I'm not like that, and neither is the other IT guy at my work, but I've seen it soo often.
Our setup is very simple, and much like some already described. Potentially malicious mail attatchments, or mails matching patterns for things like SirCam are stripped. All outgoing web requests are sent through Squid - where we keep anonymous logs of the sites that people have looked at. (That's not the intention of using Squid, we just want a decent caching proxy server).
I put my foot down when it was suggested that we filter/block particular sites, or try to trace which user had viewed a particular URL. If it were something extremely distastefull, or of suspect legality then I'd be more inclined to take these requests seriously - but only with a bit of proof in advance.
My feeling is that nobody at our work is going to sit there between 9-5 surfing for pron in an open plan office. If they are that stupid somebody will notice, and tell them to stop.
On the other hand if they're in at 9PM, or on a Saturday they're obviously working in their time, and its a lot more allowable.
This may be naive, but I think its a reasonable balance.
Hmmm.. I wonder what the increase in productivity would be if I blocked access to/.?;)
As a random factoid, it appears in my company that the most popular time for surfing the web is 3-4PM. Must be the point at which users get bored, and feel 5PM is too far away....
One mistake that has been made, which seems to have slipped past most people's notice is this:
I live in Edinburgh, and would make some fine company a wonderful SysAdmin - yet nobody has given me a job.
Not only would I be great as a Linux/Unix/Windows sysadmin, I'm good with people, cats, and small children and on top of that I'm a competent programmer too!
I'd recommend what several other people have already said - don't name machines for their intended purpose, as you get into trouble when you need to add, or remove, services + replace machines.
In the company where we work we have around 10 servers running Linux, or Windows, and around 50 desktop machines. Our system is to name desktop machines after rivers, and servers after oceans.
This system will scale upwards fairly well, (unless we suddenly acquire 1000 machines.. at which point we'll have more problems than naming systems.), and its simple to look at a list of machine names and see which ones are servers. Which is a huge win.
Once the machines have been named we setup aliases for all the servers, so we can have CNAMES for things like 'mailhost', 'newshost', 'exchange', 'exim', 'cvs', etc.
The only time we deviate from this system is for external machines, they're named pretty randomly - so we have Tigger, named after my cat, and Mordor after the holiday destination;)
Its good to hear about these older games, sometimes I wonder if people will be reminiscing about our current games in 10 or
15 years time.
Nowadays the main game that I play is Counter-Strike, its a great game - but it can only be played via a network, so each game is varies, depending on who you're playing against.
I used to play an awfull lot of SF2 when I was at college, on friends machines - I only saw one arcade machine of SFII in the wild, and that was at my local tattoo parlour; where I got these beauties, I'd kill to own one of the consoles now..
Wow, I'd forgotten all about that film, I've seen Tron a couple of times now, but the Last Starfighter was the first film I ever went to see at a Cinema, (I think I was about 8 or 9), so hearing it mentions fills me with nostalgia.
Tron was great at the time I watched it, and I've spent a lot of time over the years merrily playing Tron light-cycle games.. but I can honestly say it didn't make too much of an impact on me.
The Last Starfighter, though, was something that was in the back of my mind for years when I was watching sci-fi films, and probably had a huge affect on me. I'm gonna have
to go and see if I can get it on video/dvd now!
Maybe I'm just too young, and got spoilt by later films.. *shrugs*
Its a well known fact that security is a process, it should be considered right from the word go, and not just prior to a software release.
I've been writing a network server, recently, for streaming MP3's, so I been thinking a lot about the various issues.
I came up with a list of things that I should be doing, partly after reading bugtrack, and partly due to things I've picked up over the years.
I think its good to see books like this come out - if only to educate the newer/younger programmers who've never though about the issues before. After all many programmers just work on applications which aren't installed setuid, etc, so when they have to work on such a beast, for the first time, they're likely to work the way that they always have.
I believe that all the programmer courses available should have a section on security - largely because too many people learn from code printing in books, or online, which has all the error checking omitted, so the user can focus on the example. Its obvious from reading many peoples code that they never expect a malloc to fail!
This reminds me of something that I once did.A few years ago, when Java applets first became popular, I happened to run a website that was very popular amongst body piercers.
At the time I was getting a massive amount of hits - so I decided to see if I could take advantage of some of my visitors, by getting their browser to calculate PI for me.
I setup a simple applet on my main page, which would ostensibly scroll some text in a "flashy", (or annoying.. depending on how you like that kind of thing), manner.
