jueves, 31 de mayo de 2007

Ten Things I Love About ArchLinux

After getting up and running with Arch again, I discovered there are things about it that I just absolutely love. Here are my top 10.

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A Look at BSD Rootkits

Windows has a reputation for being easily exploited by rootkits, but just because you're using Linux or BSD doesn't mean you're safe from infection. In an interview on O'Reilly's ONLamp site, Joseph Kong (author of Designing BSD Rootkits ), talks about how to build and defend against Rootkits under BSD.

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Hardware Versus Software Firewalls

According to estimates, an unprotected Windows computer system connected to the Internet could be compromised within twelve minutes. In light of this, the need for computer security has expanded in the last few years. Today, it is just as necessary for home users to secure personal computers as it is for businesses to secure office computers. In order to gain security benefits like those many businesses possess, home network security often utilizes the same models. The difference, however, has been that most home users do not have the financial resources for top of the line security equipment. This has led many home users to begin using security tools such as freeware firewalls and over-the-counter hardware firewall solutions.

This raises a question. How do the freeware firewalls compare to expensive, all-in-one firewall solutions such as the Cisco PIX? The goal for this project, then, is to compare the Cisco PIX with two freeware firewalls.

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miércoles, 30 de mayo de 2007

RPM5.org festeja los 10 años del RPM

Apareció el sitio RPM5.org justo a tiempo para el cumpleaños número 10 del RPM Package Manager esa herramienta de administración de paquetes de software creada originalmente por Red Hat pero usada por muchas otras como Fedora, Mandriva, SuSE, etc. El anuncio de RPM5.org dice que todo el código del RPM fué movido de cvs.rpm.org a rpm5.org para preparar la próxima gran versión 5.0, cuyo lanzamiento definitivo se espera para finales de este mismo año.

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Comparing GNU/Linux and FreeBSD

GNU/Linux is the most popular operating system built with free/open source software. However, it is not the only one: FreeBSD is also becoming popular for its stability, robustness and security. In this article, I’ll take a look at their similarities and differences.

iXsystems Acquires BSD Mall

iXsystems announced today its acquisition of BSD Mall, a division of cyLogistics, that offers BSD-based CDs and DVDs for the FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Dragonfly and Darwin communities, as well as clothing, hats and other promotional items.

Slurpr: el sueño del Wardriver

Slurpr es una caja con alma Linux (Debian) y apariencia de puercoespín que es capaz de conectarse a seis redes Wi-Fi de forma simultánea y combinar los diferentes anchos de banda de todas ellas para crear una "superconexión".

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Qt v4.3.0 Released

Trolltech has released version 4.3.0 of its cross-platform development toolkit Qt, and the embedded platform Qtopia, with the same API. New features include enhanced Windows Vista support, a new ECMAscript-standard scripting module (QtScript), SSL support, improved OpenGL support, a more flexible main window architecture, SVG generation and rendering, and (in Qtopia) a new font system and OpenGL ES support.

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The secrets of about:config

Ever since its debut, Firefox has garnered a reputation for being an enormously customizable program, both through its add-on architecture and its internal settings. In fact, many of Firefox's settings aren't exposed through the Tools > Options menu; the only way to change them is to edit them manually. In this article, we'll explore some of the most useful Firefox settings that you can change on your own, and that aren't normally available through the program's graphical interface.

lunes, 28 de mayo de 2007

FlightAware.com powerd by FreeBSD and PostgreSQL

FlightAware is a free flight tracker that will change what you think about live flight tracking and aviation data.

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Opening Sources, Opening Minds

The term "open source" has several meanings. First, it is the name of a school of software design whose free products can be modified by users. However, open source also refers to a philosophy of sharing.

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domingo, 27 de mayo de 2007

Flash on FreeBSD using gnash

So, I manage to get flash working on FreeBSD. Without using the Linux compatability layer!

jueves, 24 de mayo de 2007

Dell Ships Ubuntu 7.04 PCs Today

Today by 4:00 PM CST Dell will start selling three machines with Ubuntu 7.04 pre-installed. The two desktops (XPS 410n, $899 and Dimension E520n, $599) and the notebook (Inspiron E1505n, $599) will be the first three machines with the popular Linux distribution installed by default.

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New on Gmail: Increased attachment limit-- 20 MB!

