What Was New: July - Dec. 2000
- What Was New: Jan. - Mar. 2007
- What Was New: Jan. 2001 - Nov. 2003
- What Was New: April - June 2000
Homegrown Intrusion Detection
(12/02/00)
has a significant new section on adapting the scripts to other
systems titled Monitoring Your
Systems.
Homegrown Intrusion Detection
(11/27/00)
is another new section that describes simple shell and Perl scripts
that automate remote system notification of file changes and unauthorized
processes executing on the monitored systems.
How-To Harden OpenBSD
(11/09/00)
is a completely new section on making the most secure, general
purpose operating system, more secure.
This section opens with an Introduction
to Hardening Concepts that begins with OpenBSD specific references but
is mostly applicable to all operating systems. There are then three
very OpenBSD specific pages that lead through the process of
installing an OpenBSD system,
hardening it, and
creating a recovery CD ROM. The recovery
CD ROM also contains programs deleted in the hardening process so that
they may be used when the CD ROM is in the drive and mounted but
are otherwise not available.
Hardening OpenBSD closes with a page that is not OpenBSD specific
Users, Groups and Security
but genrally applicable to UNIX. It's included here because
restricting file and directory access via user or security groups
is often considered part of the hardening process.
There are several links in Hardening OpenBSD to
password.pl, a Perl
password generator including the source code.
Security
(10/20/00)
in the Guide to Building an Association Web Site
explains what security is and gives some examples of really poor
security. Several specific exposures faced by web sites
are discussed with the emphasis on exposures unique to associations.
Some ways that an association's web site security needs are likely to
differ from other web sites are covered. The final large page,
Overview of Internet
Related Security Techniques is general and not specifically
related to associations. It explains the basic concepts of host
and network security, firewalls, proxies, network address
translation and intrusion detection systems. Some of the key
steps in hardening a computer into a bastion host for use as a
firewall or Internet server are described.
Reorganizing GeodSoft.com
(10/13/00)
discusses splitting the large "Making This Site" directory into
"Designing GeodSoft's Web Site" and
"Building GeodSoft's Web Site."
It also covers creating a new How-To section
from the existing Cascading Style Sheets section and the
Computer Time Synchronization page that had been in "Making This
Site." The mechanical details of splitting "Making This Site" into
to directories is discussed in
Splitting a Directory.
The Myth of Electronic Publishing
(10/12/00)
in the Guide to Building an Association Web Site
explains how the electronic publishing concept creates problems
in designing web sites. The top ten web sites are examined for
common design characteristics to show that they avoid print like
graphic design. Some of the key differences between the web and
print media are examined.
The Basics chapter (10/11/00)
of Guide to Building an Association Web Site provides a high level
overview of technology important to the web and also Internet technology
important to communicating with association members. Common terms
are defined. A speculative look into the
future is included as well as
a highly condensed history spread through several sections of the Basics
chapter.
Guide to Building an Association Web Site
(10/10/00)
I've begun putting up parts of my book titled Guide to Building an
Association Web Site that's been in progress for some time. The
Introduction describes the intended audience
and explains some of my biases and premises. My fundamental premise
is that a web site is a computer application system, even when its
primary purpose is information delivery. It defines what I mean by
web site design and touches on some of the characteristics that
differentiate an association web site from others.
The Stupidity of Windows NT
Installs, Backups and System Recovery (10/5/00)
Two days with the NT server down, despite the availability
of good backups and suitable hardware provoked this long discussion of the
problems recovering from a system failure with Windows NT unless identical
hardware is available or backup servers are pre built. The sheer stupidity
of Microsoft's forced multi step installs is also discussed.
Web Site Redesign (9/28/00)
Research on submitting web sites to search engines prompted additional
changes. This long page describes a redesign that optimized page design
for both search engine placement and display results, significantly
improved accessibility for the visually impaired and those few still
using text based browsers and emphasis of unique page content over
standard page components.
It's not visible to users, unless you view the source code but most of
the important pages on the site now have meta tags. In preparing for
search engines I wrote some scripts for analyzing word and phrase
distribution and for generating and fixing meta tags.
Site Redesign:
Between 9/12/00 and 9/18/00 I redesigned the site twice moving the standard
page components to the right side of the page. The effect is to make the
unique page content more immediately visible and keep it on the screen
in a greater variety of browser window sizes and proportions thus reducing
horizontal scrolling in small browser windows. Accessibility for the
visually impaired and those using text only browsers such as Lynx has
been significantly enhanced. Many pages have been successfully validated
at the W3.org HTML Validation Service
as well as achieving excellent ratings for HTML, browser compatibility, and download
times at both Web Site Garage and
Net Mechanic. I've started
work on a page describing the changes in detail.
