Wireshark with Lua on RHEL / CentOS

Wireshark with Lua-based dissector

What do you do on a rainy public holiday with COVID19 restrictions in place? Finally get Wireshark to work with Lua support to have custom dissectors. Dissectors are useful to turn binary garbage into readable TCP or UDP packet content. Lua is a scripting language and a supported way of adding dissectors in Wireshark. Unfortunately, the install package for Red Hat Enterprise Linux does not include Lua support. Compiling Wireshark on my RHEL 8.3 does not simply work because it requires Lua version 5.2 for my scripts to work. And RHEL either has version 5.3 or 5.1 which both are incompatible (long story). So, let's get going.

Upcoming Db2 IDUG conferences

A quick post on the upcoming Db2 conferences, organized by the International Db2 User Group (IDUG). 

• The IDUG North America "2021 NA Db2 Tech Conference" is going to be a virtual event again. It is scheduled from June 7-16, 2021. The conference agenda is already available and registration is open.
• The European IDUG conference, 2021 EMEA Db2 Tech Conference, is still slated to be an in-person event. I hope to meet you in Edinburgh, Scotland, this year in October. The conference team offers mentoring for new speakers. The submission deadline just passed, but if you are a customer with a good proposal, there might be .... 

Last, but not least, I recommend to take a look at the IDUG page with regional Db2 user groups. Some of them offer virtual events, too, and facilitating networking and exchange of information during the pandemic.

cron-like scheduling on IBM Cloud

cron-like scheduling

Some days ago I stumbled over my 2015 post "Bluemix: Simple cron-like service for my Python code". It is not just the name Bluemix which is dated. Since then, it has transformed into IBM Cloud Platform and has added serverless compute options like IBM Cloud Functions (OpenWhisk) and recently IBM Cloud Code Engine. Both of them support "eventing", event-based execution of code. And both support Python code as well as many other programming languages like Node.js, Go (Golang), PHP and more. So, what does it take to set up cron-like scheduling? Not much.

Cloud tutorial on serveless web app and eventing

A follow-up from my last post on Python decorators:

Solution architecture

Some years back, on IBM Cloud, we introduced an IBM Cloud solution tutorial for GitHub traffic analytics based on Cloud Foundry and IBM Cloud Functions. A Cloud Functions action is triggered daily to collect traffic data. The action stores the data in a Db2 database. Users can then analyse the data in a Python Flask app served by Cloud Foundry.

Today, that same solution scenario and app are still available, but they are served by IBM Cloud Code Engine. Code Engine is a fully managed, serverless platform that runs your containerized workloads, including web apps, microservices, event-driven functions or batch jobs. The slightly renamed tutorial — "Serverless web app and eventing for data retrieval and analytics" — demonstrates how the existing app can be containerized and both served as web app and and used to process the daily data collection event.

Continue reading the article on the IBM Cloud blog.