Now you can start sharing more of those home videos, large presentations and files you just can't seem to get smaller. We have doubled the allowable attachment size to 20 MB to make your Gmail space even more useful.

rc scripts without runlevels

Since there aren't any runlevels on BSD systems, you won't find subdirectories called rc#.d (where # is the runlevel number) full of symlinks pointing to the real startup scripts in init.d as that directory doesn't exist either. BSD systems like to separate the startup scripts that come with the operating system from those that were installed by third-party software...

Howto use multiple SSH keys for password less login

I’ve already written about howto log in, on your local system, and make passwordless ssh connections using ssh-keygen command. However, you cannot just follow these instructions over and over again, as you will overwrite the previous keys.

It is also possible to upload multiple public keys to your remote server, allowing one or more users to log in without a password from different computers.

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miércoles, 23 de mayo de 2007

No runlevels??!!

There are no runlevels on BSD-style systems. It is also true that when it comes to Unix, runlevels are a relatively new invention whereas init has been around since Thompson and Ritchie noodled around with operating systems at Bell labs in the 60s. (Does anyone know if Multics used init?) I wasn't around when runlevels were introduced in 1983; if I had been I most likely would have asked "why add all this complexity to something that already works?".

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Installing FreeBSD 6.x under VMWare Server

First of all you will need to install the host OS, and in this case we are using Windows Server 2003X64 Standard Edition R2 which must include IIS, however could have easily been an approve Linux variant, or even the VMWare ESX solution. In either case it is probably a good idea to ensure that all of the patches and updates have been applied, I mean it is still Windows after all. The nice thing about running FreeBSD in an instance under VMWare Server or any other hardware virtualization platform is that the instance can be easily relocated to new physical hardware without much concern for that new hardware.

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X.org 7.2 in FreeBSD ports tree

At long last and despite a ports freeze, X.org 7.2 has been merged into the FreeBSD ports tree. I first heard about it from Michael Lucas during a BSDCan session; you can read the official announcement here. If you're planning on trying the upgrade, it wouldn't hurt to bookmark this month's page of the ports mailing list--if you do hit a snag, it's probably already been discussed and fixed there.

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FreeBSD book: For learning and mastering FreeBSD

FreeBSD is one of the fastest, secure and widely UNIX-like operating system. Some of the biggest internet sites on earth powered by FreeBSD like Yahoo. I’ve been using FreeBSD in production environments since 1998. People often ask me about FreeBSD books. So the main aim of this post is to document all free resources, books and recommended books.

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swap partition vs swap file

I have been trying to find the performance differences between a swap partition and a swap file in Linux.

I have found several affirmations that swap partitions are better, but lots also say they are the same (at least for kernels 2.6).

I can find some differences that can help you make the good choice, or when to use swap on file or partition.

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Swap memory increase with swap file (How to create)

Usually when you install Linux you reserve a partition to be used as swap memory, and the rest of the disk for your files, but what happens if I need more swap memory?. How to create more swap memory?

Crear impresora virtual de PDF

Acabo de ver un artículo en Linux.com que explica cómo crear una impresora virtual de PDF en Linux o en cualquier otro sistema que utilice CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System) y ponerla a disposición de toda una red, donde puedan utilizarla también posibles equipos Windows. El objetivo es poder guardar en formato PDF todo tipo de documentos, sin necesidad de imprimirlos sobre papel mientras no sea imprescindible. Algo muy ventajoso -por ejemplo- para un pequeño despacho u oficina.

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Dell lanzará sus PCs con Ubuntu esta semana

A partir de ésta semana, Dell dará sus clientes la posibilidad de elegir algunos de sus sistemas de hardware con Linux Ubuntu preinstalado. La compañía recalca que, quienes lo deseen, pueden comprar las máquinas con Windows preinstalado. Los pronósticos de Dell indican que el 1% de 20 000 computadoras serán comercializadas con Ubuntu.

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FreeBSD-SA-07:04.file

Security Advisory

martes, 22 de mayo de 2007

A day without X

Would you be able to survive one full day without using the X server? Linux offers us a wide assortment of CLI based tools which use curses and/or framebuffer for functional user interfaces. There is no reason why you shouldn’t be able look up stuff online, read your email, look at pictures, watch movies and listen to music as you are trying to configure X.

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KDE 3.5.7 Release Announcement

The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.5.7, a maintenance release for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux and other UNIXes. KDE now supports 65 languages, making it available to more people than most non-free software and can be easily extended to support others by communities who wish to contribute to the open source project.

