netstat -rn. It was probably trying to look up a host. -n will prevent it from doing so. Yes I agree with you that usinjg such as system requires knowledge of the os. I've never had problems with such things, but I enjoy tinkering with the os. However, once you know where everything is, it's not so hard. Editing text files and certain commands isn't hard. It's a combination of a lack of experience and intuitiveness. Actually; if you learn something like solaris, bsd or linux in detail, you can often translate that knowledge over to the other OS providing you learn the nuances and differences including where the files are stored. In other words, the learning curve gets less steep after you learn your first unix-like OS.
Oh yeah. This message was written in netscape in x running wmaker + kpanel and kfm which is in an x-win32 using XDMCP window off a server in the server room (which also serves 20 other users concurrently) on my windows 98 desktop:) ----------
1) Both KOffice and Staroffice feel clunky to me (may be a matter of opinion). I'm waiting for the next staroffice. 2) no standard and reliable installation and de-installation methods a'la windows uninstall menus. You can argue for RPM, but its not exactly easy for a beginner. We need to be able to click on an executable, have it install like installshield, and be able to be uninstalled from a centralized and from e menu which brings us to: 3) wmconf; it's a good idea, but it needs a lot of work. a standard menu format that actually works 100% of the time (and is automatically added to) is a necessity. 4) lots of little applications that cater to the end user (not just techie toys). A good example is that application called CompuPic, recently released for linux. It caters to the end user, it works great, and it has an intuitive interface (probably because they stole it from ACDSee -- or was it the other way around). Also applications such as dreamweaver, quickbooks, quicken and golf games (hey, old people like them) 5) Games! We need current games to draw people to the platform. Hopefully XFree 4.0 will be all that it promises. 6) Video/audio codecs and some types of hardware. DVD, full quicktime with every codec we'll ever need, a reliable realplayer, all the various avi and mpeg codecs, and final non beta flash and shockwave players. These things in particular keep me bound to the windows world (well besides the games.
Linux (and *BSD) are going to get there soon enough. I wonder how many redhat releases we are away from where the user won't have to worry about ever looking at a command line (unless of course they want to), directly booting into x, and have a reliable and standard (not that non-standards will necessarily hurt) way of getting things done (or not done in the case of video games).
I don't see the problem with having commercial closed software on the platform. It's not like it's stopping open source alternatives from developing (though it may the other way around). People have to make money some way -- and quality software can't always be done where the only revenues are added services and support.
Of course, that's just my opinion, and I may be wrong. ----------
Security is only as powerful as the people included. You can encrypt, but that doesn't stop anyone from just joining the network, gathering IP adresses and becoming a nark.
It's like assuming a network with passwords changing every couple of days is secure. The people who have access are probably writing that password down right next to their desk. The same goes for warez groups. 99% of these people don't know each other in real life and anyone online can by anyone (including the FBI) in real life. It's like trying to implement an photo verification program when the people involved are shape shifters. ----------
I think kinetix is willing to take that blow because without people who learn their products, there is no demand. Without pirated versions, companies wouldn't be buying their products. You can't learn 3d modelling in a week. Most people can't afford 3dsmax either (even with student discounts). ----------
Just a quick note. I can confirm that this is the case with Half-Life. Sierra's revenues have skyrocketed for this game because of the server-client login architecture.
However, most games are bought on a quick whim, and played for a week. Half-Life is something you can play for many months (yay, counter-strike).
For the record, I've bought one copy of half-life. Unfortunately since we only have one copy here at home, the same person can't play on the same server on won.net at the same time. So I downloaded a keygen and sat there for 40 minutes generating some. Not one worked on won. So I took my lazy ass over to future shop and purchased a 42 CDN year old copy of half life. Now we want to play 3 way games online.. going to have to pick up another copy (150 bucks to play a 3 way game is such a rip off).
So in defence of Sierra, they did save some money by setting it up this way. However, I don't agree with the fact that they may have lost 10% revenues. Most of the people who would seriously pirate the game would never purchase it in the first place.
Pirates usually just like playing the flavor of the day. From what I've seen, they usually play a game for like 45 minutes and delete it and then move on to the next one. ----------
Anyway, I don't see why there is a reason to stay with BSDi except for better driver support for certain raid hardware. FreeBSD 3.3 is far better than BSDi 4.0.1.
