DLSLUG Meeting, 6 October 2006

This got mis-routed; re-posting.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ted Roche <tedroche@...>
Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 14:08:37 -0400
Subject: DLSLUG Meeting, 6 October 2006

Lloyd Kvam of Venix Corporation presented the October meeting of the
Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee Linux User Group, held in Corson Hall at
Dartmouth College. Sixteen attendees were present.

Lloyd had a customer who had a serious problem develop: a Windows server
they used, directly connected to the Internet, became infected with a
worm and subsequent secondary infections. While technicians attempted to
remove the malware from the machine, the company wanted to keep the
machine online. Due to the critical nature of the tasks it was
performing. it needed to continue to perform its main function, but
needed communication (and further infections) to and from the internet
curtailed as much as possible. Of course, this situation lead to a lot
of armchair-quarterbacking on the part of attendees, but Lloyd pointed
out that in the end it was the customer who determined the course of
action, and Lloyd assisted them with it.

Lloyd used a LinkSys WRT54G he had spare in his office. He loaded it
with the OpenWRT firmware. OpenWRT works differently from other
firmwares we've seen demoed before. Rather than one fixed image loaded
onto the router, OpenWRT provides a writable area in the router where
updated or changed programs can be uploaded, and links moved from
firmware to point at these updated files.

Lloyd had an excellent diagram (this one, I think:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/WRT54G_internal_architecture.png

that showed how the ports were wired together and how VLANs and bridges
could be made to connect the various pieces. He then went to to
demonstrate what sort of steps you would need to take from the
command-line to create and configure separate VLANs and bridge them
together. He also talked about the ebtables firewall and how rules could
be written to allow nothing to and from the server but port 80 http
traffic, while allowing other machines within the LAN to communicate
with the machine on other ports.

An excellent presentation! Thanks to Lloyd for the presentation, to Bill
McGonigle for arranging the facilities and moderation, and to Kjel
Anderson for supplying the excellent munchies!

More info: http://www.openwrt.org
Lloyd: http://www.venix.com
DLSLUG/GNHLUG: http://www.dlslug.org and http://www.gnhlug.org