I think these things were only about 2 or 4 megabytes (which was HUGE back then).
It was a 512 kB (16*32 kB), but still was huge, and must have costed you a fortune back then ! I remember having made an NVRAM of 2 kB myself which I used to store some alternate boot code, and I was dreaming about the 6264 SRAM chips which would have brought my card to 8 kB ! It was back when you could modify your PC with a soldering iron.
GRUB still lacks LILO's incredibly useful feature of changing the default image to boot for only the next boot process.
I have written a patch which does exactly that and I use it in production on a lot of small appliances. I wish I had the time to package it and to send it, it's fairly minimalist (about 15 kB patch). It was against 0.96.
Willy
Re:The VAX port stopped working a long time ago
on
NetBSD v3.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
I tried 1.5 and 1.6 a long time ago on my VLC4000, but it was not stable. It would hang around once a month, so I tried to install an old VMS but I'm too ignorant of this OS to build a server out of it. Finally, it ended up on OpenBSD. 3.1 was fine and *relatively* stable on it. Now it runs 3.7 very smoothly. The only time it reboots is when I accidentely walk on the power plug.
I like the idea of building front-end servers/proxies out of rare combinations of OSes and platforms. It reduces the risk of getting a bug exploited. I've used an easily exploitable version of openssh for 2 years without a break-in;-)
Everywhere in the document, the wire resistance is not considered. So he considers that a tap will be connected anywhere on the wire but at one point. It seems to me that an evesdrooper connecting a tap at two distant places on the wire will not only be able to instantly detect resistor combinations, but will be able to inject modified data by mirroring the signal along the wire (read left, update right, etc).
I may be wrong, but it is worrying that this risk has not been evaluated.
Slackware is good, simple, robust and efficient because it works exactly like a BSD : you set it up using your brain, then you definitely forget it because it works and does never play magic tricks under you. It does what you want. Recently, I installed FreeBSD on a machine, and felt as if I was "at home" on my slack. Same philosophy, etc...
It's the best distro to start Linux for people coming from the BSD world (including those of the old SunOS 4.1.3 era), and probably for anyone too. It can be hard to setup uncommon hardware, but when you manage to do it, you understand how everything works and that matters.
Real itanium customers stack them in 42U boxes with linux or whatever they want to run on them, and use them for financial, mechanical or weather computations, a domain where windows is not the best OS anyway.
It's sad that itanium support is removed from windows though, because alpha which had currently itanium's place did not resist long after microsoft stopped supporting it.
Thinking that HP killed the alpha and Microsoft killed the itanium makes me feel like those companies killed the two most innovant chips of those last 15 years.
I'm surprised that it has taken them this long to add support for long passwords to UnixWare 7. UnixWare 7 is a modern UNIX by all means, considering it is still being updated frequently.
I'm not surprized at all, considering the thousands of bugs they don't even plan to fix ! We had to resort to binary patching because one customer had to wait 5 seconds between every ticket print on a POS. Needless to say it caused great trouble. But the "sleep 5" in the code was there to avoid a fast busy loop !!! And that's just an example.
with modern technology that could be solved, either by altering the rotation of the Earth or the orbit of the Moon
I am intrigued by your notions of "modern technology" and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Ah, you don't know ? there's a green and a red buttons that you just have to press to get the moon closer or farther. 20 years ago, people in the X-OR movie were already able to invert the earth's rotation, so imagine what can be done with modern technology !
I've got about 20 lines in my hosts.deny file - mostly/8 and/16 nets. This is on a server that hosts some services for showing off our products and it was seeing huge amounts of SSH dictionary attacks and web shell code, etc.
What's the problem if your SSH is properly configured ? I too get a few SSH attacks a day (about 20-40) and then ? What problem do you have with web shell code ? You fear that Chineese may find bugs in your application that your customers might never notice ?
If enough people -j DROP China, etc., maybe somethign will get done about. (I know - wishful thinking).
Oh, very clever. It will not change a thing, because people doing nasty things to them illegally so there's no control over them. It's like saying that you blacklist every dialup access from your web site because most of them are zombies !
It's useless to detect new addresses or unusual activity. A better solution such as the one http://www.exceliance.fr/en/ldapercu.htmdescribed here which consists in blocking inter-workstation communication is clearly more reliable. Nowadays, workstations don't need to talk to each other. That's simple.
Floppy progressively loses its usage for personal use, but in the IT industry, it's still much used. I don't know anybody spending all the day configuring routers or simply setting up some labs without using floppies. Why ? because when you're building the network, by definition you don't have network access. And using a USB stick to copy a 20 kB file is simply overkill (not counting the fact that it is awfully difficult to plug anything in a USB socket without looking at it). So in those environments, the floppy is simply the best method. Moreover, you can give it and not expect to get it back, while you would never do it with your 1 GB USB stick.
