Got Skeletons?

A technote was published in the technote library in late March. This one will help you clean up any embarrasing log entries, which you need to clean out for one reason or another. Suppose you are running PowerTrace with WebTrace enabled in your environment and you or somebody else manage to surf to a webpage which everybody just rather forget about, then you need to find a way to surgically remove the skeletons from the closet, as you may want to retain the remainer of your PowerTrace logs.

In order to do this, you need to have the proper credentials for the PowerFuse datastore.

The article available here, will show you how to deal with this problem. A nifty buildingblock for Wisdom has also been included in the article.

Secret Tools of the Common Crow…

In case you wondered where this article went a couple of weeks ago, it had to be pulled and revised at the request of RES, as we incorrectly stated that you could get the tools at RES support. This is not currently the case.  Anyway, this posting was really supposed to have be called Secret tools of the RES Engineer, but then all of a sudden, an old Gary Larson cartoon came to mind, and ruined everything… Damn you Mr. Larson!! ;-)

Okay… so maybe a spatula isn’t gonna make the 10 o’clock news, but perhaps some other tools which are little known, which are really nice to know about would peak your interest. There is just one catch to this. You’ll have to ask around for the utilities in this article as they were really only written for internal use, but several customers and integrators got copies of them. Please do NOT contact RES Support for these tools.

Nevertheless, you ought to know about them as they can help you speed up a troubleshooting session by having the information available. Perhaps RES will make these things downloadable in the future. If this happens, stick around, RESguru will let you know.

Click here to read the article.

Clearing individual PowerFuse Logfiles

This technote and associated Wisdom BuildingBlock is inspired by a public posting at the RES Forum, specifically on how to access certain elements of the PowerFuse datastore. Now, before we proceed let’s get one thing straight. If you start messing around with your datastore on your own, the key operating phrase here is: ON YOUR OWN, i.e. don’t go crying to RES Support if you screw up and haven’t backed up your database. Responsible admins only, capice? 

Right - with that being clear, what’s all this about then? Well, one of the things which would be very usefull would be having the ability to clear individual logfiles. Let’s say for example that you want to keep your AppGuard log, but want to flush the IP-security log, perhaps because you configured it to learning mode, and you’re now swamped with a bunch of useless log entries and you want to blow those out and start over. Unfortunatly it’s not currently possible through the GUI to delete individual logs. So, with the help of a nifty SQL statement this is possible.

The technote wil demonstrate how you can clear out specific logs, without having to clear all logs at once. A Wisdom Buildingblock has been created to help get it right. Resguru.com will assume absolutely NO responsibility nor liability from the result of utilizing anything published in this article, or anything else on this blog for that matter.

With all said and done,  click the brick to read the article: 

Zen and the Art of PowerTrace

A  nice presentation shared by one of the friendly folks over at RES. This one is called Business Value of PowerTrace. It essentially shows you all the cool things which you can find out about your organization, using PowerTrace, a component of PowerFuse 2008 Enterprise edition. Please be sure to check the speaker notes on the PowerPoint, as there is a ton of valuable information in there. Some of the things you can discover are:

• What’s a certain user been doing at a certain time?
• Who’s been doing things they’re not supposed to do?
• Who’s been editing a certain [type of] docment in a given department?
• Web activity of a user or department
• What’s the Top-10 usage of applications and websites?
• What’s the daily maximum users on my terminal servers?

These and other questions are answered in the presentation. Enjoy: