On the Integration of pmacct with ElasticSearch and Kibana post a user (Xentoo) asked how to display geographic information provided by pmacct on a Kibana 4 map using pmacct-to-elasticsearch.
An experimental feature of p2es called transformations can be used to add a Geo Point field on the basis of the country code provided by pmacct.
After reading Antonio Prado’s Reverse DNS lookup for Italian Government’s mail exchangers post I got intrigued by the idea of checking how many of those Italian Government’s MX mail servers support STARTTLS.
STARTTLS “offers a way to upgrade a plain text connection to an encrypted (TLS or SSL) connection” (Wikipedia) and, when it’s implemented on the MX SMTP server, it allows a STARTTLS-aware user’s outbound mail server to encrypt the traffic toward the recipient’s server.
A couple of days ago CloudFlare announced its public alpha release of their DNSSEC implementation. Since they are using the “recent” Elliptic Curve ECDSA P-256 (RFC6605) I wondered how many resolvers can have problems with signatures validation so I wanted to take a peek at the current situation as seen by the RIPE Atlas probes network.
The public DNSBL services offered by AHBL have been shutdown.
Services and programs which used dnsbl.ahbl.org, ircbl.ahbl.org and rhsbl.ahbl.org need to be updated in order to avoid false positives:
X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.789 tagged_above=-999 required=6 tests=[BAYES_00=-1.9, DNS_FROM_AHBL_RHSBL=2.699, T_RP_MATCHES_RCVD=-0.01] autolearn=no
Spamassassin configuration, for example, needs to be fixed:
# cat /usr/share/spamassassin/20_dnsbl_tests.cf | grep AHBL
header DNS_FROM_AHBL_RHSBL eval:check_rbl_envfrom('ahbl', 'rhsbl.ahbl.org.')
describe DNS_FROM_AHBL_RHSBL Envelope sender listed in dnsbl.ahbl.org
tflags DNS_FROM_AHBL_RHSBL net
reuse DNS_FROM_AHBL_RHSBL
Comment that block or (at least) force a score zero for the rule in your local configuration:
# cat /etc/spamassassin/local.cf | grep AHBL score DNS_FROM_AHBL_RHSBL 0
In this post I want to show a solution based on a script (pmacct-to-elasticsearch) that I made to gather data from pmacct and visualize them using Kibana/ElasticSearch. It’s far from being the state of the art of IP accounting solutions, but it may be used as a starting point for further customizations and developments.
I plan to write another post with some ideas to integrate pmacct with the canonical ELK stack (ElasticSearch/Logstash/Kibana). As usual, add my RSS feed to your reader or follow me on Twitter to stay updated!
This is the big picture of the proposed solution:
There are 4 main actors: pmacct daemons (we already saw how to install and configure them) that collect accounting data, pmacct-to-elasticsearch, which reads pmacct’s output, processes it and sends it to ElasticSearch, where data are stored and organized into indices and, at last, Kibana, that is used to chart them on a web frontend.