Servers for the Information Age

The never-ending need for File Servers in the modern world

Handling the ‘Data on Demand’ needs of a New Generation!
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Proxy server is the software installed on some network server. The main purpose of this software is to relay traffic between two network hosts (client and server), sometimes this software does some data caching (usually this is performed by HTTP proxies). If your browser is configured to work through the proxy server then all your network traffic will go through that proxy server.

The main purposes of proxy servers:

* Transfer speed improvement (in case of caching proxies). You may use your ISP’s proxy to access the internet ?usually you have better connection to your ISP’s proxy than to other hosts, if this proxy has the resource you requested from the internet you will get a copy of it from proxy (from its cache).

* Security and privacy (for HTTP). Anonymous proxies hide information about your computer in the request headers, so you can safely surf the net and your information will never be used in any way.

* LAN interconnection (or LAN to WAN connection). Sometimes you experience some problems while accessing the server located in the other network (for example in the internet).

How to setup your browser for proxy access:

To set up your web browser follow the intructions below. You have to replace and with the proxy address and its port. It is preferred to use an IP address instead of proxy’s hostname to avoid the name resolution that your browser will perform in case of hostname usage. Examples:

Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or later

1) Choose the Tools menu.
2) Select Internet Options.
3) Select Connections.
4) Select LAN Settings.
5) Check “Use a proxy server”.
6) Enter in the “Address” text box.
7) Enter in the “Port” text box.
8) Press “Apply”.
9) Press “OK”.

Netscape Communicator(Navigator) v4.0 and higher

1) Choose the Edit menu.
2) Select Preferences.
3) Select Advanced->Proxies.
4) Check “Manual Proxy Configuration”.
5) Click “View…”.
6) Set the appropriate fields to and values, it depends on proxy type you want to use.

There are 3 levels of HTTP proxies:

* Level 1: High anonymous (elite) proxies. Such proxies don’t change request fields and look like real IP. You real IP is hidden of course. People that administrating internet servers will think that you are not using any proxies.

* Level 2: Anonymous proxies also don’t show your real IP but change the request fields, so it’s possible to detect that proxy with log analyzing. Nothing really matters, but some server administrators restrict the proxy requests.

* Level 3: Transparent proxies (not anonymous, simply HTTP) change the request fields, also they transfer real IP. Such proxies are not applicable for security and privacy while surfing on net. You can use them only for network speed improvement.

How to know the level of the proxy?

Forum Proxy Leecher (fpl.my-proxy.com) is an an intelligent proxy leecher that can get proxies from forums, however it’s also a good proxy tester to check the level of the proxies. It’s especially useful if you want to test a great amount of proxies. Download it at http://fpl.my-proxy.com/FPL_setup.exe.

Proxy Chain

You can use several proxy servers simultaneously. It is called “cascaded proxies”. Use the following settings in your browser: http://proxyA:portA/http://proxyB:portB/. But you may expect some speed loss in this way.

Some Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) information

HTTP is a high level (application level) protocol which provides the speed you need and quality data transfer. HTTP based on request/response mechanism. The requesting application (client) establishes the connection between you and server. It sends the request to the server in the following form: request method, URI (uniform resource identifier), protocol version, MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) coded message witch contains service information, client information and sometimes message body. Server processes the request and answers with a message which contains status string followed by the MIME coded message.

We can see that client sends to server the great amount of information including the information about itself. This information we are interested in ?it is called request fields. The header of request consists of the following fields (only those we are interested in): Pragma, Forwarded, Client IP, Via, X-Forwarded For, Proxy-Connection, Remote Address. These fields cause the privacy leak. Elite proxies correct this fields to bring you maximum privacy.

SOCKS proxies

SOCKS is a protocol that relays TCP sessions at a firewall host to allow application users transparent access across the firewall. Because the protocol is independent of application protocols, it can be (and has been) used for many different services, such as telnet, ftp, finger, whois, gopher, WWW, etc. Access control can be applied at the beginning of each TCP session; thereafter the server simply relays the data between the client and the application server, incurring minimum processing overhead. Since SOCKS never has to know anything about the application protocol, it should also be easy for it to accommodate applications which use encryption to protect their traffic from nosey snoopers. No information about the client is sent to the server. Thus there is no need to test the anonymity level of the SOCKS proxies.

About The Author

Terry Steele, the webmaster of My-Proxy (www.my-proxy.com), home of free security knowledge, online security tools and proxy softwares.

The never-ending need for File Servers in the modern world

Handling the ‘Data on Demand’ needs of a New Generation!
-
Required Beverage Feature

The History

Since the creation of food service waiters and servers have been pouring coffees, teas and sodas for their customers. A tradition of service that dates back as far as history records serving food.

Nothing new for today’s restaurant diner except maybe a bit more variety in the choices of drink. And with servers and waiters vying for more and more tip income it only stands to reason that they are pouring more and more free refills.

So where is the problem? Your customers are getting better service and your wait staff is getting better compensated. All looks good on the surface.

