Jason Simmons, Freelance it consultant

Linux “Get The Facts”

Posted on January 29, 2007
Filed Under IT & Business | Leave a Comment

Over the past 3 years Microsoft have been running a “Get the Facts” campaign against Linux. They have a number of videocasts with whizzy graphics and uptempo music, with customers explaining why they dropped Linux in favor of Windows 2003 Server.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/facts/default.mspx

Linux is not suitable for every environment, However that does not make it inferior to windows. It is important that you examine requirements in detail before deploying ANY operating system. I do have a concern about some of the benchmarks and apparently independent studies which are meant to show how Linux is actually an inferior product to windows. With facts and figures being displayed in this manner it is very easy NOT to include a key factor which has an impact on the figures read.

Microsoft have already had a poke in the eye from the UK Advertising Standards Authority regarding misleading details during this campaign.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3600724.stm

This Document makes very interesting reading if authentic, you decide

http://www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/9000/PX09695.pdf

As a response, the Linux advocates (Redhat in particular) have responded by also highlighting whizzy videocasts and whitepapers explaining how Linux is superior than Windows

http://www.redhat.com/truthhappens/

http://www.redhat.com/rhel/informationcenter/videos/customers/

So how do you choose ?

How do you choose the right operating system for your business? Well, before we answer that question let’s answer another question, that will help us answer the first one.

How will you choose your next car? Some people will buy exactly the same brand and model that they are currently driving, and maybe change the colour, the latest model might have a few new features but no real change. These people have a brand loyalty which is hard to break. Other’s will look at their needs and examine how they will use the car.

Do you get the picture……….. ?

Once you have determined your needs you might set yourself a budget. You then look around at what your money can buy. Choose carefully, you are spending a lot of money.

Would you now go out and buy a car solely on the information provided by the car manufacturer. No you are going to obtain information from magazines like WhatCar or Websites. You are going to get information from people you see in your supermarket car park who own cars on your shortlist. Ultimately you will take it for a test drive and SEE FOR YOURSELF what the car is like to live with against your list of needs.

Guess what buying Operating Systems is exactly the same process.You have to examine your business needs and forecast your future requirements. Determine your budget, you might setup a test environment to test your requirements list and seek your own information.

Can you imagine a world where you could buy any model car you wanted, as long as it was a Ford. Ford make great cars, but isn’t it great that we have a choice.

More reason’s to secure your LAN

Posted on January 27, 2007
Filed Under News | Leave a Comment

Security always comes at the expense of userabilty. It is a balancing act which changes according to the security threats that you are likely to face, and the ease of use/management.

HackerTake for example your Local Area Network. It is best practice to “shutdown” Ethernet ports when not in use, then to un-patch Ethernet ports which have not been used for a period of time. However it is seldom done due to the fact that it is a pain to suddenly make the port live when users require access. Most network admins want users to be able to just plug into the network without hindrance. Even worse, this same practice is also used on wireless networks (No WEP, WPA security). This allows network admins to sit at their workstations and enable access to network resources by enabling user accounts or changing group permissions.

Hopefully what I’m about to show you will encourage you to elevate your threat level and increase your security systems to combat a new type of threat. This threat increases the number of attacks to disrupt your network and in some case’s compromise your IT systems. It can accomplish all this without a username or password, or even a TCP/IP address, all it needs is a live network port or a open wireless
network.

It uses infrastructure protocols which are often overlooked. Most of the security attention tends to be on the higher level protocols which travel via routers and across the Internet. The infrastructure Layer 2
protocols (STP , DHCP,CDP,VTP,HSRP etc) although local are vital to the functioning of a network.

A software network analysis tool named after the bacteria which causes plague (“Yersinia pestis”)can cause everything which I have just described. It has been designed to be a penetration testing tool,however in the wrong hands it can be devastating.

http://www.yersinia.net/

There are defenses against these form of attacks, but it takes time and effort.

The best defenses are the physical ones. It does add more management time, but at least your network security will have increased.

Is DNS an Enterprise requirement ?

Posted on September 20, 2006
Filed Under General | Leave a Comment

I have just discovered something quite interesting. I have been using Fedora Linux for some time now and I like it quite a lot ( Not as much as Gentoo). However I’m looking for a stable “Enterprise” platform to base my OSS solutions on. I installed RedHat Enterprise 4 and install bind and the utils. I then noticed that the quite usefull GUI “system-config-bind” has not been installed.

