[Techtalk] How to block ports / tangent

[Cynthia Kiser]

Quoting Carla Schroder <carla at bratgrrl.com>:
> And of course I modestly recommend my own Linux Networking Cookbook, which has 
> a fabulous chapter devoted to iptables firewalls. 

Hmmm after browsing the table of contents, I may just have to treat
myself to a copy - though your Linux Cookbook looks like more fun to
me. Perhaps because I have been avoiding learning any networking stuff
beyond what files to edit to put a machine on an already managed
network. That said, I think I need to learn how to do some basic
network troubleshooting. I don't suppose you are planning to include
stuff like traffic sniffing in an upcoming book, or are you? 

Being a web applications developer, the kind of info I am looking for
is stuff like:

    prove that your ssl setup is giving you end to end encryption from
    the browser, through the web sever, to LDAP. 

    where is your http request getting lost? local network? at the
    router out of your house? before the load balancer? between the
    load balancer and the web server? 

    where did my cookie go? did the web server not send it? or did
    something drop it before it got back to my browser? (I have some
    old, low end, load balancers. They load balance fine, but I can't
    run one of my sites with active load balancing because when I do,
    folks get asked to reauthenticated - even though my session stuff
    is in the shared database, not in memory in an app server.)

    And at the moment, why is firefox showing a continuous spinning
    wheel (indicating content trasfer) even though the page is done
    rendering. This started when I got a new Mac running Leopard. I
    thought it was a plugin but I have uninstalled just about
    everything except the web developers tool kit. 

-- 
Cynthia N. Kiser
cnk at ugcs.caltech.edu