VIDEO CONFERENCING SYSTEM GETTING NUISANCE CALLS

What happens?
- You get continuous calls from random IP addresses on your Video Conferencing Unit.

What is happening?
You're being scanned by someone looking to make free phone calls. These guys are getting to be very bothersome, they're now trying on both UDP and TCP via H.323.

If your IP is set to Public then at some point everyone could get into this issue.

What can be done?
- Deploy Video Border Proxy (VBP)
but it is very expensive at least for me.

http://www.polycom.com.au/products-services/realpresence-platform/universal-access-security/vbp-e-series.html


You could try:

Configure firewall to block all incoming IPs except for those you specify or allow to dial incoming into your network.

You have a VBP, you may be able to adjust settings there to block the calls (like on a Cisco VCS you can create a CPL script that can stop calls)

I'm not aware of a way on the endpoints to prevent these calls, because this is using H323 TCP, it's very hard to prevent them without breaking H323.

Other ways:
- Put the device to 'DO NOT DISTURB' mode.
  This might help as the hackers might think that you have a firewall system.
- Shutdown the system.
  This might be helpful but hackers might still put you in their wishlist.
- Disconnect the LAN while device is not in use. 
  This might be helpful but hackers might still put you in their wishlist.

If you have access to your ROUTER then:
Add below to ACL allowing only the necessary traffic.

permit tcp any any eq 24
permit udp any any eq 24
permit tcp any any range 161 162
permit udp any any range snmp snmptrap
permit tcp any any eq cmd
permit udp any any eq syslog

VIDEO CONFERENCING SYSTEM GETTING NUISANCE CALLS

What happens?
- You get continuous calls from random IP addresses on your Video Conferencing Unit.

What is happening?
You're being scanned by someone looking to make free phone calls. These guys are getting to be very bothersome, they're now trying on both UDP and TCP via H.323.

If your IP is set to Public then at some point everyone could get into this issue.

What can be done?
- Deploy Video Border Proxy (VBP)
but it is very expensive at least for me.

http://www.polycom.com.au/products-services/realpresence-platform/universal-access-security/vbp-e-series.html


You could try:

Configure firewall to block all incoming IPs except for those you specify or allow to dial incoming into your network.

You have a VBP, you may be able to adjust settings there to block the calls (like on a Cisco VCS you can create a CPL script that can stop calls)

I'm not aware of a way on the endpoints to prevent these calls, because this is using H323 TCP, it's very hard to prevent them without breaking H323.

Other ways:
- Put the device to 'DO NOT DISTURB' mode.
  This might help as the hackers might think that you have a firewall system.
- Shutdown the system.
  This might be helpful but hackers might still put you in their wishlist.
- Disconnect the LAN while device is not in use. 
  This might be helpful but hackers might still put you in their wishlist.

HOW TO USE QNAP NAS AS A VMWARE DATASTORE VIA ISCSI

Alright people, I have been trying to work on this since Monday and have not yet been able to achieve this. I thought it would be pretty simple than with other storage like EMC or DELL. However seems not. This is because of the error below. The issue is when I try to add QNAP to VMware through Plug-in, it throws error saying NAS is not responding. I don' t see any reason for that and now I have escalated this issue to QNAP.

I was able to create iSCSI LUNS in QNAP, was able to create virtual switches and connect them in VMWare. Now the only option remains is doing it all manually. I will update the procedure soon in this blog.
TO BE CONTD..............

All about RAID

RAID 0

Splits data evenly across two or more disks, without parity information, redundancy, or fault tolerance. The failure of one drive will cause the entire array to fail; as a result of having data striped across all disks, the failure will result in total data loss. A RAID 0 array of n drives provides data read and write transfer rates up to n times higher than the individual drive rates, but with no data redundancy. As a result, RAID 0 is primarily used in applications that require high performance and are able to tolerate lower reliability.

RAID 1

RAID 1 consists of an exact copy (or mirror) of a set of data on two or more disks; a classic RAID 1 mirrored pair contains two disks. This configuration offers no parity, striping, or spanning of disk space across multiple disks, since the data is mirrored on all disks belonging to the array, and the array can only be as big as the smallest member disk. This layout is useful when read performance or reliability is more important than write performance or the resulting data storage capacity.

RAID 2

RAID 2, which is rarely used in practice, stripes data at the bit (rather than block) level, and uses a Hamming code for error correction. The disks are synchronized by the controller to spin at the same angular orientation (they reach index at the same time[clarification needed]), so it generally cannot service multiple requests simultaneously. Extremely high data transfer rates are possible. With all hard disk drives implementing internal error correction, the complexity of an external Hamming code offered little advantage over parity so RAID 2 has been rarely implemented; it is the only original level of RAID that is not currently used.

RAID 3

RAID 3, which is rarely used in practice, consists of byte-level striping with a dedicated parity disk. One of the characteristics of RAID 3 is that it generally cannot service multiple requests simultaneously, which happens because any single block of data will, by definition, be spread across all members of the set and will reside in the same location.[clarification needed] Therefore, any I/O operation requires activity on every disk and usually requires synchronized spindles.

RAID 4

RAID 4 consists of block-level striping with a dedicated parity disk. As a result of its layout, RAID 4 provides good performance of random reads, while the performance of random writes is low due to the need to write all parity data to a single disk

RAID 5

RAID 5 consists of block-level striping with distributed parity. Unlike in RAID 4, parity information is distributed among the drives. It requires that all drives but one be present to operate. Upon failure of a single drive, subsequent reads can be calculated from the distributed parity such that no data is lost. RAID 5 requires at least three disks. In comparison to RAID 4, RAID 5's distributed parity evens out the stress of a dedicated parity disk among all RAID members. Additionally, read performance is increased since all RAID members participate in serving of the read requests.

RAID 6

RAID 6 extends RAID 5 by adding another parity block; thus, it uses block-level striping with two parity blocks distributed across all member disks. According to the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), the definition of RAID 6 is: "Any form of RAID that can continue to execute read and write requests to all of a RAID array's virtual disks in the presence of any two concurrent disk failures.

RAID 10

RAID 10, also known as RAID 1+0, combines disk mirroring and disk striping to protect data. A RAID 10 configuration requires a minimum of four disks, and stripes data across mirrored pairs. As long as one disk in each mirrored pair is functional, data can be retrieved. If two disks in the same mirrored pair fail, all data will be lost because there is no parity in the striped sets..RAID 10 provides redundancy and performance, and is the best option for I/O-intensive applications. One disadvantage is that only 50% of the total raw capacity of the drives is usable due to mirroring. Source: wikipedia, techtarget.com