This release has a renewed focus on KDE PIM applications. KAddressBook, KOrganizer and KAlarm received attention with bugfixes, while KMail additionally witnessed new features and improvements with both interface work and IMAP handling: it can manage IMAP quota and copy and move all folders.

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PC-BSD 1.3.4 Review

FreeBSD along with OpenBSD and NetBSD form the triumvirate of BSD operating systems. Traditionally these BSDs are server centric operating systems - ie. those which are tuned to be run on a server rather than to be used by the end user as a desktop. Still, with a bit of tweaking and configuration, all the three of them can be used as viable desktop operating systems.

PC-BSD is a direct descendant of FreeBSD. As the name indicates, PC-BSD is a BSD operating system which lays stress on its use as a Desktop catering to the end users. From the point of its inception, the USP (Unique Selling Point) of PC-BSD has been to make it as easy as possible to install, update and use software, at the same time bringing all the powerful security features and stability of the traditional BSDs.

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lunes, 21 de mayo de 2007

Optimizing Your Nmap Scan: Nmap Scanning Methods

Although running Nmap with the default settings is very easy, it leaves an amazing amount of Nmap functionality unused. Nmap includes FIFTEEN different Nmap scan methods, and most people only use the default! There's a lot of power just waiting to be tapped.

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Top 15 free SQL Injection Scanners

While the adoption of web applications for conducting online business has enabled companies to connect seamlessly with their customers, it has also exposed a number of security concerns stemming from improper coding. Vulnerabilities in web applications allow hackers to gain direct and public access to sensitive information (e.g. personal data, login credentials).

Web applications allow visitors to submit and retrieve data to/from a database over the Internet. Databases are the heart of most web applications. They hold data needed for web applications to deliver specific content to visitors and provide information to customers, suppliers etc.

SQL Injection is perhaps the most common web-application hacking technique which attempts to pass SQL commands through a web application for execution by the back-end database. The vulnerability is presented when user input is incorrectly sanitized and thereby executed.

Checking for SQL Injection vulnerabilities involves auditing your web applications and the best way to do it is by using automated SQL Injection Scanners. We’ve compiled a list of free SQL Injection Scanners we believe will be of a value to both web application developers and professional security auditors.

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The Downide of Your ISP Turning to Gmail

Google is offering ISPs the opportunity to turn over their entire email operation to Google, with all customer email hosted as Gmail accounts. This would allow Google to grow its user base rapidly (Google is a distant third with 51M users compared to Yahoo's 250M and Hotmail's 228M). There are some obvious benefits to end users — Google is offering ISPs mailboxes of up to 10GB per user.

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sábado, 19 de mayo de 2007

Move MySQL database to a second hard disk

If your server has 2 hard disks, it helps to move the MySQL database to the second hard disk - this is because with a busy database the I/O wait is usual the bottleneck and having a second hard disk spindle working for you should speed up the forums. (In fact, on my web servers I put the php files on the second hard disk so that it’s separate to the OS).

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Turn your Linux box into a PDF-making machine

Remember the paperless office? By now we were supposed to be handling all of our documents digitally, and saving trees by using computers to handle everything electronically. If you'd like to make backup copies of ephemeral content without printing it out, turn your Linux box into a PDF generation device for your entire network.

Postfix with OpenSSL and saslauthd

opensourcehowto.org

booting Linux from windows boot loader How to

Linux boot loader like GRUB and Lilo can virtually boot to any Operating System but we can also load linux from windoz boot loader. This how to describe how we can do that!

Secure Websites Using SSL And Certificates

This how-to will guide you through the entire process of setting up a secure website using SSL and digital certificates. This guide assumes that you have already a fully functional (and configured) server running Apache, BIND, and OpenSSL. Just as a side note, this guide was written based on a Fedora Core 6 distribution, but should be the same for most other distros out there.

Linux too vanilla? Try this

A review of PC-BSD 1.3

Set Gmail as Default Mail Client in Ubuntu

Every Geek uses Gmail… it’s pretty much required. And now you can set Gmail as the default client in Ubuntu without any extra software. (Windows requires the Gmail notifier be installed).

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Desktop FreeBSD Part 4: Internet Mail Setup

The one thing that really fired up the development of the Internet as we know it today was e-mail. The protocols were designed back when the system itself was highly difficult to access, and security wasn't a significant issue. Since then, even your average household pet has heard of Internet security problems.

