We has tubez!

Hey guys, here’s my notes for the Webmin / Usermin segment I did on episode 414 of HAK5.

Talking about making your life easier if you’re a linux system admin I demonstratred the great and free tools Webmin and Usermin available from http://webmin.com/

Here’s a great screenshot of visual iptables editing.

Installing the package is as easy as RPM -i webmin-1.441-1.noarch.rpm
Once installed goto https://yourserver.com:10000 and login with a user like root.
After you’ve logged in you can just start clicking through the menus and see what you can do with this great piece of software.

During the show I explained how to create custom commands and deploy them to users with the webmin addon (http://webmin.com/usermin.html).

If you have any questions, feel free to post a comment or send me an email: matt [at] hak5 [dot] org

Hey everyone, just wanted to write a short little review about a great product I received for testing a couple months ago.

This probably should have been posted a while ago, unfortunately as we all know life gets crazy sometimes, and you forget about shit.

So here’s the review of the Sumo Sultan.

I recieved one thanks to Andrew Milligan over at Sumo.  Initially when he contacted me, we didn’t have carpet, none of our other belongings or any other furniture in the house.

Looking back, it wasn’t exactly the best time to get a giant bean bag, but I digress.

Getting the package into the front door was a little bit of an issue.  This thing even wrapped up is massive.  And it’s not even the biggest they sell!

Unpacking it was even more fun, and I must admit, more work than I thought it was going to be.  The Sultan comes vacum packed in a cardboard box, and you need to break up the foam particles in order to expand it.

Now I say foam, but it really isn’t.  Think of a foamy cotton material, but a very soft and comforatble foamy cotton.

Once you’ve got it all wrapped in it’s great suede outer shell, let it sit for a good 24 hours.  Go to sleep and when you wake up and you’ll notice that it’s quite puffy and larger than it was last night.  Go ahead and jump on it and begin to experience how amazing this giant blob is.

We had originally planned on purchasing a number of these units and replacing our couch with them, however it turned out that it wasn’t the greatest idea.

So in closing here’s some pro’s and con’s…

Pro’s

• Amazingly Comfortable
• This thing is big!
• Cover is very easy to throw in the washer and clean

Con’s

• Don’t think you’re going to use this as primary seating.

Thanks again to Andrew from Sumo Lounge for sending one of these out to test!

For those of you who may not be BASIS masters, here’s a nifty trick I figured out today.
To extract multiple CAR or SAR files, simply type the following using sapcar.exe.

sapcar.exe -xvf “ka*.car”

If you do not use quotes sapcar will not be able to process the files
Here’s hoping this makes some of your lives easier.

Hey everyone, time for your weekly update on the segments we feature on Hak5.

This week I took a look at FWBuilder. An absolutely great tool for managing firewall policies in a slew of different devices.
Here’s a little blurb from the official website.

“Firewall Builder is a GUI firewall configuration and management tool that supports iptables (netfilter), ipfilter, pf, ipfw, Cisco PIX (FWSM, ASA) and Cisco routers extended access lists. Firewall Builder uses object-oriented approach, it helps administrator maintain a database of network objects and allows policy editing using simple drag-and-drop operations.”

To be honest with you, FW builder is quite a bit more powerful than some of the other firewall management system’s I’ve used in the past, and will be following the progress of this system and have already made a request to include Juniper firewall policy support.

Find more info about FW Builder at http://fwbuilder.org

Here’s a quick blurb on the Spiceworks segment which was in Hak5 episode 402.

Existing features include:

• Help desk system
• Run and edit your own reports on a huge variety of asset data
• Ping, Traceroute, and run Remote Control against a computer
• Compare workstation configurations with each other
• Index and monitor Event Log entries and other stats
• Fully integrated help & user-community based forums
• Automatic discovery of Windows, Linux, Mac and SNMP based devices
• Manual asset addition (not limited to network devices)
• Inventory software license keys of many popular applications
• Attach documents and custom notes/attributes to any asset
• Determine your complete network inventory at a glance; view distribution of hardware vendors, servers, software installations and more

Some new features to whet your appetite:

• Microsoft Exchange monitoring – keep track of your heavy mailbox hitters and Exchange services
• LDAP integration – Allow your users to login with their Active Directory credentials while submitting a help desk ticket
• Asset groups – organize your assets into logical containers

• Service providers – Add important dates, phone numbers and other contact information pertaining to your service providers (contractors, ISPs, web-hosting, etc.)
• Revamped user navigation interface
• Share reports with other Spiceworks community members

Remember that Spiceworks works best on a corporate computer installation where you either have a Windows domain, or a master user / password installed on your boxes.

You can find more info at http://www.spiceworks.com