January 2005 Archives

Is it possible that the sheer lack of reviews out there means that no one is using these devices or does it simply mean that no one that has implemented one has had the time to review it? I am looking into installing a virus, spam and spyware scanning gateway for a number of clients on our network. I have looked into products by SonicWall, TrendMicro, Symantec and McAfee, but am having trouble finding reviews on any of the products. It is great to see the claim that they can do all of these things and more (firewalling, nat, vpn, etc), but I want to know how effective their products are. In the process of researching the different devices offered by all of these companies, I have come across SafeSquid. It is a proxy based upon Squid that also has the advertised ability to scan for viruses. Through a bit of research, though, I was unable to find whether it would also help with detecting spyware. In my opinion and based upon experience, I'm seeing spyware as just as great or greater of a problem than viruses. (Perhaps because anti-virus software seems to be fairly mature whereas anti-spyware software really has a lot of difficult obstacles to overcome before it reaches the quality or reliability of anti-virus software.) If I am filtering viruses at the point of origin for the network, it would be no better than what I currently have (nothing other than the firewall) if everyone were to become overrun with spyware. My buddy Jeff and I spent four hours at a customer's home back in October "fixing" a computer completely bombed with spyware. If we could reduce the number of calls people make regarding problems with their computers (which will inevitably happen with the expansion of our residential service), we would alleviate a large future headache that I am very concerned about.
Given my intention to find a device that will help me protect 40-75 customers at < 6 mbps (all future, not current), I think it would be intelligent to see what other people are using and learn from their experience instead of being the one to conquer the world. I have neither the time nor energy to be a leader in this area, as there are plenty of other issues I want to deal with at this point (like getting towers up and running and increasing bandwidth availability to my customers).
So, if anyone out there has had experience with any of the above listed companies/devices, please drop me a line. I would love to hear from you (yeah - the two of you who look at this website once a year). In the mean time, I am working on finding vendors who would be willing to let me try their products to see if they even work the way they claim they should. Wouldn't that be ducky?

...need I continue. Anywhere Technology has a good number of new projects on the horizon that I'm hoping to document with this weblog. One of my last projects was to get bacula up and running to finally take care of those nagging late night rememberings that I forgot to run my weekly backups. I had intended to document that project but found so many resources on the web that described how to install and configure bacula that I gave up trying to document it. One word to any aspiring administrators: never forget to document what you have done to create or install a new process that you depend on. What I have fooled myself into thinking (more times than I can count) is that if the documents exist now, they will exist when I need them again. The problem is that every new server/daemon I have put into service is tweaked to fit the needs of the system on which I am installing it. The fact is that if you are good enough and are capable of following directions (obscure as they may be), it is likely that you won't have to go back to do any work on what you implemented for some time. By the time your return to your project for maintenance or major upgrades, you have forgotten much of what makes your installation work for you. So, one of my new New Year's resolutions is to actually document what I do.
With the growth in the ISP portion of Anywhere Technology, I have a number of very difficult decisions to make. Now I better understand many of the difficult choices my Dad had to make all the years nurturing the business at Tankcraft. While it is relatively easy or straightforward to run a small business, the difficulty is twofold. One, if you are small, it is difficult to make things work financially - to support the ongoing costs of doing business and try to cut a paycheck for yourself. Two, if the opportunity presents itself to grow the business, you have the tough choice to give less attention to your current customers and go after new ones. In my situation, it seems like the timing is good to go after new territory because current customers are relatively quiet. I won't forget what my Dad told me early on that it is easy to get new customers, but it is difficult to keep them. That phrase rings loud in my head when I contemplate moving ahead. Once the decision is made, we find ourself with yet more decisions. See the routine? Decisons, decisions, decisions...
What does the future hold? Right now I am working on our new tower design. I am trying to decide whether to dump my current manufacturer, Trango and go with Motorola's Canopy system. I'm not totally unhappy with Trango, but there are nagging issues of which I don't see any move towards resolution (ahem - fixing the SNMP monitoring of bandwidth usage on the M900S SU's that we were told would come some months ago - to name one). I also like the outlook that Motorola paints for its Canopy product. I've been burned by Moto before (not directly), but I think that they have resolved some of their management issues that created the problems in the past. Hopefully I will hear from some current Canopy users tomorrow or at least by Thursday to help make my decision.
Hopefully I'll have time to talk more about my experiences with my current equipment... In the mean time, I'll go to bed so I can get some more work done tomorrow.

I like my army of Macs. No doubt about it, otherwise I wouldn't have spent the money on them. Alas, I found another issue that I find completely and utterly counter-intuitive. You set the default email client for your login account via the Mail preferences.

C'mon - this is ridiculous. This is the same issue I brought up regarding setting the default browser. You have to go to the Preferences of the applications that Apple builds in for that purpose. Jaguar/10.2 used to have an item in the System Preferences application that allowed you to set this as an Internet related preference. Why they changed this in Panther is beyond me. Well, again, for those of you searching on how to do this, here it is: Open Mail, open Preferences through the Mail menu and change the Default Email Reader to whatever you please.

Goodness... That took forever, but it's good to see mt-blacklist working again.

BTW, this wasn't Jay's fault - I haven't had time to upgrade the backend of stevenfettig.com and disabled comments in the mean-time - kinda'. They weren't technically disabled. They simply weren't working correctly.

I haven't posted for ages, but with all the word traveling around the streets about the new iPod Shuffle and the Mac Mini, I figured I would put in my 2 cents.
1) iPod Shuffle: you are a really cheap, easy-as-can-be-to-use device that will store up to a gig of data and will play some of my music in iTunes to boot. One thing others seem so quick to miss is the fact that those of us with an iPod already who want something a bit smaller and for quick trips, this is the cheapest way to get a second iPod. Any other iPod users who are going to consider this?
2) Mac mini: thank you for a machine that I can use as a true test station without blowing another 1k. Plus, you will be so much easier to convince people to try. I know of only one person (who already has a computer) who doesn't have an extra keyboard, mouse and monitor hanging around.
As long as Apple is still making the bucks on the margin, then I see the two as a huge success. Now if we could just get Apple to donate some of its profits or machines to the OpenBSD project. (See thread.)