Slashdot Mirror
The Sound of Your Firewall
upside writes "It had to be done. Once The Spinning Cube of Potential Doom gave us a 3D visualization of a firewall, someone was bound to ask themselves 'What does your firewall sound like?'."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
I really like these concepts for alternate ways to visualize large amounts of data. Reminds me of Douglas Adam's Dirk Gently books. There was a character who wrote a program called Anthem that would interpret a company's stock data and vital statistics and play a tune based on that data.
Rather than using a Wav. file, maybe this could be written to play a variety MIDI tones to account for all kinds of activity on your network!
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
where the heck do people find the time for this stuff.... I can think of a whack load more things to do... like read slashdot.
That's all well and good, but what I really, really am dying to know is what my firewall FEELS like...
moudulating the pitch on the dropped/blocked port numbers? I bet it could sound like a windchime with the proper modulus.
This wall sounds like burning!
sounds like a firefox howling thru a impermeable firewall on port 80
fifteen jugglers, five believers
I've been doing exactly this same thing for a while. I found that it got extrememly obnoxious, so I dumbed mine down to just play a wave file whenever I get pinged by someone pinging me from a command line ping. I don't know why the length is different than the crap pings that come in every 8 or 9 seconds, but with this swatch definition below, it seems to trigger only when I am pinged by hand.
/firewall-ping.*LEN=84/
/etc/pingwatch.lock 1>/dev/null` /etc/pingwatch.lock) && (/usr/bin/play /usr/local/site/etc/soun /etc/pingwatch.lock)
.wav
/etc/crontab or whatever:
/usr/local/site/bin/arp-watch
/etc/arptable 1>/dev/null : /usr/bin/play /usr/local/site/etc/sounds/new.arp.entry.wav && echo $each >> /etc/arptable
:D
So, put this in your swatch file that watches your firewall log:
watchfor
exec "/usr/local/site/bin/ping-wave.sh ping.wav"
That script just locks the darned thing so it doesnt pop and crack if i get pinged twice:
ping-wave.sh:
if `grep OPEN
then (echo -n >
ds/$1) && (echo OPEN >
fi
And here's a link to my ping wave for you to use:
ping
I also used the naturalvoices website to make a nerdy computer lady announcing new entries in my arp table. You can grab wave file too if you want. Here's the script I have for that:
put this in your
0-59 * * * * root
and then make the above command contain this:
#!/bin/bash
for each in `arp -n |grep -v "Address"|grep -v "eth0"|awk '{print $3}'`
do
if grep $each
then
else
fi
done
if anyone can improve upon my bash, please, i have no ego.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
I'd rather have a silent firewall... I'm not the kind of people who likes having a big warning everytime some script kiddy scans my port 31337 or pings me... hell ZoneAlarm will warn you if there's a DHCP server on your network... and people who don't know better think that OMG IT'S A HAX!!!!!!11111111...
Maybe it could be nice on an IDS system though..
Grrr.. ch ch ch.. grrrr. ch ch ch... grrrr.. ch ch ch..
I need to replace the harddrive soon or im going to be without a firewall.
no
"Ding Dong"..."No one's home"
"Ding Dong"..."Not interested"
"Ding Dong"..."Go away"
"Ding Dong"..."Leave me alone"
"Ding Dong"..."porn you say? well come right on in"
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
It sounds like the screams of thousands of users, as I hit that red button marked: Power.
I use windows, so my firewall sounds something like this
Holy Crap! Help me lord! Bleeep!
A rock smashing glass
Yay metaphors!
More Cowbell!
ever get the feeling that some people have entirely too much time on their hands?
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Especially, when it is being Slashdotted like the one the article links to.
I can just imagine a war movie (your network) with bullets (bad packets) ping'n off of armor (firewall).
If you think your firewall is doing anything to prevent real attacks against your system, you are very mistaken. Firewalls are typically configured to let a whole hell of a lot of traffic through. Jeez, you have to let the OS itself have full reign of a large gamut of ports just to make it work right.
