Working on Weekends

Dizzy sits in his own place, a little house including a little garden, and enjoys the sunshine. Wave LAN is the invention of the century, making nerds and hackers less easily recognizable due to the fact that they don t have to spend all the time in their basements but can actually do what they usually do out in the sunshine with a fresh and cool beer next to them. So far, he was having a wonderful day that started at ten in the morning with an extensive four- hour motorbike ride through an area that can safely be described as a 100 kilometer radius around the city. A friend with good connections to the local bike dealers had somehow managed to obtain a Honda CBR1100XX Super Blackbird for what he smilingly called test driving . Not being exactly a large person, the beast was, for Dizzy, like riding a pure concentration of power between his legs. In the end, he decided that the machine was ok, but too heavy for his taste.

Now, enjoying the afternoon sun, Dizzy is checking on the firewall rule sets that he obtained yesterday . The file is fairly large, reflecting the hundreds of communication channels going through a major corporate firewall system. It takes him about 20 minutes to find the entries that deal with the back end systems he needs to talk to. Just for the sake of completeness, Dizzy also checks what this machine named MPRDSP7 was used for before it got the SAP ITS task assigned. From the looks of the file system and the icons on the desktop, he is fairly sure that it used to have another, probably better purpose before. The only entry in the file he finds related to the box is:

  SOURCE      DESTINATION     SOURCE PORT    DESTINATION PORT    ACTION  ANY         MPRDSP7         ANY            HighPorts           ALLOW 

Checking on the configuration entry named HighPorts , he finds that this covers any TCP port from 2048 up to 65535. At least the lower ones are blocked , Dizzy thinks and makes a mental note to have the firewall rules changed. Considering his memory and its ability to recall mental notes when needed, he switches to his e-mail client and sends a real note to Frank. Then, he closes the firewall rules file and points his web browser to another local shop for bike gear and gadgets that could be installed or switched out for cooler things on his bike.