Slashdot Mirror

Yes, baseless. Or, perhaps *you've* managed to find these mythical patents MS has on .NET that it will supposedly use to blugeon the entire OSS community to death with?

You mean the nonexistent ones that Miguel's company didn't sign a contract with Microsoft not indemnifying their customers from? Or did you mean ones that Microsoft would have filed if they were into such things?

You're confused and thinking of the patents that Ballmer claimed that Linux violated but has never produced. No one has ever seriously disputed that parts of .NET are patented, least of all Microsoft (who filed them) and Novell (who signed an indemnification contract covering them).

So in fact it seems Miguel was right all along - right about the need, right about the solution, right that Microsoft would not attempt to "destroy Linux" by leveraging patents. Instead they specifically promised in writing not to do that. Why? Probably because they don't care about Linux anymore. The world has moved on, what once seemed like a threat to their business no longer is.

Right, it's not a threat to their business, and they've been insightful enough to realize that. Which is why they haven't leveraged their patents against Linux in any way. Have you been living in a cave for the last 5 years?

On the other hand, there's no evidence from all of the above saber-rattling that Linux is infringing upon any of their patents. If they really have a credible infringement case, why haven't they sued Canonical, Red Hat, Mandriva, or any other company that hasn't agreed to "build bridges" with them? One also could wonder why they haven't publicly stated which patents are infringed, but the answer is of course that with or without a credible case, publicly stating which patents are infringed upon would allow the FOSS community to fight back with workarounds or invalidations of those patents.

Stop playing with monkeys.

Was this intentional? Because it's pretty clever, if you consider, you know, Ximian.

Strange though how he is not listed under http://www.novell.com/company/bios/

I used to respect that company (NetWare 3.11, NDS, NetWare 5.0, GroupWise, ZenWorks, all top-notch tech, IMHO).

Now, a tad less.

Yeah just like when Mr. Hovsepian took his new seat as CEO he said he would do so much for linux and the linux community. A few months later Novell axe's a bunch of key KDE developers, and later on let go a bunch more of there development teams on SUSE / opensuse.

Here is a link to the open enterprise server 2 product page, in case you need a reference. http://www.novell.com/products/openenterpriseserver/

Note to NetWare users: General Support is Coming to an End
2 March 2010 - 5:11pm
novell.com

This will come as no surprise, since they've been talking about it for awhile. On March 7, 2010, NetWare will end its phase of general support. Extended support will be available between March 8, 2010 and March 7, 2012. For three years after that, until March 7, 2015, customers may utilize Novell's self-support resources...

.

It didn't try to be a jack of all trades and master of none. It did what it did, exceptionally well. Groupwise was an exceptionaly stable/scalable product, it's just anything below version 7 of the product looked ancient and lacked pretties. Even then it did everything far better then Outlook, except HTML tended to bork it, but usually that was the very broken HTML outlook spews (can't really hold Novell responsible for that). Recent versions of the client have strived to bring it in to the 21st centuary, but I've not played with it, as we lost the battle to keep the product, as people just wanted "outlook".

Note to NetWare users: General Support is Coming to an End

"Novell has been taking good care of Suse Linux. Since Novell bought them, they continued working on what I think is the best Linux distro, without hindrance, boosted their marketshare and helped in giving Linux a corporate-friendly image. I hope the new owners of Novell (should such takeover really take place) will have a hands-off approach and let things chug along nicely, as they have been"

Didn't a third party, some time back express 'intellelectual property' claims over all versions of Linux, signing an exclusive deal with Novell, wherein the third party would exchange 'vouchers' in exchange for Novell acknowledging that the third party IP claims had validity. In publications on it's website, Novell recommends Microsoft Windows and advises customers to use SuSE for IP peace of mind. And while Novell provides cross-platform interoperability, it only provides it with Windows and denies it with other Linux distros. In short, they have conspired with Microsofts in its IP extortion racket against the Open Source community.

"Technical solutions spur continued success of joint effort to advance cross-platform interoperability and deliver IP peace of mind"

Buy our stuff, or someone we don't know will sure your ass off !