And if you don't feel threatened letting the OS have full control of what goes in and out over ports that the firewall has just given up on, then how about the fact that BlackICE, the premier software firewall, was found to have a gaping hole large enough to let the Giver in without touching the sides.
Firewalls only give the impression of safety and security. Then again, what's the alternative? Unplug the computer from the wall?
(Actually, the solution is to not do any important work with the computer, as it can be broken into in any number of ways. But we'll just let that luddite thought wail past our ears and pretend that we all have really important work to do)
Microsoft firewall: "Please don't hurt me! Hey, you look cool, can't possibly be malicious, come right in... OW, OH, THE PAIN!"
Norton firewall: "Bahahahaa! You can't get past me! I AM INVINCIBLE!!! *fires the firewall equivilent of fully automatic weapons into the air*"
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
Like a 486 on its last legs, fans barely moving, and the smell of cooking dust.... ahhhh.
E.
Never rub another man's rhubarb - The Joker
Depending on how much of that blotter paper you've licked, it may sound like the colors that taste like music.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Sure, come on in.
Hi, step right up.
Wait, let me see your ID...okay...Sasser eh? Alright sounds good.
Alright, I'm going on break now. Time for wifi to shut down
Woooo Saaaa
*Obligatory Old School quote*
I thought that was Bad Boys 2?
Casual Games/Downloads
I'd have to guess something like... "WHOOSH!".
Not sure about the firewall, but that LinuxGazette server is sounding like *crash*.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
how long until full fps style interaction with firewalls? this is the beginning of a Shadowrun-like matrix net where audio and visual become a big part of hacking
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIEEEE! Too many hits!!!! F*#%ING Slashdot!"
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
You are correct.. That was Bad Boys 2, not Old School. Now that joke is much funnier.
I send firewall logs to DShield.org, and you should to. The firewall is set to only log 100 denied packets at a time, so lazy bastard that I am I set a cronjob to reset the counters every hour. That was a few months ago.
Last week I happened to be looking at the logfiles, and I noticed something: an hour was no longer enough. The counter hits 100 within 10 or 15 minutes. I can watch the hits come in, and it's all Windows crap: Port 445. Port 137. Port 139. Port 1026. That's it. Nothing interesting -- you know, no stealthy scans by l33t cr5X0rZ, no probing for open relays, nothing.
Two thoughts before I go:
First, this makes for excellent demonstration material. A coworker mentioned that he was considering moving from Windows to Linux because he was tired of all the viruses and worms. I showed him what tail -f on my firewall logs looked like, pointed out that it was all Windows junk, and he was convinced. Gave him a Knoppix CD and made another notch on my belt. :-)
Second, I'm lucky: my ISP has not yet started firewalling ports yet. A friend's ISP just started, and now his web and mail server, which I'm doing DNS for, are no longer available from outside -- they've started blocking those along with 445, 137, 139, and so on. Sadly, it looks like the ISP has no provision for lifting this if you can prove you're l33t enough, so it looks like he's screwed.
Honestly, though, I'm not surprised. Yeah, it sucks that the Internet is no longer open -- but it sucks that the Internet is no longer friendly, too, and the one is a consequence of the other. As much as I bitch about Windows and Microsoft, I don't think they're entirely to blame...you get that many people joining something, and you're going to have enough asshats to ruin it pretty quickly.
Carousel is a lie!
...but I imagine the Linux Gazette web server sounds like Rice Krispies about now.
The coolest voice ever.
We (my fellow slashdotters) did this already, it was a slashdot story about audio alarms. Someone would have one sound (cricket chirp) go off go off when a web server was hit, another sound (bell) go off when a new mail arrived, etc. Loud noise meant an attack going off, lack of noise (when given constant sound, the sudden quiet is jarring) means the server is down.
It's the "Spinning Cube of Potential Doom", for God's sake you fuckers! Couldn't you have at least wondered what an "Wailing Alarm of Ultimate Death" sounded like? >_<
Next story.