In actual fact the applet would connect to a CGI script on my server, download the current value of PI, and try to refine it. If it could get another digit it would upload the result to the server.. so the next client would start one further digit along.
After around a week, with no effort on the part of my server, I'd managed to acquire the value of pi to so ridiculous length, purely by stealing resources from my visitors.
Ultimately I didn't care about the calculation, and I'd amused myself by proving it was possible to perform work simply by having browsers view some pages - so I removed the script + applet.
Its not just games that get reviewed incorrectly, its software too.
Many computer magazines will have glowing reviews of software products that aren't available, aren't complete, or are broken in major ways.
A good current example of this the reviews that many magazines have run recently of Windows XP, these reviews started coming out at the release of the first betas - with little mention of the fact that the final release would be different.
The only thing (not a bad thing, mind you) that gcc has going for it is that it's free... it's hardly the compiler of choice if you really want to optimize your code.
IMHO the best thing that GCC has got going for it is not is price, it is the sheer portability. There exists versions of GCC that will run on anything from Solaris, Linux, BeOS, Windows, and the Macintosh.
Thats why other free compilers, such as LCC have no appeal for me - sure they're smaller, neater, and easier to understand, but they're just not portable enough.
I think that part of the reason that you can't optimize your code so much is because of the nature of the portable code generator(s) - they're written to generate code for multiple machines, and as such they don't really want to start taking advantage of features particular to one processor type, (or even on particular model of processor).
I guess something else going for GCC is the amount of existing code around that takes advantages of its "special" features...
I'm sorry, RNL may be great , but I'm not going to use it.
I went to site to have a look at it, and started downloading the Windows installer, (hey I'm at work), 5Mb! There's just no way I'm going to install a filesharing client that's so big
Basically its a smallish python program that acts as a, tiny, webserver - generating lists of all your songs, and streaming them to your clients browser - where you have XMMS, or Freeamp setup to play the stream.
I suppose if the music is already on the same machine as your webserver then it may be a bit redundant to have a second server - but Edna is neat, (this is the one program that made me start hacking Python...).
Linux needs an automatic updater like Red Carpet. Why? First, because of WindowsUpdate. It's quick, easy, and on the mark when updating the OS and MS's addons. You've bought the OS, sure, but the updates are free. At $9.95/month, now you have a free OS that ends up costing you the same as the full version of XP Home after just over a year and a half.
First of all Linux doesn't need an automatic updater - it is the different distributions of Linux that need it.
Thankfully I use Debian, which does come with such an updating service - it is called "apt"
Ever morning when I get to work I find that apt has downloaded any security updates that my servers need overnight - and sent me an email to let me see if I want to install them.
Gandalf the Grey sacrifices his life to save the others in the fellowship, and then is "resurrected" as Gandalf the White, who is even more powerful than before.
No, Gandalf appears to sacrifice his life - but he doesn't really.
The whole "rebirth" thing that we later find out later is a consequence of his journey back from the bottom of Moria - not of him actually being reborn in any way.
Re:When can I buy one?
on
Binary Watch
·
· Score: 1
The international binary time + date format mandates that the date be written after the "," separator - in base 4.
Orangatango is based on a pretty cool idea: Rather than my computer negotiating a connection with every site I want to connect to, my computer negotiates a connection with Orangatango, and Orangatango does the rest. To the outside world, it looks as though Orangatango is making all of the requests. Maybe it's not a unique idea, but they have implemented it extremely well.
That's what us computery people call a Proxy, or Proxy Server...
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, you are right, however thats not something that the marketting people would see....
Sad, but true.
Its a PR thing - exactly the same as Microsoft wanting to switch hotmail from running BSD to Windows.
Regardless of the fact that the previous installation worked its a PR nightmare waiting to happen:
"So AOL, maker of a fine corporate email system, you run Exchange? Why is that? Doesn't your software work?", etc.
Amen.
I'm not like that, and neither is the other IT guy at my work, but I've seen it soo often.
Our setup is very simple, and much like some already described. Potentially malicious mail attatchments, or mails matching patterns for things like SirCam are stripped. All outgoing web requests are sent through Squid - where we keep anonymous logs of the sites that people have looked at. (That's not the intention of using Squid, we just want a decent caching proxy server).
I put my foot down when it was suggested that we filter/block particular sites, or try to trace which user had viewed a particular URL. If it were something extremely distastefull, or of suspect legality then I'd be more inclined to take these requests seriously - but only with a bit of proof in advance.
