NORSK
NORSK (NORtel Session Killer) is a utility to provide a web based interface to allow authorized users who are not administrators of Nortel Contivity switches the ability to kill user VPN sessions. Contivity switches do not provide a means to do this short of granting full administrative rights. NORSK uses the telnet interface into Contivity administration on the server side by using a tailored version of the clogin file from RANCID. NORSK runs on Linux (it should work on any UNIX platform that supports the requirements), Apache (tested with 2.0.52-22) and PHP (tested with 4.3.9-3.12). As noted a customized version of clogin is used to perform NORSK’s functions from the server, therefore all the requirements of RANCID will need to be met, development and testing were performed using RANCID 2.3.1.
Installation and configuration instructions are contained within the README file. Since NORSK was written to use RANCID it is being released under the terms of the RANCID license which can be found in the LICENSE file included with the distribution.
If you have questions, comments or suggestions about NORSK just post a comment on this page.
The latest release includes the ability to define administrators in the configuration file. These administrators will be able to modify the configuration file and the .htaccess file from the web interface (handy if your support staff don’t happen to be Linux/UNIX savvy).
Download it using the links below
Current (stable) v0.6
Previous release v0.5
Why would you need this?
If for capacity management or other purposes you enable ssession limits on your Nortels, then you may end up with users who have orphaned sessions on the devices and will therefore receive message about too many sessions and they will be unable to connect until the orphaned sessions are gone. This is usually the result of unstable Internet connections; either ISPs who cut VPN sessions off after some period of time or perhaps home wireless networks. You can configure timeouts, but usually these are set to hours in order to avoid disconnecting users before they really want to be disconnected. The users will typically call the helpdesk at that point and ask that someone clear the sessions, yes your network engineers could do this, but with NORSK you can delegate this ability to your call center staff and resolve the problem faster without using your more expensive resources to do so.
Click on the thumbnail below to view the obligatory screen shot:
