If you are leaving in a large network of workstation with static IP assignment, you might be interesting in conversion to dynamic IP assignment for administrative reasons. In the view of administrators, they are happy to control, change settings on centralized server instead of walking around to change settings one by one especially if you are in very large industrial site.

However, writing dhcpd.conf is not as easy as a single click for large unmanaged network. Why? People or applications might strictly rely on IP address or even netbios name. We have to smoothly migrate to DHCP based on current state of network configuration. That means we should assign current IP address of each machine as before and also assign current netbios name to support legacy people and appliations.

Fortunately, there are some trick to accomplish this task with less effort. The magic is ARP. ARP stands for Address Resolution Protocol. We can use ARP to obtain list of IP address and its associlate MAC address as follow.

If you are a network administrator or must work with large Windows user, you may want to obtain the netbios name of each machine programmatically. Why? There are many reasons to know netbios name by given IP address.

1. Create a list of IP and associate name
2. Find name conflict
3. Obtain machine information from IP

Fortunately, samba package provides a tool called "nmblookup" to help us in this situation. It is very easy to reverse lookup the name using option "-A". However, there are lots of information returned.

If you are serious to blog, I don"t think you will like to use IE or Firefox to post your blogs effectively, me too. That"s why my third criteria is XML-RPC capablity. If you just want to blog, blog, blog, and blog, most of pure blog engine supports XML-RPC. For more detail, there are 2 XML-RPC APIs listed below.

1. Blogger Atom API
2. MetaWeblog API

Actually, you might see the extended version of MetaWeblog API in form of mt. Don"t think that it stands for MovableType, instead it is Meta. Blogger Atom API is the first innovative XML-RPC APIs for publishing data on website through remote interface invented by Pyra Labs (now Google). Anyway, it doesn"t support lots of features:

DATA: BEGIN OF wa_tab1,
        fld1(4) VALUE ’FLD1’,
        fld2(4) VALUE ’FLD2’,
        fld3(4) VALUE ’FLD3’,
        fld4(4) VALUE ’FLD4’,
        fld5(4) VALUE ’FLD5’,
      END OF wa_tab1,
      BEGIN OF wa_tab2,
        fld1(4),
        fld2(4),
        fld3(4),
        fld4(4),
      END OF wa_tab2.
************* Move Corresponding *************
MOVE-CORRESPONDING wa_tab1 to wa_tab2.
************ End Move Corresponding **********
******************** Move ********************
MOVE: wa_tab1-fld1 to wa_tab2-fld1,
      wa_tab1-fld2 to wa_tab2-fld2,
      wa_tab1-fld3 to wa_tab2-fld3,
      wa_tab1-fld4 to wa_tab2-fld4.
****************** End Move ******************     

I got an asking for suggestion on an annoying network problem in a company. The problem is quite simple. The company is in a 4 floors building. ADSL router and DHCP server are placed at 3rd floor. Last year, there are 2 independent network for 4th floor and 2nd-3rd floors. This year the company want to consolidate network into just one so they bought 4 switching hubs for each floor and connected all switching hubs in daisy chain style network. Unfortunately, the network was so unstable. Some machines on 4th floor oftenly were unable to obtain IP from DHCP server.

Why Linux? There are lots of encoding tool for Windows including codec pack. Usually, I use Windows for playback and also desktop work. My Windows is not as fast as you think. It is just a laptop. I don"t want to use my laptop to create a DVD! Fortunately, I have many linux account. The linux machines seem to be slower than my laptop but there are more that one of them! That means I can create a DVD faster by encoding several tracks simulteneously on multiple hosts.

The key software is ffmpeg for encoding video in any formats into mpeg2 codec. It depends on only output format of your choice. NTSC or PAL. Widescreen or Fullscreen.