I am making plans for the safety of my family and home. The systems under my resposibility will be of little importance if this hurricane comes withing 200 miles of my home.
Backup and contingency plans need to be made well in advance of a natural disaster. If you haven't made such plans already, it is likely too late for them now, at least for this event.
But, the things you may come to realize, should you ever experience a major disaster, might surprise you. The first and most shocking thing is that there is no amount of planning or preparation that will withstand the likes of a major hurricane. The next not so surprising thing is that after such an event, people are generally more interested in the tangible aspects of life, internet and network type resources are of little or no importance for several days after such a catastrophy. Food, water, shelter suddenly become much more important and much harder to find. And the least surprising thing of all, that most people don't realize until after such a disaster is that people come first. Family and friends are of the greatest importance.
So, if you don't already have backup and contingency plans in place for your network, you're too late for this one. If you do, then consider this a test of your plan and hope for the best. But, most importantly, forget the network. Get yourself and your family well out of the way of this beast and you will live to rebuild your home and the network another day.
This story is racing around the net like wildfire but, the source is obscure at best. While I'd love to jump on the fan-boy bandwagon I have serious reservations about the validity of everyones assumptions that this is going to be a company-wide/global migration.
Major unanswered questions remain. How much of their network is going to be switched to Linux. Based soley on the Scotland paper's article, I can easily see that this is reporting any of a number of possibilities other than global replacement of Windows systems. Some possibilities include; that this is specific to a local Scottish plant, or that this applies to back-end servers that run Oracle databases.
While I certainly hope that this report is true and that it is indeed global, I think that is an idea that borders on fantasy. It seems incredible as well as unlikely that Ford really plans to replace Microsoft everywhere in their corporation which puts a damper on the euphoric claims of 370,000 PCs globally.
As a final note to bolster my suspicions, it seems more than likely that any vendor such as Red Hat, SuSE, or IBM could win a massive contract like replacing Windows globally at Ford without issuing lots of press releases about it. Thus far the only source I have been able to find is the Scottish paper and all of the other internet sites, including The Register and Slashdot, are citing that same source.
I disagree. I would suggest that the application support is there today but, not the way people are trying to accomplish it. By and large most evaluations like you have done are trying to use Linux as a drop in replacement for Windows. This will probably never happen. While there are many applications that can be used as drop in replacements to Windows applications there are even more that are not. And Windows applications, for the most part, don't run on Linux.
Bit, how is this different than the likes of Windows 2003. There are countless applications, even Microsoft applications such as Exchange 2000, that will not run on Windows 2003. For some people this will mean that they will not implement Windows 2003 but, as time wears on most if not all will move to Windows 2003 and upgrade or replace their existing applications to ones that do run on Windows 2003. They will buy Windows 2003 and they will also buy Exchange 2003.
So, rather than looking for a seamless drop in replacement to Windows in Linux, why not look at it from an upgrade/migration point of view? There are numerous accounting applications that do run natively on Linux. The specialty apps that are written in VB will need to be rewritten for Linux. But why not? Chances are that those same VB apps are right now being examined for a rewrite in C#.NET. They'll have to be for the sake of Windows 2003.
The point is that people seem unwilling to rewrite or migrate their apps for a Linux environment but, for some reason, they think nothing of doing this for their Windows environment. The thing that they fail to take into account is that in the Linux environment this will almost certainly be a one time affair. But, in the Windows environment it will be a recurring theme every few years because that is what Microsoft wants and has to do in order to keep selling the same companies more software.
All too often people say that it is not cost effective or it is too difficult to make the switch but they seem to disregard these same issues as they run on Microsoft's treadmill.
BTW, have you repatched your Microsoft RCP service?
Thin clients are an excellent, though not new, idea. One of the big advantages of thin clients is cost. A thin client device that supports the RDP or Citrix ICA protocols can be had for just a couple of hundred dollars but, if you want X Term support the cost is through the roof. I want to know why the X capable clients cost so much more than the Winterm clients. I can't see any real justification for this.
