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Business value of a CMDB

by | Nov 18, 2005 | evilzenscientist, ITIL, Uncategorized

Nice article this month from Line56.com – about the business value of a CMDB.

It’s by the ex CTO of Marimba – who is now CTO of the Change and Configuration Management space at BMC – Kia Behnia.

I’d expect BMC to push a CMDB message – they after all message ITIL heavily and have a CMDB product.

The nice piece about this article is the real difference ‘process’ and ‘best practices’ can bring – regardless of your management technology.

The other truth is that a single repository as a CMDB is unworkable – a ‘meta-CMDB’ or ‘virtual-CMDB’ is far more realistic. Kia refers to federated CMDB:

However, not all management data related to configuration items are appropriate for storage in the CMDB. This is why organizations should consider a CMDB based on a federated data model. Why? Just like links within the general ledger to financial details stored in the accounts receivable system, a federated CMDB links to IT details. For example, a federated approach allows for other useful management information — such as service level agreements, purchase orders, incident and problem tickets, performance and utilization data–to be linked to the configuration items within the CMDB.

IBM Redbook – Linux File and Print

by | Nov 17, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Linux, Uncategorized

A great read from IBM – the Redbook on File and Print services on Linux.

The focus is heavily on NT4 replacement – but there are some good notes and worked examples of Windows 200x and Active Directory migration.

One area that would be interesting (for Novell customers) is replacing the LDAP components of this Redbook with eDirectory; for more comprehensive management of this space Novell Open Enterprise Server would also be a great choice.

ssh DDoS?

by | Nov 16, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Linux, Uncategorized

My servers have been subjected to extra ssh traffic in the last few days:

Nov 16 13:25:14 gc-blog sshd[6625]: Illegal user admin from ::ffff:[IPaddress]
Nov 16 13:25:16 gc-blog sshd[6628]: Illegal user test from ::ffff:[IPaddress]
Nov 16 13:25:19 gc-blog sshd[6631]: Illegal user guest from ::ffff:[IPaddress]
Nov 16 13:25:26 gc-blog sshd[6637]: Illegal user webmaster from ::ffff:[IPaddress]
Nov 16 13:25:36 gc-blog sshd[6645]: Illegal user oracle from ::ffff:[IPaddress]
Nov 16 13:25:38 gc-blog sshd[6647]: Illegal user library from ::ffff:[IPaddress]
Nov 16 13:25:41 gc-blog sshd[6650]: Illegal user info from ::ffff:[IPaddress]
Nov 16 13:25:43 gc-blog sshd[6653]: Illegal user shell from ::ffff:[IPaddress]
Nov 16 13:25:50 gc-blog sshd[6658]: Illegal user linux from ::ffff:[IPaddress]
Nov 16 13:25:53 gc-blog sshd[6661]: Illegal user unix from ::ffff:[IPaddress]
Nov 16 13:25:55 gc-blog sshd[6664]: Illegal user webadmin from ::ffff:[IPaddress]
Nov 16 13:26:05 gc-blog sshd[6672]: Illegal user test from ::ffff:[IPaddress]
Nov 16 13:26:09 gc-blog sshd[6678]: Illegal user admin from ::ffff:[IPaddress]

SANS also had a post – http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=846

I’m keeping an eye on behaviour – I think my sshd are configured reasonably well.