Practical UNIX and Internet Security, 3rd Edition

Appendix D. Electronic Resources

There is a certain irony in trying to include a comprehensive list of electronic resources in a printed book such as this one. Electronic resources such as web pages, newsgroups, and mailing lists are updated on an hourly basis; new releases of computer programs can be published every few weeks.

Books, on the other hand, are infrequently updated. The first edition of Practical UNIX Security, for instance, was written between 1989 and 1990, and published in 1991. The second edition was started in 1995 and not published until 1996. This edition was written in the second half of 2002. Interim reprintings incorporated corrections, but did not include new material.

Some of the programs listed in this appendix appear to be “dead,” or, in the vernacular of academia, “completed.” For instance, consider the case of COPS, developed as a student project by Dan Farmer at Purdue University under the direction of Gene Spafford. The COPS program is still referenced by many first-rate texts on computer security. But as of 2002, COPS hasn’t been updated in more than seven years and fails to install cleanly on many major versions of Unix; and Dan Farmer has long since left Gene’s tutelage and gone on to fame, fortune, and other projects (such as the SATAN tool and the Coroner’s Toolkit). COPS rests moribund on a number of FTP servers, apparently a dead project. But in the second edition of this book, we wrote:

Nevertheless, before this book is revised for a third time, ...