Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) Overview
0 Comments Published September 29th, 2006 in Infrastructure.
The Schools Interoperability Framework Association (SIFA) is a non-profit membership organization whose members include over 300 software vendors, school districts, state departments of education and other organizations active in primary and secondary (pK-12) markets. These organizations have come together to create a set of rules and definitions which enable software programs from different companies to share information. This set of platform-independent, vendor-neutral rules and definitions is called the SIF Implementation Specification. The SIF Specification makes it possible for programs within a school or district to share data without any additional programming and without requiring each vendor to learn and support the intricacies of other vendors’ applications.
The Implementation Specification defines the software implementation guidelines for SIF; it does not make any assumption of what hardware and software products need to be used to develop SIF-certified applications. Instead, it defines the requirements of architecture, communication, software components, and interfaces between them.
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Enabling TCP Wrappers to block inter-zone traffic
1 Comment Published September 25th, 2006 in Solaris.
TCP Wrappers has been around for many, many years. It is used to restrict access to TCP services based on host name, IP address, network address, and so on. For more details on what TCP Wrappers is and how you can use it, see tcpd(1M). TCP Wrappers was integrated into the Solaris Operating System starting in the Solaris 9 release, where both Solaris Secure Shell and inetd-based (streams, nowait) services were wrapped. Bonus points are awarded to anyone who knows why UDP services are not wrapped by default.
If you have a Solaris 10 box configured with multiple zones, then each zone on the box is by default able to communicate with any other zone on the box, provided that it has a route. There’s two ways of mediating inter-zone traffic on the same box which do work. The first of these involves a little twist on routing, and the second involves tcp_wrappers.
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