The six minute firewall from Secure Computing

As enterprises depend more on Internet-based applications, it becomes harder to defend your network against blended exploits and attacks that target your specific applications. You need something like this product which is more than a standard firewall that typically relies on intrusion prevention and signature based defenses. Secure Firewall is a network and application security device with numerous protective features built-in that are especially useful for protecting your critical applications and data. Secure Firewall has a great track record in the industry when it comes to emergency security patches and CERT advisories, and comes with solid reporting and analysis features as well as the ability to create rules to defend Web applications.We tested version 70007 on a small network in October 2008. Pros: • Combines inbound and outbound network & application protection for both known and unknown attack vectors• Simple configuration of the TrustedSource global intelligence, and Geo-Location provide unique protections to reduce your organizations exposure to attack• SSL & SSH inspection (decryption and filtering) protects against these holes in most deep inspection firewalls today • Rules can be customized for particular defenses and very granular controls over applicationsCons: • Uses a variety of management tools, some Windows-based, some browser-based• Setting up different administrative roles is fairly complexInfo: www.securecomputing.com 55 Almaden Boulevard, Suite 500, San Jose, CA 95113Product category: Email security appliancePricing: Least expensive unit $1,900 up to $70,000 for the largest networks

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My favorite networking horror stories (Baseline Mag.)

Over the years, I’ve witnessed some very strange network operations. Maybe it just comes with the territory, or maybe it’s just knowing so many hard-working IT managers who have some great stories to tell.

One of the early tales was of a Novell file server that went offline frequently in Norfolk, Va. I flew there with a couple of experts from Network General, back when they owned the Sniffer. We instrumented all sorts of things and captured traces galore. To find out what happened, you’ll have to read the column I wrote for Baseline Magazine here.

Networking horror stories (Baseline Mag.)

We all have stories about our worst network-management nightmares. I’m going to share a few choice ones to show you that, sometimes, you should expect the unexpected. Very fitting, given that today is Halloween. You can read the story in Baseline Magazine here.

Rocking the vote (Infoworld column)

You probably have heard that we are having an election here next week by now. I’ll just point you to a few things:

• My column in Infoworld this week about my take on the election, and what if we could pick our IT managers that were most akin to the particular candidates
• Second is a short video clip that someone sent me that talks about my role in the election. I don’t know how MoveOn could make these customized videos, but they are very amusing. 
• Here is another example of the customized video with my name inserted at various places. You have to watch the entire clip, it is very clever. 

Tales of the neighborhood nerd

When I was going to high school, somewhere back near the invention of electricity, being a nerd was more of a pejorative than positive. This was before movies glamorized us wearing taped-up glasses and calculators on our belt loops. Now lots of people wear their cell phones there, and we have reality shows that pair up nerds with beauty queens (I guess I was born in the wrong century). And Gates is conquering world diseases with all the dough he has collected from us, just to make it clear who has really won. Being a nerd means that I am often the go-to guy when something computerish breaks around here. Sometimes that responsibility is hard to bear, especially when word gets out around the neighborhood. 

In one town where lived for many years, it was fun to solve computer problems at first. This was back in the 1990s, when people were just getting started with broadband Internet.  Soon it seemed that everyone had a problem, and I was glad when I moved to the Midwest that I didn’t have to play the neighborhood support tech and could live in relative obscurity. 

But then I have truly passed the nerdship mantle on to my children, and it is interesting to see how the younger generation has stepped up to the plate and taken over as the new front line of support. 

Both my stepson and my daughter have risen to the challenge, each in their own way. My stepson Jeremy has been supporting a friend of his whom we’ll call Pete. Pete never really had a PC before and Jeremy helped guide him to upgrade an old computer lurking around his basement. He patiently spent hours on the phone talking him through some issues, helping him get a DSL connection once Pete realized that dial-up wasn’t going to cut it, and then through at least three re-installs of Windows because of the various spyware and other garbage that Pete managed to collect in his surfing of questionable Web sites to build up a substantial image and video collection, if you get my drift. Pete and Jeremy both don’t like going to movie theaters and have managed to download many DVDs, most of them of questionable provenance. They can find just about any video online, showing me how useless DRM is. But that will be for another column. 

Jeremy is a natural PC support technician because he does telesales and has to listen to people complain and ask stupid questions – my hat is off to him, believe me I wouldn’t last more than ten minutes listening to some of his callers. To help Pete out, he installed VNC to do remote diagnosis and control because he lives about 30 miles away. Then last week Pete called in a panic. He thought that Jeremy had connected to his PC and was wondering what was going on. Jeremy wasn’t online, but he quickly dialed into Pete’s PC and saw that someone else had found the open VNC port. Naturally, Pete didn’t have a password to protect the connection, and was using the default ports of 5800/5900. The hacker was opening command windows, installing all sorts of spyware, and generally having a good time with Pete’s wide-open machine. Pete had installed anti-virus and a firewall, but because he had re-installed XP so many times he had blown through his allowed licenses. 

