Upstream - Tech 60

Download Upstream Power Pack

Ronny Tunfjord — Mon, 07 May 2012 08:02:55 +0000

A sticky note for the latest Upstream Power Pack, the Kaseya content from Upstream.

Kind regards

The Upstream Tech Team

Tech 60

OS X Lion update

Ronny Tunfjord — Mon, 14 May 2012 20:28:43 +0000

Apple released OS X 10.7.4, the fourth maintenance update to OS X Lion. The update is currently available via Software Update and should appear on Apple's download pages.

Treat the Mac OS X like any other OS. Get control of the updates. Check out our Kaseya Agent Procedures in the current Upstream Power Pack.

Kind regards

The Upstream Tech Team

Tech 60

Upstream Tech60 coffee break 4

Ronny Tunfjord — Fri, 11 May 2012 07:08:10 +0000

Time for a coffee break again. We have collected some news and observations during this past couple of weeks. Take some time to catch up on the things related to Kaseya, application updates and general IT news for managed service providers.

Mac is not virus free

A lot has happended during the last couple of weeks with the Mac. The flashback malware has been all over the news. We provided a couple of tools to upgrade the Mac OS X with Kaseya Agent procedures. The problem was not in the Mac OS X itself, but rather depending on flaws in the Java engine. Make sure Java gets updated.

Microsoft Patch Tuesday

Notification for May 2012 contains 7 bulletins: three rated “critical” and the rest “important.”

Application updates

Firefox jumped to version 12.0 and fully leverages the new auto-update features. Look for Mozilla Maintenance Service under local system services after update. And yes, the services should be set to Manual. Firefox will start the service when called upon. This is also the standard settings for the Adobe Flash Player Update Service. Speaking of Flash. Take time to update to the latest Adobe Flash Player version 11.2.202.235 now. Read more here. The tools neded for updating is part of the Upstream Power Pack for Kaseya.

Tech60 sessions about AppAssure and Kaseya

We got a lot of good feedback on the last Tech60 session covering AppAssure and Kaseya. Take a look.

Kaseya news

Kaseya Connect in Las Vegas finished up last friday. Some of our crew came in jet lagged in the beginning od the week : ) Take time to watch the recorded sessions. A lot of good information. We are especially proud of the KNM development team from Sweden : ) There are a lot of cool new features coming and the 6.3 release is the first milestone in coming releases for this year.

Upstream news

Thursday May 24:th we will host yet another Tech60 Live. We will be at the Hilton in central Stockholm between 16:00 and 20:00 discussing Kaseya news and Bring Your Own Device (BOYD). Contact customercare@upstream.se if you want to come and hang out. It's gonna be a fun and relexed afternoon/early evening.

Thats all for now. Have a great weekend!

Kind regards

The Upstream Tech Team

Tech 60

Power Pack Updates 2012-05-07

Ronny Tunfjord — Mon, 07 May 2012 12:43:48 +0000

Hi everyone. We have updated the Upstream Power Pack.

This time we have two minor updates. Firefox us now updated to 12.0 and a new naming standard for views.

Views

We have decided to replicate the Kaseya SaaS standard for views and the list after import should look like this: App-*, Devices-* and OS-*.

Upstream Power Pack

Updated: Application - Windows - Firefox - * - Deploy Or Force Update To Latest
Current release is 12.0

Enjoy!

Kind regards
The Upstream Tech Team

Tech 60

AppAssure and Kaseya (in Swedish)

Ronny Tunfjord — Fri, 04 May 2012 07:28:52 +0000

The subject of the recorded session was: AppAssure and Kaseya.

This session explains what makes AppAssure different from other backup systems but also how it ties in to Kaseya management. Listen to our AppAssure expert talking about the features of AppAssure i general. Later we explain how this can be uses in Kaseya with a snap-in module provided by AppAssure.

Enjoy!

Kind regards

The Upstream Tech Team

Tech 60

Invite: Upstream Tech60 - Learn more about KAM, KAV, and KES (in Swedish)

Ronny Tunfjord — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 09:44:59 +0000

Hello and welcome to Tech 60, the place to be for Kaseya admins.

Upstream is dedicated to give our customers the tools, education and news to successfully manage IT environments with Kaseya. As a valued Upstream customer you are free to join the Tech60 webinar every Wednesday even weeks at 14:00 Swedish time.

This week’s subject will be: Learn more about KAM, KAV, and KES (in Swedish)

Learn more about the three security focused add-on modules Kaseya Anti-Malware (KAM), Kaseya Anti-Virus (KAV) & Kaseya Endpoint Security (KES).

Join us on wednesday May 2:nd between 14:00 and 15:00 Swedish time.

https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/805145998

The session will be recorded.

Please send in feedback and suggestions for topics and content to customercare@upstream.se

Kind regards
The Upstream Tech Team

Tech 60

Monitor VMware with KNM 4.1

Martin Sars — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 06:57:35 +0000

With the release of Kaseya Network Monitor version 4.1, we now have two built-in ways of monitoring your VMware infrastructure. We support versions 4.1 and 5.0 of ESX/ESXi from build 7345.

