ninfo 1.0.1

Plugin based information gathering library

nInfo

nInfo is a library, CLI tool, and web interface (and lots of plugins) for gathering information on any of the following:

• IP Address (v4 or v6)
• CIDR Block (v4 or v6)
• MAC Address
• Hostname
• Username
• Hashes (as in md5/sha1 etc)

It consists of multiple plugin classes that implement a get_info function. The classes contain metadata for the type of arguments they accept, and if they are relevant for internal and or external hosts.

The CLI tool

Listing plugins

$ ninfo -l
Name                 Title                Description
cif                  CIF                  Collective Intelligence Framework
cymruwhois           Cymru Whois          Cymru Whois lookup
geoip                GeoIP                GeoIP
google_safebrowsing  Google Safe Browsing Google Safe Browsing check
....

Getting information

Silly example, run two plugins against two addreses:

$ ninfo -p geoip -p cymruwhois 8.8.8.8 4.2.2.2
=== 8.8.8.8 === 
*** Cymru Whois (Cymru Whois lookup) ***
15169 US 8.8.8.0/24 GOOGLE - Google Inc.

*** GeoIP (GeoIP) ***
US - United States

=== 4.2.2.2 === 
*** Cymru Whois (Cymru Whois lookup) ***
3356 US 4.0.0.0/9 LEVEL3 Level 3 Communications

*** GeoIP (GeoIP) ***
US - United States

The Library

>>> from ninfo import Ninfo
>>> n=Ninfo()
>>> n.get_info("cymruwhois", "8.8.8.8")
{'cc': 'US', 'ip': '8.8.8.8', 'prefix': '8.8.8.0/24', 'asn': '15169', 'owner': 'GOOGLE - Google Inc.'}
>>> print n.get_info_text("geoip", "8.8.8.8")
US - United States

The Web Interface

See https://github.com/justinazoff/ninfo_web or https://github.com/justinazoff/django-ninfo

Writing A plugin

Here's a plugin:

from ninfo import PluginBase

class fun_plugin(PluginBase):
    """This plugin returns something cool!"""

    name        =  'fun'
    title       =  'Fun Plugin'
    description =  'Happy Fun time'
    cache_timeout   =  60*2
    types   =    ['ip','hostname']

    #def setup(self):
    #    #libraries should be lazy imported in setup. This is only called once.
    #    import mybackendlibrary
    #    self.client = mybackendlibrary.Client()

    def get_info(self, arg):
        #should always return a dictionary, even for a single value
        #multiple values are the norm, and allow values to be added without breakage
        result = 'hello %s' % arg
        return { "result": result }

plugin_class = fun_plugin

If installed, this plugin can be run as follows:

>>> from ninfo import Ninfo
>>> p = Ninfo()
>>> print p.get_info('fun', 'justin.rules')
{'result': 'hello justin.rules'}

I had to include a '.' in the argument, because without it, ninfo will assume the argument is a 'user' and not an 'ip' or a 'hostname', and it will not run the plugin.

Plugins are installed and located using entry_points. If the above class was in a python module called fun_plugin, it would be installed by the following in setup.py:

...
py_modules = [ "fun_plugin"],
entry_points = {
    'ninfo.plugin': [
        'fun = fun_plugin',
    ]
...

Plugin Metadata

• Strings
• __doc__ - The python docstring of the class is used as the long_description for the plugin.
• name - The name of the plugin. Can be anything, but keeping it limited to [a-z_] is recommended.
• title - The title of the plugin. This is what is actually displayed to the user.
• description - Short description of the plugin.
• cache_timeout - timeout in seconds that this plugin should be cached in memcache, and the max-age parameter sent by the web interface.
• types - A list of one or more of 'mac', 'ip4', 'ip6', 'cidr4', 'cidr6', 'hostname', 'username'.
• local - if False, this plugin will not be run against local hosts.
• remote - if False, this plugin will not be run against remote hosts.

Cloned Plugins

Multiple instances of a plugin can be created by adding another section in the configuration file and optionally overriding the plugin metadata:

[plugin:geoip]
path = GeoIP.dat

[plugin:geoipcity]
clone = geoip
path = GeoIPCity.dat
title = City GeoIP
description = City Level GeoIP

See Also

• ninfo_web - basic web interface
• django-ninfo - ninfo integrated with django
• ninfo-plugin-template - paster template for creating plugins
• ninfo-client - REST client for ninfo_web or django-ninfo
• Search github for ninfo-plugin - more plugins