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DMZ stands for DeMilitarized Zone. Basically, a decent firewall will have three interfaces--external, internal, and DMZ. The DMZ is where you put your servers and (ideally) anything you want accessible to the Internet at large. This keeps incoming (possibly hostile) traffic away from your internal machines. It also maintains a degree of separation between your Internet-accessible and possibly compromisable machines and the protected computers behind the firewall.

• Built-In Firewall
  
• Great Documentation for the Responsible Administrator, (as contrasted by The Micro$oft Knowledgebase
  
• Timely Security Updates from our Vendors and our Enemies to help us patch things quickly
  
• Source Code; ...that's 2 different links, people...
  

• Built-In Firewall
  
• Great Documentation for the Responsible Administrator, (as contrasted by The Micro$oft Knowledgebase
  
• Timely Security Updates from our Vendors and our Enemies to help us patch things quickly
  
• Source Code; ...that's 2 different links, people...
  

Another way of partitionlessly installing Linux that a few distros (Mandrake and Suse, maybe others) are offering now is to use a loopback filesystem. I've had ZipSlack on my HD for a little bit and have become entirely too fed up with UMSDOS. So, with a little tweaking of the setup scripts, I installed LoopSlack to a 1.2G file. Kent Robotti has put together a prepackaged LoopLinux that is essentially the same thing.

Loopback-Root-FS-mini-HOWT O
LoopLinux
The easiest distribution to futz around with for stuff like this.
And if anyone cares to know what I did (which is a bit of a different approach than Kent took) feel free to ask.

And yes, this is also essentially what BeOS Personal does.

(but he has a nice website and security guide on the LDP)
Sorry. I couldnt resist on this one.

=)

(but he has a nice website and security guide on the LDP)
Sorry. I couldnt resist on this one.

=)

You may want to check this mini-howto as well for more complete info on deuglyfying X, and more specifically Netscape...

Can I get a +1 Informative now, too? ;)

You may want to check this mini-howto as well for more complete info on deuglyfying X, and more specifically Netscape...

Can I get a +1 Informative now, too? ;)

Official International SI norm:

1 MegaByte (MB) is 1,000,000 bytes..
1 MebiByte (MiB) is 1,048,576 bytes...

Get your facts straight, Maxtor is right..

And yes, about Maxtors timing issues.., own two myself (not the 80GB) and they suck...

More details: Large-Disk-HOWTO

I checked into VPND somewhat recently to see if it'd be a nice way to link a few LANs which have faily powerful (min 200Mhz) firewalls which could be used to tunnel traffic.

I looked at the source code, as I had to port the program to OpenBSD. My first thought was that the person who wrote the code must've been some ASM programmer who took a 5-hour course in C. The entire body of main is the entire source file. Functional programming? What's that? The code is one big blob function. You can see blocks which are similar and could probably be handled by a separate function, but aren't.

My friend's first comment on waving him over to see the code was, "and you wanted to run that on your server?"

The code looks a lot like procmail's code, and is (IMO) a complete tear down and rewrite. I'm sure a lot can be salvaged from vpnd, but I find it hard to believe that the person who wrote code looking like that also did the strictest possible checking on all input/output code for security problems.

You might want to read the VPN section of the Linux Admin Security Guide for a listing of alternatives.
---

I checked into VPND somewhat recently to see if it'd be a nice way to link a few LANs which have faily powerful (min 200Mhz) firewalls which could be used to tunnel traffic.

I looked at the source code, as I had to port the program to OpenBSD. My first thought was that the person who wrote the code must've been some ASM programmer who took a 5-hour course in C. The entire body of main is the entire source file. Functional programming? What's that? The code is one big blob function. You can see blocks which are similar and could probably be handled by a separate function, but aren't.

My friend's first comment on waving him over to see the code was, "and you wanted to run that on your server?"

The code looks a lot like procmail's code, and is (IMO) a complete tear down and rewrite. I'm sure a lot can be salvaged from vpnd, but I find it hard to believe that the person who wrote code looking like that also did the strictest possible checking on all input/output code for security problems.

