Doing geolocation lookups in command line
Did you know that it's possible to do your own geoip lookups from the linux command line?
You need to install the geoip-bin package in Ubuntu/Debian's APT system:
sudo apt-get install geoip-bin
Then after which, lookups can be done as simply as:
$ geoiplookup 8.8.8.8 GeoIP Country Edition: US, United States
Note that the lookups are based on the GeoLite Country database. For more detailed geoip lookups you will need to buy the better databases.
Getting additional (IP/network/location) info along with your Splunk searches
Chanced upon some of the info by accident (smack at the bottom of one part of the Splunk documentation...), but I can't find it now. Going to share here anyway 
Some (or probably most/all) of your searches might involve public IP addresses, and more often than not we would want to have additional info along with the IP address to work with.
Three of the things that we could do in Splunk automatically would be to get IP-location info, or to reverse lookup an IP to a domain, or to lookup a domain to an IP.
Fun with Splunk: SSHD
Thought I'd share a bit on the tip of the iceberg, on what can be done with Splunk. Linux command line tools are still much needed for raw log analysis (since we can't have the luxury of having a Splunk installation around and ready whenever we need it), but if setup and running properly, Splunk can be pretty helpful (and not to mention faster) for some things.
(This post is pretty unpolished, partly because I can't be bothered to fiddle around with fitting the search strings into the width of the post, etc. Nonetheless, comments/discussions are always welcome heh)
One of my favourite tasks with log analysis is to get information on those people/bots which are brute forcing SSHD, so let's start with SSH attacks as an example.