Setup.exe.txt will pass through most of these filters
It sounds like you have a most excellent scanner. There are many scanners that can unzip and check archives but, I was not aware of any that could decipher recursive zipping and renaming. Which scanner are you using?
First these stats are important in demonstrating that it is important, no, imperative that admins of all flavors keep their servers up-to-date and know how to secure them effectively.
But, the stats also suggest that Linux is somehow less secure because it is attacked more often. The facts are a bit different though. Firstly, the statistics are drawn from a database of reported defacements not total defacements and definitely not total compromises. If this report were to be done in a more accurate fashion it ould have to include the hundreds of thousands of machines that are regualrly rooted by worms. Most recently, MS Blaster took over thousands of machines and reported for duty on an IRC bot channel. This report fails to account for these and many others like them.
I will conceed that Linux is defaced more than any other OS at this time but, I would also point out that this does not make it less secure. More people may report compromising a Linux box to change the Apache index page but, none of the Code, Red Blaster or many others bothered to register with the defacement database and I guarantee that these compromises outnumber Linux defacements by the millions.
I've pretty much given up on beating this dead hosre but, I'll say it one more time for your benefit: Email was not intended to be a file transfer and or storage system. If you need to transfer files a better solution would be to make them available via HTTP or FTP and simply email the URL to the recipient. They can then click the link and download the file themselves rather than a mailbox with a gigabyte of messages that all have attachmented files.
Last time: Email was never intended to be a file transfer or storage mechanism. Use it as it was originally intended and you will not have any problems or frustrations.
Try replacing the extension on the attachment and include instructions in the email on how to change it back. Setup.txt or Setup.exe.txt will pass through most of these filters because it does not have an executable extension. Additionally, Windows will not be able to execute it as it will instead try to open the file in Notepad. Instructing your recipients to rename the file after saving it to disk is simple and easy, and they will be able to execute it after that. It's rather like having to do a chmod on Unix before you can execute.
Now, this might change in the future when someone puts out a virus with the renamed extension and includes instructions to rename the virus and execute it. But, that virus hasn't surfaced yet and will probably not spread very well any way. So, until such time this technique will work to bypass most attachment filters.
Wind River is an embedded OS company. Their main OS vxWorks is used by many major vendors of things like switches, routers, PBXs and who knows what else.
It seems like only a year ago when Wind River took over BSD/OS and made lots of lavish praises and promises but, I think everyone knew that this would be the final result. Frankly I never fully understood why Wind River picked it up in the first place.
In any case, I do not feel that this is a significant loss. The major BSD development is happening in FreeBSD and NetBSD, BSD/OS was never a strong contender.
None the less, this does clearly demonstrate what happens to software that is owned by closed source companies.
Some BIOSes can do this.
on
MRAM in 2004?
·
· Score: 1
There are some BIOSes [sic] that allow you to schedule a power on and a power off time. I don't know if my BIOS has such a feature, I never looked.
Re:I'm not sure how accurate this statement is.
on
MRAM in 2004?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I have two systems under my desk that run 24/7. The reason they are always on? So that I start working the instant that my butt hits the chair nothing more. I do not like to wait for the machine to boot. I also do not like to wait for several minutes while the machine shuts down and restarts because some process went into a Z or D state and is gumming up the works.
One of the primary "selling" points of the Patriot Act was that it would be used against "foreign" suspects. However, to my knowledge, the Patriot Act has thus far been used primarily against US citizens (big surprise). Is anyone aware if the Patriot Act has in fact been used against a foreigner yet? And, if so, what the ratio of Patiot Act vs. Citizens and foreigners is?
Bot, I hope I don't make The List with this post. I'm sorry John, I didn't mean anything by it.
The timing of this is rather ironic as I read this morning that the CAPSII system will be coming online very shortly. I can't wait to see what color I am. What color are you?