Ok so this tool is not exactly brilliant, However it is extremely useful when quickly administering your DNS server. The only way I can get this tool on Redhat Enterprise is to build from source or find an RPM which someone has kindly built. I find this frankly shocking. An Enterprise operating system without GUI DNS management tools, but you do get GUI DNS tools with your hacker/hobby fedora OS. How does this make sense?.

http://inside.eweeklabs.com/Labs/jim-rapoza/69/

jsimmons.co.uk and SMTP forgery

Posted on April 27, 2006
Filed Under News | Leave a Comment

Evil Pirate

Currently my domain is being used (for same strange reason) to send mass spam email to innocent people. The downside is that my domain is the face for these activties. It’s quite a helpless feeling. I have either upset somebody , or my domain was chosen at random. There is nothing I can do about it. Either they will get bored and stop, or no servers will accept emails from my domain any more.

The case for RMX Records, SMTP Anti-forgery

Asterisk the Linux Telephone system

Posted on April 16, 2006
Filed Under IT Solutions | Leave a Comment

Asterisk is a Linux based telephone system which turns a server into a fully featured PBX, with voicemail, analogue and digital lines and
VOIP connectivity. It is not the only Open Source system available for Linux, However it does seem to be the most popular at the moment.

For the price of an average server and a small spend on on some telephony hardware, you can have a fully fledged phone system. In fact you don’t really need to buy any additional hardware, if you want to configure a pure VOIP system. The phone system is the software, and extremely configurable.

Typical Asterisk hardware

TDM400' The TDM400P enables you to connect to analouge phone lines or analouge handsets. The number of phone lines or handsets which the card supports is determined by the number of modules that you configure the card with. This card supports a maximum of four modules. This means you can alter the configuration by altering the number or type of module installed.

B410P The B410P BRI ISDN card enables the termination of upto 4 Basic Rate ISDN cards. The B410P is a half-length, full-height universal 3.3V and 5.OV 32-bit PCI 2.2 card supporting four BRI S/T interfaces. Each of the four ports of the B410P can be independently configured for TE or NT mode, with optional PWR400M module for supplying power to ISDN telephones. The B410P features on-board hardware echo cancellation performing 64ms or 512 taps per channel for each of the eight voice channels.

TDM2400P

The TDM2400P supports up to 6 analouge lines/analouge devices (FXO/FXS devices) . This works in a similar fashion to the TDM400. To alter the configuration of the card you can alter the number or type of modules installed on the card.

My installation

I’m going to descirbe an installation which I have completed for myself. It’s an installation which caters for my business and also my domestic communication requirements. I’m not going to describe how I installed the software and hardware, there are plenty of other well written installation instructions available on the internet. What I want to show here is how it can be used to provide a cost effective communications solution.

My installation

The Office

I have recently opened an office with a colleague of mine. One of the first tasks was to setup our phone system to support our internal phones, and also our helpdesk. So I setup a Compaq DL 360 server with a single TDM400P with 4 analogue lines and 10 DID numbers incoming over the internet. The dial plan is setup for the following features:

The home

At home I run a small linux based media centre system called MythTV. This sevrer is an entertainment system as well as dealing with my email. I have been looking for a way to handle the large amount of sales calls that have been cold calling. I then realised that I could use asterisk to manage anonymous calls and blacklist some of the callers that do use Caller ID. As a side effect, I now had a system to do least cost routing on outgoing calls, I could also route my work related calls over the internet to the asterisk server installed at my office.
In summary the dialplan configured allows the following features:

IAX protocol

Asterisk uses can Inter-Asterisk EXchange which is an alternative to the popular SIP and H323 protocols. IAX has been engineered to avoid some of the limitiations which the other protocols suffer. IAX can avoid the limitations caused by using Network Address Translation, and reduces the complexity of the installation to overcome limitations when using the other protocols. IAX can also trunk calls, or carry multiple calls within one stream. We are even starting to see a number of IP Hardphones which support the IAX protocol. Where possible , I would use IAX over any other protocol. For further information, read the following links:

IAX versus SIP
www.cornfed.com/iax.pdf

Conclusion

Asterisk is an extremely cost effective and feature rich solution. It is fairly easy to install however, the dialplan can take some time to complete depending on how complex your requirements are. From my experiences so far, I’m not sure whether asterisk scales that well if you have a high number of analogue handsets. This is due to the way the analogue hardware is designed. A more conventional phone system will have a higher density of handset connections , and may prove more cost effective. However if used with VOIP handsets and softphones, I’m sure asterisk can scale extremely well.