You might want to read the VPN section of the Linux Admin Security Guide for a listing of alternatives.
---

I constantly hear about how one disadvantage of free (beer) software is that it doesn't have support, hence companies like RedHat and Linuxcare will offer that. Personally, I prefer the ldp to any commercial support I've ever recieved. Of course my experience is only with crappy consumer-level support, never with enterprise-level support, which I assume is much better. And if you are a programmer with a lot of time on your hands, like me, then source code is the best documentation there is.

Now we're getting way offtopic, but I'd recommend getting yourself a cheap 486 box with a couple ethernet cards, install Linux or the LRP, and read up on IP Masquerading

Font licensing is a very contentious issue. While it is true that there is a wealth of freely available fonts, the chances are that the fonts are ``ripoffs'' in some sense, unless they come with a license indicating otherwise. The issue is made more confusing by intellectual property laws regarding typefaces. Basically, in the USA, font files are protected by copyright, but font renderings are not. In other words, it's illegal to redistribute fonts, but it's perfectly legal to ``reverse-engineer'' them by printing them out on graph paper and designing the curves to match the printout. Reverse engineered fonts are typically cheap and freely available, but of poor quality. These fonts, as well as pirated fonts are often distributed on very cheap CDs containing huge amounts of fonts. So it's not always easy to tell if a font is reverse engineered, or simply pirated. This situation creates an enormous headache for anyone hoping to package free fonts for Linux.

Perhaps one of the most offensive things about the nature of font piracy is that it artificially debases the value of the work that type designers do. Pirated fonts invariably are bundled en masse onto these one zillion font CDs, with no due credit given to the original designers. In contrast, what is commendable about several legitimate font foundries is that they credit their designers.

http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Xin erama-HOWTO.html

Good stuff. Check it out.

Presenting -- the BogoMip!

Yes, finally, a measure of how fast your processor does the IDLE loop!

"Dude, my K6-III does 800 Bogomips! It idles faster than your stinky Celeron!"

And to ensure that people know where the processor is from, they'd name it by the company name.
Thus: The AMD 800B, the Intel 400B, etc. Better than PR ratings, because you know something about the process that has even less bearing on its real world performance.

Hey, it makes more sense than the Pentium 4 (Nonatium?)

(Btw: Kudos to Intel's marketting dept. for selling the same PPro core in 5+(!) different proc revisions with little/no difference.. except in price!)
---

... what it was all about eleven years ago when I taught myself BASIC on the Apple II. That whole article gave me a great appreciation for computers, open source, and exploration that Windows stole from me completely. The entire history of computing is something that I am completely lacking. It is definately something I will remedy immediately! The whole thing about computers being a 'black-box' now a days is way too true! Now all I want to do is read, explore, and modify Coffee-HOWTO.

• Security
  
  • Peer review of code yields more pro-active identification of problems
  • Source availability allows users to create fixes to identified critical security bugs in a more timely manner -- hours rather than days or weeks.
  • A security paradigm which accounts for multiple users and a network connection from the ground up, rather than a kludge tacked on later as an afterthought
  • Well behaved user applications which do not open themselves up to trivial attack by default a la' MS Exchange.
  • User permissions, preventing a user from doing damange to anyone other than themselves should they launch a destructive trojan, or simply run amok deleting everything they can.
    
  • Kerberos implimentation which doesn't suffer from deliberate attempts to limit interoperability with other systems
  • etc.
    
• Robustness (uptimes measurable in years, as opposed to days)
• Memory management - when programs write to memory which doesn't belong to them they receive faults and are killed, they do not take the entire OS down. This is not true of windows 95 or 98, or NT when running in compatability mode.
• etc. etc. etc.
  

Neither http://www.linuxdoc.org/docs/OCR/OCR-HOWTO-0.1 (what you wrote) nor http://www.microsoft.com (what your link pointed to) gives OCR information. There is a little info in the Access-HOWTO, and a little in the unofficial AI/Alife mini-HOWTO. I couldn't find any OCR-HOWTO, and would love a real link to it if you have one.

