Yet another interesting 180-minute workshop in IPv6 Security Summit of TROOPERS16, which aimed to introduce the IPv6 troubleshooting and monitoring tools, which are essentially needed by users in order to know how to deal with IPv6 in any IPv6-enabled network.
Before we dive into this post, let me introduce you in few words “Gabriel Müller” the speaker and the instructor of this workshop. Gabriel works as a senior consultant at AWK Group by mainly assisting clients in the public and private sectors as a project manager and an expert in the network area.
The workshop started with a motivation that justified the need of the IPv6 knowledge and its elementary tools, which are considered very helpful for the users to monitor and troubleshoot their network connectivity in the presence of IPv6. Gabriel started the talk by giving an example of how sometimes using Ping command in IPv6 might fail as a result of some settings in the operating system.
After the introduction, Gabriel showed and explained the topology and the implementation of the lab environment, which was used by the attendees to perform the different required tasks in this workshop. This lab environment simply consists of an Ubuntu server that is located behind an IPv4/IPv6 router, where the other interface of the router is connected to the subnet to which the users (attendees) connect. The router also connects the clients to the external world via the interface that is connected to the network of the Troopers conference.
The instructor then mentioned and showed all the necessary tools that were required in the workshop. These tools are both CLI and GUI tools, which are capable to do all the IPv6 troubleshooting and monitoring tasks on different variety of operating systems.
In addition, Gabriel also provided the attendees with an Ubuntu virtual machine (VM) VMware image (including all the necessary tools), which was hosted on the Ubuntu server that was accessible through the network of workshop and was also copied on an USB stick. Using this VM on a Microsoft VMware Player or on an Oracle VM VirtualBox, the attendees were requested to complete the following tasks by employing the different provided tools:
- Performing basic tasks; to experience how IPv6 is used to either to connect the VM to the machines in the workshop network or to some hosts on the Internet.
- Using Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to connect to different nodes on the workshop network, as well as gathering information about these hosts.
- Configuring and Using Observium monitoring utility to query the router and the server of the workshop network using SNMP over IPv6.
- Finally, the attendees did some additional tasks which included; querying the Network Time Protocol (NTP) running on the server of the workshop network, port scanning the VM, port scanning the router and the server of the workshop network, using some network usage and performance monitoring tools (ntopng, Iperf, Jperf) to investigate the traffic between the VM and the server running on the workshop network.
At the end of the workshop, the attendees gave their feedbacks regarding the workshop, which showed a positive sign of satisfaction from all them. To be honest, I myself enjoyed being in this workshop and I hope you had the same impression by reading my post 🙂
For more information about the workshop and the lab environment, please refer to the published slides of this workshop at the following link:
Tools for Troubleshooting and Monitoring IPv6 Networks
Thanks from me “Ali Hardudi”