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Leading itemsSecurity web site Packet Storm was taken off-line by Harvard University on July 1st. Packet Storm was described by SecurityPortal.com as, " gigabytes of open source and free security software, categorized in a well thought out manner. We could find nearly all the tools we needed there, from network analyzers and intrusion detection utilities, to firewalls and encryption solutions. " They covered the incident in this article, focusing on the need to share responsibility for protecting important software archives, such as Packet Storm. A mainstream media view of the incident came from this ZDnet article, which focused on how Harvard was caught in the cross-fire between Packet Storm creator and maintainer Ken Williams and Anti-Online's John P. Vranasevich. More partisan views can be found at hackernews.com or Slashdot. From our perspective, the good story that came out was how quickly people were able to work together to retrieve the thought-to-be-lost data from Packet Storm. Rik van Riel started a movement to find pieces of the site downloaded by various people and piece together the original site, with relatively quick success. Harvard has now returned Ken's data, but the effort to find a new primary home for the site continues. Downloads from Packet Storm were estimated to run over 8GB per day, so the development of a good mirror system is essential and up to 50 mirrors may be required to spread the load of support for Packet Storm across the world. If you would be interested in becoming a mirror for Packet Storm, consider joining one of the packetstorm mailing lists, described here, and inform people on the list of your willingness to help. Linux for mission-critical applications is the topic of this PCWeek article by Anne Chen. It contains two major case studies where Linux was chosen for a mission-critical application. The first was by Cendant, looking for a cost-effective way to implement an efficient hotel reservation system for its franchisees, including Ramada and Days Inn. In the second case study, oil-giant Amerada Hess saved millions of dollars by replacing an IBM SP2 system with a "parallel multiprocessor Linux solution" (can you say Beowulf?). That decision was recommended by the company geophysicists; management listened. These are some fabulous examples of Linux moving out of the realm of web servers and ISPs, into situations where its cost-effectiveness and reliability can reap great rewards. It seems Lotus will only come kicking and screaming into the fold after all. This article takes a look at Lotus' plan to release a Linux version of their Domino product in late 1999. However, it ends with the comment, "What Lotus won't be doing, however, is bringing the Lotus Notes client or SmartSuite Millennium Edition 9.5 office suite to Linux. Users looking to using Lotus applications on their KDE or Gnome desktops can forget about seeing Linux ports of these--at least for the immediate future. Of course, we don't know what portability or technical issues may be responsible for this lackluster response to demand for such products. If there are no such barriers, it is hard to understand why Lotus would not welcome an opportunity to bring office desktop applications to a new platform on which Microsoft applications are not yet available. In his column from yesterday, entitled "Linux Don't Blink, Dave Winer had some encouraging words for the Linux community and some good advice for Microsoft. Actually, the advice is so good, that we hope (and expect) that Microsoft won't follow it! To sum it up, he tells them to first match our price (or at least get in the ballpark), keep their hands off the Linux community (it will only backfire) and market to developers based on their intelligence. That's powerfully good advice. Last week, we mentioned the Free Practice Management Project, the first open source project in the Medical field for which we'd received a press release. As is not unusual, a few of our readers wrote in to point out other projects in this field that have been around longer, but received little press, including the Freemed Project, which is reported to be only a month away from a stable, usable release. Also out there in this field are LinuDent, for dental offices, and Tk_familypractice, which runs on both Linux and Windows95 and has modules for prescription management, progress notes and more. This Week's LWN was brought to you by:
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July 8, 1999
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Security page. |
SecurityNewsPolice and intelligence agencies in Britain gained new power with the passage of legislation that will allow them to require the disclosure of encryption keys or other information needed to get access to encrypted material. Although the controversial topic of key escrow did not make it into this legislation, Hong Kong police are definitely calling for the introduction of key escrow policies.Dan Farmer and Wietse Venema will be giving a one-day seminar entitled "Dan & Wietse's Computer Forensics Analysis Class", on August 6th in Yorktown Heights, NY, USA. This free class will focus on a series of case studies and examine the information left in the wake of a security incident, on disk, memory and elsewhere. They state, "This class will be given only once. It will not be repeated, and no recordings will be made." If you are anywhere near Yorktown Heights on August 6th, this is a not-to-be-missed opportunity. We wish we could be there as well. Security ReportsChris Leishman reported a security problem with LPRng in this note. Patrick Powell responded with information on how to configure the security options in LPRng and a warning that running LPRng and any other print server SUID root is inherently insecure, due to the unreliability of the protocol used for authentication. If you are running LPRng, you will want to take a look at these posts.Salvatore Sanfilippo reported a problem with cfingerd 1.3.2, for which Larry W. Cashdollar responded quickly with a patch, though deprecating the use of finger in general. Andreas Bogk agreed and recommend that people who insist on using finger take a look at dfingerd from David Lichteblau. Netscape has acknowledge an SSL handshake bug in Netscape Enterprise Server that can be used to crash the server. They have made patches available. UpdatesNo updates for Red Hat, SuSE, Slackware, Debian or Caldera have been posted since July 1st.ResourcesComputer Security News Dailyis a nicely organized source of links to today's security-related press articles.Pgp 6.5.1 has been announced. A Beta 1 version of SecureCRT 3.0 has been released. EventsComputer Security 99 has issued their Call-for-Participation for their event, scheduled for October 4th through the 8th, 1999, in Mexico City, Mexico.Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
