Compile and install Wireshark on Fedora and Ubuntu Linux

Wireshark is the world’s most popular network analyzer. A network protocol analyzer is usually required to get the deepest visibility in determining network issues. Grabbing the newest Wireshark release for Windows and Mac OS X is easy enough. You just direct your web browser to the Wireshark site to grab it. Things can be a little trickier if using Linux. The Wireshark package listed with most Linux distribution repositories is usually a version or two behind the current stable release. Even if the repositories have the latest stable release, what do you do if you want to try out the bleeding edge features of the latest development release? You may have no other choice except to do a source-based installation. This post will show you how to do just that. ...

May 13, 2011 · 4 min

Convert AC3 audio to MP3 for XviD files with FFmpeg

I recently had an issue where I wanted to play a movie on one of my portable devices, but the file’s audio stream is encoded in the AC3 (Dolby Digital) format. But of course, the device doesn’t support AC3, so I need to convert it to a compatible format. Handbrake is my go-to tool for media file conversion, but it no longer supports output to XviD – specifically the AVI container. I could convert the whole file, but I was looking for a way to transcode the audio but leave the XviD video stream intact. This method is ideal because transcoding video is the most time-consuming operation of the media file conversion process. I researched further with the knowledge that Handbrake leverages FFmpeg. ...

June 12, 2010 · 3 min

Install/Upgrade VMware Tools on Ubuntu Server

I routinely google this task whenever I have to install or upgrade the VMware Tools on a Linux VM guest. I figure I would make a post for future reference. Ingredients used for this post: VMware ESX Server 4.0 Ubuntu Server 9.10 Steps Use the vSphere Client to connect to a vCenter Server or directly to an ESX host. Right-click the virtual machine and select Open Console. Log into Ubuntu with an administrative account. ...

January 5, 2010 · 1 min

Ubuntu TFTP

This post is a guide on how to create a TFTP server for Cisco device configuration backups on Ubuntu 8.10. 1. Install atftpd. sudo apt-get install atftpd 2. Configure atftpd as a separate server and modify the tftpboot location. Modify the file with a text editor. sudo vim /etc/default/atftpd Set the configuration. USE_INETD=true -> USE_INETD=false /var/lib/tftpboot -> /srv/tftpboot Save and exit. 3. Initialize the new configuration. sudo invoke-rc.d atftpd start 4. Create and configure the tftpboot directory. ...

November 21, 2009 · 1 min