July 2003 Archives

This week both Cisco and Microsoft announced what amount to network crippling vunerabilities, and the availability of fixes for them. You should have reviewed all your Cisco devices running IOS to apply a workaround or to update the IOS image on your routers, switches and other Cisco gear. If you have an outside vendor who is responsible for performing this work, you should contact them to make sure your network has been protected.

Most Windows machines have a feature called "Automatic Update", which shows a little globe icon by the clock on your desktop when your machine needs updates. This week the globe was there a lot.

If you're still running impending demise of 98.)

The vendors have released the fix, and both of them have home page links to articles and information about the issues. I have written about this before, and I will again.

You've been warned.

The Cisco advisory, can be found at thier web site, and has been updated several times.

The Microsoft Advisory has been updated at the security site, and the original advisory can be found from the update page.

I noticed that Microsoft thanks LSD, the security professionals who informed them of the issue and helped to develop the fix.

(Note on Aug 4: Since I wrote this Microsoft has sent two different mailings to me urging me to apply this update. I think they are trying really hard to get the word out. Maybe there's a message in this fact.)

So I finally got around to an install of RH9. There was a glitch at the end of the first disk and the install died. When I rebooted, I had enough of an install complete that it booted and most services started. I had half a mind to see what would happen if I launched KDE.

Fortunately it was the half that doesn't stay focused on one thing for long, and I rebooted to the installation.

The install started again, but once I made all the basic selections (keyboard, mouse, time zone, etc) and the package selection (um, just upgrade whatever you recognize and leave the rest alone) I was able to upgrade the only redhat installation left on my hard disk, the one that just failed.

And it worked. The install skipped to where it died, installed the rest of the RPMS and everything came back fine.

Except Apache. Sometime between 7.2 and 9 RedHat updated the world's most popular web server from 1.3.27 to 2.0.40 and that played hell with the mod_perl application I am working on here. I got Apache upgraded and running and then it turns out my handler needs upgrading too.

For most users this shouldn't present as much of and issue as I think relatively few people write thier own mod_perl handlers. And those that do are probably more aware of these kinds of changes than I was.

Dude! (If you're reference impaired, that's from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, an early effort of Keanu Reeves.)

I know most of my family would never be as rude as they are in email if they only knew what they were doing and how it is perceived. My father, for instance, seems incapable of only placing one address in the To: field of an email. Maybe he feels like they get lonely there and they need some company, so he adds some other addresses for good measure. I've often wondered how to mention this to him.

On-line Netiquette Uncensored by Judith C Kalios is a web site that gives me a tool to send to people who are netiquette impaired or otherwise oblivious normative standards of on-line Courtesies described on the site.

To be fair to my family, there are Courtesies described here that clients forget too. I laugh to get a message with a signature of 6 or seven lines of additional information. I wonder when they include a fax number and omit the web site URL. And less you think that I believe myself perfect:

Dear Aaron,

I will never send an informal note again. I had no idea the inferences you may have drawn from my gross misspelling, and I will always open and close the notes properly from now on.

Thanks,
John

I was looking for something totally different when I tripped across RFC 1025. I think the words bake off in the summary caught my interest. As I read this memo, it occured to me that some understanding of the technology that is the Internet is required to understand the culture of the Internet and to a lesser degree culture as a whole today.

The languages or protocols our computers all speak or support, were developed by groups of people and are the result of compromise and improvement over a series of years. This memo describes the technical framework which was used in the early days of network protocol development, and provides an insight into the culture that has emerged surrounding the Internet.