I have no idea what sort of back-up notification system for camera failure the TSA has set-up, but after reading about the Newark incident, I wanted to find out what kind of notifications are available for cameras connected to the Ravica SecurityProbe.  I played around with the demo interface that we have set up in our office and found that with the Notification Wizard there is an easy way to set up email (or voice or text. . .) notifications if one of the cameras connected to the SecurityProbe goes into a critical state, because it is broken or has been disconnected.  The following is a step-by-step procedure for making sure that a broken camera in your facility never goes unnoticed.

1.  Within the Ravica web-interface, click on the Notification tab and select “Begin Notification Wizard” from the menu on the right side of the screen.

2.  Select the notification type that you want to set-up.  Ravica supports almost any notification type that you could want from SNMP traps to sirens, emails to automated telephone messages.  In this example, we’ll set it up so that an email is sent to the security desk whenever the surveillance camera goes into a critical state.

3.  Enter the desired Action name, such as “Email Security Desk” and the email addresses of the individuals or groups that you would like notified when a problem arises.

4.  You can customize the email text that will be sent.  If you want, you can even attach a picture of the latest log or the current image on the selected camera.

5.  The next few pages go through the SNMP settings and resend intervals that you would like to set-up.

6. Link the camera to the email action.  Select the camera name in the Sensor column and make sure that “No Camera Signal Detector” is checked.

7.  On the final screen, there will be a list of all the sensor notifications that are set up for the SecurityProbe.  From this screen you can edit or delete an existing notification or create a new one.

That is all there is to it.  Now the security desk will get an email anytime the camera loses a signal and the problem can be resolved immediately.  Having a simple notification system, such as this, in place at the Newark Airport could have resolved the broken camera issue long before the breach occurred.  It probably wouldn’t  have helped out with the absent security guard, but that is a whole other issue. . .

SNMP v3 added some much needed security features, like ensuring message integrity, verifying that the message came from a valid source with authentication, and packet encryption to ensure that messages aren’t being disseminated by unauthorized sources.

Because of its enhanced security features, SNMP v3 quickly found itself a requirement for many government and secure corporate projects. Since 2004, SNMP v3 has found itself a home in most networks with any sort of security requirements.

That is why the Ravica SecurityProbe line of SensorProbes supports SNMP v3. From within the Settings tab, simply select SNMP under the Connectivity header to the left. You will see the screen below.

From here you can select the type of security features required:

• No Authentication
• Authentication Only
• Authentication & Encryption

Enter your desired password, choose your authentication protocol and access privilege, then it’s off to the races. Now all of your SNMP information will be sent/polled from the SecurityProbe in version 3.

This is a highly popular feature amoung SecurityProbe users. Hopefully, if you didn’t already know it was there, you will find it valuable to impliment in your network. It is now as easy as ever to keep your physical data room details secure.

~ Jon Mills
Follow me on Twitter

• “On Monday June 29, Rackspace Hosting (RAX) experienced a power outage at its Dallas data center that left several areas of the facility without power for about 45 minutes, knocking many popular customer web sites offline.
• “Early Thursday Equinix Inc. (EQIX) data centers in Sydney, Australia and Paris each experienced power failures. While the power outages were brief – Equinix said the Sydney event lasted 12 minutes while power was restored in Paris in just one minute – many key customer sites took considerably longer to recover their systems. The Sydney event led to disruptions for VoIP service in parts of Australia, while the Paris outage caused downtime for the popular video site DailyMotion and the French portal for hosting firm ClaraNet.
• “Google App Engine, the company’s cloud computing platform, had lengthy performance problems on Thursday, experiencing high latency and data loss.
• “A fire at Fisher Plaza in Seattle late Thursday night left many of the building’s data centers without power. The fire in an basement-level electrical room triggered sprinklers and caused extensive damage to generators and electrical equipment. The damage left tenants with backup plans offline for hours, and those without backup sites down until temporary generators restored power early Saturday morning. The biggest impact was at payment gateway Authorize.net, which was offline for more than 12 hours, leaving its merchant customers unable to process credit card sales. Other sites experiencing lengthy downtime included AdHost, GeoCaching and Microsoft’s Bing Travel.
• “Early Sunday, July 5, a fire at 151 Front Street, the major carrier hotel in Toronto, knocked out power on several floors of the facility used by Peer 1 networks. Power was restored in about 3 hours, after a damaged UPS unit was bypassed.”

