2022, the world is the technological paradise you always dreamed of. Space mining, smart cities, 3D printers to make your own Darth Vader mask… Just a little problem, society is based on digitization and communications and you have no idea about the visibility of distributed networks. Something of vital importance considering the rise of cybercrime. Well, don’t worry, we’ll help you.

 Do you know everything about distributed network visibility?

Well, the first thing you need to be aware of is the importance of this distributed network visibility. After all, companies around the globe say that the biggest blind spots in their security come from the network, so all their efforts are focused on safeguarding their data by reinforcing this trench. That’s why visibility is key. Even more so if we talk about Managed Service Providers (MSP), the professionals in charge of protecting customer data.

But, what is distributed network visibility? 

To put it simply, distributed network visibility supposes having full knowledge of the different components running within your network to be able to analyze, at will, aspects such as traffic, performance, applications, managed resources and many more, which will depend on the capabilities offered by your monitoring tool. In addition to increasing visibility into your customers’ networks, a comprehensive solution can give you more leverage to strategize based on the metrics you’re monitoring.

For example, MSPs can, with a good visibility solution, help improve the security of their customers by revealing signs of network danger or, through better analytics, make more informed and rigorous decisions about data protection.

As we have warned before, cybercrime is our daily bread in this almost science fiction future that we have earned, and blind spots in network security, along with what will become of the cd, is one of our great concerns.

Monitor traffic, look for performance bottlenecks, provide visibility thanks to a good monitoring tool and alert on irregular performance… That’s what we need. In addition, these super important alerts draw attention and notify technicians and system administrators, who will immediately take the appropriate measures to solve our problem.

If you are an MSP in this post-apocalyptic future that we are living in, it is very likely that you use several applications as part of your services, well, another of the obvious advantages of improved visibility is the ability to participate in application supervision. So, for example, when granular network visibility is set, you may get unquestionable insight into how applications are affecting performance and connectivity. Once you are aware of this, you may choose to filter critical app traffic to the right tools and monitor who is using which app and when. You may even make application performance more practical, reducing processor and bandwidth work by ensuring, for example, that email traffic is not sent to non-email gateways. 

Some challenges to consider

Not everything is having fun and joking around, rolling on the carpet and having crises saved by your expertise, there are several challenges for MSPs associated with network visibility.

Cloud computing has increased and mobile traffic has increased too, this only adds, to our inconvenience capacity, more blind spots to watch out for as MSP. The end has come for the magnanimous and bucolic days of lying on the grass simply monitoring traffic over MPLS links. We are in the future, and WANs are a deadlock for Internet-based VPNs, Cloud services, MPLS, and mobile users. Something complex that many rudimentary monitoring tools cannot offer full visibility of. There are many components to address. To deal with this Gordian knot and its dense complexity, MSPs must be demanding and rigorous when choosing a monitoring tool to work with.

Another of the great challenges that MSPs may face in this field is the fact that the most traditional monitoring methods are closely linked to on-premise devices. This means that all WAN locations need their own set of applications, and these must have their own sources and be properly maintained. Optionally, all traffic can be retrieved and inspected from a WAN location. This inefficient method can have a performance impact.

Due to this inefficiency, it becomes difficult to apply the traditional approach to distributed network visibility. For enterprises with many applications, networking becomes too obtuse and convoluted, with a variety of individual configurations and policies difficult to support. Additionally, there is the capacity restrictions of the devices, which limit the amount of traffic that can be analyzed without the need to update the hardware. This without noticing that at some point the devices will have to be completely patched or replaced. Damn, even if your company grows, which is what we want, network visibility will quickly be constrained and more security vulnerabilities will go unnoticed.