We have 4 BSDi boxes where I work, but we bought them in 98 when 2.2.8 was the current stable version and there weren't enough drivers for what we needed. FreeBSD has grown at a couple of orders of magnitude faster than BSDi has in the past year. I of course will still be interested when BSDi announces 5.x (if they do).
The fact that BSDi is also closed source hurts it a lot. You can't tweak the system to the nth degree like FreeBSD unless you buy an expensive source license.
It's always nice to hear a company actually announce that they are switching to FreeBSD. Most are quiet about doing such things. There are probably a ton of high profile companies using *BSD for various purposes but they don't announce it. ----------
I use a program called sharity to browse large networks (no smbmount on the IRIX, FreeBSD, SunOS and AIX machines I run). It basically creates a special mount at/CIFS where you can browse the network. It's not really mounting shares. It just redirects back to localhost where it (I'm assuming) talks with sharityd which browses the network at an application level.
Unfortunately it costs a lot of money. Free student licenses are available however. I don't know if smbmount does this as I don't use linux. ----------
There are already portable players from sony, panasonic, and a couple of other manufacturers. I have the PBD-V30 which is MSRP 799.00 (I paid 40% less due to my company getting anything sony wholesale). Anyway, building such a thing yourself would cost much more in man time as well as the single products made up to build it.
I'm assuming you don't mean straight transfer, as DVD movies are usually 6.5 - 9.4 gigs (around 7.1mbps).
The only thing breaking CSS does for us at this time is allow non-licensees the capability to produce DVD player products as well as enabling pirates to rip, reduce, re-encode in mpeg1, and place on 2 vcd's. Previously they were reduced to using PC players and grabbing it frame by frame; or just grabbing and recording from tv-out. ----------
Yes, this is true a lot of the time. I was offered an 86k salary job in san jose -- but after calculating cost of living it didn't look so good (commuting times REALLY suck too).
Where I'd really like to be is vancouver. I visited there a couple of years ago and its great. Cost of living isn't *that* high as well (I don't think). What's the state of this industry there? Does anyone here know? (building local contacts there would be no fun if there's no industry) ----------
Toronto here. I used to make 49k CDN developing consumer level graphics and video products for windows in Visual C++. Specialization was video codecs and UI implementation. It was strictly 9-5 (except tight weeks before gold master) though.
I've since moved on to consulting for companies wishing to build web portals or become application service providers. Specialization is CGI (c and perl)/Cold Fusion/asp optimization, db2/oracle/sybase/mssql7 and overall project direction. Currently on 3 month contract for 72k CDN as well as attempting to build applications to fuel my own business. I don't have any free time at all though:).
Both have their disadvantages. I'd rather be running my own software house than trying to fix the problems of often seemingly idiotic people. ----------
I deal with many external breakins per year. The vast majority of these turn out to be stolen dialup accounts (can be traced but try and get uunet to respond to abuse mail) or hacked (or legit stolen by sniffing) university boxes/accounts (especially IRIX x terminals for some reason). That and commercial shell accounts that have been traded on IRC (you can tell by the stupid vhosts).
Most of the time, if it's a company, it's usually an employee though. Disgruntled, greedy or whatnot.
But hey, I could be wrong. I only know from my own experience dealing with at least a 200 incidents as well as the fun involved in running a couple of 1500 user shell accounts that allow eggdrop access (smurfs, fork attacks, attempts to breach their restricted userland and whatnot). On the shell servers in particular, it's always the idiots who have shared accounts with friends who upon their first login try exploiting everything in sight.
I won't deny the potential for such an idiot to trash your server with ready made scripts -- but I'm willing to bet such a person isn't going to immediately do a rm -rf/. That's why intrusion detection is so important. Now, if you just left a redhat 4.2 box open for half a year without even logging onto it, then I guess you might have worries. So maybe I did grossly overstate. In most cases I've dealt with though, it's some kid who's bouncing through at least one box, immediately installing a rootkit that sends password information to a particular file, as well as a sniffer to grab plain text passwords from telnet and ftp over a non-switched network environment.
