Kjartan Mannes

The new version of Adobe Acrobat Reader 6.0 doesn't seem to be too popular in the blogging world. Sven wrote a rather negative review on his blog Quarter Life Crisis. (Found the link via Scott and Jeremy.)
There is another area I don't think Adobe is getting right either, and the marketing of their full version of Adobe Acrobat, which oddly enough didn't get a name change. In the USA Adobe Acrobat Standard costs $299 and the Professional edition is $449. I've just started a project at work where we are going to use PDF for our more formal documents we send out, so we need about 100 licenses for our user base (whom are mostly clue less). What we want is the PDF Writer part of Adobe Acrobat to convert MS Word or Excel files into PDF. The only problem is that 100 licenses of Acrobat Standard is $29900. That is a lot of cash for a virtual printer that can convert anything into PDF. You just print to it and specify where you want to store the PDF.
Granted, Adobe does have a product called Adobe Acrobat Elements, that is basically just the printer but "is available only through licensing with a minimum of 1,000 seats per order", which is a tad to much for our needs, or most companies in Norway for that matter.
So I was looking around for an alternative and someone suggested Win2PDF which is basically just the printer component and costs $35 for the basic version and $69 for the Pro version. I got a recommendation from a friend who works in a law firm that just installed Win2PDF for their 200+ users. Several of the larger ASPs in Norway are also offering it to their customers. The major reason for this is that for one its a lot cheaper, and really simple to use.
Most companies do not need the full power of Adobe Acrobat 6.0. Most of the features in Adobe Acrobat 5 use terms that no normal mortal comprehends (DocBox, Distiller, TouchUp, JavaScript, etc). I give that to any user that barely understands Word and I've increased the support load. Even if you show users the simple way to do things they inevitably click their way into some obscure part of the program causing them to scream for help and refusing to perform the operation again by making someone more technical do it for them.
So next week I am going to run a test of Win2PDF and see how it works, and will most likely choose it over Adobe Acrobat.

I've gotta build my own Linux setup. RPMs and all are fine for getting things up and running and maintaining a home box, but on a production server it just gets me in trouble. For one the RPMs don't always put things where I want them to be, also they are not customized for my system. Some software packages out there have thousands of compile options. Apache, PHP and MySQL being very feature rich makes them hard to configure at times with all their depencies, but using an RPM of them will have you end up with getting some or all the features. Me I want the ones I will use. Enabling all features when I use 20-50% of them is a waste of RAM as they spend most of their lives there, all the time and several processes on top of that.

So what is a guy to do. Well, I configure and compile those packages myself, but then the RPMs strike back. All Linux software seems to be related. The re-use of libraries is nice, but there are always problems too. Upgrading a library because PHP needs it for a new feature you need may result in you re-compiling a dozen other packages. Upgrading zlib or openssl impacts on pretty much everything. Even upgrading libgd can cause headaches if you link everything dynamically.

I like the port system of FreeBSD, I just don't like parts of the FreeBSD core. In some ways it is better than Linux, some ways not. Gentoo is a Linux alternative to BSD ports, but I wouldn't run it on a server environment. No offence to Gentoo, but it is too cutting edge to offer the stability I need. I tried installing it on a Compaq Proliant DL 360 server and it doesn't do to well with SCSI disks. I got it working in the end, but not before cursing for half a day. Maybe when there is a Gentoo 3.x.

For now I will just have to make do with the source and all the headaches it brings. Like spending 5 hours to upgrade libgd which forced me to recompile/upgrade libcurl, libz, libjpeg, webalizer, PHP, Apache, etc. Most the problems went back to RPMs though. Having used a RH install as the base for the system means that a lot of the libs came from RPMs that I haven't updated as upgrading RPMs has never resulted in much luck for me. I tend to replace the RPM version with my own compiled versions when I need a new version of a lib for some other application, or there is a serious security issue. I know I am just making things harder for myself, but thats just the way I am.

Guess it is time to build a Linux system for scratch set up just the way I like it. I'm sure it will be fun ;)

West Yorkshire police are trialling Linux workstations secured by smart cards in a bid to save £1m a year in IT costs [ZDNet |UK| - News - Story - Police put Linux on trial]

Thought I had bloged this already but didn't, bad me!

Remember the guy I complained about on Saturday? No didn't think so. In any case he was infected with a virus that was spamming me with cute little mails. Well, he found my contact information on this site and sent me a message over MSN. He was a little bit confused and asked me what all my mails were about. So I explained it to him and had him do an online virus scan. He found 4 viruses on his PC so I recommended he go out and buy an anti virus package. Good thing none of them were more serious than spreading themselves to other computers via email.

In any case I get no more nasty emails from him and I am happy!

Top Vulnerabilities to Windows System

1. Internet Information Services (IIS)
2. Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) -- Remote Data Services
3. Microsoft SQL Server
4. NETBIOS-- Unprotected Windows Networking Shares
5. Anonymous Logon-- Null Sessions
6. LAN Manager Authentication-- Weak LM Hashing
7. General Windows Authentication-- Accounts with No Passwords or Weak Passwords
8. Internet Explorer
9. Remote Registry Access
10. Windows Scripting Host

Top Vulnerabilities to Unix Systems

1. Remote Procedure Calls (RPC)
2. Apache Web Server
3. Secure Shell (SSH)
4. Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)
5. File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
6. R-Services-- Trust Relationships
7. Line Printer Daemon (LPD)
8. Sendmail
9. BIND/DNS
10. General Unix Authentication-- Accounts with No Passwords or Weak Passwords

[SANS / FBI The Twenty Most CriticalInternet Security Vulnerabilities]

Logically enough the vulnerabilities are more or less the same on Windos and Unix. I feel like I am upgrading Apache and PHP once a month, but overall any serious issues I can patch moments after I hear about a new security issue.