04.27.07
A sandwich for your network
I read a brief article in SysAdmin Magazine about a network monitor called PBNJ. No, it doesn’t stand for Peanut Butter -N- Jelly…but rather Ports, Banners -N- Junk. It uses nmap to scan systems to see what ports are open, records that in a database, then allows you to run subsequent scans to see what changed.
This really isn’t anything new and lots of projects do this already. I used an nmap extension to Big Brother back when I worked at Blackboard. I had to abandon it due to performance reasons but I’m very familiar with the practice and implementation. I thought I’d contribute some of what I know to the fledgling project.
I already contacted the maintainer, Josh Abraham. I gave him some advice on the docs detailing the database integration. I’m going to check out the code from the subversion repository and give a good going-over. I know I can contribute more than a few comments, given all the stuff I’ve done with Big Brother, working in the ASP/hosting space and being a sys admin for 9 years.
This’ll be fun. Since the project is fairly new, there’s room for more folks to help.