Yes, I've seen cases of ready made exploits (example: recent wu and pro ftpd exploits) -- but those people are usually not even worth the time calling up a university/large dialup provider et al (note that I've had bad experiences with Yale, colorado, ucsd, ucdavis, utoronto, purdue, harvard and columbia admins. In my experience they're more worried about deleting the accounts than sitting on their duffs watching for future logins when their public server cluster supports 15,000 users). Most of the time they will turn a box into their own personal file server or playpen irc eggdrop box. The people you really have to worry about are those that gain access to a system, remove your md5 checksum/tripwire whatever system before it e-mails or pages you, install a sniffer and new login program, take over the gateway if they already havent, and then eventually move to have access to all servers on your internal network. Ever wonder why the groups who are defacing public web sites for fun aren't getting caught? It's because they're bouncing through a number of sites before exploiting a IIS bug or CGI. Well that and the fact that there's no point in wasting time and money when you can easily restore from backup and/or manually fix the problem.
The only thing that an group of this sort is going to do is increase awareness of what exploits are being done, and possibly increase pressure put on those Universities/corporations/ISP's to revoke the account of a person. Once the damage is done, it's done. At that point, I really don't care what happens to this person unless I think I can get monetary compensation or make sure that they don't use proprietary information/data that had been stolen. Announcing to the world on a public list what OS you run and what you think was exploited and how isn't going to help much though... ----------
Actually, I think it's exactly what they need. My thoughts when installing a system are completely different than a newbies. Even if I hadn't installed that particular OS before, I think my results would be skewed because I've used other unix or unix like systems. Remember, he's writing to a particular audience. That audience is those that read linux.com. ----------
If you already have hte system installed -- there is probably a bunch of information in/usr/share/doc as well. Now, there isn't as much info on how to get going as linux -- but there is a lot of info for FreeBSD out there (I can't say the same thing for other *BSD's unfortunately). On a side note, 2.2.7 is as BSDish as you can get. ----------
Wouldn't you like to preprogram your VCR remotely?
Yes, indeed I would. Woops, not going to be home in time -- I'll just dial up or browse to my home network interface (which by the way will be secured by encryption and passwords [or maybe remote fingerprint verification as well]), tell the 3rd generation mpeg2 vcr the name of the show and the time and it will search the list from which I will choose. Oh wait, current tivo recorders already record based on your viewing habits as well as manual inputs:).
Food processors and cookers would probably be stupid ideas though. If it's microwaveable, then you could just switch on the microwave once you get home and maybe get changed and dinner will be done.
The only useful food related embedded systems that are networked that I can think of are dispensed foods and drinks such as coffee/condiments/bottled water/maybe some snack foods. Perhaps once these run out, It can ask if it should order some more from webvan? It may seem stupid for the home user, but it would be pretty useful to medium to large sized companies. Two or so years ago, ORL (now ATT research UK) had a networked coffee machine that gathered statistics on what types of coffee employees wanted, as well as being able to have it start making it and dispense when they got there as per their network unique user id card. It would be particularly useful in a large company so that they would know what exactly to buy.
Now, I don't see why we particularly need these things in the home, but why not. I'd be particularly excited in upgrading firmware on entertainment products such as stereos and tv's. What about a stereo with speakers all around the house that streamed songs off the internet with possible commercials if you didn't want to pay. I know people would argue that it would be vulnerable to DoS attacks -- but if the tcp/ip stack on the embedded system was a mature BSD or other stack, I don't see why there would be a possibility as such. Think about the fact that it would serves a particular function as well. The only thing I could think of that could happen is some idiot erasing your firmware while pretending to be the update server (probably unlikely, especially if it was user initiated). Give me a break. I'd be more worried about some punk breaking my window and taking my new gadget. ----------
Please tell me how you will do this attack. An exploit in IIS to overwrite any file on the system coupled by a power outage to reboot and run that program on boot?
I doubt he has world access to his systems open. I also doubt that you could tunnel IP connectivity through the power lines. It would also just be easier to walk over to his house and turn off his power or just jump through the window and wander around his vast mansion.
Yes you're joking. Ha ha. blah blah. I'm cool, MS Sucks d00d. ----------
NO. Any attacker that knows what they are doing (even script kiddies), are using a relay site that is completely unrelated to them. I can be DoS attacking you or looking at my sniffer logs on your server from my hacked account at harvard from a relay in russia from a hacked german university account from a wingate gained from a scan on any major cable modem or dsl provider to a dialup on my stolen aol account.
In short, It's useless to try. The only people they would catch are nitwits who probably aren't doing anything serious anyway. If it's a university or company, you can probably get them to be more aware -- or maybe even delete particular accounts if you have their ident (not likely).