[o]_O
Can't read the article due to 'slashing but it's already been done by peep - the network analyzer:
e edings/lisa2000/gilfix/gilfix_html/
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proc
"Bah!" - Dogbert
At least it scares away the users who come to my desk constantly to complain that their computer is too slow because of all the spyware on it.
... what is the sound of your web server in the throes of the /. effect? 10 minutes after the story has been posted and the article is MIA.
sounds like a rap with a lot of cuss words from the users as i block yahoo
fifteen jugglers, five believers
Open source of course
Peep Network Auralizer, iam sitting by a waterfall myself, those pesky flies crop up now and again but the toad deals with them
its a little old as it works, now if i can find a version for windows users they might understand the amount of network traffic from worms etc that their cable modem sees
For me, the sound of something bouncing off the iris of a stargate from SG-1, is the most reassuring noise I could imagine hearing if I converted IP traffic to sound.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
'Ecky- ecky- ecky- ecky- pikang- zoop- boing- goodem- zoo- owli- zhiv'
=)
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
That will teach you trying to karma whore, kiddie !
I know windows XP is supposed to have a firewall, but for the life of me I can't find it.
Maybe now if I listen closely.....
May the Maths Be with you!
Funny posts don't gain karma :)
I aint no whore
liqbase
"Ding Dong"
"Who is it?"
"Landshark."
"Oh... Ok."
(Chomp...)
Peep is a great tool to hear what's going on out there... where the hackers play !
It plays sound whenever an connection is made on a designated port (smtp, domain (DNS), http...) but also can play specific sounds based on events (keywords on log file -> snort, auth.log etc.)
I'd probably link mine to lots of A-Team references
Port Scan -> "I piddy the fool who messes with Mr T"
Startup -> "A Team theme music when they try to construct some form of tank out of metal sheeting and garden hose"
Yes, grasshopper, but what is the sound of one router dying??
Now I can write a virus that before it kills your NT systems, it plays Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" with this little tool. Or perhaps it plays Queen's "Another one bites the dust". Or, I can make it quasi-speech-synthesize something...
"all your base are belong to us", anyone?
stuff |
Should this post be called:
What does my interpretation of what a firewall sounds like, sound like?
Of course my Cisco firewall does make a real sound.
Its "mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm"
and the only perscription, is more cowbell baby!
Hey, Bob, you smell something burning?
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
PEEP the Network Auralizer This project, cooperatively developed by a faculty member and student in the Tufts University Comp. Sci. dept. answers this question. PEEP applies sounds to network events. Its really cool, i had checked it out, but didn't have much time to get very far with it. I imagine this software's authors will appreciate it if you give it a gander, and let them know.
sigSEGV - doy!
...hundreds of Jaffah slamming into my Stargate's titanium iris as that god-damned Code-Red and related worms STILL hit my web server every day.
Will nothing cure my ails short of packet-sniffing at the ISP level to determine who is infected and cut them off?
o/~ Badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger MUSHROOM MUSHROOM! o/~
o/~ Ohhh, a worrrm, oh noooo it's a worrrrrm o/~
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
in other words, WHO CARES?
I was thinking it'd be cool to set up your SMTP server so that each piece of detected and rejected spam would make it play a successive phrase of the SPAM Song.
Spam...
Spam...
Spam...
Spam...
Lovely Spam!...
etc.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I don't know what a firewall sounds like, but I think I hear a web server screaming...