I am paying for raw internet bandwidth and that is what I expect to get. I will not tollerate any filtering or restrictions on the use of my account.
Any ISP that mandates filtering should also provide significant discounts to their customers as they are no longer providing a full raw feed. Of course, this will never happen as the filtering will increase the ISPs operating cost so the end result will be less service at a higher price.
Block my ports and I move to another ISP. If enough ISPs start blocking ports to the point that I can no longer find one that meets my needs, then I will open my own again because the demand for the small ISP will be back.
Here is where the "magic" really is. You see, the "Cold Fusion Reactor" is plugged into a 220volt socket. If you unplug the 220volt power supply the light goes out.
If he really had a reaction that was actually creating energy, you could unplug the power supply and the reaction would continue. Infact the reaction would continue to grow and a means of throttling the reaction would be necessary.
What he really has here is a rather dangerous light bulb. It's none too efficient either.
Ramdisk based snort logs aren't too enticing to me.
Another HTTP server on 8000 doesn't do anything for me either, especially when the one on port 80 is already like molases running up hill in winter.
The fact is that this might be useful in troubleshootingsomething on the router but, for production use it isn't terribly practical. But, then again who's going to rely on this router for any real production use. This is after all, a home or small office device.
Slashdot Mirror
I am making plans for the safety of my family and home. The systems under my resposibility will be of little importance if this hurricane comes withing 200 miles of my home.
Backup and contingency plans need to be made well in advance of a natural disaster. If you haven't made such plans already, it is likely too late for them now, at least for this event.
But, the things you may come to realize, should you ever experience a major disaster, might surprise you. The first and most shocking thing is that there is no amount of planning or preparation that will withstand the likes of a major hurricane. The next not so surprising thing is that after such an event, people are generally more interested in the tangible aspects of life, internet and network type resources are of little or no importance for several days after such a catastrophy. Food, water, shelter suddenly become much more important and much harder to find. And the least surprising thing of all, that most people don't realize until after such a disaster is that people come first. Family and friends are of the greatest importance.
So, if you don't already have backup and contingency plans in place for your network, you're too late for this one. If you do, then consider this a test of your plan and hope for the best. But, most importantly, forget the network. Get yourself and your family well out of the way of this beast and you will live to rebuild your home and the network another day.
This story is racing around the net like wildfire but, the source is obscure at best. While I'd love to jump on the fan-boy bandwagon I have serious reservations about the validity of everyones assumptions that this is going to be a company-wide/global migration.
Major unanswered questions remain. How much of their network is going to be switched to Linux. Based soley on the Scotland paper's article, I can easily see that this is reporting any of a number of possibilities other than global replacement of Windows systems. Some possibilities include; that this is specific to a local Scottish plant, or that this applies to back-end servers that run Oracle databases.
While I certainly hope that this report is true and that it is indeed global, I think that is an idea that borders on fantasy. It seems incredible as well as unlikely that Ford really plans to replace Microsoft everywhere in their corporation which puts a damper on the euphoric claims of 370,000 PCs globally.
As a final note to bolster my suspicions, it seems more than likely that any vendor such as Red Hat, SuSE, or IBM could win a massive contract like replacing Windows globally at Ford without issuing lots of press releases about it. Thus far the only source I have been able to find is the Scottish paper and all of the other internet sites, including The Register and Slashdot, are citing that same source.
I disagree. I would suggest that the application support is there today but, not the way people are trying to accomplish it. By and large most evaluations like you have done are trying to use Linux as a drop in replacement for Windows. This will probably never happen. While there are many applications that can be used as drop in replacements to Windows applications there are even more that are not. And Windows applications, for the most part, don't run on Linux.
Bit, how is this different than the likes of Windows 2003. There are countless applications, even Microsoft applications such as Exchange 2000, that will not run on Windows 2003. For some people this will mean that they will not implement Windows 2003 but, as time wears on most if not all will move to Windows 2003 and upgrade or replace their existing applications to ones that do run on Windows 2003. They will buy Windows 2003 and they will also buy Exchange 2003.
