My request for the Sourcefire Snort Certified Professional courses/exam, that I posted about earlier, was finally approved, bathed in red tape and finally completed. I received my login information for the courses and certification exam (through vcampus.com). I nervously logged in expecting to see that the account had been created weeks ago, and that I was not going to get the full sixty days; but to my surprise, it was created today! I decided to setup my profile on the vcampus site first, and to my surprise you can change, every aspect of your account, including user name. Being as the original user name and password were sent to me clear text, being able to change them both securely, rocks.

I have not as of yet dived into the course material; I must admit, I’m a little nervous about it. This is the first certification test, that I feel like I am actually going to have to work for. So I am thankful to be able to get the full sixty day period to access the materials.

Extended personal spewing …

Today has been slow a slow day at work … so let’s learn about TCPTrack. What is TCPTrack? It can be defined as a passive network sniffer, that monitors an interface for network connections. More specifically it displays source and destination addresses and ports, connection state, idle time, and bandwidth usage, all in real time. Sure, that sounds a lot like netstat, until you get to the real time part. I love tcptrack for those situations where you are looking for a quick overview of current network connections, and don’t want to have to use something as robust as ntop.

On to the goodness ….