What Are You Thankful For?

Published: 2009-11-26. Last Updated: 2009-11-26 14:13:41 UTC
by Tony Carothers (Version: 1)
4 comment(s)

On this day of Thanksgiving in America, I'd like to take the opportunity, and give you the readers the chance as well, to express thanx for the tools that exist that make our lives easier.  I am talking about the software tools that we all know and love that enable us to do our jobs, such as packet sniffers, syslog servers, intrusion detection systems, etc., etc. 

My personal thanx goes out to all those who have created, and kept updated, traffic sniffers.  Whether I have been working as a network admin, system admin, or security admin I have found the sniffer to be the first tool I go to in my toolbox when I have a question about something cooking on my network.

Now it's your turn; what are you thankful for?  Maybe the security information manager that helps consolidates all the events in your world for easier analysis?

tony d0t carothers at isc d0t sans d0t org

Keywords: Tools
4 comment(s)

Comments

While it's not a tool I'm thankful for I would like to point out that ISC makes my day so much easier and for that I am thankful.
From a general perspective, I'm thankful for all of the people that have ever written a piece of software that "does one thing, and does it well".

Every time I type in a four line command that ends with "| a2ps | uuencode | mail" I am thankful that it all works so well!
I am thankful to anyone who's taken some time to write a clear description of how they've solved an issue and posted it, to a blog or discussion forum.

I'm currently learning how to work with Juniper firewalls, and the amount of good work people have put into explaining what the company has had, ahem, a few challenges explaining or organizing has been invaluable.

So, for everyone out there from tinkers like me to people with a dozen certs who have taken time to explain how to get something to work: thank you very much.
We all use dozens of tools daily, today's favourite is Wireshark. I remember debugging SNA packet traces with a binder back in the '80's - it was fun at the time, but traces were much smaller then (green screen terminal traffic).

Yesterday i was 8 hours straight on ngrep, tcpdump and wireshark. Without Wireshark, it probably would have been triple (or more) the hours spent to find the solution !

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