martes, 31 de julio de 2007

win-get: apt-get para Windows

win-get es una pequeña utilidad de línea de comando para la instalación automática de Software Libre y de código abierto para Windows, basado en la funcionalidad del Advanced Packaging Tool (apt) de Debian.

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lunes, 30 de julio de 2007

Building the ultimate Linux-based music server

This article describes how to build your own silent, fast, eco-friendly Linux-based PC for use in a digital music listening system. The PC is based on a high-end Via mini-ITX board, passively cooled case with heatpipe technology, Debian Linux, and a little creative embedded elbow grease.

Diagnose and manage your network for free with Linux and open source tools

In this Internet-connected world it is an essential skill to know how to troubleshoot network problems. High-quality software suites exist to do the job but can easily cost in excess of tens of thousands of dollars. With a handful of absolutely free open source tools you can do it yourself – on any computer anywhere in the world.

Using htaccess to password protect your site the easy way

The scenario is that you have a group of files within a folder that you want to password protect. You want to keep them secure from prying eyes.

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viernes, 27 de julio de 2007

BSD Talk 122 - Interview with Warner Losh

Interview with M. Warner Losh about embedding FreeBSD.

Intel launches open-source project

Intel launched its first official open-source software project today, a tool that makes it much easier to program multi-core chips working together.

"We did it because our customers said, `If it's going to be a standard, it needs to be everywhere and it needs to be forever,"' said James Reinders, chief evangelist for Intel's software development products, at the O'Reily Open Source Convention in Portland, Ore.

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Deployment of a High-Availability Cluster on FreeBSD

The goal of this document is to describe precisely the various steps involved in the deployment and configuration of a Linux-HA cluster on FreeBSD using the ports. We will focus on a precise description of the various steps involved to achieve the deployment of a working solution.

This documentation is based on FreeBSD 6.2.p5 and heartbeat-1.2.5_3

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jueves, 26 de julio de 2007

FreeBSD Ports vs Packages

Something that confused the hell out of me when I first started using FreeBSD was ports vs pkg_add. It was worth getting used to ports, I think, because these days I use nothing else.

What’s the difference?...

TestDisk - Powerful free data recovery program

TestDisk is a powerful free data recovery software.

TestDisk can handle a massive list of file systems, and can be run under any of the following environments:

* DOS (either real or in a Windows 9x DOS-box),
* Windows (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003),
* Linux,
* FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
* SunOS and
* MacOS

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How to create a streaming audio site with Linux or FreeBSD

Are you bored at work and wish you could listen to the hundreds or thousands of mp3's or ogg's that you have ripped to your hard drive at home? Maybe you want to create an internet radio station and live out your fantasy of being a DJ. Whatever your reason, I'm going to show you how to very easily and freely create a kick ass streaming audio site using Linux or *BSD that you can listen to from any computer. I say again, any system - Windows, Mac, Linux, whatever - will be able to listen. Sound cool? (no pun intended)

This article is going to assume an intermediate level of l33t computer hacking skillz. If you don't even know what "l33t" is or if your idea of computer skills means fooling around in the Windows control panel, you might be lost here. I'll try to keep this as simple as I can, but we're going to be dealing with networking, webservers, HTML and shell scripting. Of course you might be smart as hell and can pick this stuff up easily. Read on.

DesktopBSD 1.6RC3 Released

DesktopBSD 1.6 RC 3 is now available for download from our mirrors or via BitTorrent. This release candidate is considered a large step towards a final release 1.6 with major changes such as: X.Org release 7.2, improving support for modern graphics hardware; NVIDIA graphics driver, providing hardware 3D acceleration for NVIDIA video cards; latest FreeBSD 6-STABLE as base system with High Definition Audio support; support for multiple processors and multi-core CPUs; more up-to-date software packages from the DesktopBSD build servers; many small bug fixes and optimizations.

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VirtualBox 1.4.0

This new version brings hundreds of improvements, more than any update since the first official release in January 2007, including support for FreeBSD and OpenBSD guests has been improved.

