Symantec Government Symposium – A review

Recently i had the opportunity to attend the Symantec Government Symposium in Washington DC.  This is an event sponsored by Symantec and some of its partners.  About 1500 customers of Symantec was gathered in one building to discuss what is going on in the Federal Space in regards to IT and IT Security.

The symposium started out with an introduction from John Thompson and Enrique Salem.  The former president and CEO of Symantec introduced the new CEO Enrique Salem, who then introduced the keynote speaker Senator Mark Warner, from Virginia.  Mr. Warner has a tech background and understand technology.  However, I was disappointed in the tone of the speech as it seemed more like a campaign speech instead of a keynote speech.  Mr. Warner is newly elected and perhaps that is why it seemed so much like a stump speech.

I attended the track entitled “Secure and Transparent Government.”  The first session in this track was called “Assessing Security Standards Today.”  The roundtable discussion was made up of Erick Hopkins (U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee), Ron Ross (Senior Computer Scientist and Information Security Researcher, NIST), and Tony Sager (Chief Vulnerability Analysis and Operations Group, Information Assurance Directorate, NSA).  The big take away from this discussion (besides everyone having really really long titles) was in regards to the changes to FISMA (Federal Information Security Management Act).  FISMA was originally passed during the Bush Administration and provides guidance on what branches of the government must do.  From the discussion I learned that FISMA 2.0 will have a lot more “teeth” to it.  FISMA is one new thing I will be learning.

The second session I attended was “Information Security: You can’t secure what you don’t manage.”  The members of this roundtable discussion were Jaren Doherty (Associate Deputy Assistant Secretary, Office of Cyber Security, Directory of Veterans Affairs), Holly Ridgeway (Director, Justice Security Operations Center, Department of Justice), and Pete Stark (Manager, Corporate Information Security, US Postal Service).  I was disappointed in this session, I thought they would have talked more about how to manage these endpoints, why managing the endpoint, etc.  It seemed more discussion about what they did security policy instead of how the endpoints were managed.

The first place to start with a secure endpoint is to have that endpoint managed.  This mantra is something we at ITS have been preaching since we started with Altiris back in 2001.  In fact this mantra is something Mr. Salem himself has talked about when mentioned operationalizing security.  The session was very disappointing.

The rest of the day I spent trying to meet and greet people and to try and get the ITS name out in the public.  It was great to meet potentially new customers and more Symantec sales people to work with.

 

A great event if you do business with the government and with Symantec.  Follow the hashtag #symgovsym on Twitter for more information

Problems getting wireless card to work in RHEL5, works in Kubuntu 9.04

Dear Lazyweb,

I have a Dell Latitude E6500 that I currently dual boot RHEL 5 and Kubuntu 9.04.  I have one small problem.  The Dell hasa a Intel Wifi Link 5100 card in it that works fine in Kubuntu, however I cannot get it to work at all in RHEL5.  lspci shows the card is there, but cannot get to even find my wireless access point to connect.  Wired works fine, but in my study I don’t have any wired connections.

Any hints on what I’m doing wrong?  Pretty new to RHEL so I might be missing some easy.

Thanks

Problems running VMWare Workstation 6.5.1

Reloaded my laptop this weekend w/ Kubuntu 9.04 as I was having problems and am redoing my laptop for dual boot purposes.  Before the reload i had no problems with runing VMWare Workstation 6.5.1, now after the reload I am unable to launch any of my VM’s.

Here is the error:

Failed to open device “/dev/vmci”: No such file or directory
Please make sure that the kernel module ‘vmci’ is loaded.
Module DevicePowerOn power on failed.

Any ideas?  Googling didn’t help out

Installing the DLP Integrated Component in Altiris

Summary

This article is part I of II on the DLP Integrated Component and how it works within the Symantec Management Console (Altiris). Part II will cover using the Integrated Component (IC) to manage your Endpoint Agents. We will discuss installation of the Symantec Management Console and then installation of the DLP Component

Contents

Summary    1

Introducing the DLP Endpoint Agent    1

Installing the DLP Integrated Component    1

Installing the Symantec Installation Manager    1

Installing the Symantec Management Console    2

Installing the DLP IC    4

Introducing the DLP Endpoint Agent

Installing the DLP Integrated Component

Installing the Symantec Installation Manager

The Symantec Management Console utilizes the Symantec Installation Manager (SIM) to install all parts of the Management Console. SIM can be downloaded from the Symantec Website (http://www.symantec.com/business/products/trialware.jsp?pcid=pcat_infrastruct_op&pvid=cm_suite_1) Once this is downloaded launch the executable and you will be greeted with this screen:

Select Next and you will be presented with the directory to install SMC into. A quick word of warning, the directory you select here is the directory all of the Console will be installed to.

Once the installation is finished, the Symantec Installation Manager will start allowing you to install other portions of the console.