How many times have we read popular pronouncements not to use a certain popular e-mail program that is highly vulnerable to attacks hidden in messages? Those attacks are possible because the program is designed to make things so easy. It does everything for you. It's too easy for folks to forget the danger, because that's the software that came with their systems. That sort of large, do-it-all software takes up lots of resources, too.

There is a better way. It requires changing how you view Internet mail, going back to the original intent. In this case, it also means using what came with your system -- your FreeBSD system. However, be aware, if you do not have a mail server account with your ISP, or some other provider, you will probably have a difficult time using a built-in system mail server to send mail across the Net. Most mail services to whom you try to send mail will probably be blocking mail from dialup and DSL connections. If you cannot work this out, while you may learn a lot, you'll still be stuck using a regular mail client.

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HEADS UP: xorg 7.2 update in progress

Dear FreeBSD Users,

Within the next 24 hours, the long-awaited update to the X.org 7.2 windowing system will be committed to the ports tree. This upgrade has been 6 months in the making and would not have been possible without the dedicated work of Florent Thoumie , Dejan Lesjak and many others in our army of
developers.

For the past two weeks the ports tree has been frozen while our developer community has concentrated on testing and refining the upgrade process. This is a major upgrade, but we have worked hard to smooth out the road bumps that have been encountered during testing so far. We believe that the upgrade is now ready for general deployment, but particularly cautious users may wish to delay their upgrades and monitor the freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.org and freebsd-x11@FreeBSD.org mailing lists for discussion of remaining issues that may be encountered by users.

Please note that it will unfortunately not be possible to perform this update without some manual intervention. Please refer to the /usr/ports/UPDATING file to learn about the steps necessary, and the changes involved. One important aspect of the upgrade is that X.org 7.x is no longer installed in the /usr/X11R6 directory; instead it installs in /usr/local along with the other ports.

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viernes, 18 de mayo de 2007

The First Terabyte Hard Drive Reviewed

ExtremeTech has a review and benchmarks of the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 1TB Hard Drive, which ushers in the terabyte age. It performs well on HDTach and PCMark benchmarks, though not as speedily as professional-grade drives. It could be just the ticket for digital media junkies.

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HEADS UP: xorg 7.2 ready for testing

Dear porters,

We are now ready for xorg 7.2 testing! Over the past week we have done extensive tests of various upgrade scenarios, fixed many remaining bugs, and now the upgrade is looking good. Of course, we can't possibly test everything, so that's where you come in.

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jueves, 17 de mayo de 2007

Google Expands to 'Universal' Search

Google today said it is now integrating results from a variety of its search engines in an attempt to deliver as relevant and comprehensive a result set as possible.

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IETF moves against IPv6 threat

Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) engineers, reacting with unusual speed, have moved to address a serious security lapse in IPv6 before it becomes too widespread.

The bug, involving Type 0 Routing Headers, could allow attackers to greatly magnify the effectiveness of denial-of-service attacks, and was highlighted at a presentation at the CanSecWest security conference earlier this month. It is in fact the reappearance of an old problem that was eliminated from the current IPv4 system long ago.

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Sixth Generation of Desktop Virtualisation Software

VMware, Inc., the global leader in software for industry-standard virtualised desktops and servers, today announced the general availability of VMware Workstation 6, the sixth generation of its desktop virtualisation software product. VMware Workstation 6 delivers groundbreaking advances in virtualisation technology while offering numerous new features such as Windows Vista support, as well as industry-first support for multiple display monitors and USB 2.0 devices, making it highly appealing to IT administrators, developers, testers and other technical professionals and enthusiasts.

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GCC 4.2.0 Released

CC 4.2.0 has been released.

GCC 4.2.0 is a major release, containing new functionality not available in GCC 4.1.x or previous GCC releases.

miércoles, 16 de mayo de 2007

How Image Spam Works

CSO Magazine has an article about "The Scourge of Image Spam," with an explanation of its effect (a year ago, fewer than five out of 100 e-mails were image spam; today, up to 40 percent are in that category, and image spam is the reason spam traffic overall doubled in 2006).

