North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Operational impact of filtering SMB/NETBIOS traffic?

  • From: Adam Rothschild
  • Date: Mon Nov 20 11:09:14 2000 
On Sat, Nov 18, 2000 at 08:19:12PM -0800, Roeland Meyer wrote:
> You'd have LOTs of complaint from me and many of my clients. Many of
> us log into our external gateway PDCs from foriegn locations. We
> have shares because we want shares.

Yikes.  Isn't that what secure road-warrior VPNs are for?

> You are considering killing off a whole bunch of legitimate use
> because some are too brain-dead to not have unintentional shares on
> the internet?

Intentional or not, sniffing SMB passwords and share info doesn't
require much skill.

> We use SMB/Samba INSTEAD of NFS because we believe SMB to be more
> secure.

That's like saying the electrical chair may be far more appealing to
some than lethal injection.  NFS and SMB are both insecure and
inefficient mechanisms for file transfer over the public Internet.
SMB may be the lesser of the two evils, but it's really irrelevant.
Why not use ssh/sftp, or for the Unix impaired, some https-based file
transfer interface, instead?

On Sun, Nov 19, 2000 at 09:06:06AM -0800, Roeland Meyer wrote:
> [...] in addition, you block the NetBIOS ports then you block
> application-level access for 80% of internet users.

Howso?  Sounds like you'd be promoting responsible usage instead.

-adam