I am pleased to announce the release of version 2.28 of TemplateFx – a dynamic templating tool enabling you to write configuration templates once and deploy multiple times. Download links and instructions can be found on the TemplateFx page.

The changes in this release are summarised below:

• Completely re-written the dynamic parsing code due to an issue with parsing a specific construct.
• Completely re-written the Output class using a SwingWorker and a JProgressBar.
• Added support for “1 TO 10″ and “A TO Z” syntax within FOREACH blocks.
• Added support for “ELSE IF” and “ELSE” construct within IF blocks.
• Auto-populates the file extension of “.html” if the output contains HTML.
• Fixed a bug on IF blocks if the block was empty.
• Fixed a bug on FOREACH blocks if the block was empty.
• Fixed a bug where FOREACH blocks weren’t working for single entry lists.

I am pleased to announce the release of version 2.27 of TemplateFx – a dynamic templating tool enabling you to write configuration templates once and deploy multiple times. Download links and instructions can be found on the TemplateFx page.

The changes in this release are summarised below:

• Changed the GUI so all output windows are now created in tabs instead of opening in a new window.
• Added support for FOREACH blocks within the template to allow intra-row looping.
• Improved “Find and Replace” so it doesn’t use the last match as the bounds for the next search.
• Errors tab on “Output” is now disabled when errors present but not on current tab.
• Improved the output of ScriptExceptions in the “Errors” tab to include context.
• About window now closes on escape.

I am a big fan of IP Accounting as it enables me to keep long term-ish statistics on a per src/dst prefix basis. I am able to work out my weekly or monthly bandwidth usage and can see how much data each host on my network uses. I can see that I have used a total of 4.7GB in the last 5 days and the majority of that has been towards my Apple TV. A lot of people are probably thinking this is probably achieved better using a more scalable solution like NetFlow, but I like the ability to query this data on-box and not have to use a collector.

Having my network IPv6 enabled at home with an IPv4 tunnel providing IPv6 services, I was curious to know how much data was being delivered over IPv6. To my dismay I discovered that IP Accounting isn’t supported for IPv6. With a little help from the kind people at the cisco-nsp mailing list I discovered Flexible NetFlow with permanent caches.

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After spending a little time investigating online gaming on the PS3, there appears to be a lot of conflicting information with regards to what NAT is and how the PS3 classifies your NAT type. Everyone who plays online seems to spend a lot of their time (instead of actually playing games) trying to achieve a different NAT type, or thinking their NAT type is why they keep getting shot.

NAT or Network Address Translation is something which people generally can’t avoid and has become the norm in computer networking. For a device to be able to access content on the Internet they need a public IP address. There aren’t enough public IP addresses (until IPv6 is fully embraced, which is still a way off) to give every one of your devices a public address which mandates a form of translation.

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