7 min
IT Ops
Logging in a Software Defined Network
Background
This blog will give an overview of Software Defined Networks (SDN), present some
suggestions for logging in an SDN and finally present an overview of some
research work we are doing on SDN logging.
If we consider a Software Defined Network (SDN) paradigm is a racetrack, SDN
controllers are race cars. Networking vendors especially those in the
telecommunication area such as Deutsche Telecom, Orange, Vodafone use their own
SDN controllers to manage the orchestration of their own equi
4 min
IT Ops
Network Administrator’s Guide to Surviving an Audit: Preparation
Sooner or later, your organization will likely be the subject of an IT audit.
But as ominous as that sounds, it doesn’t have to be something to dread. If
you’re a network administrator, you’ll have a specific role in an audit. Since
audits are rarely small projects, you’ll likely be working with others
throughout the process. The best way to fulfill your specific role well is to be
prepared for an audit before it happens. Simply put, an audit is an examination
to determine if controls are suff
4 min
IT Ops
Log Analysis for System Troubleshooting
Systems of all kinds create log data constantly and voluminously. In searching
out the most compelling reasons to dig into and analyze such data, we compiled a
list of seven reasons that usually drive such activity. In this blog post we
tackle the first of those 7, which include:
1. System troubleshooting
2. Security incident response
3. Security troubleshooting
4. Performance troubleshooting
5. Understanding user behavior or activities
6. Compliance with security policies
7. Complianc
8 min
IT Ops
Roots and Culture: Logging and the Telephone Bill
Telephone systems were the Internet before there was an Internet.
Think about it.
By 1920 millions of people were exchanging data on a worldwide network using a
device that connected on demand. Sounds like the Internet to me.
But unlike the current day Internet, the telephone system cost money to use.
Alexander Graham Bell’s investors wanted it that way. That’s why they gave him
the money. Thus, people who used the telephone system had to pay for it. So
going as far back as 1877, every mont
6 min
IT Ops
5 Rules of Pair Programming Etiquette
I like Pair Programming [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming]. I’ve
been doing it episodically for about 10 years. Whenever I’ve pair programmed, at
the end of a session, I’ve always walked away a better developer than when I
started.
However, the practice can be expensive when the pair doing the programming
are not efficient. When a lot of friction exists between the two coders
involved, costs can exceed double that of a single programmer trying to hash
things out on his or her ow
2 min
IT Ops
Java 8 - Lazy argument evaluation
Overview
“I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job. Because he will find
an easy way to do it” – Bill Gates
Lazy evaluation is an evaluation strategy
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation_strategy] which delays the evaluation
of an expression until its value is needed. The opposite of this is eager
evaluation, where an expression is evaluated as soon as it is bound to a
variable.[wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazy_evaluation]]
Like most imperative programming l
4 min
IT Ops
Logs To Understand User Activity and Behavior
Logging user activity is a great way to understand what users are doing, and how
they are using network and computing resources. Collecting data from the
standpoint of a user identity or login is a great way to correlate all kinds of
information, too, including client or workstation activity, network and server
access, and application usage. This provides a unique opportunity to make use of
Logentries’
[https://logentries.com/centralize-log-data-automatically/?le_trial=user_activity_and_behav
6 min
IT Ops
The Value of Correlation IDs
In the old days when transactional behavior happened in a single domain, in
step-by-step procedures, keeping track of request/response behavior was a simple
undertaking. However, today one request to a particular domain can involve a
myriad of subsequent asynchronous requests from the starting domain to others.
For example, you send a request to Expedia, but behind the scenes Expedia is
forwarding your request as a message to a message broker. Then that message is
consumed by a hotel, airline
5 min
IT Ops
The Generosity of Thought: Caring and Sharing in the Open Source Community
I want to share something with you that is pretty amazing. But, before I do,
allow me to provide the backstory.
The Backstory
I’ve been using Open Source Software (OSS) for a while now. I started with the
big ones, Apache [http://apache.org/], Maven [http://maven.apache.org/], MySQL
[http://www.mysql.com/], etc…. But, as time went on and my work became more
specialized, I started using smaller projects. When you use the big projects
such as Maven and Apache, there’s a boatload of books, video
5 min
IT Ops
Solving the expression problem
If you look at any OO-based codebase of a nontrivial size, you’ll [hopefully]
find well understood behavior formalized and encapsulated through the effective
use of polymorphism- either via interfaces which decouple calling code from a
types’ implementation, or via sub typing to share code common to multiple types.
To take an example from a statically typed language like Java, let’s look at the
Map interface and a few of its implementations in the standard library:
A receiving method which
3 min
InsightOps
Announcing InsightOps - Pioneering Endpoint Visibility and Log Analytics
Our mission at Rapid7 is to solve complex security and IT challenges with
simple, innovative solutions. Late last year Logentries joined the Rapid7 family
to help to drive this mission. The Logentries technology itself had been
designed to reveal the power of log data to the world and had built a community
of 50,000 users on the foundations of our real time, easy to use yet powerful
log management [https://www.rapid7.com/fundamentals/what-is-log-management/] and
analytics engine.
Today we are
5 min
IT Ops
Node.js as a Proxy to Logentries.com
Logging from the client side of a web application can seem like a challenge.
The web browser exposes everything to the user. There is no way to hide
anything delivered to the client from prying eyes, including your log token to
your Logentries
[https://logentries.com/centralize-log-data-automatically/?le_trial=nodejs_as_a_proxy-logentries_blog-post_cta-create_trial&utm_campaign=nodejs_as_a_proxy&utm_source=logentries_blog&utm_medium=post_cta&utm_content=create_trial]
log. There is no relia
4 min
IT Ops
Goodbye to the VCR: Rewinding Down Memory Lane
The VHS tape was a thing of a magic that is alien in the world of on-demand
media. It represented a promise of entertainment. A promise only realized when
loading the tape into the player and pressing the play button. There was an air
of excitement around every video, and you could never be entirely certain about
what the video contained.
I was reminded of the mystique of the VCR just this month when I read about its
final demise. Funai Electric, the last major manufacturer of VCR players,
3 min
IT Ops
Widely-used Android App Leaks MS Exchange Credentials
In October, Rapid7 researchers
[https://community.rapid7.com/community/infosec/blog/2016/10/11/r7-2016-21-nine-folders-certificate-validation-vulnerability-cve-2016-2533]
uncovered a significant vulnerability in the Nine mobile application
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ninefolders.hd3&hl=en] for
Android. Baldly stated, this app leaks Microsoft Exchange user credentials, plus
mail envelopes and attachments, mailbox synchronization data, caleandar entries
and tasks to attac
4 min
IT Ops
Overview of 'online' algorithm using Standard Deviation example
Here at Logentries
[https://logentries.com/centralize-log-data-automatically/?le_trial=online_algorithm-logentries_blog-post_cta-create_trial&utm_campaign=online_algorithm&utm_source=logentries_blog&utm_medium=post_cta&utm_content=create_trial]
we are constantly adding to the options for analysing log generated data. The
query language ‘LEQL’
[https://logentries.com/resources/how-to-videos/building-a-query/] has a number
of statistical functions and a recent addition has been the new Standard