IT Connection - Technology Blog

I don’t update this blog for a very long time. I started it in a very different time for me, I had other interests and even with a small amount of time to write, I created some few nice articles here.

Back then, there was no social media, the online space was not enough to more then some photos and few files and I had the dream to be know by writing a blog (without the time to do so).

Now I have a totally different life, but I still love technology and work with it daily. But I have no interest on writing a blog. My time now is for taking care of my health, do my job, be with my girl and my kid.

If you are reading this, thanks for passing by. The articles will remain here, 2 or 3 of them are still applicable today, but I will not update or change anything. If you want to leave a comment, i’m still reading them and replying in private.

See ya!

MailScanner is one of the best antispam tools out there. It works integrated with spamassassin and can really protect you mail with a very small rate of false positives.

The newest version was announced today in the mailing list and it introduces some bug fixes and new features and other improvements.

Together with MailWatch you can have a very nice and professional tool to fight spam and keep your mail under control.

Dansguardian is a great content filter with virus scanning capabilities and much more.

The newest version (2.9.8.2) is available and has the following improvements:

- Solved WebDAV problem on Outlook Web Access;
- Fixes for error messages and config files;
- Handle single dots on the end of domain names;
- Fix for a bug in the phrase filtering;
- Added more info to error messages when connecting to proxies.

I´m using this version in production and it is very reliable. Virus scanning is working like a charm and is a very good option for web content filtering in general.

If you have a small network at home this software can be really nice to protect your family and your kids from bad things on the Web.

The first rumor of Apple iPhone I remember was more then a year ago. Since then, many other came to the news.

None of them actually had a confirmation, picture or anything to prove the existence of the gadget. The closest was on the patents filled by apple, mainly one that created a rumor of the Full Screen Video iPod with a “touchscreen” click wheel.

More then two years since the project begun and no one had an accurate view of it. Congratulations Jobs, it is hard to keep secrets like that.

I don´t agree with all of apple´s actions but this is a very good case of security policy and strong information classification.

Articles:
Does secrecy hurt Apple?
How Apple kept its iPhone secrets
Apple tries to keep its secrets
Why Is Apple so Secretive?
Be Thankful for Apple Secrecy
WSJ: At Apple, Secrecy Complicates Life But Maintains Buzz

I described a BUG in samba when updating the port on FreeBSD.

This BUG is solved with the new release o Samba (3.0.23d).

Using a testing machine I updated the port using portsnap to fetch the updated ports collection and portupgrade to update the packages.

This new release addresses a lot of bugs and solves some potential seg foults, witch means that you must consider an upgrade on your systems.

(IN)SECURE Magazine is a freely available digital security magazine discussing some of the hottest information security topics.

This free security magazine is becoming better every issue.

This month brings you:

* Effectiveness of security by admonition: a case study of security warnings in a web browser setting
* Interview with Kurt Sauer, CSO at Skype
* Web 2.0 defense with AJAX fingerprinting and filtering
* Hack In The Box Security Conference 2006
* Where iSCSI fits in enterprise storage networking
* Recovering user passwords from cached domain records
* Do portable storage solutions compromise business security?
* Enterprise data security - a case study
* Creating business through virtual trust: how to gain and sustain a competitive advantage using information security

Read more …

Tux is a free (as in beer) magazine for the Linux community. It always brings nice topics that worth reading.

This month issue brings topics about games, Linux edutainment (education software) , desktop customization for Christmas season and a lot more.

To download, go to their website and subscribe.

This month article I payed more attention was about a game called Planeshift, a MMORPG game.

It looks a very promising game, with cool graphics and gameplay. Looks very enjoyable.

Free Software Magazine is the free online magazine about free software. It is free to subscribe, free to download and free to read online.

You can get all issues on their website.

The Issue 15 brings brigs very nice topics, but I will highlight 2 of them:

- Hibernate function on Linux:
Explains how to enable “swsusp” and “suspend2″. Hibernate in Linux is something that have never worked for me, but this article is good to show some new functions and features and how to make it all work.

- Secure E-mail Servers with FreeBSD 6:
This article shows how to build a secure mail server using FreeBSD and Postfix. It is very handful and gives a lot on information on how to integrate postfix with mysql, amavis, spamassassin and how to configure secure authentication using SSL/TLS.

Thanks for one more great issue of the magazine.

Last week I installed a new FreeBSD machine to use as an authenticated proxy using squid and samba.

It was a fresh install, so I installed a basic system and then used the ports system to install squid (2.6.3) and samba 2.0.23c.

This setup is easy and very well documented in the official documentation of the softwares. After configuring samba and squid to authenticate using NTLM I put the system to work in a test environment. All tests were successfull, so I put the system to work in a production environment.

After 5 minutes in production, with lots of connections being made, I get tons of the following error in syslog:
“winbindd: Exceeding 200 client connections, no idle connection found”

I had another box using FreeBSD 6.1 and samba 3.0.21 without problems, so I rolled back the production environment to this box to have time to downgrade the new box to also use samba 3.0.21. Just uninstall the current problematic samba and all dependencies using “pkg_delete” and then execute a “pkg_add -r samba3″. Your current configuration will not be deleted and the system will work as expected.

This bug is documented here and there is no solution yet. The problem is not exclusive to FreeBSD, as there are repports of Linux boxes with the same problem.

Don’t upgrade your samba port until the bug is patched. Follow the samba bug tracking system and fill it with new information that can help the developers.

Digg This !!!

Dansguardian is a very nice opensource web content filter with advanced features.

The most intresting features are:

- Support for traditional URL blacklists;
Content filter based on words, phrases and regular expressions;
Support for NTLM (windows) based authentication;
Custom block pages;
Support for group based filtering;
Filter for mime types, file types and extensions;
Support for virus scanning;
Ability to switch off filtering for specified sites, parts of sites, browser IPs and usernames.

The full feature list can be found here. The new version (in beta stage) has much more features.

The software is opensource, but it has a commercial download licence. It is free for non commercial use, but you can buy a licence for commercial installations. The price is very nice and you pay only one licence for the major version (all revisions of version 2 for example).

If you need a fast, secure and flexible web content filter, go for dansguardian. It has most features from major vendors and is very easy to setup.

If you want a good commercial url black list, go for URLBlacklist. They have nice support and price (only $70 per year for one download per month).

If you use FreeBSD, the new development version is availabe on /usr/ports/www/dansguardian-devel. Note that you need to download the source file to /usr/ports/distfiles before building the package.