----

You can feed kernel boot parameters from lilo as described in the document here. The workaround for the Promise Ultra33 card works for booting the HPT-366 controller in Ultra33 mode.

Not only was I was quite offended by several of the email messages MPAA included, I was amazed at the stupidity of some who originally sent the mail. Come on folks, "I'm going to kill you if you continue with your litigation"? What is that going to gain? All that does is encourage the perception of our community as crack-pots. OK, everyone take a deep breath and go read the Advocacy-mini-HOWTO Actually, reading the sample of mail the MPAA chose to post is an excellent case study in Advocacy. The first couple (at least) are perfect examples of what types of messages not to send. On the other hand, there are several good examples of reasonable requests and statements of possition.

Built up cases- As a rule, there are only so many lawers in the world. With the Government, 17 states and Slashdot/Andover.net on their tails, someone is bound to find the plug and power down the machine.

Open vs. Closed Source- Next, as we all know, Open standards improve and evolve much faster than Closed source ones. With this in mind, we can be sure that even more developers will migrate to open source projects and leave closed behind. This trend will eventually leach down to the end-user/AOLer level.

Open Will Pay- Until recently, only closed-source operations had any value outside of the university. Today with more media attention and student grants from sources such as the Linux Doccumentation Project, Free Software developers can earn a living from the very beginning.

The GNU Generation- Unlike Bill's generation, the new generation has had at least some introduction to Free Software (Linux in perticular). With all these new developers, GNU will continue to spread. And lastly,

Declining Popularity- As we all know, Microsoft Windows (winblows) is nothing more than a crappy GUI/filesystem module for MS-DOS. As you can imagine, this causes many problems, such as crashing, "illegal operations", etc. Also, windows/internet explorer is nothing more than 3.1's Program Manager with some 32-bit features and long filenames carelessly glued on with VB. Since Microsoft is a closed proprietary company, it cannot afford to completely overhaul the system-only jam more annoying features. The only thing holding them up is their monopoly and all the millions of crazed trolls they control with stolen borg nanoprobes :+} Already, the Evil Empire's name has been marred by the current and passed actions against their unfair practices (remember IE bundling? [still happens!]). As soon as the United Stated Department of Justice (DOJ) slamms down the final hammer, Bill's "Borg Cube" will have only a couple of years to live. Mabe three at most.

The Aftermath- After the "Czar of the Evil Empire" is dethroned, many users and developers will have to look for new options. Of course, most of these people will probably turn to a free *NIX such as Linux or *BSD. In 10 years, all computers will have open systems except for specialized ones for NASA or other governement use. These systems will be very specially designed for their tasks, so they will not likely work on any server, home pc, or embeded system anyway.

Sadly, many of the hardcore Windows users and MS staff will turn to other Closed-source platforms such as MacOS and BeOS. I also have a feeling that OS/2 Warp Server & Client may make a *slight* comeback. It is rumored that IBM will release the code or foster the development of a open clone within the next couple of years.

Adverse Effects- While the Open model will foster development, change, and community, there will also be those who do not fully appreciate Free standards or technology development. There will surely be a mass explosion of cracker scum developing more advanced and devistating ways to steal and deface computer systems, as they will have full access to the code and will be able to create destructive methods around what they find. However, the 'good guys' will also have the very same information and will therefore be able to stop them much more quickly, putting them on the level, at the very least.

Crackers aside, there is also the threat of some company or organization unfairly taking over the Market as Microsoft has done. This "rougue" company could even become more powerful than Microsoft ever was. However, it is unlikely that *any* company, closed or not will ever get more than 45-50% of the market fairly or monopolistically.

While these predictions may seem likely at this time, they may turn out completely differently. The 'Net is a big place. Technology covers nearly the entire planet. The only thing we can expect to be sure of is that things will change.
May the source be with you.

