• cloud,  Mac Security,  Network Infrastructure

    Configure Syslog Options on a Meraki

    Meraki has a syslog option. To configure a Meraki to push logs to a syslog server, open your Meraki Dashboard and click on a device. From there, click on “Alerts & administration”. At the “Alerts & administration” page scroll down to the Logging section. Click on the “Add a syslog server” link and type the IP address of your syslog servers name or IP. Put the port number into the Port field. Choose what types of events to export. This could be Event Log, Flows or URLs, where: Event Log: The messages from the dashboard under Monitor > Event log. Flows: Inbound and outbound traffic flows generate syslog messages that…

  • Active Directory,  Windows Server,  Windows XP

    Use Syslog on Windows

    There are a number of tools available for using Syslog in a Windows environment. I’ll look at Snare as it’s pretty flexible and easy to configure. First download the snare installation executable from http://sourceforge.net/projects/snare. Once downloaded run the installer and simply follow all of the default options, unless you’d like to password protect the admin page, at which point choose that. Note that the admin page is by default only available to localhost. Once installed, run the “Restore Remote Access to Snare for Windows” script. Then open http://127.0.0.1:6161 and click on Network Configuration in the red sidebar. There, we can define the name that will be used in syslog (or leave…

  • Active Directory,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Microsoft Exchange Server,  Network Infrastructure,  Ubuntu,  Unix,  VMware,  Windows Server

    Stashbox: Turning a Mac Mini Into A Logstash and Kibana Server

    You have a lot of boxes. You would like to be able to parse through the logs of all those boxes at the same time, searching for a given timestamp across a set of machines for a specific string (like a filename or a port number). elasticsearch, logstash and kibana are one way to answer that kind of need. This will involve downloading three separate packages (which for this article, we’ll do in /usr/local) and creating a config file. First, install the latest Java JDK. This is available at jdk8-downloads-2133151.html. The following is going to download the latest version of logstash and untar the package into /usr/local/logstash (I like nesting…

  • Mac OS X

    Logger In Bash

    When bash scripting, a useful command is logger. The logger command allows you to “make entries in the system log.” When using the logger command, you can write to your own entries to the system log. To show how this command works, we’re going to open two terminal windows, preferably side-by-side. In one window, we’re going to look at the output of the system.log file interactively using the tail command with the -f option tail -f /private/var/log/system.log In the other window, we’re going to simply enter the logger command followed by the word frogger: logger frogger This will show you an entry similar to the following: Jun 3 00:34:44 ce.pretendco.com…