This is the second of a series of videos showing you how to configure Vantage in detail.
This video will take you through the system requirements, and the installation of Vantage and the Web Module.
Archive for the ‘System Administration’ Category
Detecting a distributed reflected DNS attack
Friday, December 10th, 2010
The other night as I was getting ready to sleep, I received an email from the host of my personal Linux VPS saying that I had exceeded my monthly transfer quota. I didn’t pay much mind to the warning, as the excess transfer was insignificant, and at that time I was too tired to care. I closed my email, got into bed and fell asleep.
How much do IronPort WSA Appliances eat?
Friday, November 12th, 2010
If you are thinking about deploying IronPort Web Security Appliances you probably want to plan how much disk space to budget for with regards to logging and reporting.
Every organization is different with regards to the volume of logs it creates, but I’ve averaged three data sets submitted to us by customers to produce the following estimates. (more…)
Watch your TMG’s waist line. Switch log format and reduce fat now!
Wednesday, October 27th, 2010
We often recommend customers using Microsoft ISA or TMG switch their logging to W3C text file, in order to get the best possible import speed, and also because the text logs are much easier to access from a remote machine (see my previous article on accessing TMG’s SQL Express Log database). Logging to the default MSDE or SQL Express databases also requires more resources in terms of processor utilization, memory consumption and disk I/O.
But there is another advantage to switching to text. They take up considerably less disk space. Here are some figures:
How to report on bandwidth utilization using Cisco devices
Thursday, May 27th, 2010
Today I was speaking to a customer that had the following reporting request:
“I would like to know how much of my bandwidth is being eaten by each protocol. I will then use this information to determine if circuit may need to be increased due to increased traffic”.
This customer was collecting syslog messages from a Cisco Firewall, then using WebSpy Vantage to generate reports. In theory, this sounds like a fair plan. Unfortunately, the Cisco Firewall logs many different types of messages. Some to do with denied packets, some to do with authentication, some for vpn and so on. The information contained within each message changes. Some events include the size information that is required for any type of bandwidth assessment and some don’t. Correlating the required events to get any sort of accurate ‘bandwidth’ representation is a bit of a nightmare.
Fortunately, there’s a simpler method. (more…)
How WebSpy Vantage uses your CPUs
Friday, May 21st, 2010
I’m frequently asked how WebSpy Vantage utilizes a systems CPU resources. Sometimes you may notice Vantage utilizing 100% of your machine’s CPU power, and other times it will be hardly touched. So here is an overview of how the software works internally so you can understand when your CPUs will and won’t be pushed. (more…)
OpenBSD 4.6 on XenServer 5
Friday, March 12th, 2010
I’ve just been trying to set up an OpenBSD 4.6 VM on one of our XenServer machines, and found that it kept shutting itself down during boot after showing the message “nvram: invalid checksum”. After digging around online, I found a fix.