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OpenBSD & BIND 9 cache poisoning

when BIND 9 was first imported into OpenBSD, we decided not to use the default ID generation algorithm (LFSR, Linear Feedback Shift Register) but to use a more proven algorithm (LCG, Linear Congruential Generator) instead. thanks to this wise decision, the BIND 9 shipped with OpenBSD does not have this weakness.

the proactive security of OpenBSD strikes again,

Firewall Builder 2.1.13 Released

The main focus is better support for new features available in PF in OpenBSD 4.1, and improvements in the built-in policy installer for Cisco PIX and IOS access lists.

(more...)

Dona al proyecto Linux Fund con tu tarjeta Visa

El proyecto de Linux Fund tiene ahora otra forma para lograr sus objetivos filantrópicos, "por medio de las compras que hagan los geeks con su tarjeta VISA Linux". La idea es que con cada compra, las entidades emisoras de las tarjetas (los bancos) donen una determinada cantidad de dinero a la iniciativa de Linux Fund.

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OpenBSD Foundation Announced

KernelTrap is reporting on the creation of the OpenBSD Foundation, a Canadian not-for-profit corporation intended to support OpenBSD and related projects, including OpenSSH, OpenBGPD, OpenNTPD, and OpenCVS.

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SSH tricks

SSH (secure shell) is a program enabling secure access to remote filesystems. Not everyone is aware of other powerful SSH capabilities, such as passwordless login, automatic execution of commands on a remote system or even mounting a remote folder using SSH! In this article we’ll cover these features and much more.

Build a $250 Ubuntu PC

When we review budget computers, a phrase we commonly throw around is "just the basics." We use it to denote a PC that can handle e-mail and instant messaging, Web surfing, average office tasks (such as word processing, spreadsheets, and finance management), light photo editing, and simple print-design projects. True, these are things computers have been tackling for a long time, but the operating systems and software used to do them have become more complex, rendering a dusty, old, beige machine obsolete in a heartbeat. Even just poking around the Internet demands more processing power than it did a few years ago.

If you're still using a particularly long-in-the-tooth PC, it's likely because you don't have the money to spend on a new machine. We can appreciate that, so we pulled together a desktop that can ably handle today's average demands, built with easy-to-assemble, off-the-shelf components for a total cost of less than $250.

miércoles, 25 de julio de 2007

Running on OpenBSD - The Conclusion (Part 4)

In a world that three operating systems dominate (Windows, Linux, MacOS) and alternative sounds weird we gave a run at OpenBSD as our operating system from end-to-end. The following document is the fourth and final part of a four part paper that describes how we managed to setup our entire company using only OpenBSD and its provided ports and tools.

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NetBSD hires Andrew Doran for full-time SMP development

The NetBSD Foundation announces that it has hired Andrew Doran to work full-time on improving symmetrical multi-processing (SMP) in NetBSD. This work is made possible through a generous donation by Force10 Networks and internal funding by The NetBSD Foundation.

Andrew Doran is an independent, Dublin based Unix systems consultant with special interest in building scalable systems. He has been a NetBSD developer since 1999 and is currently working on the transition from a big-lock SMP implementation to a fine-grained model, which allows multiple CPUs to execute code in kernel context simultaneously. Hiring Andrew full-time will boost work in this area, with the final result of a SMP implementation that is ready for tomorrow's multi-core-CPUs.

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martes, 24 de julio de 2007

RELENG_6 patch [Re: pf 4.1 Update available for testing]

now available at: http://people.freebsd.org/~mlaier/PF41/ with instructions how to build.

Please test if possible and provide me with feedback.

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GCC 4.2.1 Released

Although this minor update would otherwise be insignificant, it will be the final GPL v2 release; all future releases will be GPL v3.

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FreeBSD port security/xca-0.6.3 update

After many weeks of (re)compiling and code wrangling, followed by 5 weeks of waiting for someone to commit, it is finally here!

OpenBSD 4.1 Syslogd SSLified

Recently I, and my Echothrust partner Panagiotis Efstratiou, were up to some administrative tasks for a Greek university. The term 'university' often implies a complex infrastructure, 'complex infrastructure' means a lot of boxes and eventually a lot of boxes produce a lot of logs. So we decided to develop one central log server for auditing all our servers but then again we faced some problems. The OpenBSD syslog daemon is fast, stable and secure, but what about UDP? How can we setup a secure central server? What are the available solutions? In order to answer these questions we have to travel back to the 80s...

