Archive | March 4, 2005

Rick Schummer’s RSS Feed

Over at FoxBlog, Craig complains “Shedding Some Light… …that’s the name of the new blog from VFP developer Rick Schummer. However, I can’t add him to my blog roll. Why? No RSS feed. Now, it may be there, if given the proper URL, but it should be discoverable. I shouldn’t have to guess where it is or go find it.”

You can grab it off the blogroll to the right. It’s a blogger thing, that they don’t include the RSS link in a lot of their layouts. But it’s in the source, in a meta tag in the header, and the better RSS readers will usually sniff it out if you point them to page. This is still one of those rough edges in RSS/blogging/aggregation.

Apache Virtual Hosting with Fedora Core 3 and SELinux

The Fedora Core 3 Linux distribution includes a very powerful new security feature called SELinux. In my (very) limited understanding, SELinux overlays another set of policies and permissions over the basic UNIX-style security to produce a far more secure product. However, it can also trip up the unsuspecting. At last night’s LAMP class, we got caught. Installing Virtual Hosts as we had with Fedora Core 2 threw permission errors, despite everything we could think of. As it was a beginner class, we just settled for placing the virtual hosts under the standard DocumentRoot at /var/www/html and continuing on with our exercise, with a promise that we’d investigate and explain to the students what went wrong at the next class.

The Fedora web site provides guidance at “Understanding and Customizing the Apache HTTP SELinux Policy.” I was also pleased to see that a WebMin module is under development to simplify SElinux management at http://www.selinux.hitachi-sk.co.jp/en/tool/selpe/selpe-top.html

UPDATED: Indeed, it was the SELinux that was causing the problem. Turning that off (requiring one of the very rare reboots in the Linux world) and fixing a problem with rights (the parent home directory needs x permissions for searching, as pointed out in the Apache FAQ) solved the problem. We’ll be able to present the solution to the class, along with a little side-talk on how to figure these things out, at the next class.

Rick Schummer joins the blogosphere

Rick Schummer announces “Rick Schummer has researched the blogging craze for more than a year to understand the advantages of this not-so-new approach to publishing ideas, thoughts, news, or whatever. After much thought and consideration, he has finally decided to jump into the blogosphere. You can read his postings (Shedding Some Light) on his personal site, RickSchummer.com.”

Now, if Rick can only learn to stop referring to himself in the third-person… 🙂

No Patch Tuesday?

Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley notes A Quiet Patch Tuesday on the Way. “Read our lips: No new Microsoft security patches next Tuesday.”

Pretty hard to believe.

Don’t mistake this for “there are no outstanding security problems” but rather “there are no solutions available for outstanding security problems.” I’m sure there are folks in the back room in Redmond working hard to address them. All software has vulnerabilities. SANS has a great list of the Top 20.

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This work by Ted Roche is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.