Tag Archives | Linux

FireFox gets a new update; FF 1.5 run nearly over

By Ted Roche on March 21, 2007 in Home Page, OpenSource, Security

mozilla.org news reports “Firefox 2.0.0.3 and Firefox 1.5.0.11 Security and Stability Update”

“As part of Mozilla Corporations ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 1.5.0.11 and Firefox 2.0.0.3 are now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux for free download from http://getfirefox.com… Due to the security fixes, we strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to these latest releases… Note: Firefox 1.5.0.x will be maintained with security and stability updates until April 24, 2007. All users are encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 2. Firefox 1.5.0.11 is available for download from http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-older.html.”

So, there’s only about 5 weeks left of FF 1.5 support. Get testing your apps under 2.x. And get patching for the latest releases!

MonadLUG notes, 8-Mar-2007: tac and “Pitch Your Distro”

By Ted Roche on March 19, 2007 in Home Page, Linux, Technology

The second Thursday of the month is the usual meeting of the Monadnock Area Linux User Group, MonadLUG, at the SAU #1 offices on Hancock Road in Peterborough. This month, Ray Côté ran a discussion on “Pitch Your Distro” and Bill Sconce took on the “Man Page of the Month” on the command tac.

You won’t think you could make much of a presentation on tac, but that would be underestimating Bill Sconce 😉 Here’s the short form: tac is cat backwards. Longer form: tac lets concatenates files, but reverses the line ordering of the result, so you get last line first. There are only a couple switches, -s to specify a separator other than newline and -r to use a regex separator. Using this simple tool, Bill was able to present a wicked example that reversed not only line order by character order, and lead to a discussion about the use of regular expressions, piping, precedence, quoting and backticks. A good time was had by all.

The main discussion was a let’s-go-around-the-room discussion of what distros are in use and why and for what. With nine people present (and one of them a non-combatant), how many distros would you expect? We heard about: Debian, Slackware, OpenBSD, OS X, Fedora, RedHat, CentOS, SuSE, Mandrake, Ubuntu, Xubuntu, more RedHat, Knoppix, Gentoo, Libranet and some Knoppix war stories. Many aspects of the different distros were discussed: cost, support, lifespan, the difficulties of sound cards, and more.

Many thanks to Ray for running the meeting, Bill for tac and bringing a projector, and all for participating.

Next month’s meeting (April 12th) will have Seth Cohn presenting Drupal. Hope to see you there!

CentraLUG notes from Andy Bair’s Digital Forensic File Carving presentation

By Ted Roche on March 19, 2007 in Home Page, Linux, OpenSource, Security, Technology

Our thanks to Andy Bair for making the trip north from Massachusetts to present to the Central New Hampshire Linux User Group on March 5th, 2007, the first Monday of the month, at the New Hampshire Technical Institute’s Library. Andy announced that his work at MITRE was done and that he would be starting a job at Korelogic in the immediate future.

Andy worked with several friends at KoreLogic to take on the Digital Forensic Research Workshop (DFRWS) 2006 File Carving Challenge. They were supplied with a 50 megabyte “chunk” from a hard drive with the assignment to find as many files in that chunk as possible. The DFRWS’ motivation was to move the state of the art forward, and all participants were required to supply the source code of the applications they developed. Andy and his team won the challenge, beating out a number of other teams, notably Simson Garfinkel, who came in second. Andy demonstrated the procedures they worked out, talked about the algorithms they used, and showed the graphing of the results that made boundary detection and anomaly detection more easy to pick out. Andy and his team extended the UNIX magic technique to detect patterns in files, extending magic to XMagic which included regular expressions and more sophisticated rules to match files to the patterns. It was a very interesting presentation, presented well. Andy’s presentation, the source code and original data can be found at this link [Updated link – tr, 15-Feb-2010].

Thanks to Andy for the presentation, to Bill Sconce for supplying the projector, and to the New Hampshire Technical Institute for providing the facilities.

Upcoming presentations include:

Bill Stearns demonstrating Logical Volume Management April 2nd,
Seth Cohn presenting Drupal on May 7th, and
Ben Scott presenting OpenWRT on June 4th.

We plan to meet at the usual location, but keep an eye out for a more detailed announcement as the date gets closer.

Blog, the first five years…

By Ted Roche on March 19, 2007 in Home Page, LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, Personal, PHP, Python, Technology

… ended yesterday, and today I start the sixth year of blogging. The first year was blogging on the Perl-based TWiki software, 2003 through 2006 on Radio Userland. This year, I’m using WordPress, on a self-hosting Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP platform. Wonder what I’ll be running in another five years? It’s been a blast, and I hope it continues to be. Primarily, my blog is my voice online: notes of places I’ve found and want to share (or publicly bookmark so I can find them again), news to pass on, or events on which I comment. Thanks for reading.

GNHLUG MythTV Installfest beta 31-March-2007

By Ted Roche on March 18, 2007 in Home Page, LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, Technology

GNHLUG recently held an alpha installfest of MythTV, the media-center software (think Free TiVO, jukebox, photo album, more) that runs on Linux. We’re just announcing the beta version in two weeks:

http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/MythFest

This installfest is limited to GNHLUG members and staff and students of the New Hampshire Technical Institute. We hope to open future versions to the public, as we refine the process.

Shipping is a Feature: Linux Magazine (p)reviews RHEL5

By Ted Roche on March 17, 2007 in Home Page, LAMP, Linux, OpenSource, Technology

First Look: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 | Linux Magazine: “Red Hat Enterprise Linux RHEL has long been a fixture in enterprise machine rooms. Robust, fast, and feature-rich, RHEL is often the standard by which other enterprise distributions are measured. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 RHEL5, Red Hat once again raises the bar for commercial Linux. CIOs, don the Red Hat.”

