A version of the same idea that is designed to stop malware is Deep Freeze. We use it for a small lab I administer at a school and, in combination with only allowing students to use non-admin accounts, stops malware cold.
- Sam
Re:Bash has been my favorite for 12 years
on
Bash Cookbook
·
· Score: 1
Ash is a small shell that is basically yet another attempt to make an open-source POSIX-compliant version of/bin/sh. It's nice because it's small; the runtime is about 50k, and it has been ported to Busybox, which makes it a nice "tiny Bash". It's/bin/sh on some BSD systems and on Ubuntu. The Wikipedia knows all, of course.
It's a good way to make sure scripts don't have Bash-isms.
- Sam
Bash has been my favorite for 12 years
on
Bash Cookbook
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Bash has been my favorite interactive shell for 12 years now. Basically, *NIX command shells, which in the 1980s had a lot of interesting ideas presented (csh, tcsh, ksh, etc.), have basically settled down. The only shells I have seen in use on modern *NIX systems (read Linux and the odd BSD) is Bash and Ash. Ash has had a resurgence in popularity lately because a version of it is part of Busybox (along with a tiny implementation of awk).
Bash takes Bourne Shell scripting (which was always more powerful than Csh scripting), and combines it with Csh's and Tcsh's best interactive features (! expansion, arrow history, tab completion, etc.).
The last time I saw people try to have a different paradigm with *NIX shells was with the 'rc' and 'es' shells of the 1990s, which was an attempt to introduce functional programming to the shell. Both shells stopped being actively developed before they were full featured (they never had job control, for example).
More recently, there is a new shell out there called the 'fish' shell, which I tried and didn't like. I don't like its requirement to have everything in a bunch of colors; a true *NIX shell, in my opinion, should not try and make everything colorful (I also despise ls with colors).
Looks like ksh finally was open sourced, but by then Bash had become the standard shell you're guaranteed to have in just about any Linux distribution (exceptions being tiny distributions which use Busybox for everything).
You know, the ISC should have fixed this issue in 2001. This is an old known issue with DNS and DNS implementors who cared about security were never vulnerable to this particular hole.
I think one of the reasons MaraDNS (my own DNS server) is as good as it is is because I
paid attention to DJB's writings. You know, a lot of people don't
like DJB and his software is very polarizing. His confrontational
behavior towards BIND and Sendmail was, at best, very unprofessional.
I also don't like his dishonesty about the security issues both DjbDNS
and Qmail have, pretending that these programs have no security
problems. That is also fanboy behavior and not behavior a responsible
software developer should have. The license was an issue for years,
also; when the license was finally made reasonable late 2007 it has
been too long to really develop a community of developers around
either DjbDNS or Qmail (or Publicfile or...).
That said, he had some good ideas. The idea of randomizing both the
query ID and the source port came from DJB and I implemented it in
MaraDNS because I took the time to read what he had to say about DNS
before implementing MaraDNS.
It is unfortunate that the bad blood between DJB and the BIND
developers made it so BIND didn't implement source port randomization
back in, say, 2001. It was known and a good idea then; it's essential
today.
Just like you wouldn't buy an unsupported printer for your mac and expect it to work, you wouldn't buy an unsupported printer for your Linux box and expect it to work. Except, somehow, Linux is supposed to magically support everything.
This isn't the problem. The problem is that Linux doesn't have a unified driver model. Drivers frequently break between minor kernel versions and forget about having a new driver work with an older kernel.
This is a real-world problem. I bought a Linux compatible notebook. I very specifically chose hardware that would work with Linux with the minimum of hassle. When Ubuntu proved to be unusable (the wireless driver never worked with a static IP and one day just stopped working altogether), I put CentOS 5.2 on this computer.
The video card finally worked with CentOS; X, unlike the kernel, is pretty stable about their driver API. The sound card doesn't work. I only got the networking card to work by installing a third-party driver; it's an older driver version and has an issue with crashing if I don't send traffic over the wireless interface; I usually have a process ping the gateway router once a second, which causes the problem to not manifest itself.
I wish the core kernel developers would find something more productive to do with their time than constantly changing the kernel-level API and ABI for drivers, breaking drivers and making it nay-to-impossible to backport drivers for new hardware.
This is one area where Windows clearly kicks Linux's ass: Drivers. Drivers for a given version of Windows are pretty much guaranteed to work for at least five years. This laptop has no problem working in Windows XP, a seven-year-old OS; none of this laptop's hardware works with a circa-1991 era Linux kernel (yes, I tried this), since new drivers don't work with older kernels.