Conclusions and good wishes

I gave you a very bad prospect. But don’t worry, it was only an adverse in crescendo until reaching the great catharsis: While there are many traditional monitoring tools that cannot address distributed network visibility challenges, there are, thank heavens, other monitoring tools that can.  This is the example of Pandora FMS, a monitoring software that is up to the challenges such as those raised and that helps technicians manage complex networks and much more. Pandora FMS allows you to control, manage and customize the tool through a centralized interface. Thanks to its scalability you will be able to manage networks with hundreds of devices and give IT providers what they need to increase security and maximize efficiency. You don’t believe it? Try it now for 30 days for free. You see, not everything was going to be bad in this post apocalyptic future!

In our daily life we can face different difficulties. From spilling coffee on our clean shirt just before leaving home to not finding an emoji that satisfies us to answer that someone we like. Stupid little things compared to how difficult it is sometimes to identify network problems for an external IT provider.

Steps to identify network problems

As we pointed out, finding network problems is, due to its transient nature, a hassle. And IT vendors often have to stay on site to monitor firsthand for signs that often signal network problems. This is not cool at all. Being able to monitor network devices or cloud services from a remote location should be part of our rights, something fundamental in the life of someone who wants to be a good Managed Service Provider (MSP). For this reason, we wanted, from our blog, to help these poor people with a list of steps to identify network problems. We are that kind and philanthropic. Take note!

One: Supervise, supervise and supervise

Today we know that there are many tools that help MSPs to monitor servers and others, but today’s networks are something much more complex and difficult to deal with. In the past, you had to make do with simple routers or switches, but now you can monitor with the help of all kinds of IoT devices, cameras, VoIP phones/systems, etc. There is no reason to complain. Make use of all of them to carry out your supervision work. Manage with a good monitoring tool from routine ping tests to the most complicated SNMP queries. With the right weapons, professionals can do their job remotely, taking advantage of the information provided by network devices.

Two: Pay attention to the Cloud

We have mentioned it more than once in this blog, the Cloud has become of key importance for companies, whether they are small or large.  Adopting more services based on the cloud for the functions that are vital to your business. The bad thing? Sometimes the Internet speed is not the ideal one we would like, and there are even interruptions in our services. Usually the IT provider is advised to diagnose and bring the problem to light. However, without accurate historical data to verify what was happening at the time the outage occurred, it is very difficult for the technician to make a good diagnosis.

With Pandora FMS, for example, by constantly monitoring the connection between your clients’ devices and your services in the Cloud and creating, in turn, a collection of historical data that you could return to in the event of a failure, you wouldn’t have that problem.

And three:  Go for the unusual

You should investigate any unusual activity on your devices like a police sleuth, because it could mean a potential security risk, even when segmented into your own VLAN or physical network.

Network monitoring is an indispensable part of any IT provider tool. Troubleshooting, proactive monitoring, security… Efficiency and responsibility can help you earn money, or at least help you save it, thanks to this additional service.

It will never be “We have to keep an eye on this until it happens again”. With a good monitoring tool, you will have the data at hand to determine what happened, why it happened and what the steps should be now so that it does not happen again. Because as we’ve seen, network problems can be harder to find than a sober intern at a company dinner, but with the right tools, you can get enough help to get by on your feet.

Conclusions:

If there are any conclusions to be drawn from this article, they are:

1. Change your shirt, quickly, by one that has not been stained with coffee before leaving the house.
2. All emojis are good if she, or he, likes you too. Well, except for the one with the poo. That emoji is hideous!
3. Incorporating Pandora FMS to your team can help you do your job more efficiently and for your clients’ networks to be always safe.

Whether you are a DIY ace or a master at roast beef, a decorated luthier or the best seamstress in the neighborhood, we all love to work with good tools, right? This includes, of course, good IT professionals. Because IT monitoring tools are fundamental when it comes to supervising a network infrastructure and applying the corresponding policies and security measures. Even so, not every monitoring tool is perfect, in fact some could even get to the point of harming us. Let’s take a look!