July 8, 1999
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Kernel page. |
Kernel developmentThe current development kernel on the mirror sites is 2.3.9, though from Alan Cox's diary, it appears that 2.3.10 has been released and prepatches for 2.3.11 are already out there, apparently containing enough of Alan's patches that he didn't consider it necessary to release any ac patches for 2.3.10. The current stable version remains at 2.2.10. Alan Cox's patches for this kernel are up to ac9. There were a lot of active reports of oopsen with the 2.2.10 kernel in the last week, but not a lot of clarity as to whether the specific causes were from hardware issues or from the kernel itself. Presumably the fact that 2.2.10 has not yet been released is an indication that no one is confident the file corruption problems have been found and resolved. Alan enable "slab poisoning" in his patches for the 2.2.10 kernel series with his ac7 patch. To quote Alan, "The slab poisoner puts 5a5a5a5a through memory to try and trip up code that doesn't clear memory properly or uses memory that has been freed." So far, this has caught bugs in several drivers, including the ide-tape, AMD scsi and ALSA drivers. None of them were serious, but well worth squashing, nonetheless. Discussion of albods raged on unabated this week, but no new milestones seem to have been reached. A second topic, hotly discussed but without particular issue, was how to improve oops reporting for Linux. We mentioned last week the availability of the kmsgdump patch, to allow kernel messages to be dumped to a floppy disk. Discussion started there and moved to the question of why such dumps could not go directly to a hard disk, or more creatively, why they could not be broadcast via a network card. All of these methods seemed preferable to many to the default method of writing an oops out by hand or hooking up a serial cable. However, the concensus seemed to be that writing to a hard disk was too dangerous given the PC architecture. The ethernet option was intriguing to some people and Henning P. Schmiedeh did mention he might take a crack at the code needed to do this. Hans Reiser asked for some documentation on the new wait.h that came with 2.3.8. Ingo Molnar responded with a list of four major changes/goals introduced into the waitqueues. Linux access control has been a hot topic lately. One site with relevant information is http://research-cistw.saic.com/cace/, which contains descriptions of and comparisons of the different means of access control. It also has links to access control projects, such as the Domain and Type Enforcement Project. [Thanks to "Don"] Improving large memory support was the reason for this DMA patch from H.J. Lu. Douglas Gilbert then pointed out that Jaroslav Kysela has already posted a patch for the same problem, and suggested that the two should talk. Various patches and updates released this week:
Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
July 8, 1999
For other kernel news, see: |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Distributions page. |
DistributionsWe mentioned the Hard Hat Linux distribution for embedded systems from Montevista Software, Inc., last week. Unfortunately, it seems there is a conflict over the use of the name. Hard Data Ltd, a Canadian company, has been distributing a version of Linux called "Hard Hat Linux" for its customers for nearly two years. It is unfortunate to see community members become at loggerheads over such issues. Perhaps they could consider splitting the name between "Hard Hat Linux" and "Hard Hat Embedded Linux", with links between the two sites to redirect people coming to the wrong site. We did contact Montevista for their side of the story, but did not receive a response. The Laetos Project aims to develop an end-user-friendly distribution based on GNU/Debian Linux. More information is available on their website. Stormix Technologies sent us this press release about their new distribution, Storm Linux, for which they've made available a pre-release (alpha) version. No URLs for Storm Linux were provided, though we've contacted them and hope to get more information in the near future. DebianThis week's Debian Weekly News is now available. It covers the impact of the perl 5.005 package on Debian, the new mailing list, debian-release, a summary against the proposed move of non-free and contrib and pointers to a long discussion about the relationship between Debian maintainers and their upstream developers.EnochEnoch 0.6 has just been released. Enoch is geared towards high performance, providing pgcc-optimized builds for Intel Pentium, Pentium Pro/II/III and AMD K6 series processors.MandrakeThe Linux Mandrake team has happily announced the availability of a Mandrake download site with all strong encryption in Sweden. This is the beginning of their plans to develop more mirrors (outside the US) in the near future.Yellow Dog LinuxYDL Champion Server 1.1 will be debuted at this month's MacWorld NY. Yellow Dog Linux is a PowerPC-specific Linux distribution. This latest release extends hardware support from Apple PowerPCs, through the new PowerBook G3s to some IBM RS/6000s. It will run the 2.2.6 kernel, and up-to-date packages for KDE, Gnome and more.Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
July 8, 1999
Please note that not every distribution will show up every week. Only distributions with recent news to report will be listed.