Secure your system. Close all public access to services not needed. Pay attention to those that you need open. Obscurity also can't hurt when used complimentary to good security policies. ----------
I want to hear the price point. What we need is affordable access. I'm already drooling over the possiblity of > 1MB internet access on my laptop anywhere in the city. I've been looking for apartments and I've had to make sure they were in a Shaw Cable area so that I could get their very nice 39.99 (canadian) very fast cable access:). ----------
I've never installed X on OpenBSD -- but to do this on FreeBSD, you:
a) check to make sure your video card is supported by xfree first b) run/stand/sysinstall and go to post install operations -> install additional distributions -> whatever you want on the x menu c)once that's done, go to post install -> configure xfree86 server from which it run XF86Setup (or the command line util if wanted). d) once you have that running, then post install -> Setup XFree86 Desktop and install your window manager of choice (gnome + enlightenment or afterstrep [doesnt work very good in bsd], windowmaker, fvwm2, or KDE (i'd recommend kde + blackbox or windowmaker or just plain KDE).
All linux XFree setup's I have tried have been similarly intuitive.. ----------
quick example. About 6-9 months ago, there were maybe 40-60 people in #FreeBSD on efnet at a time. This number has grown to 170-240 on average. This is similar to the growth in the #linux channels except at a lower order of magnitude. I think we'd have more people in there if the ops didn't get pissed off when someone asked something particularly stupid:). The linux channels on the other hand seem to be more oriented towards setup help (there are some cool people in #FreeBSD ready to help though !). ----------
While I agree, I think that Linux design is progressing at such a speed that it's not really possible to do this. OpenBSD pays meticulous detail to security -- but the system may become at least a little dated when the userland/kernel/base system have to be audited or specifically planned for security purposes.
Most problems are in userland daemons and programs though. Stuff like recent AMD buffer overflows were experienced on a wide range of systems. I don't think it's acceptable to have a remote TCP/IP DoS attack in a so called stable kernel though..:). ----------
Steeper learning curve? I doubt it, unless the you're comparing redhat to them. Debian and slack can be equally daunting to a user. Of course, anyone reading Linux.com is probably using redhat anyway... ----------
I did recompile my FreeBSD kernel on numerous occcasions, but always had that ``did I do it properly'' feeling that I've never encountered with Linux.
I don't see why it's hard. cd/usr/src/sys/$arch/conf cp GENERIC MYKERNEL ee/pico/vi MYKERNEL (possibly open up another term to look at LINT in the same directory) after done;/usr/sbin/config MYKERNEL cd../../compile/MYKERNEL make depend make make install reboot -- in the rare case where your kernel doesn't work, you can just boot kernel.old or kernel.generic and try again. Remember to read error messages when compiling the kernel (just like when compiling linux kernels !)
It's almost exactly the same on all BSD based systems including BSDi. I think it's just inexperience with the type of system. I felt the same way when I first tried linux after using BSD and SunOS for years.
Although some of the 'snobbery may be true, there are still people who are willing to help newbies -- just like linux. However, it IS annoying when a newbie asks a question that is readily available in the documentation/handbook/mailing list archives. Give a man a fish and he'll always come back for more -- but teach a man to fish...
Another thing I partially agree with is the partitioning scheme. Disk druid (or whatever) should be a little more intuitive. I once set up a system and downloaded all my distributions, then configured some menu options, then reboot. To my horror, it said that there was no bootable partition. Unfortunately you can't set up a bootable partition that goes beyond 1024 cylinders (tried making / 27 gigs). I had to totally re-install. Thank god I have a fast internet link and get 690k/s from the MIT mirror:).
Anyway, once the system is installed and you get aquainted with it, it's very nice to use. Some of the things you have to setup are possibly hard -- but I don't think they are much less intuitive than most linux distros. I think it's that you just have to get used to it. I myself experienced problems using slackware, then redhat (from which I had to sit there deleting crap I didnt want for 20 minutes and re-arrange the crappy rc files). ----------
Yes, and even looking at it again, I do not see that. I don't see how they would fix the problems when they were using two identical chips which were the same chip that I tried before. I could be wrong though. I'll try and get my hands on one (the company I work for has OEM software in all their wonder products and I live about half a minute away from their main office in thornhill).