Better monitoring tools, better monitoring

It’s instinctively basic: you have to find the right monitoring tool for each job. Indeed, although it may seem unheard of, it is quite difficult for IT teams to find comprehensive and outstanding monitoring tools. Some of them are too specialized or do not support all applications because they might lack certain features. This dilemma can lead IT teams to use hundreds of disparate monitoring tools, due to the need to attend to all monitoring tasks. I know what you are thinking: “That must be expensive”. Yes, it is, plus it slows down the working pace due to the huge amount of reports, each with their own features, to be inspected and checked.

That is why we must avoid tool proliferation, as we avoid the proliferation of gremlins or herniated discs.  Preventing it through individual monitoring solutions, even if this requires significant changes, such as the implementation of integrated tools, conceived to support multiple applications, or special network configurations.

The most efficient thing would be to go for IT monitoring tools that include updates to support today’s most respected applications and provide IT administrators with a single management board.

Simplifying is the key

If you have to choose a monitoring platform, you should be aware beforehand that different IT sectors require different types of solutions. Try, with a single solution, to address as many sections as possible, thus adding further depth to monitoring activities. Such a single solution will give you a greater ability to automate responses and locate irregular events in any system you are monitoring.

For this reason, IT departments often look for a suite of fully integrated IT tools offered by centralized system management and monitoring companies. These companies often promise to reduce the license and maintenance costs of their software, as well as the use of their monitoring tool integrated in the corresponding environment to help manage the company.

The IT department will reduce costs thanks to these integrated tools, among other things because they already have a strong response to any problem that may arise. In fact, one of the direct benefits is the reduction of incidents that require the action of the support teams. Also general performance visibility and system availability, thus increasing the total productivity of the company.

But hold on there, before you go running to look for a monitoring tool that suits your company’s requirements and even your zodiac sign, it is TOTALLY NECESSARY to define what justifies monitoring in your company. Remember that each piece of your IT department will have something to say and contribute, there are different features regarding each function, information flow and security clauses. Once you have a full and clear idea of what you and your company need, you may start with a good monitoring strategy.

Application monitoring tools

Application monitoring is, broadly speaking, monitoring activity logs to see how applications are being used. You know, looking at the access roles of the users, the data that is accessed, how this data is used… If your monitoring tool is good, it even shows a window to the log data and an exhaustive view of all the data elements that make up a healthy application: response times, data traces…

Any self-respecting application monitoring tool has to offer these kinds of features, as well as being integrated with database and network monitoring. Thus, together, they will be able to improve application response times through active and immediate solutions to performance problems that arise.

Network monitoring tools

DNS host monitoring, IP address management, packet tracking… This is more or less what all network monitoring tools usually offer. They usually fall short, however, when it comes to supervising everything related to network traffic, whether internally or externally. What they should always provide, under oath, is full surveillance of all devices connected to the network.

Compliance control monitoring

Don’t worry, if you haven’t yet managed to justify implementing a full monitoring tool, compliance monitoring will make up your mind.

Compliance monitoring solutions will provide you with templates based on types of regulations, allowing you to conveniently design and implement a comprehensive compliance monitoring strategy, including the ability to monitor log data, in real time, from any type of device connected to your network, including routers and switches.

Thanks to compliance control monitoring tools you will be able to collect, correlate and export any necessary registration information for the IT team. Report templates will be able to align with formats common to regulatory agencies. In addition to providing exhaustive analysis in the case of internal audits.

Conclusions

If we have made something clear today, it is that the system management and monitoring solution you choose must meet a small series of requirements: be integrated into several systems, be accessible to the IT team through an intuitive interface based on a control panel, be scalable, and stay constantly evolving so that its ability to help you maintain your services can go forward and transcend when you need it.  

If doubt and anxiety overcome you, do not worry, what you are looking for is not far away. Pandora FMS is capable of monitoring all these IT areas that we talked about and much more. Thanks to its more than 16 features and more than 500 Enterprise plugins available. Also, if you are not very knowledgeable in this matter, do not worry, we manage it for you with our MaaS solution.

