09:07 Sunday, September 09 2004

arghhh...my head

I slept (or didn't) excessively poorly last night. Nearly every possible reason not to sleep well seemed to happen all at once. Surprisingly, the only thing that didn't keep me up was noise from our (recently quiet) neighbors. I had really horrific indigestion for a while. Then Denise woke me unintentionally with leg pains. And then for the remainder of the night I kept having this bizarre & annoying reoccuring dream about work. I woke up for good just after 7AM where I decided to give up, as I felt like crap, and figured that David would be waking up shortly anyway. As it turns out David slept until just after 8AM, but I have a horrible headache all the same, and I feel like a truck hit me.
For anyone out there who is using nmap on Redhat and upgraded to Fedora, take note, the behavior has changed for the return value of a scan. In the version of nmap that came with RH-7.3, when a port scan returned anything other than 'open' the return value was a 1. This was nice and useful for anyone integrating nmap into a shell script. However, in the version of nmap that comes with Fedora Core 2(and possibly earlier), it always returns 0 as long as the scan completes with some kind of port status (open, closed, filtered, etc). I discovered this the semi-hard way in our primitive port monitoring scripts which were no longer detecting port failures since everything was a 0. I fixed this just by grepping for 'open' in the scanning output, but its not as elegant as it once was.