Being a company dedicated to open-source, we had tons of open-source software
proving that the open-source paradigm was a workable one. Our workstations
were all Red Hat Linux systems, which were configured and customized to help us
achieve our mission statement. Our back-end servers were all running FreeBSD. Our
security console was a custom, in-house developed front-end built on open-source
scripting tools (which was the base for what would later become the Sguil Project).
Chapter 1
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Our network sensors were all built on Snort, and dumped all transactional data into
a PostgreSQL data warehouse. Our office productivity suite was an early release of
OpenOffice.org. Yet we lacked one important piece of a customer-focused service
group: a reporting system.
So, what tools did we use to address the area of reporting? We had scripts. Lots of
tedious, boring, and manual scripts that generated lines and lines of ugly text. The
scripts took hours to run, mostly due to lack of proper indexing on the reporting
tables, because the DBAs refused to listen to us and focused on the transactional
databases that housed all our live data. So the scripts were slow, and their output
was ugly. The scripts may have outputted RTF documents, but no formatting tags
were actually used. Part of our job was to go through each of these reports, cut
out duplicate lines, change fonts and font weighting, and manually go through
and confirm the accuracy of each of the counts in the summary.
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