SEH’s PS56 WLAN Print Server

SEH says that its new PS56 WLAN Print Server interface card will make your network printing more secure. Utilizing the highly secure WPA and WPA2 encryption standards, the IPv6-enabled PS56 will connect all HP output devices with an EIO port to a wireless 802.11g network. Because the WPA and WPA2 standards have not yet been cracked, offers SEH, they are regarded as the safest protection for WLANs.

To enhance security further, the PS56 also includes TLS/SSL encryption and several IEEE 802.1X authentication methods. The interface card simply slides into the respective slot on the printer unit and is easily configurable and manageable.

SEH

WaveMaker’s Visual Ajax Studio 4.0

As the Ajax wave surges on, one of its well-known providers, WaveMaker, is adding new Ajax-related tools, such as Visual Ajax Studio 4.0. The product is an open-source development tool that “makes it easy to build visually stunning Web applications”. The company claims that “with just 15 mouse clicks and zero coding, a developer can build and deploy a sleek, Web-based application”.

The new 4.0 release offers faster development time, better-quality applications, the company’s own Live Layout data display, enhanced drag-and-drop capabilities and IDE-quality editing that exposes the source code and offers syntax highlighting. Visual Ajax Studio 4.0 supports Linux, Mac OS X 10.5 and Windows XP and Vista.

Wavemaker

Super Talent’s Pico D USB Drive

The folks at Super Talent have added a new model, the Pico D, to its line of ultra-diminutive USB Flash drives. The Pico series of USB drives, measuring in at 1.4 inches, is an inch shorter than most USB drives on the market today, says the company. Other features include a pivoting lid that won’t get lost, shock and water resistance and transfer speeds up to 30MB/sec. Not to mention that the little guy is kinda cute too.

SuperTalent

Getting Samba Software

Getting Samba Software On your Samba server, you’re going to need your distribution’s packages for Samba’s libraries; the Samba dæmons smbd, nmbd and winbindd; the Samba client commands smbclient, smbmount and so forth (which are useful even on servers for testing Samba configurations); and also the Web-based configuration tool SWAT (Figure 1). Naturally, nearly all these things are contained in packages whose names don’t correspond neatly with the names of their component dæmons, libraries and so forth, but I give some pointers on those shortly.

First, a word about SWAT, which requires a modest security trade-off for Ubuntu users. Although normally in Ubuntu the user root can’t log in directly, Samba requires this to be possible, so you need to set a root password on any Ubuntu box that runs SWAT. Like so much else about Samba, this is not something I recommend doing on any Internetfacing Ubuntu box. However, SWAT is such a useful and educational tool, I feel pretty confident in stating that in non-Internet-facing environments, the mistakes SWAT will help you avoid probably constitute a bigger threat to system security than SWAT does.

As I mentioned, Samba packages are included in all major Linux distributions. In Debian and its derivatives, such as Ubuntu, you’ll want to install the following deb packages: samba, samba-common, samba-doc, smbclient and swat (plus whatever packages you need to satisfy dependencies in any of these).

In SUSE, you’ll want to install samba, samba-client, samba-winbind and samba-doc. (SWAT is included with one of these, probably samba.)
In Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its derivatives, you need samba, samba-client, samba-common and samba-swat.

Installing these binary packages should involve installation scripts that put startup scripts, symbolic links and so forth in the correct places for everything to work (at least, after you configure Samba to serve something). Using SWAT is the best way to get up and running quickly—not because it does very much work for you, but because its excellent help system makes it super-convenient to summon the pertinent parts of Samba’s various man pages.

There are two SWAT quirks I should mention. First, SWAT must be run by an Internet super-server, such as the old Berkeley inetd or the newer xinetd. Ubuntu configures inetd automatically when you install the swat package, but if your distribution of choice does not, you need a line like this in /etc/inetd.conf:

swat stream tcp nowait.400 root /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/sbin/swat

Second, to get SWAT’s help links to work under SUSE 11.0, you may need to create the following symbolic links while logged in to a terminal window as root:

ln -s /usr/share/doc/packages/samba/htmldocs/manpages
-> /usr/share/samba/swat/help
ln -s /usr/share/doc/packages/samba/htmldocs/using_samba
-> /usr/share/samba/swat/help
ln -s /usr/share/doc/packages/samba/htmldocs/index.html
-> /usr/share/samba/swat/help
ln -s /usr/share/doc/packages/samba/htmldocs/manpages.html
-> /usr/share/samba/swat/help

Samba over the Internet?

If Samba is so very convenient, you may wonder, why not use IPsec or some other VPN/encryption tool to secure its use on the Internet? This is actually possible. As it’s been a while since I covered IPsec in this space, and in the intervening years, IPsec support has been added to the Linux kernel, I just may end this series with a quick tutorial on doing Samba over IPsec.

However, Samba is a very “chatty” protocol—it generates a lot of packets even if you’re using it only for small files or shares. This causes problems not so much for your Internet link as for Samba performance:
Samba can be very sensitive to dropped or delayed packets, which is more likely in your modestly sized Internet uplink than over your exponentially bigger Local Area Network (LAN) fabric.

So, trying to get Samba working over IPsec may or may not be worth your time, and it may or may not warrant my covering it in this series of columns. Have no fear, one way or another, you can expect me to provide a tutorial on using the Linux kernel’s IPsec functionality in a future Paranoid Penguin column.