As a admin of a domain that usually receives about 10K mail a day, and with the sobig outbreak nearing 200000K emails/day, i would say that i can collect a very nice collection of email addresses that i got virus notifications from (since the sender address is forged to one of my domain) by looking at the logs, and if a was a malicios person, i could use that to spam them, or worse.
The virus notifications disclose your private email address, without telling you about that. This should be the button to push at the antivirus vendors and users so they would disable these notifications
One impact, that strangely no one noticed here, is the amount of bandwidth this worm consumes from buzy smtp servers. My company provides email support to hundreds of thousands of users, so our addresses are in their address books.
My 2 t1 connections were overloaded a few hours after the worm got in the wild ! i had to work for about 10 hours to design a dynamic firewall filter to block infected systems from hammering my server, since these clients try to send their mail over and over to the same email adresses.
People intested in the filter description can find it in the postfix-users mailinglist - look for the messages "Battling SoBig.f induced bandwidth problems ". I only pity these who do not have the flexibility of a good *Nix based mail server - no way you can do that with Exchange
I don't think that there is something to prevent you from building your own RHEL from srpms, i actually tried that a few days ago, believe it or not, on a standard P4 desktop computer with 256RAM it takes less then 2 days to build EVERYTHING in the latest RHAS 3 beta. and i believe that some community effort could actually spring a free version of the RHEL products. Coupled with GPL up2date servers like www.nrh-up2date.org it could be a good alternative to stock redhat, unless you really need their support. some work would be required of course to remove the few packages copyrighted by redhat from the distro (there are some, like anaconda-images) but it does seem possible. anyone want to join me in this effort ?
I think that you have missed the point where redhat says that the developers of packages will maitain their own rpms for the distro. As a developer that had to create rpms, i see clearly that this move would influense the way developers produce - distribute their programs. If a developer maintains the rpms, he will probably tell people to use them in their install, this would mean that he would tell people to use RedHat to install the software on !
RedHat is simply recognising, like Microsoft, that is has to attract developers for it's platform, so that people would develope for RedHat platform, not for general Linux.
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As a admin of a domain that usually receives about 10K mail a day, and with the sobig outbreak nearing 200000K emails/day, i would say that i can collect a very nice collection of email addresses that i got virus notifications from (since the sender address is forged to one of my domain) by looking at the logs, and if a was a malicios person, i could use that to spam them, or worse.
The virus notifications disclose your private email address, without telling you about that. This should be the button to push at the antivirus vendors and users so they would disable these notifications
One impact, that strangely no one noticed here, is the amount of bandwidth this worm consumes from buzy smtp servers. My company provides email support to hundreds of thousands of users, so our addresses are in their address books.
My 2 t1 connections were overloaded a few hours after the worm got in the wild ! i had to work for about 10 hours to design a dynamic firewall filter to block infected systems from hammering my server, since these clients try to send their mail over and over to the same email adresses.
People intested in the filter description can find it in the postfix-users mailinglist - look for the messages "Battling SoBig.f induced bandwidth problems ". I only pity these who do not have the flexibility of a good *Nix based mail server - no way you can do that with Exchange
I don't think that there is something to prevent you from building your own RHEL from srpms, i actually tried that a few days ago, believe it or not, on a standard P4 desktop computer with 256RAM it takes less then 2 days to build EVERYTHING in the latest RHAS 3 beta. and i believe that some community effort could actually spring a free version of the RHEL products. Coupled with GPL up2date servers like www.nrh-up2date.org it could be a good alternative to stock redhat, unless you really need their support. some work would be required of course to remove the few packages copyrighted by redhat from the distro (there are some, like anaconda-images) but it does seem possible. anyone want to join me in this effort ?
I think that you have missed the point where redhat says that the developers of packages will maitain their own rpms for the distro. As a developer that had to create rpms, i see clearly that this move would influense the way developers produce - distribute their programs. If a developer maintains the rpms, he will probably tell people to use them in their install, this would mean that he would tell people to use RedHat to install the software on !
RedHat is simply recognising, like Microsoft, that is has to attract developers for it's platform, so that people would develope for RedHat platform, not for general Linux.