But Wait, There's More. . .

• Both Windows 2000 and Linux have security holes, and if you are running these operating systems in your shop, you had better get the patches that have just been announced. Last week, servers running Windows 2000 employed by the U.S. Army were hacked, using a previously unknown buffer overflow related to Microsoft's WebDAV group development extensions to its Internet Information Services Web server. Hackers submitting very long fake URLs--about 50,000 characters or more--can cause the Web server to puke all over itself, and thus allow hackers to enter main memory and run programs of their choosing. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the hackers attacking the Army servers were inside the network, mapping it out and sending data out of the network through TCP/IP port 3389, which carries encrypted traffic. Microsoft issued a patch for this on March 17. If you can't apply the patch now, disable WebDAV immediately. You can also download a tool called Urlscan that will disable long URLs from being processed by IIS Web servers. In addition, the Samba open-source implementation of Windows print and file serving for Linux has a big hole in it, which commercial Linux distributor SuSE discovered last week, after one of its customers was hacked. And Red Hat announced on Tuesday morning that another Linux kernel vulnerability had surfaced in the Linux 2.4.18 kernel; apparently there is a vulnerability related to the ptrace function that can lead to local users gaining root privileges. Go to your Linux supplier or www.linux.org to find out more about this security risk.
  
  

• One of the interesting new standards to come along in the past few years is a variant of the SCSI standard for plugging peripherals into servers and workstations. A number of the big computer vendors have created a variant of SCSI called Internet SCSI, or iSCSI, which allows SCSI devices to communicate with one another and with servers and workstations using Internet protocols. The iSCSI has recently been ratified as a standard by the Internet Engineering Task Force and is expected to be one of the contenders for future storage area networking, alongside Fibre Channel, InfiniBand, and a few others. Gartner's Dataquest market research unit says that iSCSI will link 1.5 million servers to SANs (more than any other kind of link) by 2006, which is why Microsoft says it will adopt the technology. Microsoft says it already has 60 vendor partners working on iSCSI products for Windows, and that it is prepping beta 2 of its iSCSI support for release later this month, through the www.betaplace.com Web site. Exactly what Microsoft's plans are for incorporating iSCSI support into Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 are unclear, but it's in the cards.
  
  
• Just as Hewlett-Packard was trying to complete its merger with rival Compaq in early 2002, the company announced the NetServer tc2100, an entry server for small businesses, with a $649 sticker price, that had everything most of these companies could want, including a one-touch backup and restore, via an integrated tape subsystem. These machines were popular among HP's resellers and Intel-based server customers, which is why they survived the merger and are still sold by HP. The tc2100 supports a 950 MHz Celeron or 1.3 GHz Pentium III processor. The tc2120 server that replaces this machine in the HP NetServer line is quite a bit more powerful, and it has an even lower price tag, if you can believe it. The tc2120 uses either Celeron or Pentium 4 processors running at much higher clock speeds. The base machine comes with a 1.8 GHz Celeron processor, 128 MB of main memory (expandable to 4 GB), a 40 GB IDE-ATA drive (two drive bays max), a 48X CD-ROM drive, a Gigabit Ethernet adapter on the main board, and a dual-channel Ultra ATA-100 controller--all for $549. A tc2120 with a 2.53 GHz Pentium 4 processor, 256 MB of memory, and the same other base features sells for $799. Customers who want faster 10K RPM SCSI disks can add them to the machine as well, but adding a 36 GB disk bumps the price up to $949. Adding a Windows 2000 Server license with five clients bumps the cost of that SCSI disk version of the tc2120 to $1,749.
  
  
• According to statistics from market researcher IDC, the relational database market grew by a smidgen in 2002, up 0.7 percent to $12.95 billion across all vendors and platforms. According to preliminary research (which is subject to change and does not include sales of flat-file databases that are popular on IBM mainframes), the top-five RDBMS vendors accounted for 85 percent of total sales worldwide last year. (The IDC data only counts revenues, so, by definition, it undercounts the prevalence of open-source databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL, just to name the two popular ones that are out there doing real work on Linux and other platforms.) IDC says that sluggish sales among large enterprises made it tough on market leader Oracle and on number-four vendor Sybase, both of which rely heavily on big business. Sales at IBM and NCR's Teradata unit, which ranked number five, were up because they drove sales into the midrange market, particularly for business intelligence and customer relationship management applications that promise to cut costs and drive sales at the companies who install these applications. Microsoft was the number-three vendor and the fastest-growing RDBMS maker, with 15 percent growth, giving it $1.4 billion in sales. Oracle still outsold Microsoft by more than a factor of three, with $5.1 billion in sales, or 39 percent of the total market. However, Oracle's sales were down, and it lost a few points of market share. IBM sold $4.4 billion in relational databases in 2002, giving it nearly 34 percent of the market, according to IDC, thanks in large measure to the popularity of its DB2 variants on mainframes and OS/400 platforms and to its continuing growth in the Unix and Windows markets.
  
  
• IBM last week announced a new release of systems management software for its Intel-based xSeries server line, IBM Director. The 4.1 release includes 20 performance and automation enhancements, and, like its predecessors, it can be used to control all xSeries rack and tower servers as well as the BladeCenter blade servers from IBM. The new software also has a number of plug-in modules to extend the management capabilities of the base IBM Director product. The Server Plus Pack module includes predictive server performance maintenance features that IBM says can keep xSeries machines performing as optimally as possible, given their workloads and configurations. The Remote Deployment Manager module can be used to replicate server operating systems on new or existing hardware. The Software Distribution Premium Edition module is used to remotely distribute application setups on new or existing machines. And, finally, the Application Workload Manager module is a policy-based workload manager that keeps applications from hogging too many resources and affecting the performance of other workloads running on the machines.
  
  

Sponsored By STALKER SOFTWARE

COMMUNIGATE PRO MAIL SERVER BY STALKER SOFTWARE, INC. Stalker Software is the technology leader in messaging and provides email solutions for thousands of Telco's, ISP's and corporations worldwide. Our flagship solution, CommuniGate Pro, is a comprehensive messaging solution incorporating high performance, speed, reliability, security and an extensive feature set. It supports over 30 hardware/OS combinations. KEY FEATURES: Anti-spam, Calendaring, IMAP4rev1, ESMTP, POP3, WebEmail, MailList, Central Directory LDAP services and much more. FREE TRIAL: www.stalker.com