Regina REXX is the first (and probably only) product I ever installed at an employer's site; mostly I figure it's best just to use what's already there when writing tools. But one day I heard my boss talking on the phone about a difficult task: In order to hunt for viri in the system, they would occasionally get a big chunk of firewall logs, import it into Excel and try to use Excel formulae to isolate one type of error message about a certain packet being forbidden. Then they tried to analyze the numbers. If one IP address sends one packet to another IP address, not suspicious. If one address sends ten thousand packets to one IP address, probably no problem. But if one address sends one packet to each of ten thousand addresses, we have ourselves a virus, folks!
The problem is that Excel formulae are not at their best trying to isolate this one kind of message, and then parse the various parts of it. REXX is. So my boss let me install Regina REXX on my PC, and in an hour or three I had a program that would read 2MB of firewall logs, pick out and parse the right messages, and create an Excel workbook that identified the culprits in 20 seconds or less. Much better. One of the small triumphs I enjoy remembering. --- Bob Bridges, [email protected], cell 336 382-7313 /* Consumer skepticism makes quality products. This may be why governments and churches and school systems do not exhibit unseemly zeal in encouraging critical thought. They know they themselves are vulnerable. -Carl Sagan, from "Broca's Brain" */ -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Seymour J Metz Sent: Sunday, December 19, 2021 18:46 ....I use OREXX for ArcaOS and OOREXX for Linux (I have Regina but rarely use it.). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