Of course, he was about to re-install XP for another time, once he disconnected from the Internet and could take control of his machine again. Perhaps now Pete has learned his lesson, although I think another re-install is in his near future.  

My daughter Maia is also called upon from her college friends to help with their computer problems, and sadly had her own disaster this week with a hard drive that went south, without any backups. She is more of a Mac person because of her dedication to iPods and her own extensive collection of audio downloads. She even taught me a few things, such as the $15 iGadget tool that will allow you to copy music back to your Mac from your iPod.  Maia, like Jeremy, is also adept at using the Web to find stuff, and was the first in the family to do video Skype chats. I think she was responsible for converting about a dozen of her friends to Macs.  

One of the reasons that I did tech support for the ‘hood was that I always learned something out of the encounters. When you poke around someone’s computer, you get to see a lot of interesting stuff, sometimes things that you would rather not know about your neighbors. (Oh, the stories I could tell!) I even wrote a book about how to survive your home network (now hopelessly outdated, otherwise you know I would link to Amazon and nag you into buying a copy). So it is nice to see both kids learning new things from their experiences, and becoming the good kind of nerds. 

Whether they will have their own reality TV shows remains to be seen. But at least they are now doing backups and running firewalls.

Infoworld: Apple ships sub-$500 notebook PC!

Things are good at Apple. iPods and iPhones are selling at something on the order of 100,000 units a day, they have new laptops that are less pricey but still sexy looking, and even Chairman Steve was on the analysts’ call this week for the first time in several years.  

But one thing Jobs said really stuck in my craw. “We don’t know how to build a sub-$500 computer that is not a piece of junk and our DNA will not allow us to ship that.” Excuse me? I guess the sub-$500 computer that I purchased doesn’t count, namely, the iPhone. 

You can read the rest of my column on Infoworld here.

More Gmail Contacts annoyances

So I have either 6556 or 9788 contacts in my Gmail contacts address book. Why the difference? It has to do with the way the contacts are displayed, I kid you not.

I have tried to get an answer from Google. They sent me to this blog post, which unfortunately doesn’t really explain what I am observing. Yes, the new UI will no longer populate your “suggested contacts” list with people that you reply to. 

Google updated its interface for Gmail substantially last year, and since then the new UI just doesn’t work for me: it takes forever to load, crashes my browser frequently, and also has a big bug that for the life of me I don’t understand why it isn’t fixed: if you have more than 20 or so groups of contacts (I have about 50, I use this feature a lot), you can only display the first 20 in the new UI. Google could easily fix this by adding a scroll bar to the groups listing when you want to add someone to a particular group. Right now, you can’t scroll down past the first 20 group names.

Here are screenshots showing you before (below) and after the new UI is turned on (at left), and the relevant numbers of contacts displayed.

I asked Google to explain this. Still waiting a response.

How not to steal a laptop

I have had my own laptop stolen just once, from the trunk of a locked car parked in a shopping mall, several years ago. I was putting some packages that I purchased in the trunk, and I guess someone decided to remove not only my purchases but my laptop as well. There are some happier laptop stories, and this one is just so funny, I had to share with you. 

Those of you that aren’t Mac users, by way of introduction all of their laptops come with built-in cameras and software that allows you to take pictures of yourself, or anyone else sitting in front of the thing, called PhotoBooth. Earlier this summer, a Michigan-based headhunter by the name of Damian Zikakis had his laptop stolen when someone broke into his offices. He replaced it a few days later and because he had used Mozy’s online backup service, thought that he was covered at least in terms of being able to bring back his files from the Internet backup. This took some time to recreate all of his files. 

When Zikakis had a moment to examine the layout of his new machine, he “found several incriminating files. The individuals who had my computer did not realize that the Mozy client was installed and running in the background. They had also used PhotoBooth to take pictures of themselves and had downloaded a cell phone bill that had their name on it.” Zikakis did a bit of head hunting on his own and contacted the appropriate police department with this information. They were able to recover his computer, and now have the task of figuring out who actually took the laptop originally and what law enforcement options to pursue.

This is similar to another case reported earlier this year when built-in Mac remote desktop software was used to recover another laptop from a thief who happened to boot the machine up and not notice that he was automatically connected via an IM session.

Note to potential thieves: wipe your stolen laptop’s disk before use. 

And for those of you that want to do something more, there are a variety of software tools for both Mac and Windows that can aid in the recovery of a stolen laptop, here are the ones that I know about:

• Oribicule’s Undercover for Macs
• MyLaptopGPS just for Windows
• Computrace LoJack for Laptops has versions for both Mac and Windows
• Adeona is a free open source product for both Mac and Windows

Infoworld: Four ways to cut data center operating costs

With the markets in a tizzy this week, I have my own calming strategy for you. Start to think about ways that you can cut the cost of your own data center operations. Here are four suggestions, if you can find time in between looking up the values of your dwindling stock portfolio.