At the time of writing these lines, almost everything we connect to our devices is through the so-called Universal Serial Bus (USB): cameras, microphones, external storage… It’s the fastest and safest way to synchronize and backup information between our mobile phone and computer! But what does all this have to do with the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2 Ubuntu)? Let’s have a look.

Study in WSL2 with Ubuntu: proprietary and free software

To begin with, I will leave you a link to an article published in this blog, in order to facilitate knowledge of the technology I will be discussing. I will add more of them throughout the text. We have quite a bit to go through, so I recommend a nice, steaming cup of black coffee in your hands before we start.

*The Last tests I have carried out have been on virtual machines (VirtualBox®: they may be created, erased, modified, etc. on Solid State Drive).

Brief retrospective

I always say that “in order to know where we are going, we need to know where we come from.” Since 1989, I have worked with the products sold by the Microsoft Corporation: first the MS-DOS operating system and its only form of command-line interaction, and then Microsoft Windows, which also uses the graphical environment. Yes, I am well aware, MS-DOS® as such was eliminated, but its commands remain. It was replaced with Powershell®, which we have already talked about, and it is important for today’s topic.

At the end of 2016, Microsoft surprised us with the news that its SQL Server® could be run on GNU/Linux. For me, who for many years worked installing and maintaining data servers for my clients, this was shocking news. But wait, there’s more, on my journey, I discovered that   BASHware can affect a Windows system via WSL. Which brings us to today’s article, where we’ll go into handling USB devices, with particular attention to microphones and webcams, under WSL2 with Ubuntu 20.04.

WSL and WSL2

I recommend, again, the excellent article on WSL2. Although time has passed and there are some significant changes. At that time, WSL2 was installed by means of commands. Now, and I want to emphasize it, I notice that by MS Windows Control Panel, “Programs and Features”, we can add the two key components that are Virtual Machine Platform and obviously Windows Subsystem for Linux in the section of “Turn Windows features on or off”:

After this, the operating system must be restarted, this is already an idiosyncrasy of the house of Redmond! (There will be many more resets later that I will leave out. They will be implied.)

Another aspect that was added in July 2021 is the possibility of adding the Linux distributions that one wishes, directly, through the command line in Powershell (depending on the version and type of MS Windows that you have installed).

To see the available distributions:

wsl --list --online

To install Ubuntu 20.04:

wsl --install -d Ubuntu-20.04

After some time, depending on your Internet download speed, it will ask for username and password. It will immediately display the status of updates for Ubuntu.

To set WSL2 as default:

wsl --set-default-version 2

The option to download and use from the Microsoft Store is still valid and available, for Ubuntu 20.04 it takes almost half a gigabyte of space.

The fundamental difference between WSL and WSL2 is that the latest download is a complete Linux kernel, but not just any kernel, it is one specially designed to be coupled with the Windows kernel. This means that applications running on WSL2 will always have to be “passed through” -but not interpreted, as it was in WSL- before interacting with any hardware, USB included.

The only thing WSL does better than WSL2 is file sharing between the two operating systems. Apart from that, WSL2 offers many more advantages and improvements in WSL2.

Podman in WSL2

To give you an idea of how useful it is to include a full Linux kernel in MS Windows, the Podman software (Docker’s successor) can be run on WSL2. If you still don’t know what Podman is, make more coffee and read another of our articles.

Developer mode

A feature that Powershell offers that you may use to your advantage, once you have installed and configured WSL2, is the developer mode. It is accessed by pressing the Windows start key, typing “Powershell” and choosing the developer settings. The first thing is to activate the developer mode and wait for the necessary software to finish installing.

This consists of two main components: 

• Device Portal.
• Device Discovery.

The Device Portal will open port 50080 (remember to properly configure the Windows Defender Firewall), and from any web browser you may enter the configured credentials and access a variety of aspects that you can see in the following image.

*There is a tutorial for establishing safe connections with HTTPS but it is irrelevant for this article:

Differences aside, this is similar to what eHorus offers for both basic and advanced monitoring, if used together with Pandora FMS. I have included this feature because the configured credentials are required for the next point.

