Programming

I was first introduced to DSHIELD last month. Particularly, my interest was in the textual feeds of recommended hosts to block at the firewall. The lists come in the form of a text file formatted with individual hosts and entire networks. The feeds are refreshed on a regular basis from community input. I wrote a small shell script to pull these recommended lists and create an iptables chain that is called from my existing server firewalling rules. The input, output and forwarding chains all call the DSHIELD chain. After about a month of use it seems to have paid off, because the DSHIELD chain in my firewall rules blocks many packets from these blacklisted hosts - and so far no one has complained. This script is run nightly to refresh the DSHIELD chain. If for any reason it cannot contact the DSHIELD site, it will keep the existing rules in place. Here is the BASH shell script I use on Fedora and CentOS servers.

For my perfect team I want to build a software development team and staff the lead roles. There are many roles involved with the creation and sale of a software product. I am going to focus on the team responsible for the creation of the solution. The roles I chose to staff are project management, requirements analyst, engineering, content and documentation, and customer support leads. Many people can share a single role, or each person can have multiple roles. For my case, each person gets a single role. The project manager is responsible for monitoring the progress, time lines, budgets, and in general doing what needs to be done to see the project reach its conclusion. The project manager is often a central figure of communication between the development team and other groups. My project manager is Meg Whitman from eBay. [1] Meg has turned eBay into an online mainstay with $4 billion a year in revenue and a $60 billion market capitalization. The requirements analyst uses a variety of techniques to understand the problem from first hand contact with stakeholders inside and outside the organization. Grace Hopper [2] lived from 1906 to 1992. She is responsible for such ideas as compiled source languages and was deeply involved in trying to make computers easier for developers and operators. She often placed herself in the problematic situation to understand it and help propose a solution. The engineering lead is a broad role incorporating all of the technical aspects and control systems in place for the project. For this role I will choose Alan Cox [3] from the team of Linux contributors. Alan was responsible for many of the improvements to Linux that helped it gain respect as a reliable platform. Although a deeply technical person, Alan has an MBA that I believe gives him an insight to the economics of engineering problems. The content and documentation specialist is responsible for all information included with the solution that is needed by the consumer. This role is also responsible for any included templates or other information that can jump-start the solution for the user. Carl Sagan [4] will be my content and documentation producer. Carl Sagan taught science and wrote about it his entire life. He contributed to the popularization of science in America. Customer support provides help, receives and records defect reports and enhancement requests, and provides assistance with unique problems or environments. Blake W. Nordstrom [5] of the Nordstrom department stores will be in charge of my customer service organization. Nordstrom has a reputation of excellent service and has been aggressively applying technology to improve their customer’s experience. [1] http://money.cnn.com/2005/10/31/news/newsmakers/top50_women_fortune_111405/?cnn=yes [2] http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/hopper.html [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Cox [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_sagan [5] http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/biography/M-R/Nordstrom-Blake-W-1961.html