NOTE - This has been made largely redundant by the inclusion of Scheduled Task setup in Open-AudIT Enterprise v1.5.1.

Introduction

To enable discovery on a regular basis, you need to be able to schedule the Open-AudIT discovery to run at the required frequency, e.g. every day.  To do this using a series of discover a subnet using a script can be useful to setup scheduled Discovery runs. These can be created using the cron scheduler on Linux. The script named discover_subnet_cron.sh is designed for this purpose and is included with Open-AudIT Enterprise. You can supply individual arguements arguments on the command line or set them inside the script. Both ways have benefits.

Argument options

If you set the arguments inside the script:

...

./discover_subnet_cron.sh option=value

Argument Types

The script has two basic types of arguments - required and optional.

The required arguments are:

• openaudit_user, this is the username of a valid Open-AudIT administrator level user (set to 'admin' by default). This is not the unix user running the script.
• openaudit_pass, the corresponding password for the above user (set to 'password' by default).
• openaudit_url, this is usually left at the default supplied value (set to 'http://localhost/open-audit/index.php/discovery/discover_subnet' by default).
• local_address, this is the ip address of the Open-AudIT server upon which the Discovery is run. This must be an address visible to remote devices if they are to be audited using an audit script (audit_windows.vbs or audit_linux.sh).
• subnet, this is the nmap style subnet (no default). Valid examples are:
  192.168.0.1 (a single address)"
  192.168.1.2/32 (a single address with mask)"
  192.168.3.0/24 (a 24 bit mask - 192.168.3.0 to 192.168.3.255)"
  198.168.0-255.1-127 (a range of ip addresses)

The optional arguements are:

• snmp_community, the SNMP community string for any devices discovered on this subnet (set to 'public' by default).
• ssh_user, the SSH username for any devices discovered on this subnet (no default).
• ssh_password, the password for the above SSH user (no default).
• windows_user, the Windows username to be used in this discovery run. This should have local administrator rights on any discovered Windows PCs (no default).
• windows_domain, the Windows domain for the above user (no default).
• windows_password, the Windows password for the above user (no default).
• debugging, the command line output level. 0 = none, 1 = debug (set to '1' by default).
• quiet, no need to specify a value. using this is the equivalent to debugging=0.
• verbose, no need to specify a value. using this is the equivalent to debugging=1.
• syslog, if set, will log to this file (set to /usr/local/open-audit/other/open-audit.log by default).

Even though the credentials are optional, not providing them will limit Discovery to only those that are provided. hence, providing no Windows credentials will prevent an audit script from being run upon any Windows computers, etc.

Debugging

If the option is set "debugging=1" or the "verbose" option is provided, command line output will occur. If "debugging=0" or "quiet" are set, no output will occur.

...

./discover_subnet_cron.sh verbose subnet=192.168.0.1/32 local_address=192.168.0.8 
---------------------------------------
Open-AudIT Subnet Discovery cron script
(c) Opmantek, 2014. 
---------------------------------------
ARGUMENTS
---------------------------------------
Open-AudIT User: admin
Open-AudIT Password: password
Open-AudIT URL: http://localhost/open-audit/index.php/discovery/discover_subnet
Subnet: 192.168.0.1/32
Local Address: 192.168.0.8
Debugging: 1
Syslog: /usr/local/open-audit/other/open-audit.log
Help: n
SNMP Community: public
SSH User: 
SSH Password: 
Windows User: 
Windows Password: 
Windows Domain:
DEBUG
---------------------------------------
Logged: Discovery for 192.168.0.1/32 cron job submission
Logged: Discovery for 192.168.0.1/32 cron job completed

Help

If help is invoked with "help" or "help=y", or if an incorrect command line option is provided, output to the console will occur providing an overview of the script and it's options. If an incorrect argument is provided, debugging will also be enabled. The output is below:

...

./discover_subnet_cron.sh subnet=192.168.0.1/24 ssh_user=root ssh_password=rootpass snmp_community=snmpsecret windows_user=administrator windows_password=testpass windows_domain=open-audit.com

Scheduling using Cron

Because of file permissions, it may be easiest to set the crontab schedule using root. This is not necessary though and the script can be run (assuming file execute other permission is set) by any valid user, it is advisable that these files be restricted in their access, as they contain passwords.

...

You might like to run infrastructure subnets at night, and user subnets during the day, there are many options available with this flexible solution.

Logging

Once a discovery job has been run, an entry into the standard Open-AudIT log will be created.

This is viewable by Menu -> Admin -> Log -> View Log, inside Open-AudIT or Menu -> Views -> Log inside Open-AudIT Enterprise.

The standard file location is /usr/local/open-audit/other/open-audit.log. Typical entries into the log for a discovery run will look like:

...