The Answer Squad

Today I want to introduce you to a handy little website that will help you when trying to deduce what is going on in your network.

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com Is a great resource to check the status of a website. If you can get to other websites but are having trouble getting to certain places downforeveryoneorjustforme.com will help you figure out if there is something on your end blocking it or if the website is actually down.

Now obviously if you can’t get to any website because your connection is out or you are having major problems with connectivity this won’t be of much help. But for intermittent problems or checking to see if twitter is down AGAIN, this site is great.

The Windows NT and Windows 2000 Resource Kits come with a number of command-line tools that help you administer your Windows NT/2K systems. You can find out more about each tool by clicking on the link for each tool.

In the ever growing struggle of ‘ going green’ you can use the ‘psshutdown’ tool to shutdown all the machines that arent needed at night.

You can simply make a file with all the machine names in your network, and have a script that runs psshutdown.exe at a scheduled time. If you run the file with a -c switch it allows the user to abort the shut down. So you could use a -t switch with a 30 second delay which should give the user plenty of time to stop the shut down.

You can download Pstools here

The tools included in the PsTools suite, which are downloadable as a package, are:

• PsExec – execute processes remotely
• PsFile – shows files opened remotely
• PsGetSid – display the SID of a computer or a user
• PsInfo – list information about a system
• PsKill – kill processes by name or process ID
• PsList – list detailed information about processes
• PsLoggedOn – see who’s logged on locally and via resource sharing (full source is included)
• PsLogList – dump event log records
• PsPasswd – changes account passwords
• PsService – view and control services
• PsShutdown – shuts down and optionally reboots a computer
• PsSuspend – suspends processes
• PsUptime – shows you how long a system has been running since its last reboot (PsUptime’s functionality has been incorporated into PsInfo)

The PsTools download package includes an HTML help file with complete usage information for all the tools. You can also type in the command at the command line with /? to get all the options and switches for the program.

Note: some anti-virus scanners report that one or more of the tools are infected with a “remote admin” virus. None of the PsTools contain viruses, but they have been used by viruses, which is why they trigger virus notifications.

So in our earlier post we told you how to get cacti up and running now lets talk about setting up some host to get some use of it.

The first thing you will need to do is login to your cacti web gui.

Once you do you will see this screen.

Once at this screen click on ‘Create Devices for your network’

Add host screen

On this screen you will want to click the ‘Add’ Button.

Now you will see the template for adding a host. We are going to add our Nagios box so we can keep track of the traffic we are sending out.

Once you input the fields it will look like this. You can use an IP or a dns name, we are going to be using snmp for graphing because it allows us to get he most out of our data.

This is our filled out template ready for the next step.

You will notice in the top left that we were successful and we are now getting snmp data from our host.

Now we are going to add a graph to this host. In the upper right hand corner click on ‘ Create graph for this host’

Here you will need to pick the interface you will want to collect data on, for us it is Eth0 the one with the ip address. Check the box next to the interface and choose what you type of graph to create. We chose in/out Bytes with total bandwidth. When you click create you should get a confirmation that the graph was created.

Now we can go into graph management and click on our host to see that everything is working.

Next thing we want to do is add this graph to our tree. to do this you will want to go into ‘Graph management’  check the box next your corresponding host go into the drop down at the bottom of the screen choose ‘ Place on tree (default tree)’ and press go.

You will get a confirmation the host was added, and now if you click on the ‘Graphs’ button at the top let. You should be able to see not only the local machine graphs but your new host.

Hope this helps you out and gets you started graphing your host with cacti.

Users of insecure, jailbroken iPhones are reporting their smartphones have been hit by a worm that turns their lock wallpaper to that of 1980s pop star Rick Astley.

Sophos labs is warning jailbroken Iphone users to make sure they have changed the default ssh password of their phones.

The worm is capable of breaking into jailbroken iPhones if their owners have not changed the default password (”alpine”) after installing SSH. Once in place, the worm hunts for other iPhones that are similarly vulnerable on the mobile phone network, and installs itself again.

This is the second incident of hackers taking advantage of ssh on the iphone, it looks like this is definitely becoming a trend that could cause a lot of problems for jail broken iphones. Sophos labs are still looking at the worms code and updates will be posted to their website.

