Re: network appliance...

[talis () MILLCOMM COM (Ryan Permeh)]

It has been a while since i talked with any of the network appliance people, but they were doing quite a sales job on 
us, and we almost bought(they aren't bad boxes for what they do, just really really expensive).  Our guy told me that 
they had their own microkernel based os.  I may have jjust assumed this, but i beleive it was a microbsd.  However, i'm 
certain that it is closed source, and has some heavy modifications to increase disk performance and network file 
sharing performance accordingly.  (even though these things are spendy, they really are very fast).

The fact that nmap didn't find it may allude to a broken nmap, or possibly to the fact that nmap simply doesnt have a 
singature on this.  Upgrade to the nmap2.30Beta20.  This has the latest signature file, allowing the best possible 
identification of os's.  
it should be responding, however, to a showmount(show what nfs mounts are availible), or a smbclient -L request(show 
the list of exported SMB shares). Theese are the two primary focuses of this boxm, sharing via NFS and sharing iva SMB.

As far as i know, there are no known vulnerabilities in their os.  Because of price, i haven't had a chance to bang on 
them very hard(and probably never will, until they start shoing up in bargain bins:) and i doubt a ton of other people 
have either.  And judging from the responses about NetPliance's device, this peice of hardware still occupies somewhat 
of a niche in enterprise computing.

Ryan

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: JT 
  To: VULN-DEV () SECURITYFOCUS COM 
  Sent: Monday, April 10, 2000 10:16 PM
  Subject: network appliance...

  has anyone heard of vulnerabilities in the Network Appliance base operating systems? they're the company that makes 
large filer head systems and my company is considering buying one. the operating system is unix or unix based but an 
nmap scan on known open ports in demonstration showed absolutely nothing - no operating systems id either. i was 
curious as to whether this is really as safe as it seems...
   
  thanks,

  jim tatman
  jtatman () leopard com