Should You Set Your Sights on Windows XP

Case Study

New Equipment for the Farmshed
While we hear a great deal about how rural Australia lags behind the cities in access to and adoption of the Internet, this hasn't stopped The Farmshed from wanting to be a one stop shop on the Internet for the agricultural sector. More to the point, by providing decision support services, market intelligence, and a marketplace for agribusiness inputs, The Farmshed wants to use the Internet to introduce efficiencies into Australian agriculture. These services include weekly updates, market alerts, and SMS alerts on futures prices and cash prices.

-Think of companies like Steggles or Ingham, which are growing at six percent, whereas the rest of the sector is growing at one percent," says Farmshed senior technical architect Glen Andrews. -We hope to get medium-sized agribusinesses to share that same growth by giving them the same support services and market intelligence the larger companies have."

Andrews supports the PCs of 30 administrative and technical staff, as well as the production staff from the Web site. Initially, these machines were all running Windows NT and starting to be upgraded to Windows 2000 Professional. Then Andrews received advance copies of Windows XP Professional from Microsoft and rolled it out to the admin and technical staff's PCs.

XP cuts out some system administration tasks and simplifies or improves others, says Andrews. The Remote Desktop feature was a key decision factor. -We've got remote sales staff and staff at home who want to access office functionality and work from home. However, because our sales staff are running around the country in rural areas, we still wanted something that used relatively low bandwidth."

The integration of videoconferencing and remote assistance into Windows Messenger is assisting Andrews' technical support tasks as well. -For a small business that's often not great help because you're usually in the same room. However, since I have remote staff, I can take control over their machine even if they're in Cloncurry," he says.

Andrews finds the IntelliMirror feature a great time saver, allowing him to push out standard images to all the PCs. -You can create a scripted install file, and that becomes a no-interaction installation, just bung it in and it works. It saved us a hell of a lot of time, we did 20 machines in a night," he says.

What's a Raw Socket?
If Smart Tags caused the most XP media furore, the raging argument over something called full TCP/IP socket support, or raw sockets support, has created the most sheer confusion. Full socket support means that the entire functionality of TCP/IP, the communications protocol used on the Internet, is built into Windows so that individual programs don't need to include support themselves. Prior versions of Windows 95, 98, and Me did not have this built-in functionality, although it's been in NT and 2000 all along.

Steve Gibson and other security advocates screamed that providing full TCP/IP socket support in Windows XP would provide would-be hackers an easy way to exploit PCs for illicit purposes. Full socket support makes it easier for miscreants to spoof or falsify a PC's IP address, letting Trojan horse programs escape detection when they launch denial of service attacks. Using spoofed IP addresses makes it difficult, if not impossible, for system administrators and ISPs to isolate and stop such attacks.

Microsoft countered that full socket support is a non-issue and that it enhances XP's own Internet features and makes it easier for others to implement theirs.

However, one issue lingers: most XP users will by default have top-level, or administrator, rights to modify their Windows system. Administrator-level users can install, add, modify, or delete apps and files; change other users' access to the systems; and use programs that take advantage of full socket support and address spoofing. That means anyone who breaks into your XP PC can run amok on your system and even use it to launch denial of service attacks.

There are good reasons for including full socket support. For one, it already exists in Windows NT and 2000, as it does in Linux, SunOS, and other operating systems. Full support in the OS means that developers don't have to write code for those functions into each and every application they create (as they do for Windows 95 through Me), and that keeps apps smaller and more stable. Besides, hackers had an easy enough time writing Trojan horses into their malicious code and using them to launch distributed denial of service attacks against Gibson's Web site and othersâ€"all from Windows machines without full socket support. Gibson's call to action is to limit the number of users who have admin rights on all systems and to avoid working in admin mode as much as possible; instead, be deliberate about setting up non-administrator user accounts for yourself, your coworkers, and your family to use in order to minimise system corruption and maintain security.