Lists of Distributions |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Development page. |
Development toolsBreaking the arbitrary boundaries normally imposed on items for this section, Minotaur 0.1 has been announced. It is a generalized extension that allows you to run Python scripts from Tcl, Tcl scripts from Perl, Perl scripts from Python, etc. "Minotaur works by loading the appropriate shared library into another script language's context. So, for example, running Tcl from Python means that the Python main program imports the Minotaur extension, which in turn loads the Tcl libraries - thus Tcl becomes "embedded" into the Python runtime environment (which is similar to embedding Tcl in a normal C program). As involved as that sounds, performance is already surprisingly good, and the capability is turning out to be quite useful. This is an alpha release and should be treated as such. JavaVersion 0.3.2 of the Java-based game, humanoid, has been released.PerlGuy Kawasaki (formerly of Apple) and Sun's Bill Joy will be keynote speakers at The Perl Conference in August (part of the O'Reilly Open Source Conference. More information, including talk titles, is available at the Perl News for July 7th, 1999.Welcome to CPAST, Comprehensive Perl Arcana Society Tapestry states the new perl history site. The primary resource on the site so far (besides poetry) is the Perl Timeline. PythonUpdated Python documentation for Python 1.5.2 has been announced and is available at http://www.python.org/doc/.SmalltalkSmallInterfaces brings the idea of interfaces explicitly into Smalltalk.Tcl/tkSection Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
July 8, 1999 |
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Development projectsFront PageFront Page for Linux? Wouter Liefting pointed out that a Linux version of Front Page 4.0 appears to be available.GimpThis week's Gimp Kernel Cousin reports on the Gimp Help Browser, which has just been committed to the CVS for inclusion in upcoming Gimp releases, a problem with menu thumbnails and a patch for a new bell-and-whistle: drag and open.GnomeHavoc Pennington's Gnome Summary for June 28 - July 4 is now available. It includes pointers to Gnome buttons from Ville Ptsi, a list of new features in the file manager, a new pager applet called Desk Guide and more.LinuxPower now has out a new Bi-Weekly Report on Gnome. LinuxToday has an audio interview with Miguel de Icaza available. High AvailabilityVersion 0.4.1 of Alan Robertson's Heartbeat code is out. It contains code from Volker Wiegand for monitoring and controlling heartbeat via /proc. He mentions that the new code is not yet stable or recommended for any but the brave.MagicPointAn update to magic point 1.05a has been released, containing performance enhancements and some memory leak fixes that caused crashes under Linux.MidgardSeveral new developments are highlighted in this week's Midgard Weekly Summary and it appears that Midgard 1.1 may make it out later this week. For more information on the Midgard web development platform, check the homepage for Midgard.ZopeHere's this week's Zope summary from Amos Latteier. There are plans to make Zope work better with the Python Imaging Library and OpenGL. Martijn Pieters posted a patch to allow customizing tree tag decoration.You can also read a press release posted by Paul Everitt detailing how Digital Creations and UserLand are making Zope and Frontier play nicely together. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh | |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Commerce page. |
Linux and businessLast week we ran a press release about EBIZ Enterprises' Linux-based Personal Internet Appliance (Pia). This press release is about their plans to market the $199 device through Internet service providers. Prodigy has already signed up to promote the Pia. (Thanks to Cesar A. K. Grossmann) EBIZ Enterprises, Inc. and Onsale, Inc. announced the launch of The Linux Brand Store, demonstrating the growing acceptance of and demand for the Linux operating system. TheLinuxStore is located on Onsale's atAuction web site. Actiontec Electronics now supports Linux across an entire line of modems and PC card readers. Actiontec will provide comprehensive, broad-based support of Linux throughout its entire range of modems and desktop computer PC Card readers. See the press release for more information. Olicom Inc. announced broad support for the free Linux operating system across its entire line of Token Ring, Ethernet and ATM network interface cards. Penguin Computing announced Quad Xeon systems utilizing Intel 550 Mhz Processors. The Quad Xeons, like all Penguin Computers, run only Linux and are now the fastest Quad Xeon systems available. Penguin Computing also announced 2U Rackmount Systems with four hot-swappable hard drives. These systems run only with the ultra-reliable Linux operating system. Here is a press release about the Microcontroller Linux Project. The uClinux (pronounced you see Linux) provides Embedded Linux for almost any device. Just as Linus Torvalds predicted, Linux targeted for embedded systems is now a reality. CAD-UL now offers an embedded-centric C/C++ toolkit for Linux development on PC hosts. See the press release for more information. Linux and GNU Certification is now available. See this press release for more details on Certification by Sair through Sylvan Prometric facilities worldwide. Toshiba now offers Linux support service in Japan. The support is similar to that offered by NEC and Hitachi, but with some additions aimed at developers. Here is the service's web site (in English). (Thanks to Maya Tamiya) Press Releases:
Section Editor: Rebecca Sobol. |
July 8, 1999 |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Linux in the news page. |
Linux in the newsThis week's recommended reading includes articles with differing points of view:
More Linux - Microsoft comparisons and more differing viewpoints:
Business news:
and finally:
Section Editor: Rebecca Sobol |
July 8, 1999 |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Announcements page. |
AnnouncementsResourcesThe Why you shouldn't use Microsoft Products website is looking for a new maintainer. Check out this note from the current maintainer for more details.EventsOpen Source/Open Science. Brookhaven National Laboratory is organizing a one day conference on the use of open source software in scientific research. Here's a pre-announcement. A full announcement/conference web page will follow shortly.
Job OpeningsA Senior Linux Research and Development Engineer is being sought by Inprise, to work on their Delphi for Linux project. |
July 8, 1999
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Software Announcements
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Back page page. |
Linux links of the weekInformation on a project to create a generic Linux subsystem for memory devices, especially Flash devices, now has its own website. They've also got information on M-Systems' Disk-On-Chip 2000 which has some serious problems with its current driver, including a possible GPL violation. Over a year ago, in February of 1998, we mentioned the SANE project as one of our first "Links of the Week". SANE, or Scanner Access Now Easy is still an essential resource for anyone wanting to use a scanner with Linux. They are up to version 1.01 and are due major kudos for the service they've done for the community. Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
July 8, 1999 |
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Letters to the editorLetters to the editor should be sent to letters@lwn.net. Preference will be given to letters which are short, to the point, and well written. If you want your email address "anti-spammed" in some way please be sure to let us know. We do not have a policy against anonymous letters, but we will be reluctant to include them. | |
From: Brett Viren <bviren@superk.physics.sunysb.edu> Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 18:13:06 +0900 (JST) To: lwn@lwn.net Subject: Difficulty of installation. LWN mentions a Detroit Free Press article. I requote your excerpt: "But I'm not going to be hard on myself, or Linux. No one buys a PC today without an operating system already installed. Putting Windows or the Mac OS onto a blank PC would probably be just about as difficult as installing Linux." This got me thinking. In my experience it is quite trivial to install Linux on a blank PC (especially with our modern day distributions' install methods). What is the most challenging part is actually installing Linux on what was previously a Windows only machine such that Windows is kept around. It is ironic that one of Linux's largest criticisms is due to trying to play nice with one of Linux's largest competition (using that word loosely). It would be nice if the folks in Microsoft would give as much consideration to Linux and create an OS which doesn't, for example, heavy handedly overwrite the MBR (LILO's usual resting spot) in order to install. -Brett. | ||
From: nride@us.ibm.com To: letters@lwn.net Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 10:52:00 -0600 Subject: Assorted Benchmarks In the midst of all the howling about the assorted benchmarks from Mindcraft and PC Labs, I think people have missed something rather important. The benchmarks are highlighting several areas where Linux could be better. We're getting a lot of excellent information on how to make this OS faster and better. I propose that we need more benchmarks, not less. We don't want benchmarks because we're playing Microsoft's game. We want benchmarks to highlight potential kernel and server issues. Issues that, once they come to light, will be fixed in a matter of hours. I propose also that we need to implement different types of benchmarks for things that aren't normally measured today. Things like stability. We don't want increases in speed if the trade off is a decrease in stability. So we need some good stability benchmarks. Say, beat on the servers over the network and see if they can survive. That sort of thing. -- ---------- Bruce Ide nride@uswest.net nride@us.ibm.com | ||