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
My firewall sounds like a really bad techno song. It starts with a nice driving rythem with hits on 137 that come out like:
O M
bump-bump-bump-bump-bump-bump-bump-bump-bump
Then maybe a few attempts at an SQL worm on 1433-1434 so i get the second layer of the track; that's sound like 'dittlit-bump' so the track now becomes
bump-bump-bump-dittlit-bump-dittlit-bump
Now we've got some rythem going, but we there's always that annoying yet musical sound that comes interrupts the song the first time you hear it, but then you get used to it. We'll call that a portscan. ports 135-137-445-3127-5000
dah-dah-dahdah-dah-dah-dahdahdah
But at just that moment I get a fresh IP from my DSL provider, and the last guy who had it was running eDonkey, AIM file transfers, and bittorrent (as happened to my a couple days ago) and all the crap clients for said programs don't realize the old client died, so they keep trying said addresses.....we'll call that a big-ass bass hit that starts the loop over again.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Holy crap, my firewall sounds exactly like the Strong Bad techno song, minus the 'the system is down' quote. (ahhh the benfits of coyote linux. or IPcop.)
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail.html
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
You need this kind of quality to accurately measure the warfare that your Firewall is waging against anything evil on the cyber-waves. That latest Windows virus? Nope got smacked down by your firewall and you heard it about a minute ago.
Forget games(!?), just listen to your firewall wage glorious battle for the freedom and security of your PC and/or home network(!) in the comfort of your own home! All it would need then is a quality commentary...
"Firewall detected malicious port scan and DOS (Denial of Service) attacks aimed towards IP 19.5.4.10 on port 70. Access denied, commence lockdown and vapourize all opposition!" Forget those war movies folks, you can experience it for yourself now!
Or how about "Reinforcements (firewall updates) have just arrived deploying them as according to operating procedures".
Man, that would be the life, at least now spending hours on your own PC won't be dull again! Only thing left would be to be figure out a way to salute to your firewall and give it medals of honour...Hmmmm, this will take some time to figure out, but at least we got this far ^_^
... you know, my firewall sounds just like John Cage's 4'33"! This is sooo weird!
-m
#
# Modus Ponens
#
How about if after crackers 0wn you, they replace your 'ping' .wav with one of the Reagan quote, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!"
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
is the scream of the website going down in flames...
--
Life is a sexually transmitted fatal diseas.
I did this before myself. Here is what my firewall sounded like.
Obligatory:
"I love the smell of firewall in the morning. Smells like... victory!"
I guess they are now wondering what a Slashdotting sounds like?
Anyone wants to guess?
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Walking many ports over many hosts creates a lawnmower effect. A single IP port scan creates a stripe.
.wav file. The scanning itself is the least interesting part, it's what the attacker does after he finds an available service that is interesting. The way he has it visualized is ok, but perhaps 3D is the way to go, where that box is turned slightly, and the back wall of the box has little holes in it, where you have services mapped to a DMZ. Then when a connection goes through the hole, you can also visually see it.
What I want to see is when a machine on the inside or a DMZ has a port open to it, say port 80 & 443 - I want to see when somebody who JUST walked my net with a lawnmower then starts sending ADDITIONAL packets to the open ports. Maybe you could do that with sound. The code could take a src-ip that just mowed you, and assign a sound to it. Then, any additional data to open ports would create a sound, maybe a buzzsaw into wood
And whisper'd in the sounds.... of silence....
My thoughts exactly, dude
DOS attack -- Hail storm, Pong or Arkanoid with gold bricks
Firewall penetration -- Breakout or Arkanoid with lasers
Block All Traffic -- Mario with a star
AK-74 firing teflon tipped 7.62mm in Mammoth Cave
Adding different flavors of odor to different traffic would be fantastic. For example, adding a bad strong smell to virus traffic would give us some alert. hmmm..."I smell virus"
http://www.isolvesystems.com - Technology Marketplace
You realize what this means, don't you?
These two technologies combined will make instrusion detection as snazy as hacking looks in movies. The next step will be putting these types of visualizations on the cracking tools.
Once that happens, we won't be able to laugh at how stupid hackers come off in movies... Well, we will have a harder time explaining why they come off stupid.
My firewall sounds like a Sparcstation LX, because it is one.
"Who's going to believe a talking head?" - Herbert West
Was there ever a use for this flag other than to annoy your co-workers?