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netstat -rn. It was probably trying to look up a host. -n will prevent it from doing so. Yes I agree with you that usinjg such as system requires knowledge of the os. I've never had problems with such things, but I enjoy tinkering with the os. However, once you know where everything is, it's not so hard. Editing text files and certain commands isn't hard. It's a combination of a lack of experience and intuitiveness. Actually; if you learn something like solaris, bsd or linux in detail, you can often translate that knowledge over to the other OS providing you learn the nuances and differences including where the files are stored. In other words, the learning curve gets less steep after you learn your first unix-like OS.
:)
Oh yeah. This message was written in netscape in x running wmaker + kpanel and kfm which is in an x-win32 using XDMCP window off a server in the server room (which also serves 20 other users concurrently) on my windows 98 desktop
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Agreed. KDE is surprisingly easy to use.
However:
1) Both KOffice and Staroffice feel clunky to me (may be a matter of opinion). I'm waiting for the next staroffice.
2) no standard and reliable installation and de-installation methods a'la windows uninstall menus. You can argue for RPM, but its not exactly easy for a beginner. We need to be able to click on an executable, have it install like installshield, and be able to be uninstalled from a centralized and from e menu which brings us to:
3) wmconf; it's a good idea, but it needs a lot of work. a standard menu format that actually works 100% of the time (and is automatically added to) is a necessity.
4) lots of little applications that cater to the end user (not just techie toys). A good example is that application called CompuPic, recently released for linux. It caters to the end user, it works great, and it has an intuitive interface (probably because they stole it from ACDSee -- or was it the other way around). Also applications such as dreamweaver, quickbooks, quicken and golf games (hey, old people like them)
5) Games! We need current games to draw people to the platform. Hopefully XFree 4.0 will be all that it promises.
6) Video/audio codecs and some types of hardware. DVD, full quicktime with every codec we'll ever need, a reliable realplayer, all the various avi and mpeg codecs, and final non beta flash and shockwave players. These things in particular keep me bound to the windows world (well besides the games.
Linux (and *BSD) are going to get there soon enough. I wonder how many redhat releases we are away from where the user won't have to worry about ever looking at a command line (unless of course they want to), directly booting into x, and have a reliable and standard (not that non-standards will necessarily hurt) way of getting things done (or not done in the case of video games).
I don't see the problem with having commercial closed software on the platform. It's not like it's stopping open source alternatives from developing (though it may the other way around). People have to make money some way -- and quality software can't always be done where the only revenues are added services and support.
Of course, that's just my opinion, and I may be wrong.
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Security is only as powerful as the people included. You can encrypt, but that doesn't stop anyone from just joining the network, gathering IP adresses and becoming a nark.
It's like assuming a network with passwords changing every couple of days is secure. The people who have access are probably writing that password down right next to their desk. The same goes for warez groups. 99% of these people don't know each other in real life and anyone online can by anyone (including the FBI) in real life. It's like trying to implement an photo verification program when the people involved are shape shifters.
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I think kinetix is willing to take that blow because without people who learn their products, there is no demand. Without pirated versions, companies wouldn't be buying their products. You can't learn 3d modelling in a week. Most people can't afford 3dsmax either (even with student discounts).
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Just a quick note. I can confirm that this is the case with Half-Life. Sierra's revenues have skyrocketed for this game because of the server-client login architecture.
However, most games are bought on a quick whim, and played for a week. Half-Life is something you can play for many months (yay, counter-strike).
For the record, I've bought one copy of half-life. Unfortunately since we only have one copy here at home, the same person can't play on the same server on won.net at the same time. So I downloaded a keygen and sat there for 40 minutes generating some. Not one worked on won. So I took my lazy ass over to future shop and purchased a 42 CDN year old copy of half life. Now we want to play 3 way games online.. going to have to pick up another copy (150 bucks to play a 3 way game is such a rip off).
So in defence of Sierra, they did save some money by setting it up this way. However, I don't agree with the fact that they may have lost 10% revenues. Most of the people who would seriously pirate the game would never purchase it in the first place.
Pirates usually just like playing the flavor of the day. From what I've seen, they usually play a game for like 45 minutes and delete it and then move on to the next one.
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Okay, who are these people? :)
Anyway, I don't see why there is a reason to stay with BSDi except for better driver support for certain raid hardware. FreeBSD 3.3 is far better than BSDi 4.0.1.
We have 4 BSDi boxes where I work, but we bought them in 98 when 2.2.8 was the current stable version and there weren't enough drivers for what we needed. FreeBSD has grown at a couple of orders of magnitude faster than BSDi has in the past year. I of course will still be interested when BSDi announces 5.x (if they do).
