Approximately 60-hours terror siege of Mumbai resulted in the deaths of over 150 people (toll still rising), while more than 300 people sustained injuries as the terrorists took hold of Nariman House, Taj Hotel and Oberoi-Trident hotel. I am deeply saddened with the terrorist attacks in Mumbai and it is due to the India’s brave armed forces, a few of who lost their lives in battle with the terrorists that the situation is back in control. With this post, I would like to salute five such heroes, whose sacrifices will not be forgotten for a long time – Hemant Karkare (Chief of the Mumbai Anti-Terrorist Squad), Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan (National Security Guard Commando), Ashok Kamte (Additional Commissioner of Police, Mumbai), Vijay Salaskar (Head, Anti-Extortion Cell, Mumbai) and Gajendra Singh (NSG Hawaldar).

Recently I was invited to present a guest lecture at the DD University (Nadiad) during their ClaroTechnico 2008 event. I presented a lecture on hacking and covered topics like types of hacking, history of hacking, anatomy of a hack, etc. Here are some photographs of the event.

I had long forgotten the BGInfo utility from sysinternals (now Microsoft) which shows the system information on the desktop. What it does is allow you to pick up items like CPU, RAM, IP information, Hostname, Disk Space, etc. and show them on the desktop. Advantage? Saves time as you have to go through number of clicks before you can collect all the information. Here is a screenshot of how the software looks like:

Download from here

Now that I’ve been reminded of this nice utility, I’m going to add this to all my servers running in the office. I would not recommend using this on live servers which are connected directly to the Internet i.e. servers which can be connected directly via Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Since the desktop from this software is visible even at the login box, anyone can connect to your server and pull out important information. Unless you have secured RDP to listen only from particular IP, or have setup access to servers after VPN, I strongly object the use of this software. Overall, I just love this utility and here is a snap of a desktop from one of my test servers in office.

I’m not much of a Linux guy but still love Nagios. Few days back I came across a script on Nagios Exchange (http://www.nagiosexchange.org/cgi-bin/page.cgi?g=Detailed%2F2639.html;d=1 ) which does a check for Windows updates and reports the results back to the Nagios server. The moment I saw it, I was very happy and I wanted to set this up. But the happiness did not last for long. Few hours later I found that it was not going to be easy to set this up and get it running. The problem is not the script – the problem is me. Always had been away from the Red Devil and Penguin since Windows always was my passion.define service{
use generic-service
host_name Name Of Host – replace this with your Host Name
service_description Updates
check_command check_nrpe!check_updates!-l
}

Searched a lot on the Internet and forums but I could not find a single site which would show how to implement the script in NsClient ++ and how to define the command and service in Nagios. Finally, I managed to crack it and now I would like to share this with everyone who may need some help on this.

Follow these steps to get this working:

[1] Download the script from Nagios Exchange and store it on your hard disk of your server which you need to check for updates. Note down the path to the wsf script for further reference.

[2] Edit your NSC.INI file (NsClient ++) and add this line to it:
check_updates=c:windowssystem32cscript.exe //NoLogo //T:40 C:Scriptscheckupdates.wsf $arg1$
The line above will check for the checkupdates.wsf script under the Scripts folder and run it using cscript. The $arg1$ will return the value back to Nagios.

[3] Next step is to add a command to your Nagios command.cfg file:
#’check_nrpe’ command definition
define command {
command_name check_nrpe
command_line $USER1$/check_nrpe -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -p 5666 -c $ARG1$ -a $ARG2$
}

[4] Now it’s time to define the service. Depending on the way you use templates, I’ll leave it up to you to decide where to place it. Add the following lines:
# Monitor updates in windows machine

Do a pre-flight check of Nagios. If no configuration errors are reported then you are good to go. Restart nagios for the new checks to work.