Vera Cruz, Mexico, deemed the gateway to the heart of Mexico during the Mexican War, and was besieged by General Scott with 12,000 men from March the 23rd to the 29th 1847. General Morales commanded the town with 4390 men. Scott found no difficulty in landing his soldiers from the island of Lobos, his rendezvous, and in placing his batteries. The town was poorly fortified and Scott's bombardment effected great ruin. On March the 25th Morales held a council of war. He was advised to surrender, but refused to do so, and resigned his command to General Jose Juan Landero. This general surrendered on March the 29th. The Mexican officers were allowed to retain their arms and effects and the soldiers were permitted to retire to their homes. Scott then took possession. Research Battle of Vera Cruz
A castle (from the Latin castellum, meaning fortress) was a stone defensive building. The concept of castles was introduced to the British by the Normans and replaced the earlier Saxonburh. The castle underwent many changes, its size, design, and construction being largely determined by changes in siege tactics and the development of artillery. Outstanding examples are the 12th-century Krak des Chevaliers, Syria (built by crusaders); 13th-century Caernarfon Castle in Wales; and the 15th-century Manzanares el Real in Spain. The main parts of a typical castle are the keep, a large central tower containing store rooms, soldiers' quarters, and a hall for the lord and his family; the inner bailey or walled courtyard surrounding the keep; the outer bailey or second courtyard, separated from the inner bailey by a wall; crenulated embattlements through which missiles were discharged against an attacking enemy; rectangular or round towers projecting from the walls; the portcullis, a heavy grating which could be let down to close the main gate; and the drawbridge crossing the ditch or moat surrounding the castle. Sometimes a tower called a barbican was constructed over a gateway as an additional defensive measure. Early castles (11th century) consisted of an earthen hill (called a motte) surrounded by wooden palisades enclosing a courtyard (called a bailey). The motte supported a wooden keep. Later developments substituted stone for wood and utilised more elaborate defensive architectural detail. After the introduction of gunpowder in the 14th century, castles became less defensible and increases in civil order led to their replacement by unfortified manor houses by the 16th century. Large stone fortifications became popular again in the 18th century, particularly those modelled after the principles of fortification introduced by the French architect Vauban, and were built as late as the first half of the 19th century. In the late 19th century, castle-like buildings were built as residences for the wealthy as part of the Romantic revival in Europe and America. Research Castle
In fortifications, a portcullis is a strong and heavy defensive framework of wood with iron spikes at the bottom hung in grooves within the chief gateway of a fortress or castle. The portcullis could be lowered to bar access during an assault. Research Portcullis
CGI (The Common GatewayInterface) is a specification that allows computer Web servers execute other programs and incorporate their output into the text, graphics, and audio sent to a client Web browser. The server and the CGI program work together to enhance and customise the World Wide Web's capabilities. By providing a standard interface, the CGI specification allows developers use a wide variety of programming tools, such as C and Perl. Research CGI
In computing, a firewall is a system that is set up to control traffic flow between two networks.
Firewalls are most commonly specially configured Unix systems, but firewalls have also been built out of many other systems, including systems designed specifically for use as firewalls. The most common firewall today is CheckPoint FireWall-1, but competitions such as Cisco's PIX are quickly catching up on CheckPoint. One type of firewall is the packet filtering
firewall. In a packet filtering firewall, the firewall examines five characteristics of a packet: Source IP address Source port Destination IP address Destination port IP protocol (TCP or UDP) Based upon rules configured into the firewall, the packet will either be allowed through, rejected, or dropped. If the firewall rejects the packet, it sends a message back to the sender letting him know that the packet was rejected. If the packet was dropped, the firewall simply does not respond to the packet. The sender must wait for the communications to time out. Dropping packets instead of rejecting them greatly increases the time required to scan your network. Packet filtering
firewalls operate on Layer 3 of the OSI model, the Network Layer.
Routers are a very common form of packet filtering firewall. An improved form of the packet filtering firewall is a packet filtering firewall with a stateful inspection engine. With this enhancement, the firewall 'remembers' conversations between systems. It is then necessary to fully examine only the first packet of a conversation.
Another type of firewall is the application-proxy firewall. In a proxying firewall, every packet is stopped at the firewall. The packet is then examined and compared to the rules configured into the firewall. If the packet passes the examinations, it is re-created and sent out. Because each packet is destroyed and re-created, there is a potential that an application-proxy firewall can prevent unknown attacks based upon weaknesses in the TCP/IP protocol suite that would not be prevented by a packet filtering firewall. The drawback is that a separate application-proxy must be written for each application type being proxied. You need an HTTP proxy for web traffic, an FTP proxy for file transfers, a Gopher proxy for Gophertraffic, etc. Application-proxy firewalls operate on Layer 7 of the OSI model, the Application Layer. Application-gateway firewalls also operate on Layer 7 of the OSI model. Application-gateway firewalls exist for only a few network applications.
A typical application-gateway firewall is a system where you must telnet to one system in order telnet again to a system outside of the network. Another type of application-proxy firewall are SOCKS firewalls. Where normal application-proxy firewalls do not require modifications to network clients, SOCKS firewalls requires specially modified network clients. This means you have to modify every system on your internal network which needs to communicate with the external network. On a Windows or OS/2 system, this can be as easy as swapping a few DLL's. Research Firewall
The G6-233 is a Personal Computer by Gateway 2000. It is built around an Intel 233Mhz Pentium II Processor with 64MB of SDRAM (expandable to 384MB), 512KB L2 Cache, 4.3GB, 10ms UltraATA Hard Drive, 1 3.5' 1.44MB Floppy Disk Drive, Mitsumi 32X 90ms CDROM, STBAGP 3D Graphics Accelerator with 4MB DRAM, and supplied with a 15 inch EV500 TCO-92 0.28dp Monitor. Research G6-233
A proxy cache is a computercache system on a network, such as the Internet, often located near to a network gateway and used to reduce the bandwidth required over expensive dedicated internet connections. Proxy caches serve many users with cached files from many remote servers. Their primary usefullness is in caching files requested by one user for later retrieval by another. Some
proxy caches are part of cache hierarchies, in which a cache can ask neighboring caches for a requested file to reduce the need to fetch the file directly from it's source. Research Proxy Cache
Traceroute is a computer program for the Unix platform that attempts to trace the route an IPpacket would follow to some Internet host. It traces the route by launching UDP probe packets with a small time to live (ttl) and then waiting for an ICMP 'time exceeded' reply from a gateway. Research Traceroute
In computing, mail bombs are emailed messages designed to crash a recipient's electronic mailbox, or to send unathorised emails using a target's SMTPgateway.
Mail bombs can be a single message with huge files attached, or thousands of emails sent with the intention of flooding a mailbox or server or both. Another form of mail bomb involves sending thousands of emails to different people, with a forged 'from' address and asking the recipients to reply, thereby generating thousands of emails to the target victim (the address specified in the 'from' address). Research Mail Bomb
The Probert Encyclopaedia was designed, edited and programed by
Matt and Leela Probert
Abbreviations
Research Battle of Vera Cruz
