The Register reports that a senior MS exec is making the following comments: “We have to create an evolutionary approach in an open standards way;” “Common standards are the things that equalise everybody;” “It is very important we adopt a common standard space.”

It’s at ApacheWeek.com. Among the items: ”

Two denial of service attacks were found in the Apache 2.0 code this week – both concerned with memory usage when sending
large requests. The first was that the server did not respect the maximum header field length, and would consume memory
indefinitely while reading a header line. A fix for this was quickly checked in. The second problem remains unconfirmed; using an
httpd.conf from an old installation of 2.0 with the current code can cause a GET request with a large body to leak memory.
Neither of these problems are known to affect Apache 1.3.”

Grey Zone, Inc., a developer of out-of-the-box Web
content management software, announces the release of SecureZone 5. SecureZone 5 enables business users to
create a completely functioning extranet, including users and content, in as
little as 3 minutes. SecureZone
empowers non-technical professionals to rapidly spawn an unlimited number of
distinct Web sites from a single platform.
The product combines security, content management, and audience-based
publishing capabilities that simplify the Web publishing process, helping
companies rapidly and cost-effectively conduct business over the Web.

“Customers are tired of paying exorbitant prices for
software and the implementation services associated with Web content management
products currently available,” says David Harris, Vice President of sales and
marketing for Grey Zone. “With
SecureZone, we are providing our customers with a full-featured product at an
incredible value, and putting content control in the hands of the creator,
eliminating much of the bureaucracy associated with conventional products.”

Grey Zone and IBM previewed the new product to rave
reviews at LinuxWorld in August.
“SecureZone is an excellent complement to the IBM zSeries family because
the zSeries has the power and scalability to support virtually any volume of
web sites that SecureZone customers can create,” says Eugene Bernosky, Chief
Executive Officer for Grey Zone.

SecureZone differs from other products in its of
ease-of-use, rapid implementation, scalability, and technology. It incorporates ground-breaking,
patent-pending technology called RDDAC (Reverse Driven Data Access Control),
that provides company administrators with fine-grained control of data for
security and administration, and provides access and administrative functions
for each individual piece of content.

“Grey Zone offers deep functionality coupled with ease of
use,” states Susan Feldman, Director of content and retrieval technologies for
IDC. “It is unusual to have such an
array of content management features in a quick to implement application that
can be handled by business users directly.”

In addition, SecureZone includes new V-Site? technology
that allows corporations to easily deploy multiple public Web sites powered by
a single platform. The platform allows
for corporate globalization, including features such as application masking and
Unicode compliancy for seamless distributed publishing and administration in
multiple languages. Other new
functionality includes a built-in media library that enables reuse of data
across multiple Web sites.

“SecureZone 5 has opened the door to true sustainable,
decentralized content management, while ensuring brand and messaging
consistency,” says Matthew Ott Director of eMarketing for Terayon Communication
Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: TERN). “With
many solutions, the content can get away from you, but the Media Library gives
administrators control over what content administrators put online.”

The platform supports multiple publishing methodologies
via prepackaged and/or XML API. It
scales to run on anything from a PC to a mainframe. SecureZone for Linux is available on the IBM zSeries and S/390
mainframes, as well as the IBM iSeries and pSeries product families. In addition, the new product supports a number
of database environments, including Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) and IBM?s DB2.

Other new features include:

· Advanced reporting and editing functionality

·
Sequence Manager for presenting content in different
views

·
Quick Select for repurposing content to new audiences

·
Separate edit and view modes

·
Advanced meta tag functionality

·
Group-based administrative privileges

·
Secure Categories

·
Advanced move and copy functionality

·
Proprietary SQL database routines

·
Expanded modules with business logic

·
Configurable search

For a complete description of all new functionality in
SecureZone 5, please visit www.greyzone.com,
or call 877-411-GREY.

Starting November 7, Grey Zone invites the public to
attend weekly online Web demonstrations of SecureZone 5. Please inquire about special press
demonstrations/briefings.

About Grey Zone

Grey Zone provides the leading web content management
platform that enables business users to publish web content from a browser
through simple point-and-click templates.
SecureZone, the Complete Corporate Web Platform?, combines content
management and secure targeted publishing into a single prepackaged software
platform that is the most cost-effective solution on the market.

For further information on this exciting Silicon Beach
company, or to attend an informational Web seminar, visit the Grey Zone web
site at www.greyzone.com, or call Mary
Pat Michielssen at 831-477-7100.

ZDNet reports on arguments from the ACLU that face-recognition systems are intrusive and won’t work. The security system “offers us neither order nor liberty,” says the ACLU.

