Writings on various topics (mostly technical) from Oliver Hookins and Angela Collins. We currently reside in Sydney after almost a decade in Berlin, have three kids, and have far too little time to really justify having a blog.
Disclaimer: Most of this post was written in 2014, but it's been languishing in my drafts folder for a long time and I thought I'd push the publish button rather than waiting to perfect it. The original context was that I was attempting to perform integration testing on a client application that needed to handle a variety of different network behaviours - including TCP resets. I mulled over how…
I've been hacking on a small Ruby on Rails project to summarise and then prettily display pmacct traffic data. It's not an original idea by any stretch and in fact is directly inspired by a system we had at my last job. For obvious reasons I have to at least reimplement the idea myself, and while the original was written in Python using PostgreSQL, mine will be using Ruby and MySQL.
One small pain point I've already encountered is the lack of IP address functions in MySQL. PostgreSQL at least as far back as 7.4 has supported IP address functions and in the case when you need to be comparing addresses and summarising based on local subnets they are sorely…