The second component is Device discovery which, among other aspects, will open an SSH server to make a connection. 

This allows us to open a terminal with the Windows command line and, once there, you may directly use WSL2 for any task that you need to develop remotely from another computer. In this case, as an example I used the PuTTY software to connect from the real machine to the Windows 10 virtual machine with WSL2 installed and configured: 

As you can see, once the default configuration has been established, just by typing the command wsl you will be ready in a Linux environment, not GNU/Linux but MSW/Linux.

USB in WSL2

We come to the purpose of this blog post: USB handling in WSL2. At the time of writing these lines, there are two pieces of news, one bad and one good.

• The bad news is that no, WSL2 is currently unable to support USB, so for example your USB connected cameras and microphones will not be available to be used from WSL2.
• The good news is that you may compile your own Linux kernel for WSL2 and have access to the occasional microphone or webcam from your chosen Linux distribution. But what applications could you use for it?

Compiling Linux kernel for WSL2

Before doing anything, first update Ubuntu WSL2 with the usual commands:

$ sudo apt update

$ sudo apt upgrade

And if you thought that this was enough software download… well not, now what I call the programming environment (dependencies) must be installed:

$ sudo apt install build-essential flex bison libssl-dev libelf-dev

And now you may download the base kernel source code for Ubuntu on WSL2:

$ sudo git clone https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel.git

There are three gigabytes to download. The source code. Awesome.  Although you may always use the parameter git clone -depth=1<repository>, I did not use that option. I recommend at least 100 gigabytes free in storage before going into the downloaded folder (cloned repository) and running:

$ make -d KCONFIG_CONFIG=Microsoft/config-wsl

At this point I must clarify that I found many configuration options to compile. For example, to install the software for handling Snap packages on Debian. However, all this is excluded from Microsoft support, nothing you will be able to complain to this company if something goes wrong in the compilation process.

To finish off, turn off WSL2 with the command wsl –shutdown and copy the newly compiled kernel in the following way, not without first backing up the original kernel:

C:\Windows\System32\lxss\tools\kernel

At this point you should be able to connect any microphone or webcam and have access from WSL2… But it’s going to be no. It turns out that you must first get the hardware drivers for MS Windows, obviously, and then the Linux ones, enter in the source code the latter and recompile again. In addition to that, install in Ubuntu WSL2:

sudo apt install linux-tools-5.4.0-77-generic hwdata

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/local/bin/usbip usbip /usr/lib/linux-tools/5.4.0-77-generic/usbip 20

And by the way, it must also be installed on Windows, with an MSI installer package, the USBIPD-WIN project…

As we can see, since we have gotten used to the graphical simplicity of Windows, if you disable the USB through the Device Manager, no hardware will be able to connect with or without your consent, since it will be blocked at operating system level.

Installing graphical applications in WSL2

Finally, although in the case of the snap package installer it is explicitly unsupported in Ubuntu over WSL2, other applications that interact with hardware (such as sound, for example) will be able to be installed, but when they try to access files of hardware (remember that in Linux everything is a file) because they simply will not find such resources. This is the case of the espeak software:

In theory, the Ubuntu blog indicates that by means of X Window System Architecture it is possible to “pass” the graphical interface of the applications installed in WLS2. Microsoft officially announced just before the end of 2021 that the following graphics applications can be run:

• Gedit (my favorite graphical GNU text editor).
• GIMP (powerful for graphic design).
• Nautilus (file explorer).
• VLC (audio and video player).
• Applications based on X11 (calculator, clock, etc.).
• Google Chrome (at your own risk due to its high RAM and resource consumption).
• Microsoft Teams (by the way, Pandora FMS has a special connector).
• Even Microsoft Edge web browser for Linux!

But this has some drawbacks. First, you must have Windows 11 Build 22000. Second, have the video hardware drivers for WSL2 installed. Third, be enrolled in the Windows Insider Program. I hope you liked the information!

