Monitor your transition to IPv6 with WatchMouse (2009-10-14)
You've heard it before, and it's being announced more frequently and louder: The number of available addresses on the Internet is running out, and we all should move to the new addressing scheme, IPv6, as soon as possible.
The uptake has been rather slow in the past, but that seems to be changing now as companies, ISPs, and other organizations are taking their first steps on the road to the IPv6 world. For most of these companies, however, this is quite a big step, with many things to consider and many uncertainties.
External IPv6 monitoring
As of today, WatchMouse offers IPv6 monitoring for web sites and other external services of your company. The monitoring network will, just like visitors of your website that happen to be on an IPv6 connected network, connect to your site when an IPv6 record is available in the DNS of your domain.
Check your IPv6 connectivity right now? Just visit our Check Host tool or the Ping tool. And while you're at it, set up a rule in your account to monitor your site continuously from our world wide monitoring network.
Many changes
To fully enable IPv6 monitoring, we have upgraded several components of our infrastructure:
By offering IPv6 standard in all packages (including the free package and the 30-day trial) and in the tools on our site, we hope to facilitate a smoother transition to IPv6 in your organization.
Is your company interested in IPv6? Then do keep an eye on our IPv6 posts on WatchMouse labs.
Why do you need a monitoring service such as Watchmouse? (2005-01-31)
There are a
number of reasons for this, depending on your role in your
organization, and what you want to achieve. Each of these roles leads
to a different approach for using and setting up the
service.
Most likely you are either responsible for keeping a
service such as a website online, or you have contracted somebody
else to do that for you. Additionally, you could be a consultant or
technical architect who wants to get an insight in performance and
uptime characteristics of various solutions and services.
If your
role is to keep things running, you really want to be notified of
problems as soon as possible, before your customers or supervisors
notice. You want appropriate error messages and not too many false
alarms. As you configure Watchmouse you probably want to have a quick
alert by e-mail or SMS/text message when things don't work and have additional
diagnostic information available. In this way, downtime can be kept
to a minimum. It is not only the quality of the systems that counts,
but also the speed with which you can fix problems.
Your role
could also be in overseeing your service providers, whether they are
internal or outsourced. In that case, you don't want to be
interrupted by these messages, unless the situation becomes dramatic.
Instead you would like to look at the weekly report, and see if your
service providers are living up to their promises. On the Internet it
is easy to get 99% uptime, and you should really be doing better than
that. The services that regularly fail to make this grade need
attention, to see if another approach to provisioning them works
better.
If you are considering technical alternatives for the way
you are setting up your e-business, you are most likely interested in
typical failure modes. For example, we know from experience that
most website problems are software problems, followed by sizing
problems. Communications problems are fairly rare, and if they occur
they take the form of peering problems: websites cannot be reached
from specific networks, even if all networks are operational. One
approach using Watchmouse reports is to check various aspects with
different rules. Use one rule to download the homepage, another to
check the DNS and a third to check connectivity to the hosting
centre. In a next column I'll go into the details of this.
Peter van
Eijk is a management consultant specialized in management of
network infrastructures. He can be reached via his
contact page.
Cisco Releases Security Advisory to Address Multiple Vulnerabilities in Unified CallManager and Presence Server (2007-03-30)
Cisco Systems has released Security Advisory cisco-sa-20070328-voip to address multiple vulnerabilities in the Cisco Unified CallManager (CUCM) and Cisco Unified Presence Server (CUPS). The advisory indicates that the following attack vectors could be used against a vulnerable system:
- It may be possible to crash a CallManager system, resulting in a denial of service, by sending a series of specially crafted packets to the Skinny Call Control Protocol (SCCP) service port.
- It may be possible to cause various CUCM / CUPS services to crash, resulting in a denial of service, by sending a large amount of ICMP Echo Requests (Ping) to a CUCM or CUPS system.
- It may be possible to cause various CUCM / CUPS services to fail, resulting in a denial of service, by sending a specific UDP packet to the IPSec Manager Service on UDP port 8500.
There are no workarounds for these vulnerabilities; however, Cisco has released free software to address the flaws described in this report.
More information, including links to the fixes, can be found in Cisco Security Advisory cisco-sa-20070328-voip - Multiple Cisco Unified CallManager and Presence Server Denial of Service Vulnerabilities.