Believe me, many people who configure switches, routers, etc... still use floppies a lot ! I still use mine several times a week, sometimes tens of times a day, and it was hard to find a notebook with a floppy drive these days...
It's one thing to give up the firewall if all you have behind it is servers.
I cannot agree here, whatever you have behind your firewalls - servers/stations -, the firewall protects your network from OUTGOING traffic, while the hosts themselves cannot. Having a webserver broken into and used as a spam base is not something any admin should accept to risk. And the firewall protects against that : outgoing traffic.
Rule of thumb : if a root on any of your front servers can do nasty things to your network or outside, then you need a firewall to filter traffic from this server.
Willy
Stupid ! What next ? Man with a CPU in the ass ?
on
The Neuron Drive
·
· Score: 1
This is plain stupid, useless and very amateur. I can also take a photo of one of my test PCs which does not have any case around it... I'm sure it will be of interest to most people here... at least as much as this crappy article.
I guess that the submitter and the canvas only share one common neuron. Unfortunately, it holds the disk.
I'm really wondering what "interesting" articles we'll see after this...
It's interesting to note that some moderators are be easily influenced by whatever text is addressed to themselves. It's the same as when you were at school and wrote a few kind words for the corrector of your copy to get a few bonus points because you should him that he really existed through as a human being and not as one robot build for this work. Maybe I'll be modded interesting for this:-/
They don't sale or support Unix or Linux. What is the problem? They need to focus on their customers. That makes plenty of business sense.
You don't get it : it's buy a product, and disabling it to anihiliate competition. If MS buys every commercial company developping for unix/linux then announces they drop the unix/linux support, at the end they will render those OSes close to useless.
Microsoft runs a shitload of web presence on W2K3, and the only case when they had a breach was when admins simply ignored applying patches. Maybe your admin is incompetent?
Of course he must be ! Any competent admin will simply refuse to use such an OS. Only those who feel secure by clicking boxes all the day continue to use it. Have you seen how many windows admins were designed as admins while they has no IT knowledge before ?
I really think that Windows on a server does not cause the security breaches itself, but at least it attracts incompetent admins who make those vulnerabilities effective and exploitable. Not to mention that they never have any log ! As long as they still see the logon box, they think their server is running OK.
If Apple prevents its OS from running on a standard PC, it will be a fatal error for them. Instead, they need to make it available as the Windows competitor, and in a first time close their eyes on piracy, because people fed up with windows bugs will sometimes agree to switch to OSX "just for a test" at first, and then become more and more used to it. The same way as Windows replaced DOS. They would need an OS which runs on standard PC with some limitations (eg: no smp), so that when people running OSX will want to upgrade their PC, they may finally chose a mac to have a full-featured system.
If, on the other side, they allow Windows to run on their Macs, people who will encounter problems in OSX (usually cannot open a self-extracting zip or cannot use a particular browser plugin), will finally switch to windows and stick to it. Then, when the day of the hardware upgrade happens, they will think that to do the same thing, a standard PC will cost less.
Why not just (a) be less trusting of Content-Length, and (b) reject malformed requests with two of them?
Apache already does this. Multiple content-length fire an error, as well as requests using chunked transfer-encoding.
You're forced to trust Content-Length because it's the only way to know when to stop reading. It's just as if you proposed to be less trusting on the length field in an IP packet.
the decreased revenue is primarily due to a shinking market for commercial Unix
But this is not due to the pressure, it's due to the fact that people don't want anymore to use this crappy OS. Unixware is the most buggy piece of software on earth, and it's the OS that disgusts students from unix in general for the rest of their lives. When bugs are not fixed after years, you have to hex-edit the binaries yourself to fix them by hand ! What to say next ? Unixware, problems, bugs, even search engines will not index those words together anymore as they're everywhere on the net...
I will be glad when they're dead and nobody will care anymore about this awful OS.
It's not about your cheap PC, nobody cares about it. It's that there are companies which rely on high-performance servers for data bases/proxies/caches/directories, etc... on which it would become a real problem if an intruder could steal certain information such as private SSL keys. Moreover, a campus administrator not necessarily want his students being able to steal his root password.
Again, every inter-process vulnerability don't affect your windows PC you start up to read your mail and browse the net. You can go back to your porn sites, dad won't know.
Slashdot Mirror
I think these things were only about 2 or 4 megabytes (which was HUGE back then).
It was a 512 kB (16*32 kB), but still was huge, and must have costed you a fortune back then ! I remember having made an NVRAM of 2 kB myself which I used to store some alternate boot code, and I was dreaming about the 6264 SRAM chips which would have brought my card to 8 kB ! It was back when you could modify your PC with a soldering iron.
