Recent Blog Posts
Blogs ยป Archive for May 8th, 2004
W3C Validator Update
The W3C Markup Validator is a powerful tool for checking that your XHTML or HTML is free of errors. Unfortunately, it suffers from extremely unfriendly error messages which can make it hard for newcomers to validation to understand the problems with their markup. The team behind the validator released a brand new version yesterday which incorporates a number of improvements that have previously been trialled in beta releases (changelog here).
The most useful feature of the validator, at least for new users, is “verbose mode”, which adds detailed human-readable explanations to every validation error. Unfortunately, verbose mode is not enabled by default and must instead be enabled using the Advanced Interface. Personally I would like to see this option available from the main page as it dramatically increases the usability of the validation results.
Sasser Worm Author Confesses
BBC: “An 18-year-old German high school student has admitted creating the Sasser internet worm, police say.”
Analysts also warn that the worm will never disappear, as it doesn’t have a time limit to its operation and due to the way it distributes itself.
Attacks of this nature are always damaging to Microsoft and .NET developers looking to see Windows used more predominately in the server market.
The future however, looks slightly brighter. XP Service Pack 2, which includes changes to core architecture within Windows (the way in which RPC is handled, and memory management) is in a free technical preview, and with its simplified and co-ordinated new Windows Update service, it is hoped such attacks will become much harder.
Configure Firewalls with a GUI
I happened across this product a few days ago and have been evaluating it as a potential time-saver and also to streamline firewalls across multiple servers.
Firewall Builder is a front end for configuring several firewalls, including iptables, ipfilter, OpenBSD PF, and Cisco PIX.
It is critical that anyone moving to a GUI for firewall configuration first understand how to work with these firewalls from the command line and their native config files to insure proper configuration, however, that said, fwbuilder can save time and help you manage your firewall, as well as managing rules across different firewalls under your administration.
It does this by using a central database for your firewall rules, then enabling you to submit rules across differing firewall programs on differing platforms.
fwbuilder can be run on numerous platforms, including Linux, Unix, Solaris and Mac OS X (using Fink). There are rpms for Red Hat and SUSE and of course source installs across all supported platforms.
As a related side-note, Telconi Terminal offers graphical Cisco device configuration to Linux, Mac OS X, Unix and Windows systems. Telconi Terminal is currently a tech preview, so it is not necessarily going to be open source and very …