But the question arises, are you getting paid for all those drinks, sodas and coffees? You certainly are paying for all the ingredients. Do your sales reflect the prices that should be charged?

The Need

But what happens when the server forgets to ring up the soft beverage? Your servers and waiters are already pouring the same amounts of soft beverages so your food cost takes a hit. If they don’t ring the drink to begin with (even if by mistake) then you are out the income that is supposed to offset the heavy pouring that is already taking place.

What you need is a way to enforce the ringing of at least 1 beverage/drink per person ordering food. Sounds simple, but not all point of sale systems can do this.

The Solution

Some restaurant point of sale system have a feature that will allow you to establish items on your menu that will require a beverage, beer or drink be rung to match. For instance, you can set entree’ items to require a beverage, beer or drink be rung to match. Of course, your software company should make a provision that a “No Drink” button be on the screen for those rare instances when a person doesn’t even have a water to drink.

Prior to sending the order to the kitchen the software will scan the ticket to verify that items requiring a beverage do have a corresponding item. If not the software should display a warning message prompting the server to ring the appropriate item before allowing them to proceed.

If the guest does not want a soft beverage or simply wants a water then the appropriate key should be depressed, this will then allow the order to proceed. Management should inspect the nightly sales reports to observe how many “No Drinks” or waters are being served by each server. If one server seems to be out of line with the others then a problem may have been discovered.

The Benefit To You

The benefit to you is simple. You get paid for what is served.

The cost to you is nothing extra. You are already paying for the beverages being served. You are just not getting paid for them.

Mistakes happen. Items are left off the ticket and after the customer is gone it is too late to recover. Your restaurant point of sale system should help reduce your loss by reminding your servers and waiters to properly ring all soft beverages, beers and drinks.

About the Author: Jerry D. Wilson is Director of Internet Sales for DirecTouch Restaurant Point of Sale. With over 25 years of hospitality point of sale experience, he has written several articles explaining different aspects of hospitality point of sale software. Please visit http://www.directouchpos.com for more information.

Source: www.isnare.com

The never-ending need for File Servers in the modern world

Handling the ‘Data on Demand’ needs of a New Generation!
-
Whatever you do with the following information is solely your responsibility.
#telnet ip:25
That title looks like random letters and symbols, but it is actually the command used to connect to an SMTP server via telnet. The # represents the shell, telnet is the program used to start a connection via telnet, ip is the ip address of the mail/smtp server (an SMTP server comes with XP PRO and is easy to set up), and 25 is the port SMTP daemons run on.
First of all, the newer Windows command shells are not truly DOS, and the telnet command is a little different. Namely, you will replace the colon between the ip and the port with a space. I don t know why this was changed but there is nothing to be done about it so you just have to live with it. The colon is used, however, in almost all other operating systems, such as BSD, Linux, and probably Mac (I don t own a Mac).
When you connect, you will know right away what daemon the server is running. A daemon is a program that deals with all incoming connections and data on a specific port. The most common SMTP daemon is Sendmail (for Linux and maybe cygwin). Don t expect to find this on too many big websites (ie Yahoo, Microsoft.com, etc), I would think they would know better. But on many websites this daemon is still being used.
This tutorial will cover just fake mail sending. You will not learn how to take down any mail servers, because it is generally irresponsible to take down mail servers, and the only practical application is testing the security of your own server (if you really want to know how, use Google). That being said, you could potentially cause havoc with fake mail as well, but the playing field is more even considering everyone is equally at risk (not just those with outdated software on their servers), and unless you are smarter than the average kill-random-computers-with-winnuke person then the most harm you can do is anonymously insult people.

Fake Mail Commands
Generally, the following commands will work fine:
helo
mail from: someguy@random.com
rcpt to: someotherguy@anywhere.com
data
content of email
.
quit
Entering those commands when connected via telnet to a Sendmail daemon will send someotherguy@anywhere.com an email containing content of email from someguy@random.com. In some cases, you might need to type helo random.com at the beginning (random.com being the domain of the return address) to get this to work. The return and to addresses, as well as the content of the e-mail, can be modified as much as you want. If it doesn t work, the daemon might need authentication, or the syntax might be different (try adding <>s on either side of the email addresses). And, backspace does not work, even though it looks like that. If you mess up in typing a command and press backspace, the command is void. In the contents of the e-mail, backspaces will show up as boxes when read by the receiver.
This is an invaluable social engineering technique. Imagine sending an email to an AOL customer, faking the return address as a system administrator, with contents something like We are debugging the system lost all our user data for your area. We require you to send your name, date of birth, address, username, password, credit card number, and credit card expiration date. They would happily comply, thinking you were someone you weren t.
You are not completely anonymous when using this technique. Anyone who is serious about safety should know about email headers, or information included in the email. If you have pop3 enabled with your email (you do if you have gmail) then just open up the mail with Thunderbird (of Outlook, ugg) and tell it to display the headers. I will not go in depth on this, but a search on the internet will show you what you need to know to spot fake mail.

About the Author

eblivion — Mike Vollmer
http://eblivion.sitesled.com