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The acquisition spree continues…. Now this looks a little strange at first glance but I’m sure if Intel is paying up $48 per share in cash there is something more aimed at it? Are we looking at an era where security is build on to the chips itself? Looks interesting…

News Highlights:

• Purchase of all of McAfee’s common stock for $48 per share in cash, valuing the deal at approximately $7.68 billion. McAfee will operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary, reporting into Intel’s Software and Services Group.
• Acquisition enables a combination of security software and hardware from one company to ultimately better protect consumers, corporations and governments as billions of devices – and the server and cloud networks that manage them – go online.
• Intel elevates focus on security on par with energy-efficient performance and connectivity. The acquisition augments Intel’s mobile wireless strategy, helping to better assure customer and consumer security concerns as these billions of devices connect.
• Intel has made a number of software-related acquisitions of leaders in their respective industries that also rely on great silicon, including Wind River, Havok and now McAfee.

Press Release:- [ Here ]

Use a lot of Juniper equipments/configuration samples/guides etc? Some time back I had written a blog post on getting information on Juniper products which are relevant and with examples was to search it at http://kb.juniper.net

Read here {http://www.rsivanandan.com/2010/01/24/documentation-for-juniper-devices/}

There is a much better way if you use Firefox. There is a search plug-in that you could use to integrate it with Firefox and have the term/configuration you want directly from the browser.

Can’t wait to get it? Head straight to http://kb.juniper.net and below right hand corner, you can see ‘Install Search Plug-in’.

Install it and there you have it;

An example page that I searched was looking as below;

Have fun…

When I started off this site, this was rather a note to self kinda thing and over years I learnt that people actually do visit my site. So recently, very very recently I signed up for Google Analytics to see how much really is the traffic onto this blog.

Prior to that, I thrived to avoid adwords/analytics etc, just ‘coz it was of no interest to me; remember, this was a blog to self and was never intended to do business. So I decided to check how much traffic do I get;

The Google Analytics says that for about a month, I got a total of 1254 visits with an average of 1.44 pages/visit. A rough average over a period is 41 visits per day, looks like a small number? Well, it may be a very small number but for someone who never thought someone would even visit this page, this is a big number. Again, I’m not after ‘reaching 1000 visits a day’ target kind of mission here.

Minimum visitors during the whole period was – 16

Maximum visitors during the whole period was – 75

Again, Analytics did a map overlay of regions people are using this;

This tells me that, I have over 19% of people who’re directly coming over to this site, while majority is referral of Google and other search engines. Geography wise North America and a bit from India/Europe etc…

At this time, the biggest technology industry seems to be Mobile Phone industry with Android breaking iPhone revenues (still can’t believe, a whopping 886% growth for Android from 2009, man – now that is some number!). So I decided to make this blog mobile friendly for those who might be interested in browsing/reading stuff here from their handhelds. One plugin did all those possible, MobilePress, and of course wordpress is just great!; tried using with my Xperia X10 (runs Android 1.6) and it worked just great. Seems this plugin actually offers more to the iPhone users…

Folks, try it out and lemme know. I would be glad to hear!

Got a question on this one in my comments page and hence thought of putting it together. Say there is a PPTP server residing on the trust side of your NS firewall (applicable to all/most of the NS firewalls running Screen OS). For simplicity, assuming that the device is in NAT mode and you want to allow connections coming from internet for PPTP VPN, follow the steps here;

First create a custom service to address the PPTP requirement (This is Microsoft windows specific);

set service CustomPPTP group "other" 47 src 2048-2048 dst 2048-2048

set service CustomPPTP + tcp src 0-65535 dst 1723-1723

The first line above creates a custom service named “CustomPPTP” with protocol number 47 (GRE) with source/destination port as 2048.

The second line adds to the same service for PPTP (port 1723 TCP).

Then the next step would be to NAT the internal PPTP server to publically accessible server using a public ip address. Here we’d use the same address assigned on the untrust interface (single public ip available scenario);

set vip multi-port

set interface ethernet0/0 vip 2048 CustomPPTP 10.1.1.10

The first line above states that it is a multi-port VIP. Normally a VIP listens only on a single port, if a single ip address is used and you want to have multiple ports forwarded, multi-port VIP is needed.

The second line above sets a VIP for port 2048 for the internal server (PPTP Server) 10.1.1.10 (assuming the ip of the internal PPTP server to be this).

almost done; the only thing pending is a policy to allow traffic to pass through this condition;

set policy from untrust to trust "any" "VIP::1" "CustomPPTP" permit

The above policy allows any machine from untrust zone (internet) to connect to VIP address (trust zone) for the service “CustomPPTP”.

Just save the configuration and you should have it working just fine…

Juniper KB Link

Continuation to the last post of MPF on Cisco ASA series, Juniper’s nextGen firewalls (SRX series that run JunOS software) can also be used for blocking unwanted sites. While SRX supports integration to SurfControl/WebSense etc, this post is more focused on the inbuilt capabilities just like what Cisco’s ASA had.

