Open Source

Network Inventory and Configuration Management

We all know much about Kiwi Syslog Software.  For many years I am using Kiwi Cat tools for configuration management and automate many of daily tasks. Kiwi Cat tool really helped me to perform many tasks like configuration backup, telnet, SSH and much more. The free version just supports 5 devices; hence I started looking at open source community and came across this wonderful application called Zip Tie.

 What is Zip Tie? ZipTie is a framework for Network Inventory and Configuration Management. ZipTie allows you to easily discover all devices in your network to create a comprehensive inventory and to manage the configuration of those devices. Every installation includes a suite of tools to help manage your network. In addition, ZipTie is constantly under development and leverages a large community of network experts who share their tools, device adapters, and experience. It allows you to create or import your own custom tools or download them from the ZipTie community. The software is free to download, use, and distribute. ZipTie.org is the community site and tools exchange for Open Network Inventory and Configuration Management. (Courtesy Zip tie) For a more detailed explanation of ZipTie, please read this technical white paper by Roger Castillo, AlterPoint’s CTO entitled ZipTie Network Inventory Management Framework - enabling the next era of network management tools.

Screen shot courtesy Zip Tie web site

Open Source Network Gateway

In our organization internet management was a big issue, since we had no budget allocated to Internet management I was worried? How should I control our internet usage? Tried to convince the management to buy content filtering appliances, unfortunately they had no budget and our users had no control and they were enjoying the freedom of internet. I started looking for open source appliances and came across Untangle. Which proved to be great for us to control our users? (Who were not happy)? By installing this open source network gateway we could manage to block most of the unwanted contents, P2P applications and much more.

What is Untangle?

Untangle is a privately held company that provides an open source network gateway for small businesses. Untangle provides many gateway applications, such as blocking spam, blocking malware, web filtering, phishing protection, intrusion prevention, and more [1] on the Untangle Gateway Platform.

Untangle was founded in 2003 as Metavize, Inc. by John Irwin and Dirk Morris. Metavize officially launched in 2005 at Demo@15![3]. In 2006, Metavize raised a $10.5M series-A venture round from CMEA Ventures and Rustic Canyon Partners, named Bob Walters as CEO, and renamed to Untangle, Inc. In 2007, Untangle released the Untangle Gateway Platform as open source under the GPLv2 license .In 2007, Untangle also experienced significant growth and surpassed 100,000 users in 2,000 organizations

Some of the features available with Untangle are as follows 

·         Spam Blocker

·         Spyware Blocker

·         Web Filter

·         Virus Blocker

·         Firewall

·         OpenVPN

·         Phish Blocker

·         Protocol Control

·         Intrusion Prevention

·         Attack Blocker

·         Router

·         Untangle Reports

Untangle can be installed easily on any pc and its ready use. You can download Untangle from following link http://www.untangle.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=226&Itemid=739

The minimum hardware requirements to install untangle are as follows

Untangle can also be installed in VMware platform do follow this link for more details http://wiki.untangle.com/index.php/Untangle_Virtual_Appliance_on_VMware

In order to know about the supported configurations do access http://wiki.untangle.com/index.php/Introduction#Supported_Configurations

Further details can be found at the following links

http://www.untangle.com/

http://wiki.untangle.com/index.php/Main_Page