The fact that BSDi is also closed source hurts it a lot. You can't tweak the system to the nth degree like FreeBSD unless you buy an expensive source license.
It's always nice to hear a company actually announce that they are switching to FreeBSD. Most are quiet about doing such things. There are probably a ton of high profile companies using *BSD for various purposes but they don't announce it.
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I use a program called sharity to browse large networks (no smbmount on the IRIX, FreeBSD, SunOS and AIX machines I run). It basically creates a special mount at /CIFS where you can browse the network. It's not really mounting shares. It just redirects back to localhost where it (I'm assuming) talks with sharityd which browses the network at an application level.
Unfortunately it costs a lot of money. Free student licenses are available however. I don't know if smbmount does this as I don't use linux.
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There are already portable players from sony, panasonic, and a couple of other manufacturers. I have the PBD-V30 which is MSRP 799.00 (I paid 40% less due to my company getting anything sony wholesale). Anyway, building such a thing yourself would cost much more in man time as well as the single products made up to build it.
I'm assuming you don't mean straight transfer, as DVD movies are usually 6.5 - 9.4 gigs (around 7.1mbps).
The only thing breaking CSS does for us at this time is allow non-licensees the capability to produce DVD player products as well as enabling pirates to rip, reduce, re-encode in mpeg1, and place on 2 vcd's. Previously they were reduced to using PC players and grabbing it frame by frame; or just grabbing and recording from tv-out.
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"Playback of MP3 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer-3) at bit rates up to 320 Kbits/sec"
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Yes, this is true a lot of the time. I was offered an 86k salary job in san jose -- but after calculating cost of living it didn't look so good (commuting times REALLY suck too).
Where I'd really like to be is vancouver. I visited there a couple of years ago and its great. Cost of living isn't *that* high as well (I don't think). What's the state of this industry there? Does anyone here know? (building local contacts there would be no fun if there's no industry)
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Toronto here. I used to make 49k CDN developing consumer level graphics and video products for windows in Visual C++. Specialization was video codecs and UI implementation. It was strictly 9-5 (except tight weeks before gold master) though.
:).
I've since moved on to consulting for companies wishing to build web portals or become application service providers. Specialization is CGI (c and perl)/Cold Fusion/asp optimization, db2/oracle/sybase/mssql7 and overall project direction. Currently on 3 month contract for 72k CDN as well as attempting to build applications to fuel my own business. I don't have any free time at all though
Both have their disadvantages. I'd rather be running my own software house than trying to fix the problems of often seemingly idiotic people.
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I deal with many external breakins per year. The vast majority of these turn out to be stolen dialup accounts (can be traced but try and get uunet to respond to abuse mail) or hacked (or legit stolen by sniffing) university boxes/accounts (especially IRIX x terminals for some reason). That and commercial shell accounts that have been traded on IRC (you can tell by the stupid vhosts).
/. That's why intrusion detection is so important. Now, if you just left a redhat 4.2 box open for half a year without even logging onto it, then I guess you might have worries. So maybe I did grossly overstate. In most cases I've dealt with though, it's some kid who's bouncing through at least one box, immediately installing a rootkit that sends password information to a particular file, as well as a sniffer to grab plain text passwords from telnet and ftp over a non-switched network environment.
Most of the time, if it's a company, it's usually an employee though. Disgruntled, greedy or whatnot.
But hey, I could be wrong. I only know from my own experience dealing with at least a 200 incidents as well as the fun involved in running a couple of 1500 user shell accounts that allow eggdrop access (smurfs, fork attacks, attempts to breach their restricted userland and whatnot). On the shell servers in particular, it's always the idiots who have shared accounts with friends who upon their first login try exploiting everything in sight.
I won't deny the potential for such an idiot to trash your server with ready made scripts -- but I'm willing to bet such a person isn't going to immediately do a rm -rf
Yes, I've seen cases of ready made exploits (example: recent wu and pro ftpd exploits) -- but those people are usually not even worth the time calling up a university/large dialup provider et al (note that I've had bad experiences with Yale, colorado, ucsd, ucdavis, utoronto, purdue, harvard and columbia admins. In my experience they're more worried about deleting the accounts than sitting on their duffs watching for future logins when their public server cluster supports 15,000 users). Most of the time they will turn a box into their own personal file server or playpen irc eggdrop box. The people you really have to worry about are those that gain access to a system, remove your md5 checksum/tripwire whatever system before it e-mails or pages you, install a sniffer and new login program, take over the gateway if they already havent, and then eventually move to have access to all servers on your internal network. Ever wonder why the groups who are defacing public web sites for fun aren't getting caught? It's because they're bouncing through a number of sites before exploiting a IIS bug or CGI. Well that and the fact that there's no point in wasting time and money when you can easily restore from backup and/or manually fix the problem.
