DS doesn't interfere with FH because FH will just work around the jammed channels that DS is using. However, with DS, if someone is FH on your channels, you're SOL. DS vendors try to paint the problem as being with FH but that really isn't the case. With FH, you have to jam 26 channels to block a signal. With DS, you have to jam a few channels in one of the three sequences and you can jam the whole sequence. I've seen this problem coming for about two years, ever since I had my first wireless networking course. The sad thing is, as litigious a society as we live in, some lawyers will probably get rich off of interference. As I understand it, microwaves (the kind you cook food in) also operate in the 2.4Ghz range, as does some TV feeds (i.e. when the truck is out on location for breaking news and sending info back to the main station). As 2.4Ghz becomes more and more populated with bunches of different equipment, vendors have (and already are) making the leap to the next free band, the 5.8Ghz band. Witness the evolution of wireless phones. I'm not sure what the cheapie ones run at but you have 900Mhz, now 2.4Ghz, guess where the next ones will be? 5.8Ghz (along with all the other wireless devices that migrated there to get away from the congestion in the 2.4Ghz band:)
Just because a company adapts to a changing software development paradigm doesn't mean they are desparate. If it was anybody but Apple, you'd be lauding them for their forward thinking. SGI is in the same boat, as are a number of other companies. Sure, there are many who are just jumping on the bandwagon but thats the nature of revolutions - the bandwagon starts, people jump on, and who knows where it ends up.
I'm talking about the cheesy one with the heart on a computer. Unless I'm mistaken, that computer is something akin to a Macintosh Classic or Color Classic and isn't even affected by the virus. Do news graphics creators verify their image integrity?
Given the past screwups of distributed.net, this latest snafu isn't suprising. In fact, I had a bad feeling about the whole thing when I switched my clients over to OGR from RC5 - just call it a gut feeling that somewhere during the contest, they would announce they had a bug and their results were bogus. I guess this is it. Can anyone tell me about other distributed projects they are aware of? I know of dcypher.net and thats about it. Maybe its time we start a "new" distributed.net - heck, throw in a "new" slashdot too while we're at it....
No, the newer version support is NOT in kernel 2.3.x (at least as of 2.3.41). You can get updated drivers at ftp://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/linux/drivers/kern- 2.3 but I'm not sure when that will be merged into the main devel. branch of Linux.
To clarify the one of the replies to your question - yes, Tulip support has been in the kernel for some time. However, support for card which require newer drivers has not been, at least until 2.2.14 (and the version included in 2.3.x is the old standard 0.89H).
In July 1999, we formed a committee consisting of our President, Chief Financial Officer, and a systems administrator, as part of our effort to perform a coordinated audit of:
...
Geez - those poor corporations that hired programmers to check their work - what a waste of money. All you need to verify Y2K compliance is a President, CFO, and a sys admin and observe what happens when you turn the date ahead.... Its not like components interact over time or anything
I don't think that my post put sendmail up on a pedestal at all. There's nothing that implies that it should be shielded by critique, I mentioned nothing about Microsoft and I mentioned nothing about it being open source.
Every major piece of software, be it in the NT or UNIX camp, has security holes in it. Every document you read should say "if you got with your software, check with your vendor because there's bound to be security holes in it". It goes without saying almost (qmail might be an exception, since no one has collected the cash prize for exploiting it as far as I know).
And yes, I admit that I don't fully understand what every single rules set does in my.cf file. Sue me. I also don't understand what every single piece of code that is in the linux kernel does but I use that anyways. Do you read and understand all the source code you use? Or even better, are you using a closed source application? Do you know what IT'S doing internally? Do you test ever buffer in every application to make sure it won't overflow and smash the stack? I don't. I don't have the time to do that - I'd never get anything done.
