Contact from Sharktech available?

2014-12-09 Thread Duane Toler
Can someone from Sharktech contact me off list to discuss an NTP flood from
your co-lo network?  One of my customers has a site being hammered by a few
subnets of yours.

Thanks!!

-- 
Duane Toler
deto...@gmail.com


MXLogic outage

2012-08-08 Thread Duane Toler
Probably old news by now, but MXLogic folks are having some major
issues today and not reliably receiving inbound mail.  Several of our
customers are talking with MXLogic about it.

FYI.

-- 
Duane Toler
deto...@gmail.com



Re: ASA log viewer

2011-11-21 Thread Duane Toler
On Sun, Nov 20, 2011 at 17:33, Jimmy Hess mysi...@gmail.com wrote:
 Yes.
 logging permit-hostdown

 However,  if you don't need to refuse connections when TCP syslog
 fails, then you don't need 100% of your syslog messages,   you should
 use UDP syslog for performance.

 TCP just makes sure you will get all syslog messages between time A
 and time B     or none of them.
 If there are WAN issues,  there are many cases where one would prefer
 SOME syslog messages, with an understanding that the network
 bottleneck means messages are being lost,  rather than  few/no syslog
 messages to help  debug the issue

 --
 -JH


Except you can't do syslog via TLS with UDP. :-/

--
Duane Toler
deto...@gmail.com



Re: ASA log viewer

2011-11-20 Thread Duane Toler
I think it was ASA 8.3 that began to provide an option to NOT cease
functionality when tcp syslog server was unreachable. In ASDM, it is a
checkbox at the bottom of the logging servers config section.

Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 20, 2011, at 7:43, Joe Happe joe.ha...@archlearning.com wrote:

 Completely agree with splunk for log searching / analysis, even has some 
 ASA/PIX modules.  Please note, unless something has changed that I completely 
 missed, an ASA/PIX will stop forwarding user traffic if it is configured for 
 tcp syslogs and the connection breaks.  (no more disk, network issue, etc) 
 This is based on the premise that a system cannot be considered secure if the 
 audit trail is unavailable, and tcp syslogging(vs udp) is usually used to 
 make sure you don't miss an entry due to a dropped packet.  Something that 
 dates back to the old C2 security standard??(not sure of the current 
 version).   Typically this requires admin intervention (by design) to clear 
 the condition.   If you use udp for syslog the ASA won't be in this mode, and 
 you won't block traffic if syslog fails.  With that said, there may be a 
 command I'm unaware of that allows a tcp syslog to fail and not block traffic.

 ~jdh




Re: ASA log viewer

2011-11-20 Thread Duane Toler
I'll go back to check that option about queue size. Thanks for the hint!

Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 20, 2011, at 9:23, jjanu...@wd-tek.com jjanu...@wd-tek.com wrote:


  e.g.,  interface_name syslog_ip[tcp/port] [emblem format] [secure]


 Also, when you do a sho log, do you have the following set?


  Deny Conn when Queue Full: disabled





ASA log viewer

2011-11-19 Thread Duane Toler
Hey NANOG!

My employer is deploying CIsco ASA firewalls to our clients
(specifically the 5505, 5510 for our smaller clients).  We are having
problems finding a decent log viewer.  Several products seem to mean
well, but they all fall short for various reasons.  We primarily use
Check Point firewalls, and for those of you with that experience, you
know the SmartViewer Tracker is quite powerful.  Is there anything
close to the flexibility and filtering capabilities of Check Point's
SmartView Tracker?

For now, I've been dumping the logs via syslog with TLS using
syslog-ng to our server, but that is mediocre at best with varying
degrees of reliability.  The syslog-ng server then sends that to a
perl script to put that into a database.  That allows us to run our
monthly reports, but that doesn't help us with live or historical log
parsing and filtering (see above, re: SmartView Tracker).

If a customer called to help us troubleshoot connection issues over
the past few days, there's no way to review the logs and figure out
what happened back then.  Every CCIE we've talked to, and Cisco
themselves, seem to not care about firewall traffic logs or the
ability to parse and review them.  We know about Cisco Security
Center, but that seems incapable of handling logs, etc.  CS-MARS
would've been great, but that's overpriced and now discontinued
anyway.  We'd hate to spend the time writing our own app if there's a
viable product already available (we're willing to pay a reasonable
price for one, too).

Any ideas?

Thanks!!



Re: ASA log viewer

2011-11-19 Thread Duane Toler
On Sat, Nov 19, 2011 at 20:04, Jay Ashworth j...@baylink.com wrote:
 - Original Message -
 From: Duane Toler deto...@gmail.com

 My employer is deploying CIsco ASA firewalls to our clients
 (specifically the 5505, 5510 for our smaller clients). We are having
 problems finding a decent log viewer. Several products seem to mean
 well, but they all fall short for various reasons. We primarily use
 Check Point firewalls, and for those of you with that experience, you
 know the SmartViewer Tracker is quite powerful. Is there anything
 close to the flexibility and filtering capabilities of Check Point's
 SmartView Tracker?

 Is your problem the aggregation proper, or the mining?

 Do the ASA's log to syslog?