Next version of Windows: Call it 7

Microsoft is planning to ship its next major version of Windows--known internally as version "7"--within roughly three years, CNET News.com has learned.

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Password vulnerability in Firefox 2.0.0.5

According to a message posted over the weekend on the Full-Disclosure mailing list, the latest version of Firefox, 2.0.0.5, contains a password management vulnerability that can allow malicious Web sites to steal user passwords. If you have JavaScript enabled and allow Firefox to remember your passwords, you are at risk from this flaw.

How to install KDE 4 in OS X

This (brief) tutorial is by no means the ‘only’ way to install KDE 4 in OS X. However, it’s probably the easiest. Keep reading for a step-by-step walkthrough, and a couple of disclaimers.

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lunes, 23 de julio de 2007

PfSense: 1.2 Release Candidate 1 released!

1.2-RC1-2 has been released! Here are just a few of the new improvements and features that have made their way into this new version...

PC-BSD 1.4 BETA Released!

After months of hard work, the PC-BSD team is pleased to make available the 1.4 BETA release. This version includes many exciting new features and software...

Five steps to becoming the local security guru

It’s not difficult to become the local security expert — the guy to whom others look when they need network resources secured, the guy they point to when they want to source someone in their attempts to reform security policy, and the guy organizations like TechRepublic ask to write about security. In other words, barring perhaps the ability to compose a well-written essay without grammatical and spelling errors, it’s not too difficult to be me. There are really only five steps to it.

viernes, 20 de julio de 2007

Holes Remain Open in Firefox Password Manager

Although the Mozilla developers have fixed a known hole in the password manager of Firefox & Co, a door remains open for exploitation. According to an article on the heise site, hackers can still use JavaScript to steal passwords from users of the Mozilla, Firefox, and Safari browsers. However, the real problem might not be Firefox' password manager. If users can set up their own pages containing script code on a server, the JavaScript security model breaks. Heise Security demonstrates the possible password theft in a demo.

Hotmail Delivers Far Fewer Emails with Attachments

It has long been suspected that there is a silent policy that makes Hotmail automatically delete the majority of attachments to save on bandwidth and internal disk space...

W3C Considering An HTML 5

When the decision was initially made to move in the direction of XHTML, instead of a new version of HTML proper, it seemed like a good idea. Years later and the widespread adoption of CSS (among other things) has proven that things don't always develop the way we expect. As a result, HTML 5 has been revived by the W3C.

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Opera 9.22 Released

"We released 9.22 today and it's a recommended security update. There are changelogs for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux/UNIX."

(more...)

Running on OpenBSD - Parts 1, 2 and 3

Will Backman writes about an interesting series of blog entries detailing how Echothrust Solutions uses OpenBSD throughout the company:

"In a world that three operating systems dominate (Windows, Linux, MacOS) and alternative sounds weird we gave a run at OpenBSD as our operating system from end-to-end. The following document is the first part of a four part paper that describes how we managed to setup our entire company using only OpenBSD and its provided ports and tools."

(more...)

IPsec Interview on BSD Talk

Will Backman of BSD Talk recently interviewed FreeBSD Developer George Neville-Neil about the changes to IPsec in FreeBSD 7.0. The audio is now on line.

miércoles, 18 de julio de 2007

OpenMosix Project EoL Announcement

Moshe Bar, openMosix founder and project leader, has announced plans to end the openMosix Project effective March 1, 2008.

The increasing power and availability of low cost multi-core processors is rapidly making single-system image (SSI) Clustering less of a factor in computing. The direction of computing is clear and key developers are moving into newer virtualization approaches and other projects.

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martes, 17 de julio de 2007

How To Create Strong Passwords…And Remember Them

In today’s online world, having a strong password is a must. However, the problem with strong passwords is that they can be difficult to remember. Altering the passwords you currently use by adding a meaningful symbol is one step toward making them difficult for Internet thieves to crack. Here is a list of symbols, some suggested uses, and some examples of how to incorporate them into your passwords.

