Raju vegesna’s Blog

For the last two+ years I have been observing an interesting change in the Security Appliance market. First, there were Firewall Appliances, then there were VPN boxes and later came Anti-Virus, Anti-SPAM etc. Now, we see combo boxes.

It is nice to see that there are many Security Appliances out in the market combining Firewall+Router+IpSec VPN+Anti Virus+Anti-SPAM+DHCP Server+Web Filtering+Intrusion Detection & Prevention and a lot more.

While interated boxes like these are a treat for any IT guy for ease of management, I feel there still are other functionalities that can be integrated into these boxes. Some of other functionalities I would like to see in these appliances are Traffic Management + Load Balancing + DNS Server + Network Management + IP Address Management + SSL VPN etc. I hope to see these integrated boxes some time in near future.

Even with the current functionality, when these vendors pack this much functionality, I often wonder why the hardware is of low config. They still seem to be using a single P3 or P4 processor with 256 or 512MB RAM. They can as well lgo with a dual processors with more RAM. Hardware is so cheap these days (compared to the prices they charge).

Raju

Writing this on a sunny california afternoon connecting my Dell laptop to www through WiFi and trying to kill some time

I recently read in few places that Google is planning for a new browser named GBrowser. They have registered the domain gbrowser.com. I just liked their idea a lot.

I know that developers will not be keen on seeing yet another browser in this Browser-Incompatability-World. Well, but from a company perspective, I think it is an excellent idea. Thinking a bit more on what they are planning to do with it, here is what occured to me…..

Google has around 100 thousand Servers in their clusters (I myself saw around 30K of them in one location). They are using the same cluster of servers for all their services including Google Search, Blogger, Orkut etc. I also saw a test project on their site ‘Google Compute’ where the users can donate their computing cycles to Google’s research. Now combining these two with GBrowser, will be powerful. They can make GBrowser as ‘The Only Software Required’ on your machine. They can make us use their computing resources instead of our CPUs which means that we’ll be using the worlds biggest grid for computing purposes. Well, the grid will be expanded all over the world if people donate their CPU Cycles for this purpose.

Basically, this way, there will be one huge Virtual Computer spanning across multiple data centers and multipe homes serving millions of people at the same time and all the users need is a GBrowser.

Well….I am not marketing for Google May be I am thinking too much into it?

Raju

I heard about people trying to gain access to other networks and having fun (what’s fun about that???). Anyway, if it is a corporate network, it might make little sense because these sick people steal data, but what is the use trying to hack into home networks?

Well….sometime you are probably forced to use others network. Infact, I ended up doing the same couple of days back.

I was working doing an important firewall upgrade yesterday and suddenly my internet service from my ISP died on me. Several reboots of my cable modem didnt help. So I ended up using NetStumbler to determine the Wireless networks in my neighbourhood and selected a WEP Disabled Linksys AP and it immediately gave me an IP (DHCP was enabled on this AP). Then I completed my work. Thanks to this neighbor.

I then got curious and tried logging into his Linksys AP and and found that he didnt change the default settings, including password. I later scanned the network and found that his C drive was shared. When I opened it out of curiosity, I ended up seeing many viruses files in there. So I placed a text file named ‘Read Me XXX’ (XXX is the name of his system which is his name) on his Desktop. In the text file, I told him what I had to do and asked him to secure his Wireless AP and clean the viruses on his machine. I signed the bottom saying ‘Helpful Hacker’

Today I scanned the network again to see the status of that AP. I was happy to see it Secured. But if I losse my www connectivity again, I may not get any help fom him

Raju