You can read my column in this week’s Infoworld here. 

Fundraising on the Internet

You would think that in this day and age of online everywhere and social media all the time, using the Internet to help raise funds for charities would be a big business. Nevertheless, it still is in its infancy, and while there are a number of applications that can help ordinary people collect money for various causes, none are close to being anywhere as good as they should be. And none of these tools can compare with a well-maintained email list for ease of use and to actually deliver results.

I should know: for the past several years, I do an annual bike or walking charity event where I raise several thousand dollars. Some of you have graciously donated regularly, year after year.  Some of you have turned into becoming your own fundraisers, and I gladly support your efforts so in effect we are just passing back and forth a donation. And one of my side efforts is the site accidentalfundraiser.com, where I do podcasts with Carol Weisman, a professional speaker who consults to non-profits on fundraising, among other things. 

So here is a brief lay of the Internet fundraising landscape. I welcome your comments; please post to my Strominator blog if you don’t mind, so that others can see them. 

First off you may not know what cause to support. You can start with change.org, which will search more than a million non-profits, or at least so they say on their site. Another site, Idealist.org, has volunteer opportunities, internships, and other programs that you can search too. 

Once you find a cause, you want to start to build your network. There are a number of tools to do this, such as fundable.com and chipin.com. You type in some details, what your goal is and when you need it by, and they will collect funds and send to your PayPal account. 

What you really need at this point is a list of email addresses of potential marks, I mean, donors. All of these tools can take just a plain text list, or if you want to get fancy and personalize with the names you can create a CSV file that matches their format. 

In some cases, your charity may have already made arrangements and set up their own backoffice software donation system. This is the route that the majority of events that I have been part of, such as the Komen and Avon walkathons and the MS and JDRF bikeathons. The two bigger vendors in this space are: Kintera (which is owned by BlackBaud, a vendor with a lot of other donation management products that are used by professional fundraisers) and Convio. The latter is the better of the two tools, but both are cumbersome to import your address list and manage the emails that you send out and replies that you get. And once you get your donors imported in one system, you can’t easily extract this information if you have to use another one for another cause. 

I use a combination of an email list with an Excel spreadsheet that tracks the donations. It is easy to see who has donated when, and while it takes some work to maintain, it is quickly portable from one event to another. 

Now you might ask what about social networks? If you search Facebook for the keywords charity, donation, or social cause, you will find hundreds of apps that can be used for this purpose. Most just have a few members, which doesn’t inspire confidence. The two most well known are Facebook Causes and MySpace Impact. Both are more akin to portals that connect you to various causes and non-profits. If you are a big user of either network, you can start here and see where they take you. 

Outside of these efforts, there are others that are rather offbeat, such as Save the Earth, with 35,000 members. They donate money to save rainforests for everyone that installs and plays their game. Another is SocialVibe.com, which allows users of various social networks to put a “badge” on their profile pages, where they can be sponsors and collect points that go towards charitable efforts. The more profile views you have, the more money gets donated to the charity of your choice. This summer they donated $100,000 to various causes. And a company called DankApps.com has developed several social cause apps for Facebook. These apps donate two cents for every new member that installs their app, along with a revenue sharing agreement to support charities to prevent child abuse and other causes. Another idea is care2.com, with close to 10 million members on its own social network and where you click on various causes to donate. 

You would think the social networks are an ideal place to raise money. After all, you have developed a nice network of your 5,000 closest “friends” and why not start here soliciting donations from them? While the social networks should be all over this, the hard reality is it is still difficult to develop applications and harder still to manage your contacts, replies and donations. The net result is that most social network apps are clunky and hard to use, and this negates any of their potential viral effects.  

What I have found is that the events that I participate in have their own viral nature: people hear about what you are doing and want to do more than just send you a check, so they get involved in an event in their town. Or they get drafted into joining a team, which has its own secondary effect. If you already support various charities, you are drawn to these efforts because a) you were already giving something anyway and b) you might as well support your friends and causes that you have some personal connection to. 

What about some other efforts? I have been part of Kiva.org, which collects your money and uses it to make microloans to various people around the world. The money is gradually repaid, and then you can loan it out again, a sort of miniature version of Freddie Mac (well, maybe that isn’t the best example, but you get the idea). You pick the project to loan to, and you can track their progress in terms of raising what they need and the repayments. 

Then there is trusera.com, run by friends of friends of mine, where you post videos supporting various charitable efforts and plus3network.com, where you can claim sponsors per mile of various personal athletic efforts to raise money for charities. 

I have just hit the highlights here. Some other good suggestions for tools can be found here.

Good luck with your own social causes, and you’ll be hearing from me next spring when I start up my fundraising effort for 2009.