Seek unification over the SPOG
There are a few marketing trends that annoy me. One in particular is the Single Pane of Glass. This is a notion that an administrator or NOC team can look at everything from a window. What has ended up happening…
Spirent Avalanche Next
Spirent provides a focus on network and application testing software. Their traditional markets focused on cloud providers, hardware vendors, and traditional service providers. Recently Spirent has made plays into the Enterprise market with devices such as AXON for enterprise hardware,…
Airtight Management
I mused online recently about the team that Devin Akin is building over at AirTight. Hiring talent like Ryan Adzima and Andrew VonNagy is a great play on AirTight’s behalf. These are experts in their own right and alumni…
Solarwinds RAW
What felt like a scene from a spy flick, the NFD6 delegates piled in to Aruba’s offices during #NFD6 for the Solarwinds presentation. Before we began I have had dealings with Solarwinds around their NPM Orion platform and was extremely…
Review: The Practice of Network Security Monitoring
When I saw this book on the coming soon list I was definitely excited. Richard Bejtlich, Chief Security Office of Mandiant, has delivered a book surrounding the venerable Security Onion distribution entitled “The Practice of Network Security Monitoring.. After the…
The Wall of Fire – 05 – Documentation
There comes a point in all deployments when an installation transitions from deployment to support. This involves handover documentation and for many people what this encapsulates varies. The importance of having comprehensive documentation on handover cannot be overstated. It should…
Tightening the screws
ThousandEyes offer a different spin on SaaS monitoring. They deliver the ability to gain critical insight into SaaS applications from the Customer point of view and anywhere else you want too. Their distributed agent model allows business to gauge a…
ASA CX SSP management
The Context aware modules for the Cisco ASA provide enhanced functionality for L7 services. These include but are not limited to URL category/reputation databases, HTTP inspections, AVC, TLS proxy, TCP Proxy, and Multiple Policy decision points. The management of these…
Positive auditing
Forward As I mentioned last earlier, I have been asked about being apart of the Thwack Ambassador program and my first post went up. I am linking to it now for my readers who follow my blog and may not be aware of the…
Dale dug a hole, Anthony made a script
You may think my title is odd. Well there is an explanation. There is an Australian classic movie called ‘The Castle’. It is about an average Australian family who just make do and appreciate their family and lot in life.…
OneConfig for JUNOS
Ever need to make a firewall change or update a rule set but not had access to the device? An always on, cloud based software as a service solution has grown from the labs of OneConfig. Based on the premise of…
Getting green with JUNOS
In a branch office you generally have workers who work standard business hours. These generally exist between the hours of 0700 and 1800 hours. Most branches have VOIP handsets or APs that run off PoE. These do not need to…
Solarwinds Thwack Ambassador
Solarwinds provide a plethora of network and server management tools. They are a household name for network and server administrators. Their portfolio of software stretch from application monitoring, virtual machine management, to the ever handy IP Address management platform. All…
Auto discovery with Solarwinds NPM
Solarwinds Orion NPM is a feature rich management platform that offers a comprehensive monitoring solution. Leveraging SNMP, this product can manage every single aspect of a device down to the last degree. Today I am going to show off one…
We have ways of making you talk
In the previous post we discussed what the VMware vSwitch actually was. This allowed the reader to gain insight into the difference of a software switch compared to a hardware switch. This discussion assumes a default vSwitch install and the…
Don’t let your outage window best you
Outage windows. They vary from after 5pm, to a 4 hour window per quarter, and even just 17 seconds per year. They are valuable. They are something that shouldn’t be squandered. The sad thing is that some treat them was…
Spirent has a Warp Displacement Generator
For many engineers, Spirent equipment is the stuff of legends. The packet generators and network test environments were expensive enough to come with a human to drive them. Deployments in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars were not uncommon and rarely seen…
Have faith and stem the flood of SYNers
In my previous post I showed what a SYN flood and SYN scan was. The ability to determine open ports rather silently and not trigger alarms may have raised the eyebrows of some. I mentioned that Stateful Packet Inspection and…
TCP SYN Scanning
The purpose of this post is to dissect what a TCP SYN scan is by digging into the TCP protocol. The notion of TCP SYN scans have been around for many years. It is something that a network engineer should…
Ping all the addresses
Wow, not a Juniper post. I bet those of you who don’t use Juniper are excited? Today is a handy blog for your toolbox. I work on older hardware now that I am an ex-gamer and dedicating my time to…
The power of USB backups on the SRX110
The SRX110 device that I have been labbing with has come with two USB slots. One is designed to be a 3g/4g wan module which would allow a failover internet connection and could server as a remote access gateway. I…
Nexus “ah-ha” moment part 1
I have been using the Nexus platform for a year now. I always find I get “ah-ha” moments due to the fact most of the time I am hiding in IOS. Here is a little one regarding showing interfaces. I…
When you get into a fight the person with the person with the best notes wins
Disclaimer about #NFD4 posts Statseeker was first cab off the ranks on Wednesday afternoon. The Australian company does one thing and does it well. Scaling interface statistic monitoring built upon FreeBSD. Using a custom, optimized time sequence database to store…
LAB – NTP setup on ASA
The importance of time should not be under estimated. NTP allows synchronisation of clock information across your network. I am labbing my ASA inside GNS3 and want to set up a router to be the Timekeeper! The idea of this firewall…
Banners
Reading though my Cisco CCNP Firewall book I came across an interesting paragraph. It started to make me really think about my internet facing devices and other hosts. Although various urban legends exist of hackers who were acquitted of penetrating…