Paul's Down-Home Page

From an article I’m working on, the difference between high availability and business continuance succinctly expressed:

Availability measures how much use we get out of a system before it fails, or between failures. Business continuance (BC) is different; it means being able to continue business operations (possibly with some degraded capacity) while a recovery operation is in progress. A simple example might help: if your building has an automatic emergency generator, that’s HA. If you have to bring in your own generator from home, that’s BC.

Last year, I wrote about US v. Councilman, a court case in which the initial ruling seemed to indicate that it was OK to intercept others’ email under certain conditions. Yesterday the First Circuit Court of Appeals issued a new ruling, essentially reversing the old one. Councilman was indicted in 2001 for violating the US federal law covering wiretapping because he was using procmail to copy inbound messages to hosted users on his server. The case was originally dismissed based on Councilman’s claim that the messages he copied were in “electronic storage” (which has a narrow meaning under the 1968 wiretap law), and that what he did wasn’t technically “interception” as defined in the law. The government appealed, and now the Court of Appeals is siding with them. Read their ruling for yourself; after I have time to dig into it a bit more, I’ll have more to say (bearing in mind, of course, that I’m not a lawyer and don’t give legal advice.)

Finally! Microsoft’s released Microsoft Messenger:mac 5.0, which can use both the MSN Messenger service and Live Communications Server 2005. It fully supports TLS and Kerberos (although you’ll need to read this reskit paper to turn Kerberos on). It also supports PIC for LCS if you’re using it. In my tests over the last few months, I’ve found it very stable. It just works. If you’re using a Mac, give it a try. (now, if we could only get a new version of the suck-a-delic Windows Media Player for Mac…)

See above: how much would you pay for a solution that actively prevents people from using “reply-all” to mass-distribution mails? (RMS does lots of other neat stuff, too, that I’ll be writing about in the future.)

Here’s an interesting tidbit: Scalix announced today that they’re going to ship a wireless solution for their messaging product, based on Notify‘s product. Pricing and availability weren’t announced; from a functionality standpoint, Notify has a pretty nice solution in terms of the range of devices and OTA methods they support. However, this may add significantly to Scalix’ “flyaway” cost, making them potentially less attractive compared to Exchange 2003. No word yet either on whether Scalix will require device or mobile CALs in addition to mailbox CALs. Developing…

Bruce Schneier is a smart guy, but he also has a strong anti-Microsoft bias. That’s why it’s no surprise to see this article, in which he lambasts Microsoft for “building in security bypasses”. What’s he talking about? A quote from Microsoft’s Martin Taylor:

For example, this new feature tool we have would allow me to tunnel directly using HTTP into my corporate Exchange server without having to go through the whole VPN (virtual private network) process, bypassing the need to use a smart card. It’s such a huge time-saver, for me at least, compared to how long it takes me now.

Of course, that’s our friend RPC-over-HTTPS. I think Schneier missed the point because he misunderstands the intent of the feature, which is to allow mail-only access from remote systems. It’s true that VPNs allow for secure remote access to many different types of resource, often using multi-factor authentication. It’s also true that many VPN systems (particularly the clients) are unstable and difficult to use, particularly from locations like hotels and airports where the network provider may not be clueful. The RPC tunneling feature allows secure access to email only without a VPN. This is actually a security benefit.

Why? Think of what happens when you connect a remote computer via VPN: you’re allowing it unrestricted access to your entire corporate network. That means that when Joe Executive‘s home machine connects via VPN it has free roam of the network. That places a mighty high premium on ensuring that the remote machine is uncompromised, hence the interest in network access protection (but that’s a solution for another day). As an admin, if I have users who only need email, I’m perfectly happy for them to use RPC-over-HTTPS instead of VPN because then I know that their machines are very unlikely to be able to cause damage to other machines on my intranet, no matter how crap-infested they may be. Couple RPC tunneling with an application-layer RPC scanner (like the one in ISA Server 2004) and you’re better off than you would be with a pure VPN solution.

Some of the comments on Schneier’s post make good points about the tradeoff between usability and security, including one guy who asks why VPNs are so hard to use. That’s for another post, unfortunately.

The MS SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 teams have a hysterical site called “Escape from Yesterworld” that casts IT development as something out of Flash Gordon. The overall site design is brilliant, and there are some extremely amusing video clips there, including:

• Evil Wears a Cape
• I.T. From Ages Past
• Repetitive Tasks of Doom
• Change Orders of Death
• Terror on Two Wings

Well worth a look– I give it two thumbs up.