NetWare has been doing block suballocation for a while now. Not a bad way to make use of a larger block size, and it was crucial when early 'large' drives had to tolerate large blocks, at least before LBA was common. Novell tackled a lot of these problems fairly early as they lead the way in PC servers and had to deal with big volumes fairly quickly. Today, we take a lot of this for granted, and we are swimming in disk space so it's not a big deal. But once upon a time, this was not so. 80MB was priceless. Those sure were the days, grooming volumes and wincing over a 5MB file... ahh....

Not the first time block size was trumpeted as the next Insanely Great Thing.

I wish Windows fully implemented it. Hard to say, though, since the info is vague.

Novell uptime contest from 2001: http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/103.html

NetWare was bulletproof, for what it did.

http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/netware/img/bartb_uptime.gif

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server_discovered_after/

I could not get it to run on Vista64, but my impression is the same; it allows you to write macros that target GUI components by fuzzy graphical matching of little screen shot snippets to what is currently on the screen. They provide an (unfortunately somewhat tedious) video demo that illustrates what it does.

It would be a boon for working with Lightroom, which has horrific keybindings; no way to rebind keys, and many common functions that have no keys at all (like red-eye reduction, where you must interact with a graphical element). I have been able to get around some of this with AutoHotKey, but I'd love to be able to bind a hotkey to a mouse click on a specific GUI component, regardless of it's current absolute x,y coordinate on my screen. That's exactly what Sikuli is supposed to do.

I really wish Adobe would co-opt the awesome dynamic key rebinding mechanism Gimp uses ...

Ctrl-Alt-Backspace really isn't all that easy to hit. I accept that one shouldn't be able to kill X simply by holding the wrong three keys. However I think Ubuntu's decision to change the keys is much worse than openSUSE's solution which is to require you to press Ctrl-Alt-Backspace twice in quick succession in order to kill X. http://www.novell.com/linux/releasenotes/i586/openSUSE/11.0/#01

I think those are Novell's "main" products.

Except for SUSE Linux Enterprise and Mono.

As for Sun, Solaris isn't 100% open source. Also Sun is largely a hardware company.

Did you forget about the whole Java thing (almost all open sourced)?

We Linux is not so easy, and believe it or not,

Perhaps these links will be of help to you then. You seem to not be up-to-date.

• Red Hat Network/Satellite
• Novell's Endpoint Management
• Canonical's Landscape

Red Hat and Novell have quite a bit to help manage your Linux (and Windows, in Novell's case) infrastructure; this is only a quick sampling. If you're truly interested in it, you'll need to contact their representatives and have a dog-n-pony show, like the Microsoft ones you've attended.

Novell has never abandoned iFolder, it's part of the Open Workgoup Suite offering. http://www.novell.com/products/openenterpriseserver/ifolder.html We have been actively using it in our company for several years and I installed version 3.8 a few days ago as part of OES2 SP3. It's a great product, I can highly recommended. The Open Source version can be found here: http://ifolder.com/ifolder

For those who don't know, Yast is basically the configuration tool for *everything*

It is also used for the installation itself. If you make your own openSUSE or SUSE based distribution, you can completely change the whole installation process.
http://forgeftp.novell.com//yast/doc/SL11.1/ has a TON of information and if you desire you can even write your own modules.

e.g. the part about automated partitioning under AutoYaST.

For those who don't know, Yast is basically the configuration tool for *everything*

It is also used for the installation itself. If you make your own openSUSE or SUSE based distribution, you can completely change the whole installation process.
http://forgeftp.novell.com//yast/doc/SL11.1/ has a TON of information and if you desire you can even write your own modules.

e.g. the part about automated partitioning under AutoYaST.

For those who don't know, Yast is basically the configuration tool for *everything*

It is also used for the installation itself. If you make your own openSUSE or SUSE based distribution, you can completely change the whole installation process.
http://forgeftp.novell.com//yast/doc/SL11.1/ has a TON of information and if you desire you can even write your own modules.

e.g. the part about automated partitioning under AutoYaST.

I say unreliably, because years ago we had a Novell server that used an automated compression scheme. Eventually, the drive got full anyway, and we had to migrate to a larger disk.

