Topics for Future Posts

I have a few things I'd like to post about but not much free time so here's a list of topics I'd like to post about. I can bump things up the list if anyone has an interest in something specific, but I can't promise to do anything quickly.

Here are the "interesting" things I've been doing lately:

• Using scapy to emulate a broken LNS
• Using scapy to emulate a PPPoE subscriber (to prove that IP packets sent before IPCP completes are discarded)
• Using one FreeRADIUS server to authenticate for both the LAC and LNS
• Using FreeRADIUS realms and DEFAULTs to minimise config for a wholesale ISP model
• Creating a bunch of scripts for automating RADIUS CoA randomly throughout a given user base
• Using expect scripts to take router health snapshots & statistics throughout a multi-day stability test
• Configuring a very quick-and-dirty LNS using Cisco hardware
• Configuring Ubuntu as a PPPoE client
• Using scripts to keep a pair of redundant RADIUS servers in sync using SCP
• Using byte references to build Wireshark capture filters for MPLS / PPP encapsulated or 802.1Q tagged frames

OK it hardly makes for good light reading material but it may save a few hours if you need to repeat any of the tasks I've been working on.

I will say, though - I am not a programmer so my code will be scruffy and certainly not written with security in mind. I'm definitely not saying my methods are the best way to achieve anything, but they might get you out of a hole when time is short. In short, anything I suggest on here is for lab use only, and should not be considered suitable for live environments!

What's this all about?

I work for a large networking equipment vendor and at the moment I'm working on a project where I'm responsible for getting a lot of testing completed on broadband technologies. We must be testing some pretty good stuff because for a lot of the cases, the tools required either:

a) don't exist
b) don't work
c) pretend to work but are really doing some other, rubbish, thing
d) don't scale

I'm finally getting to the end of some of the toughest challenges in my working life to date and I thought it would be worth starting a blog to document and share some of the tricks and tools I've used. Most of these are just quick tricks I've used in well known products like FreeRADIUS or Wireshark but many have been absolutely instrumental.

I'm not an expert on most of this stuff, so a lot of what I think is great will be old hat to many. I had to search a while to find most of it, though, so hopefully posting on here will save someone else some time and effort.