Slashdot Mirror
Build Your Own NOC
Geminus writes "Ever wanted to build a cheap NOC but had difficulty explaining tech stuff to bean counting managers? Here's the basics on building one for under two grand. Makes for a pretty good dog-n-pony show, and proves useful too! Damn, I want to be an Armchair Network Operations Center General."
Probably right. I've wondered about this before, when seeing these statements. But at least you don't have to worry about leaking information or being used as an intermediate host in an attack. Worst case is essentially a DOS. On the other hand, were this a logging host, you could concievably infect it as you mentioned, download to it a simple program (you'd have to hope you download it right, since there won't be any way to do TCP style checksumming, I suppose) and have it grep through the logs to remove entries with your IP address or whatever, all automatically. No? But that'd be a bitch of an exploit, if you could pull it all off all one way.
Unfortunately, as someone who has had to support real NOCs for real networks on a tight budget, I can state without reservation that the open source tools you mention (MRTG/RRD, OpenNMS) are mediocre to the point of unusability.
Some people might find this puzzling, but the best NOC systems I've used on tight budgets were homegrown applications, usually after trying out and discovering the deficiencies of the open source tools. It isn't that hard to write a good NMS, but once someone rolls their own good one in-house, it rarely gets released into the wild. For that matter, many of the commercial packages are steaming piles, so if you have a talented programmer or two on staff, you can add value to your company by just writing your own NMS and not waste time with mediocre packages.
This is one of those things that SOMEONE could do well in the open source domain, but I haven't seen it. When someone hacks together the foundation of a really slick NMS at some company that needs it, it inevitably becomes a competitive asset and therefore cloistered in the bowels of engineering. Having a killer NMS is a significant competitive advantage, and the field is populated with enough mediocre solutions right now that there is significant financial pressure to keep NMS code bases proprietary.
It would really be better if stories like this were not chosen for the front page. Whenever a story is posted with unexplained acronyms, tons more people click the links to see wtf it's talking about. More people who don't care about the actual (obscured) topic needlessly eat up the bandwidth, and the links are slashdotted much sooner. I know this is off-topic, however it does pertain to this story...