For years I’ve used the nslookup utility to quickly confirm that something-or-other about a domain name is correct. Commands like “nslookup -type=soa” roll right off my fingers onto the keyboard not because I’m such a fine typist as because I’ve used them so many times. This has earned me some low-grade derision from Linux-enthusiasts, generally the same types that use vi for everything and cannot comprehend the simple luxury of an application like joe. But I digress. Worse than the personal snootiness is when a shell pops up nonsense like this:

$ nslookup deguia.net
Note:  nslookup is deprecated and may be removed from future releases.
Consider using the `dig' or `host' programs instead.  Run nslookup with
the `-sil[ent]' option to prevent this message from appearing.
Server:         208.201.224.33
Address:        208.201.224.33#53

Name:   deguia.net
Address: 209.204.175.65

Nslookup is deprecated, use dig. Dig does everything nslookup does, but better and uses five less keystrokes. Well… Yeah, dig will tell me what the A record is for www.deguia.net just fine. It’ll also carry along a screenfull of crap with it:

$ dig deguia.net

; <<>> DiG 9.2.1 <<>> deguia.net
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 48163
;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;deguia.net.                    IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
deguia.net.             7200    IN      A       209.204.175.65

;; Query time: 0 msec
;; SERVER: 208.201.224.33#53(208.201.224.33)
;; WHEN: Wed Feb 13 20:39:23 2008
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 44

Compare with the simple elegance of nslookup or host:

$ nslookup deguia.net
Server:         208.201.224.11
Address:        208.201.224.11#53

Name:   deguia.net
Address: 209.204.175.65

$ host deguia.net
deguia.net has address 209.204.175.65
deguia.net mail is handled by 10 mailin-02.mx.sonic.net.
deguia.net mail is handled by 10 mailin-01.mx.sonic.net.

Those two commands together caused less screen-scree than dig did by its little three-letter self. Do I want to wade through all that garbage from dig? Oh hell no. I ran the command to get an answer to a very straightforward question. If I wanted to read a novel I'd have gone to the library. Lots of information there, very little of which is of typically of use to me.

By my calculations, that's roughly a 1:50 signal to noise ratio. For every pixel of output I'm looking for, I'm skimming through 50 pixels of junk. Good old nslookup provides a 1:7 ratio. Same output for my purpose, less jibber jabber, so I waste the five extra keystrokes to save my scroll buffer a little work and keep more previous work on-screen for the moment. More recent versions of host fare well, but lack a crucial ingredient for my purposes: a warning if the response is non-authoritative. That extra couple lines telling where the answer is from has saved my bacon more times than I care to recall.

Earlier today I was perusing lawsofsimplicity.com when a message came through my inbox that reminded me of a little something I'd forgotten all about, the "+short" option. With the +short brewed into a quick little bash alias, dig behaves much more like our good buddy host, but with a lot more handy options available. The web and email content clicked in my head, and I finally find myself willing to give dig another shot.

Nevermind that link I put up. It’s rubbish for my purposes. I didn’t really have my heart set on making a Vista gadget so much as simply making an alternate means for somebody to open up a Vista box for ICMP echo response. So I loaded up a copy of Visual Basic, learned a couple things, and brewed up a simple application that tests for a firewall rule of a particular name, then allows the user to open up ICMP (if the rule isn’t already there) or close it off (by deleting the rule). All done through janktastical wshShell.run legerdemain. At first I used wshShell.exec (as it allows access to stdout), but I suppose I know better now.

I’ve got some testing to do, particularly in regards to the “publish” mechanism in Visual Basic. I’ve never used that beast before, usually just brewing up remedial scripts for use on Apache web servers, so all this business regarding signing and means of distribution are totally foreign to me. Once I’m satisfied that it works properly on systems other than my laptop, insert some means of LARTing fools that try to run it on pre-Vista boxen, and narrow down precisely which hosts I intend to let ping it (the Sonic.net latency tester and technical support IPs being obvious choices), I’ll put a little finishing polish on the text, and…

Boy is it easy to make a mountain out of a molehill. The things I’ll do to help little old ladies not have to do this.

p.s. – the escape characters in Visual Basic are retarded.

So here I am trying to make a quick little sidebar gadget. Nothing fancy, I just want to be able to tell if a specific, named, firewall rule is active, and either present a button to disable it (if it’s there) or a button to enable it (if it isn’t). This can be done handily through the command line, but requires elevation. So I search around a bit. Turns out I’m the only person on the face of the Earth that actually wants a gadget to prompt for elevation. Turns out a sidebar gadget cannot do that directly. Guess I’ll have to kludge it.