My feeling is that nobody at our work is going to sit there between 9-5 surfing for pron in an open plan office. If they are that stupid somebody will notice, and tell them to stop.
On the other hand if they're in at 9PM, or on a Saturday they're obviously working in their time, and its a lot more allowable.
This may be naive, but I think its a reasonable balance.
Hmmm.. I wonder what the increase in productivity would be if I blocked access to /.? ;)
As a random factoid, it appears in my company that the most popular time for surfing the web is 3-4PM. Must be the point at which users get bored, and feel 5PM is too far away....
Noooooo ... I only have one pet, and
he's going to live forever......
One mistake that has been made, which seems to have slipped past most people's notice is this:
I live in Edinburgh, and would make some fine company a wonderful SysAdmin - yet nobody has given me a job.
Not only would I be great as a Linux/Unix/Windows sysadmin, I'm good with people, cats, and small children and on top of that I'm a competent programmer too!
Come on Edinburghers, give me a job .. please!
If you take a look at GNUSoftware.com you'll find tons of Unix software for Windows.
To answer your question, specifically, though here's the page for Unix shells, where you have the choice of Bash, Tcsh, and ZSh
I'd recommend what several other people have already said - don't name machines for their intended purpose, as you get into trouble when you need to add, or remove, services + replace machines.
In the company where we work we have around 10 servers running Linux, or Windows, and around 50 desktop machines. Our system is to name desktop machines after rivers, and servers after oceans.
This system will scale upwards fairly well, (unless we suddenly acquire 1000 machines .. at which point we'll have more problems than naming systems.), and its simple to look at a list of machine names and see which ones are servers. Which is a huge win.
Once the machines have been named we setup aliases for all the servers, so we can have CNAMES for things like 'mailhost', 'newshost', 'exchange', 'exim', 'cvs', etc.
The only time we deviate from this system is for external machines, they're named pretty randomly - so we have Tigger, named after my cat, and Mordor after the holiday destination ;)
Its good to hear about these older games, sometimes I wonder if people will be reminiscing about our current games in 10 or 15 years time.
Nowadays the main game that I play is Counter-Strike, its a great game - but it can only be played via a network, so each game is varies, depending on who you're playing against.
I used to play an awfull lot of SF2 when I was at college, on friends machines - I only saw one arcade machine of SFII in the wild, and that was at my local tattoo parlour; where I got these beauties, I'd kill to own one of the consoles now ..
It's almost as bad as Last Starfighter
Wow, I'd forgotten all about that film, I've seen Tron a couple of times now, but the Last Starfighter was the first film I ever went to see at a Cinema, (I think I was about 8 or 9), so hearing it mentions fills me with nostalgia.
Tron was great at the time I watched it, and I've spent a lot of time over the years merrily playing Tron light-cycle games .. but I can honestly say it didn't make too much of an impact on me.
The Last Starfighter, though, was something that was in the back of my mind for years when I was watching sci-fi films, and probably had a huge affect on me. I'm gonna have to go and see if I can get it on video/dvd now!
Maybe I'm just too young, and got spoilt by later films.. *shrugs*
Its a well known fact that security is a process, it should be considered right from the word go, and not just prior to a software release.
I've been writing a network server, recently, for streaming MP3's, so I been thinking a lot about the various issues.
I came up with a list of things that I should be doing, partly after reading bugtrack, and partly due to things I've picked up over the years.
I think its good to see books like this come out - if only to educate the newer/younger programmers who've never though about the issues before. After all many programmers just work on applications which aren't installed setuid, etc, so when they have to work on such a beast, for the first time, they're likely to work the way that they always have.
I believe that all the programmer courses available should have a section on security - largely because too many people learn from code printing in books, or online, which has all the error checking omitted, so the user can focus on the example. Its obvious from reading many peoples code that they never expect a malloc to fail!
This reminds me of something that I once did.A few years ago, when Java applets first became popular, I happened to run a website that was very popular amongst body piercers.
At the time I was getting a massive amount of hits - so I decided to see if I could take advantage of some of my visitors, by getting their browser to calculate PI for me.
I setup a simple applet on my main page, which would ostensibly scroll some text in a "flashy", (or annoying .. depending on how you like that kind of thing), manner.
In actual fact the applet would connect to a CGI script on my server, download the current value of PI, and try to refine it. If it could get another digit it would upload the result to the server .. so the next client would start one further digit along.
After around a week, with no effort on the part of my server, I'd managed to acquire the value of pi to so ridiculous length, purely by stealing resources from my visitors.