The author, Rich Miller then goes on to point out some tough questions and the lessons learned from these outages.

Although it is surprising that data centers of this size can experience an outage like this, what is even more surprising is that it all happened in a week’s span. I wonder, is the National Security Agency going to look into this?

The equipment used to monitor this size data center is monumental, but even the smallest IT department can obtain economically priced sensor equipment, like the Bitsight8, combined with Intelligent Sensors, like the AC Voltage Detector and the Digital Voltometer.

The process is easy. Browse to TwitterMail, insert your twitter username and password to get your TwitterMail address instantly. Then go to your SensorProbe and create an email alert. Alert goes off, email is sent and Twitter is fed.  Make sure that everyone that is supposed to recive these messages  are followers of your Twitter account.

Needless to say, something had to be done. I complained to the powers that be,  but their first response was less then rewarding. Answers  like “It’s in your head,” or “You are right under the vent,” were explored; but I knew that they were wrong.

Luckily, things got worse. The temperature was getting colder and for longer periods of time. More people were saying things like “Gee it’s cold,”  or  “Hey, are you cold?” and “Turn up the heat or I am breaking up the conference room table and building the biggest bonfire this side of Boston.” In one remote section of the office there were a group of  dissidents that wanted to change the company dress code so that it included a L.L Bean Arctic Parka.

At this point I decided to throw on my Jimmy D detective hat and get some proof. Since I am Uber Geek, I decided to use the tools of my trade, I would need technology!

I integrated a high scale, super conductive data collection station into my work environment. To be honest with you, it surpasses the one that I once viewed at MIT that is currently used to monitor global warming. In reality, I secretly  moved my BitSight2 temperature probe from the server room over to my desk. I then setup Denika to trend its SNMP data. With Denika I was able to set a minimum temperature threshold, which would alert me when the temp fell.

I diligently collected data for two weeks. I even adjusted the threshold, as I saw the temp get lower and lower. The data was conclusive. I had my answer. I could now confidently register my complaint to the powers that be and demand change! At the same time, I now had the ability to defuse the previously described uprising. Viva Data! Viva Jimmy D! Maybe I need to get out of my cube more often?

Again, in reality, I took this data to my boss and quickly showed him that in the afternoons were seeing an average of 54 degrees, mornings were a bit higher. He took this to building management and they are currently in the process of finding out what the issue is.

The good news is that my cube is getting warmer, the bad news is the I got my BitSight taken away!

I logged into Denika and then clicked on the SvrRoom4 report group. I pat myself on the back for being super smart. When we set up this server room I made sure to setup reports for the various Ravica probes and complimented them with other related SNMP reports. I have quite a few, port utilization, memory, CPU utilization and most importantly System Temperature.

So I looked at the reports. I drilled down in the historical graph and could see that the air flow sensor saw a steady decline a little after 1:30 am. I then went over to the temp sensor and started to see the temp climb around 1:45 am. The temperature sensor reached the threshold at 1:55 am.

At this point I was a bit puzzled. We had placed the air flow sensor by the cooling unit but the AC voltage detector was reporting fine. That means the environmental fan was running.

I’m lucky, I was the designer of this server room and was adamant about having a security light that I could turn off or on remotely. So I sent the command to turn on the light and then logged into the webcam. The good news is that I could see what happened. We had stacked some cardboard boxes on that wall and one had fallen in front of the vent. That means that fan was running but air couldn’t get out.

The good news is that I was able to find and remedy the problem quickly. The bad news is that I had to get dressed and drive over to the office and move the boxes. I did make sure to stack all the boxes on top of the desk of the person who was supposed to get rid of them in the first place!

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Jim Dougherty aka “Jimmy D”
Lead PreSales Support Engineer and
Netflow Evangelist for Plixer International!

Follow me on Twitter
http://twitter.com/jimmydnet

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