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lunes, 14 de mayo de 2007

Performance Evaluation of Xen Vs. OpenVZ

Compared to an operating-system-level virtualization technology like OpenVZ, Xen — a hypervisor-level virtualization technology that allows multiple operating systems to be run with and without para-virtualization — trades off performance for much better isolation and security. OpenVZ's performance advantage due to running virtual containers in a single operating system kernel can be significant. A performance evaluation study (PDF) done by researchers at the University of Michigan and HP labs provides insight into how big a performance penalty Zen pays and what causes the overheads (primarily L2 cache misses).

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domingo, 13 de mayo de 2007

How To Back Up MySQL Databases Without Interrupting MySQL

This article describes how you can back up MySQL databases without interrupting the MySQL service. Normally, when you want to create a MySQL backup, you either have to stop MySQL or issue a read lock on your MySQL tables in order to get a correct backup; if you don't do it this way, you can end up with an inconsistent backup. To get consistent backups without interrupting MySQL, I use a little trick: I repplicate my MySQL database to a second MySQL server, and on the second MySQL server I use a cron job that creates regular backups of the replicated database.

Gentoo 2007.0 Review

The latest Gentoo release is upon us and I am going to take a look at what's new. Promised updates include a revamped installer and the latest versions of your favorite applications.

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AMD Will Deliver Open Graphics Drivers

AMD will soon deliver open graphics drivers, said Henri Richard just a few minutes ago, and the audience at the opening keynote of the Red Hat Summit broke into applause and cheers. Richard, AMD’s executive vice president of sales and marketing, promised: “I’m here to commit to you that it’s going to get done.” He also promised that AMD is “going to be very proactive in changing way we interface with the Linux community.”

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Buscador de Wikipedia en español

Desde hace algún tiempo, estaba pensando en hacer un buscador que indizara una gran cantidad de texto para comprobar que problemas reales se tienen cuando se trata con cantidades ingentes de información. Para ello había dos opciones, escoger una base de datos con muchos registros o escoger una con menos registros pero si una cantidad grande de texto por cada uno de ellos(...)

Server Monitoring With munin And monit On Debian Etch

In this article I will describe how you can monitor your Debian Etch server with munin and monit. munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect of your server (load average, memory usage, CPU usage, MySQL throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much configuration, whereas monit checks the availability of services like Apache, MySQL, Postfix and takes the appropriate action such as a restart if it finds a service is not behaving as expected. The combination of the two gives you full monitoring: graphics that lets you recognize current or upcoming problems (like "We need a bigger server soon, our load average is increasing rapidly."), and a watchdog that ensures the availability of the monitored services.

Absolute FreeBSD now available for pre-order

By popular demand, Absolute FreeBSD is available for pre-order. This new edition of Absolute BSD is fully updated for FreeBSD 7.X.

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New Swedish NetBSD Mirror

We (NetBSD.se) are proud to announce a new service. This time we have committed ourselves to providing more activities for the CVS services.
From now on, we have a bunch of CVS services for NetBSD, pkgsrc and pkgsrc-wip; available via AnonCVS, CVSup, CVSweb, and rsync.

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miércoles, 9 de mayo de 2007

Easily Upload Suspicious File to VirusTotal

Do you still remember 2 months ago I discovered a website that is able to scan any file with 30 antivirus engines by simply uploading it to the website? Good news is, it has increased to 32 antivirus engines now and also there's a new method on how you can easily upload the suspicious file to VirusTotal.

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Lintrack As A LAN Gateway And An OpenVPN Bridge

This tutorial will guide you through installation and configuration of Lintrack, a GNU/Linux distribution specialized in networking tasks. We will give two LANs access to the internet along with DHCP and DNS cache servers, and then we will connect our networks using OpenVPN in bridging mode. You should be running all these in well under an hour, thanks to the unified configuration interface of Lintrack.

OpenBSD: OpenJDK 1.7 import started

Kurt@ imported the first OpenJDK port today, the first step toward making Sun's GPL'd Java implementation available to our users; this will eventually mean we can have the JDK binaries available as packages.

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Sun Open Sources Java

Sun Microsystems has announced the release of an open-source version of its Java Development Kit for Java Platform Standard Edition. Sun has contributed the software to the OpenJDK Community as free software under the GNU GPLv2.

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Sun Debuts JavaFX As Alternative To AJAX

Internetnews is reporting on Sun's introduction of JavaFX at JavaOne today. Looks like a combination Applet, Flash, Javascript, and AJAX with a friendly programming interface. Does this really spell the end of AJAX?