With the Lua script that comes with the install package, you can easily setup monitoring of the most common health counters’ operational status. The counters that are checked are the following:

CPU
Storage volumes
Storage Extent
Controller
SATA ports
Memory
Power supply
Fan

The script checks for any abnormalities in the operational status for each counter and will set an alarm if the status is not in an OK state.

To start monitoring, first you need to create an object choosing VMware as the operating system and then choose version (ESX 4.1, ESXi 4.1 or ESXi 5.0).

When you choose Vmware as the template, you will see the following options for choosing monitors. The new options for version 4.1 is the built-in Lua script for health and the VMware performance monitor.

VMware Health Check

For the health check Lua script, choose “WBEM_ESXi_Health_.lua” script. In most cases, you can leave “Secure” and “Ignore not found” as True, which is their default values. Also make sure you select a logon account (Use object default account is default) and check “No account logon.”

For the display results of this monitor, you will just see “Test OK” in the status windows as long as the operational status for the tested hardware is OK.

If any of the performed tests would fail, the details of what part that failed will be shown in the status field and will be included in the alarm event.

VMware Performance Monitor

When setting up this montor, it will automatically check what performance counters that are available for your version of ESX/ESXi. For detailed information about the counters, refer to your VMware version’s documentation.

In this example, the counter ”rescpu.active5.latest” was chosen. This counter will show the CPU’s last 5 minute’s average activity in percent from VMware.

The “Data Type” in this case should be chosen as “CPU Utilization.” Please refer to the KNM Documentation for creating your own data types.

In the “Comparison Options”, you could for example set that this monitor should pass if the current average CPU load during 5 minutes is less than 50% or trigger an alarm if over 50%.

Click on ”Save” and this is how the monitor will look like in KNM.

If we then create a report from the collected data, in this case on a ESXi 4.1 system with some more load, it could look something like this.

Below is how the monitoring could be configured for an ESXi 5.0 system. We have CPU load during the last 5 minutes, memory average usage, network average usage plus the health check Lua script configured for this object.

Invite: Upstream Tech60 - AppAssure and Kaseya (in Swedish)

Ronny Tunfjord — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 06:30:06 +0000

Hello and welcome to Tech 60, the place to be for Kaseya admins.

This week’s subject will be: AppAssure Backup and Kaseya (in Swedish)

Learn how to use AppAssure the backup solution in Kaseya. We explain what AppAssure is an how to use the Kaseya plug-in to manage backups on many different sites.

Join us on wednesday April 18:th between 14:00 and 15:00 Swedish time.

https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/500920126

The session will be recorded.

Please send in feedback and suggestions for topics and content to customercare@upstream.se

Kind regards
The Upstream Tech Team

Tech 60

how we handled the mac flashback updates

Ronny Tunfjord — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 08:04:23 +0000

The Flashback malware has been a very hot topic the last couple of weeks. Apple is not the fastest company when it comes to releasing updates it seems. More than 600000 machines is reported infected.

But the latest Mac OS X Java patch distributed from Apple's automatic software update will do the trick. If you can get it out to the clients that is. This is the biggest dilemma. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and the ever growing demand for Mac in the workplace has created an army of unmanaged laptops.

The last Tech60 session covered how to patch Mac OS X by using Kaseya Agent Proceudres. If you have not yet checked this out, go here.

The results of the Kaseya Agent Procedures presented in the link above can be summarized like this:

First, run a scan for missing updates You can compare this to Patch Scan in the Kaseya Microsoft Patch Management module. The Kaseya Agent Log report can look like this:

Information highlighted in red is what we are looking for. Depending on Snow Leopard or Lion there are different updates, but focus on all recommended updates.

The result after running the actual update can look like this:

As you can see the output indicates the update was successful with a nice Done last.

If you have many Mac OS X machines under your management in Kaseya you can also disable the auto update function for the end users with a simple Kaseya Agent Procedure. Read more about this in the latest Upstream Power Pack update.

Give it a try!

Kind regards
The Upstream Tech Team

Tech 60

How to patch Linux and Mac

Ronny Tunfjord — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 13:23:31 +0000

The subject of Tech60 last week was: How to patch Linux and Mac

The session covered the Kaseya Agent Procedures needed for patching Linux and Mac. There are no reason to post the session as all you hear is us rambling on about command line switches : )

We summarize this better in a couple of lines in text.

As Linux example we used the Ubuntu Server 64 bit. With Kaseya Agent Procedures we ran the command line: agp-get update and apt-get upgrade -y. This will tell the Ubuntu server to get the list of available packages and later patch the machine to current stable release. We also showed how to use uname to put the current Linux kernel in a custom field.

On the Mac OS X side we used the softwareupdate command. Go to terminal in a Mac and type softwareupdate --help to read more about this. We used the command to list missing updates, prepare for update and update without reboot. Also the Mac kernel was mentioned, as the uname Agent Procedure in no different from the Linux command above.

On a special note it is very important to patch the Mac OS X to the current Java release. There are some nasty malwares attacking older Mac Java versions in the wild.

The Kaseya Agent Procedures used in the session is now part of the Upstream Power Pack.

Enjoy!

Kind regards

The Upstream Tech Team

Tech 60