 Cheers,
 -- jra
 --

Yep, we log to syslog, and the issue is the mining.  Not that I/we
*can't* grep/regex/sed/awk/perl our way thru the log files.  It's just
that it's overly tedious.  Especially when compared to Check Point's
product (given that they are aiming to compete...).



Re: ASA log viewer

2011-11-19 Thread Duane Toler
On Sat, Nov 19, 2011 at 20:30, Jonathan Lassoff j...@thejof.com wrote:
 On Sat, Nov 19, 2011 at 4:51 PM, Duane Toler deto...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hey NANOG!

 My employer is deploying CIsco ASA firewalls to our clients
 (specifically the 5505, 5510 for our smaller clients).  We are having
 problems finding a decent log viewer.  Several products seem to mean
 well, but they all fall short for various reasons.  We primarily use
 Check Point firewalls, and for those of you with that experience, you
 know the SmartViewer Tracker is quite powerful.  Is there anything
 close to the flexibility and filtering capabilities of Check Point's
 SmartView Tracker?

 For now, I've been dumping the logs via syslog with TLS using
 syslog-ng to our server, but that is mediocre at best with varying
 degrees of reliability.  The syslog-ng server then sends that to a
 perl script to put that into a database.  That allows us to run our
 monthly reports, but that doesn't help us with live or historical log
 parsing and filtering (see above, re: SmartView Tracker).

 It sounds like you've already got a pretty good aggregation setup going,
 here. I've had great luck with UDP Syslog from devices to a site-local log
 aggregator that then ships off log streams to a central place over TCP (for
 the WAN paths) and/or TLS/SSL.
 It sounds like you may have something similar going here, though I'd be
 curious to know where you've had this fall down reliability-wise.

We considered that, but didn't want to burden small customers with a
classic scenario of ok well you have to have our other box in your
room and have to deal with procurement, maintenance, upkeep,
monitoring, blah blah.  Recent ASA code (8.3-ish, 8.4? i forget) had
syslog-tls built in and finally able to ship logs out across the
lowest security zone, which was quite a nice addition.

The break down is periodic log-reporting failures. After some
indeterminate time, the device seems to just give up and just not
send logs.  Plus, it doesn't reconnect on a failure.  I added a Nagios
check to monitor the state of things, so now I get notified in this
situation (or at least within a few minutes).  When this does occur, I
ssh to the ASA and have to run the 'no logging enable' and then
'logging enable' to jump start it again.  Sometime that's not even
enough and I have to remove the logging  command for external syslog
and re-add it again.

It's very weird and quite spurious.


 If a customer called to help us troubleshoot connection issues over
 the past few days, there's no way to review the logs and figure out
 what happened back then.  Every CCIE we've talked to, and Cisco
 themselves, seem to not care about firewall traffic logs or the
 ability to parse and review them.  We know about Cisco Security
 Center, but that seems incapable of handling logs, etc.  CS-MARS
 would've been great, but that's overpriced and now discontinued
 anyway.  We'd hate to spend the time writing our own app if there's a
 viable product already available (we're willing to pay a reasonable
 price for one, too).

 I don't know of any great commercial products, as I've only built homegrown
 tools for various organizations. I'm curious though, what kinds of features
 are you looking for? Searching log data? Alerting on events based on log
 data?
 Cheers,
 jof

I'd like to fully search on an 'column', a la 'ladder logic' style.,
as well as have the data presented in an orderly well-defined fashion.
 I know that sounded like the beginnings of use XML! but oh dear,
not XML, please. :)  Poor syslog is just too flat and in a state of
general disarray.  The bizarre arrangement of connection setup, NAT,
non-NAT, traffic destined to the device, originating from the device,
traffic routing across the to another zone, etc. ... it's very
nonsensical, verbose, and frankly maddening.

Best I can tell, the whole thing doesn't make any sense (and was a
bear to tease apart with regex).

I've gotten a few suggestions to check out Splunk, so I'll toss that
into the review pile and see how that works out.  Thanks to the folks
who suggested that!

--
Duane Toler
deto...@gmail.com



Re: ASA log viewer

2011-11-19 Thread Duane Toler
On Nov 19, 2011, at 9:05 PM, Jonathan Lassoff j...@thejof.com wrote:

Ah, this totally makes sense now. I can see why you'd want to use features
that are already on your ASAs. Sounds like a bug to me, though.
I wonder what Cisco calls syslog-tls though. Syslog-like packet bodies,
over a TLS-wrapped TCP socket?

Sorry to hear it's been so unreliable -- I guess that's why I'm biased
towards just running generic PCs and open source software for this kind of
stuff; when bugs happen, you're actually empowered to debug and fix
problems.


Yep all of our other gear is Linux for that reason (plus Mac OS on the
desktop so things just work).

Cisco called the syslog-TLS stuff just syslog plus a secure parameter,
and port 1470 by default. ASDM had a fairly helpful interface to get it
configured.  I think it requires the K9 image or whatever it's called to
get the option.


This does indeed sound like a good application for splunk. They have ways
of defining custom logging formats that will parse out simple column and
message types so that you can construct queries based on that information.

There's some more information here in Splunk's docs on custom field
extraction:
http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/latest/Knowledge/Managesearch-timefieldextractions

Cheers,
jof


Sounds promising!  Thanks again!

Sent from my iPad