Blue Lance goes deep into the heart of NetWare

When Novell announced it would be shipping a limited edition of Blue Lance’s LTAuditor with NetWare 6.5 a few eyebrows shot up since NetWare supposedly already has built-in auditing capabilities (Auditcon for NetWare 5 and below, Novell Advanced Auditing Services for NetWare 6). The announcement also seems to have re-energized Blue Lance, the venerable NetWare services company from Houston, which is almost 20 years old (LTA has been around since 1990).

LTA is an efficient, relentless tool for creating audit trails of as much or as little of your network’s activity as you would like. It helps you find the problems and also identify the culprits when anomalies or improprieties take place. But auditing tools are often described as after the fact security devices – the audit log will tell you that the horse seems to have disappeared and, by the way, the barn door was left unlocked and open.

Wouldn’t it be even better to know about the barn door before the horse went walkabout?

Blue Lance CEO Umesh Verma thought so and when a company leader muses about a potential capability the whole firm falls into line very quickly. So LTA has now been extended and enhanced to become “LT Auditor+Assessment for NetWare.”

LTA+A, in addition to handling all the traditional auditing functions, also  scans Novell’s eDirectory and the NetWare file system for specific security policy violations, identifying vulnerabilities and risks, automatically collects specified audit data, and prepares reports quickly in easy to read formats so that you can take quick, efficient corrective action.

LTA+A works in five major areas (users, groups, containers, volumes and files) to identify vulnerabilities by collecting information about:

* User objects such as security equivalents, password configurations, logon information, trustee assignments.

* Group objects such as group members, trustee assignments, security equivalences.

* Containers, including intruder detection settings, trustee assignments, objects available in the container.

* NetWare volumes such as available space, type of volume, and more.

* File information such as owner, size, last modified date, attributes, etc.

You can download a free evaluation version from Blue Lance’s Web site, but don’t wait too long. From now until June 20 you can purchase LTA+A for 50% off the list price. There’s even better news for those using a competitive security assessment tool (such as one from Symantec, Computer Associates or BindView) – Blue Lance will give you the LT Auditor+ Assessment Software License at no charge as a competitive upgrade when you sign an Annual Maintenance agreement,  which Blue Lance guarantees to be at least 20% less than the one you have now!

Try out LTA+A this week. If it’s right for you, give Blue Lance a call next week. You could save a bundle and improve your security. Not a bad combination.