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Two Flaws Found in Kerberos Authentication

Two security flaws discovered in the Kerberos authentication mechanism last week could allow hackers to crash or take control of affected computers. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which developed Kerberos and distributes it under an open source license, labeled the two flaws "critical" in its advisories, which can be found here and here. Kerberos, along with Enterprise Identity Mapping, is a key ingredient in the single sign-on technology created by many vendors. IBM, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat, and others embed Kerberos software into their application and system software. MIT has issued patches for the two flaws and says the flaws will be fixed in an upcoming release of Kerberos, krb5-1.4.2.

Fujitsu, McAfee Partner for PrimePower Security

Unix server maker Fujitsu, the dominant half of the Fujitsu-Siemens partnership, announced this week it has partnered with security software specialist McAfee to sell and support McAfee's Entercept host intrusion prevention system on the PrimePower line of Solaris servers.

The Entercept product is not an intrusion detection system, which tells you when bad things are going wrong on your network, but rather an intrusion prevention system, which keeps bad things from happening in the first place. Entercept consists of agent software, which costs $400 per server or $27 per desktop, and a central management server, which only runs on the Windows platform and which costs $3,500. The agent software sits between applications and the operating system kernels running on servers or desktops, and if something malicious happens--a virus tried to cause a buffer overflow and propagate itself or somehow take over the machine--then Entercept simply kills that process. Basically, the software locks down a machine and prevents any software from making any kind of unauthorized changes to any piece of software running on the machine. Such software can not only improve security, says Dan Wolff, senior product manager for the Entercept product, but it can reduce the urgency of putting patches on production systems. As we all know, production systems are sensitive to any changes, and patches sometimes have unintended consequences. Entercept is supported on PrimePower machines running Solaris 2.7, Solaris 8, and Solaris 9; Solaris 10 support is coming in the second quarter of 2006, says Wolff.

Interex Cancels HP World User Group Event Next Month

If you were planning on attending the HP World event hosted by the Interex user group of Hewlett-Packard customers, you might want to see if you can get your airfare back or be thankful that you lived close enough to drive to the event in San Francisco. This week, Interex pulled the plug on HP World, which was set for next month. The group posted the following notice on the HP World site:

"It is with great sadness, that after 31 years, we have found it financially necessary to close the doors at Interex. Unfortunately our publications, newsletters, services, and conference (HP World 2005) will be terminated immediately. We are grateful to the 100,000 members and volunteers of Interex for their contributions, advocacy and support. We dearly wish that we could have continued supporting your needs but it was unavoidable."

HP has been putting on its own user group events, and Interex is apparently filing for bankruptcy, but we were unable to confirm this as we went to press. In the meantime, HP will offer paid attendees to HP World a pass to its own HP Technology Forum, which is scheduled for September 12 to 15 in New Orleans, and offer discounted exhibition space to vendors that do not compete with HP who want to show their wares at HP Technology Forum.

IBM Announces Updated HACMP AIX Clustering Software

IBM is putting the finishing touches on the latest release of its High Availability Cluster MultiProcessing (HACMP) clustering software for its AIX Unix variant, and says HACMP V5.3 will begin shipping on August 12.

IBM has been co-developing HACMP with a company called Availant since 1990, and in November 2003, iSeries HA software vendor Lakeview Technology acquired Availant to broaden its position in the HA arena. In that same month, Lakeview also snapped up HA Technical Solutions, which offered HA clustering software for Unix, Linux, and Windows platforms.

HACMP V5.3 is noteworthy because it is the first version of the clustering software that supports IBM's AIX 5L V5.3 operating system. While the new Power5-based servers will run the earlier AIX V5.2, the sophisticated virtualization features that are supported on Power5 iron require AIX V5.3; AIX V5.2 has much less flexible and coarser-grained logical machine partitioning. IBM says that the updated HACMP software simplifies the integration of DB2 and Oracle databases in a cluster, supports Veritas file systems as well as IBM's own file systems for AIX, and supports up to 32 nodes. (A node these days means an AIX instance, because partitioning allows a server to be carved up into pieces.) The software also includes extended distance (XD) add-ons that allow several different styles of clustering over large geographical distances. IBM says it will withdraw HACMP V5.2 from marketing on April 30, 2006 and will discontinue service on the program on September 30, 2007.

Lawson Nearly Doubles Profits Despite 13 Percent Drop in Revenue

Revenues dried up significantly for Lawson Software last quarter, but smart management allowed the ERP software vendor to nearly double its profits, nonetheless. The St Paul, Minnesota company's revenues shrunk nearly $13 million, or 13 percent, to about $87 million for the fourth quarter, which ended May 31. Most of that shrinkage can be attributed to a precipitous 36 percent drop in license revenues, from about $27 million to about $17.5 million, while the remainder can be chalked up to a modest 5 percent decrease in services revenues, to about $69.5 million. Despite the appreciable drop in revenues, the company reported net income of $5.9 million for the quarter, compared with $3.5 million for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2004 (these are GAAP numbers, not pie-in-the-sky pro forma numbers). This increase is the result of an additional $700,000 in interest income and the absence of a $1.2 million tax valuation allowance, which was recorded in prior year's quarter, the company says.

For fiscal 2005, the company recorded a profit of $5.3 million on revenues of $335.2 million, compared to a net income of $8 million on total revenues of $363.6 million for 2004. Harry Debes, the midrange veteran who took over as Lawson's CEO and president last month, when Lawson and Intentia announced their planned merger, says the fourth quarter results show that the current management team can turn the business in the right direction "With our spending now at a run rate that makes sense, we can focus more of our attention on growing revenue," he says. "Looking forward, the acquisition of Intentia International will give us a greater customer base into which we can cross- and up-sell our applications."

Gartner Says Microsoft, IBM the Leaders in Web Services

Never one to squander a good PR opportunity, Microsoft is making the most of a recent Web services report from industry analyst Gartner that looks favorably upon the software giant's Web services strategy. Last week, the analyst group published a report called the 2005 Magic Quadrant for Web Services Platforms, and in it, Microsoft was included in the "leader quadrant," which is where those vendors with the highest "completeness of vision" and the most "ability to execute" come together. Microsoft director of Web Services Strategy, Ari Bixhorn, says the software giant has a "comprehensive solution for organizations to integrate heterogeneous IT investments more securely and reliably," and that's probably accurate, as far as Gartner's analysis goes. But Microsoft wasn't the only company in the leader quadrant, and has to share that space with rivals IBM, Oracle, SAP (who is more of a partner these days), and Tibco Software. All in all, Gartner rated Microsoft highest in completeness of vision, and rated IBM highest in ability to execute.

Ingenica Unveils Host Printing Utility

Bell Canada subsidiary Ingenica recently launched new software to make printing easier for OS/400, mainframe, and Unix users. The product, called UniPrint Host Module, enables users of these servers to submit PCL5 print jobs to any network-attached printers over Citrix ICA and Microsoft RDP sessions. Along the way, the UniPrint Host Module also converts the PCL5 print job to the PDF format, which the Toronto company mistakenly called Printable Document Format. (The last time we checked, PDF still stood for Portable Document Format, but perhaps it is time for a change, Adobe.) Connecting Unix, mainframe, and OS/400 servers with network-attached printers increases the potential pool of printers that work with these servers and eliminates the requirement to use specialized servers. "Host Module addresses the needs of mainframe users by making it simple to print from a mainframe application to any desktop or network printer," says Polly Galita, Ingenica's director of sales and marketing. Host Module works with the version 5 releases of the UniPrint Server and Gateway Module products that Ingenica launched in December.