Starport vs. the Borg: temporary victory?

[mdlbear]

Well, I finally figured out what to enable on an XP machine, and my firewall, to let it see and communicate with the other machines on a Windows network. (update: you have to force it to use NetBUI over TCP -- it's two dumb to get it right in auto mode.) The LPR protocol problem is still a mystery, but one I no longer have to worry about. Now I need to find the driver disk for my inkjet printer.

I also figured out that the reason the new machine couldn't listen to streaming audio from filk radio was that almost all traffic from the PC zone to the net was blocked. Seemed like a good idea at the time. What I really had to do was unblock everything and block only the known-evil stuff going out. Need to figure out exactly what to block; at the moment it's really only Windows filesharing and SMTP mail.

Comments

[mneme]

My security hat says you should invert it and figure out what was being blocked that needed not to be and just unblock that.

I don't listen to my security hat much.

[mdlbear]

That's what I do for the wireless zone, and it's what I started out trying to do for the PCs. I may go back to it eventually. Trouble is, there are too damned many undocumented protocols out there, and I have better things to do than pore over the firewall logs every time somebody with a PC complains that something else doesn't work. I'll just block the most egregious ones and hope for the best.

Internally, on the other hand, things are locked down pretty tightly. Nothing gets into a server, or between zones, unless I give it permission.

[penngwyn.livejournal.com]

What's a "NetBUI"?

Many people confuse NetBEUI and NetBIOS (or NetBT -- NetBIOS over TCP/IP). I assume you really mean the latter. (NetBEUI is all broadcast and non-routable, and generally all-round blecherous.)

XP doesn't enable NetBT by default because MS couldn't figure out how to fix its massive security holes without breaking compatibility. So in Win2K they introduced CIFS as a much better alternative, and in XP that's the default.

[mdlbear]

That's probably what I meant -- I was of course posting from a Linux machine in another room from the BorgBox (which was turned off, anyway).