システム管理な雑記 -- Sleeve notes of a sysadmin --

Note: Migrating existing user profiles to new accounts on Windows machines (XP/2003)

2007-10-08T05:06:00Z

-- English -- Moving user profiles, which is needed during/after migration from existing environments to Active Directory, is a kind of somewhat tough thing, I mean the amounts of target accounts and time consumed, and some of caveats. Currently we can mainly use the following supported patterns: User Settings Migration Tool(USMT)/Files and Settings Transfer Wizard(FSTW) USMT is for automatic deployment. This tool can migrate profiles settings from the source accounts to the target accounts on the...(read more)

Misc: Awarded again as MVP.

2007-10-08T03:26:00Z

--English-- Thanks to everyone involved, I am awarded again as an MVP, 6th or 7th time in a row. (Well, I am not sure which is correct. ) I received MVP awards in the following order: Security (2002.07-2002.09; this may not be an official one) Security (2002.10-2003.09) Windows Server Systems Security (2003.10-2004.09) Windows Security (2004.10-2005.09) Windows Security (2005.10-2006.09) Windows Security (2006.10-2007.09) Windows Security (2007.10-2008.09) My first opportunity as an MVP came when...(read more)

日本語テスト... /test posting in Japanese

2007-10-08T01:40:00Z

----Japanese---- 日本語での投稿テストです。日本語が使えることが確認できたので、日本語と英語の両方で投稿してみよう。この投稿では、日本語を先、英語をその次、の順番で。 ---- English ---- This is just a test post in Japanese. As I confirmed that we can use Japanese, I am going to post articles both in Japanese and English. Japanese first, then English texts follow, for this post....(read more)

Awarded Again

2004-10-03T11:16:00Z

Today I have signed up for the MVP program for another one year. This time I am awarded for Windows Security, as it seems the category I got awarded, "Windows Server Systems Security", does not currently exist.

Whew, there are really bunch of famous and cool people in the category...

I have also found a good thing. Japanese MVPs specialized in Windows Security has increased in number.

Here are Japanese Security MVPs whom I know:

Name	Web Site in Japanese (pls open up your favorite translator when you browse any of these sites below...)
Hideaki Ihara	One of the most active people in Japan. Specializes in security in general. Broad knowledge. His strongest interest nowadays seems forensics. Port139 http://www.port139.co.jp/
Hajime Kojima	His site is a kind of hub of info regarding security, FreeBSD, Linux, and Windows. Security Hole Memo http://www.st.ryukoku.ac.jp/~kjm/security/memo/
Michio Sonoda	An active expert in several of communities. Specializes in security policies in general.
Akira Ryowa	An active expert in several of communities. Specializes in PKI, encryption, penetration tests, and so on...
Hidenobu Seki (aka. Urity)	Specializes in authentication process concerning Windows. NTLM, DCOM, RPC, for example. A regular speaker in Black Hat Briefings. Security Friday http://www.securityfriday.com/
Kaoru Yoshida	A trainer of "Legend" for various and many of technologies and products around Windows and server products of Microsoft. MOM and DRM are what he is currently into. He had sessions at TechED 2004 Yokohama (in Japan).
Yuu Arai	One of Japanese regular reporters of vulnerabilities to MSRC. (MS02-023.062, and so on...) Specializes in client-side things, it seems.
Tsuneyoshi Hamamoto	Specializes in network and security. A founder and moderator of a mailing list called "connect 24h" in which many of interesting topics are found. Banquet of broad band connection http://cn24h.hawkeye.ac/
Kunio Miyamoto (aka. wakanoto)	An IPSec and WebDAV guy. A character. A regular poster in a site called @IT, and also an editor at SlashDot Japan.

Honeynet Security Console

2004-05-16T23:36:00Z

From seculogger's blog.

Honeynet Security Console

It seems very neat. I decided that I should evaluate this, with sebek!

Microsoft Support Webcast: Microsoft Windows XP: Exploring Boot Options and Recovery Console June 25, 2002

2004-05-10T15:16:00Z

This webcast covers topics around "how to use the recovery console" and more about troubleshooting the boot phase. It is a must thing, you know, as we engineers handle issues around servers. ;-)

Microsoft Support Webcast: Microsoft Windows XP: Exploring Boot Options and Recovery Console June 25, 2002

Note: [IIS] How to have NNTP Feed?

2004-05-09T22:01:00Z

From Bernard's article.
Errors in IIS 6.0 Documentation

I have once tested this NNTP Feed feature of IIS 6.0, with Shavlik's news server.
It seems I have to dig more on this.;-)

Thanks, Bernard!

JAPAN: Personal and private information in danger?

