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Politics And Protocols

Rich November 24, 2008 No Comments

Catching up from last week I saw this article in Techworld (from NetworkWorld) about an IETF meeting to discuss the impact of Dan Kaminsky’s DNS exploit and potential strategies for hardening DNS. The election season may be over, but it’s good to see politics still hard at work: One option is for the IETF to do nothing about the Kaminsky bug. Some participants at the DNS Extensions working group meeting this week referred to all of the proposals as a “hack” and argued against spending time developing one of them into a standard because it could delay DNSSEC deployment. Other participants said it was irresponsible for the IETF to do nothing about the Kaminsky bug because large sections of the DNS will never deploy DNSSEC. “We can do the hack and it might work in the short term, but when DNSSEC gets widely used, we’ll still be stuck with the hack,” said IETF participant Scott Rose, a DNSSEC expert with the US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST). Look, any change to DNS is huge and likely ugly, but it’s disappointing that there seems to be a large contingent that wants to use this situation to push the DNSSEC agenda without exploring other options. DNSSEC is massive, complex, ugly, and prone to its own failures. You can read more about DNSSEC problems at this older series over at Matasano (Part 1, Part 2, site currently experiencing some problems, should be back soon). The end of the article does offer some hope: The co-chairs of the DNS Extensions working group said they hope to make a decision on whether to change the DNS protocols in light of the Kaminsky bug before the group’s next meeting in March. ” We want to avoid creating a long-term problem that is caused by a hasty decision,” Sullivan said. “There are big reasons to be careful here. The DNS is a really old protocol and it is fundamental to the Internet. We’re not talking about patching software. We’re talking about patching a protocol. We want to make sure that whatever we do doesn’t break the Internet.” Good- at least the chairs understand that rushing headlong into DNSSEC may not be the answer. We might end up there anyway, but let’s make damn sure it’s the right thing to do first. Share:

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Upgrading to Parallels 4.0

Adrian Lane November 24, 2008 No Comments

I installed Parallels 4.0 on the iMac last week, upgraded my licenses and converted my bootable images to the new format. It took a while to do as the conversion process takes a long time. While the installation was trivial, I had 4 different bootable images to convert, which took a good 3 hours to migrate even though they were only a couple of gigabytes a piece and only have a handful of applications installed. But I had no problems and everything worked fine. There are a couple subtle changes to the interface that make management of the images a little easier. I have not witnessed the performance enhancements that are claimed to be present, but I have not had performance issues in the past, so your mileage may vary. As the build I used was the one provided right after the official announcement, I was expecting that a new one would be released soon to clear up some small issues that have popped up. Sure enough, build 4.0.3540.209168 popped up today. Problem is I cannot install it. The ‘Continue’ button is grayed out; tried a couple of times, but there are really no options other than to accept and continue, but still I cannot proceed. I cannot imagine something this simple not getting picked up by QA. Anyone else out there having this issue? Share:

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