For those of you with Macs out there Macheist is offering 6 Top Mac apps for free. That’s right completely free. The only caveat is that the app ‘Mariner Write’ will only be unlocked when they have reached 500,000 downloads. As of making this post they were right above 209 thousand.  So head over there and pick up your copy of these 6 apps, shovebox, write room, twitterrific, tiny grab, hordes of orcs, and marine writer.

So you may be asking yourself, why in the world would I want to monitor my network printers with Cacti? Well lets say you have a user who is very import or maybe just very demanding to deal with. So say the VP of the company has a network printer and is constantly calling you when his toner runs out and he is never happy and the printer is always “broken”. Well what if you could avoid that call? If you’ve been following along here at the squad thelast few months we have talked a lot about Nagios, Cacti and monitoring your network. Well how about if you could setup a graph and alert so not only would you be able to see usage on your printers to help know who really needs a 40,000 page a month duty printer, but you would be able to see when that VP’s printer is running low on toner so you can slip into his office before he even notices and change it out thus stopping that call from happening!

SNMP Printer Template

Above is a Cacti template to help you graph your network printers. There are other templates for specific models but this should do for a generic printer.

If you need help importing a template into cacti go here.

Nagios SNMP Check

There you can find a Nagios plugin to help keep track of your printers and get some notifications. I hope these help you in your further usage of Cacti to get a handle on your network.

Foxy proxy is a plug-in for Firefox I have been using for about a year now. If like a lot of folks you have different settings for your browser at work and at home it quickly becomes a pain having to go in and edit those settings a few times a day. Foxy Proxy puts an end to that and makes it simple. Foxy Proxy is a Firefox extension which automatically switches an Internet connection across one or more proxy servers based on URL patterns. Put simply, Foxy Proxy automates the manual process of editing Firefox’s Connection Settings dialog. Proxy server switching occurs based on the loading URL and the switching rules you define. In its simpliet form you input your proxy settings into Foxy proxy and just choose which one you will use at the bottom right of your screen.

Firefox was just updated to 3.5.5 only 8 days  after version 3.5.4 the new version of the browser fixes three bugs: one critical bug across all platforms, and then one lower priority one for Windows and one lower priority one for Mac.

The bug fixes crashes in the Gif decoder that was not present in version 3.5.3, the windows bug fixes a security runtime issue and the mac version and html parser error.

Mozilla Evangelist Christopher Blizzard tweeted that although the critical bug wasn’t security related, it was annoying to many users.

Change log can can be found Here .

So you’ve got Cacti installed and running but you want to unleash the full power. Well to do that you’re going to need some templates. Templates can be found all over with a simple Google search. If you are thinking about doing, it chances are someone has already graphed it and made a template for it. Lets add some templates!

That is the page to import your cacti templates. Most templates are xml file but you can also import from text inside the block.

To import a template simply click browse and locate the template you would like to import. Once you have imported the template simply click save. Cacti will indicate if the template was saved successfully. That is about the long as short of it. If the template runs scripts there is a bit more you have to do.

For script-based templates, you have to copy the script that the template author distributed to the /path/to/cacti/scripts folder.

For SNMP data queries with an additional XML file holding the data query definition, you have to copy the XML file to the/path/to/cacti/resources/snmp_queries folder.

For Script data queries with an additional XML file holding the data query definition, you have to copy the XML file to the/path/to/cacti/resources/script_queries folder.

You can find templates for everything from Apache, Mysql, Windows, and UPS devices. I think if your toaster had a network card you would be able to monitor the amount of toast it makes and what darkness setting it was on with cacti.

http://forums.cacti.net Try that link for all the templates you could ever need.

The google Chrome blog reports that Bookmark syncing has now moved into the beta build from the dev release making it that much stable and close to production. You can get the Beta here As of right now it is only for Windows. Hopefully the code will slowly start to trickle into the Linux and Mac ports soon.

According to the Google blog

Once you’ve activated Google Chrome bookmark sync on each of your computers, any changes you make to your bookmarks will appear on all synced computers in just a few seconds. (For those of you who are curious, this bit of magic is made possible by the same XMPP-based servers that power Google Talk).

Now isn’t that handy. The Chrome team is claiming a 30% speed increase over the latest stable release. I will be downloading the beta tonight and testing it over the next week or so. I will keep you guys posted but this looks very promising especially if it ties into google docs well.