How to audit machines over a WAN

The difference between the Corporate and Desktop Editions of Enterprise Server are not so much in the auditing technology, but moreso in the way that Enterprise Server connects to your databases. You can find a fairly good explanation of how this works at: http://microforge.net/store/pricing.htm. In particular, refer to the section that concerns Architecture or Server Mode).

The auditing, in either case, is done using WMI... although this can theoretically be performed over a WAN, there are a number of things that make this difficult. The first is that probably the machines you want to audit will be sitting behind a firewall or switch, and don't have an address on the public Internet that they can be accessed by... if this is not the case, and you are able to, for example, ping each machine that you want to audit, then this first issue won't be a problem for you. The second problem, however, is that WMI runs over RPC which uses ports other than port 80... and it's very unlikely that these ports will be exposed on the firewall or router that the machines you want to audit are using to connect to the WAN.

We have developed a solution to both of these problems (which is an NT Service called ENT Network Monitor). You can run ENT Network Monitor on any networks you manage and use this as a kind of subnet auditing proxy - which would connect to the machines on that internal network to run the audits and then post the results back to your central ENT Server, over the WAN, using the HTTP protocol. 

ENT Network Monitor is only available for use with ENT Server Corporate Edition, which can be downloaded from the Downloads section of our website.

Another option would be to use EntAudit.exe (our command line auditing utility) to audit these machines to an audit snapshot file, which can then be emailed or saved to disk and posted to your Enterprise Server at a later date. This allows you to audit machines over the WAN, even without the ENT Monitor.

For further information, please also refer to the Network Auditing Strageties whitepaper, in the Documentation section of this web site.