If you read the Top 10 Network Security Tools (Part 1). Here is the continuation.

6. Hping2 - A network probing utility like ping on steroids. This handy little utility assembles and sends custom ICMP, UDP, or TCP packets and then displays any replies. It was inspired by the ping command, but offers far more control over the probes sent.

7. Kismet - A powerful wireless sniffer. Kismet is an console (ncurses) based 802.11 layer2 wireless network detector, sniffer, and intrusion detection system. It identifies networks by passively sniffing (as opposed to more active tools such as NetStumbler), and can even decloak hidden (non-beaconing) networks if they are in use. It can automatically detect network IP blocks by sniffing TCP, UDP, ARP, and DHCP packets, log traffic in Wireshark/TCPDump compatible format, and even plot detected networks and estimated ranges on downloaded maps. As you might expect, this tool is commonly used for wardriving.

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Here’s the First 5 of Network Security Tools:

1. Nessus - Nessus was a popular free and open source vulnerability scanner until they closed the source code in 2005 and removed the free version (”registered feed”) in 2008. Key features include remote and local (authenticated) security checks, a client/server architecture with a GTK graphical interface, and an embedded scripting language for writing your own plugins or understanding the existing ones.

2. Wireshark - Wireshark (known as Ethereal until a trademark dispute in Summer 2006) is a fantastic open source network protocol analyzer for Unix and Windows. It allows you to examine data from a live network or from a capture file on disk. You can interactively browse the capture data, delving down into just the level of packet detail you need. Wireshark has several powerful features, including a rich display filter language and the ability to view the reconstructed stream of a TCP session. It also supports hundreds of protocols and media types. A tcpdump-like console version named tethereal is included. One word of caution is that Ethereal has suffered from dozens of remotely exploitable security holes, so stay up-to-date and be wary of running it on untrusted or hostile networks (such as security conferences).

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A sysadmin makes sure your network connection is safe, secure, open, and working. A sysadmin makes sure your computer is working in a healthy way on a healthy network. A sysadmin takes backups to guard against disaster both human and otherwise, holds the gates against security threats and crackers, and keeps the printers going no matter how many copies of the tax code someone from Accounting prints out.

Friday, July 25th, 2008, is the 9th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. On this special international day, give your System Administrator something that shows that you truly appreciate their hard work and dedication.

Here is little perl script created by rhai of pinoytux.com on how to rotate apache log files.

#!/usr/bin/perl

$DIR=”/var/www/html/sites/yoursite.com/logs”;
$DATE=`date +%F`;
chomp $DATE;

@log = `/usr/bin/find $DIR -type f -name “*.log” `;

#print “\nRotating $DATE\n”;

foreach $log (@log) {
chomp $log;
$new_fn=”$log”.”-”.”$DATE”;
#print “$log $new_fn\n”;
`mv “$log” “$new_fn”`;
`gzip -9 $new_fn`;

}