Why this site?: Prior to this, Tom Shaw's rule set was only available as an excel spreadsheet. We discussed having other options for users. If an online database was created, there would be better organization and opportunities to provide custom rule sets. There has been a lot of re-organization and rule tuning recently which is incorporated in the data set at this site.

What's in the download files?: The download files are formatted to be directly used by STF. If you wish to use separate rules files, you will need to create RULESFILE preferences. For example:

RULESFILE format rules
RULESFILE content rules
RULESFILE 45day rules
RULESFILE blackholes
RULESFILE virus rules

The .gz download files are generated by the database. The .sit files are generated by hand until a workable script gets figured out. A database query restricts the outputs to only active and test status rules. The fields/columns that don't belong in an STF rules file are stripped. Once the file(s) are downloaded and decompressed, thay can be put in the EIMS filters folder along with STF, or the contents can be copied and pasted into your existing rules files.

How is this site done?: The GUI middleware product that contains the web user interface logic and accesses the database is Qilan (pronounced kai' lan). You can read about Qilan at the Qilan site. Qilan works with the query selected on the web page to pass the proper SQL to Openbase and feed the results back to Apache. The Qilan engine also generates new files after Tom has made edits by passing the proper SQL query to Openbase and iterating the records returned into one field. Qilan can allow a web page to call Unix scripts. The Qilan field is then written to a file via stdout and makefile using shell scripts on the Unix side of OS X. Another shell script controlled by Qilan gzips the tab delimited file and copies it to the directory where the web page link can access it. (Actually this stuff wasn't that hard, the Qilan GUI saves a lot of time and takes care of the SQL, but the shell scripts had to be figured out and hand coded). This site is split between a couple of Macs. One is a beige G3 running OS X version 10.1.3 using Tenon Intersystems iTools 6.5.1 with Apache 1.3.22. The backend SQL database engine used for rule storage is OpenBase

 

Future plans:

• Store user profiles and allow each user to store their selection of the generic filters appropriate for their download.
• highlighting of new filters to be reviewed and selected
• ability to store custom filters
• Enter and nominate new generic filters
• email notification of new generic filters being posted (good for new virus filters!)