SST/JASS 4.2.2 is out

Jason Callaway has posted a new version of SST (aka JASS). The new release of version 4.2.2 addresses a change in passwd behaviour in relation to locking NP accounts.

Download the new version.

Django gets support for IPv6 fields

My favorite web development framework recently committed some code to add support for IPv6 addresses in data models. The commit closes a ticket I opened 6 years ago. Congratulations to Erik Romijn for finally closing this off. Better late than never :)

The new code differs from my original code in a number of ways. First of all it has better testing and documentation. Second, it does IPv6 address validation programmatically rather than using a regular expression.

The code also borrows from ipaddr-py, which I also contribute to.

A variation on my original code is still running and has been used to manage IPv6 addresses so I can vouch for it. Most of my code doesn't actually use IPAddressFields in Django because of this even older issue which was fixed 3 years ago.

Now both of them are fixed I might look at using the new fields.

Service Tags Nmap Script Accepted

The Nmap NSE script to probe for Sun Service Tags that I wrote last December has been committed to the Nmap trunk. Many thanks to David Fifield for his advice, testing and elegant refactoring of my newbie LUA code to make it more robust.

I expect the code will live on in the Nmap subversion repository rather than my own from now on. If you'd like to use the script you can get it from here or wait until the next release of Nmap to come out.

Sun Service Tags Nmap Discovery Script

Oracle/Sun has had a software agent available for a few years now that runs on numerous operating systems (Solaris 8,9,10, RHEL, OEL, SuSE, and Windows) which enables automatic discovery of assets including software and hardware. The agent is called Sun Service Tags and it provides a way to query a system over a LAN and find out about the hardware, OS, and some of the software installed on it (I say some because the software developer has to register their application at install time with Service Tags and not many outside of Oracle/Sun seem to).

I was inspired last week by a colleague who was looking at installing a Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) agent on his Solaris systems so he could easily get an inventory of his network via his routers and switches with the show cdp neighbor command. I pointed out to him that his Solaris systems very likely had Service Tags already installed on them and he could just query that.

To prove the point a set out to write an Nmap script that could scan a host or network and display all the Service Tags information it could find for each host. The nmap script can be downloaded here and needs to be installed in /usr/local/share/nmap/scripts (or where ever your nmap stores them).

You can see some sample usage output below:

# nmap -sU --script=servicetags -p 6481 1.1.1.1

Starting Nmap 5.35DC1 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2010-12-14 15:57 EST
Nmap scan report for host.example.com (1.1.1.1)
Host is up (0.00045s latency).
PORT     STATE SERVICE
6481/udp open  unknown
| servicetags:
|   URN: urn:st:3bf76681-5e68-415b-f980-db3d77fda252
|   System: SunOS
|   Release: 5.10
|   Hostname: host
|   Architecture: sparc
|   Platform: SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise-T5120::Generic_142900-13
|   Manufacturer: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
|   CPU Manufacturer: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
|   Serial Number: ABC123456
|   HostID: 12345678
|   RAM: 16256
|   CPUs: 1
|   Cores: 4
|   Virtual CPUs: 32
|   CPU Name: UltraSPARC-T2
|   CPU Clock Rate: 1165
|   Service Tags
|     Solaris 10 Operating System
|       Product Name: Solaris 10 Operating System
|       Instance URN: urn:st:90592a79-974d-ebcc-c17a-b87b8eee5f1f
|       Product Version: 10
|       Product URN: urn:uuid:5005588c-36f3-11d6-9cec-fc96f718e113
|       Product Parent URN: urn:uuid:596ffcfa-63d5-11d7-9886-ac816a682f92
|       Product Parent: Solaris Operating System
|       Product Defined Instance ID:
|       Timestamp: 2010-08-10 07:35:40 GMT
|       Container: global
|       Source: SUNWstosreg
|     SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise-T5120 SPARC System
|       Product Name: SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise-T5120 SPARC System
|       Instance URN: urn:st:51c61acd-9f37-65af-a667-c9925a5b0ee9
|       Product Version:
|       Product URN: urn:st:hwreg:SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise-T5120:Sun Microsystems:sparc
|       Product Parent URN: urn:st:hwreg:System:Sun Microsystems
|       Product Parent: System
|       Product Defined Instance ID:
|       Timestamp: 2010-08-10 07:35:41 GMT
|       Container: global
|       Source: SUNWsthwreg
|     Explorer
|       Product Name: Explorer
|       Instance URN: urn:st:2dc5ab61-9bb5-409b-e910-fa39840d0d85
|       Product Version: 6.4
|       Product URN: urn:uuid:9cb70a38-7d15-11de-9d26-080020a9ed93
|       Product Parent URN:
|       Product Parent:
|       Product Defined Instance ID:
|       Timestamp: 2010-08-10 07:35:42 GMT
|       Container: global
|_      Source: Explorer

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 1.43 seconds

As you can see it reveals quite a bit of information about the system including the hostname, OS version and kernel patch revision, serial number, host id, RAM, number of CPUs and core, etc etc. Very useful for system administrators and hackers alike!

This was my first foray into writing in the Lua scripting language so I have probably made some mistakes and would appreciate some feedback if you find any bugs or have any suggestions.

Oracle Solaris Summit - Solaris 11

The live stream and slides for the Oracle Solaris Summit have been posted here.

The slides cover a range of topics on Solaris 11. Of interest are the Image Packaging System and Deploying Oracle Solaris 11 in the Enterprise presentations.

The lack of custom scripting hooks in both IPS and the new installer, AI, should be of a concern to anyone who has large customized Jumpstart environments. Don't hold your breath waiting for these features to come either. You'd be better off putting time and effort porting your build environment to something like Puppet or Chef and just using Jumpstart/AI to put the basic bits onto disk.