Installing the Symantec Management Console

When the Symantec Installation Manager is launched it will be default open up to Install New Solutions. While you can install both the DLP component and also the Management Console at the same time, I recommend installing just the Console and then the component.

From the Installation Manager scroll down until you find the Symantec Management Console

After selecting “Review selected products” and then Next, aceept the license agreement and continue. Fill out the required information. This information is required to verify export controls.

After the information is filled out, select Next for the systems requirement check

The Symantec Management Console requires ASP.net, IIS, IE 7.0, at least 2.0 gigs of RAM, and Windows 2003 Server along with MS SQL 2005. As you can see in the screenshot I do not meet the requirements. If you do not, close the Installation Manager and resolve any problems.

If you meet the requirements select Next to begin installation of the Symantec Management Console. While it is not necessary to restart after the installation is complete, I have had the best luck rebooting before moving on to other installations.

Installing the DLP IC

Once the Symantec Management Console has been installed, install the DLP Integrated Component. To do so, launch the SIM from Start -> Altiris -> Symantec Installation Manager. Once launched the following screenshot will be displayed showing installed products.

Click on “Install new products” to install the integrated component.

From the filter drop down, select “Filter by all” and scroll down till you find the DLP Integrated Component, see the following screenshot.

Follow the same steps, without making any changes you did during the installation of the management console.

When the Integrated Component is finished, launch the Symantec Management Console to begin using it.

Using Skytap for Demoing Altiris

With the release of Altiris 7 and the upcoming release of Service Desk, plus moving into more and more Symantec products we have seen the need for more hardware for demos, videos, and other projects.  However hardware is expensive and something that money can’t be spent on during the current economy we are going through.

One of the engineers I work with investigated moving into “cloud computing”, how much it would cost us and who would be the best company to invest some money into.

The company that we decided to work with is called Skytap and I am loving working with it.  Each month with the contract we have, we have 1000 hours of computing time to use.  Also we have 10 Skytap Virtual Machines we can be running at a time.  A SVM is defined as 1 Gig of RAM and 1 processor.  For a CMS 7 demo of 1 NS 7 box then I consume 3 SVM’s.  3 Gigs of RAM and 2 procs.

My Altiris demos have never been so good or so quick to respond.  All I need is internet access and a web browser and I can provide a kick butt demo.

Let me know if you need more details or information, but I highly recommend Skytap.

Contributing to Ubuntu shouldn’t be just packaging

We have had a lot of discussion on #ubuntu-us-mi in regards to how I can contribute to Ubuntu.  It seems the answer is always “packaging.”  But there are people who can code or develop some missing ingredient to Ubuntu that a person might want to develop.

Let me try to explain, saw this from @dhoolbach on identi.ca

want to learn !ubuntu development and packaging – I need your input: http://is.gd/Of4Q

And it goes back to the discussion we had on the channel.  A new user says “I want to contribute”  And someone responds “Package this app”  But what if they don’t want to package?  They want to contribute code.  The answer then is “Work Upstream” but how does someone go about just that?  Do we explain enough how to work upstream on code/patches/etc?  Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I think we need some howto’s or guidance on how to help solve itches best resolved upstream.

Discuss or correct me if I’m wrong

What I’ve been working on lately

This blog has been pretty quiet lately, so I thought I would drop a few notes to discuss what’s been going on in my life:

Work:  Been doing a lot related to developing a new practice within ITS.  I have started working with Symantec’s DLP product and have done several Risk Assements/Proof of Concepts which has opened up my eyes to the amount of data loss that is occuring within companies, and most of the time the company doesn’t even know it.  DLP is a great product but is only a leg of what CEO Enrique Salem calls “operationalizing” your security.  The other parts of this include DLP, Control Compliance Suite, Symantec Endpoint Encryption, and Symantec Endpoint Protection.  We at ITS are working on a team to handle these products and I am currently doing some of the heavy lifting to get this up and runnin.

Kubuntu/Ubuntu life:  Been doing a lot of thinking in regards to Ubuntu and how it relates to the enterprise.  Also started back to think about Kubuntu and KDE docs again.  Starting to contribute again to the whole process.

Personal life:  Travel with work is keeping me busy.  Also my family is keeping me busy.  Interested in what is going on family wise?  Follow our blog

KDE 4 and Activities

Thanks to a blog post on KDE’s Planet, I finally figured out what to do with the Zoom out portion of the Plasma Button.  So you can create a new activitiy and use it to run like a seperate Desktop.  Multiple desktops is one of the things I miss when I switch out of Windows as I like to keep my work stuff and my play/fun stuff seperate.

The question I have to find out, and so far can’t in anything I’ve read, is can I have a compelty different Task Bar in one activity versus the other?  Is it possible to not show Applications running in one Activity on the task bar and not on another task bar The goal would be have work’s applications in a seperate activtiy and play things (choqoK, Google Reader, Google Mail, etc)  not show up on the task bar.

I hope this makes sense.  Maybe it is something very simple that I am missing?