But since the copy operation de-compressed files on the fly we couldn't copy because any attempt to reference several large compressed files instantly consumed all remaining space on the drive. What ensued was a nightmare of copy and delete files beginning with the smallest, and working our way up to the largest. It took over a day of manual effort before we freed up enough space to mass-move the remaining files.

This is because you didn't use NetWare's tools to copy the files - the command line NCOPY, for example, with /Ror and /RU (available when file compression was introduced with NetWare 4) would have copied the files in their compressed format, avoiding this (Link: http://support.novell.com/techcenter/articles/ana19940603.html). Using the Novell Client for Windows, I'd imagine that its Explorer shell integration would give you GUI tools, too, though I no longer have a NetWare server to verify this, and always preferred the command line anyway :).

No offense, but the scenario you describe is the result of ignorance, nor poor design.

Novell doesn't want to kill him; Novell agrees with him:

http://www.novell.com/prblogs/?p=1309

One thing to be aware - the current version of Novell Groupwise, has a bug in it's AFP stack that prevents Snow Leopard clients from connecting to shares.

http://www.novell.com/products/openenterpriseserver/snowleopard.html

It has been done already. Not quite what you described, but close enough.

So what is the problem with that?
check this out http://wiki.novell.com/index.php/Novell_Client_for_Linux

Just because GPL allows selling commercial software, it doesn't mean that it is very feasible.

I hear that said, yet it happens.
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/09/08/01/169247/The-Ethics-of-Selling-GPLed-Software-For-the-iPhone
http://redhat.com/
http://www.novell.com/linux/

Novell Response
Novell points out that the Judge affirmed the payment ($3million) SCO was ordered to make to Novell, so there's hope yet.

Someone better tell Novell.

It's free to download on the internets!

So's Linux, but people still pay for it.

http://www.novell.com/products/zenworks/assetmanagement/

Features

Complete View of IT Assets
software license compliance
Elimination of manual tracking and inventory gathering
Change notification
custom reporting
Integrated Management
Automated discovery
Detailed software and hardware inventory
Software usage tracking
Contract management

there are only 2 other major OS makers who are publicly traded, that are in competition to RH

HPQ HP-UX
ORCL Solaris
IBM AIX
NOVL SUSE

Looks like Red Hat has plenty of competition. Red Hat's business performance selling support services for their distribution of linux has been outstanding and their inclusion in the S&P 500 is well deserved.

Defacing a poorly written PHP app on Apache is just the same as hacking the same app on IIS. That's got nothing to do with the web server, and certainly nothing to do with the kind of exploit we're talking about here.
 

the poor security practices in the platform are beginning to be exploited...

Oh, yeah. Apache in a chroot, SELinux, and AppArmor make for poor security practices. Friggin' swiss chesse, that is!

Good luck doing anything further than exploiting the code in the web app. You're stuck serving drive-by downloads to unaware WinXP users.

Could be worse. Try <Left Shift><Right Shift><Alt><Esc>.

Link to Novell Microsoft FAQ

For the particulars on what they're going to do, you would have ask Novell or Miguel. However, it's pretty clear that Microsoft is reserving the option.

There is a patent covenant for anyone that downloads [Moonlight] from Novell [...] as to extending the patents to third parties -- you have to talk to Microsoft.

Miguel de Icaza, MIX '08

Q. What does the patent agreement cover with regard to Mono and OpenOffice? A. Under the patent agreement, customers will receive coverage for Mono, Samba, and OpenOffice.org as well as .NET and Windows Server. All of these technologies will be improved upon during the five years of the agreement and there are some limits on the coverage that would be provided for future technologies added to these offerings. The collaboration framework we have put in place allows us to work on complex subjects such as this where intellectual property and innovation are important parts of the conversation.

Also, a lot of people like GP are going to talk about standards. They don't really know what they're talking about, and are victims of a little semantic game. That something is a "standard" or even an "official" ECMA standard doesn't say anything about how patent-encumbered it is. ECMA standards are allowed to have so-called "reasonable and non-discriminatory" patent licensing. RAND licensing is incompatible with free software.

http://www.novell.com/linux/microsoft/faq_opensource.html

Q8. What does this mean for Mono and its inclusion in non-SUSE distributions? Does Mono infringe Microsoft patents?

