Hospitable IT

I was having a lot of problems today moving the SFTP backup target for a Cisco Unified CCX system. To cut a long story short (and it took a bloody long time to work this out!), the problem was with the ciphers that were being made available by the SSHD service on the new backup target.

I recently experienced some issues at a site with DFS, there was a suspicion that DFS replication was periodically flooding the WAN network links. I cobbled together this script to assist in tuning the network throttling but haven’t actually implemented it as a PRTG sensor yet.

Today I had to setup wireless access for a group of PCs that were to be used in a training room where wired access was limited. To solve this problem I implemented an alternate login method for the existing wireless network that used the AD computer account to authenticate using Protected EAP-MSCHAPv2. This way the PCs connected to the wireless network before anyone logged in.

In the third post of this series, we configure our Graylog server to use Active Directory as an external authentication source

This post covers securing a Graylog server using SSL/TLS.

I have recently been involved in some security audit work and found myself having to replace the self signed SSL certificates used by the secure HTTP service on a number of Cisco 3850 switches. It was a bit fiddly so I thought it deserved a post to cover the steps I went through.

While upgrading the Firmware on a Cisco UCS C Series Server today I noticed that the Storage Array was in a degraded state but the IS Operations team had not received any alerts. There wasn’t a suitable PRTG sensor available so I wrote one!

A client recently needed to be able to use PRTG to monitor the state of an IPSec VPN Tunnel that was terminated on their Palo Alto Firewall array. Palo Alto firewalls have a very useful REST API so I was able to modify a Power Shell script that I had created previously to get the job done.

Having an intelligent, scalable and easily searchable consolidation point for log files is a very useful capability. Graylog is an open source project that is able to ingest logs from a wide variety of sources and provides very useful visualisation, processing and alerting capabilities. This post will go through the details of how to install a single server instance of Graylog 2.3 onto Ubuntu 16.04.