Owner's Manual

Ensuring a Secure Dell OpenManage IT Assistant Installation 207
See the Dell OpenManage Server Administrator Command Line Interface
User’s Guide on the Dell Support website at support.dell.com/manuals for
more information.
In summary, to successfully and securely manage servers per the security
measures introduced here, system administrators should adhere to the
following best practices:
• Ensure that the operating system is up-to-date with the most recent
operating system security patches.
• Implement SNMP community names that cannot be easily guessed.
•Configure SNMP to be
Read Only to limit configuration, update, and
power control to Server Administrator only.
• Configure SNMP to accept requests only from the IP address of the system
running IT Assistant.
• Use tools such as Group Policies in Active Directory
to enforce the SNMP
settings for all servers to be managed.
• Configure Server Administrator to deny user level access.
Ensuring Database Security When Using IT Assistant
If Microsoft SQL Server
®
database is not detected when IT Assistant is
installed, the process installs a copy of SQL Server 2005 Express Edition SP2,
which is set to an authentication mode of trusted or Windows only. However,
other applications that may have previously installed MSDE or SQL Server,
including previous versions of IT Assistant, frequently chose either an
authentication mode of SQL or mixed mode, which allows SQL Server to
manage its own user IDs and passwords. In the case of early versions of
IT Assistant, the supervisor account password was set to either null or
dell. At a minimum, decrease the exposure to a network break-in by
changing these passwords to strings that correspond to the best practices
mentioned previously. A better option is to change the database
authentication mode to trusted or Windows only.