Frequently Asked Questions
- Question: What is Ungoliant?
- Answer: Ungoliant is a project that is design to help with internet spreading worms and general policies. It uses a number of opensource products and custom applications to achieve this goal.
- Question: What exactly does Ungoliant do?
- Answer: Ungoliant is a suite of software that can move troublesome hosts into a private VLAN that is not routed on your network.
After the user is moved into this VLAN, the only website that they can contact is the one that is hosted by Ungoliant. This is used to notify the user of the reason they were removed from the network and what must be done for them to get back on.
This is very useful in stopping the propagation of network worms or an email attachment virus. This can also be used to enforce network usage policies.
The core of Ungoliant uses ISC DHCPD, OpenVMPS, ISC Bind, Mysql and Apache backends.
- Question: How scalable is Ungoliant?
- Answer: Ungoliant has very little overhead associated with it. It could as easily manage 5 machines, or 5 thousand.
Ungoliant is based around VLAN technology. This means it is the same amount of overhead for the system to have everyone in the isolated VLAN as it is to have them on the live network.
- Question: How long have you been using Ungoliant?
- Answer: We have had the technology in production since the fall semester of 2004. The version to be released here will be much improved and optimized over the original implementation.
- Question: Does Ungoliant work with NetReg from NetReg.org?
- Answer: Currently, it does not, but we are releasing our version of NetReg along with Ungoliant. We do have plans to make Ungoliant compatable with the backend components of NetReg.orgs version, but we don't have the time for proper testing at this point.
- Question: Is Ungoliant free?
- Answer: All of the applications that we release are covered under the GPL. Other backend applications that Ungoliant uses may have a different license.
- Question: How often will Ungoliant be updated?
- Answer: We will update Ungoliant when we have improvements that can be made, or vital issues that need addressed. We currently do not have a release roadmap planned out for this project.
- Question: Can I contribute a sensor that I have created?
- Answer: Yes you can! We are very excited to see what the community will create to extend this system. If you create a sensor that you think would be useful to someone, let us know. We will construct a page for each contributed sensor with a writeup from the author, and information on where to get it.
- Question: Where did the name Ungoliant come from?
- Answer: Ungoliant is a character in a JRR Tolkien story. The former name of the project while it was still private was Shelob, which was the daughter of Ungoliant. The project changed it scope and direction to something much larger than we had envisioned, so we wanted to give the project a new name that reflected this. In Tolkien fiction, Ungoliant was much larger than Shelob, so we thought that this would be a fitting name.
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