AxCrypt - Open Source File Encryption

I've been playing with Open Source encryption lately.  Lots of cool stuff out there.  In particular I really like both TrueCrypt and AxCrypt.  As I'm still testing TrueCrypt I'll leave that to a later post after I have a little more hands on experience.  However, AxCrypt is much easier to get a handle on and it's really useful.  If you need to send a file to someone confidentially, this is a great tool.

You can take any type of a file and encrypt it with either a passphrase or a key file.  Passphrases are basically long passwords so that's easy to understand.  However key files are even cooler.  Say you've got a copy of an mpg file, a large graphic file or heck even a large binary file.  You can use those files as keys (think really long, complex passwords) for the encryption.  The guy on the other end needs the same exact file to decrypt the message.  This is a really powerful and AxCrypt can meet AES 128 bit file encryption standards.  You even get compression during the process.  One of my favorite features is that it can compress and encrypt the file inside of an exe package so the receiver doesn't need to have a copy of AxCrypt.  Good stuff...check it out. 

 

Go Live - ShoreTel Lessons Learned

So our office in Denver is up and running.   It was a pretty big project for us and I had 3 of my staff as well as myself on site for the first week to ease the transition. The ShoreTel system worked great.  The users love the PC Software (especially the operator) and the voice quality is fine.  The entire office is wired for 1GB POE. Most offices only have 1 live data connection which is shared between the phone and the PC.  Here are a few lessons learned from the ShoreTel perspective:

• The HP Switch worked great as a backbone switch for this office. I'll be looking to drop the rest of my Cisco switching gear in favor of HP.
• We went with the new 230G phones (which are black and white) and they worked fine.  I wanted gig at the phone so I'd have gig at the PC and that was a smart decision.
• Don't concentrate on customizing buttons on the phone as much as customizing the Call Manager software that each user will use.  They will get more mileage out of the software client.
• We used a Bogen speaker system and amp for overhead paging.  Still having a few issues with that (undoubtedly a wiring issue) but I think it will work well.
• Music on hold turned out to be a little more expensive then I first thought. They said you could use any old iPod which is technically correct, but the low end ones (shuffle) can't charge and play at the same time. It ended up being cheaper to buy a IAPMp3 from http://ilaudio.com/digital-players.htm. It's about the same cost as an iPod would have been and it comes with 10 free styles of music so there's no copyright issues.  It's simple to set up and highly recommended.
• We had to deal with 10 digit dialing in Denver.  All calls outside the area code (not outside the local calling area) had to be preceded by a 1.  I bet there's a work around for this be we were unable to find one.
• The IP 8000 conference phone works great. It's harder to set up in ShoreTel because it's a SIP phone, but it works just fine.
• Make sure to explain the difference between parking and holding to your users. They are easily confused about these two features because they are so similar.
• ShoreTel Director comes with a tool to troubleshoot trunks which lets you monitor all calls and digits dialed. This tool was immensely useful and is called the Trunk Test Tool. Oh how I wish we had this tool on our PBX!
• Bite the bullet and get a spreadsheet of all phones, mac addresses and locations. You'll thank me later.
• If you've got a small office, have the operator add all the extensions as contacts.  That way they can drag and drop calls with very little effort.

All in all I'm very pleased with the ShoreTel solution.  The fact that I don't need a dedicated "phone guy" to manage this system is a huge benefit as well. I can wait to get all my sites on ShoreTel.

LiveView - boot up a static disk image

I just found this tool a few days ago and I haven't had time to fully test it, but it looks really cool.  Basically, this tool (which is Open Source under GNU) will use VMWare to mount a dd-style disk image.  I haven't really discussed dd on this blog, but it's kind of a Ghost like tool that takes a sector by sector image of a disk and stores it in a single (or set of) disk files.  My favorite way to do this is by livecd like Helix or Knoppix-STD. Anywho, back to LiveView....

Here is the short and simple description right from their website:

"Live View is a Java-based graphical forensics tool that creates a VMware virtual machine out of a raw (dd-style) disk image or physical disk. This allows the forensic examiner to "boot up" the image or disk and gain an interactive, user-level perspective of the environment, all without modifying the underlying image or disk. Because all changes made to the disk are written to a separate file, the examiner can instantly revert all of his or her changes back to the original pristine state of the disk. The end result is that one need not create extra "throw away" copies of the disk or image to create the virtual machine.

Live View is capable of booting

• Full disk raw images
• Bootable partition raw images
• Physical Disks (attached via a USB or Firewire bridge)
• Specialized and closed image formats (using 3rd party image mounting software)

Containing the following operating systems

• Windows 2003, XP, 2000, NT, Me, 98
• Linux (limited support)

Behind the scenes, Live View automates a wide array of technical tasks. Some of these include: resolving hardware conflicts resulting from booting on hardware other than that on which the OS was originally installed; creating a customized MBR for partition-only images; and correctly specifying a virtual disk to match the original image or physical disk. "

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I expect this tool to be great for security situations, but heck it's just as useful for daily admin tasks.  For example, if your company had a policy to take and store a dd image of each departing persons hard drive you could theoretically boot that image at a later date without worry about compatible hardware and see the machine in the state it was the day they left the company.  Even better, dd each person's machine before a rollout or rebuild.  Then get back to their image if something isn't working after the changes.

Enjoy and have a Happy New Year!