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Best Practices

This document contains best practices, tips, and tricks for the Lantronix product family.

User Management

  • If you have more than 20 users, consider offloading Authentication to TACACS or RADIUS
  • Create groups and add users to groups (may be multiple groups per user)
  • Add email address to user account for alerting and reporting
  • Disable users instead of deleting
  • Use lowercase for all usernames unless required by TACACS/RADIUS; usernames are case-sensitive

Security

  • Disable the "admin" user
  • Disable the "administrator" user
  • Assign privileges to groups, not to individual users
  • Keep the default "deny use system auth" permission to ensure users authenticate with managed devices.
  • When creating roles, subtract permissions from the default "admin" role instead of building a new role from scratch
  • If using third-party AAA:
    • Cache passwords
    • Enable failover to local passwords when the network is down
  • If forwarding Auditing information, use stop-only.

Control Center Configuration

  • Change emsadmin's password
    • Changing the root password is NOT recommended. It cannot be recovered if it is lost / forgotten. (The root user is not allowed to log in via SSH.)
  • Configure NTP
  • Enable echo service

Local Manager Configuration

  • Connect both power supplies
  • Connect both Ethernet ports (GE-0/GE-1) if using bonded mode

Out-of-Band

  • Schedule a ppp cycle job to continually test the out-of-band connection
  • Schedule a dialtone test for v92 modems

Device Management

  • Verify serial communication using the terminal command prior to initializing port
  • Ensure IOS and ROMMON baud rates are the same
  • Create a functional account for Local Managers to use when managing devices
  • Make use of advanced drivers where possible
  • Enable all passive monitoring
  • Allow LM to clear device log on managed device

Reports

  • Subscribe to the "no heartbeat" report to stay informed of LMs that have gone offline
  • Subscribe to the "Failed Logins" report; this will show you if someone is trying to break into your Local Managers.