urlscan and urlview: With the assist

Not having a lot of experience with the convenience and immediacy of local mail service, I find that things like urlscan and urlview are sometimes lost on me.

I’ve done my best though, to try and see the fearful symmetry of urlview, which skims through text files and plucks out viable URLs, then displays them as links. How would that be useful? When sent an e-mail filled with links, of course.

From there, it’s a simple hop-skip-and-jump to your fav-o-rite browser, and you can wallow at your leisure in the murky swill of the Internet.

And it’s got most of the requisite points — some color, a full-screen interface, abort keys on screen. Granted, it’s simple, but not so simple as to be unnoticed.

urlscan is a re-imagining of the task, and is written in python. You can probably see the resemblance.

And you can see where there’s a slight variation on the original theme, with a top-and-bottom arrangement over urlview’s list-and-status bar style. You pick your preference.

(I did notice, just as a side note, that urlscan seemed to glance over URLs that were prefixed with http:// but that may have been a quirk in my test list.)

Other notes: urlview has a complete configuration file in /etc/urlview/. urlscan can dump its ouput to STDOUT. Both expect you to configure $BROWSER beforehand, although I believe urlview can rely on its own configuration files too. Both are in Debian and Arch/AUR.

I feel obligated to mention that both urlview and urlscan are quite happy working their magic on plain text files, and don’t rely on any mail system whatsoever to work (which should be obvious from my screenshots). So if you have a project that needs to skim for web addresses, either will probably suffice.

On the other hand, I can’t really think of many ways to use either program beyond what they’re designed for — filtering through e-mails and displaying links. Perhaps in time I will find something to use them with. … 😉

scanlogd: Nothing to see here

I’m a little behind the power curve today, after spending the day with some curious computer issues, which may or may not be related to hardware upgrades.

Also a curious issue: scanlogd. The curious part being, I am afraid I don’t have anything to show for it.

kmandla@j05sdg1 ~ $ sudo scanlogd
kmandla@j05sdg1 ~ $ 

If something beyond that is supposed to happen, I can’t see how it comes about.

I’ve been working with the Debian version, which installs and starts without issue, but doesn’t … really … seem to show anything for the (miniscule) effort involved.

I read through the man page, and maybe that lack of output is OK. It seems it shouldn’t really do anything unless someone attempts to scan ports on that machine — in which case it should just make a note of the attempt somewhere in /var/log.

Which is very very unlikely to happen, given that scanlogd is just wallowing around on my home network.

I will leave it to the more knowledgeable server managers to see if it is of any use. As for me, as a lowly desktop user, this doesn’t seem to have a function. 😦

doscan: Oddly enough, I get nothing

In this business, if a program gives me nothing at all as its output, it means one of two things.

First, and the less likely of the two, it just doesn’t work. I’ve run into more than one of those in the D section; I’ll list them out for you in a day or two.

Second, and probably the problem in 90 percent of cases, I’m using it wrong, and being a dunderhead.

That’s probably what’s happening in the screenshot above. That’s the Debian version of doscan, which by all rights should list machines on my local network listening for a TCP connection.

I used the address above as a sort of generic network that I don’t mind sharing on the Internet, and of course as you can see, nothing comes about of it. Not even an error message.

But it’s the same for my actual network address. And if I try a wider, building-wide network? Nothing. What’s worse, the two commands there are straight from the man page as examples.

And yet, I see nothing as output. I assume that a null response yields nothing, but I also wonder if maybe something in doscan’s guts has gone sour, and all it will ever report is a blank line. 😦

It could be the case. Like I said, that was the Debian version. There is no version in Arch or AUR, and my attempts to build it from scratch resulted in make errors.

That does make me a little suspicious, not just because the last update listed at the home page was in 2003. Like I’ve said, 10 years is not a huge issue for Linux software, but it does make me look askance.

I open this one to the general public. If you can get doscan working and displaying some sort of output, please share. I am left wondering why, oddly, I get nothing. 😐