If you're running your firewall on Solaris, hook up a speaker and run snoop -a...
;)
(Though frankly I'd prefer a WOPR filter
Hmmm. Reading the intro I thought it would be similar to the cube of doom thing: i.e. mapping the port and src/dst IP to some frequency/harmonics map. But it will probably generate the same noise as your old 2400 baud modem on /dev/ttyS0.
Back to the days where listening to your network was a normal thing:
"Hey Bob, quiet! Listen to modem 1. I think I hear a telnet session coming in."
No electrons were harmed sending this message. Wait,
What is happening to the world?!!? .wav files and has a keyboard!?!?!
.wav play while xmms is running in the background.
A firewall that can play
I would rather get that keyboard out and plug it into my desktop for my feet to do the typing when my hands are relaxing.
However If you say that's for your desktop, a windowmaker dockapp would fare 100 times better than your symphony.
I would be interested to know how one can get that
If a NAK went to a port where nothing was listening, would it make a sound?
I've been running a firewall with 'audio feedback' for quite a while now. Back then I wanted a filtering bridge, and the simplest way to do it was to scrounge a PC, some SMC network cards, and download the free version of KarlBridge which could do this. One of the tricks used in this software was to use the 'sound' connector on old PC motherboards (from when they could only make beeping noises) to drive an 'activity' LED instead of that speaker. Unfortunately, the computer I choose for this had a little speaker attached directly to the motherboard, and I had no greate urge to de-solder it, so I decided to just leave it as it was. This bridge is still running great, and whenever I'm in the coms cupboard where this lives, I can hear the network activity clicking away like a geiger counter, since that is pretty much the kind of noise it makes.
They should get the wave file from Unreal Tournament where the announcer says "DENIED!" whenever a packet drops.
---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
Then you'll remember the scene that could fit what a firewall sounds like: No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No!
The CB App. What's your 20?
With a bit of awk or grep, you could have your snort logs give you sounds for different events. Sure, it's not interesting to hear every single worm hit your firewall, but whenever someone's doing sneaky scans etc it would be a good idea if a big speaker went BONG in the war room.
Stop the brainwash
I seem to remember a similar concept being used in fighter aircraft. The pilot would hear certain directional sounds to indicate inbound missiles. The advantage of using sound over a visual display was that the human mind is apparently very good a detecting the direction where a sound is coming from, and it avoids overloading the visual display further.
I've also heard of using sound in the monitoring systems for mechanical equipment. Operational events are assigned a certain sound, and a "normal" state of the equipment would have certain patterns and frequencies that an operator would recognize as normal. The operator doesn't have to know what each individual sound means. If something abnormal happens, the operator get a "sense" that something is wrong by the change in tempo / frequency, etc.
If done properly, I think that adding sound feedback to a network / firewall monitoring application could be useful.
you meant the ports were accepting all incoming connections
What you need to ear is not the DROPed packets, but the ACCEPTed ones.
If you make a diferent sound for every port/address/whatever packet you receive it becomes easy to recognice when the traffic is anormal.
My Firewall only ever makes this sound: *arf* *arf* *arf*
But that could be because my dog is named Firewall.
"Who are these slashdot people... they swept over like Mongol-Tartars!"
- "Latest Chernobyl Motorcycle Photos"
All the time
3.243F6A8885A308D313
If he had sounds of different pitches for different events, I could have composed a short ditty to "play" to him.
"Your Honour, I wasn't trying to crack his system, I was trying to play the Humming Chorus from Madame Butterfly".
(Important to pick something that's in the public domain, don't want the RIAA coming after you for unlicensed performances...)
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
"All Your Base Are Belong to Us!"
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. - HST
What he/you are looking for is this project.
(the website is a bit down right now so it seems, see google, you know the drill)
It's been on slashdot before...
New things are always on the horizon
but I can't bring myself to do so, knowing that they have tried to screw over the REAL Linux Gazette.
Sorry, but I just can't support SSC.
