Bejtlich - versions

I really enjoyed reading this post from Richard Bejtlich. There is one piece that makes it almost perfect:

"Web 2.0: this is what is here, with more on the way -- essentially indefensible applications all running over port 80 TCP (or at least HTTP) that no developer really understands and for which no one takes responsibility"

I saw once a perfect example of this "no developer really understands". I was called on a weekend by a developer who was trying to deploy his new application into production. Obviously, the usual suspect for the problems he was facing was the firewall.

I spent almost an hour to understand not only where the application was running, but also its architecture. It end up that he wasn't aware that his web service needed a HTTP server! :-) After solving that specific problem, I scheduled some basic networking classes with that group of developers the next week. I noticed how deep they knew about Java, and other programming stuff, but they didn't have a clue about the data flow of their applications in a network perspective. Nice context to work with, specially if you you're trying to control the information flow on your network.