I can't religiously defend sendmail because it has, historically, had its problems. Perhaps I'm wrong to use such an application to deliver my mail. The reason I continue to use it is a) it works out of the box with my IMAP package and has rulesets for delivery specifically with the Cyrus stuff from CMU, b) it has LDAP support for delivery lookup, c) newer versions will have SASL support for authentication and d) I find it simpler to setup than qmail. To get the functionality I want out of qmail, I have to download the core package, use a bunch of addons that people have contributed, do a bit of hacking, and then still not have a product that works quite as well as I want it too. Most definitely its my own ignorance of using qmail but for my situation, sendmail works.
I'm not saying that qmail sucks or that sendmail rules. All I'm saying is that for what I want to do, sendmail works fine. For some sites, that still have UUCP or BITNET, sendmail is one of the only options. If the number one rule for designing a mail server is "You must use a MTA that has no history of security exploits", qmail wins and sendmail loses. My past experience in getting qmail to work with my setup (LDAP/PAM) wasn't good and thats why I continue to drag around the "dead beast" known as sendmail.
Sendmail seems to generate a lot of hate and a lot of love, from its detractors and supporters, respectively. How many of those who use qmail have ever setup and administered a sendmail install? And how many sendmail admins have ever setup and used a qmail install? Both have their pros and cons. Both were designed differently - one came from way back in the day when the world was a bit freer (as far as computer security goes) and as a result, its had many exploits. I don't think that Eric Allman will ever suggest that sendmail was coded with security first in mind (and thats no excuse for not being secure). Because of that, the sendmail approach has been to add new features, patch bugs, and end up with a MTA that can do anything (but is bloated).
There are somethings that sendmail, because of its "bloated" quality can do well. Ever try to do mail via BITNET or UUCP with qmail? Probably not - I'm not sure it can be done. But sendmail has hooks for those mechanisms.
Qmail is (argueably) easier to install, has a nice mailing list manager and IT WAS DESIGNED WITH SECURITY IN MIND. Sendmail wasn't. Thats not excusing its security holes - its just noting that the environments that shaped the two MTA is different. And perhaps its time to move away from a MTA that was designed wrong from the start. But you can disable alot of the unneeded features of sendmail if you want.
This is a near religous war (akin to emacs vs. vi). But for those of you who argue that sendmail has a difficult config file - have you ever read the README files on how to set it up? I'm working on installing a new mail server now, built around the Cyrus IMAP package and sendmail 8.9.3. Compiled Cyrus and supporting libraries (libsasl) on Tuesday and got it running. Compiled sendmail yesterday - install BerkeleyDB 2.77, got sendmail source, uncompressed and untarred, cd sendmail-8.9.3/src,./makesendmail to generate Makefile, edit Makefile to point to Berkeley db stuff, make, make install, cd../../cf/cf, create a 10 line.cf file, m4 miconfig.mc > sendmail.cf, HUP it and I have a MTA that hands off everything but a few local accounts (like root) to cyrus. Its got antispam features out of the box, it uses LDAP, its reasonably fast, and I did it in my spare time - cyrus install was about one hour and sendmail was about the same (less if you don't count the interruptions).
All the sendmail.cf file amounts to is an expansion of a ton of m4 macros. The.cf files are not difficult to generate at all - like I said, ten lines and I have a fully functional mail server. I don't profess to know what all the rules do - but I don't necessarily have to - it works.
Microwaves do operate in the 2.4Ghz range - stick a Breezecom Wireless unit beside a microwave and you'll have a fun time with an intermittent network connection. Some TV stations also broadcast their feeds in the 2.4GHz range, though its supposedly a free for public use frequency range. Look for the next set of wireless phones to go into the 2.4GHz range as well (up from 900MHz). Its getting cluttered and some of the new 10Mb+ wireless networking equipment is jumping up into the 5GHz range somewhere.
Re:Speaking of uptime...
on
Kernel 2.2.12
·
· Score: 2
The reason for the near hypocrisy when NT-run sites are down vs. UNIX-run sites that are down is that OS users are bigots (most of them anyway) and maintain that their OS of choice is the best in the world, half the time without really ever using anything else or having any real world experience to know what else is out there. I must agree that there are complete idiots out there who fancy themselves administrators of computing systems just because they have that level of privelege at the login screen of WinNT.
