Scorpion Software Blog

Why celebrating Earth Day is important

At Scorpion Software we work to not only protect our clients, but protect the planet. Which is why we strive to be a carbon neutral company. It’s why we use recycled materials in all our packaging. Why we deliver all our software online instead of on CD. Why our own hardware tokens use replaceable batteries to extend their life. And why we developed AuthAnvil SoftTokens. It’s just the right thing to do.

Today we celebrate Earth Day. Each year it is a day that is intended to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth's natural environment. And its something we truly believe in. We care about this planet. Not only out of a feeling of social responsibility, but for the benefit of all generations to come.

It's one of the reasons we have had our token exchange program for the last year. Did you know that we will take ANY working hardware token from a competing vendor (or even our own) and replace then FREE of charge with an equivalent AuthAnvil SoftToken? And that for every 20 that are disposed of in an eco-friendly manner, we purchase one ton of carbon offsets that are produced at the Soderglen Wind Farms in Alberta, Canada?

Below is one of the videos I shot last year when I did a site visit to the Wind Farm. See for yourself the impact a simple decision like using AuthAnvil SoftTokens can have on our people, on our places, and our planet. It's the right thing to do. And something I am proud of when we think of Earth Day. We may be celebrating it today... but we believe in it every single day. How about you?

(If you can't see the video below, check it out in HD on Vimeo here.)

Happy Earth Day!

An Update to the AuthAnvil Reporting Script

I was recently asked if I could make a couple of updates to the AAEmailReport.vbs script that I built about a year ago, to add support for reports on individual sites, and to allow for a more flexible date range. Well, it’s ready to go and up on our downloads page for anybody who wants to take advantage of the powerful reporting capabilities within AuthAnvil.

To start receiving daily reports, simply set the script up as a scheduled task in your version of Windows (instructions on that are available in the original blog post)

You’ll just have to configure a few parameters. These, in order, are:

• The SQL server and instance name where the AuthAnvil database resides. ie: SERVERNAME\AUTHANVIL or SERVERNAME\SQLEXPRESS. For standalone SQL servers, it may simply be the SERVERNAME.
• The runlevel. This can be a number between 1 and 3, where:
  1 = Send only failed logons
  2 = Send only successful logons
  3 = Send both failed and successful logons
• The "From" address
• The "To" address
• The name or IP address of the mail server to send this report through
• The number of days that you would like the report to cover, in the form of number of days ago you would like the report to start. This is an optional parameter, and if it isn’t specified, it will default to 1, running a report for yesterday’s logins.
• The Site ID of the AuthAnvil site that you would like to run the report on. This is an optional parameter, and if it isn’t specified, it will default to 1, running a report for site ID 1.

As an example, the Run line in our office looks something like this:

C:\Windows\System32\cscript.exe C:\Tools\AAEmailReport.vbs CORPSQL08 3 security@scorpionsoft.com authanviladmins@scorpionsoft.com 192.168.1.1 7 1

As you can see, our main SQL 2008 server where our AuthAnvil database exists is called CORPSQL08, and we are requesting to send both successful and failed logon information to the authanviladmins from security, going through our Exchange server on our SBS box, and we are requesting a report on logons for the past week (not including today) for site ID 1.

Hope that's helpful. Enjoy!