Last week I went to Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to assist them with Portaledge. The Department of Energy thought it would be a good idea to include Portaledge output in PNNL’s National SCADA Test Bed Real-Time Security State Visualization Project, I hope they find a good acronym or project name for that. When I arrived at the main campus I was a bit shocked that the facility wasn’t fenced in and crawling with armed guards. Coming from Sandia California, next door to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, you get used to seeing guard with pistols and assault rifles walking around.

After getting checked in I met with the Secure Cyber Systems Group and we roughly discussed a game plan. I helped them with a bit of training on OSIsoft’s PI server. The training was mostly on administration, setting up interfaces, point creation and the module database. These are the basic skills required to run Portaledge. Once the basics were finished, we started testing the different interfaces needed for Portaledge. These included the ipflow interface, ping interface, tcpresponse interface and the performance monitor interface.

Next we downloaded and installed the Portaledge events, created all of the points and created the module database portion of Portaledge. Once we started the Portaledge events, I noticed a couple of entries were missing from the module database. I fixed these on their system then I updated the release packages to fix these minor issues. Once these issues were resolved, Portaledge was up and running. I then showed a couple of people in the group how to change the output if need be. It was helpful for me to go through a fresh install with people new to the product.

I would like to thank PNNL, especially the Secure Cyber Systems Group, for hosting. I am eager to see what ideas they have for the visualizing Portaledge alerts.

As I stated above, I recently updated the Portaledge packages. If you have been having problems with a few of the Portaledge events, I recommend obtaining the latest packages and using the templates for the event or events that are not working properly.