I administer both systems and while my slant is towards UNIX, we have NT servers in 6 buildings that do not crash and have, in some cases, over a year of uptime. Now granted, all they are doing is file serving and DHCP so its not exactly a sweeping stability victory for NT to say it doesn't crash on these boxes. But the secret is hardware, at least in my experience. If you buy decent hardware that is certified to work with NT, it greatly improves the stability of the OS.
Now the email server that runs on NT (Netscape Messaging Server) - thats a different story. It was done before my time but its definitely entropy in action.
My motto has always been to use what does the job best for you. For some, that may mean using NT. They will sacrifice some stability and scaleability for the (sic) "ease" of use and stupid wizards (my own bias slips through..). For others, a UNIX system does the job best. Though graphics may never see the light of day on my DNS server, I wouldn't trade BIND and the command line on it for anything NT has to offer.
KmArT
Re:They fell for the 2.2.11 "joke"...
on
Kernel 2.2.12
·
· Score: 1
Ever hear of TESTING a kernel before putting it into full production use??
Agreed. Linux is one of the primary reasons that I've stayed at my current job. As part of a small IT department (a manager, myself and a tech), I have had the opportunity to realign our network operating systems from Windows NT to Linux boxes. When my previous boss left, it was a golden opportunity for me to get rid of NT in the server end and let Linux shine. I am midway through a conversion process that also includes LDAPifying everything and although I've had offers of higher pay, the experience I'm gaining now is something I believe I can cash in on in the future. Not that I live for money or the materials of this world but if someone is willing to pay me for the skills I have, I won't turn it down!
I'm a similar situation here myself. I've kept half an eye on the job market, as I know that pretty much any job would pay me better than where I work now (I work for a K-12 school district). I applied recently for a job that ended up being just a few miles down the road from where I live. From what the recruiter told me, I was able to piece together what company he was talking about (there is only one company near me that would have an Internet product for four years). The job was for a UNIX admin position but I also happened to know that this company uses Macs for their product, which is something I am also very familiar with, working in an educational environment. The recruiter insisted he have my resume right away so I came in on a Saturday and typed up an updated resume and sent it to him. That was about a month ago. I never heard anything back. Never an acknowledgement, never a "We don't want you". Nothing. I had half a notion to just bypass the stupid recruiter and submit my resume directly but I wasn't totally gung ho about the job. However, whats frightening to me is the trend that there now is a middleman involved in the whole employment process - the geek headhunter. My experience has been there are those who are good and are knowledgeable but they are dwarfed in number by the droids who simply put a bunch of keywords into a database to search on and if your resume matches, you're in for an interview. I dealt with a recruiting firm in Pittsburgh where the person would call me about UNIX jobs because that was what was on my resume. They continually assured me the jobs fit me and I would later see them posted on a jobs website and they were way off base with what I am familiar with. I guess the old tried and true method of who you know still works best. People networking will probably more often land you the better job.
Microsoft is just tooting their horn that for once, the problem is NOT NT. From what I understand, Ebay's setup consists of NT servers running the cgi's and web stuff and a Sun box doing the database stuff at the backend. The problems were with the Sun box OR with some clueless people who administer the Sun box and are experiencing growing pains. I would vote for the latter - for all the cash that Ebay is raking in, I had several problems with them when I posted items a long time ago. It doesn't surprise me that they have two hard outages like this - they grew too big too fast and just don't have what it takes to do business 24/7. This outage may have given them a healthy dosage of clue though. I did hear that there were problems with the NT cgi cluster as well. The bottom line is that while the problem was with a Sun box running a database, it probably wasn't the hardware or OS but more likely a system that wasn't capable of handling the sort of load that Ebay receives. I don't speak for Ebay and could be full of it. This is just what I've picked up from mailing lists.
http://www.eeye.com/database/advisories/ad06081999 /ad06081999-exploit.html and a few exploits also moved across BUGTRAQ not too long after the advisory did. They are versy short (5-10 lines) perl scripts. I know nothing about IIS and would probably like to keep it that way but if this thing works, script kiddies are going to have a field day!