2004-05-09T21:54:00Z

From seculogger, another Japanese MVP.
http://www.7th-angel.net/seculog/item/550.html

According to NHK, a leading broadcasting company in Japan, about 38% of market-leading companies in Tokyo Stock Exchange Market stated that they do not and will not have|prepare rules to prevent the outflow of private information.
Src (Pls use babelfish to have them translated):
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/2004/05/09/k20040508000025.html
http://www.asahi.com/national/update/0508/012.html

* Babelfish:
http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com/babelfish/tr

I do not understand what these companies have in mind, as the privacy law will be enforced in the next year. This means all the companies should be careful and does have responsibility enough to prevent such a thing, otherwise it is each of these companies' fault. I wonder where people in this country are heading for...?

Tool: Quest Software Quest Central (Freeware)

2004-05-09T21:36:00Z

From SQLJunkies.

Quest Software Quest Central for SQL SERVER - FREEWARE Now Available
http://www.quest.com/quest_central/sql_server/freeware/

It features things like this:

Database Administration
Space Management
24x7 Monitoring
Performance Diagnostics with Spotlight
Database Analysis
Load Testing and Data Generation

Hmm, sounds not too bad, you know.

Tool: Syslog Turbo, DHCP Turbo, etc.

2004-05-09T19:48:00Z

Softwares from Weird-Solution seems somewhat cool.

http://www.weird-solutions.com/

As for Syslog Turbo there are things that is helpful for daily sysadmin jobs, like analysis and log rotation features. We can manipulate it with a sql-like dialect, which may be fairly useful as long as you are familiar with SQL.

There are other easy-to-manipulate server softwares like DHCP, BOOTP, and TFTP so please check them out.

Tool: ieSpell

2004-05-09T08:25:00Z

A spell checker for IE. I found it when I did some spell-checks on the previous article. This tool is for English only, it seems. Still, it is very cozy.

ieSpell - A Spell Checker for Internet Explorer

Just a note of log consolidation issues.

2004-05-09T04:13:00Z

There are numbers of tasks around sysadmins and security engineers at the data centers, which include log management and monitoring the servers/clients to check if there is an unusual thing happening/ongoing.

I have begun to think of this one year ago when around me there were many of "untouched" or unmanaged as for the system environment. With such a server, when a trouble happens there is no one who could trace what is wrong or what should be done, or worse, when the box downs. It is not cool....

So, to trace the anomalies I am now heading in log consolidation/management to have evidence enough for troubleshooting and detection of problems.

What I have completed:

consolidating logs and alerts of network appliances, routers, (managed) switches, firewalls.
This means I have to collect both syslog messages and SNMP traps.

To do this I am using WinSyslog from Adiscon as a central location for storing syslog messages and Kiwi Syslog Daemon to collect SNMP Traps. From Kiwi SNMP traps are translated into syslog and be poured in the syslog storage.
consolidating Event log entries from Windows Machines.
For this I am using NTSyslog I got from SourceForge. I am still in a half way as it cannot handle multi-byte languages properly, especially around (what do you say in English? We say this "kaigyo code" in Japanese) and Chinese characters.

Another point here is the future possibilities of using of Log Parser, which is written by a guy in Microsoft.
We can handle eventlog messages in multi-byte languages without a fear with the current versions of the tools released, as it handles those characters as Unicode.
We engineers in regions with multi-byte languages welcome this tool very much as we do not have to think about "how to localize this cozy tool?", etc, etc.

I am not yet planning utilizing this very kewl and cozy tool in my framework because I want to design "effortless and yet cohered" design, though.
I emphasize here that I am planning to improve/change the whole design so there is such a high possibility that I will be using this tool.

In the MVP Summit 2004 some of us Japanese MVPs had a chance to discuss on the tool with the author, in which we have heard there will be much improvements in severals of the coming versions. I promise he is so dedicated and is so enthusiastic. ;-)
Choosing the base platform.
I chose the following stuffs for this system:
A. Log consolidation
Windows 2000 Server/Server 2003
IIS 5.0 and later
Active Server Pages
Microsoft SQL Server 2000
Adiscon WinSyslog 4.2 or later
Kiwi Syslog Daemon (to just translate SNMP Traps into syslog messages, without an effort.)
Softether (as providing the VPN way to collect logs of servers in several segments of different locations on the Internet.)

B. MRTG and some other system monitors
For this I am using several up to now, and I am planning to consolidate the monitors in just a few nodes, as I want to include links for the graphs of MRTG in the system A. above. I intentionally have several nodes, as in such a way I can troubleshoot more precisely where the bottle neck/system down occurs.