Willy
GRUB still lacks LILO's incredibly useful feature of changing the default image to boot for only the next boot process.
I have written a patch which does exactly that and I use it in production on a lot of small appliances. I wish I had the time to package it and to send it, it's fairly minimalist (about 15 kB patch). It was against 0.96.
Willy
I tried 1.5 and 1.6 a long time ago on my VLC4000, but it was not stable. It would hang around once a month, so I tried to install an old VMS but I'm too ignorant of this OS to build a server out of it. Finally, it ended up on OpenBSD. 3.1 was fine and *relatively*
;-)
stable on it. Now it runs 3.7 very smoothly. The only time it reboots is when I accidentely
walk on the power plug.
I like the idea of building front-end servers/proxies out of rare combinations of OSes
and platforms. It reduces the risk of getting a bug exploited. I've used an easily
exploitable version of openssh for 2 years without a break-in
Willy
Everywhere in the document, the wire resistance is not considered. So he considers that a tap will be connected anywhere on the wire but at one point. It seems to me that an evesdrooper connecting a tap at two distant places on the wire will not only be able to instantly detect resistor combinations, but will be able to inject modified data by mirroring the signal along the wire (read left, update right, etc).
I may be wrong, but it is worrying that this risk has not been evaluated.
Willy
Slackware is good, simple, robust and efficient because it works exactly like a BSD : you set it up using your brain, then you definitely forget it because it works and does never play magic tricks under you. It does what you want. Recently, I installed FreeBSD on a machine, and felt as if I was "at home" on my slack. Same philosophy, etc...
It's the best distro to start Linux for people coming from the BSD world (including those of the old SunOS 4.1.3 era), and probably for anyone too. It can be hard to setup uncommon hardware, but when you manage to do it, you understand how everything works and that matters.
I can't read TFA, I only have the choice to download and install the flash plugin. Nothing to see there, go away.
Real itanium customers stack them in 42U boxes with linux or whatever they want to run on them, and use them for financial, mechanical or weather computations, a domain where windows is not the best OS anyway.
It's sad that itanium support is removed from windows though, because alpha which had currently itanium's place did not resist long after microsoft stopped supporting it.
Thinking that HP killed the alpha and Microsoft killed the itanium makes me feel like those companies killed the two most innovant chips of those last 15 years.
Willy
I'm surprised that it has taken them this long to add support for long passwords to UnixWare 7. UnixWare 7 is a modern UNIX by all means, considering it is still being updated frequently.
I'm not surprized at all, considering the thousands of bugs they don't even plan to fix ! We had to resort to binary patching because one customer had to wait 5 seconds between every ticket print on a POS. Needless to say it caused great trouble. But the "sleep 5" in the code was there to avoid a fast busy loop !!! And that's just an example.
This guy might have linked against a static zlib and used a different one between this old openssh and the new one.
willy
with modern technology that could be solved, either by altering the rotation of the Earth or the orbit of the Moon
I am intrigued by your notions of "modern technology" and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Ah, you don't know ? there's a green and a red buttons that you just have to
press to get the moon closer or farther. 20 years ago, people in the X-OR movie were already able to invert the earth's rotation, so imagine what can be done with modern technology !
Blocking a /16 means blocking some ~65000 IP addresses. Blocking a /24 means blocking around 16 million IP addresses.
/24 will block a C class which is 256 addresses. Blocking /8 means 16 millions addresses. It's most often stupid anyway.
No ! blocking
Willy
I've got about 20 lines in my hosts.deny file - mostly /8 and /16 nets. This is on a server that hosts some services for showing off our products and it was seeing huge amounts of SSH dictionary attacks and web shell code, etc.
What's the problem if your SSH is properly configured ? I too get a few SSH attacks a day (about 20-40) and then ? What problem do you have with web shell code ? You fear that Chineese may find bugs in your application that your customers might never notice ?
If enough people -j DROP China, etc., maybe somethign will get done about. (I know - wishful thinking).
Oh, very clever. It will not change a thing, because people doing nasty things to them illegally so there's no control over them. It's like saying that you blacklist every dialup access from your web site because most of them are zombies !
Security through obscurity...
willy
It's useless to detect new addresses or unusual activity. A better solution such as the one http://www.exceliance.fr/en/ldapercu.htmdescribed here which consists in blocking inter-workstation communication is clearly more reliable. Nowadays, workstations don't need to talk to each other. That's simple.
I'm glad an article about such an interesting discovery got duped, because I missed the first one.
