I got an interesting question through the comments section on my blog:
Quite a good questions. Let’s have a look:
The other day I wanted to verify whether a service running on my Linux server was listening on IPv6 as well as IPv4. It turned out that it wasn’t that easy to answer – if at all.
Continue reading Services listening on IPv6 and IPv4 (or maybe not?)
I was missing a generic layer 4 ping in my toolbox. Initially searching for a mere TCP ping, I have found Nping which completely satisfies my needs and gives so much more. ;)
What’s a layer 4 ping, and why? –> A normal ping (= ICMP echo-request) reveals whether the destination IP address, that is: the mere server/VM, is up and running. That’s great for a layer 3 networker since routing to and from the destination is already working. However, it does NOT reveal whether or not a service at layer 4 (TCP or UDP) is up and running as well. That’s what a layer 4 ping is about: sending TCP SYNs to the port in question, waiting for a “SYN ACK” (port is listening) or “RST”/no reply (port is not available). Common use cases: Waiting for a service to start again after an upgrade, or waiting for new firewall policies (to allow or deny) a certain port.
I am constantly trying to add more protocols to the Ultimate PCAP. Hence I used some time in my (old) Cisco lab to configure and capture the following protocols: IS-IS, GLBP, and VRRP. And since Alexis La Goutte sent me some CAPWAP traffic, this protocol is also added. All packets are now found in another update of the Ultimate PCAP. Here are some details:
Continue reading Capturing – because I can: IS-IS, GLBP, VRRP
The other day I was searching for a trace file with a decent protocol mix that could be used to introduce a few colleagues to Wireshark. This brought me to Johannes Weber and his Ultimate PCAP.
To get a first impression of a trace file I used Wireshark’s protocol hierarchy – and boy, that’s a lot of protocols. This was not exactly what I was looking for: This single trace file holds snippets from 2014 to 2020 with a myriad of protocols and IP networks. Unfortunately, it’s nothing like the protocol mix found in a network analysis project.
Nevertheless, the trace file caught my interest as a long time Wireshark user. After nearly 20 years of network analysis, I had my own collection of traces with a few odd frames. To my big surprise, I had recorded a few protocols that are not yet part of the Ultimate PCAP.
So here is my small contribution to this collection:
Continue reading Adding some packets: RARP, SNAP, MPLS & More
More than 6 years ago (!) I published a tutorial on how to set up an IPsec VPN tunnel between a FortiGate firewall and a Cisco ASA. As time flies by, ASA is now able to terminate route-based VPN tunnels (which is great!), we have IKEv2 running everywhere and enhanced security proposals. Hence, it’s time for an update:
Continue reading Route-Based VPN Tunnel FortiGate <-> Cisco ASA
More than 6 years ago (!) I published a tutorial on how to set up an IPsec VPN tunnel between a Palo Alto Networks firewall and a Cisco ASA. As time flies by, ASA is now able to terminate route-based VPN tunnels (which is great!), we have IKEv2 running everywhere and enhanced security proposals. Hence, it’s time for an update:
Continue reading Route-Based VPN Tunnel Palo Alto <-> Cisco ASA
The NTP Pool is a volunteer organization that provides time synchronization service to hundreds of millions of computers worldwide. A typical client might query a particular NTP Pool server ~10-60 times/hour. Wikipedia lists some abusive clients that far exceeded the normal rate. This wastes NTP server resources, may interfere with other clients, and can trigger DDoS protections. In late 2019, a software update made some FortiGate firewalls very unfriendly to the NTP Pool.
Continue reading FortiGate bug: firewalls sending excessive requests to the NTP Pool
An updated version of my Ultimate PCAP is available. It features some more network protocols that I will depict in this blog post. It’s getting more special since the most common protocols were already in there. ;)
This is a guest blogpost by Martin Langer, Ph.D. student for “Secured Time Synchronization Using Packet-Based Time Protocols” at Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences, Germany.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) published the Network Time Security protocol (NTS) as RFC 8915 on October 1, 2020. This new standard offers security mechanisms for the widely used Network Time Protocol v4 (NTPv4), which has been operated mostly unsecured until now. After almost eight years of development, global collaboration, and many interoperability tests of leading NTP software developers, NTS represents a mature security protocol. In this post, I’ll give you a short overview of the development progress of NTS and provide a list of public implementations and NTS secured time servers…
This is a really nice feature: you can run iperf3 directly on a FortiGate to speed-test your network connections. It’s basically an iperf3 client. Using some public iperf servers you can test your Internet bandwidth; using some internal servers you can test your own routed/switched networks, VPNs, etc. However, the maximum throughput for the test is CPU dependent. So please be careful when interpreting the results. Here we go:
NTP (Network Time Protocol) messages are sometimes rate-limited or blocked entirely by Internet operators. This little-known “NTP filtering” was put into place several years ago in response to DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. NTP filtering may drop NTP messages based on rate or message size. Let’s dig into it: Continue reading NTP Filtering (Delay & Blockage) in the Internet
Uh, I wasn’t aware of so many different printing protocols. Do you? While I was trying to solve a little printing problem I took a packet capture of three different printing variants over TCP/IP: Raw via TCP port 9100, LPD/LPR via TCP port 515, and Apple’s AirPrint which uses the Internet Printing Protocol IPP. As always, you can download this pcap and have a look at it by yourself.
Since PAN-OS version 9.0 you can configure GRE tunnels on a Palo Alto Networks firewall. Greetings from the clouds. As always, this is done solely through the GUI while you can use some CLI commands to test the tunnel. This time Palo put a little stumbling block in there as you have to allow a GRE connection with a certain zone/IP reference. I will show how to set up such a GRE tunnel between a Palo and a Cisco router. Here we go:
I did a short presentation at the spring 2020 roundtable of the UK IPv6 Council. The talk was about a case study I did with my NTP server listed in the NTP Pool project: For 66 days I captured all NTP requests for IPv6 and legacy IP while analyzing the returning ICMPv6/ICMPv4 error messages. (A much longer period than my initial capture for 24 hours.) Following are my presentation slides along with the results.
Continue reading UK IPv6 Council Spring 2020: Incorrect Working IPv6 Clients & Networks