Sayonara 2013

Just a few updates.

First, I finally have a scientific publication. Together with Andrew Goldberg and Ilya Razenshteyn we worked on hub labels and created a paper Separating Hierarchical and General Hub Labelings. It was accepted to the MFCS2013 conference and published in the proceedings. You can have a preprint from arxiv or a final paper from the publisher.

Second, I realized there are many textbook algorithms almost everybody implemented and I didn't. I started algory project on GitHub to fill this gap.
I don't promise a cool graph library in the near future, but I hope to add new algorithms there sometimes.

simple port scanner

Strange, but well-known scanning tool nmap has a quite aggressive license. It is in fact GNU GPL Version 2 but with some exceptions. Among others there is one which may force you not to use nmap in your scripts:

 * Note that the GPL places important restrictions on "derived works", yet *
 * it does not provide a detailed definition of that term.  To avoid       *
 * misunderstandings, we consider an application to constitute a           *
 * "derivative work" for the purpose of this license if it does any of the *
 * following:                                                              *
...
 * o Executes Nmap and parses the results (as opposed to typical shell or  *
 *   execution-menu apps, which simply display raw Nmap output and so are  *
 *   not derivative works.)                                                * 

This is very confusing and I've decided to write my own port scanner for uguu which is BSD-licensed. Needless to say, we planned to use nmap originally. With having our own tool we strike several goals at once: no nmap license terms violation, no external program execution in our python scripts, lessen the number external parts uguu is depended on, scan a list of host-port pairs at once without grouping by ports (you can give nmap list of hosts through stdin but you can't specify ports there, afaik). And with all these advantages it was fine by me to have a scanner with less performance. But as for my small /24 network with 4 computers and no crappy firewalls it is even faster than nmap (nmap -PS -p): 3 seconds against 8 seconds.

The scanner is written in python and is available as a part of uguu codebase (bin/network.py). It can be executed as a standalone application with ip range (three formats are available: single host, ip1-ip2, ip/netmask) and port specified in command line. Ip range can't be large for now due to number of open files limitations, but it worked for me with /24 netmask.

PS. Should I pass some other options to nmap? But no cheating here, it has to be a user-invoked port scanner.

uguu - search engine for local networks

I've spent new year holidays on designing and writing (alongside with another one developer) a local searcher which would allow quick search and browsing through SMB and FTP shares. For years we were using http://sourceforge.net/projects/fsmbsearch but I don't like neither it's design which almost doesn't rely on relational database (I may be wrong here and it would be interesting to find out the answer) nor it's implementation when installation requires dealing with autohell, patching some outdated version of samba and getting loads of perl modules.

The new search engine called uguu is entirely open source and is available at http://code.google.com/p/uguu. It uses libsmbclient and small amount of C code for scanning SMB share, postgres for database, python for scripts and django as web framework.
It is still very far way to go (for example, no search page yet) and there are some things I plan to do myself, but if you want to contribute in any way feel free to join google group devoted to this project: http://groups.google.com/group/uguu