[TriLUG] Fun Cheap Firewall (or web/email/dns/whatever server)

[Peter Neilson]

Clay Stuckey wrote:

> ... It breaks 
> my heart when poor decisions cause less than the best to be provided to 
> the war fighter. I put up with this crazyness because I know that my 
> efforts have a direct impact on improving the capabilities, safety and 
> morale of the troops. The environments that I work in are 99% Linux so 
> this absolutely is a TRILUG topic.

The reference I made to McClellan was also weirdly on topic. The man is 
both reveiled as an inept leader who failed to use military intelligence 
that was afforded to him, and also praised as a superb general. His 
troops thought him both brave and caring. General Lee, against whom he 
fought, found him to be his most competent adversary. Lincoln fired him 
and may or may not have restored him. And part of his story, the 
military intelligence part, involves a series of military orders, lost 
by or stolen from both sides! Those orders, including the famous 
"missing" order 191, were on slips of paper. Not today, but perhaps 
sometime in our future, orders could be on the successor to the thumb 
drive. "In the event of capture, clean the dirt from under your 
thumbnails and grind it into the dust with your feet, to avoid the 
undernail intellichips from falling into enemy hands."

Unix, long before Torvalds and Linux, had various connections to the US 
military and specifically to military intelligence in its incarnation as 
NSA. (NSA? What? No Such Agency.) The first US government user of Unix 
was NSA, and their project was apparently to develop a secure version of 
it. Most labs outside BTL that worked with Unix were funded through the 
US Government, usually the military. My lab at MIT ran on Air Force funding.

TriLUG topic? I think so. Anti-US-military? Not at all, Chip, not at 
all. Not any more than the WWII cartoons (such as Dear Gertrood by 
Wendell Ehret) that poked fun as the difficulties of being a GI.