writing them to a file at the same time.  I always remember it involves 'tee', but never the exact syntax.  So, here is the command:

tcpdump -i eth1 -U -w - | tee dump.pcap | tcpdump -n -r -

This will listen:

• listen on eth1 (-i eth1)
• Don't wait until the output buffer fills before writing packets (-U)
• Write packets to STDOUT (-w -)
• Read from STDIN write to file and write to STDOUT (
  tee dump.pcap)
• Read packets from STDIN (and don't resolve names) (tcpdump -n -r -)