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NTOOLS E-NewsFlash: Clustering News and Back Orifice Fix!
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Hi All,

Three particularly interesting items in this Flash:

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1) NEW ANNOUNCEMENT: SUNBELT WEB AVAILABILITY PACK CONTAINS
MICROSOFT'S BRAND NEW NT LOAD BALANCING SERVICE

2) NEW SECURITY PRODUCT: PRIVACY98 BRINGS SECURE W95/98 FILE 
SYSTEM AND DEFEATS 'BACK ORIFICE'.

3) NTOOLS E-NEWS ARCHIVES AVAILABLE
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1) NEW ANNOUNCEMENT: SUNBELT WEB AVAILABILITY PACK CONTAINS
MICROSOFT'S BRAND NEW NT LOAD BALANCING SERVICE

You are probably asking yourself, what is that new Win NT Load 
Balancing Service? Never heard of it! Yes you have, but it was 
called differently. So what is it? It's IP-clustering technology
that you know as Convoy Cluster Software.

Sunbelt has created a combo-pack that contains 3 tools for a low 
price: Convoy for IP-clustering, DoubleTake for file mirroring
and LogCaster for Event Log Management and Service monitoring. 
These three together will keep your website up no matter what. I 
have these 3 running on the three systems that now form our web-
cluster: 2 new Dells and our Intergraph server. Can you remember 
when the Sunbelt website was completely down? Neither can I! :-)

The combination of these three products grew out of our own need
to have a fault tolerant website, and continuous requests from
our customers for functionality like this. Any mission critical
Internet or Intranet site needs this kind of high availability.
This is a software-only solution that will really cover your
behind.

The Convoy Module was just bought by Microsoft and was renamed
Win NT Load Balancing Service. It will be part of the MS NT Server
Enterprise Edition. Convoy can still be bought until the end of the 
year as a separate product via Sunbelt though, so you can get your
hands on this technology that's blessed by Microsoft and runs the
www.microsoft.com. If you want to know specifics, here is the press 
release: http://www.valence.com/prelacq.html

The DoubleTake module is Windows NT Magazine's Editor's Choice
July 1998 and was chosen over all other mirroring tools including
Octopus. LogCaster is a highly advanced Log Management tool that
functions as an early warning system. 

To get all the info on the Sunbelt Web Availibility Pack check out
this page:http://www.sunbelt-software.com/swap.htm

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2) NEW SECURITY PRODUCT: PRIVACY98 BRINGS SECURE W95/98 FILE 
SYSTEM AND DEFEATS 'BACK ORIFICE'.

You likely still have many hundreds or thousands of workstations
running W95/98 hooked up to your NT servers. Security has become a 
major concern but there is very little you can do on those aging
boxes. Certainly there is no budget to wholesale upgrade to NT WS
yet. It's a known fact that FAT is not secure at all. That is why
Privacy98 was developed. This will allow you to make the 95/98 file 
system finally secure. You can protect valuable files from hackers, 
cracker, and peekers.

Win95/98 systems are mostly single user, in theory. This has caused 
many system administrators not to take the security and integrity 
of the local data into consideration until recently with new hacks
seeing the light.

SIB development, a new promising company in the field of Win95 System 
Level development, came out with their first product Privacy98 to
address and this important security issue. Recent research shows that
often over 70% of your critical organizational data resides on these 
innocent but vulnerable 95/98 machines. Someone might grab that data 
in a moment where the owner is not paying attention.

Privacy98 is an add-on for Win95/98, and is not meant to replace the 
NT security model. The product fills a hole left there by Microsoft.
SIB development's mission is in Win95 system development for NT sites.
The company is planning a series of professional tools for the 
Windows95/98 platform to address the needs of these organizations.

Features:

Privacy98 is the first and most comprehensive File System security 
tool for Windows95/98. You could consider it both an extension to 
your System Policies, and at the same time a Secure File System for 
W95/98, a dream we've all had for a long time.

Privacy98 delivers File System Security at the file & directory 
level. It constitutes a UNIX/NT mixed security model to deliver an 
efficient, comprehensive, and easy to use security structure. At all 
times, the File System is NOT ALTERED so as not to compromise the 
integrity of your data at any point.

With Privacy98, different users of the workstation can assign 
permissions to files/directories with ease and flexibility. By using 
the permissions editor of Privacy98, your users can deny "Delete", 
"Read", "Modify", "Execute" and the advanced permission "Explore". 
Once a user assigns permissions to a file, he automatically becomes 
the owner of that file, and other users can not alter the permissions 
of that file, as long as there are permissions residing on it.

What about Back Orifice: Can Privacy98 help me? 

YES. The problem with BO is that people can use your machine as if 
they are there right in front of it. But what if they can't even 
touch your files? Whether using BO or ANY future hack for that 
matter.

With Privacy98 we have 2 implementation ideas to defeat BO:

a) For Net-Surfers; After installing Privacy98, log in as yourself, 
and protect the files that you need to protect. But before you 
connect to the net, just logoff, or login as a dummy user. In this 
case your sensitive files can not be touched.

b) For networked users; Usually people try to play with your machine 
when you are not there, to avoid being noticed. So, all that you have 
to do with Privacy98, is that you Log-Off when you are not there. 
It's as simple as that, even people with FULL access to your disk are 
not able to mess with any files that you have your permissions 
enforced on.

Privacy98 is free for individual home users that are now at risk due
to Back Orifice. The minimum purchase for corporations is a 50-pack 
that costs $995.00. Volume discounts apply.

An evaluation copy is available for download at:
http://www.sunbelt-software.com/priv98.htm
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3) NTOOLS E-NEWS ARCHIVES AVAILABLE

You can check out the last 12 months worth of messages sent to
you by cutting and pasting this URL in your browser and entering
the email address you are subscribed with. It's got them all
since August last year. Hope this helps.

http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/scripts/lyris.pl?enter=nt-list&text_mode=0

That's all for this NewsFlash!

Warm regards,

Stu Sjouwerman

(email me with feedback: [email protected])