July 2003 Archives
These guys are my heroes:
- Jon Postel of ISI
- Steve Jobs of Apple
- Bill Gates of Microsoft
- Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems
An open letter to sun, that complaints about their reaction on security incidents:
More than most times, I usually cannot find a single thing on Sunsolve referencing the latest security threats (using a paid support account with access to all the private stuff) and as of the time of writing, the "Latest Security Bulletin" on SunSolve has something from November 2002 on it. (I know there have been at least 5 major security problems with Solaris since then)
Really? Wasn't there any security issue since November 2002? I don't think so.
If you are a SUN SysAdmin, you should not rely on their security bulletins.
Subscribing to mailing lists like Bugtraq and CERT is highly recommended.
Dealing with printing in Unix is fun. Especially when you need to print a PDF document from your FreeBSD desktop to a shared HP LaserJet printer on a Windows XP machine behind NAT router!
In this special case you should be a Unix geek, network admin and also have too much free time to play with diffrent softwares.
You need to have Samba installed for SMB part of this game, and also CUPS is your friend for printer operation. CUPS comes with a neat web interface that makes life easy. It also has a good database of printers that contains many printers.
If you are considering Unix for you desktop, CUPS is a must.
Spammers' new trick: Sign your mail with PGP and most of spam filtering programs (like SpamAssassin) will not recognize it. This way spammers make sure that you receive their mails.
Technically speaking, spam filter programs consider signed messages as authticated and pass them without further check.
Wise spammers!!
I didn't know that MovableType is already in FreeBSD ports collection! You can find it at /usr/ports/www/MT
Its cool! just get into its directory and type make. and you will have a complete MovableType installed on your system. Highly recommended.
Seen this on someones email signature:
"experience is what causes a person to make new mistakes instead of old ones."
Truth
This new Cisco IOS bug was not too dangerous itself. The emergency upgrade process was more dangerous. I am sure there was many long time outages during internet reboot night. People were upgrading all their routers, especially when the exploit code released in a public mailing list.
There are still many routers vulnerable to this new security hole and many administrators are not still aware of this new bug. Exploit code (called shadowchode) and also instructions learning how to simulate the attack using hping are widely available on internet.
After leaving FreeBSD project, Matt Dillon has started his own BSD based project. DragonflyBSD supposed to be continuation of FreeBSD 4.x branch. I guess Matt was not happy with the new changes in 5.x branch, so he started his own OS. A CVS repository is also available.
I don't like busy desktops with many icons and everything spreaded on it. Only a web browser and some terminal windows are enough.
Check out my desktop screenshots ( shot 1 - 257KB , shot 2 - 384KB ) running WindowMaker 0.80 on X 4.3.
Yes, I have WiFi on my laptop. Lucent/Orinoco 802.11b Silver card which works fine, even better than my XP (My Windows XP sometimes failes to associate card with my wireless network).
Here is the dmesg snippet if you are curious:
heaven:~# dmesg | grep wi0
wi0:
wi0: 802.11 address: 00:02:2d:5e:8c:ff
wi0: using Lucent Technologies, WaveLAN/IEEE
wi0: Lucent Firmware: Station (8.72.1)
wi0: 11b rates: 1Mbps 2Mbps 5.5Mbps 11Mbps
wi0: bad alloc 206 != 203, cur 0 nxt 0
whole dmesg if you are even more curious. (Ignore those unknown entries in my dmesg, I didn't expect a better output from my fujitsu laptop)
oops! bad alloc 206!!! But it still works fine. I have also used Cisco Aironet 350 card and USRobotics cards without any modification to kernel.
No, it is not Linux, it is something original. I don't like copies when the original is available for free. ;-)
I am still running FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE ( I make world at least once a week ) on my laptop happily while some of my friends are experiencing problems with 5.1 on their laptops. Most common problems are APM/ACPI, Sound and Modem issues.
For me the only problem is my Modem which is a Rockwell softmodem and a little bit of APM problems. As for the modem I can't do anything since there is no driver in FreeBSD for this softmodem, and the problem with APM is my laptop's VIA mainboard which is not comparable to intel equivalents.
I am using X only to have many fullscreen xterms and graphical web surfing. and thats really enough for me.
p.s. I am thinking of posting some screenshots from my desktop in a couple of days.
Not only the pagerank, but the Google and all its hype is dead to me. In age of internet and light-speed data transmission, I interpret death as lack of innovation . All those Froogle, Catalogs and other search ideas are not important to me. I only need an accurate, neutral, fast and lightweight search engine.
With all the new changes in Yahoo! search facilities and their new acquisitions, I am sure that they have something revolutionary in their mind.
I can clearly see the day that google stands in second place, after Yahoo!.
Wise point from Steve Friedl about /bin/true on Solaris platform:
#! /bin/sh
#
# @(#)true.sh 1.5 88/02/07 SMI; from UCB
#
exit 0Looks interesting! This has been reworked 5 times to get to the current status.
Nettoons is the way that juniper uses to convince people to switch from cisco.
I personally don't care about the cartoons (sorry,they are nonsense) and I guess juniper should use its resources to tune up its gear and provide better support services. Such efforts from a top manufacturer like Juniper makes me more negative about them. It has negative effect.
Finally I switched from KDE to WindowMaker completely.
Frankly, KDE was heavy for my daily use. I need web browsing, email, network tools, instant messaging, Text Editor, Image Editing and Technical Drawing. All those multimedia and game stuff and noisy desktop was not usable for me. So I decided to switch.
And WindowMaker was the (probably right) choice. It is lightweight and fast. It had whatever I really need. I use Mozilla Firebird as Web browser, aterm is my favorite console, Gimp and Gaim are also my daily pals. AbiWord, Gnumeric and Dia are also my daily apps.
The only challenge was finding a suitable file manager, and asfiles was the answer to the question.
It is working fine overally, and I am happy with my new desktop.
I have been busy with ISP/Datacenter stuff and multihoming during past couple of days. Many many useful docs on internet. RFC2901 (Guide to Administrative Procedures of the Internet Infrastructure) is a good point to start, also NRSC's ISP Resource Center, Datacenter Resource Site and Sean Donelan's General Design Considerations were all great.
I suggest ISP and Datacenter operators to have a look at above sites. I've learned plenty of things from them.