Bogomips = Bogus MIPs

WTF? Doesn't anyone RTFM anymore? Ohh, and you never said which filesystem! I'll assume (there's that evil word again!) you mean EXT2...


How about The Filesystems-HOWTO? A quote from section 6.2:

``Standard'' Ext2fs features

The Ext2fs supports standard Unix file types: regular files, directories, device special files and symbolic links.

Ext2fs is able to manage filesystems created on really big partitions. While the original kernel code restricted the maximal filesystem size to 2 GB, recent work in the VFS layer have raised this limit to 4 TB. Thus, it is now possible to use big disks without the need of creating many partitions.

Ext2fs provides long file names. It uses variable length directory entries. The maximal file name size is 255 characters. This limit could be extended to 1012 if needed.

Ext2fs reserves some blocks for the super user (root). Normally, 5% of the blocks are reserved. This allows the administrator to recover easily from situations where user processes fill up filesystems.


Quote from section 6.3:

Ext3 support the same features as Ext2, but includes also Journaling.


Maybe you should RTFM and be a little more specific next time! ;-)

What I believe you want is this, the Kernel HOW-TO.

And yes, Commander Taco is a malevolent dictator.. refused to post a submission of mine on the DMCA rally that happened 2 days ago.

Of course, since sites like Slashdot apparently don't find this worthy of the front page, many people had NO idea it happened, or if it even happened at all, including myself. Remember last time when there was a DMCA protest, Slashdot gave like 2 days notice? I sent this in -weeks- in advance, and Slashdot posts nothing. What's up with that?

Anyway, off my soapbox, and happy kernel'ing.

--

There's been a Linux from Scratch HOWTO for a while now, very interesting reading.

Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".

Just a short note: If you are using Linux (oh, let's be politically correct, make that any flavor of unix), you always have access to the mail server. Most distributions include sendmail or qmail, trough which you can define filtering rules.

If you have a POP3 account you can get your mail to your local machine by using fetchmail, which (if I recall correctly), includes spam-filtering options.

2 links:

Linux Mail users howto

Linux Mail administrators HOWTO

Just a short note: If you are using Linux (oh, let's be politically correct, make that any flavor of unix), you always have access to the mail server. Most distributions include sendmail or qmail, trough which you can define filtering rules.

If you have a POP3 account you can get your mail to your local machine by using fetchmail, which (if I recall correctly), includes spam-filtering options.

2 links:

Linux Mail users howto

Linux Mail administrators HOWTO

There is a funny little site called the Linux Documentation Project

It contains fun Guides that cover topics like:

• The Linux Kernel
• The Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide
• The Linux Kernel Hackers' Guide

I do not know enough kernel stuff to know if they are usefull or current but maybe they'll be helpful.

Citrix

There is a funny little site called the Linux Documentation Project

It contains fun Guides that cover topics like:

• The Linux Kernel
• The Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide
• The Linux Kernel Hackers' Guide

I do not know enough kernel stuff to know if they are usefull or current but maybe they'll be helpful.

Citrix

There is a funny little site called the Linux Documentation Project

It contains fun Guides that cover topics like:

• The Linux Kernel
• The Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide
• The Linux Kernel Hackers' Guide

I do not know enough kernel stuff to know if they are usefull or current but maybe they'll be helpful.

Citrix

There is a funny little site called the Linux Documentation Project

It contains fun Guides that cover topics like:

• The Linux Kernel
• The Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide
• The Linux Kernel Hackers' Guide

I do not know enough kernel stuff to know if they are usefull or current but maybe they'll be helpful.

Citrix

There is a funny little site called the Linux Documentation Project

It contains fun Guides that cover topics like:

• The Linux Kernel
• The Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide
• The Linux Kernel Hackers' Guide

I do not know enough kernel stuff to know if they are usefull or current but maybe they'll be helpful.

