As most of you are aware, I have written a few posts about and the great value it provides in a. It can help to uncover not only network issues that may exist, but also potential security events unfolding or machines being on a segment of the network they should not be on. It is a great tool overall that I highly recommend running in a lightweight on the network. I have written a few posts on how to get up and running fairly quickly with the solution, including email alerts. One of the housekeeping tasks that need to be done with Arpwatch however is maintaining updates on the OUI tables. Let’s take a look at how to Use Ansible to Update OUI tables in Arpwatch. If you have several Arpwatch probes out on your network, using Ansible is a great way to automate this process of updating the OUI tables.

XArp is a security application that uses advanced techniques to detect ARP based attacks. Using active and passive modules XArp detects hackers inside your network. ARP attacks allow an attacker to silently eavesdrop or manipulate all your data that is sent over the network. This include documents, emails, or VoiceIP conversations. ARP spoofing.

What is an OUI?You might wonder, what is an OUI anyway? The OUI is known as the Organizationally Unique Identifier that is the 24-bit number that uniquely identifies a vendor or manufacturer of a certain piece of hardware. In fact, if you have seen a MAC address before, you have seen the OUI!

Night preface study guide answers questions. The OUI is the first three octets of a MAC address. For instance, the MAC address that starts with 74:e6:e2 is a Dell MAC address. There are many great OUI lookup websites out there, but one of the first that pops up in a Google search is the one from Wireshark. You can lookup a vendor using their quick OUI lookup utility.Keeping the OUI tables up to date means you are able to more effectively identify devices that arpwatch sees on the network. If you don’t have a matching OUI identifier for the MAC address, the host simply comes through as “Unknown”. Automating this process allows much more effectively keeping up with the most recent OUIs as they are released.

Why Use Ansible to keep this updated?Ansible is a great way to automate many operations across the environment, and it is especially at home managing, even though the Windows support is now really great also. Using Ansible, we can connect to any number of Linux hosts, update the ethercodes.dat file that is used by Arpwatch and do this programmatically.First I want to give a shout out to writer of the script I had found some time ago for updating the ethercodes.dat file here:Using this shell script, you can easily pull down the latest OUI file and format it in the way arpwatch can use. Rtl8188cu driver for mac.