UTM feature (Unified Threat Management) is integrated into SRX devices. So in order to block a site(s);

1. First create a custom block lists to contain the websites that you want to block.

custom-objects {
    url-pattern {
            badsite {
                    value www.facebook.com;
            }
            addictivesite {
                            value www.twitter.com;
            }
}
    custom-url-category {
        bad-sites {
            value [ addictivesite badsite ];
        }
    }
}

As you can see, the custom URL category block list above contains the site ‘www.facebook.com’ and ‘www.twitter.com’ and based on the preferences time-eating sites like facebook/twitter/myspace etc can be used in here. Again, the advantage is that it doesn’t deal with ip addresses and hence very effective how many ever servers are hosted around the world.

2. Then create a web filtering policy to allow the traffic after screening the type/site to which the traffic is going to, as below;

policies {
    from-zone trust to-zone untrust {
        policy utm {
                match {
                        source-address any;
                        destination-address any;
                        application any;
                    }
        then {
                permit {
                    application-services {
                                            utm-policy wf-block-specfic-categories;
                                        }
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
        }
utm {
    feature-profile {
        web-filtering {
            url-blacklist bad-sites; #This causes sites in the bad-sites category to be blocked

utm-policy wf-block-specfic-categories {
    web-filtering {
        http-profile block-selected-sites;
                }
        }
}

Along with this, SRX also supports usage of ‘Custom Block Messages’ and also make this time bound. Say if you don’t want to block it completely but just block it during business hours that is possible too by scheduling policies.

Productivity increase by blocking non-project related sites is one of the myth that I’ve seen a lot on various online forums and as well there are always counter research data as to this has nothing to do with ‘increase in productivity’. I guess, I kinda agree too (Well, I know one of the leading IT companies who doesn’t give computers with internet access to any employee and only the lead/manager has it, that too restricted).

So putting aside the arguments, one of the issues with blocking outgoing connections based on IP has always failed (imagine the cloud of servers, if you were to block say yahoo mail). Now the Modular Policy Framework does support regex checking in the URL header to see which site it is going and block it, if you’d like to.

Here is the Cisco article describing the MPF in details {Here}

Now how do you block say access to facebook or myspace, from being utilized by your employees?? Pete has a good write-up on it and hence I’m not going to write it again here.

In short the configuration you need is; Thanks to Pete for providing such a detailed write-up.

On the Global Policy
————————————————-

regex domainlist1 "facebook.com"
class-map type regex match-any DomainBlockList 
  match regex domainlist1 
class-map type inspect http match-all BlockDomainsClass
  match request header host regex class DomainBlockList
policy-map type inspect http http_inspection_policy 
class BlockDomainsClass
  reset log
policy-map global_policy
  class inspection_default
  inspect http http_inspection_policy
service-policy global_policy global
———————————————-

With its own policy

———————————————–
regex BLOCKED_DOMAIN_1 "www.facebook.com"
access-list TRAFFIC_TO_INSPECT_FOR_BLOCKED_DOMAINS extended permit tcp any any eq http
class-map type regex match-any CLASS_MAP_BLOCKED_DOMAIN_LIST
  match regex BLOCKED_DOMAIN_1
class-map type inspect http match-all CLASS_MAP_DEFINE_TRAFFIC_TO_INSPECT
  match request header host regex class CLASS_MAP_BLOCKED_DOMAIN_LIST
class-map CLASS_MAP_HTTP_TRAFFIC
  match access-list TRAFFIC_TO_INSPECT_FOR_BLOCKED_DOMAINS
policy-map type inspect http POLICY_MAP_HTTP_INSPECTION
  parameters
  class CLASS_MAP_DEFINE_TRAFFIC_TO_INSPECT
  drop-connection log
policy-map POLICY_MAP_OUTSIDE_INTERFACE
class CLASS_MAP_HTTP_TRAFFIC
  inspect http POLICY_MAP_HTTP_INSPECTION
service-policy POLICY_MAP_OUTSIDE_INTERFACE interface outside

I’ve been lately pretty much exploring my photography skills, a long lost ambition now kind of came true. Simple reason, I can afford to buy these now which I couldn’t earlier.

A Nikon D-5000 is what I have, It is a Prosumer Camera (Professional + Consumer), after much research found that this one would be ideal for a beginner like me, who’d love to have the professional SLR options to some level so that it doesn’t overwhelm me too much and of course the damage on the pocket too.

Comes with a Kit Lens which is 18-55MM AF-S lens, the D-5000 doesn’t have an inbuilt motor so I have to buy lenses that have the motor built-in, means a little more money involved.

Then I also bought a telephoto zoom lens (55-200MM), which does a pretty good job. In fact this lens seems to fare much better than the kit lens for the similar kind of shots. I’m a newbie and still can find out the difference.

It is a lot of fun and pain at the same time.

I’ve learnt that you click 50 shots to get one shot perfect, just the way you want it and you’d know Planning on investing more time doing this. I’ve uploaded some of the photos that I thought are good onto http://fotoblog.rsivanandan.com

What Y’all think????

                                                                                                               Nokia 5800 XpressMusic (Symbian)         

Nokia N900  (Maemo)                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Sony Erricson Xperia X10 (Android)

The only one missing in the combination is Windows Mobile, gotta have one when 7 is released Oh yeah, I hate iphone!