Haiku Getting a FreeBSD Network Driver Compatibility Layer

Thanks to the work of one of the most active code contributors lately, Hugo Santos, Haiku is getting a generic FreeBSD network driver compatibility layer that will allow FreeBSD network drivers to be compiled and used in Haiku with few, if any changes. At the time of this writing, not only has Hugo committed the compatibility layer to the Haiku tree, but he has also succeeded in building two FreeBSD drivers (if_em/Intel Pro 1000 and if_le/PCNet) which are now capable of running in Haiku.

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martes, 8 de mayo de 2007

Thunderbird’s Most Underrated Feature: Identities

There are many good reasons to use Thunderbird 2 as your default desktop email client. Mozilla’s Thunderbird feature page lists some of them: advanced views, decent searching, security, junk mail screening, RSS feeds, add-on plugins and themes, cross-platform versions, and more.

However, there is one feature in Thunderbird that gets less press, yet is handled so beautifully as compared to other desktop clients it’s about time someone stood on a platform and sang its praises: identities.

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Things I can do in Linux that I can't do on Windows

Since I often hear from friends and people on the Internet about things they can't do in Linux that they could on Windows, I thought I'd write up a list of things I can do in Linux that I can't do in Windows.

chkrootkit on FreeBSD with Nagios integration

The goal of this HOWTO is to show how to get chkrookit installed and then monitored from Nagios/nrpe. I admittedly am not a Bash guru, but the below script works for me.

lunes, 7 de mayo de 2007

The life of VHCS on our FreeBSD server

In September of 2005, VHCS released a hacked version of their management system available on FreeBSD on the VHCS forums. The port is very buggy and has not been used on any known production servers. Our venture into the installation of this port was more than one would call trouble, but the appeal of the publicly available management portal drove me on to get it working.

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Mysql database migration and special characters

orthogonalthought.com/blog

Firewalling with OpenBSD's PF Packet Filter

Peter Hansteen has apparently been maintaining his own PF tutorial. I originally noticed Peter's guide through a submission to RootPrompt.org.

The tutorial like many others goes through the configuration basics and ends off with specific case studies for certain configuration approaches. One nice addition to this particular guide is a section on setting up a wireless access point and doing access control via authpf.

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How to REALLY erase a hard drive

You may already know that “deleting” a file does nothing of the sort. But did you know that your disk drive has a built-in system for the secure erasure of data?

No? Then read on.

The Perfect Desktop - Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn

With the release of Microsoft's new Windows operating system (Vista), more and more people are looking for alternatives to Windows for various reasons. This tutorial shows people who are willing to switch to Linux how they can set up a Linux desktop (Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn in this article) that fully replaces their Windows desktop, i.e. that has all software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that runs also on older hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

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Gentoo Linux 2007.0 Released

The Gentoo Release Engineering project is pleased to announce the much-delayed release of Gentoo Linux 2007.0, code named 'Secret Sauce'.

(more...)

sábado, 5 de mayo de 2007

PHP 5.2.2 and 4.4.7 Released

PHP 5.2.2 and 4.4.7 have been released with a plethora of security updates. Many of the security notifications come from the Month of PHP Bugs effort, and range from double freed memory to bugs in functions that allow attackers to enable register_globals, to memory corruption with unserialize(), to input validation flaws that allow e-mail header injections, with an unhealthy sprinkling of other bugs and flaws fixed.

(more...)

ArchLinux — smooth and cuddly

ArchLinux or Arch for short is one of the uprising new distributions. Well, at least compared to old folks like Debian or Slackware it’s still fresh and shining :) . Arch is gaining new users and good reviews every day. Let’s find out why this is happening.

OpenBSD 4.1: Puffy Strikes Again

OpenBSD 4.1 has just been released. Federico Biancuzzi interviewed several developers to discuss some of the new features for networking, active porting efforts (landisk and UltraSPARC III), work on SMP, and the improvements in spam fighting.ç

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viernes, 4 de mayo de 2007

Encrypted home partition in Linux

Have you ever wondered what would have happened if all the important data have been stolen from your mobile PC? For example the information about a confidential project you have been working on for the last 2 years in your company … A horrifying vision, isn’t it? If you don’t want it come true, please consider encrypting your home drive. Here is how to do this in Linux.

