iPhone OS 4.0 - Lock Screen Notifications?

Posted by Chris Mason on Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Don't get me wrong, I love my iPhone and probably will for a long time yet, but there is one really minor issue that really bugs me. I use my iPhone, not just on a daily basis, but on an hourly basis for lots of different things. I use it for surfing the web, checking my email, reading RSS feeds to name just a few (as long as I can charge it at least once a day), but how can a phone that Apple claims is aimed at the business market require no less than 6 touches of the finger to be able to see if you have any email messages?

I understand that I am obviously not in the 5% of people who have exceptional hearing who can hear the sound of a small chime from the depths of their pocket, or the 10% of people who can feel a vibration that only lasts a split second - which aren't even customisable!

As an ex-BlackBerry user I have obviously had a gifted past with regards to mobile email. I was able to feel the vibration of a new mail message or if I did miss the vibration, I could press a single button to view the 'Today' screen, which told me how many new messages I had.

I am not asking for much, but a simple way to check if you have any messages without having to unlock your iPhone. How about a small little icon in the status bar with a little number next to it? Is that too much to ask for, it is not exactly complicated or difficult to implement!

Unfortunately the only way to achieve this at the moment and from what it looks like in iPhone OS 4.0 as well is to jailbreak your iPhone. I don't wait to have to jailbreak my iPhone to get simple functionality, which should be on a phone as standard to be classed as a business phone!

Come on Apple! Sort it out!

Dynamic Route Leaking (Vrf to Global)

Posted by Chris Mason on Monday, May 10, 2010

The concept of leaking routes between different VRFs on a Cisco router is pretty common. It is used when multiple VRFs are deployed on a router using VRF Lite and traffic needs to route between the VRF tables. Although it is local you would define route-targets and use BGP to redistribute between the two tables.

The above concept is a dynamic concept and isn't usually dependent on static routes, however leaking from the Global table to the VRF table and vice versa is usually a manual task using specific static routes with the 'global' keyword.

However, how would you leak routes between the Global and VRF table dynamically if you didn't want to create static routes?

ns4 v4.3.6

Posted by Chris Mason on Tuesday, November 24, 2009

I am pleased to announce the release of ns4 v4.3.6. Within this release I have decided to add an optional 'file' argument to the '-d' parameter which allows you to use this in preference to the transports defined within the configuration file. By using the '[n:location]' tag we can use the following syntax to maintain the structure that would be used with transports:

$ 
ns4 -ad '[date]/[n:location]/[node].txt'

The '-x' parameter has been added to ns4 which allows you to verify connectivity to nodes. This works exactly the same as using the '-d' paramter without any commands defined within the configuration. I decided to add this new parameter as you could be adding a new node to the configuration and you don't want to run all the commands every time you are testing it.

The main feature which has been added to ns4 is a simple snmp poller. Although technically this feature belongs in it's own program it was relatively trivial to add to ns4. The reason why it fits well is because ns4 provides the framework to define nodes so you have all the information you need within the configuration file. This will only work on nodes which don't have a proxy defined as you need direct access from ns4. At the moment ns4 will poll the OIDs which are defined within the configuration file every 60 seconds.

Within the node options we need to define two new attributes: 'snmp_community' and 'snmp_oids'. These should be defined as follows:

container:
 node:
  - {id: 'R1', address: '172.16.0.101'}
 options:
  snmp_community: 'PUBLIC'
  snmp_oids:
   - {id: 'Free Mem', oid: '1.3.6.1.4.1.9.9.48.1.1.1.6.1'}
   - {id: 'CPU', oid: '1.3.6.1.4.1.9.9.109.1.1.1.1.7.1'}

Once the OIDs have been defined within the configuration file we can then run ns4 with the following command line:

$ 
ns4 -n R1 -p '[node].txt'

The logfile paramter after the '-p' parameter is optional and supports dynamic tags.