From: Alexander Fordyce (afxylosystems.com)
Date: Fri Aug 20 2004 - 14:08:00 CDT

• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]

Feel free to skip this message. There's nothing useful here.
(Anyway...)

I can't tell you how frustrating this is sometimes. I read Lucas's
book, along with endless marc's list searches, along with days of google
searches. The problem I inquired about has existed since at least Sat,
8 Sep 2001 without any clear solution. At least I managed to nail the
problem down to it's clear culprit, and my stunningly specific insights
;-) prompted a kind and knowledgeable soul to offer a solution --
according to my searches the first one for this particular problem.

Yes, I'll re-read these books, and I have "Secure Architectures With
OpenBSD" and "Building Firewalls with OpenBSD and PF, 2nd Edition" on
order, but while I've been waiting for them to arrive, I've already set
up my snazzy pf-protected servers (by reading the outstanding OpenBSD
documentation) and written some handy scripts to parse, block, and
notify me of the worst of the intrusion attempts (I'm not new to
scripting, in other words). I want to know more -- I need the harder
stuff. Yet another "getting started" tutorial isn't going to do it.

Seriously, how could I have bridged the gap using the commonly available
documentation from my predicament to the solution suggested? Pardon my
frustration, but I've just spent rather a lot of time on this when I
should have spent it curing diseases, building cathedrals, negotiating
peace in the middle-east, etc. I fear the answer will be something like
"spend several years assiduously studying the subject". If that's the
case, cool. I just want to make sure I'm not missing something obvious.

Eternally grateful for any and all advice,
Alex

> Quoth hellsopninehells.com (Peter H. Coffin), Friday, August 20,
> 2004 10:29 am -0500...

> On Fri, Aug 20, 2004 at 09:59:16AM -0700, axax-im.com wrote:
> > ...Which leads to my next peripheral question... How could I have
> > discovered this by myself? I'm not yet an expert, clearly, but I'm
> > struggling in that direction (at least I found the problem), and
> > I've made great strides in the past couple of weeks by following
> > the lists & devouring all other documentation, and I've scanned
> > several books, but from what I know now to a fix like the one
> > suggested is a big jump. What's the shortest distance between these
> > two points?
>
> Knowing a few things about scripts and signals helps.
>
> Get the following books, and read them. Read them a lot.
>
> Absolute OpenBSD - Lucas - No Starch Press
> Using csh & tcsh - DuBois - O'Reilly
> + the comparable one for your favorite shell, same publisher
> (E.G. Learning the Korn Shell if ksh is your thing)
> Unix System Administration Handbook - Nemeth, et al. - Prentice Hall
> a.k.a. The Purple Book
>
> There are other nice books as well, but these are the big ones that
> cover most of the important bits.

• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]