George Ross's Home Page

• In 1992 I gave a talk at the European X Users' Group conference, describing our X configuration. A modified version of this appeared in volume 7 of The X Resource, published by O'Reilly and Associates. A further modified version was published locally as a technical note.
• The slides and examples for a couple of introductory X toolkit programming talks I gave to fourth-year students for several years until 1995 are here. Incidentally, the X Consortium's "hardcopy" documentation can be found here.
• Here are the slides and diagrams for the "guest" half-lecture I gave to the CS3 comms course in March 1998. Note that there's a more recent version here.
• These are the slides for a brief introductory talk on ethernet technology that I used at the beginning of an internal Computer Science meeting in November 1998 to discuss our future network topology...
• ... and these are the slides for a short presentation on our then-newly-acquired 3Com SuperStack 3300 switches that I gave at the Edinburgh Science COs meeting in December 1998.
• These are (most of) my slides from the SciCOs "security" meeting of June 1999. I think the only missing one is of our IPfilter rules, and that's here.
• Here are the slides for my part of the EdLUG "security workshop" held on 14th March 2000.
• The slides for my talk at the UKERNA Workshop on Computer Security held in November 2000 are available in PostScript, PDF or .dvi formats. The other contributors' slides can be found by following the links from UKERNA's own conference pages. You might also be interested in the TCP wrappers stuff on Wietse Venema's home page, the IP filter home page, and the ipchains documentation.
• In March 2002 I gave the CS3/MSc comms "guest" lecture again, the subject matter being how and why the CS network has evolved the way it has over the last 25 years or so. The slides and diagrams can be found here. Last year's version is still here. Graphs of the traffic on most of our switch ports are also available to EdLAN users.

I've written a Tnm-based utility to make it easier for our technical staff to configure our HP ProCurve and 3Com SuperStack 3300 switches. The ProCurve version is here, and the SuperStack version is here. If you want to generate MRTG configuration files you can use this tool. I've also written a couple of little monitoring utilities: MACwatch dumps switch forwarding tables into a history file (run it from cron every so often; and note that if you want to get information from a 3Com SuperStack switch for anything other than the default VLAN then you'll need to enable fastIP); and Monitor tracks up and down times for switches and end-systems.

You can find my makeDNS utility here -- it's a utility for converting /etc/hosts files into DNS RRs.

Here are a few little X utilities that I wrote some time ago. testCard.tar.gz displays some useful patterns on the screen, xmailwatcher.tar.gz (which we don't use any more, so it's not maintained!) keeps an eye on a mailbox's contents, and xquitbutton.tar.gz provides a handy "stop" button for X sessions. None of them is guaranteed bug-free. On the contrary, at least one of them is guaranteed to have at least one bug in it.

Some time around 1973 I walked through the railway tunnels above Glen Farg on the old Edinburgh-Perth via Kinross line. Here is a note on their location for anyone who fancies looking for them. (I've no idea what kind of condition they're in now!)