[VoiceOps] DID's + Asterisk Security

[Peter Beckman]

On Wed, 5 Aug 2009, J. Oquendo wrote:

> I made a butchery for my own servers.

  Well written article, and comprehensive too.  Well done!

  My problems with interpreted scripts to handle parsing of log files in the
  way your article describes are:

     * Scanning happens in chunks, a cron job for example.  If for some
       reason your log file gets pretty big, maybe tail or grep takes a long
       enough time for you to have TWO versions of the script running, which
       could lead to some unexpected results.

     * Scanning happens in 5 minute granularity, and you may be screwed by
       the time the script gets around to running again.

     * The code is interpreted, not compiled, and thusly less efficient with
       greater overhead.

     * Grepping and Copying involves lots of IO.

  In a production environment, log files can get really big, making parsing,
  grepping and copying costly, especially every 5 minutes.  There is a great
  benefit to on-the-fly log parsing and action with a compiled tool that
  uses minimal resources.

  For most people, all the tools are functionally the same -- block hosts
  that pass a certain threshold or set of rules.  But when you get into
  production systems with a lot of customers and a lot of attacks, the
  interpreted script (PHP, Python, bash/sh/tcsh) simply doesn't scale as
  well as a compiled, native OS byte-code long-running daemon.

  I don't want to get into another language flame war, we all use what works
  for us during the time we need such things, and when it stops working for
  us, we change.  There's 9 ways from Sunday to do the things we all have to
  do as VoIP folk, none of them are wrong, every choice has tradeoffs.

Beckman
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Peter Beckman                                                  Internet Guy
beckman at angryox.com                                 http://www.angryox.com/
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