Links

asterisk.org/
asteriskguru.com/tutorials/

Firefox Community Adverts

Posted on April 14, 2006
Filed Under News | Leave a Comment

The Firefox browser has been experiencing a large increase in popularity. It’s a cross platform browser with a good feature-set. In my opinion it performs better than the established Internet explorer.

In true community spirit, the users of the browser are helping to spread the word about the browser. My contribution is to have a small button on my website.

My meagre contribution has been put to shame by a completion being held to create video adverts to increase awareness of Firefox. What a fantastic idea to get your end users to advertise your product for you. This underlines the true spirit of the driving force behind the browser.

However this is slightly tainted because of the fact that the videos are stored in Quicktime .mov files. This excludes Linux users where Quciktime playback is currently problematic.

Now can this be applied to a commercial product?

Best viewed on Windows or mac
http://www.firefoxflicks.com/

Microsoft opens port 25

Posted on April 14, 2006
Filed Under News | Leave a Comment

Microsoft have launched a new site for the discussion of open source technologies and Microsoft technologies. Microsoft apparently has an extensive lab where Open Source tools are tested, Linux playing a major part. This website will be a forum for discussion of it’s findings. On the face of this seems fairly benevolent, discussion can only be a good thing

However Microsoft have a extreme commercial interest in seeing the deployment of it’s own products over the deployment of Linux for example. This makes me slightly skeptical as to how objective some of these articles can be. Microsoft have even coined a new phrase “Coopetitition”. Keep an eye on the site, it might actually prove interesting.

http://port25.technet.com/

SAP dismisses open source innovation

Posted on November 11, 2005
Filed Under News, Open Source | Leave a Comment

Apparently Shai Agassi,the president of SAP has made a rather surprising remark during an address to a business conference. He states that Open Source (In particular Linux) is not innovative enough. He adds that

“Intellectual property [IP] socialism is the worst that can happen to any IP-based society, And we are an IP-based society. If there is no way to protect IP, there is no reason to invest in IP”

These statements are surprising because I had the opinion that SAP had a rather positive view of Open Source. It has collaborated with Mysql to help mature Mysql’s enterprise offerings.MySQL gets access to SAP database technology . SAP have also invested in Zend, the PHP company SAP & Zend. I also was surprised when SAP showed great interest in the article I wrote for PHP architect on how to Integrate SAP with PHP

I disagree with what he stated. Intellectual property socialism has launched a global innovation which the whole globe is taking advantage of, the Internet. Imagine if Vint cerf had “protected” his IP and licensed the use of TCP/IP. Or you had to pay Tim Berners Lee a license fee every time you wrote your shopping list in HTML. SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and all the other enterprise players would not be in the position to commercialy exploit something which was created out of the very thing he is deriding.

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2145809/sap-dismisses-open-source?page=2

Integrate Linux with Active Directory

Posted on November 11, 2005
Filed Under IT Solutions | Leave a Comment

While attending a Linux Expo in London, I came across a company named centrify which create integration tools to allow Linux users to be integrated with Microsoft Active Directory. I have used any of these products, so I’m not sure how effective they are. However this is an imporant find which will ease the management of Linux servers.

Most business systems will have Active directory delployed in some form within the infrastructure. Therefore this is a could find to help minimise system managment costs
http://www.centrify.com/directcontrol/overview.asp

An example of unapplied Information Technology

Posted on October 10, 2005
Filed Under News | Leave a Comment

While doing some research into how I can get Linux to autoplay a DVD, I came across a rather worring article on Zdnet. The article explains that Dell is currently being sued by InterVideo because they have been supplying software that allows users to play DVD’s automatically on insertion

It appears that this simple operation can only be provided by InterVideo due to a patent that they have on this simple operation. If you have read some of my thoughts on how Information Technology should be applied, you will note that I have stong opinions on how Information Technology is being exploited. This is another example of the misplaced focus. I could understand if they were protecting investment in a complex video codec, but this is not the case.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1040_22-5833838.html

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