I wish OpenOffice would let me easily assign keyboard shortcuts to special characters. As an ESL teacher, it would be nice to be able to quickly and easily type in pronunciations of English words using IPA special characters in OpenOffice. But I can't; this is why I use Microsoft Office for my classes.
This one feature is a deal killer for me, and why I only use OpenOffice to convert Office 2007 documents to Office 2003 documents for my co-workers.
It would also be nice if OpenOffice was not such a resource pig compared to Microsoft Office.
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A version of the same idea that is designed to stop malware is Deep Freeze. We use it for a small lab I administer at a school and, in combination with only allowing students to use non-admin accounts, stops malware cold.
- Sam
Ash is a small shell that is basically yet another attempt to make an open-source POSIX-compliant version of /bin/sh. It's nice because it's small; the runtime is about 50k, and it has been ported to Busybox, which makes it a nice "tiny Bash". It's /bin/sh on some BSD systems and on Ubuntu. The Wikipedia knows all, of course.
It's a good way to make sure scripts don't have Bash-isms.
- Sam
Bash takes Bourne Shell scripting (which was always more powerful than Csh scripting), and combines it with Csh's and Tcsh's best interactive features (! expansion, arrow history, tab completion, etc.).
The last time I saw people try to have a different paradigm with *NIX shells was with the 'rc' and 'es' shells of the 1990s, which was an attempt to introduce functional programming to the shell. Both shells stopped being actively developed before they were full featured (they never had job control, for example).
More recently, there is a new shell out there called the 'fish' shell, which I tried and didn't like. I don't like its requirement to have everything in a bunch of colors; a true *NIX shell, in my opinion, should not try and make everything colorful (I also despise ls with colors).
Looks like ksh finally was open sourced, but by then Bash had become the standard shell you're guaranteed to have in just about any Linux distribution (exceptions being tiny distributions which use Busybox for everything).
More information, of course, is on the Wikipedia..
I think one of the reasons MaraDNS (my own DNS server) is as good as it is is because I paid attention to DJB's writings. You know, a lot of people don't like DJB and his software is very polarizing. His confrontational behavior towards BIND and Sendmail was, at best, very unprofessional. I also don't like his dishonesty about the security issues both DjbDNS and Qmail have, pretending that these programs have no security problems. That is also fanboy behavior and not behavior a responsible software developer should have. The license was an issue for years, also; when the license was finally made reasonable late 2007 it has been too long to really develop a community of developers around either DjbDNS or Qmail (or Publicfile or...).
That said, he had some good ideas. The idea of randomizing both the query ID and the source port came from DJB and I implemented it in MaraDNS because I took the time to read what he had to say about DNS before implementing MaraDNS.
It is unfortunate that the bad blood between DJB and the BIND developers made it so BIND didn't implement source port randomization back in, say, 2001. It was known and a good idea then; it's essential today.
- Sam
This isn't the problem. The problem is that Linux doesn't have a unified driver model. Drivers frequently break between minor kernel versions and forget about having a new driver work with an older kernel.
This is a real-world problem. I bought a Linux compatible notebook. I very specifically chose hardware that would work with Linux with the minimum of hassle. When Ubuntu proved to be unusable (the wireless driver never worked with a static IP and one day just stopped working altogether), I put CentOS 5.2 on this computer.
The video card finally worked with CentOS; X, unlike the kernel, is pretty stable about their driver API. The sound card doesn't work. I only got the networking card to work by installing a third-party driver; it's an older driver version and has an issue with crashing if I don't send traffic over the wireless interface; I usually have a process ping the gateway router once a second, which causes the problem to not manifest itself.
I wish the core kernel developers would find something more productive to do with their time than constantly changing the kernel-level API and ABI for drivers, breaking drivers and making it nay-to-impossible to backport drivers for new hardware.
This is one area where Windows clearly kicks Linux's ass: Drivers. Drivers for a given version of Windows are pretty much guaranteed to work for at least five years. This laptop has no problem working in Windows XP, a seven-year-old OS; none of this laptop's hardware works with a circa-1991 era Linux kernel (yes, I tried this), since new drivers don't work with older kernels.
I wish OpenOffice would let me easily assign keyboard shortcuts to special characters. As an ESL teacher, it would be nice to be able to quickly and easily type in pronunciations of English words using IPA special characters in OpenOffice. But I can't; this is why I use Microsoft Office for my classes.
This one feature is a deal killer for me, and why I only use OpenOffice to convert Office 2007 documents to Office 2003 documents for my co-workers.
It would also be nice if OpenOffice was not such a resource pig compared to Microsoft Office.