Cisco IOS emulator

Today a discover a great piece of software called Dynamips that will allow us to emulate the CISCO IOS, and run virtual routers and PIXes. You heard right "Emulate" not "simulate", the software actually runs the IOS and let you create interfaces, the software is command line but there is other interesting project called GNS3, which is a graphical network simulator that allows simulation of complex networks.

I'm starting to play with this thing, but seems pretty solid, there are people that are running in their homes as PIX firewalls, routers, ipsec vpns and QoS, with GNS3.
This is very interesting when you need to test something in a real IOS, and you don't have the necessary hardware.

It's important to remark that you will need the CISCO IOS images.

Enjoy-CMM

Explico - Network forensics

A great new tool for analyzing network traffic has been released, as stated in the Xplico web site:

"Xplico isn’t a network protocol analyzer. Xplico is an open source Network Forensic Analisys Tool (NFAT)."

The goal of Xplico is extract from an internet traffic capture the applications data contained.
For example, from a pcap file Xplico extracts each email (POP, IMAP, and SMTP protocols), all HTTP contents, each VoIP call (SIP), and so on. Xplico isn’t a network protocol analyzer. Xplico is an open source Network Forensic Analisys Tool (NFAT).

Website and more info: http://www.xplico.org/about

-CMM