Fun with 40m

Thanks to a reddit thread yesterday, and unbeknown to either of us until we met up on 40m SSB last night two Kiwis here in the US got chatting for near an hour.

Wife snagged a pic.

If that wasn't chance enough, 20 mins prior to that contact after I had finished tuning the AL-80B up I said my callsign once, and a KL7 near Fairbanks Alaska started calling me back, we managed a few overs before the band shut between WA and AK.

This comes after a good couple of weeks calling CQ on various bands and various times and getting .. well, nothing. I'm all for digi modes and all things new, but nothing beats getting putting on the headphones, vacuum tube amp with a 3-500Z anode glowing, antennas smoldering, and a couple of fun QSOs! 

Pneumatic Antenna Launcher

I recently got a Pneumatic Antenna Launcher from Alan Biocca Engineering, the CSV17. Very well made, fires weighted tennis balls, and pumps up with bicycle pump.

Every other launcher I've seen fire lead weights which are asking for trouble, unless you're going over a tree with nothing of consequence behind it (e.g. an empty field).

I got a line over a Fir tree branch at 60ft on the first try with 50 psi (the 90 psi max will go 150+ ft), and with-in a couple hours in the rain I had my OCFD up where it clears the other trees around. At the previous height of 40ft I was always getting snagged in the Maple trees, and couldn't get one leg fully clear of one.

The OCFD has come to life on 80m and 40m, signals are noticeably stronger, and it's uncovered a layer of weaker signals previously lost in the noise. I've started to hear more DX on 20m too. On 6m the local repeaters are much stronger which suggests it might be useful here too.

The antenna launcher has already paid for it self in ease of getting a lines accurately over trees, and improved antenna performance as a result!

Report Linux IP, hostname & name servers

This script finds Linux hosts, and reports their IP address, FQDN hostname, name servers and outputs results in CSV format.

Details:

• nmap is used to scan IP ranges for hosts listing on port 22, then
• Remote ssh command is run to connect to each host, find FQDN (hostname -f) and configured name severs (resolv.conf)
• This assumes the user running the script has the privilege to login to each host via SSH
• The RSA key fingerprint prompt is auto accepted and the RSA key fingerprint is then discarded so that your ~/.ssh/known_hosts file is not filled up with hundreds or thousands of  RSA key fingerprints
• Results are output to CSV file.

https://github.com/lonney9/BashScripts/blob/master/Report-IP-DNS-FQDN-CSV.sh

Windows DNS Server Query Stats

Generate reports from Windows DNS servers showing client query statistics. This will simply show the IP/hostname of the client, and how many queries it has generated. We used this to track down what was talking to our Windows DNS servers as part of a network migration project.

Uses Windows DNS server debug logging and Microsoft Log Parser 2.2.

DNS servers output log to local storage, log directory is shared read-only.

An intermediate host is used to run a PowerShell script via Task Scheduler that reads the log over the network, parses it and outputs a CSV and HTML report for easy viewing. This removes the need for DCs / DNS hosts to run a script and users to login to them to retrieve the report.

The script is configured to only parse the log if has been X number of hours (e.g. 12) since the last report was generated and if the log file is over X (e.g. 50mb) size. The Windows DNS server debug log is cleared and started fresh when max log size is reached (this is by design). This way we can schedule the script to run every few minutes, and capture a reasonable amount of data a couple times a day, if nether condition is met, the script does nothing.

The scripts I assembled plus config info can be found at https://github.com/lonney9/WindowsDnsServerReporting