Books Blog: books.elliottback.com

Snort for Dummies, by Charlie Scott, Paul Wolfe, and Bert Hayes, teaches basic intrusion detection skills through the Snort platform. Snort is an open source intrustion detection system for computer networks. It’s a free piece of software which resides on a computer and watches all of the network traffic passing through that machine. Unusual or dangerous traffic is flagged and recorded to alert the network administrator. Basically, Snort is a sentry for your network, on the lookout for hacking, viruses, and anything else you write a rule for.

Quite frankly, the book sucks. You’ll get at least as much from the Snort users manual, which is a free 90 page introduction to Snort. It’s 1/3 as long as Snort for Dummies, and fits in more content with less cruft. The first three chapters of Snort for Dummies introduce the software and its requirements. Why not read Snort - Lightweight Intrusion Detection for Networks and the Snort FAQ? Chapters 4 and 5 cover installation for Windows and Linux–but so does Snort’s Windows and Linux guides. The remaining chapters cover basic snort usage and configuration, and by basic, I mean basic. There’s nothing in there not in the manual, and explanation is not needed–how they manage to stretch out the material for four hundred pages, I do not know.

So, Snort for Dummies gets the lowest rating I can give: :1star:. Really–just read the manual.

after seeing a beautiful mind and vaguely hearing about dh lawrence from russell crowe’s imaginary friend paul bettany… i was compelled to try to read some of lawrence. funny how i still link the author with the movie though they have nothing in common.

a quote in To the Lighthouse struck me as a good summary of that book: “a family of unrelated passions”
if that is a capsule description of TTL, then “family of connected and intertwined passions” could describe sons and lovers. people seemed to have felt more, to reacted with more force, breathed with more intensity 100 years ago than they do today. there are only several main characters: Mrs. Morel, Paul, Clara and Miriam. There is really only one plot: Paul’s struggle to realize his role as a son and as a lover (hence the title).

the best parts of the book are when lawrence turns each character inside out and dissects, traces and maps their passions. i wish i had another word for passion– a mixture of desire, force, intention and want– a craving. people in this book are human and flesh. but they seem maybe more human than we are– their every days are filled wiht color and movement, not an aritficial heightening of emotion, but a very real possession with the everyday. Its a celebration of the primitive emotions and tasks of life. but very very beautiful.

This is the least popular of the four blogs I run, but suddenly the Google toolbar is showing a pagerank of 5! Has there been an update? Is it just starting? None of my other sites show any change–just this one. Maybe the new algorithm favours infrequently updated pages with long articles and no backlinks!

This is definitely weird, but in that “cool” kind of weird way.

What Fascism really is, and isn’t. A long essay.

Scott Rettberg discusses the relationship between books and blogs