Yep, the Ipswitch implementation of tarpitting does
turn out to be nearly as unconfigurable as Dan said.
According to the release notes, it can only be enabled
and controlled via EDITING THE REGISTRY(!), and even
then very little tweaking is possible.

\Uh-oh, better fasten seat belt, rant on\

Edit the registry? Edit the freaking registry?!?!
Jeezus, it's the year 2005, people!!!

What is Ipswitch thinking? Why bother having any
administrative interface at all? After two years of
requests for this feature, how hard was it to add a
single "enable" check box?!?!?

And what if we need to release an accidentally
tarpitted address on the fly, or customize trigger
points and durations to the realities of our traffic,
and not Ipswitch's? Sorry, looks like we're SOL.

It again highlights the systemic problem with Imail I
reluctantly stated two weeks ago:

"My biggest complaint about Imail was not the
features--it was the half-baked implementation of most
of them. It was maddening--enough functionality to be
ticked on a feature list, but often inflexible,
untweakable and sometimes pathetically unusable."

Look, I'm glad that Ipswitch FINALLY has basic
tarpitting available--but realize that competing
servers now give their customers interfaces like this
(attached jpg) to allow adjustments for their network
conditions. It also has a separate bypass list (bypass
tarpit trigger by domain, IP, or email address).

Ipswitch is not going to win old customers back, keep
exisiting ones, or gain many new with clueless,
half-hearted functionality like this. And what manager
actually signed-off that controlling a major feature
via regedit was "good enough" in 2005?!? That person
cares nothing of quality and should be fired. Clear the
cobwebs man, and turn the programmers loose on doing it
right!!!

I don't want to rain on Ipswitch's new release parade
tonight--but I hope the other important new additions
in 8.2 have a lot more flexibility and fine-tuning
capability than this tarpitting implementation.

Unbelievable...requiring registry editing for basic
settings in 2005...SHEESH!

\unfasten seat belt, remove Nomex, rant off\  :-)

Dev


Wednesday, April 27, 2005, 1:40:07 PM, you wrote:

DH> The thing I was interested in was the
DH> Dictionary attack feature that breaks a connection
DH> after so many ERRs in a single connection.  I guess
DH> that isn't configurable, because there's no place
DH> in the GUI to set it.  Not that I need it, but it
DH> is really the thing that Imail needs most IMO, a
DH> defense against the dictionary attacks that forced
DH> me and many others to put up an IMgate box or use
DH> BlackIce or some other method of mitigating the
DH> extreme loads that Imail was experiencing when it
DH> was dealing with the dictionary attacks on its own.

<<attachment: tarpit1.jpg>>

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