News from PANUG/BizNix - June 13, 2002
http://panug.org - http://biznix.org

BIZNIX MEETING TODAY

Just a reminder that the BizNix meeting is tonight starting at 6:15 pm.
Some of us will be there early to setup equipment for demonstrations of
the Linux Terminal Server Project. You'll see Linux desktops and 
heavyweight applications running on lightweight hardware. We'll also
show you how you can run Windows applications via a Hydra client
to a Windows XP terminal server.

The meeting is at Novell's office in Tigard. Directions are on the
BizNix web site - http://biznix.org 


GOPHER HOLE
by Ed Sawicki - http://escrubber.biz  http://alcpress.com

SANS and others are reporting a bug in Internet Explorer that relates
to the gopher protocol. Most IE users have never heard of or used
gopher, so the recommendation is to disable it. One of the
procedures for disabling it is as follows:

1. Run Internet Explorer
2. Select Tools
3. Select Internet options
4. Select Connections
5. Click on "LAN settings"
6. Check "Use a proxy server [for your LAN]"
7. Click on "Advanced..."
8. In the two boxes to the right of "Gopher:" place "localhost" in the
   "Proxy address to use" box and "1" in the "port" box.

This will cause IE to try to connect to the computer's port 1, which will
fail. A better solution would be to disable the gopher protocol
entirely but I don't know if this can be done. Please write in if you
know how to do this.

Still, another solution would be to install a gopher server on your
network (Linux-based and free of course), configure your firewall to
insulate it from the Internet, and point IE to it. Now users will be able
to read a screen that tells them that they can't use gopher rather than
seeing the ambiguous IE error message.

Want to install a gopher server but don't know how? Contact me.
ed@alcpress.com