Date: Fri, 02 Jul 1999 13:54:41 -0700 From: Tim Hanson <tjhanson@tscnet.com> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: Mindcraft I take exception to your paragraph on the Microsoft / Mindcraft fiasco. Your introspection is admirable I suppose, but it brings to mind the finding of purpose and meaning and important lessons to be learned after an attack by a Great White. Why do you suppose Microsoft advertizes for people who know Linux to lead Linux strike teams, to make the best gosh darn products with which to compete? I don't think so. It wouldn't surprise me that M$ knew all along how Linux would do best case, with the guys from Red Hat doing the tuning, and staged the whole thing, including the first tests to get us making noise for them. We just followed their script. Maybe Linux advocates aren't up to dealing with one of this century's most egregious commercial predators, the product of an individual agnostic to any principle except maintaining his personal power over our society, Bill Gates. The Linux community, as it gets more under the skin of Gates and those he promoted to positions of power, can expect to be baited like this over and over again. Don't expect M$ to cooperate with any other benchmarks; Gates will never use a deck he hasn't stacked. All this discussion by Linux advocates about the unfairness of the tests and the call for more balanced measures is irrelevant. Gates got to the audience he wanted; leaving us talking to ourselves is no concern. And that's where we're left. Talking to ourselves. | ||
Date: Tue, 06 Jul 1999 14:03:59 -0600 From: Scott Marlowe <smarlowe@uswest.net> To: lwn@lwn.net Subject: lead page I would have to take an exception to the statement made on your opening page about the Mindcraft results. You say: BEGIN QUOTE The Mindcraft rerun. The results are in; as expected, NT still beat Linux strongly, though not so strongly as before. For this particular set of tests, NT just performs better. For details, see the PC Week article that first made the results available. There are a few things to note about these results. First, perhaps, is that much of the Linux community (including this publication) reacted a little too strongly to the initial results. Certainly there were numerous problems with how the first test was done, and it was right to bring those to light. But, in the end, fixing the problems did not change the ultimate results of the test. END QUOTE In fact, the results changed drastically in one regard: stability under load. While http accesses per second is a fairly worthless number to grade a web server by, stability under load is a very important metric. Apache/Linux as a web server was shown in the original test to be very unstable under load, and worse yet, it did not recover after the load was removed, it stayed in a crippled state and had the httpd server had to be restarted to fix the problem. The reason for this is simple, they compiled apache with the -O4 option, when it is known to be unstable with any optimization over O2. To this day, Mindcraft has NOT retracted their statement in the initial survey that showed Apache / Linux to be unstable. I still hear from people who think Linux / Apache is unstable because of this test, and your saying that the ultimate results did not change does not help things. We, the Linux / Apache community need to address the issues raised by Mindcraft about performance, yes, but the issues of stability have been almost totally ignored, when in fact, they are a much more important point. Linux / Apache is stable under heavy load, even if a bit slow on a multi-NIC machine. | ||
Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 15:32:49 -0400 (EDT) From: Kristofer <kris@melon.org> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: GNU Cobol > Converting Cobol to C would do nothing to improve the control flow of > the programs, while making its data handling completely unreadable. > > Unless the only human resource one has available is C programmers, I > would strongly discourage such a conversion. > > What the world needs is a free Cobol compiler - if this is the way to > get one, even if it is not within the framework of the GNU Compiler > Collection (which would make it retargetable to other architectures than > the Intel ia32 model, among other benefits), then so be it. Converting Cobol to C, while not improving the control flow, wouldn't hurt it either, and the major advantage of C that justifies such a project is that C already has a free optimising compiler for several different architectures. If you don't want the C code, you can still do all your work in Cobol, and forget about the time it spends as C code the same way we all forget about how our C code spends time as assembly code when we compile it. Instead of wasting our time reinventing the wheel, we should be solving the real problem, which is giving the compiled software proper debugging symbols that can be recognized by gdb as Cobol symbols, and making sure the C layer is as transparent as the assembly layer. Kris Coward, Math Student/RA, SysAdmin Univ. of Toronto | ||
Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 15:41:23 -0400 (EDT) From: Kristofer <kris@melon.org> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: MS Linux > Amidst all the speculation and rumors about Microsoft coming out with > their own proprietary Linux distribution, it seems that no one has > considered a much more likely scenario. When the Red Hat IPO hits the > market, MS could buy up virtually all the offered stock for $100,000,000 > or so (Bill could take it out of petty cash) and thus acquire a name > brand Linux, not to mention the services of the Red Hat sales and > service staff and their engineers and developers. IIRC the shares of Red Hat being issued for sale will constitute only a small ortion of the total wonershil of Red Hat.. certainly not enough for MS to push any sort of agenda it may have.. of course, this doesn't rule out their buying a whole lot of shares, they own a whole lot of Apple after all. Kris Coward Math Student/RA, SysAdmin Univ. of Toronto | ||
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