Human friendly printing numbers in command line

When I am on Unix system running things of from command line (either SQL or shell of any sort) with long number, I find these numbers hard to read.  For example a printout of netstat packets shows

236477161 packets

Which is really 236.4  million packets, a human friendly representation will be more like

236,477,161 packets

DNSSEC maintenance tools

DNSSEC has a reasonable effort for one time setup but even more pain comes in managing the keys, expiry and updating your keys and then adding DS (Delegation Signer) keys with your provider or DLV (DNSSEC Look-aside Validation) to the less ideal DLV. system.

Inconvenience != Security

Many people have suggested idea for how they can better secure their users from doing stupid mistakes and ask for my opinion.  Most of these ideas (IMO) seems to add just inconvenience to the user without improving security.  So, my quote for this has been

"While security is not convenient, just inconvenience is not security either!"

My favorite egrep patterns

When it comes to using finding matching patterns inside text files, log files and text emails; egrep is very useful tool in your UNIX toolbox.  Here are some of these to find IP addresses, emails, URLs ...

DNS PCAP and BPF

DNS most interesting protocol can be analyzed using some packet filters that can help you look at and analyze various types of DNS packets on the network.  In this blog, I am compiling a list of these to summarize the ones I have discovered as useful for analyzing DNS packets.  The examples are relevant to UDP DNS which is about 90-95% of DNS packets seen.

GeoIP and SQL (Oracle)

I wrote a blog in CERT/CC on GeoIP in your SOC (Security Operations Center).  Here I am exploring a little bit more nuts and bolts (technical) details on optimal ways to use GeoIP data in SQL.  The idea is really optimize bulk lookup of IP addresses for geolocation with very quick response times for say thousands or millions of IP addresses.

ip2long and long2ip in Excel, SQLite and Oracle

Ever stuck with having to do data manipulation in Excel at a customer's restricted Microsoft environment, say with IP Addresses?  Here are some time savers for your IPV4 address manipulation in Microsoft Excel.  I have also added some SQLite function which can be helpful as SQLite has no native INET_NTOA or INET_ATON functions in MySQL.