They say that your unpatched Microsoft Windows machine will live for only 12 minutes on the net before getting 0wned. Now, a lot of people are saying a lot of different things about Windows security, but I tend to agree to this particular one. I’ve seen it plenty of times at work. In fact, we now have a requirement for all colocated clients to fully patch their servers before connecting to our backbone.
Slashdot has a story. And a dup.
That NoName 100 Mbps switch that I was using for my internal network has strangely died today. I’ve experienced problems with it before, but it was different all the time. I always had a hub as a temporary backup solution, but I gave it away some time ago. Thanks to my brother, I now have a brand new 3Com 100Mbps switch. It is only 5 ports instead of 8 ports of the dead one, but it should be enough. I have only 3 ports occupied now, so there are another 2 for my guests.
The funny coincidence is that two days ago I had to repeat three times that network administration is not my biggest interest. :)
MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher) is monitoring utility, which runs on many platforms and is capable of collecting and graphing statistical information such as network traffic, CPU/Memory/Disk space usage, etc. MRTG can gather information using both SNMP protocol and external scripts. Below are few pieces of my MRTG config file together with scripts, which I felt like sharing.