--On Tuesday, November 27, 2001 11:54 PM -0800 Andrew Ryan
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> At 11:23 PM 11/27/01 -0500, Ed Ravin wrote:
>> The trick is to use an MTA that supports username+tag addressing (i.e.,
>> [EMAIL PROTECTED]). When a failure occurs,
>> the system sends an email alarm to the two-way pagers, with a return
>> address of "mon+incident-ID@domain". The "incident-ID" is unique for
>> the current failure (and is applied to all subsequent failures until
>> everything stabilizes and "goes green").
>
> I think that's a pretty decent idea. I was thinking of a similar scheme,
> with the one addition that I was also thinking that the username should
> be embedded in the ID string. Because if you are letting people do stuff
> like ack, disable, etc., you should know who did it. So a particular ID
> string would be a "ticket" for one event for one user. Then you could see
> in mon.cgi, for example, who acked the message without them having to
> type their name in.
Neither of these ideas provides any true level of security to the system.
If a malicious user can sniff the traffic, or guess the ID strings, they
can forge events into the system.
I've been thinking about writing a WAP client that would allow internet
phones to access mon and find out about current problems. The best idea
I've come up with so far for the security model is to require SSL
encryption on the connection to the WAP cgi script (which you can do
because the gateway systems that internet phones talk to know how to talk
to a secure web server), and require a username and password over that
connection. Once you've done that the only potentially insecure part of
the transaction is between the phone and it's gateway service. If the
phone has secure communications to the cell network, and the network is
secure, then everything is fine.
We're looking at starting a project to replace our current home grown
monitoring infrastructure with something based on mon. The authenticity of
any data put into the system is pretty important to us. A secure WAP
client is one of the pipe-dream goals for the system.
-David Nolan
Network Software Developer
Computing Services
Carnegie Mellon University
