As a baseline I monitor the utilization of the processor, memory, disks, and auto started services.  I have just recently started working with the plugins for Active Directory Domain Controllers, Active Directory Member Servers and hardware monitoring of Dell servers.  All of these and more are available from Nagios Exchange as free downloads.  The processor, memory and disk monitoring plugins I use are all perl scripts that have been rolled up into exe’s for the masses and work very quickly without perl being installed on the system; the auto started services plugin I use is a vbs script that uses WMI to pull services that are set for auto start on boot and returns a value if something is wrong with any one of them.  The Active Directory plugins I use are vbs scripts that use “dcdiag” and “netdiag” from the Windows Server 2003 Support Tools installation.  The Dell hardware monitor uses the “omreport.exe” program to check any Dell Poweredge server for hardware related issues.  It checks all the same stuff that you would see in OpenManage.

I encourage you to give Nagios a try with or without the use of GroundWorkOpenSource.  I use it because it takes only a few minutes and comes preinstalled with a very easy to use GUI for building Nagios configurations and makes it easy to manage lots of hosts.

My next project related to this is to put what I currently have into a managed services model and start offering monitoring as a per host / per month service for my company.  Nagios has the ability to be a distributed monitoring solution perfect for this type of setup.  I am planning to use OpenVPN as the bridge across networks so that I would have full access to the remote host without opening up any ports on the firewall.

pfSense 1.2 Final will be out here sometime soon so I’ll be updating numerous firewalls to that code base when it does hit FINAL.

This next weekend I will be installing a pfSense box for my Dad to start using/managing.

I have been working with my Dad on a web hosting reseller configuration at http://www.builthosting.com. Hopefully we will be able to get that up and running so I can migrate the rest of my websites over to there. He is doing the reseller setup through HostGator.

I’ve been working on some other website / blogging ideas to help pass the time, however, I don’t have time to think about them…strange situation.

This week at work, the TechTalk for the second time will be hosted by someone else. Kenny Kant, my counterpart at work has offered up his services to do a TechTalk on Microsoft Small Business Server 2003. I’ll try to talk to him about adding some content on here as well.

This year I will be trying much harder to keep the blog updated with good information and hopefully help someone in the process.   Stay tuned.

The installation more than easy as you use the built in firmware update function of the Linksys wireless router. All you do is upload the firmware, let it reboot, and reconnect via the web interface and configure as normal. The features that the firmware adds or unlocks is amazing. Most of the features are those you would see on commercial enterprise access points.

I’ll test the generic version right now and then try the VoIP and VPN versions sometime soon. I’ll let you know.

At work one of my upcoming projects will be testing the embedded hardware from ALIX to build a firewall that is as capable as a Cisco PIX 506E and then some for under $300. The hardware I am speaking of actually needs to be assembled which is kinda cool and all in all is the size of a Cisco PIX 501 which is in the neighborhood of 6″x6″. Not too shabby huh.

Here’s the parts list stolen from the pfSense blog:

ALIX Board
Black Case
2GB CF Card
Power Supply
Wireless Card
Pigtail
Antenna

The CF card, wireless card, pigtail and antenna might be sourced elsewhere if I can find good deals however for the power supply, ALIX board and case I will be using Netgate. Total cost for the item’s mentioned at time of this writing is $235.50 plus tax and shipping.

As you can see the embedded hardware will have 3 10/100 NIC’s and an 802.11a/b/g wireless card which when pared with pfSense would make an excellent branch office or home router/firewall/IDS/wireless device.

I’ll let you know my progress as it begins to unfold, it shouldn’t take me long after I receive all the parts.

Now for the easiest trick in the world. Download Putty form that website, rename putty.exe to ssh.exe and place it in the C:\Windows\System32 directory. This will allow you to launch putty from the command line just like telnet as well as add some other neat things.

From the command line (run or CMD)

ssh -telnet 192.168.1.1
ssh 192.168.1.254

Putty can also just be launched for an interactive setup with “ssh” from the command line. That will launch the newly renamed executable for you to change settings on and connect to the items that you would like to administer. Putty also allows you to tunnel traffic through SSH with localhost connections. I’ll try to make a fun sheet on that as well. One good tutorial I read was how to setup a SOCKS proxy through and SSH tunnel.

pcattcp.exe -r

The transmitter, another computer on a remote segment of the network can be run with:

pcattcp.exe -t 10.0.0.20

The software will then work it’s magic and give you the report at the end of the test. To test from multiple locations, you can launch multiple sessions one right after another on the receiver side and have multiple computers be transmitters to that single receiver.

