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Syslog Standards: A simple Comparison between RFC3164 (old format) & RFC5424 (new format) Though syslog standards have been for quite long time, lot of people still doesn't understand the formats in detail. The original standard document is quite lengthy to read and purpose of this article is to explain with examples Some of things you might need to understand The RFC standards can be used in any syslog daemon (syslog-ng, rsyslog etc.) Always try to capture the data in these standards. Especially when you have log aggregation like Splunk or Elastic, these templates are built-in which makes your life simple. Syslog can work with both UDP & TCP  Link to the documents the original BSD format ( RFC3164 ) the “new” format ( RFC5424 ) RFC3164 (the old format) RFC3164 originated from combining multiple implementations (Year 2001)

Summary Though in many cases syslog is preferred to transport the pfSense logs to external system, Elastic beats provides quite a niche way to send the logs while modelling the data alongside. This makes it ready-made to send to ElasticSearch directly and get ready-made outcomes like SIEM, performance etc. Pre-reqs A build server (preferably Ubuntu or Fedora) with internet connectivity shell access to pfsense server Basic knowledge of Elastic Stack (filebeat.yml configurations etc) Ensure connectivity is allowed from pfsense machine to your Elastic Stack receiver Setup Summary Connectivity tests Install dependencies in build server (vagrant, virtualbox, gmake, go etc) Download Elastic Beats source Make elastic Beats package for FreeBSD Copy binary packages to pfsense server Configure Beats to send to destination Configure ElasticSearch to view the data Installation Steps Connectivity tests Logon to pfsense server via Shel

perl (Swiss Army Knife of Programming) is quite efficient in data processing. Though though not enterprise class as python, perl has a substantial presence in many packages including - git downloads for Windows - present in all Linux Enterprise installations - PAR (Perl Archive Toolkit) acts like a JAR file to be packaged up One of the main problems you hit is the non-availability of packages or modules within perl. For instaance take the example of CSV module in perl. This is a very useful module if you want to play around with manipulating CSV. If you need to do cross platform scripts, below script is an efficient way to check the packages that are available "locally" in that server or machine before you start configuring your complex code.  This can be a life saver and thus you can include your packages alongside if you need. #!/usr/bin/perl # list all of the perl modules installed use File::Find ; for (@INC) { find(\&modules,$_) ; } sub modules {

You might have heard of " BitCoin ". But did you know  BitCoin is just ONE out of many decentralised crypto-currencies out there in the market? This article is just to summarise some of these crypto-currencies and makes you to judge whether to invest or try-out on them. Just a word of caution: These are highly volatile and risky. DO AT YOUR OWN RISK What is crypto-currency? A cryptocurrency is a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange. Many of us express it in terms of USD or GBP or EUR, but always consider them as old plain " Barter " system to exchange goods and services. BlockChain and why is it powerful? A blockchain is a decentralised digital ledger that records transactions. Think of it as a huge sheet of paper which records every transactions in the world which are unique and is permanently written and cannot be reverted. This makes validating transactions transparent to anyone in the world, thus making it extremely secure to trade goo

I had to create a sample script to convert epoch time to Human readable format.  (both ways) Also from Human readable time format to Epoch.  Input is a file with "Epoch" or "Human Readable"  format and the program will convert in the other format. This could be used for embedding into your application or for batch convert, please find my program in Java .... Afterwards, you can put this java file into a shell script if you want to automate your linux scripts Usage: <scriptname> <inputfiletimeformat> <input_file_name_full_path> ....

Vagrant is an excellent tool for automation and doing proof of concepts (POC's). In many of the POC's you might need cluster and vagrant can do the clustering in matter of minutes by cloning an existing VM and then making into multiple Virtual machines Assumption You have basic idea of Linux & vagrant we are going to use centos/7 for vagrant guest The host is Fedora25/Redhat/CentOs system. Can be easily done for ubuntu as well Let's see the overall Summary of what we are doing to do create a working directory download and install virtualbox, then vagrant clean-up any unwanted boxes you have. putting the config file and provisioning Validating the nodes Creating a working Directory sudo su - mkdir /opt/vagrantOps cd /opt/vagrantOps Download and Install vbox, vagrant to your host (Fedora 25) vi /etc/yum.repos.d/virtualbox.repo  # with contents as per Virtualbox recommendation dnf install VirtualBox-5.1   # This will install vbox  f

Recently as part of Indian Governments demonetisation drive, there is a significant opinion divide on whom the real impact falls upon. This article is more of a data driven analysis based on key metrics Black Money - What is it? Who owns it? Wealth division - How wealth is divided and how it is stored Balance of power with Money Population Permanent vs temporary removal of high currency denominations Summary of Black Money In simple terms "black-money" means funds/wealth earned in day-to-day "transactions" which are NOT subjected to tax and therefore unaccounted. One of the biggest misconceptions for the word "black-money" is that it is some type of fake currency, but it is not.  Also other key word here is "transactions" which involves shift of funds/wealth. For instance, if a ordinary blue collar worker earns Rs500 and goes and buys milk from his friendly neighbour for Rs 100, then that IS black-money transaction of Rs100. In a mode