Tuesday, August 13, 2019

The best easy and free video editing software available is Shotcut

I've never editing a video before, but I needed to yesterday. I found Shotcut, and I couldn't be happier about how easy it is to use. It's free, easy AND it's a portable app, so you don't have to install anything. They've got a very active forum and tons of how-to videos available. If you need to do some video editing (including multiple tracks, audio overlay, and all the high-ed options), give it a try.

Monday, July 15, 2019

JavaScript regular expression trick

Working on a Netcool Impact implementation recently I ran across a feature of JavaScript regular expressions that really impressed me. I'll compare it to a somewhat similar feature/syntax in Perl.

If you need to test a string for a regular expression in Perl, you can do the following:

if ($mystring =~ /my_regular_expression/) ...

That will return true if $string contains the specified regular expression.

In JavaScript, you can invoke the test() method directly on the regular expression (including the leading and trailing "/") with one parameter, which is the string to test. Here's what the equivalent of the above looks like in JavaScript:

if (/my_regular_expression/.test(mystring)) ...

And to test if it doesn't match, the syntax is:

if (!/my_regular_expression/.test(mystring)) ...

That's it. I just thought it was pretty neat.

Wednesday, July 3, 2019

APM historical data without a TEMS

IBM APM only directly supports the storage of up to 32 days of data. You've always had the option to store older data in the ITM 6 data warehouse, but setting up an entire ITM 6 infrastructure has always seemed like a whole lot of work. As it turns out, you don't have to set up the entire infrastructure! You oonly have to set up a warehouse proxy agent, summarization and pruning agent and the warehouse database. No TEMS or TEPS, as the WPA and SPA can work in autonomous mode.

Madhavan Vyk recently posted a great article on DeveloperWorks detailing exactly how to configure this:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/0587adbc-8477-431f-8c68-9226adea11ed/entry/Integrating_IBM_Cloud_APM_8_x_with_Tivoli_Data_Warehouse?lang=en

Monday, May 6, 2019

IBM Netcool Agile Service Manager 1.1 is available with new observers

I've been busy, so I only just now saw that ASM 1.1 was released in April with a bunch of new observers. Observers are used to "observe" individual applications to provide additional data to the topology view(s) in ASM. Here's the download document:

https://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg24043717

Below is the list of observers from that link. Some that I believe are new are ITNM, BigFix, ServiceNow, New Relic and DynaTrace.

PartDescription
CC166EN
IBM Netcool Agile Service Manager v1.1 Docker Observer (asm 1.1.4.1) - Linux 64bit English
CC167EN
IBM Netcool Agile Service Manager v1.1 Event Observer (asm 1.1.4.1) - Linux 64bit English
CC168EN
IBM Netcool Agile Service Manager v1.1 ITNM Observer (asm 1.1.4.1) - Linux 64bit English
CC169EN
IBM Netcool Agile Service Manager v1.1 OpenStack Observer (asm 1.1.4.1) - Linux 64bit English
CC16AEN
IBM Netcool Agile Service Manager v1.1 File Observer (asm 1.1.4.1) - Linux 64bit English
CC16BEN
IBM Netcool Agile Service Manager v1.1 ALM Observer (asm 1.1.4.1) - Linux 64bit English
CC16CEN
IBM Netcool Agile Service Manager v.1.1 REST Observer (asm 1.1.4.1) - Linux 64bit English
CC16DEN
IBM Netcool Agile Service Manager v.1.1 TADDM Observer (asm 1.1.4.1) - Linux 64bit English
CC16EEN
IBM Netcool Agile Service Manager v.1.1 VMWare NSX Observer (asm 1.1.4.1) - Linux 64bit English
CC16FEN
IBM Netcool Agile Service Manager v.1.1 VMWare vCenter Observer (asm 1.1.4.1) - Linux 64bit English
CC16GEN
IBM Netcool Agile Service Manager v.1.1 DNS Observer (asm 1.1.4.1) - Linux 64bit English
CC16HEN
IBM Netcool Agile Service Manager v.1.1 Cisco ACI Observer (asm 1.1.4.1) - Linux 64bit English
CC16IEN
IBM Netcool Agile Service Manager v.1.1 Kubernetes Observer (asm 1.1.4.1) - Linux 64bit English
CC16JEN
IBM Netcool Agile Service Manager v.1.1 IBM Cloud Observer (asm 1.1.4.1) - Linux 64bit English
CC16KENIBM Netcool Agile Service Manager v.1.1 Juniper Contrail Observer (asm 1.1.4.1) - Linux 64bit English
CC16LENIBM Netcool Agile Service Manager v.1.1 ServiceNow Observer (asm 1.1.4.1) - Linux 64bit English
CC16MENIBM Netcool Agile Service Manager v.1.1 New Relic Observer (asm 1.1.4.1) - Linux 64bit English 
CC16NENIBM Netcool Agile Service Manager v1.1  BigFix  Inventory Observer (asm 1.1.4.1) - Linux 64bit English
CC16PENIBM Netcool Agile Service Manager v1.1 Dynatrace Observer (asm 1.1.4.1) - Linux 64bit English

Wednesday, March 13, 2019

A Great Application Dependency Discovery and Mapping Tool

I recently ran across www.device42.com and am blown away by the price and capabilities of their offerings. One of the most difficult challenges in IT is to get application dependency maps in your infrastructure. The biggest hurdle is access to the different systems. Device42 helps ease this problem by providing standalone discovery executables that can be given to system administrators to run themselves. This means that credentials don't NEED to be stored centrally (this is the root of the access problem). Each administrator can simply upload the results of the discovery process.

The tool also lets you drag-and-drop servers into rack configurations, so you can get a real-world visualization of your datacenter.

All of the above is standard in the software from the leaders in this space (BMC ADDM, ServiceNow Discovery, IBM TADDM), but Device42's price just blows the others away. Their pricing page is here: https://www.device42.com/pricing/ . If you've done any research in the space, you know that the pricing gives you a terrific amount of value.


* Gulfsoft has no relationship with Device42. This opinion is being provided simply because we're so amazed by this application.

Tuesday, March 12, 2019

How does an SQL injection attack occur and how can developers guard against it?

I ran across this great YouTube video that shows exactly how to perform an SQL injection attack:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciNHn38EyRc

I like the way the author steps through all of the gory details of the attack, including his assumptions, thought processes, etc. It's simply a great tutorial on how a hacker would go about formulating this type of attack. What it doesn't explicitly cover is the list of specific mitigation techniques that can be employed to stop this kind of attack, but you can find that information easily with Google:

https://www.google.com/search?&q=how+to+protect+against+code+injection

There you'll find tons of language-specific solutions to the problem.