Did you know when to use Bcc?

I had a topic on the Persian section of my website titled "when to use Cc or Bcc in our Emails" about three years ago. Those who didn't learn when to use Cc or Bcc can see the consequences here:


Thanks Babak for pointing this out to his blog visitors!

RFCs and Best Practices

I have found it amusing browsing the list of RFCs in my spare time. It is really entertaining to me and good to learn how tech stuff work. But there is more into RFCs than Defining standards and Protocols. Some of them provide Best Current Practices (BCP) and information for the information community. Here are three of them:
RFC2196 - Site Security Handbook
RFC2504 - Users' Security Handbook
RFC2505 -Anti-Spam Recommendations for SMTP MTAs

I am an Encouraging Director!

I found Personal DNA on jalal's blog! very interesting personnal assessment questionnaire.I am an Encouraging Director!
Give it a try!

Huawei Devices and Strange Syslog Message Format!

My php-syslog-ng is up and running and I am in the process of configuring all my nodes to send their syslog messages to syslog-ng server but there seems to be some problems on some devices. No problem with my Linux servers and my Huawei firewalls but Huawei switches and routers are apparently using the wrong syslog message format. I can see all my switches and routers as a host named "2006" which is the YYYY part of the date in my php-syslog-ng web interface! and the hostname appears in the message string which is different from what RFC 3164 says about the syslog packet header. It seems that Huawei managed to have its own syslog message format on some of their devices. I am looking for some way to change this behavior.

Does Windows Support SNMP v3?

Moving towards SNMP v3 needs some thinking before the final decision to make sure all parties included in the migration are capable of that! This includes the Managers and Agents.
Managers can be a major concern since many of them do not support SNMP v3 nodes which can cause the whole move to collapse in the planning phase!!!
Agents includes all Devices like Switches, Routers, Firewalls or operating systems (Windows and unix/linux family). Many devices come with SNMP v3.
For Unix and Linux servers the Net-SNMP provides a complete solution for the move but for Microsoft Windows servers it should be mentioned that the SNMP service which is built into the operating system does not support SNMP v3 but luckily there is an alternative which is installing the Windows version of Net-SNMP:
Installing Net-SNMP on Windows

How to Configure SNMPv3

SNMPv3 provides both authentication and encryption (privacy) which addresses the security issues in SNMP v2/3 (No Authentication and Confidentiality) implementation which was only based on community names.
with SNMP v3 it is now possible to create username/password and define which MIBs is the user allowed to view and all these can also be encrypted.
This is a good resource to get a quick view on how to configure Cisco and Net-SNMP for SNMPv3:
Configuring SNMPv3
If you are intrested to know more about SNMP this is a thorough resource which many documents are referring to as a technology reference:
Essential SNMP, Second Edition

Setting up Syslog-ng in Fedora Core 5

I am busy with setting up a php-syslog-ng server on Fedora Core 5 these days but things are really getting harder than I imagined! Having the syslog-ng service itself up and running is simple and straight forward but adding the opportunity to monitor the logs through a web interface; which is what I really need has made my life difficult!
The difficulty is where different details from Apache, MySQL and syslog-ng configuration file must be adjusted.
I am documenting the process as I go on and will put it here once completed.