Willy
Floppy progressively loses its usage for personal use, but in the IT industry, it's still much used. I don't know anybody spending all the day configuring routers or simply setting up some labs without using floppies. Why ? because when you're building the network, by definition you don't have network access. And using a USB stick to copy a 20 kB file is simply overkill (not counting the fact that it is awfully difficult to plug anything in a USB socket without looking at it). So in those environments, the floppy is simply the best method. Moreover, you can give it and not expect to get it back, while you would never do it with your 1 GB USB stick.
Believe me, many people who configure switches, routers, etc... still use floppies a lot ! I still use mine several times a week, sometimes tens of times a day, and it was hard to find a notebook with a floppy drive these days...
willy
It's one thing to give up the firewall if all you have behind it is servers.
I cannot agree here, whatever you have behind your firewalls - servers/stations -,
the firewall protects your network from OUTGOING traffic, while the hosts themselves cannot. Having a webserver broken into and used as a spam base is not something any admin should accept to risk. And the firewall protects against that : outgoing traffic.
Rule of thumb : if a root on any of your front servers can do nasty things to your network or outside, then you need a firewall to filter traffic from this server.
Willy
This is plain stupid, useless and very amateur.
I can also take a photo of one of my test PCs which does not have any case
around it... I'm sure it will be of interest to most people here... at least
as much as this crappy article.
I guess that the submitter and the canvas only share one common neuron. Unfortunately, it holds the disk.
I'm really wondering what "interesting" articles we'll see after this...
willy
It's interesting to note that some moderators are be easily influenced by whatever text is addressed to themselves. It's the same as when you were at school and wrote a few kind words for the corrector of your copy to get a few bonus points because you should him that he really existed through as a human being and not as one robot build for this work. Maybe I'll be modded interesting for this :-/
Why do you ask this to Frank if you know his name ?
They don't sale or support Unix or Linux. What is the problem? They need to focus on their customers. That makes plenty of business sense.
You don't get it : it's buy a product, and disabling it to anihiliate competition. If MS buys every commercial company developping for unix/linux then announces they drop the unix/linux support, at the end they will render those OSes close to useless.
willy
Microsoft runs a shitload of web presence on W2K3, and the only case when they had a breach was when admins simply ignored applying patches. Maybe your admin is incompetent?
Of course he must be ! Any competent admin will simply refuse to use such an OS.
Only those who feel secure by clicking boxes all the day continue to use it. Have
you seen how many windows admins were designed as admins while they has no IT
knowledge before ?
I really think that Windows on a server does not cause the security breaches
itself, but at least it attracts incompetent admins who make those vulnerabilities
effective and exploitable. Not to mention that they never have any log !
As long as they still see the logon box, they think their server is running OK.
Willy
If Apple prevents its OS from running on a standard PC, it will be a fatal error for them. Instead, they need to make it available as the Windows competitor, and
in a first time close their eyes on piracy, because people fed up with windows bugs will sometimes agree to switch to OSX "just for a test" at first, and then become more and more used to it. The same way as Windows replaced DOS. They would need an OS which runs on standard PC with some limitations (eg: no smp), so that when people running OSX will want to upgrade their PC, they may finally chose a mac to have a full-featured system.
If, on the other side, they allow Windows to run on their Macs, people who will encounter problems in OSX (usually cannot open a self-extracting zip or cannot use a particular browser plugin), will finally switch to windows and stick to it. Then, when the day of the hardware upgrade happens, they will think that to do the same thing, a standard PC will cost less.
Willy
Why not just (a) be less trusting of Content-Length, and (b) reject malformed requests with two of them?
Apache already does this. Multiple content-length fire an error, as well as
requests using chunked transfer-encoding.
You're forced to trust Content-Length because it's the only way to know when
to stop reading. It's just as if you proposed to be less trusting on the length
field in an IP packet.
Willy
the decreased revenue is primarily due to a shinking market for commercial Unix
But this is not due to the pressure, it's due to the fact that people don't want anymore to use this crappy OS. Unixware is the most buggy piece of software on earth, and it's the OS that disgusts students from unix in general for the rest of their lives. When bugs are not fixed after years, you have to hex-edit the binaries yourself to fix them by hand ! What to say next ? Unixware, problems, bugs, even search engines will not index those words together anymore as they're everywhere on the net...
I will be glad when they're dead and nobody will care anymore about this awful OS.
It's not about your cheap PC, nobody cares about it. It's that there are companies which rely on high-performance servers for data bases/proxies/caches/directories, etc... on which it would become a real problem if an intruder could steal certain information such as private SSL keys. Moreover, a campus administrator not necessarily want his students being able to steal his root password.
Again, every inter-process vulnerability don't affect your windows PC you start up to read your mail and browse the net. You can go back to your porn sites, dad won't know.