|
Bad News
|
B-Monitor tags standard items, such as author, subject, date and time; standard violations, such as offensive language, sexual harassment and gambling; and configurable features, such as product names and transaction types. The tags also can classify the sender's intention, goal or mood. In the labs I installed B-Monitor in an enterprise messaging environment running Sendmail under Solaris on a Sun Fire 280R server and a Sun Ultra 10 workstation. I changed the appliance's IP address and manually configured the bmonitor.xml and adminclient.xml files with the primary mail server's IP address. I set the device to monitor and filter mail for the test domain (w2k.nwc.com) and to handle all incoming and outgoing mail for the primary mail server by configuring sendmail.cf and DNS MX records. To generate mail traffic, I used an SMTP mailer (Blat version 1.9.4) for Windows 2000 Professional on 10 Dell Celeron 500-MHz computers and a mail relay.
Languistics supplied a test collection of 10,000 text files designed to violate an enterprise's acceptable use policy. These files, classified into categories based on content, contained offensive, discriminatory, drug-related and racist language.
After doing a random check to verify the text files' abusiveness, I set up B-Monitor's PolicyBuilder and PolicyMonitor. These Java applications create, view, manage and report on e-mail policies and rules. Using Samba, I exported the applications' directory to a Windows 2000 Server using J2RE 1.3.1_02.
Policies use conditions, actions and exceptions to define specific violations. Conditions are states of a message that exist to trigger a rule. Actions occur when those conditions are met. You can configure exceptions to any rule. For example, you may want to exclude certain rules from applying to some users, like your CEO or CIO. When it ships, B-Monitor will include a Java API to let customers create custom actions, such as sending SMS-based alerts. Unfortunately, B-Monitor does not support Active Directory, LDAP or other directory schemas.
Discover the benefits of scalable backbone and network services for application and cloud providers.
Network automation is gaining momentum. Here's how you can drive this powerful technology to its full potential.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
