herzlich@NGP.UTEXAS.EDU.UUCP (01/15/87)
>Subject: Security software >Reply-To: "DAVE DOROSZ" <dorosz@esdvax> >We're investigating various security packages for our VAX. Does anyone >have any experience with AUDIT and CONTRL software produced by Clyde >Digital Systems? We're considering these two packages to run under VMS >and would be interested in comments on it, good or bad, from other users. >In particular, we would like to know the effect these pacakages have on >response time and wether Clyde Digital's claim that they only require >10K of disc for every 20 ports and 2% CPU overhead, is realistic. We tested both AUDIT and CONTRL about a year ago. We had some problems at first but got good respons from the engineers and received patches immediately. At that time, they didn't handled Virtual terminals very well and were crashing the system. The "observed" performance was excellent from both products. We didn't run monitor to watch the CPU usage but did observe that the detached process was very compact in terms of memory usage and accumulated very few page faults and I/O operations over long periods of time. You preconfigure the number of simultaneous users for the CONTRL system. We only wanted consultants to be able to CONTRL another terminal so we configured the system for 5. For those unfamiliar, CONTRL is like ADVISE on a TOPS-20 system - both the user and advisor can send data to the terminal or program. AUDIT is a 'PHOTO' or script(1) program. The program was very slick - you could actually call AUDIT from a program - and it had lots of options. We uncovered a bug if the user tried to type his log file before exiting out of the AUDIT session. The program would start grabbing what appeared to be random pages of memory. It runs heavily privileged. The second bug came from logging out before closing the log file. Audit was still entering data into the log file. This was the problem of the virtual/physical terminal problem and was fixed as mentioned above. You should also note that an optional program called FRAMER is needed to handle full screen output properly. More $$$$! The programs were still excellent and these bugs are fixed. Now, why didn't we buy these programs? 1. Cost - They spent a lot of research money and they're trying to to recover it, all at once. $3,000 per program sounds about right. It was much too high for a utility program. Their cluster pricing is terrible. Also check software maintenance costs. 2. Gary Grebus/Marty Sasaki - keep updating PHOTO on the DECUS tapes. It's not perfect (freezes/kills a system if the user is heavily privileged) but the program works and the price is right. 3. At the time we were testing the software Clyde Digital was going through a major change in engineering and support. You can probably talk to Mr. Clyde at DEXPO and ask him yourself. You might talk with the Clyde Digital salesman again. I understand they were repackaging these programs with limited functionality for a lot less?? -- Larry Herzlich --University of Texas at Austin, Computation Center --{seismo,harvard,ihnp4}!ut-sally!ut-ngp!herzlich --CC.LHerzlich@a20.cc.Utexas.Edu