Posted on Net-security.org: “A problem was discovered in the ht://Dig web indexing and
searching
program. Nergal reported a vulnerability in htsearch that
allows a
remote user to pass the -c parameter, to use a specific
config file,
to the htsearch program when running as a CGI. A malicious
user could
point to a file like /dev/zero and force the CGI to stall
until it
times out. Repeated attacks could result in a DoS. As
well, if the
user has write permission on the server and can create a
file with
certain entries, they can point the server to it and
retrieve any file
readable by the webserver UID.”

The BBC has the info. “The two sides say they have now reached an agreement. It wrings
some concessions from Microsoft but stops well short of a
break-up of the company – which would have been the worst case
scenario for the software giant.”

– by Brian Aker –

At the most
recent LinuxWorld, I
happened upon a little booth with some guys selling computers on a card,
something I
have seen before but that is still rare enough to catch my attention. Especially
cool
about these cards, though, is that they’re PCI cards acting as loopback devices
to
the host computer, controllable by the host.

Loopback you say? The cards communicated via
a logical ethernet device that only the host could see. This means sockets, and
this means you have bus-speed ethernet. This results in a very simple socket
interface to program against.

The OmniCluster SlotServers 1000 are half-size PCI
cards with an internal IDE adapter, one
SODIMM slot (my board had 256 megs onboard, but I’m told they are testing 512
meg
SODIMMS) and an internal plug which allows you to attach an adapter that will
let
you use an ADB keyboard. On the card’s edge is a 10/100 ethernet port, a USB
port, sound ports, and a VGA output plug. There is also a male PCI card
adapter on top of the card that will require an adapter to use (and a pretty
funky
case to support). I was told the male PCI card is for testing, but waste not,
want not. By attaching a male-to-male adapter to it, it will take a 3v PCI card
(even though you will need a fairly odd case to support something like this).
So it’s pretty much a standard PC on a card.

The SlotServers I received had an additional goodie as well, a 20-gig IBM IDE
drive (they sell this as an add on for $299, you don’t need it though since
the card can use any internal IDE drive and can even share a drive under
the right setup). This turns the half-sized cards into full-sized cards, but in my case
brought
with it the complication that the cards didn’t quite match up with the
full-sized
card slots in my case. Because mine is a tower case, the cards sagged a little
(they
still ended up being supported, but not quite exactly right). I also had the
nifty
idea of sticking one of these cards in my G4 Mac, but the full length cards, it
turns
out, won’t fit in one with the add-on IDE extension. Taking off the extension
and hooking it to a different drive in the case worked fine. Doing something
like
this with a non-supported host will still leave you with a card that works,
because
all it really needs is the power from the PCI bus, but it won’t be controllable
by
the host.

The cards I received had their host drives installed with a standard Red Hat
7.1 distribution. They behaved just like a normal PC running Red Hat. The cards
can
run
Apache and will work as a DHCP server, and because they are sitting on the bus
and have an
ethernet port, they make great firewalls for local networks. Each card is
a Linux
box on a
card with an obviously small footprint (effectively zero footprint, if it goes
into
a box already on the network), so you can do everything you normally expect to
do with a Linux box.

Now let’s take a different sort of problem: Anyone who has worked with the Web
has
run into the problem of separating Web servers from the servlet
engines that produce dynamic content. For a first round of testing, I downloaded
IBM’s Java SDK and installed it on an Omnicluster card. I then set up the Java
servlet engine to run locally on the card. I compiled mod_jserv on the host
computer and pointed it to use the servlet engine. Presto! I had a host computer
using an Omnicluster card as a dedicated CPU for running Java applications,
while letting the
host handle the rest of the work.

Then I found that, because the host computer had more CPU/memory
than the OmniCluster cards (the host computer is a dual-processor Intel box with
2
gigs of memory,) it had more cycles to spare than the OmniCluster card. So, I
reversed the setup, using the host as the CPU and letting the Omni card handle
the
incoming traffic. The database I was using was also on the host, and this
allowed faster connections to the servlets, and the combination worked quite
well.
So now I have a setup with the host computer running servlets that are talking
to
the DB, and the OmniCluster card running Apache.

I was not completely happy with this setup, though, because if I were to lose
the
servlet engine I would have a problem. I’d have to wait for it to come back
up before I could begin to serve more Java pages. The solution for this? I added
an
additional OmniCluster card and placed the servlet engine on it. So you now have
one
card serving pages, with another card handling servlet requests, and finally, a
host
running the database. All of the communication happens over the local bus, which
keeps the need for security between databases/servlets/webservers to a minimum.
Finally, the host computer can reboot an Omni card if it needs to, so I have a
simple
way of rebooting the cards if they should lock up, although I should mention
that
this never happened during my tests.