Pidgin 2.0 Released

After nearly two years of development, Pidgin 2.0 has finally been released! Originally called Gaim, Pidgin is a powerful and robust open source instant messaging client that supports many protocols.

(more...)

jueves, 3 de mayo de 2007

How fast is your disk?

With a little bit of torturing, and some fun on the way, find out how fast your hard disk drive really is.

(more...)

Opening the Unix Desktop to Web Developers

I have always played with web design on my Windows XP workstation, and with the event of open-source operating systems, I wanted to try to set up a fully-functional desktop aimed at web design easily. After reading this article you'll see that beside Adobe Flash, you can have an affordable, secure and alternative system which can fullfill your needs.

We can find examples of configurations for popular Linux distros with step-by-step procedures to install applications aimed at web design or multimedia. This time, I'm going to use PC-BSD, a fairly new operating system based on rock-solid FreeBSD, because installing software, especially commercial applications, is more familiar on PC-BSD for someone like me who's a long term Windows user. I won't describe the system installation, to sum up, it's a simple step-by-step wizard that assists you to install your system, pretty much like Windows and popular Linux distros.

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Sed - An Introduction

grymoire.com

Preventing Brute Force Attacks With Fail2ban On Debian Etch

In this article I will show how to install and configure fail2ban on a Debian Etch system. Fail2ban is a tool that observes login attempts to various services, e.g. SSH, FTP, SMTP, Apache, etc., and if it finds failed login attempts again and again from the same IP address or host, fail2ban stops further login attempts from that IP address/host by blocking it with an iptables firewall rule.

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AN.ON: navegación web anónima

Se trata de AN.ON, un sistema de navegación web anónima presentado por la Universidad de Dresde (Alemania). Por si alguien aún albergara alguna duda sobre su legalidad (o sobre la del uso legítimo del anonimato en general), el proyecto ha sido patrocinado por la Fundación Alemana para la Investigación y el Ministerio Federal de Economía y Tecnología. Aunque la subvención se acaba (y ya existe un servicio de pago más eficiente para cubrir los gastos), se asegura que se mantendrá la posibilidad de su uso gratuito.

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miércoles, 2 de mayo de 2007

[Gnash-dev] YouTube seems to be working now

lists.gnu.org

Ext3cow Versioning File System Released For 2.6

Ext3cow, an open-source versioning file system based on ext3, has been released for the 2.6 Linux kernel. Ext3cow allows users to view their file system as it appeared at any point in time through a natural, time-shifting interface.

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Fiwix 0.3.1 Released

GNU/Fiwix is a 32-bit x86 operating system kernel based on the Unix architecture and fully focused on being Linux compatible. It is designed exclusively for educational purposes, so the kernel code is kept as simple as possible for the benefit of students. In the latest version, the virtual memory manager code has been improved to support SVGAlib-based applications and to add the ability to mmap() physical addresses. The way to map physical addresses in the /dev/mem driver has been improved. The mmap() and readpage() methods have been added to the VFS structure. Among other improvements in the VFS layer, the code to build with gcc 4.x has been fixed.

martes, 1 de mayo de 2007

Dragonfly BSD 1.8.1 now at LinuxTracker

linuxtracker.org

OpenBSD 4.1 released

OpenBSD 4.1. has finally been released.This release features tons of new drivers, better support for sparc64, and lots more functionality. With only two remote holes in the default install, in more than 10 years, you really should check it out.

pfsense 1.2-BETA-1 released!

1.2-BETA-1 has been released! Here are just a few of the new improvements and features that have made their way into this new version:

* FreeBSD updated to 6.2
* Reworked load balancing pools which allow for round robin or failover
* miniupnpd has proven to work so well that it is now in the base install but deactivated by default (uninstall the miniupnpd package before upgrading to avoid duplicate menu items)
* Much enhanced RRD graphs

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Dell to Sell Machines with Ubuntu Pre-Loaded

Cnet is reporting that Dell will shortly announce a partnership with Canonical to offer Ubuntu pre-loaded on certain consumer-oriented desktops and notebooks. The announcement comes after a groundswell of support for pre-installed Linux on Dell's IdeaStorm site.

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One man writes Linux drivers for 352 USB webcams

A LONE HOBBYIST programmer sitting at his home in France is responsible for adding 352 USB webcams to the list of those supported by Linux. He tells the INQUIRER about this often unknown and unrecognised achievement.

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