OpenBSD Documentation Update (9/10/00)
After six weeks, a post in comp.unix.bsd.openbsd.misc prompted me to again
try to mount a floppy disk with no more success than I had previously.
Finally I asked how and quickly recieved two replies that provided the
piece I'd been missing.
More Microsoft Management Console
Problems Update (8/28/00)
One week later (the next time I needed it) MMC couldn't find the IIS
configuration data again. And once again on
9/07/00.
Terms of Use (8/27/00)
A new Unauthorized Use section has
been added. The original Terms of Use was entirely content oriented.
That section has not changed. This new section defines acceptable
and unacceptable methods of access and network behaviour that will be
regarded and treated as intrusion attempts.
Time Synchronization: A Beginner's
Guide to Network Time Protocol (NTP) (8/26/00)
Over the past few days I've found and installed ntpd on both my Unix
and Windows NT machines. Ntpd is an open source implementation of a
Network Time Protocol (NTP) server. It can synchronize all the
computer clocks on your network with a
network of public time servers to achieve an accuracy within a small
fraction of a second of the correct UTC (Coordinated Universal Time).
Client solutions are available for other platforms. Because of the
effort I had to go through to figure out the basic install information,
I wrote a tutorial that should help others set up NTP in much less time.
Numerous links to authoritative sources are included.
Incompatibilities With Non
Windows OSs (8/22/00)
Everyone who's worked with non Windows operating systems knows you need
to be careful about hardware selection to avoid hardware for which there
is no software device support. You might think that a keyboard, mouse, video
(KVM) sharing box that has no drivers and sits between the computer with
the OS and the controlled peripheral would be completely transparent to
the OS. Unfortunately, practical experience shows this not to be the
case.
Update to an Apache Problem
(8/22/00)
I think I understand what caused an Apache error message that appeared
after I re-installed Red Hat Linux 6.2.
More Microsoft Management Console
Problems (8/21/00)
Once again MMC has lost all the
Internet Information Server configuration data. A search of Microsoft's
web site found no information on this problem. I had to again reinstall
IIS to get access to the data. Fortunately no data was actually lost but
was just not available to MMC, IIS's management program.
Linux / UNIX / Open Source Beats Window
(8/7/00)
This is a big contrast to the problem I had recently mounting a floppy on an OpenBSD
system and where I never found the necessary documentation. Today I came across
a document that I wanted and it was only available as a Postscript print file
and I don't have a postscript printer. On my Linux system I quickly found
documentation for a utility that did a perfect conversion the first time
even though I'd never used this or any related utility.
Cascading Style Sheets
(7/30/00)
After more false starts on this section than I can remember, it's finally
up. The introductory page needed substantial rewriting to
accomodate the changes from print (for which it was first written with its
enclosed sample section) and browsers that I did not have when it was first
written. I wanted to keep some of the flavor of the
original test page
with the various techniques that were tried and abandoned as it was found
one browser or another would not display style sheet code in an expected manner.
Further, I wanted some record of the appearing and disappearing browser problems
(Netscape) as the test page was developed. As it was written it simply didn't
make sense if you hadn't seen the evolution. Then trying to wrap
the original test
a page, which had nothing to do with the GeodSoft.com standard page, inside
a standard page presented more issues. By far the simplest page was the
new page explaining the use of style sheets on
standard GeodSoft.com pages.
OpenBSD Documentation Problem
(7/28/00)
I searched man pages and the OpenBSD web site for an hour and
half or more, trying to figure out how to mount a floppy and never
found an answer. Open source projects must solve basic usability
issues if they hope to achieve mainstream acceptance.
Performance Surprise
(7/7/00)
I've just finished the first pass at the About
GeodSoft: Large Project section with the addition of a new page
describing how increasing loads caught me by surprise and forced an
unexpected server upgrade under the pressure of clearly declining
performance.
Electronic Document Sharing
(7/7/00)
A description of one of the larger ATLA NET projects I worked on
has been added to the About
GeodSoft: Large Project section.
Site Synchronization Script
(7/6/00)
I finally have a working (sort of) process for synchronizing new
and updated pages from the development to the public sites.
- What Was New: Jan. - Mar. 2007
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- What Was New: April - June 2000
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