Re:Whining? Naww.. Ignorance, maybe.
on
Linux 2.2.8
·
· Score: 1
You will see such updates and fixes in EVERY kernel release. What goads me is people who complain about just having downloaded 2.2.X and now 2.2.X+1 is out so now they have to download THAT. It all comes down to this: if there is a legitimate reason to upgrade the kernel, do so. If not and you have some fetish with running the latest kernel all the time, then don't complain about them being released so often. No one is making anyone upgrade and its nice that there is active development on the kernel. Like someone mentioned, we could have the Microsoft format - a monolithic service pack every few quarters or few years, with a bunch of hot fixes in between.
There's an easy way to get long uptimes - don't upgrade the kernel unless you don't have to. It amazes me all the people whining about HAVING to upgrade the kernel everytime a new one comes out. You don't have to and if you've got a configuration that is working fine, doesn't contain bugs that cause it to crash or have bugs that lead to security exploits, then just leave it be for goodness sake! I played the kernel upgrade game with the 2.1.x on my own workstation but my servers here behind the firewall are running whatever they are running and they'll stay that way until someone comes out with an exploit that can be launched from a Macintosh (we have almost entirely Mac clients) or until I absolutely need one of the new kernel features to do something I need to get done.
Re:Upgrading RH6 to 2.2.8 problems...
on
Linux 2.2.8
·
· Score: 2
Do you have the binutils rpm installed? the as86 assembler is part of that package....
As far as I'm concerned, that Gartner article is about dead on target. I'd have to say the majority of Linux users that read Slashdot are quite capable of deploying Linux in their enterprises. But, the majority of IT departments in corporations don't have a majority of Slashdot readers. What I'm getting at is that despite the fact that Gartner is often far behind and wrong, their reports carry some weight with the pointy haired people.
And if you will note, they predict (easy to do when it already happens) that Linux will take off with a 70 to 80 percent certainty. Thats not bad at all.
A personal anecdote - I've been looking for a UNIX sysadmin job in Pennsylvania, especially in the Pittsburgh area. Haven't found much of anything and absolutely nothing about Linux. I'm hedging my bets on Linux and in my book, when there are Linux jobs posted for Pennsylvania, I'll know that Linux is here to stay. Amish country isn't exactly Silicon Valley (but we run Linux in our school district!)
The temp agencies I talked to are getting a smattering of request for Linux but not the kind you'd expect for something that has already arrived. Just a little more patience - my prediction is that within the year, Linux jobs will be the most prevalent of the various UNIX jobs available.
Slashdot Mirror
All you will get is a bounce - thats no longer a valid address. I sent mail through ABC's web form and it bounced immediately from that address.
DS doesn't interfere with FH because FH will just work around the jammed channels that DS is using. However, with DS, if someone is FH on your channels, you're SOL. DS vendors try to paint the problem as being with FH but that really isn't the case. With FH, you have to jam 26 channels to block a signal. With DS, you have to jam a few channels in one of the three sequences and you can jam the whole sequence. I've seen this problem coming for about two years, ever since I had my first wireless networking course. The sad thing is, as litigious a society as we live in, some lawyers will probably get rich off of interference. As I understand it, microwaves (the kind you cook food in) also operate in the 2.4Ghz range, as does some TV feeds (i.e. when the truck is out on location for breaking news and sending info back to the main station). As 2.4Ghz becomes more and more populated with bunches of different equipment, vendors have (and already are) making the leap to the next free band, the 5.8Ghz band. Witness the evolution of wireless phones. I'm not sure what the cheapie ones run at but you have 900Mhz, now 2.4Ghz, guess where the next ones will be? 5.8Ghz (along with all the other wireless devices that migrated there to get away from the congestion in the 2.4Ghz band :)
Just because a company adapts to a changing software development paradigm doesn't mean they are desparate. If it was anybody but Apple, you'd be lauding them for their forward thinking. SGI is in the same boat, as are a number of other companies. Sure, there are many who are just jumping on the bandwagon but thats the nature of revolutions - the bandwagon starts, people jump on, and who knows where it ends up.