Citrix

CFS is a solution, but not the best solution. It runs in user space (if I remember correctly), so a skilled script kiddie could read the memory contents and discover the key. Furthermore, it is pretty slow, especially if you are considering using large files (i.e. MP3 files). A better solution was posed by some Columbia grad students, called Cryptfs. Cryptfs builds on CFS and the later implementation TCFS. For an overview on the weaknesses of other encrypted file systems check out the Cryptfs home page. Unfortunately, I cannot find the implementation of Cryptfs.

Another solution is to use a loop-back encrypted file system. There is a how-to at linuxdoc.org.

"I feel like a bitter boyfriend. 'You'll be back! You'll be back here on your hands and knees, begging me to take you back!'Maybe I can play 'Mom,' too. 'When you get nailed by stupid licensing schemes, don't come crying to me! It's all fun and games until someone loses stock value!'"

Does anyone remember the Linux advocacy how to?
I find it sad that it seems that there are so many self appointed Linux/OSS zealot advocates who feel the need to throw fits when someone doesn't chose Linux for their product. I would dare say that most of these advocates have never contributed to a project, never written a line of code, and often seem to have no idea what/who they're commenting on beyond what they read into in an article they read on yahoo, excite or some press release. Often their argument is just a slam of another OS, or the company making a choice they disagree with, rather than making any positive remarks about Linux beyond Linux/OSS is better.

I don't believe such behavior helps the cause(s) any farther, and only makes the people who do contribute look bad.

Well, you can start at the Wacom Tablet HOWTO.

There is a driver here, which Wacom themselves link to.

As far as I know, their serial versions are supported, but not USB. I haven't actually tried it ('cause I have a USB Graphire), but pressure sensing is supposed to be usable in the Gimp.

dufke
-

I'm not sure what you mean by saying that HTML has "insufficient structure" on the presentation layer. Maybe some examples would help.

Read upthread. HTML does not specify sections, for instance. It is far too oriented towards the appearance of a document and insufficiently towards rigorous document structure. SGML and XML are all about document structure; that is what industry uses SGML for all the time.

(What do I mean by rigorous structure? In an SGML or XML DTD, you can specify that a document of a particular class must have (for instance) an author, modification date, etc. You can specify (for instance) that headlines must only appear at the beginning of chapters and sections, and that different headlines be used for each. If a file does not have the required features of the document class it claims to be (in the DOCTYPE header) then that is a syntax error. HTML by contrast is very loose and unstructured, oriented towards flexible presentation rather than being able to verify completeness. That may be the Right Thing for playing around, but it is the Wrong Thing for manpages, HOWTOs, or books.)

DocBook is hardly a niche application -- O'Reilly uses it constantly, and it is what Linux HOWTOs and other documentation are kept in by the Linux Documentation Project.

Of course, if a Linux distribution shipped all of the documentation in one format, I'd probably be so happy that I wouldn't care what format that is.

That was my point all along, yes.

I agree that XHTML is probably a good starting point for unified Linux documentation.

FWIW, XHTML is not the same as XML. XHTML is "a reformulation of HTMLÊ4 as an XML 1.0 application" (to quote the W3C's take on it ... and they should know. XHTML can be displayed by ordinary HTML browsers like the one you're using now, but it can also be parsed by an XML parser. It's basically a transitional form ... getting people used to writing formally correct XMLish markup while there aren't yet enough XML tools out there.

(In other words, XML is not a markup language; it is a markup metalanguage. XML applications, of which XHTML is one, are markup languages.)

XHTML, because it is HTML, is the Wrong Thing for documentation, because HTML has insufficient structure, and the wrong sorts of what it's got. DocBook may or may not be the Right Thing for manpages, but the Linux Documentation Project folks seem to get along with it for HOWTOs, and they seem to be okay at rendering it into text or HTML or various other formats. DocBook is an SGML system and not XML, but that will be changing with the next major revision, and presumably LDP will be keeping up.

When people say Linux, they are typically referring to a distribution, a group of files already compiled and packaged with the kernel, which makes everything run. Actually, Linux is just the kernel (vmlinux-* or vmlinuz-* that sits in your /boot directory). Read a HOWTO from The LDP for more information.

