Category Archives: Networking

Matching Processes to Listening Ports on Windows

Posted on July 16, 2012 by

Do you really know what is running in the background on your Windows PC or server? Not knowing is how security holes perpetuate themselves into serious issues. While ignorance may be blissful someone else may be poking around your networking looking for a way in. With Windows systems it’s easy to list listening sockets that could present a risk. Once you know what’s listening on your system you can then hunt down the process and validate its existence. In many cases the services are part of windows or otherwise acceptable services or applications. To start issue a “netstat” command with … Continue reading →

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Tail Cat and Grep Your Log Files

Posted on July 12, 2012 by

I recently treated myself to a long overdue syslog server for our network devices. The system is on a Linux system (I would have it no other way) and has been instrumental to troubleshooting and auditing these past few weeks. You can read this article for some log parsing tricks ranging from basic to a bit more advanced. Cat, Grep and Tail are the commands that truly set Linux based syslog servers apart from one running on windows. Don’t get me wrong, there are other decent alternatives but it’s hard to beat a typed command and an instant result. There … Continue reading →

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Redirecting Cisco Show Command Output

Posted on July 11, 2012 by

Have you ever issued a diagnostic command on a Cisco device and wish you could keep the output to review off line at a later time? There actually is a way to do this! (without copying and pasting, etc). I recently was asked to send the results of “show tech-support” to Cisco’s TAC to get help with an issue. To my dismay the result of this command overran the length of the terminal window’s buffer. Rather than changing things on my side I knew this was the opportunity I needed to make my life easier. To send output directly you … Continue reading →

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Authenticating APC Network Management Cards with Network Policy Server

Posted on July 3, 2012 by

Working in a large environment with 100% power availability as a requirement I have had the experience of working with many APC UPS systems.  We typically monitor the UPS remotely and from time to time have to log in to check statuses or review errors.  Our environment frowns upon shared credentials as do I so authentication to these systems had to be updated.  I knew we had options because I had seen RADIUS authentication listed in the specifications for the management card. Initially I created a fairly vanilla policy and was able to log into the APC’s.  The issue, however, … Continue reading →

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