Pretty slick — and it was all Linux, so it was trivial to do. I am told that
the
cards will also run Windows so those of you who need rebootable Windows boxes
might
find something of interest with this.

I also toyed around with a similar setup using mod_perl, letting the OmniCluster
cards work as Webservers and the host as a mod_perl proxy engine. (The setup for
this sort of environment is documented in the mod_perl FAQ). I’ve frequently
consulted for corporate clients seeking secure networks for their e-commerce
sites who
needed to use multiple hosts. Because rackspace was an issue in most of these
situations,
these cards would have come in handy.

The database I had been using on the host for testing was MySQL. One of the
problems
we have with MySQL on Slashdot is that when we are generating a lot of dynamic
content for the site, replication can get backed up. (We use replication to keep
a
current version of the site and to populate a database that is just used for
searches). So I’ve been looking for a way to ensure that replication always
stays up
to date. I tried a local test to see if something like the OmniCluster cards
would
work well for this. I was able to download the RPM from the MySQL site and
install
it on the OmniCluster cards. Via NFS, I set up MySQL so the OmniCluster cards
could see the same database files as the host. I then enabled file locking for
MySQL, and was
able to select off the same tables as the host. While this was an interesting
hack,
MySQL needs a better distributed lock manager than system file locks, so this is
probably not a very practical use. (Now, if the OmniCluster cards had
fiberchannel
or SCSI it would be a very different story. Then you could share
drives directly).

The only question I really had left in my mind after all of this was the
cards’ binary
compatibility. For a real test, I hooked up a CD-ROM to the OmniCluster
card’s IDE bus and inserted my fully functional copy of DB2. After going through
the install, I fired up DB2, added and dropped some tables, and ran a few Perl
scripts
to test it. Worked like a charm. The memory on the cards (just 256MB,
remember), did not make running DB2 a very practical case study, though.

I have to say, even though rack space is not an issue in my office, the
Omnicluster
cards are nice, because I can keep them in my desktop computer, use them for
other
development work, and never worry about trashing my “main” box. I don’t like
adding boxes in my office for noise and heat reasons. Because the cards do not
have fans on them, the general decibel level of my office was not changed.

The only real problem I found with the cards (other than the fact that they
don’t
line up well for full-length cards) was that the software to control the cards’
install was a little clumsy. I was even able to initially crash one of the cards
by
not following the instructions completely. (There was also a problem with the
IBM add-on hard
drives failing, but I blame that more on the original packaging than any failure
of
the cards.) I do wonder about re-installing the cards, though, if you are using
the
IDE card extensions. Unless you keep a bunch of spare CD-ROM drives in the host
computer for the cards to use, you’ll need to open up the host to attach a CD
drive.
There are a number of ways around this, but still it is an issue you should keep
in
mind. I am told that in the near future you will be able to use local disk
images from the host to
run the cards, which would also make them a lot easier to manage. That would
probably make for a nice solution for the next up-and-coming Rackspace.com
look-alike that wants to sell dedicated servers, but has issues with dedicating
an
entire full sized PC to each client.

The list price for a SlotServer 1000 was $499 with 32 MB Memory, $549 with 128 MB,
and $619 with 256 MB. Shop around, though, because these are list prices and at Linux World
they were going for quite a bit less.

In the end, if you are looking for a solution that requires secured networks
between
hosts, want better use of space or just need a contained development
environment, you
should give the OmniCluster cards some consideration. Plus, if you consider how expensive four-way and eight-way processor boxes are, and are not
scared of
a little distributed processing, these cards make a great way to solve problems
for traditional client-server computing.

Brian Aker is senior programmer for Slashdot.

It’s a Gartner Group commentary on ZDNet. “Linux yields the most
savings, compared with Unix
or other operating systems,
where Linux servers have a
dedicated function, such as
Web server, caching or
proxy, and where the
environment can be
replicated over many
servers–to hundreds or
thousands in a server farm,
for example.

That means Linux does best
in highly replicated arrangements as a low-end extension to Unix. As the software stack running
on top of Linux becomes more complex or comprises commercial proprietary elements, Linux’s
cost advantage over Unix will shrink.”

InfoAnarchist writes, “There is an article in The Register about silencing security companies into not disclosing vulnerability details about their products. Typical Microsoft practices.”

Derek Glidden writes, “I got sick of trying to figure out from what other people have been saying whether or not the 2.4 kernel VM system was any good or not, so I decided to run my own tests, write them up and post them online. The short conclusion is that the 2.4 VM rocks when compared with 2.2, but there’s more to it than just that.”