What I am not yet doing:

Consolidating logs scattered around the system and messages written in other forms
As for these logs I am imagining api.log, setup.log, and so on which are written in the text format and scattered around the whole system for Windows OSes.
Consolidating Backup and Task Scheduling logs of Windows NT-Based OSes
Consolidating HFNETCHK/MBSA resultant texts.
Consolidating MRTG results
Consolidating results from tools for penetration testings like NIKTO, Syhunt, N-Stealth, Nessus, and so on.
Merging and consolidating /var/log/messages and so on in Unix platforms including FreeBSD and Linux.
Merging the logs of crond and the texts of logwatch from Unix platforms.
Consolidating results of system monitoring softwares like those released from Dell, HP, and so on.
Visualize the results to make it easier to confirm what is going on.
Issuing alerts via e-mail and web monitor pages.
The site design as a whole. (I am using IIS as a web server to show the results.)
Designing a fault-tolerant system for both SoftEther and the server.

KB:314470 Definition of System Partition and Boot Partition

2004-05-09T02:49:00Z

Sometime it is so confusing, you know. ;-)

314470 Definition of System Partition and Boot Partition

SNMP and WMI on Windows: WMIex.MSFT.NET

2004-04-14T04:00:00Z

The famous snmpboy site has evolved dramatically to handle WMI implementation!

http://wmiex.msft.net/

KB: 810639 FIX: FTP Passive Mode Support for Firewall Scenarios

2004-02-10T00:06:00Z

This article describes how to put controll on the ports used with FTP PASSIVE mode with IIS 5.0.
SP4 is required to enable this.
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=810639

Tool: Pagedefrag de Sysinternals

2004-02-09T18:42:00Z

Un utilitaire pour les dossiers defragment qui ne sont pas faits après bootup.
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/pagedefrag.shtml

Ev2T

2004-01-30T05:45:00Z

It is a tool which converts event log messages to SNMP traps.
http://www.ncomtech.com/download.htm

As for multilbyte languages it may not be ready...
At least sending traps to Kiwi has been terrible when I used this tool with Japanese version of Windows Server 2003.
You may have to obtain a management app which is capable of handling multibyte messages like Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.
Anyway there seems no probs when used with English version of NT Kernel-based OSes.

Syslog management on Windows platforms.

2004-01-30T05:18:00Z

Do you know WinSyslog from Adiscon? It is so cool a tool for us system operators/administrators.
Check it out at: http://www.adiscon.com/
(For Japanese: http://adiscon.port139.co.jp/)
This tool is so cool, as it allows you to consolidate all the standard error/log messages to one server. With MSSQL you can even display the messages via IIS 4/5. Merging Syslog, SNMP, and Windows Event logs are critical for system admins, to whom we can say this tool is the very solution for managing system health in general.
You can merge SNMP with syslog, using either the latest version of WinSyslog, or with Kiwi Syslog Daemon (http://www.kiwisyslog.com).
You can merge Windows event logs with the following tools:

1. Event Reporter from Adiscon

2. Event logs to syslog utility from Purdue University.

3. ntsyslog service tool from SourceForge

cf. I found a localised version of ntsyslog in Vector or Mado-no-mori, which uses EUC-JP for Japanese. If you have already deployed Linux- or *NIX-based solution for the consolidation of logs, this client is just-fit, it seems.

Note: there are other tools in the world to facilitate this function. According to Kawabata-san (http://www.kawabata.com/), you can even write up the tool that just-fits to your need. ;-)

***System Requirements:

A. System: See the URLs above
B. Human:

B-1. Knowledge of syslog (unix and network devices you use.)

B-2. Ability or Experience of manually parsing eventlogs on Windows

B-3. Ability to configure network devices to emit logs, if you think you'd like to add the target of monitoring.

B-4. Ability to configure SNMP on servers and clients to enable them to emit SNMP messages.

B-5. Ability/experience to configure server management tools like Allied Telesyn SwimView, HP OpenView or Dell Server Administrator /IT assistant for PowerEdge Systems.
(It is okay to use other administrative tools according to the needs at your managed networks. Tools above are just as examples.)

Outputs are just like this.(Special thanks to lg_de_sucre, a cool guy working together.)

Howto: Manage logs (delete unwanted/needless log messages)?

-> Create jobs (using T-SQL) from SQL Server Enterprise Manager.

Howto: merge the route and simplify the system?

-> Use SoftEther or other VPN products.

Howto: merge outputs of Snort?

-> Consult with docs around Snort.

http://www.winsnort.com/ or http://www.snort.org/ are both good-starts.

Ah, it seems I am gonna miss the last train, so see ya later!

YamaKen at the office in Tokyo.