Just flip the "b" upside down and it becomes a "p". I'm sure thats how they intended it to be read ;)
I'm talking about the cheesy one with the heart on a computer. Unless I'm mistaken, that computer is something akin to a Macintosh Classic or Color Classic and isn't even affected by the virus. Do news graphics creators verify their image integrity?
Given the past screwups of distributed.net, this latest snafu isn't suprising. In fact, I had a bad feeling about the whole thing when I switched my clients over to OGR from RC5 - just call it a gut feeling that somewhere during the contest, they would announce they had a bug and their results were bogus. I guess this is it. Can anyone tell me about other distributed projects they are aware of? I know of dcypher.net and thats about it. Maybe its time we start a "new" distributed.net - heck, throw in a "new" slashdot too while we're at it....
No, the newer version support is NOT in kernel 2.3.x (at least as of 2.3.41). You can get updated drivers at ftp://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/linux/drivers/kern- 2.3 but I'm not sure when that will be merged into the main devel. branch of Linux.
To clarify the one of the replies to your question - yes, Tulip support has been in the kernel for some time. However, support for card which require newer drivers has not been, at least until 2.2.14 (and the version included in 2.3.x is the old standard 0.89H).
I think you might be confusing Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs....
According to their Y2K statement
...
In July 1999, we formed a committee consisting of our President, Chief Financial Officer, and a systems administrator, as part of our effort to perform a coordinated audit of:
...
Geez - those poor corporations that hired programmers to check their work - what a waste of money. All you need to verify Y2K compliance is a President, CFO, and a sys admin and observe what happens when you turn the date ahead.... Its not like components interact over time or anything
Every major piece of software, be it in the NT or UNIX camp, has security holes in it. Every document you read should say "if you got with your software, check with your vendor because there's bound to be security holes in it". It goes without saying almost (qmail might be an exception, since no one has collected the cash prize for exploiting it as far as I know).
And yes, I admit that I don't fully understand what every single rules set does in my .cf file. Sue me. I also don't understand what every single piece of code that is in the linux kernel does but I use that anyways. Do you read and understand all the source code you use? Or even better, are you using a closed source application? Do you know what IT'S doing internally? Do you test ever buffer in every application to make sure it won't overflow and smash the stack? I don't. I don't have the time to do that - I'd never get anything done.
I can't religiously defend sendmail because it has, historically, had its problems. Perhaps I'm wrong to use such an application to deliver my mail. The reason I continue to use it is a) it works out of the box with my IMAP package and has rulesets for delivery specifically with the Cyrus stuff from CMU, b) it has LDAP support for delivery lookup, c) newer versions will have SASL support for authentication and d) I find it simpler to setup than qmail. To get the functionality I want out of qmail, I have to download the core package, use a bunch of addons that people have contributed, do a bit of hacking, and then still not have a product that works quite as well as I want it too. Most definitely its my own ignorance of using qmail but for my situation, sendmail works.
I'm not saying that qmail sucks or that sendmail rules. All I'm saying is that for what I want to do, sendmail works fine. For some sites, that still have UUCP or BITNET, sendmail is one of the only options. If the number one rule for designing a mail server is "You must use a MTA that has no history of security exploits", qmail wins and sendmail loses. My past experience in getting qmail to work with my setup (LDAP/PAM) wasn't good and thats why I continue to drag around the "dead beast" known as sendmail.
There are somethings that sendmail, because of its "bloated" quality can do well. Ever try to do mail via BITNET or UUCP with qmail? Probably not - I'm not sure it can be done. But sendmail has hooks for those mechanisms.
Qmail is (argueably) easier to install, has a nice mailing list manager and IT WAS DESIGNED WITH SECURITY IN MIND. Sendmail wasn't. Thats not excusing its security holes - its just noting that the environments that shaped the two MTA is different. And perhaps its time to move away from a MTA that was designed wrong from the start. But you can disable alot of the unneeded features of sendmail if you want.
