A lot of us can take the loud emergency sirens for granted when they go off to inform us that bad weather is near, but if you live in a small town like my parents you may not have that luxury.  Even in 2012 there are still small towns in the United States that don’t inform their citizens when danger is near.  A lot of these small towns have a siren that can be heard throughout town, but they feel it is better used to inform citizens when it is noon, rather than impending danger.

So what is the solution for these folks?  Well, a weather radio of course! Well, maybe not…  I’ve always been a fan of these little devices that go off whenever there is a watch, warning, or advisory but a lot of folks find them annoying, Especially when they go off at 3 o’clock in the morning to alert them of a Severe Thunderstorm Watch.  In all reality, who is really going to do anything for a tornado or thunderstorm watch.  Personally, I’m going to ignore it. These common annoyances have led some weather radio owners to simply unplug them so that they can get a decent night’s sleep. See the problem?  Although weather radios can be useful in a real emergency, there is a huge probability that they simply desensitize their owners to the point, that they don’t even get plugged in anymore. It would be like working in a building that had the fire alarm going off every 20 minutes.  You might jump up for the first couple alarms, but how many alarms have to go off before you say “screw it” and keep working.

Another issue with the weather radio paradigm is that you must subscribe your radio to a county (or multiple counties).  In places like the state of Iowa, weather warnings are not considered county wide.  They can activated for a portion of a county, however anyone subscribed to that county will receive the alert regardless of where they are located. Once again, causing a surplus of alerts.

So do you see the problems? The first is that there may be no alerting going on and the second is a alarm that is going off so often that folks don’t even want to pay attention anymore.

So what is the solution?  Honestly, I have no idea.

In this day and age, it seems like we should be able to subscribe to alerts for our own cities rather than counties, but it seems it could cause a major technological issue.

A small project that I have been working on, it getting alerts delivered via social media such as twitter and Facebook. I already have a script that runs and pulls data from the Weather Underground API, and then pushes it up to Twitter. The only problem is, I’m not sure that if there is a tornado/thunderstorm warning for a part of my county, if weather underground will post it for all cities within the county.  This would leave us stuck with the over alert issue.

Does anyone else have thoughts on this?

Over the past several weeks, the university that I work for has been upgrading their residential network. This process has involved pulling out all of the old switching equipment and replacing it with the brand new Enterasys K10 switches. Many days had been spent pulling out patch cables in all of the residence hall’s network closets. After installing the new switching hardware, a lot of time was spent repatching the closets and documenting which ports on the switch were connected to which jacks in each of the dorm rooms.

Documentation is a very important step in any IT project and this particular project was no different. Our first step in the documentation process involved writing down what jack was connected to what port as they were being connected to the switches.  An easy enough process but definitely not a perfect one, so we added a second step to verify the documentation in the first step. To do this I wrote a script and web application that would utilize the Cisco Discovery Protocol that Enterasys so kindly includes in their switches.

The Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) is a Data Link Layer protocol developed by, you guessed it, Cisco. If enabled, the CDP packets can be transmitted on every port of the switch. These packets contain useful information including, but not limited to, Device ID, Port ID, IP address, and even Location. By default, the K-Series will transmit those packets once every minute.  For our project we set them to transmit every five seconds, so that the student employees that would be going room to room, would have to spend as little time as possible in each room.

I tried to find a decent Python module to capture the CDP packet but it proved to a major pain to find a module that would work with the version of Python I was using, so I decided to use Tshark, which is the command-line version of Wireshark.  It can be installed when you install Wireshark. I have the Python program open a tshark process with the display filters set to display only CDP packets and dies after 7 seconds.. The script captures the output of that process once it dies and parses it.  From the output, the script pulls out the Device ID, which is the base mac-address of the devices, and the port number. Once the script has collected that data, it opens a web browser and passes the data to the web application.

The web application is a simple set of php scripts with a MySQL back end. When the first page receives the data, it searches the MySQL database for the room where the jack is located for that particular port and chassis. If the room number is in correct, they can hit submit, if its wrong, they simply can change the room number in that field and click submit.  Any ports with incorrect locations were loaded in to a separate database table.

So far the other students have made it through two of the residence halls with no errors in the documentation, except for that of ports that were added after we had visited those closets.  Hopefully this verification process continues to go smoothly.

Every time someone would attempt to send me an IM on facebook, Firefox would go gray and stop responding for a moment. I have discovered the quickest way to solve this problem, is to delete the .mozilla folder in my user profile.

CAUTION: This will remove all settings, extensions, and bookmarks in firefox.