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OpenBSD/DG/Squid HowTo

I’ve had several people ask me recently how to setup Dan’s Guardian (DG) with Squid as a transparent proxy. I’ve been using DG for a couple of years now and I’ve set it up for some others as well. I’ve always used OpenBSD as my OS of choice for my router/firewall/content filter(RFCF) because OpenBSD is the most secure Operating System in the world. “Only two remote holes in the default install, in more than 10 years!” It says so right on their website (http://www.openbsd.org). I was first turned on to OpenBSD by my good friend DarkUncle (http://darkuncle.net) who helped me setup my first OpenBSD RFCF with Squid and DG as an alternative to SonicWall.

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Video - How Password Crackers Work

We all know that password security is important and yet we still use simple passwords that can be cracked in a matter of seconds. This video clip demonstrates the power of LOphtCrack and how simple passwords can be accessed even when using the default dictionary and no rainbow tables.

Spammers Strike Again With Image Spam via PDFs

BorderWare Technologies today announced that its real-time, multi-application reputation service, BorderWare Security Network (BSN), reported a new trend in spam in which images are embedded in PDFs.

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NetBSD en el escritorio

Un usuario común se toma el trabajo de instalar NetBSD como una opción para su PC de escritorio, y escribe un esclarecedor recuento de su experiencia para quienes estén considerando hacer lo mismo en algún momento. La PC en cuestión fué una modesta Athlon K7 de 1.2 GHz, con un motherboard VIA82 y 288 Mb de RAM, y video NVidia Geforce2 64 Mb; pero antes de comenzar, hay una sabias palabras de advertencia...

Back up like an expert with rsync

In the last two months I've been traveling a lot. During the same period my main desktop computer went belly up. I would have been in trouble without rsync at my disposal -- but thanks to my regular use of this utility, my data (or most of it, anyway) was already copied offsite just waiting to be used. It takes a little time to become familiar with rsync, but once you are, you should be able to handle most of your backup needs with just a short script.

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lunes, 16 de julio de 2007

killing processes

One of the things I hate about Windows is that there is no good way to kill frozen processes. Theoretically, you type Ctrl-Alt-Delete, wait for Task Manager to pop up, and kill the process. But in reality, the process doesn't always die immediately (it usually takes multiple tries and a very long time). GNU/Linux users don't have this problem. Here's how to end processes using the terminal, a few GUIs, and even a first person shooter.

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Ubuntu Linux: Using Mutt and Gmail

This page is a guide to using the email client Mutt to send, receive and read email on an Ubuntu computer using a Gmail account as a relay as well as a description of my own path to this goal. If you need to ask why I have put such an effort into this project and did not simply use the web interface of Gmail perhaps this page is not for you. Mutt is an amazing piece of software and it will handsomely repay the effort involved in setting it up with Gmail.

Eyes on Your Network - Nagios on BSD

I have long wanted a Nagios installation to monitor our network happenings and keep me apprised of quirks and outages. I have used a smattering of utilities here and there, but most required that you sit right in front of them 24/7 and had limited configuration options. Nagios is the pocket battleship of monitoring applications and, of course, it doesn’t cost a penny.

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Hide DNS server (BIND) version from others

DNS server is one of the most targeted application for attack, It’s always a good idea to hide your DNS server version information so that BAD guys cannot view the version and start the attack to this specific version of your DNS server (Bind).

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Dru's FreeBSD Find of the Day

From the "wow, I can't believe this file has been on my system since 2001 and I only discovered it now" department.

It's Friday so I decided to watch the csup messages on my laptop during my coffee break. The first file caught my eye as it had an interesting name which I hadn't run across before:

more /usr/src/ObsoleteFiles.inc

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Building a Fully Encrypted NAS On OpenBSD

In this document I will try to explain what it takes to get an encrypted NAS on OpenBSD. This involves software RAID and encrypted filesystems.

domingo, 15 de julio de 2007

Better Scripts #3 - use logger

When you write scripts, especially scripts that will be executed unattended by cron or a similar facility, in most cases you want some way of getting error messages. Sometimes email is the way to go, sometimes you can just redirect output to a text file. Solaris and most other *NIX operating systems are shipped with a tool to log directly to syslog, logger(1).