This is a near religous war (akin to emacs vs. vi). But for those of you who argue that sendmail has a difficult config file - have you ever read the README files on how to set it up? I'm working on installing a new mail server now, built around the Cyrus IMAP package and sendmail 8.9.3. Compiled Cyrus and supporting libraries (libsasl) on Tuesday and got it running. Compiled sendmail yesterday - install BerkeleyDB 2.77, got sendmail source, uncompressed and untarred, cd sendmail-8.9.3/src, ./makesendmail to generate Makefile, edit Makefile to point to Berkeley db stuff, make, make install, cd ../../cf/cf, create a 10 line .cf file, m4 miconfig.mc > sendmail.cf, HUP it and I have a MTA that hands off everything but a few local accounts (like root) to cyrus. Its got antispam features out of the box, it uses LDAP, its reasonably fast, and I did it in my spare time - cyrus install was about one hour and sendmail was about the same (less if you don't count the interruptions).
All the sendmail.cf file amounts to is an expansion of a ton of m4 macros. The .cf files are not difficult to generate at all - like I said, ten lines and I have a fully functional mail server. I don't profess to know what all the rules do - but I don't necessarily have to - it works.
Microwaves do operate in the 2.4Ghz range - stick a Breezecom Wireless unit beside a microwave and you'll have a fun time with an intermittent network connection. Some TV stations also broadcast their feeds in the 2.4GHz range, though its supposedly a free for public use frequency range. Look for the next set of wireless phones to go into the 2.4GHz range as well (up from 900MHz). Its getting cluttered and some of the new 10Mb+ wireless networking equipment is jumping up into the 5GHz range somewhere.
The reason for the near hypocrisy when NT-run sites are down vs. UNIX-run sites that are down is that OS users are bigots (most of them anyway) and maintain that their OS of choice is the best in the world, half the time without really ever using anything else or having any real world experience to know what else is out there. I must agree that there are complete idiots out there who fancy themselves administrators of computing systems just because they have that level of privelege at the login screen of WinNT.
I administer both systems and while my slant is towards UNIX, we have NT servers in 6 buildings that do not crash and have, in some cases, over a year of uptime. Now granted, all they are doing is file serving and DHCP so its not exactly a sweeping stability victory for NT to say it doesn't crash on these boxes. But the secret is hardware, at least in my experience. If you buy decent hardware that is certified to work with NT, it greatly improves the stability of the OS.
Now the email server that runs on NT (Netscape Messaging Server) - thats a different story. It was done before my time but its definitely entropy in action.
My motto has always been to use what does the job best for you. For some, that may mean using NT. They will sacrifice some stability and scaleability for the (sic) "ease" of use and stupid wizards (my own bias slips through..). For others, a UNIX system does the job best. Though graphics may never see the light of day on my DNS server, I wouldn't trade BIND and the command line on it for anything NT has to offer.
KmArT
Ever hear of TESTING a kernel before putting it into full production use??
Agreed. Linux is one of the primary reasons that I've stayed at my current job. As part of a small IT department (a manager, myself and a tech), I have had the opportunity to realign our network operating systems from Windows NT to Linux boxes. When my previous boss left, it was a golden opportunity for me to get rid of NT in the server end and let Linux shine. I am midway through a conversion process that also includes LDAPifying everything and although I've had offers of higher pay, the experience I'm gaining now is something I believe I can cash in on in the future. Not that I live for money or the materials of this world but if someone is willing to pay me for the skills I have, I won't turn it down!