"We maintain that Mono does not infringe any Microsoft patents. This agreement does not impact the rights and abilities of other distributions to bundle and ship Mono.

Novell is the leading contributor to Mono and we remain committed to the Mono project. Mono is a community project with many constituents and collaborators from companies, universities, governments and individuals.

The Mono project has a set of rules it uses to handle patents that might read on its implementation. The general policy is to work around, remove, or find prior technology on any patents that might read on any implementations in Mono. We continue to support this policy."

Also,
http://www.mono-project.com/FAQ:_Licensing#Patents

" Could patents be used to completely disable Mono?

First some background information.

The .NET Framework is divided in two parts: the ECMA/ISO covered technologies and the other technologies developed on top of it like ADO.NET, ASP.NET and Windows.Forms.

Mono implements the ECMA/ISO covered parts, as well as being a project that aims to implement the higher level blocks like ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows.Forms. ...The core of the .NET Framework, and what has been patented by Microsoft falls under the ECMA/ISO submission. Jim Miller at Microsoft has made a statement on the patents covering ISO/ECMA, (he is one of the inventors listed in the patent): here (http://web.archive.org/web/20030424174805/http://mailserver.di.unipi.it/pipermail/dotnet-sscli/msg00218.html)

Basically a grant is given to anyone who want to implement those components for free and for any purpose."

Hey ClosedSource. You can refer to our previous conversation for links; but for the others, you can get it from the horse's mouth:

There is a patent covenant for anyone that downloads [Moonlight] from Novell [...] as to extending the patents to third parties -- you have to talk to Microsoft.

Miguel de Icaza, MIX '08

He was apparently unhappy about it, and the news made Slashdot. He wasn't, however, unhappy enough to stop playing Microsoft's game.

Keep in mind that this in addition to (and separate from) the licensing deal struck in 2005, which is its own ball of nastiness. Again, we can go straight to the source (I'm not linking to boycottnovell or anything): http://www.novell.com/linux/microsoft/faq.html.

A relevant excerpt:

Q. What does the patent agreement cover with regard to Mono and OpenOffice? A. Under the patent agreement, customers will receive coverage for Mono, Samba, and OpenOffice.org as well as .NET and Windows Server. All of these technologies will be improved upon during the five years of the agreement and there are some limits on the coverage that would be provided for future technologies added to these offerings. The collaboration framework we have put in place allows us to work on complex subjects such as this where intellectual property and innovation are important parts of the conversation.

As for your favorite talking point about "Mono predating Novell involvement", Miguel has never understood that RAND != FREE. Again, check out our previous conversation, I'm not going to do the work twice. Readers can find everything they need to know on Miguel's blog.

What you fail to understand or accept is that any Microsoft IP in the FOSS ecosystem is destructive. I recall that this was your last stand in our debate: There is defensible Microsoft IP in mono, but it's "reasonable". If that is the case, then FOSS has good reason to be wary.

I don't want another debate with you, as you were totally willing to ignore the evidence I gave you previously. I am posting this for other readers' sakes.

I was going to post a link to a funny script some guy once made that disactivates your linux after 30 days, but instead I found this

Another great installation tutorial for SLED

http://forums.novell.com/novell-product-support-forums/suse-linux-enterprise-desktop-sled/sled-hardware/340340-ralink-rt2870-usb-stick-works-well-sled-10-a.html

"The Swiss like their operating systems like their cheese -- Plenty of holes." - by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 25, @05:12PM (#28087709)

Then, why didn't they choose Linux? It too, has had its share of "holes", such as this list below:

-----

Root Password Readable in Clear Text with Ubuntu:

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/13/0525254

-----

Is This The Biggest Linux Security Breach? REDHAT SERVERS HACKED:

http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=827351

-----

UBUNTU SERVERS HACKED:

http://it.slashdot.org/it/07/08/15/1341224.shtml

-----

SuSE Linux LPROLD BUFFER OVERFLOW:

http://www.novell.com/linux/security/advisories/2003_014_lprold.html

-----

Weakness In Linux Kernel's Binary Format:

http://it.slashdot.org/it/06/10/03/2122220.shtml

-----

Ubuntu May Be Killing Your Laptop's Hard Drive:

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/30/1742258

-----

KDE Heap Overflow Vulnerability Found:

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/21/0936249

-----

Critical Security Hole in Linux Wi-Fi:

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/15/1515259

-----

Bitten By the Red Hat Perl Bug:

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/29/1423201

-----

Debian Bug Leaves Private SSL SSH Keys Guessable:

http://it.slashdot.org/it/08/05/13/1533212.shtml

-----

Ext4 Data Losses on Linux:

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/19/1730247

-----

Longstanding Linux IO Wait Bug:

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/15/049201

-----

Intel Cache Poisoning Is Dangerously Easy On Linux:

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/22/1815226

-----

Major Security Hole In Samsung Linux Drivers:

http://it.slashdot.org/it/07/07/18/0319203.shtml

-----

Want more? I'll produce them, upon request... (especially ones that are indicative of USER LEVEL app problems, or those in hardwares)

AND, sure - Some of those from my lists above MAY be fixed by now (hopefully @ least), but THAT is NOT THE POINT - THIS IS:

Linux, BSD, MacOS X (all *NIX, in general/in other words) have/have had THEIR problems too...

So, please - don't try to make it sound as if only Microsoft's Windows NT-based OS family has them, because they ALL do & it also largely depends on the skills, determination, & efforts of those ADMINNING those OS & their networks as well, period...!

(What you have to hope for, is fast patching!)

APK

P.S.=> The "Pro-Linux" penguin crowd here NEVER FAILS TO AMAZE, with their "straight out of PRAVDA" propoganda (telling 1/2 the story to make Microsoft look poorly, but "StRaNgELy" always omitting THEIR OS' own downsides & such over time)...

Now, of course, the owners of /. here know 1 thing, &

I know everyone hates Novell but they got a product called ZLM which aims to control servers and workstations during all their life cycle (including network installation of OS, deployment and some cool management tools) and its not restricted to RPM based Linux. You can separate hosts by groups and apply stuff per group or folder. Check it: http://www.novell.com/products/zenworks/linuxmanagement/

You're probably looking for:
http://www.novell.com/products/zenworks/linuxmanagement/

And yes, it does support some flavors of RedHat. Nigbuntu you're SOL on. If you're developers are running that you should fire them anyway.

Obviously ssh should be off by default. Many people use a different port for ssh, as long as you understand that that is security trough obscurity, that is fine. It is not a real option if your system is a multi user system. Imagine if each webserver on the internet ran on a random port. Not very nice.

So then you must ask yourself if everybody in the whole world is allowed to run ssh to you or just a few.
You can already use your hosts.allow to block many and allow other IP adresses.
Then you can ask yourself if each user is allowed to connect by ssh or not and use AllowGroups or DenyGroups to give access. (or AllowUsers and DenyUsers)

I can not put my ssh on a different port, as I am sometimes in places where only that port will work. I have ssh also running on port 80 and 443, as sometimes only those work. Next to that I use blockhosts which blocks IPs after 3 attempts and is very easy to use as described here.

So with all this, I have the following possible restrictions and they can be all used or none or in any combination.
1) Access on a different port.
2) Access only from certain IP adresses or ranges
3) Allow access only for certain users
4) Block the IP after a certain amount of failed attempts
2)

Yep, RHEL is 7 years total with 4 years general support and 3 years of extended support, SUSE is 5 years general and 2 years extended.

I believe more "average people" (primarily Windows refugees since 90% of desktop users are currently using Windows) can quickly get comfortable with Ubuntu or even Fedora, than with OS X.

I don't know but I'd think it would be roughly evenly split for people switching from Windows to Linux or Macs. I switched from Windows to first Linux then OS X and I found OS X a little easier. The biggest difference between them was the mouse, er trackpad on my Mac, which only has one button. However two button mice work with OS X, my trackball has two buttons. However I use key press/clicks as I did with Windows and I picked up on that pretty quickly.

Certainly Open Office and Evolution are more like the familiar Microsoft Office and Outlook than are the equivalent OS X apps.