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Security paper shows how application can steal CPU cycles

The annual Usenix security symposium is a gathering place for all kinds of ideas: those on how to stop security flaws and those about what kinds of new security issues may emerge in the future. A neat example of the latter was presented by Dan Tsafrir, Yoav Etsion, and Dror G. Feitelson in their paper (PDF) entitled "Secretly Monopolizing the CPU Without Superuser Privileges." The team presented a proof-of-concept program for Unix-based systems—although it could theoretically be adopted for any modern multitasking operating system—that allows a specified task to "cheat" and take more CPU cycles than the OS would normally allow it to have.

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Create a fake Wireless Access Point

If one access point is good, 53,000 must be better.

Black Alchemy's Fake AP generates thousands of counterfeit 802.11b access points. Hide in plain sight amongst Fake AP's cacophony of beacon frames. As part of a honeypot or as an instrument of your site security plan, Fake AP confuses Wardrivers, NetStumblers, Script Kiddies, and other undesirables.

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Safer, Faster, and Smarter internet access by using OpenDNS

OpenDNS protects you from phishing — bad websites trying to steal your personal information. When you try to go to a phishing site, Opendns let you know. Let’s try to configure and use this on Linux.

PHP 4 End of Life Announcement

The PHP development team has announced that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. Critical security fixes will be made available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08.

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coLinux - Cooperative Linux Short Review

Since I discovered Linux I also started to have this dilemma which OS, Linux or Windows I should use to do everyday works. On Windows I had a lot of important apps that I couldn’t find linux counterparts to – starting from Outlook for PocketPC synchronization, through Visual Studio for programming needs, to some games. On Linux, from the other hand, I have had excellent audio player Amarok, great scripting support (Python, Ruby) and easy server setup for web testing needs.

The problem is, for me, and many other developers, administrators or just normal users, that if you want to use applications from different OS, you have to reboot and boot into the other OS. Sometimes, when you, for example, just want to do a quick test of newly compiled application, and go back to work, it is very inconvenient and time consuming.

Standard ways of dealing with these problems is either creating virtual machine for Linux, setting two PC, one with windows, second with Linux, or using Cygwin/SFU (Services for Unix). But there is also other way, which allows you to run Linux on Windows natively - coLinux.

viernes, 13 de julio de 2007

FreeBSD 7 lo que se viene

Como sabemos nuestro querido sistema Operativo PCBSD se basa en el gran FreeBSD el cual en la próxima gran actualización de FreeBSD, su versión 7.0, será una de sus más importantes hasta ahora, con la más grande cantidad de nuevas tecnologías y mejoras incluídas desde FreeBSD 5.0.

(más...)

Gracias comunidad PCBSD-PE.

jueves, 12 de julio de 2007

Nuevo Scheduler para el Kernel Linux

El desarrollador Ingo Molnar es el responsable de un nuevo planificador de procesos que hará su aparición en el futuro Kernel 2.6.23 de Linux. Según KernelTrap, el nuevo CFS (Completely Fair Scheduler) modela una "CPU multitarea ideal y precisa en hardware real. Ejecuta la tarea que tiene la necesidad más desesperada por conseguir tiempo de CPU y trata de dividir los recursos de la CPU entre las tareas en ejecución para conseguir una multitarea hardware tan ideal como es posible".

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Bash tutorial

First you probably need to read a UNIX command bible to really understand this tutorial, but I will try to make it as clear as possible, there is about 100-150 UNIX commands explained later in this tutorial.

You are to have some UNIX experance before starting on this tutorial, so if you feel that you have UNIX/Linux experance feel free to start to learn here.

What I included here is general shell scripting, most common other things and some UNIX commands.

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Proponen al Gobierno Chileno el uso masivo de software libre, mediante sistema Linux, por las ventajas que presenta

El Diputado de Renovación Nacional, Roberto Sepúlveda hizo un llamado a las autoridades pertinentes del Gobierno para que impulse en sus plataformas informáticas el uso del Software libre Linux, dadas las innumerables ventajas que presenta frente a los software propietarios, vale decir los que operan bajo licencia, y que por ende tienen un mayor costo.

“Considerando que en nuestro país la inversión en desarrollo científico es ínfima, el uso de sistema Linux nos provee de poderosas herramientas computacionales, prácticamente a costo cero, con una gran vida útil, con mayor seguridad, estabilidad, flexibilidad, y por sobretodo, el no uso del antivirus”, manifestó el parlamentario.

