The Jalan Project

What is Jalan ?

Jalan is a tool aimed at network administrators in charge of medium to large sized LAN parties (our was ~200 players). Network administration of a LAN party differs from "classical" network administration, as the technical staff has to cope with a network of untrusted, potentially misconfigured, infected or malicious hosts, over which they have no administrative control. As LAN parties are short-lived events, even a few minutes of downtime can quickly become frustrating for the participants. Because of this, LAN parties usually enforce strict rules and policies for the users to connect their boxes to the local network, at the expense of the happiness of participants.

We want to let network administrators relax their rules without turning their job into a security nightmare, by providing them with an efficient solution for LAN party management.

What is the development status of Jalan ?

Jalan is a complete rewrite of the internal suite of management tools that was sucessfully used during the last two editions of PolyLAN, which is named PLT. Those tools are written in Perl, you can find an outdated (but useable) version in the Files section.

The new version will be written in Java for the J2SE5.0 environment. This wll hopefully lead to easier maintenance, and extension of the project with a web interface.

In the meantime, we continue to adapt PLT to our needs, and will release the last version shortly after the next PolyLAN (september 2006)

What are the main features ?

• Manages network devices via SNMP
• Monitors status of local backbone links
• Monitors misconfigured hosts (using IP adresses that have not been explicitely allocated by the designated DHCP server)
• Actively searches for roque DHCP servers
• Let participants authenticate themselves and register their machines, and isolates unregistered hosts in a DMZ if the network devices support 802.1q VLANs
• Let administrators lookup associations between IP address, MAC address, identity of the owner, connection point to the network (Switch ID and port) and physical location (place number) of a host
• Let administrators block any misbehaving host at the physical/link layer, by IP address or owner identity, etc..

What are the new features that will be added to PLT/JaLan ?

The development version of PLT already includes the following:

• Quarantining of misbehaving hosts in a dedicated VLAN
• Better handling of syslog priorities make the LAN log actually useable in realtime
• Supports some Dell switches with bogus or incomplete SNMP stack

What are the software/hardware requirements ?

the experimental core of Jalan runs on the J2SE 5.0 environment, and is tested with the SUN JDK 5.0. The web interface runs on a J2SE 5.0 compliant servlet container, and is tested with Apache Tomcat 5.5. The PLT tools run with Perl.

Jalan needs administrative access to network devices to develop its full potential. As of now, we only plan to support devices manageable through SNMP, and implementing the Bridge, 802.1P and 802.1Q MIBs.

Jalan also needs to get information from the designated DHCP server of the LAN. As of now, only the ISC DHCP daemon (dhcpd) is supported.

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Last updated on Jun 15 2006