Open Office has a version I have installed on my Mac. There is also Evolution for OS X.

Falcon

I keep seeing people write that RMS was proven right. What was proven right?

When Stallman released the GPLv1 twenty some years ago, the naysayers and namecallers said:

1. It wouldn't work.
2. It wasn't needed.
3. Individuals would never use it.
4. Corporations would never use it.
5. Only a few "tree-hugging-nutjob-hippie" would ever use it.

Stallman was proved right and the naysayers were proved wrong on all these counts.

1. The GPL has withstood every legal challenge it has faced even though the vast majority of cases are settled before reaching a courtroom precisely because the GPL is so solid legally.
2. The all-out attack on the GPL (MS's Halloween Documents for example) demonstrate that the GPL is so effective that some companies with closed-source business models see it as their number one threat.
3. By many measures the GPL is the most used FOSS licence.
4. See IBM and Linux. As for all the "IBM hates the GPL" astroturfing see point (2) above. Also see SUSE Linux Enterprise.
5. Many major projects use the GPL including Linux, KDE, and MySQL. Many projects have switched to the GPL over the years such as Trolltech's QT framework.

But perhaps the best proof that Stallman was right is all the anti-GPL hate, lies and dirty tricks that flood the Internet crowned by the Microsoft funded SCO lawsuits against IBM and Novell and others. See especially the shameful coverage of these lawsuits by Maureen O'Gara Rob Enderle.

If Stallman was wrong, why on earth would anyone go to so much trouble trying to discredit the GPL? If Stallman had been wrong twenty years ago then his ideas would have died out by now and he would be totally ignored. People certainly wouldn't be saying that he's "wondering [sic] off to the tree-hugging-nutjob-hippie commune."

In fact, the acceptance and use of the GPL is still going strong and growing. The ideas behind the GPL have spread into other area such as Groklaw's uses them for legal research and the Creative Commons licences use them for books and other creative endeavours.

It use to be that Novell stuff was extremely difficult to setup, but once you got it running it ran for ever. Like the difference between a Cisco router and a $20 DLINK.

Anyone still using Novell software today? It's crap. Zenworks 10.1.3 blows up if you try to use it to delete a registry key. It's a known defect a year after the product has been released.

Check their forums, their software is crap. http://forums.novell.com/ In there you can see they are bleeding customers.

Hi,

I have done some large deployments with the same challenges you mention. The software we have used is the Linux Management suite from Novell. Here is the direct URL : http://www.novell.com/products/zenworks/linuxmanagement/

It works well with Redhat and SuSe but does not support many other distributions. In fact as you would expect its by far the best integrated with SuSe however it works well with Redhat.

Have you had a look at ZENworks Linux Management ? http://www.novell.com/products/zenworks/linuxmanagement/ From what I've heard, this provides GPO-type management of SUSE desktops ... maybe Red Hat too ?!?! Also does image management / build management AutoYaST and KickStart, Remote Management (Secure VNC by the looks) and package deployment (with dependency resolution)

I am a teacher with a lab of about 20 workstations running Ubuntu 8.10.

I installed Webmin on the workstations and my computer and use the clustering features. I use likewise-open for AD authentication and Webmin for everything else.

You can create a policy template by configuring one workstation and copying the gconf.xml.mandatory to the administrators workstation. All you have to do then is use the cluster file copy in Webmin to push your xml file to your clustered workstations. It works for me anyway.

I also recommend Cluster SSH for some tasks that require a shell. CSSH works just like SSH but allows you to send a single command to every machine in the the group simultaneously.

Locking Down
Webmin
CSSH

Have you had a look at Novell's Zenworks suite?

Zenworks

Precisely. As far as I can tell, that is exactly what ZenWorks does.

From the blurb on the linked page:

Control Linux desktops and servers from the comfort of your office. Novell ZENworks Linux Management makes it easy to extend Linux within your existing environment. It uses Policy-Driven Automation to deploy, manage and maintain Linux resources. Advanced policies let you control workstation and server settings as well as certain applications.

Although as many others have pointed out, you probably don't need to go to such lengths, but if you really want to ...