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World's Fastest Broadband Connection — 40 Gbps

A 75-year-old woman from Karlstad in central Sweden has been given a scorching 40 Gbps internet connection — the fastest residential connection anywhere in the world. Sigbritt Löthberg is the mother of Swedish internet guru Peter Löthberg, who is using his mother to prove that fiber networks can deliver a cost-effective, ultra-fast connection. Sigbritt, who has never owned a computer before, can now watch 1,500 HDTV channels simultaneously or download a whole high definition DVD in two seconds.

WoW

FreeBSD-SA-07:05.libarchive

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

=============================================================================
FreeBSD-SA-07:05.libarchive Security Advisory
The FreeBSD Project

Topic: Errors handling corrupt tar files in libarchive(3)

Category: core
Module: libarchive
Announced: 2007-07-12
Credits: CPNI, CERT-FI, Tim Kientzle, Colin Percival
Affects: FreeBSD 5.3 and later.
Corrected: 2007-07-12 15:00:44 UTC (RELENG_6, 6.2-STABLE)
2007-07-12 15:01:14 UTC (RELENG_6_2, 6.2-RELEASE-p6)
2007-07-12 15:01:32 UTC (RELENG_6_1, 6.1-RELEASE-p18)
2007-07-12 15:01:42 UTC (RELENG_5, 5.5-STABLE)
2007-07-12 15:01:56 UTC (RELENG_5_5, 5.5-RELEASE-p14)
CVE Name: CVE-2007-3641, CVE-2007-3644, CVE-2007-3645

For general information regarding FreeBSD Security Advisories,
including descriptions of the fields above, security branches, and the
following sections, please visit .

I. Background

The libarchive library provides a flexible interface for reading and
writing streaming archive files such as tar and cpio, and has been the
basis for FreeBSD's implementation of the tar(1) utility since FreeBSD 5.3.

II. Problem Description

Several problems have been found in the code used to parse the tar and
pax interchange formats. These include entering an infinite loop if an
archive prematurely ends within a pax extension header or if certain
types of corruption occur in pax extension headers [CVE-2007-3644];
dereferencing a NULL pointer if an archive prematurely ends within a
tar header immediately following a pax extension header or if certain
other types of corruption occur in pax extension headers [CVE-2007-3645];
and miscomputing the length of a buffer resulting in a buffer overflow
if yet another type of corruption occurs in a pax extension header
[CVE-2007-3641].

(more...)

miércoles, 11 de julio de 2007

How to close down GNU/Linux safely after a system freeze with the SysRq key

Despite jeering at Windows for the infamous system freezes and blue screens of death, there are and will be times when your computer just locks up: the cursor is frozen and even invoking a console by Ctrl + Alt + [F2, F3, ...] to close down the X windows session running on F7 is non-functional.

My fellow blogger, Andrew Min, has given excellent tips on this website when faced with stubborn processes and applications that just refuse to terminate. This tip may be of assistance to those whose entire system has frozen and aren’t happy to just do a hard power off and trust to luck that data will not be corrupted. Fortunately GNU/Linux has journalled filesystems so the chances of this happening are reduced and you will not suffer the indignity of being told that you performed an illegal operation or having to drum your fingers waiting impatiently for scandisk to complete.

(more...)

martes, 10 de julio de 2007

New kernel brings better wireless support

In Linus Torvalds' words, "Not a whole lot of changes since -rc7," but the more significant upgrades in kernel release 2.6.22, announced over the weekend, include a new wireless stack, a new FireWire stack, and a new SLAB allocator for more efficient memory management.

"For too many years, Linux wireless support has worked, but not very well," according to the folks at Linux Kernel Newbies. "2.6.22 has a completely new, better wireless stack included."

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How to Avoid Being Blacklisted

A blacklist usually refers to a list of e-mail or IP addresses known to send spam e-mails or some other type of unsolicited messages. Such lists are currently used by mail servers for filtering incoming e-mails and blocking the ones listed, in order to improve mail security and integrity. The blacklist is also the opposite of what is called a whitelist.

