How to take part in some time travel

Posted on By Mark Wilson

So you thought that old version of your website was gone forever? It may have been a little naive of me, but I figured that once I put up a new version of my website, then that was it, the old one was overwritten.

Not so, it seems – today I stumbled across the Internet archive wayback machine, which is a service that allows people to enter a URL, select a date range, and then surf on an archived version of the website. Scarily, I was able to search on old versions of my website going back several years. Not everything is in there, it takes a while to load, many graphics are missing, and if a site wasn’t picked up by the Internet archive crawler then it just won’t appear, but how about seeing old versions of www.microsoft.com?

I guess this can be useful. For example, I used to work for a company called ICL. That name is long since consigned to the history books (they are now trading as Fujitsu Services), but it is still available on the wayback machine. I managed to find a press release from back when the BBC and ICL jointly announced BBC Online in September 1996; as well as what ICL was saying about millennium date compliance in the middle of 1997.

Most web administrators will know that they can control web crawlers (like the one behind the Internet archive) using a robots.txt file in the root of the site (there is even an online robots.txt generator). After the robots.txt file is loaded in the root of the webserver, the wayback machine can be forced to crawl the site, pick up the new file, and remove all documents.

Now it seems I need to go and update the robots.txt files on my websites…

Anyone worried about running Microsoft ISA Server as a firewall?

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Over the last few years just about every network administrator I’ve worked with has laughed at the idea of a Microsoft firewall in an enterprise environment (at least as a front line of defence – many organisations use Microsoft ISA Server behind another firewall). When forced by the American parent company to run Check Point FireWall-1 on a Windows platform instead of a Nokia appliance server, one of my ex-colleagues in the European subsidiary of a major fashion design, marketing and retail company was disgusted; but in all honesty, a well-patched and well-managed Windows system can just as secure as a well-patched Linux one (and conversely badly patched systems are badly patched, whoever the operating system vendor).

The Common Criteria Evaluation and Certification Scheme (CCS) is an independent third party evaluation and certification service for measuring the trustworthiness of IT security products, recognised by governments in Canada, the United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Germany and France.

Windows 2000 Professional, Server, and Advanced Server with service pack 3 and the hotfix described in Microsoft knowledge base article 326886 has been certified for common criteria evaluation assurance level (EAL) 4+; and ISA Server 2000 with service pack 1 and feature pack 1 (in firewall mode) has EAL 2 certification. According to Microsoft, Windows XP with service pack 2, Windows Server 2003 with service pack 1 and ISA Server 2004 are all undergoing EAL 4+ certification at present.

In addition, ICSA Labs tests firewall products against a standard yet evolving set of criteria and Microsoft ISA Server 2000 with service pack 1 running on Windows server 2000 with service pack 4 has been certified by ICSA. As a side note, for anyone looking at the area of firewalls, the ICSA firewall buyer’s guide is worth a read.

So it seems that a Windows server can be secure enough to run a firewall; and that Microsoft’s firewall product is also pretty secure. EAL 2 might not be the highest certification level, but if ISA Server 2004 achieves EAL 4+, then maybe all of those network administrators’ minds can be put to rest.

Whatever the platform, it’s the solution that counts (problems with AOL on a Mac via ADSL)

Posted on By Mark Wilson

At the danger of being flamed by Apple Macintosh fans everywhere (please don’t) – I thought Macs were supposed to be simple.

To be honest, that’s one of the reasons I didn’t get on with my iMac in the late 90s – it was too big a shift for me as a long-time Windows user (even though I had used Macs at uni’ many years before), but that was with OS 8 or 9 (I can’t remember) and I guess, being UNIX based, that OS X will also give me a command prompt?

Anyway, a couple of nights back, my neighbour, who is very proud of his new purchase – an iMac G5 – dropped by to ask if I could help him get his Mac connected to the Internet. His Windows PC connects fine, using a BT Voyager 100 ADSL modem and AOL but when he called AOL, they said they don’t provide Macintosh support. We spent a few hours looking at this and the best advice I could find was to obtain the Mac drivers for the modem and some configuration information (as well as a phone number for AOL Mac support!) from the Mac User’s forum. Unfortunately the last post at the time of writing is just a few days old and is from someone who had a working connection that has just stopped and we couldn’t get it working either.

Fast forward a couple of days and my neighbour dropped by to say that he phoned AOL and they only support dial-up connections for Macintosh users. He also found the same anecdotal evidence I had found of people who have their Macs working with AOL broadband (but not consistently). Once glimmer of hope is that net4nowt and MacUser talk about AOL Services for Macintosh, which it seems was released on 6 May 2005 as AOL Service Assistant, allowing Macintosh users to access AOL services, although the net4nowt advice seems to be to use this on a routed connection (not direct via ADSL modem).

My neighbour is now off to buy a broadband router (probably the best solution for him anyway given that he has multiple computers now) – fingers crossed that gets him on line with the Mac.

The irony of all this is that he upgraded from Windows ME to XP and couldn’t get his broadband connection working – until I downloaded the BT voyager 100 drivers for Windows XP for him a couple of weeks back! Now his Windows PC works, but the Mac he bought in frustration doesn’t… just goes to show that it doesn’t matter what platform you use, there will usually be some complications in getting the various elements of a solution to pull together (and it seems that for broadband AOL on a Mac it just won’t work at all).