We are drug addicts. Not to green cannabis or MDMA, necessarily, but we do are addicted to some elements scattered around the globe that support the base of the world economy and that we need, like water, so that everything remains in order. The shortage of silicon chips is already one of the most suffocating problems that humanity has to face these days, we tell you about it in this article.

A new world problem: shortage of silicon chips

Perhaps there were some smart people who knew it before, but, for the rest of the mortals, it was in 2021 when the crude dependence that the technology industry has on factories that produce microchips was revealed. Yes, those little things are absolutely essential for the operation of electronic devices.

You can now start trembling with fear, the shortage of semiconductors, of silicon chips, which work as the heads of computing devices, is not good for us. Because, as you may tell, they control everything these days, from your smartphone to your laptop, from your tablet to your new car, from your state-of-the-art washing machine to your kid’s Playstation 5.

What is this semiconductor crisis about?

As it happened with the rest of the markets, the restrictions imposed by the pandemic forced the closure of many of the factories that were devoted to the production of these chips, thus making their production more difficult. And what’s worse, on top of that, the demand for computer devices increased, since everyone was locked up at home, needing to work remotely or entertain themselves with screens so as not to die of disgust making bread or staring at the wall. To all of this we add the inevitable delay in shipments and transport on a global scale, as well as the rise in the price of silicon, an essential element for microchip manufacturing, and other components that were bitterly disputed by the great world powers. As if that were not enough, two large chip producers, Taiwan and China, suffered certain catastrophes that seriously affected the capacity of their factories.

We know that the semiconductor industry fluctuates, that it is fickle and regularly goes through certain cycles of shortage, but all of this happened at the same time: this fluctuating nature, the alteration of demand and supply patterns due to the pandemic, the disagreements between the great powers, and then the catastrophes in the countries with the highest production… Not even done on purpose!

Who has been the worst off because of the shortage?

One of the markets that has been the most affected is the automobile sector. In fact, the AlixPartners financial consultancy recalls that, due to the shortage of chips, the global automobile industry has lost, this past 2021, 210,000 million dollars in revenue. That’s about 7.7 million cars less.

But not only that, the shortage of semiconductors also threatened the availability of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets with microchips in the last months of last year, which is, as you know, when these things are sold more. The Christmas campaign.

In fact, the very Apple, during November, had to choose between its iPads and its iPhones, diverting the chips that were originally destined for the former for the latter, since the iPhones are sold more and they are more lucrative. This meant that many specialist stores in the UK didn’t have stock of the iPad mini or the basic iPad for months.

But now comes perhaps the sector that has defended the problem of silicon, chips, semiconductors and all their ancestors the most: the world of gamers. Because the universe can be sunk with a single click of Thanos but the difficulties to get the brand new PlayStation 5 or the Xbox Series X is inexcusable. Indeed, Sony had it hard. Forced, even, to stop the production of its flagship product, the PS5, because the hundreds of chips that make it up are too difficult to obtain. The same thing happened with the giant Nintendo, which warned, distressed, that they were in serious trouble. They couldn’t keep up with the demand for their new console. Meanwhile, high-end graphics cards for PC gaming are still hard to find. If things continue like this, at any moment gaming lovers will leave the controls of Call of Duty, come out of their burrow and go themselves refine the silicon.

Moving on to the aesthetic spectrum, we note that if you’re bald you might not have noticed, but the Supersonic hair dryer and Airwrap hair styler have been missing for months as tech giant Dyson continues to beg for chips among the few supplies that work selling them worldwide.

Conclusion: What will happen in the near future?

Yes, things are very bad regarding the supply of chips and semiconductor materials. Although, don’t worry, experts warn that the effects of the shortage will only take a year to subside. There will be gradual improvements, although all the demand will probably not be met before 2023.

Many companies, such as Intel, have decided to create new chip factories in Europe, America and Asia to avoid another shortage on such a scale. In the meantime, meditate, exercise, read our articles, check your security system, or try to bring back tug-of-war as an Olympic sport.