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Text Compressor 1% Away From AI Threshold

Alexander Ratushnyak compressed the first 100,000,000 bytes of Wikipedia to a record-small 16,481,655 bytes (including decompression program), thereby not only winning the second payout of The Hutter Prize for Compression of Human Knowledge, but also bringing text compression within 1% of the threshold for artificial intelligence.

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FreeBSD Status Reports Q2/2007

This report covers FreeBSD related projects between April and June 2007. Again an exciting quarter for FreeBSD. In May we saw one of the biggest developers summits to date at BSDCan , our 25 Google Summer of Code students started working on their projects - progress reports are available below, and finally the 7.0 release cycle was started three weeks ago.

If your are curious about what's new in FreeBSD 7.0 we suggest reading Ivan Voras' excellent summary at: http://ivoras.sharanet.org/freebsd/freebsd7.html and of course these reports.

The next gathering of the BSD community will be at EuroBSDCon in Copenhagen , September 14-15. More details about the conference and the developer summit are available in the respective reports below.

Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! We hope you enjoy reading.

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Virus scanning

This article outlines how to setup virus scanning using AMaViS (A Mail Virus Scanner), ClamAV, and Postfix. The actions describe below are particular to a FreeBSD system and are applicable to other operating systems by altering the path to the configuration files, and adjusting for other OS-specific issues.

Have Spammers Overcome the CAPTCHA?

It appears that spammers have found a way to automatically create Hotmail and Yahoo email accounts. They have already generated more than 15,000 bogus Hotmail accounts, according to security company BitDefender.

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Fighting spam with pf

This article will show you how I am using PF (the the Packet Filter from the OpenBSD project) and spamd (also from OpenBSD) to implement greylisting and greatly reduce incoming spam.

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Desktop FreeBSD Part 6: User PPP Connections

By this time, you should have guessed that running KDE takes a large chunk of machine resources. Really old machines will run this latest version of KDE quite slowly. I chose it for the FreeBSD beginner because it’s a good safe place to start, with so many built-in tools. One of the most important ones up to now has been KPPP — the dialup tool. In this lesson we are going to learn how to dialup without KPPP. With that, about the only reason to keep using KDE is simply that you like it.

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SwapBoost 0.1 Alpha

SwapBoost es un script experimental escrito en Bash que nos permite utilizar el espacio libre que tengamos en nuestra memoria USB o pendrive, para utilizarlo como memoria Swap incrementando en algunos casos el rendimiento del sistema. Se podría decir que funciona de una forma similar al ReadyBoost de Windows Vista.

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Xbox port of OpenBSD

My name is Markus Ritzer, and I have ported OpenBSD to the Microsoft Xbox. I have done this as a project for university, and this project is finished on July 18th.

It is not an official port until now, and I don't think it will become one. I don't have enough time to be a maintainer of my port...

DragonFly BSD 1.10 release scheduled for July 15th-20th

The 1.10 release will be around July 15-20ish.

Linux 2.6.22 Kernel Released

Linux creator Linus Torvalds announced the official release of the 2.6.22 kernel: 'It's out there now (or at least in the process of mirroring out — if you don't see everything, give it a bit of time).' The previous stable kernel, 2.6.21, was released a little over two months ago. New features in the 2.6.22 kernel include a SLUB allocator which replaces the slab allocator, a new wireless stack, a new Firewire stack, and support for the Blackfin architecture.

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script -r / -p

Stefan pointed me at a nice feature of NetBSD's script(1) command today: It can record a terminal session, and play it back later, with corresponding timing that shows all pauses etc. - very nice for showing how something works, but where a simple screenshot may not be the optimal thing.

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lunes, 9 de julio de 2007

Solaris, Secure by Default

If you know about OpenBSD (and you really should, it is a great OS) you may also know that one of their slogans are “Secure by Default” which now also Solaris is adopting. OpenBSD is one of the few operating systems you can put directly on the Internet and be quite sure that I won’t be hacked. By default only ssh is running and listening on a port. If you need any additional services to run you need to enable them yourself. This is of course common sense but OpenBSD was most likely first and they are doing an excellent job with regards to that. In addition they also provide a number of other great security features but I won’t go into them in this article.

domingo, 8 de julio de 2007

Internet anonymity for Linux newbies

One of the most attractive things about Linux is the number of installation options one is presented with and how tempting it is to customize. But for a newbie, in terms of Web security and PC hygiene, that's also the worst thing about it. The fact is, Windows is easier than Linux for a casual user to make fairly secure, whereas Linux is easier than Windows for a power user to make very secure.

