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SmoothWall Firewall Review
Daniel Goscomb, one of the lead developers of Smoothwall, responds:
In our opinion this article is extremely badly researched and written. Furthermore it shows a lack of knowledge on the author's part.
The main concern he has is that of people being able to log in to the firewall and read configuration files. This point is irrelevant as there is only a single user that can access the shell, root. This also removes the need of shadow password files, if you have access to the machine to get the passwd file, you are already in as root anyhow.
Secondly he complains of plain text passwords for the ppp passwords. This is not our doing. The passwords are stored in this format as pppd requires them to be in plain text in the two files. He also mentions that the permissions of these files are wrong. If he looked a little more closely he would have seen that they are in fact symlinks to the 2 real files, which do have the proper permissions on them.
He also mentions the same "problem" with the shared keys system in FreeSWAN. Again, they are stored like this as FreeSWAN requires them in this format to read them.
As to the part about user authentification of the CGI scripts. This is completely irrelevant. There is no authentication in the CGI scripts. The authentication is done via .htaccess files, and has no interaction with the CGI at all, other than when you change the passwords.
I also find it disturbing that the author gave us no room for comment in his article, nor did i see anything to suggest he had even asked us about these so called "problems". We would have been happy to answer any questions he had.
Sincerely,
Daniel Goscomb.
Posta da firsta
That doesn't seem to be little more than excuse talk to me.
Join the Free Software Foundation
Guys,
SHould I put one of these firewalls to protect my Linus beowulf cluster?
I don['t want any body who is not authorized to play with my cluster.
Do they teach this response when pursuing a Computer Science degree? "Obivously you can't do it, because I can't think of how to do it." Sheesh.
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What, chicken to post in anything but anonymous mode? Loser.
What is the address of the "Troll Tuesday 2001" website? It includes a picture of CmdrTaco and one of the other editors involved in anal sex.
Thank you
Hi, I was in #smoothwall at that time too. I agree with Hellcore's comments - the "reviewer" came on and refused to admit he was writing an article, had an obvious agenda, and failed to listen to anything that anyone said. The fact that SmoothWall is designed to protect your LAN **from** the Internet was ignored. SmoothWall was not designed to protect your LAN **from** internal users. Regardless of this, there is only a single account that has a shell - "root" - and shadowing passwords and hiding passwords from this user is next to useless. If someone manages to gain shell access to the SmoothWall machine, they already have root access. Your box is gone. Just remember that this has not happened. There have been no known successful hacks on an un-modified SmoothWall. Secure? Yes, it is. Regards, HiltonT
Once again, another ipcop troll/spam. ipcop is a project whose manager is spamming unrelated mailing lists about their SmoothWall fork. Yes, that's all it is, a fork. Plus it's a project that's having to be reminded by SourceForge of their obligation as a GPL-derived project by giving proper and full due credit to the project they are derived from.
neuro at well dot com (when I post, it's my opinions, no-one elses)
Soon everyone will realize that slashdot is only for trolls, and no one else.
Furthermore, science is for gayrods.
--WinXP forever.
w3rd! +h15 d00d fu>0ring 0wNz y0ur @55
gr33tz to pr0pz4, p1mpz0r 4nd nUmBnUtZ
> It was the eve of the 0.9.8 release
It was actually the eve of the 0.9.9 release, 4 days after September 11th. As your email archive shows, I kept telling you to let things go - there were, and still are, worse things in the world to worry about than people giving you perceived attitude.
Go hug a loved one or something.
</peacenik>
neuro at well dot com (when I post, it's my opinions, no-one elses)