I thought I heard a huge sigh coming from the south this week: RHEL5’s delivery was tough labor, from what I understand. I’m looking forward to trying it out. All the features sound pretty cool: Xen integration, the Global File System, and better user interfaces for Security Enhanced Linux. The article above is a preview and the explanation of virtualization is a bit shaky, but the intent is right.

For a good explanation of why you want Red Hat, watch the funny videos here. The usual disclaimers apply: I liked Red Hat so much, I bought (one one-millionth of) the company. Pricing is better and competitive: there’s an $80 basic desktop with a year of web support and updates. Rather than buying “end-user” licenses, developers (yes, it’s still all about “developers, developers, developers, developers”) would much likely prefer the “Standard Developer Subscription” which for $299 gives a developer download access and 1-year support for up to five products, a much better deal than MSDN, more along the lines of the Action Pack or one of those promotions.

Seacoast LUG: OpenWrt, 9-April-2007

By Ted Roche on March 13, 2007 in Home Page, Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Ben Scott announces the April meeting of the Seacoast (New Hampshire) Linux User Group, a presentation on OpenWRT:

Who : Ben Scott

What : OpenWrt – LinkSys firmware enhancements

Where: Room 301, Morse Hall, UNH, Durham, NH

Date : Monday 9 April 2007

Time : 7:00 PM to 9ish

For the April 2007 SLUG/Seacoast/UNH/Durham meeting, Ben Scott will be presenting on OpenWrt and related tools. The focus will be on initial installation and configuration, and a general survey of capabilities, rather than a specific application. A live demo is planned.

OpenWrt is “a Linux distribution for embedded devices”. In particular, it is commonly used as third-party firmware for the popular LinkSys WRT54G line of SOHO routers. OpenWrt provides a modular system for customizing the firmware (embedded software) for such devices. It can add everything from SSH to VPN to VoIP and more.

In addition to the OpenWrt base package, X-Wrt and WebIf^2 will also be covered. X-Wrt is a set of additional/updated packages for OpenWrt, which provide even more enhancements, with a particular focus on end-user experience. In particular, it provides WebIf^2, an advanced web user interface for OpenWrt.

Ben will bring a LinkSys WRT54G device running stock firmware, and attempt to demonstrate the whole process of installing and configuring OpenWrt and X-Wrt. Come see Ben tempt the Live Demo Gods!

SLUG is the Seacoast Linux User Group, and is a chapter of GNHLUG, the Greater NH Linux User Group. Rob Anderson is the SLUG coordinator. SLUG meets the second Monday of every month, same time, same place. Meetings take place starting at 7:00 PM. Meetings are open to all. The meeting proper ends around 9ish, but it’s not uncommon to find hangers-on there until 10 or later. They take place in Room 301 (the third floor conference room), of Morse Hall, at the University of New Hampshire, in Durham.

Preserving our documentation for posterity

By Ted Roche on March 11, 2007 in Home Page, Linux, Microsoft, OpenSource, Technology

Recently, I received a diagram created in Microsoft Visio I wanted to examine and possibly edit. It turns out that OpenOffice.org Draw does not have an import module for the proprietary (and apparantly undocumented) .vsd format, nor can I find another FOSS product that does. This is one of the reasons to keep a Windows machine around – to read the proprietary format files. Or it should be. My version of Visio is a version or two old, and it wouldn’t read it either. I asked my co-worker to send the diagram in another format I could use. We tried a number of them. SVG (Structured Vector Graphics) is a standard format and OpenOffice.org has a filter for it. However, it turns out that Microsoft uses proprietary extensions to the format for items like word wrap and the filter won’t read them (Neither will Gnome image viewer nor FireFox nor Dia). EPS, EWF and WMF are more standard and were readable, but the graphics are reduced to primatives at that point with no larger structure. Drawing Exchange Format (.DXF), which might have come from AutoCAD, is equally illegible.

The .VDX format is XML, so I had some hopes for that. It looks like the Dia diagramming tool will work with .VDX files with a plugin. [Update: irony of ironies: the VDX plugin link is now dead. Good news: VDX is now a built-in import/export filter.]

What a disappointment. While we are not writing anything particularly profound that needs to be preserved for posterity, it would be nice to know we could read the files in a few months on our platforms of choice. Vendors need to get more serious about interoperable, open formats.

The smoke clears after the DST spring-ahead…

By Ted Roche on March 11, 2007 in Home Page

… and we’ll see if any news develops. Either: nothing will happen and news media will point at IT for once again crying Y2K wolf, despite a lot of sysadmins sleepless nights last week and this weekend. Or some major system will fail and the media will conclude IT isn’t taking their role seriously enough. Either way we lose, eh?

Here’s the score here at Roche Manor: a power blackout at 0045 this morning reset most of the home appliances for us, so we could just find all the stuff blinking “12:00” to reset. One Win2K laptop reset fine, thanks to our manual intervention with tzedit.exe in advance. One WinXPPro machine sprung two hours in advance instead of one. Two Linux laptops and three Linux servers Just Worked Fine. And the iMac wonders what all the fuss is about.

Update: Two WinXPPro laptops sprang ahead 2 hours. I think each was booted into Linux first, and perhaps that updated the computer’s clock before the Windows machine. Resetting the WinXPPro machines by having them synch with the internet time servers seemed to clear it up. I don’t run any software on the machines know to be DST-incompliant (Outlook, Exchange, etc.)

Now we wait to see what happens on the traditional Spring Ahead Day…

MerriLUG: GNU Privacy Guard and PGP