The diagram below illustrates what I am speaking to accomplish with this.

Alternatives to TTCP would be iperf and qcheck as well as a whole lot more.

At work, as a project, I am (with one of my colleagues) building two firewalls that act as one just like an active/passive failover cluster. Currently I am running release 1.2 RC3 that was released just a few days ago. So far the solution has been stellar to say the least. The developers and the community behind pfSense are really awesome, the capabilities that the “FREE” firewall solution has in it’s back pocket beat the crap out of a Cisco PIX 515 or ASA 5510. Sure, you can do most all of the things that pfSense does with a PIX or ASA from Cisco but It’ll cost you extra. Now with the Snort Package available from pfSense as well as Squid and a BGP package, pfSense is starting to grow some muscles. I will say that Cisco has the VPN department OWNED but hopefully the features that they offer will be developed for OpenVPN in the near future. Now on to the build.

Here is a simplified diagram of the design that I have built successfully:

The design is a no brainer, managed switches inside and outside, two firewalls with a CARP sync connection between and 3 VLAN’s internal to the network that are in noway, shape or form able to talk to each other, unless of course, someone does a little VLAN hopping. I’m not going to worry about that at this point however.

The true beauty behind using pfSense for this solution is the simplicity of the installation and configuration to get it up to a production level. Once you figure out how the different facets of NAT can help you achieve your goal, the configuration is very straight forward. If you want your entire segment to send out traffic as a single IP (NAT Overload) you put it in the Outbound NAT table, if you want to provide services on specific ports, you add them to the Port Forward Table, and if you want your single IP address on the inside to have it’s own dedicated outside IP, add it to the 1:1 NAT Table. Very simple stuff. When you add things to the Port Forward NAT table, it has the ability to auto add a firewall entry for you as well, I usually let it do this and then adjust it’s configuration accordingly.

The CARP (sync mechanism) for pfSense is quite easy to configure as well. Their is a very nice tutorial on http://www.pfsense.com that shows you how to accomplish this. Basically on the primary firewall, you put in the IP of the other firewall, tell it what interface to sync through and what to sync, and voila, you are done.

I’ve barely started putting services behind the firewall but will be pushing the project live here very soon. I will keep you posted on how it performs, the battles that I had to fight to get things to work and offer any guidance that I may have that would benefit you. Thanks for reading.

Windows vs. Linux (Ubuntu)

Internet Browsing
W – Internet Explorer
U – Firefox

Email Clients
W – Outlook, Outlook Express
U – Thunderbird, Evolution

Chat Clients
W – MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, AIM, mIRC
U- Gaim / Pigdin, xChat, BitchX

Com Port Communications
W – Hyperterminal
U – MiniCom

FTP Client
W – Filezilla FTP Client
U – Filezilla FTP Client

Remote Access Servers
W – Terminal Server, RealVNC, TightVNC, WinVNC
U – FreeNX, RealVNC, TightVNC

P2P Filesharing
W – Limewire, Bearshare, Bittorrent
U – Limewire, Azureus

VoIP Clients
W – Skype, X-Lite
U – Skype, Linphone, Twinkle

Drawing / Photo Editing
W – Paint.net, Photoshop, MSPaint
U – GIMP
3D Annimation / Rendering
W – 3D Studio MAX, Blender
U – Blender, Maya

DVD Players
W – Windows Media Player, PowerDVD
U – MPlayer, Kaffine, VLC

MP3 / Music Players
W – Winamp, iTunes
U – RhymeBox, K3b

Office Productivity
W – Microsoft Office
U – OpenOffice.org

Network / Relation Mapping
W – Microsoft Visio
U – Dia

Accounting / Financial
W – Quicken, Microsoft Money
U – GnuCash

Desktop Publishing
W – Microsoft Publisher, Quark
U – Scribus

PDF Editing
W – Adobe Acrobat Professional
U – PDFEdit, pdftk

Imaging
W – Norton Ghost
U – G4u, dd

Partition Resizing
W – Norton Partition Magic
U – GParted

Backup Software
W – Symantec Backup Exec
U – BackupPC, Amanda

Web Servers
W – Microsoft IIS
U – Apache

File Servers
W – Microsoft File Services
U – Samba

Email Servers
W – Microsoft Exchange
U – Postfix, Sendmail

AntiVirus Software
W – Symantec AV, Mcafee
U – ClamAV, AVG

For more of these “like” software lists, please visit what I believe to be the most complete list on the internet, Table of Equivalents.