Recent Blog Posts
Blogs ยป Archive for April 7th, 2004
Setting a Tripwire
Intrusion detection and change management are often associated with expensive enterprise systems out of reach of many individual and small businesses offering hosting and development services.
Another golden kernel from the open source community has been addressing this with a free Linux implementation of their enterprise solution. Tripwire has been a favorite for many due to its granular change management control over the filesystem. An rpm or source download is available from Tripwire’s open source site. Tripwire is best deployed immediately on a newly built server, however, once installed on any server you have set a benchmark going forward for system security.
The program monitors key attributes of files that should not change, including binary signature, size, and so on. Additionally, for files that are expected to change (log files, httpd.conf, etc.), the Tripwire configuration policy enables settings to watch elements that should not change, such as user, group, and permissions.
The configuration policy is available to be customized for your particular situation, and various levels of monitoring can be instituted for differing directories such as /etc, /usr, /root, and /var with special rules and adjustment to which elements of directories or files are being monitored.
Upon initial install and …
Mozilla Vision Thing
Via Mozillazine, a fascinating post by Brendan Eich, the father of Javascript and Mozilla’s chief architect. This is fiesty stuff. Brendan basically lays out his view of how things are might play out, over the next five years, in the “battle” to control the application development and deployment platform of the future, the two main sides being Microsoft + Longhorn + XAML vs. “Open Source” + Mozilla (Gecko) + XUL.
Mozilla are definately ahead of the field with XUL (see Introducing XUL) having something that “works” now. There’s still some hurdles to overcome though.
As a platform for deployment over the web, XUL still suffers from practical issues - a compromise between security concerns and ease of use has yet to be made and this is preventing, say, PHP coders from churning out XUL based apps the way we can churn out HTML. Neil Deakin summarizes these problems nicely here.
From a strategic angle, Mozilla is also in a grey zone between commerical software and Open Source, thanks to their Netscape / AOL past. It means they don’t have the money to force-feed everyone their technology on the one hand while on the other, are missing a strong following in Open Source circles, …
Sponsored Links
Logo Design, Web page Design and more!
- Custom logo designs created ‘just for you’.
- Pick the design you like best.
- Only pay if you’re satisfied with the result.
Download sample chapters of any of our popular books.