I'm a similar situation here myself. I've kept half an eye on the job market, as I know that pretty much any job would pay me better than where I work now (I work for a K-12 school district). I applied recently for a job that ended up being just a few miles down the road from where I live. From what the recruiter told me, I was able to piece together what company he was talking about (there is only one company near me that would have an Internet product for four years). The job was for a UNIX admin position but I also happened to know that this company uses Macs for their product, which is something I am also very familiar with, working in an educational environment. The recruiter insisted he have my resume right away so I came in on a Saturday and typed up an updated resume and sent it to him. That was about a month ago. I never heard anything back. Never an acknowledgement, never a "We don't want you". Nothing. I had half a notion to just bypass the stupid recruiter and submit my resume directly but I wasn't totally gung ho about the job. However, whats frightening to me is the trend that there now is a middleman involved in the whole employment process - the geek headhunter. My experience has been there are those who are good and are knowledgeable but they are dwarfed in number by the droids who simply put a bunch of keywords into a database to search on and if your resume matches, you're in for an interview. I dealt with a recruiting firm in Pittsburgh where the person would call me about UNIX jobs because that was what was on my resume. They continually assured me the jobs fit me and I would later see them posted on a jobs website and they were way off base with what I am familiar with. I guess the old tried and true method of who you know still works best. People networking will probably more often land you the better job.
Microsoft is just tooting their horn that for once, the problem is NOT NT. From what I understand, Ebay's setup consists of NT servers running the cgi's and web stuff and a Sun box doing the database stuff at the backend. The problems were with the Sun box OR with some clueless people who administer the Sun box and are experiencing growing pains. I would vote for the latter - for all the cash that Ebay is raking in, I had several problems with them when I posted items a long time ago. It doesn't surprise me that they have two hard outages like this - they grew too big too fast and just don't have what it takes to do business 24/7. This outage may have given them a healthy dosage of clue though. I did hear that there were problems with the NT cgi cluster as well. The bottom line is that while the problem was with a Sun box running a database, it probably wasn't the hardware or OS but more likely a system that wasn't capable of handling the sort of load that Ebay receives. I don't speak for Ebay and could be full of it. This is just what I've picked up from mailing lists.
http://www.eeye.com/database/advisories/ad06081999 /ad06081999-exploit.html and a few exploits also moved across BUGTRAQ not too long after the advisory did. They are versy short (5-10 lines) perl scripts. I know nothing about IIS and would probably like to keep it that way but if this thing works, script kiddies are going to have a field day!
You will see such updates and fixes in EVERY kernel release. What goads me is people who complain about just having downloaded 2.2.X and now 2.2.X+1 is out so now they have to download THAT. It all comes down to this: if there is a legitimate reason to upgrade the kernel, do so. If not and you have some fetish with running the latest kernel all the time, then don't complain about them being released so often. No one is making anyone upgrade and its nice that there is active development on the kernel. Like someone mentioned, we could have the Microsoft format - a monolithic service pack every few quarters or few years, with a bunch of hot fixes in between.
There's an easy way to get long uptimes - don't upgrade the kernel unless you don't have to. It amazes me all the people whining about HAVING to upgrade the kernel everytime a new one comes out. You don't have to and if you've got a configuration that is working fine, doesn't contain bugs that cause it to crash or have bugs that lead to security exploits, then just leave it be for goodness sake! I played the kernel upgrade game with the 2.1.x on my own workstation but my servers here behind the firewall are running whatever they are running and they'll stay that way until someone comes out with an exploit that can be launched from a Macintosh (we have almost entirely Mac clients) or until I absolutely need one of the new kernel features to do something I need to get done.
Do you have the binutils rpm installed? the as86 assembler is part of that package....
And if you will note, they predict (easy to do when it already happens) that Linux will take off with a 70 to 80 percent certainty. Thats not bad at all.
A personal anecdote - I've been looking for a UNIX sysadmin job in Pennsylvania, especially in the Pittsburgh area. Haven't found much of anything and absolutely nothing about Linux. I'm hedging my bets on Linux and in my book, when there are Linux jobs posted for Pennsylvania, I'll know that Linux is here to stay. Amish country isn't exactly Silicon Valley (but we run Linux in our school district!)
The temp agencies I talked to are getting a smattering of request for Linux but not the kind you'd expect for something that has already arrived. Just a little more patience - my prediction is that within the year, Linux jobs will be the most prevalent of the various UNIX jobs available.