The only thing that an group of this sort is going to do is increase awareness of what exploits are being done, and possibly increase pressure put on those Universities/corporations/ISP's to revoke the account of a person. Once the damage is done, it's done. At that point, I really don't care what happens to this person unless I think I can get monetary compensation or make sure that they don't use proprietary information/data that had been stolen. Announcing to the world on a public list what OS you run and what you think was exploited and how isn't going to help much though...
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Actually, I think it's exactly what they need. My thoughts when installing a system are completely different than a newbies. Even if I hadn't installed that particular OS before, I think my results would be skewed because I've used other unix or unix like systems. Remember, he's writing to a particular audience. That audience is those that read linux.com.
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Uh.
/usr/share/doc as well. Now, there isn't as much info on how to get going as linux -- but there is a lot of info for FreeBSD out there (I can't say the same thing for other *BSD's unfortunately). On a side note, 2.2.7 is as BSDish as you can get.
FreeBSD Handbook
Mailing list, Handbook and FAQ searches(Years and years worth of mailing list archives)
"FreeBSD for the lazy and Hopeless"
A comprehensive guide to FreeBSD(sort of dated but still applicable)
FreeBSD Tutorials
If you already have hte system installed -- there is probably a bunch of information in
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Wouldn't you like to preprogram your VCR remotely?
:).
Yes, indeed I would. Woops, not going to be home in time -- I'll just dial up or browse to my home network interface (which by the way will be secured by encryption and passwords [or maybe remote fingerprint verification as well]), tell the 3rd generation mpeg2 vcr the name of the show and the time and it will search the list from which I will choose. Oh wait, current tivo recorders already record based on your viewing habits as well as manual inputs
Food processors and cookers would probably be stupid ideas though. If it's microwaveable, then you could just switch on the microwave once you get home and maybe get changed and dinner will be done.
The only useful food related embedded systems that are networked that I can think of are dispensed foods and drinks such as coffee/condiments/bottled water/maybe some snack foods. Perhaps once these run out, It can ask if it should order some more from webvan? It may seem stupid for the home user, but it would be pretty useful to medium to large sized companies. Two or so years ago, ORL (now ATT research UK) had a networked coffee machine that gathered statistics on what types of coffee employees wanted, as well as being able to have it start making it and dispense when they got there as per their network unique user id card. It would be particularly useful in a large company so that they would know what exactly to buy.
Now, I don't see why we particularly need these things in the home, but why not. I'd be particularly excited in upgrading firmware on entertainment products such as stereos and tv's. What about a stereo with speakers all around the house that streamed songs off the internet with possible commercials if you didn't want to pay. I know people would argue that it would be vulnerable to DoS attacks -- but if the tcp/ip stack on the embedded system was a mature BSD or other stack, I don't see why there would be a possibility as such. Think about the fact that it would serves a particular function as well. The only thing I could think of that could happen is some idiot erasing your firmware while pretending to be the update server (probably unlikely, especially if it was user initiated). Give me a break. I'd be more worried about some punk breaking my window and taking my new gadget.
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and NT isn't exactly secure
Please tell me how you will do this attack. An exploit in IIS to overwrite any file on the system coupled by a power outage to reboot and run that program on boot?
I doubt he has world access to his systems open. I also doubt that you could tunnel IP connectivity through the power lines. It would also just be easier to walk over to his house and turn off his power or just jump through the window and wander around his vast mansion.
Yes you're joking. Ha ha. blah blah. I'm cool, MS Sucks d00d.
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NO. Any attacker that knows what they are doing (even script kiddies), are using a relay site that is completely unrelated to them. I can be DoS attacking you or looking at my sniffer logs on your server from my hacked account at harvard from a relay in russia from a hacked german university account from a wingate gained from a scan on any major cable modem or dsl provider to a dialup on my stolen aol account.
In short, It's useless to try. The only people they would catch are nitwits who probably aren't doing anything serious anyway. If it's a university or company, you can probably get them to be more aware -- or maybe even delete particular accounts if you have their ident (not likely).
