Re: Help configuring Symantec NIS ad blocking - tech support is worthless
From: Fred Elbel (frelbel@nospam.csn.net.deletethispart)Date: 04/19/02
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From: Fred Elbel <frelbel@nospam.csn.net.deletethispart> Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2002 14:10:16 GMT
On Thu, 18 Apr 2002, "Scott Cerny" wrote:
> Fred,
>
> I work for Symantec on NIS (not tech support), so I'm familiar with the way
> the ad blocking strings work just from personal experience. I'm not sure
> the answer tech support gave you was necessarily the opposite of mine. I
> think there is just a bit of confusion on their part about wildcards. When
> a string is added to the ad blocking list, the wildcards at the beginning
> and end of the string is implied. It is not necessary to add a * to the end
> of the entry, in fact you shouldn't add a *. For example, the entry
> http://www.abc.com/top/banners would block any ad whose URL contains that
> string, such as http://www.abc.com/top/banners/ad.gif. Another example
> would be a simple entry like "banner" (without the quotes). This entry
> would block any ad whose URL contained the string "banner", such as
> http://www.abc.com/top/banner/ad.gif. I hope that makes some sense.
Hi, Scott:
Yes, that makes sense. But again, this is not at all what tech support
said. They indicated that wildcard matching *is* incorporated into
rule pattern matching, and they said nothing about a "floating" match
like the "banner" example you gave.
Here is a follow post from tech support:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
On Thu, 18 Apr 2002, Ben Nahorney responded to Fred on the Symantec
forum:
Subject: Re: Ad blocking syntax, documentation, and operation
This is a copy of Symantec's response to your Ask Symantec Discussion
Group question. If you would like to reply to this message, follow
this link and post your reply there:
>Thanks, Eddie, for your definitive response. So you are saying that
>wildcard (*.*) matching is incorporated into the pattern matching
>algorithm. You are also saying that the algorithm, without wildcards
>specified, will match for the length of the supplied rule string.
Yes.
>So one form of making an ad blocking rule more generic is to shorten
>the string and trim off the trailing file name and subdirectories.
>However, above, you also said that wildcard pattern matching is
>allowed. So just to confirm, using your example, would the following
>also be a 'generic' modification?
>h t t p ://st21.yahoo.com/*.*
Yes it would. This would block any content matching the blocking
rules and coming from st21.yahoo.com.
end post
-----------------------------------------------------------------
> I do agree that it is not explained clearly in the product documentation. I
> will do my best to fix that for future versions of NIS.
Thank you.
Now let me ask: if you review the Symantec forum thread (posts drop
off after 2 weeks), there were numerous people who responded to my
questions. None of their responses were similar to yours, and most of
them were clearly hedging and giving conflicting results.
I think you are correct and I thank you for your response.
It indicates that tech support is essentially clueless and is willing
to "shoot from the hip" in answering specific questions. This is
clearly a problem and has to do with Symantec product training,
product documentation, tech support training, and especially tech
support management. To whom should these concerns be addressed?
Fred Elbel
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