Open-AudIT v3.0.0 released

Created by Mark Unwin
Feb 20, 2019

After a long and interesting v2 series, we welcome v3 into the world!

 

Why v3 you ask? Well, with the recent improvements around discovery scan options and the resulting dramatic increase in discovery times along with the Windows version finally updating its XamppLite package to the latest full Xampp install, we thought it warranted the version increase.

 

What's changed? See Discovery Scan Options and the Release Notes for Open-AudIT v3.0.0.

 

Windows users have been left waiting lately, so you might also want to check the release notes for Release Notes for Open-AudIT v2.3.2 and Release Notes for Open-AudIT v2.3.3

 

We have introduced a new field for your devices called "identification" along with a new device type of "unclassified". This is used when we have some information about a device, but have not been able to talk to it using SNMP, WMI or SSH. So if we have a MAC address, or we know port X is open, then we know something and provide a type of unclassified. We populate the identification field with what we know. In the case where we literally have an IP and possibly a DNS hostname, the device will remain unknown in type. You can see these details on the Devices section of the Discoveries screen. This should help point you in the right direction to identifiying a device, rather than us throwing our hands in the air and saying "we couldn't talk to it, so it's unknown".

 

The new Discovery Scan Options are fully customisable for Enterprise users, choosable on a per discovery basis for Professional users and selectable on an install basis for Community users. We set the default to use UltraFast options and the increase in speed (especially on Linux servers) is, to put it midly, massive. We have genuine reports of a customer scanning their /22 and having the scan time drop from 29 hours to under 10 minutes. That is not a lie or exaggeration. I know it sounds hard to believe. Obviously there are surrounding conditions - network speed, device speed, reduced Nmap ports reporting, etc - but the result is genuine. To say we're happy with the performance is understating it quite a lot (smile)

 

We have finally managed to move Windows users from XamppLite to full Xampp. This wasn't without it's challenges, the largest being the PHP changes from 5.3 to 7.3 and encryption functions. In order to facilitate this, we use the existing 2.x install to export the encrypted credentials for credentials, device specific credentials, clouds and LDAP servers to a file, upgrade Xampp and Open-AudIT, then on the database schema upgrade, use the generated text file to encrypt the credentials and update the database entries. Once that's done and you're happy everything has worked, you can delete the file c:\xampplite\open-audit\migrate.json (we do not delete this file automatically). We also do not remove the old XamppLite installation. That is left for the user to decide to delete it at a time when they're happy with their new Open-AudIT 3.0.0 install.

 

Open-AudIT has never been easier to use, faster or more customisable than it is right now.

 

If you haven't upgraded, get on board!