Secure your system. Close all public access to services not needed. Pay attention to those that you need open. Obscurity also can't hurt when used complimentary to good security policies.
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I want to hear the price point. What we need is affordable access. I'm already drooling over the possiblity of > 1MB internet access on my laptop anywhere in the city. I've been looking for apartments and I've had to make sure they were in a Shaw Cable area so that I could get their very nice 39.99 (canadian) very fast cable access :).
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I've never installed X on OpenBSD -- but to do this on FreeBSD, you:
/stand/sysinstall and go to post install operations -> install additional distributions -> whatever you want on the x menu
a) check to make sure your video card is supported by xfree first
b) run
c)once that's done, go to post install -> configure xfree86 server from which it run XF86Setup (or the command line util if wanted).
d) once you have that running, then post install -> Setup XFree86 Desktop and install your window manager of choice (gnome + enlightenment or afterstrep [doesnt work very good in bsd], windowmaker, fvwm2, or KDE (i'd recommend kde + blackbox or windowmaker or just plain KDE).
All linux XFree setup's I have tried have been similarly intuitive..
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quick example. About 6-9 months ago, there were maybe 40-60 people in #FreeBSD on efnet at a time. This number has grown to 170-240 on average. This is similar to the growth in the #linux channels except at a lower order of magnitude. I think we'd have more people in there if the ops didn't get pissed off when someone asked something particularly stupid :). The linux channels on the other hand seem to be more oriented towards setup help (there are some cool people in #FreeBSD ready to help though !).
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While I agree, I think that Linux design is progressing at such a speed that it's not really possible to do this. OpenBSD pays meticulous detail to security -- but the system may become at least a little dated when the userland/kernel/base system have to be audited or specifically planned for security purposes.
:).
Most problems are in userland daemons and programs though. Stuff like recent AMD buffer overflows were experienced on a wide range of systems. I don't think it's acceptable to have a remote TCP/IP DoS attack in a so called stable kernel though..
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Steeper learning curve? I doubt it, unless the you're comparing redhat to them. Debian and slack can be equally daunting to a user. Of course, anyone reading Linux.com is probably using redhat anyway...
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I did recompile my FreeBSD kernel on numerous occcasions, but always had that ``did I do it properly'' feeling that I've never encountered with Linux.
/usr/src/sys/$arch/conf /usr/sbin/config MYKERNEL ../../compile/MYKERNEL
:).
I don't see why it's hard.
cd
cp GENERIC MYKERNEL
ee/pico/vi MYKERNEL
(possibly open up another term to look at LINT in the same directory)
after done;
cd
make depend
make
make install
reboot
-- in the rare case where your kernel doesn't work, you can just boot kernel.old or kernel.generic and try again. Remember to read error messages when compiling the kernel (just like when compiling linux kernels !)
It's almost exactly the same on all BSD based systems including BSDi. I think it's just inexperience with the type of system. I felt the same way when I first tried linux after using BSD and SunOS for years.
Although some of the 'snobbery may be true, there are still people who are willing to help newbies -- just like linux. However, it IS annoying when a newbie asks a question that is readily available in the documentation/handbook/mailing list archives. Give a man a fish and he'll always come back for more -- but teach a man to fish...
Another thing I partially agree with is the partitioning scheme. Disk druid (or whatever) should be a little more intuitive. I once set up a system and downloaded all my distributions, then configured some menu options, then reboot. To my horror, it said that there was no bootable partition. Unfortunately you can't set up a bootable partition that goes beyond 1024 cylinders (tried making / 27 gigs). I had to totally re-install. Thank god I have a fast internet link and get 690k/s from the MIT mirror
Anyway, once the system is installed and you get aquainted with it, it's very nice to use. Some of the things you have to setup are possibly hard -- but I don't think they are much less intuitive than most linux distros. I think it's that you just have to get used to it. I myself experienced problems using slackware, then redhat (from which I had to sit there deleting crap I didnt want for 20 minutes and re-arrange the crappy rc files).
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Er nevermind -- my contacts must be glazed over. I'll have to see it for myself though.
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Yes, and even looking at it again, I do not see that. I don't see how they would fix the problems when they were using two identical chips which were the same chip that I tried before. I could be wrong though. I'll try and get my hands on one (the company I work for has OEM software in all their wonder products and I live about half a minute away from their main office in thornhill).
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