So, rather than looking for a seamless drop in replacement to Windows in Linux, why not look at it from an upgrade/migration point of view? There are numerous accounting applications that do run natively on Linux. The specialty apps that are written in VB will need to be rewritten for Linux. But why not? Chances are that those same VB apps are right now being examined for a rewrite in C#.NET. They'll have to be for the sake of Windows 2003.
The point is that people seem unwilling to rewrite or migrate their apps for a Linux environment but, for some reason, they think nothing of doing this for their Windows environment. The thing that they fail to take into account is that in the Linux environment this will almost certainly be a one time affair. But, in the Windows environment it will be a recurring theme every few years because that is what Microsoft wants and has to do in order to keep selling the same companies more software.
All too often people say that it is not cost effective or it is too difficult to make the switch but they seem to disregard these same issues as they run on Microsoft's treadmill.
BTW, have you repatched your Microsoft RCP service?
Thin clients are an excellent, though not new, idea. One of the big advantages of thin clients is cost. A thin client device that supports the RDP or Citrix ICA protocols can be had for just a couple of hundred dollars but, if you want X Term support the cost is through the roof. I want to know why the X capable clients cost so much more than the Winterm clients. I can't see any real justification for this.
You're kidding right? Do a quick Google and see how much you can control right now. Don't forget the obligatory X10 devices for home automation either. You can easily tie in a Sharp Zaurus to most of these setups and you could also use VNC from the WinCE devices, if that's what you have.
If you wanted to control your appliances via PC or PDA you could do it, right now. You just have to put in a little effort initially.
So the maximum range is going to be ~1000 feet but ~300 feet is closer to reality.
This screenshot seems a bit troubling. Whats with the concentric circles on the display? Is this some form of targeting system?
Somebody set us up the bomb?
Knoppix
DamnSmallLinux
Knoppix Mini Cd
OpenGroupware Live CD
Moppix
Gnoppix
Quantian Scientific Computing Environment
Freeduc
L.A.S.
BlueEyedOS
Oralux
and others I can't presently remember.
Setup.exe.txt will pass through most of these filters
It sounds like you have a most excellent scanner. There are many scanners that can unzip and check archives but, I was not aware of any that could decipher recursive zipping and renaming. Which scanner are you using?
First these stats are important in demonstrating that it is important, no, imperative that admins of all flavors keep their servers up-to-date and know how to secure them effectively.
But, the stats also suggest that Linux is somehow less secure because it is attacked more often. The facts are a bit different though. Firstly, the statistics are drawn from a database of reported defacements not total defacements and definitely not total compromises. If this report were to be done in a more accurate fashion it ould have to include the hundreds of thousands of machines that are regualrly rooted by worms. Most recently, MS Blaster took over thousands of machines and reported for duty on an IRC bot channel. This report fails to account for these and many others like them.
I will conceed that Linux is defaced more than any other OS at this time but, I would also point out that this does not make it less secure. More people may report compromising a Linux box to change the Apache index page but, none of the Code, Red Blaster or many others bothered to register with the defacement database and I guarantee that these compromises outnumber Linux defacements by the millions.
I've pretty much given up on beating this dead hosre but, I'll say it one more time for your benefit: Email was not intended to be a file transfer and or storage system. If you need to transfer files a better solution would be to make them available via HTTP or FTP and simply email the URL to the recipient. They can then click the link and download the file themselves rather than a mailbox with a gigabyte of messages that all have attachmented files.
Last time: Email was never intended to be a file transfer or storage mechanism. Use it as it was originally intended and you will not have any problems or frustrations.
Try replacing the extension on the attachment and include instructions in the email on how to change it back. Setup.txt or Setup.exe.txt will pass through most of these filters because it does not have an executable extension. Additionally, Windows will not be able to execute it as it will instead try to open the file in Notepad. Instructing your recipients to rename the file after saving it to disk is simple and easy, and they will be able to execute it after that. It's rather like having to do a chmod on Unix before you can execute.
