* How did various open source tools fare in the hands of our testers?
This summer was certainly not slack-off time for Network World testers, as our Lab Alliance experts were busy testing and writing up test results on several Linux and open source products over the last three months.
The Sourcefire Realtime Network Awareness (RNA) product, based on the open source SNORT IDS, was reviewed by Joel Snyder, earlier this month. Tom Henderson, Rodney Thayer and Laszlo Szenes of Network World’ Lab Alliance also put Novell’s SuSE Enterprise Linux Server (SLES 10) and SuSE Enterprise Linux Desktop 10 (SLED 10) through the paces in July. In June, Barry Nance tested the Longitude server monitoring platform, which can be used to monitor Red Hat and SuSE servers, as well as MySQL JBoss and Apache applications.
“The goal of Sourcefire’s RNA is to build host profiles for all the systems on the network and assist in prioritizing and analyzing IDS events,” Snyder wrote in his review of the product. The product analyzes IDS information from incoming traffic, and tells you how suspicious traffic may affect real systems on your network – pretty useful stuff. However, Snyder did find some of the administration tasks tedious, such as correcting inaccurate vulnerability findings, which required some manual tinkering – this could be cumbersome if, as Snyder found in his test, you’re dealing with hundreds of false positives on a Linux/Apache server. Read the review of Sourcefire here.
Our biggest open source product test came in July when our testing team got its hands on the brand-new SLED 10 and SLES 10 products from Novell. In his review of the desktop product, Henderson et al said that with SLED 10, Novell “is getting closer to shipping a viable competitor to Microsoft’s Windows/Office combination.”
With a slick GUI, the OpenOffice.org-based application suite provides plug-and-play hardware support. Synchronizing the desktop with various LDAP and Windows Active Directory schemas was tricky, but not insurmountable, Henderson said. As for the server product, SLES, our testers said it is a solid Linux server platform, with decent speed, security and management tools. But some of SLED 10’s bells and whistles were hard on Henderson’s ears; the Xen server virtualization tool was buggy, and the AppArmor security tool was tricky to configure. Read the full review of Novell’s products here: SLED 10; SLES.
In June, Barry Nance tested the Longitude 3.0 product, which promises agent-less server monitoring for Red Hat, SuSE, Unix flavors from IBM, Sun and HP, and Windows. The tool can also be configured to monitor database and Web servers, and even infrastructure such as Active Directory and DHCP. The browser-based tool allows users to set up thresholds for performance, utilization and other metrics and monitor the systems through a dashboard, or though e-mail or pager alerts. While not offering as much monitoring data as agent-based products, Nance gave the product a 4.1 score out of 5. Read the review of Longitude here.