Ultimately I didn't care about the calculation, and I'd amused myself by proving it was possible to perform work simply by having browsers view some pages - so I removed the script + applet.
Its not just games that get reviewed incorrectly, its software too.
Many computer magazines will have glowing reviews of software products that aren't available, aren't complete, or are broken in major ways.
A good current example of this the reviews that many magazines have run recently of Windows XP, these reviews started coming out at the release of the first betas - with little mention of the fact that the final release would be different.
Not to mention (re)booting, powering down, and hot-mounting USB toys ..
I wasn't aware of that - I remember using it a long time ago, when it wasn't that portable.
I have the book "LCC a retargetable C compiler .. but I don't remember it being as prolific as GCC.
The only thing (not a bad thing, mind you) that gcc has going for it is that it's free... it's hardly the compiler of choice if you really want to optimize your code.
IMHO the best thing that GCC has got going for it is not is price, it is the sheer portability. There exists versions of GCC that will run on anything from Solaris, Linux, BeOS, Windows, and the Macintosh.
Thats why other free compilers, such as LCC have no appeal for me - sure they're smaller, neater, and easier to understand, but they're just not portable enough.
I think that part of the reason that you can't optimize your code so much is because of the nature of the portable code generator(s) - they're written to generate code for multiple machines, and as such they don't really want to start taking advantage of features particular to one processor type, (or even on particular model of processor).
I guess something else going for GCC is the amount of existing code around that takes advantages of its "special" features...
Wait - you won't download a 5Mb install file.. but you will download gigs of mp3s?
Nope .. I'm an ex-DJ, so I've got tons of CD's lying around.
Currently I have around 20Gb of MP3's on my homenetwork, all ripped "by hand", not a single downloaded track in sight.
Downloading even one MP3 of decent length over a 56k modem would give me pause for thought...
I'm sorry, RNL may be great , but I'm not going to use it.
I went to site to have a look at it, and started downloading the Windows installer, (hey I'm at work), 5Mb! There's just no way I'm going to install a filesharing client that's so big
Enda creates playlists, and a nice interface to them, so it doesn't directly support Ogg files.
.Still, if you edit the source code for the program, you can add a line to include them in your playlists - afterall its XMMS which plays them.
Patch below:
+ '.ogg' : 'audio/ogg',If you need any help with this then mail me..
Edna sounds like it could do what you want.
Basically its a smallish python program that acts as a, tiny, webserver - generating lists of all your songs, and streaming them to your clients browser - where you have XMMS, or Freeamp setup to play the stream.
I suppose if the music is already on the same machine as your webserver then it may be a bit redundant to have a second server - but Edna is neat, (this is the one program that made me start hacking Python...).
Linux needs an automatic updater like Red Carpet. Why? First, because of WindowsUpdate. It's quick, easy, and on the mark when updating the OS and MS's addons. You've bought the OS, sure, but the updates are free. At $9.95/month, now you have a free OS that ends up costing you the same as the full version of XP Home after just over a year and a half.
First of all Linux doesn't need an automatic updater - it is the different distributions of Linux that need it.
Thankfully I use Debian, which does come with such an updating service - it is called "apt"
Ever morning when I get to work I find that apt has downloaded any security updates that my servers need overnight - and sent me an email to let me see if I want to install them.
The world would be a better place if there were only one religion
But there is only one religion, one true religion, anyway.
Honestly - if you can't be bothered taking an interest in purely local affairs you should be dammed for all eternity.
:-)
Gandalf the Grey sacrifices his life to save the others in the fellowship, and then is "resurrected" as Gandalf the White, who is even more powerful than before.
No, Gandalf appears to sacrifice his life - but he doesn't really.
The whole "rebirth" thing that we later find out later is a consequence of his journey back from the bottom of Moria - not of him actually being reborn in any way.
The international binary time + date format mandates that the date be written after the "," separator - in base 4.
Obviously ;-)
Shameless plug I know - but GNUSoftware.com has a directory of tons of GNU stuff ported to Windows.
Check it out sometime, and add pointers to software that isn't listed .. please!
Orangatango is based on a pretty cool idea: Rather than my computer negotiating a connection with every site I want to connect to, my computer negotiates a connection with Orangatango, and Orangatango does the rest. To the outside world, it looks as though Orangatango is making all of the requests. Maybe it's not a unique idea, but they have implemented it extremely well.
That's what us computery people call a Proxy, or Proxy Server ...