Configure ipchains (or iptables) on a 166MHz P1, you'll definately hear the activity...well, if you know your server intimately that is. =)
NAME
... ]
/dev/audio (warning: can be noisy).
snoop - capture and inspect network packets
[
OPTIONS
-a Listen to packets on
Years ago I worked as part of the helpdesk service at my college. One of our public labs had a large line-impact printer.
... I was at work this morning and something just like my original printer story happened. We've got large format DesignJet printers from HP (basically giant InkJet printers that can handle 3 to 5 foot wide, 300 foot long rolls of paper). When they print, they run a vacuum fan to hold the paper down and steady while the print head zips back and forth across the sheet. The vacuum fans produce a dull sort of roar while printing. BUT, there's this second sound while they're printing ... the sound of the print-head zipping back and forth, back and forth, across the sheet. Well, this morning, I was dealing with some stuff that really had me focusing on the task at hand. All of a sudden, some part of my brain alerted me to the fact that I'd been hearing the dull roar of the vacuum fan for a while, but not the sound of the print-head moving back and forth. This is really an am
[I'll include a side note for those who do not know what a line-impact printer is. Do you remember dot-matrix printers? No? Ok, no help for you. But for those of you who do remember them, you probably realized how having a single print-head that had to travel back and forth across the page contributed to their relatively slow printing speed. No doubt some of you came to the same conclusion the developer of the line-impact printer did: instead of having a tiny print head move back and forth across the page, simply create a huge print head (well, very wide but not very high) that could print an entire line at a time. That makes for a faster printer, and also a much more reliable printer (far fewer moving parts). Hence you can still find them in industrial applications where people need large volumes of low quality prints. This also happened to be ideal in an 1980's computer lab visited by uber geeks who needed to print out their code, and psychology students who needed to dump pounds and pounds of statistical data to a printer somehow. Anyway...]
The helpdesk office at this particular computer lab was attached to the lab with the line printer. So it was close enough you could hear it running. With normal, plain text like you'd see in a printout from a computer program, the printer (being an impact printer) made a recognizable sound. Mostly a wavering, roaring sound. However, when some idiot decided to dump a PostScript file to the printer - and with the printer just being designed for plain text (i.e. no freakin' PostScript like all the signs said) - the sound would change to a solid, angry roar as each entire page would be filled up by PostScript code. The difference in sound proved to be incredibly useful. Anyone sitting in the helpdesk office, even if they were concentrating on some other task and thus seemingly oblivious to the faint sound of the printer, would somehow hear the change in the sound. They'd know that someone had screwed up and that they needed to go and stop the job before the printer blew through an entire box of fan-fold paper.
As I say, we'd just tune into the change in the sound automatically. It wasn't even an especially conscious thing. You'd be working away on some task, completely engrossed in homework or something, and all of a sudden your brain would tune into the fact that the background sound had changed. With normal printing it was completely tuned out. You never noticed it until there was a problem. How fantastic is that? This is a great feature of the human brain - you can be giving your full attention to one task, but some other part of your brain is still somehow listening out for changes in your environment and will let you know if something's changed. I would find this so useful for a firewall. The sounds would have to be low volume and carefully chosen so as not to drive me insane in either instance (normal operation or "uh oh" mode), but I'd really love to give this a try.
It's such a coincidence
Whoever designed level 61 in Frozen Bubble is a sadistic bastard.
Since I run pf, it simply goes "Ha-ha" when a script kiddie tries to get in.
The easiest way to literally listen to your network is with tcpsound. It's like tcpdump but 1) interprets the output from tcpdump so that you can first ssh to a remote host (i.e. your firewall) and 2) mixes configurable .wavs using libSDL. The implementation is very very simple but it works very well.
/root/.tcpsound has a click sound for incoming HTTP packets and a ding sound for outgoing HTTP packets.
