RE: Operational impact of filtering SMB/NETBIOS traffic?

[Roeland Meyer <rmeyer () mhsc com>]

How closely have you looked at Samba sources? BTW, I've done it through SSH
tunnels too. The problem is that some SAs (a fair large percentage) think
that a port labeled "secure" (port 22) means that they have to take special
care to make sure that it is blocked (yes, they are the recently
lobotomized). So, three-quarters of the time, a VPN is not do-able and you
are forced to go plain-text direct. If, in addition, you block the NetBIOS
ports then you block application-level access for 80% of internet users.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu [mailto:Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]
> Sent: Sunday, November 19, 2000 8:19 AM
> To: Roeland Meyer
> Cc: 'Scott Call'; nanog () nanog org
> Subject: Re: Operational impact of filtering SMB/NETBIOS traffic? 
>
>
> On Sat, 18 Nov 2000 20:19:12 PST, Roeland Meyer 
> <rmeyer () mhsc com>  said:
> > shares on the internet? We use SMB/Samba INSTEAD of NFS 
> because we believe
> > SMB to be more secure. smb.conf certainly gives more 
> security options than
> > exports does.
>
> Don't confuse "more options" with "more security".
>
> A protocol can have dozens of options, but yet be 
> fundementally insecure.
> -- 
>                               Valdis Kletnieks
>                               Operating Systems Analyst
>                               Virginia Tech