A Complete Network Information Center

Benjamin King

This article presents a Web-based network information center that will be implemented as a CGI application to help monitor your networked hosts. This network information center will keep track of all the computers on your networks, their operating systems, and the services they offer such as http or telnet. By tracking this information in a central place, it will be easier for you to monitor your computer networks.

For example, if the Computer Emergency Response Team (http://www.cert.org) issues an alert concerning a certain http server for Windows NT, how would you determine how many of your computers are at risk of being compromised? With the aid of this application, you can easily determine how many hosts, and specifically which hosts, are vulnerable on your network. It's all done through a Web browser, which means you can access this information anywhere on your network. Once you have this information, you will be better prepared to make a decision regarding what action to take.

Background

The first step in solving any problem is to pick the right tools for the job. This job is going to require a network scanner, a database, and something to glue it all together. For the network scanner, I chose Nmap (http://www.insecure.org/nmap) for it's portability, ease of installation, and wide range of features. I chose MySQL (http://mysql.com) for the database because it's small, fast, gets the job done, and it also has excellent on-line documentation with numerous examples. To glue all this together, I chose the Perl scripting language for its powerful use of regular expressions and its easy integration with any database (thanks to the DBI/DBD module).<>