Securing W2K

Michael Howard over at the Secure Windows Initiative released a pretty good set of guides on "Securing Windows 2000 Server". You can even grab the security templates and job aids if you know where to look. Overall I am impressed that Microsoft relelased this information. Consultants who need to lock down their systems now have a pretty good guide to assist themselves.

Speaking of consultants, a congrats goes out to Bear for making the leap into becoming his own boss. I disagree with people that say they can't make their own opportunities, and I am happy to see Barry make the leap. If you need any help at all Barry, let me know. I'll be there for ya in any way that I can.

I am getting pretty frustrated with myself at work lately. I am having a HELL of a time finding a bug reporting system them is extremely easy to use, set up and is free. We used to use Bugzilla, but I really find that its much to complicated. Way to many fields that no one uses or needs for a simple trouble ticketing system for developers and testers. I like FogBUGZ but refuse to run IIS in my network. Joel ported the database to now support mySQL, I am hoping he will someday port the service itself, so I don't HAVE to use a Windows platform as a server. All my servers are Linux or OpenBSD based, and I use Windows for desktop environments. I refuse to turn that around. It just doesn't make sense. Of course, I can't afford to buy FogBUGZ anyways, but thats besides the point.

There are LOTS of bug reporting systems, and they all seem to suck, or not complete. I will not install PHP, so more that 50% of the reporting systems go away, and the perl ones I saw are just butt ugly. I don't want to see rainbows when I look at bugs... I nice little notification icon will suffice. Maybe someday someone will write a FogBUGZ clone, or better yet.. strip down Bugzilla to something lighter for people that don't need to make such complex queries you can drive the CPU to a halt. Chances are I will end up continuing to use Bugzilla... but I really wish I didn't have to.