Now, this might change in the future when someone puts out a virus with the renamed extension and includes instructions to rename the virus and execute it. But, that virus hasn't surfaced yet and will probably not spread very well any way. So, until such time this technique will work to bypass most attachment filters.
helo valid? .exe|.bat|.cmd|.vb*|.scr|.jsp|.com|.sys|.bin|..... .
mailfrom: xxx
rctpto: xxx
data
550 For security reasons this form of message is denied on this system.
connection closed.
Wind River is an embedded OS company. Their main OS vxWorks is used by many major vendors of things like switches, routers, PBXs and who knows what else.
It seems like only a year ago when Wind River took over BSD/OS and made lots of lavish praises and promises but, I think everyone knew that this would be the final result. Frankly I never fully understood why Wind River picked it up in the first place.
In any case, I do not feel that this is a significant loss. The major BSD development is happening in FreeBSD and NetBSD, BSD/OS was never a strong contender.
None the less, this does clearly demonstrate what happens to software that is owned by closed source companies.
There are some BIOSes [sic] that allow you to schedule a power on and a power off time. I don't know if my BIOS has such a feature, I never looked.
I have two systems under my desk that run 24/7. The reason they are always on? So that I start working the instant that my butt hits the chair nothing more. I do not like to wait for the machine to boot. I also do not like to wait for several minutes while the machine shuts down and restarts because some process went into a Z or D state and is gumming up the works.
3:44pm up 42 days, 22:59, 6 users, load average: 0.13, 0.26, 0.31
I'm glad to see that the hardware industry is producing vaporware now and that vaporware is not exclusive to the software industry.
BTW didn't Bill Gates promise instant booting PCs five or so years ago? My new machine takes a full two minutes to boot.
One of the primary "selling" points of the Patriot Act was that it would be used against "foreign" suspects. However, to my knowledge, the Patriot Act has thus far been used primarily against US citizens (big surprise). Is anyone aware if the Patriot Act has in fact been used against a foreigner yet? And, if so, what the ratio of Patiot Act vs. Citizens and foreigners is?
Bot, I hope I don't make The List with this post. I'm sorry John, I didn't mean anything by it.
I thought that in the US, it was the citizens that gave the government rights. Not the other way around. I'm so naive, aren't I?
The timing of this is rather ironic as I read this morning that the CAPSII system will be coming online very shortly. I can't wait to see what color I am. What color are you?
I am paying for raw internet bandwidth and that is what I expect to get. I will not tollerate any filtering or restrictions on the use of my account.
Any ISP that mandates filtering should also provide significant discounts to their customers as they are no longer providing a full raw feed. Of course, this will never happen as the filtering will increase the ISPs operating cost so the end result will be less service at a higher price.
Block my ports and I move to another ISP. If enough ISPs start blocking ports to the point that I can no longer find one that meets my needs, then I will open my own again because the demand for the small ISP will be back.
Here is where the "magic" really is. You see, the "Cold Fusion Reactor" is plugged into a 220volt socket. If you unplug the 220volt power supply the light goes out.
If he really had a reaction that was actually creating energy, you could unplug the power supply and the reaction would continue. Infact the reaction would continue to grow and a means of throttling the reaction would be necessary.
What he really has here is a rather dangerous light bulb. It's none too efficient either.
Snort logs will be written to /var/log/snort
Ramdisk based snort logs aren't too enticing to me.
Another HTTP server on 8000 doesn't do anything for me either, especially when the one on port 80 is already like molases running up hill in winter.
The fact is that this might be useful in troubleshootingsomething on the router but, for production use it isn't terribly practical. But, then again who's going to rely on this router for any real production use. This is after all, a home or small office device.
Slow as hell and not terribly practical. But, still very cool.