:)
http://www.ioplex.com/~miallen/tcpsound/
Just install one lib, build the tcpsound binary and run:
# tcpsound -r server.com ! port ssh
Or better, run it without ! port ssh for a split second to determine the ssh client address (you) and exclude that like:
# tcpsound -r server.com ! host <host/ip of listener>
This is a little like the application "peep" but you only need sshd root access and tcpdump on the remote machine.
The config can be heavily tweeked to play any wav sound given a port. You can have different sounds for packets with a specific source port vs a different destination port. For example, you'll see the default config it creates in
A bathroomhumor.conf sould really be added to the distribution for demonstration purposes
that this sort of thing would go well with that overpriced glowing monitor globe you can buy.
Infoglobe
Or at least a homemade version of it.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
I recall reading something along these lines once as an alternative way to track web server hits, but the programmer used random animal and bird noises. Jungle in a box.
find > /dev/dsp
> I guess they are now wondering what a Slashdotting sounds like? Anyone wants to guess?
A swarm of Locusts invading a luscious garden immediately comes to mind...
This should also be pretty close, I guess.
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
From the Wikipedia link you provided I gather someone has written a PhD Thesis on the Slashdot effect. When I was in college we had to write ours about boring stuff like compiler optimizations...
:-)
Now everybody: let's Slashdot the thesis paper about the Slashdot effect
If my firewall had a sound card, I'd want it to sound like the game Missle Command :)
If a packet is dropped at the firewall, and there isn't an open port to hear it, does it make a sound?
Cave, wreck, and deep diver.
The old Atari 8-bit computers had I/O that relied on the sound chip for clocking, and as a side effect, I/O always resulted in at least some small amount of sound. In fact, the designers took advantage of this when it came to storage by purposely turning up the volume for disk (and tape) I/O. You'd get hissy beeps for disk reads (one per sector) and hissy thumps for writes. (The hiss was the actual data modulating the waveform.) After using one for not too long, you'd get very accustomed to the sounds of various operations (booting, saving, loading, etc., each had their own rhythm) and you'd immediately know by the sound when something was wrong.
I kinda miss that.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Since my firewall doesn't have a sound card and is in a cabinet in the attic, I'm thinking of another way to use the example given. Actually, it's pretty simple. Use syslogd to send the logs from your firewall to a different system, also running syslogd (I imagine BSD might also use the same protocol). Then use the script on that system. Since I would like the 'plink' to be in the living room, I'll need to set up a machine next to the stereo. Might as well put one there to play MP3s on anyway...
Hello little man. I will destroy you!
(Won't waste another month on that... ;)
I actually tried something like this for fun. I wrote a NAT routing program using WinPCap a year ago, and threw in one line of code: Beep(Packet.cksum % 3000, 10); (3000 being some abstact maximum frequency of sound, and 10ms per packet). It is really quite awesome to listen to. The cool thing is, that with say a stream of packets from one TCP session seem to have patterns that yeild decrementing checksum (so the sound actually cycles down and sounds like a 'down-load')
"Yes, I have a Disaster Recovery Plan. It's called my Resume"
It's an interesting way to demonstrate what the company firewall is currently doing, should the beancounters be blundering around looking for apparently-unused electronica to downsize.
Fire the sound application up with an appropriate mix of movie sound effects tuned towards the "deflection of incoming ordinance" end of the spectrum, and let them know that each sound indicates a successfully blocked attack on the company.
For bonus points, make a screen flash with overlapping warning messages at the same time, synched to the sounds.
For the cynical, rig up a sequence using klaxons in case someone tries a Walter Peck manouver.
I just can't be bothered.
Grrr.. ch ch ch.. grrrr. ch ch ch... grrrr.. ch ch ch.
Moneyyyyy - it's a crime. Gotta buy a new disk in a real _short_ time.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
"You hear that, Mr Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability. Of your website being Slashdotted, Mr Anderson."
[YELLOW~1]
Urine! Testing...%1!,%2!,%3!,(R)D:\PUB\PEE-CUPS and packets to drop off