Bizzaro World

Macs Can Do It

I liked Michael J. DeMaria's Workshop article "How To Make Mac OS X Do Windows" (July 22, 2004). At last, people are noticing that having a Mac in the enterprise is not only easy, but really no different from having any other box on the desktop.

One open-source solution that lets a Windows administrator remotely control a Mac box is Real VNC (www.realvnc.com), developed by Timbuktu and the AT&T labs. It comes in handy for Microsoft Project file conversions, as well as for many of my users (Mac OS 10.3.4) who need to visit client Web sites using Internet Explorer for Windows.

Damon John Hoxworth
Systems Administrator
Holguin, Fahan & Associates

[email protected]

Spam Control

As a network manager who updates e-mail filters weekly, I especially enjoyed reading Ron Anderson's "Sick of Spam" cover story (May 13, 2004).

Most of my spam comes from PCs on broadband networks all over the world; little comes from e-mail servers with registered MX records. Since all spam has SMTP packet types in the IP headers, the first thing we should do is limit outgoing traffic at our edge routers/ firewalls by packet type. We should then configure our nodes to let only authorized servers send e-mail.

James Hird
IT Manager
Logic General

[email protected]

Corrections

The "Network Protocol Analyzer Features" chart on page 48 of our July 22 issue contained some inaccuracies. The corrected version can be found here.

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