Brad Johnson
--We are the Music Makers, and we
are the Dreamers of Dreams

I found the HOWTO to be the most useful.... You can install onto an UltraATA drive, it's just a pain in the ass :) Mandrake 7 didn't work for me, but RH 6.1 did.

Come on, IBM! We want to know how fast this thing is in BogoMIPS.

The NT Driver is at http://www.chat.ru/~ashedel/ext2fsnt/

The driver is in a format I never heard of: RAR

Personally, I use the "ext2 tools" for Win NT. This includes command line tools e2cat, e2cd, e2cp, e2ls, e2part, e2pwd. Not elegant (command line tools), but they get the job done. To use, set the E2CWD DOS environment variable to the drive and partition (e.g., E2CWD=1:2). I don't have a URL (it's dead), but I'm sure you can find it with some searching.

There are probably many "established" professionals in your area who would be more than happy to come in and give a presentation on Open Source in general, or Linux in particular. Check for a local Linux users group, or even a local branch of a related user group (like Perl Mongers, for exaqple). Even if the presentation is just for the teachers, it would probably be well received. If you are in the Boston area, contact the FSF. See the Linux User Group HOWTO for more info.

If you can't program you have no business using a pre-release kernel!

I'd have to disagree with this. Programming isn't really required for the pre- series if you're willing to accept failure :) However, a good knowledge of the hardware in your box, and a basic knowledge of lilo are required. Here's an LDP HOWTO on this. Their stuff is usually pretty good

Now, what is the FSF model of making money from writing documentation?

Consider this: Many companies (I don't think I need to name Red Hat here) pay people to write code that's to be released under the GPL. It doesn't seem too unreasonable to me to assume that they would pay people to write the free documentation (under the FDL) the same way that they pay people to write free software. It's rather complementary, IMO.

Something else: What about documentation that's been languishing for several revisions of the software? If this license becomes widely used (which I suspect it will, eventually, because of the reputation of RMS), then it would be no problem to just hire somebody to modify the documentation, much the same way as, say, ESR became the maintainer of popclient. (In fact, you wouldn't need any permission; ESR sought this from popclient's previous maintainer out of tact.) This could also simplify matters for the LDP if they decide to standardize on this license (much as they standardize on the file formats they accept).

You give the documentation away, and you make money by...? By what? Support of the documentation? That is, you get paid for adapting, modifying, and or re-writing the documentation? I don't think this works.

However, I don't know how this will fare up against other free-documentation licenses, such as the OPL. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

--

EXT2FS does not have much problem with file fragmentation. Like most Unix filesystems, it automatically reuses all empty space and tries to keep files/directories together.

XFS does look interesting, and it should at least reduce restart time.

Notice that on a server you can reduce file system updates by putting files which are rarely updated on read-only filesystems which are separate from the often-updated ones, reducing the partitions which need to be checked.

Of course, maybe you should also start by considering how much better anything else is when compared to what you're presently using. NT needs defragmentation, and crashes often enough that restart time and disk recovery are great concerns.

• Look at the Font De-uglification HOWTO
  FDU-Mini HOWTO
• Install some True Type fonts from ...... Microsoft!
  They have a fontpack
• 
  which provides some nice stuff like Arial Black etc...and then install one of the TT font servers:
• One of the most popular is xfsft
• Another available for download is xfstt
• Use RH6.1 which has xfs prepatched with xfsft for TT fonts
• If it's just the sizes that bother you, that's a pretty oldish problem which is fixed by switching the order of the 100dpi and 75dpi fonts in your font catalogue
  There's a note about it from as far back as NS2 at bigfontsthat might help
• Finally Christopher Browne has really helpful web-pages with this topic indexed (among many others) at cbbrowne

The XFree86 Font Deuglification Mini HOWTO
----

One little detail I have forgotten to mention in my previous post -- the full version of FrameMaker is supposed to support RTF as well as MS Word formats for import (and export?). There is also a FrameMaker SGML version (though I am not sure if there is Linux port of it) -- would not this be a great tool for LDP?