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FreeBSD vs. Gentoo

FreeBSD and Gentoo are both acceptable operating systems in my book, but they both have their weak and strong points. They both have excellent speeds, so you're not going to see any tedious graphs of how much faster Gentoo can convert a .gif to .png on this page. If you see an interesting term in this article and want to find out more about it, google it, I'm not about to spam the page up with a bunch of links either.

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sábado, 7 de julio de 2007

Sun Releases ODF Plugin for MS Office

Heise online is reporting that Sun has released their OpenDocument Format (ODF) plug-in for Microsoft Office 2000, XP and 2003. The plug-in allows Microsoft Office (for Windows) users to open ODF files and save their work in ODF formats used by OpenOffice, StarOffice, and other programs.

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Slackware 12 Review

I'm big fan of Slackware Linux, I have used it since the 9.0 version, and I am very happy with this distribution, in the beginning was challenging to setup mostly because I was a newbie, today I am installing and reviewing the recently released version 12 in my toshiba l35-sp1011...

viernes, 6 de julio de 2007

How to Perform System Boot and Shutdown Procedures for Solaris 10

This chapter provides a description of the OpenBoot environment, the PROM, NVRAM, and the kernel. It describes how to access OpenBoot and the various commands that are available to test and provide information about the hardware.

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jueves, 5 de julio de 2007

Google loses "Gmail" trademark case

A court in Germany today banned Google from using the name "Gmail" for its popular webmail service following a trademark suit filed by the founder of G-Mail.

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miércoles, 4 de julio de 2007

Full Slackware 12.0 Review

So as you all should know by now, the king of Linuxes, Slackware, just released version 12.0. After over 14 years Slackware still holds true to its ideals of keeping it simple and straight forward.

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ESET releases Online Scanner - Beta

Looks like ESET, a global provider of antivirus software, today announced a release of its new online scanning service. Powered by award-winning ESET NOD32 Antivirus software, ESET Online Scanner is a free Web-based service that enables computer users to perform a comprehensive systeeset_logom scan to check for and clean viruses, spyware, and other malware—without uninstalling their existing antivirus solution.

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Setting up an Encrypted Debian System

Ever since I heard that the new Debian “etch” installer supports encrypted LVM, I wanted to try having an encrypted disk. Given recent news stories about loss of identity information from stolen laptops, it is certainly not paranoid to want to do this — and if you tell me otherwise you are probably one of those guys trying to steal my identity information!

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How-to enable WPA2 on Toshiba Satellite M30 (end of 2003) laptop (Windows / Mandriva Linux)

I assume you have a Toshiba Satellite M30 laptop running Windows XP Service Pack 2...

80+ AJAX-Solutions For Professional Coding

Web-developers can create amazing web-applications with AJAX. Stikkit, Netvibes, GMail and dozens of further web-projects offer a new level of interactivity we’ve used to give up the idea of. Modern web-applications can be designed with enhanced user interfaces and functionalities, which used to be the privelege of professional desktop-applications. AJAX makes it possible to create more interactive, more responsive and more flexible web-solutions. And it’s the first step towards rich internet applications of the future.

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML isn’t a new programming language, as it is often mistakingly called. Basically, AJAX is a set of XHTML, CSS, DOM, XMLHttpRequest and XML, put together and used together for the same purpose - to improve the user-server-interaction.

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HTML 5 differences from HTML 4

HTML 5 defines the fifth major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web, HTML. "HTML 5 differences from HTML 4" describes the differences between HTML 4 and HTML 5 and provides some of the rationale for the changes.

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LinRails — Ruby On Rails For Linux

LinRails is a binary package that includes Ruby-1.8.6, Rubygems-0.9.4, Rails 1.2.3, Mongrel 1.0.1, MySQL-5.0.41, ncurses-5.6, OpenSSL-0.9.8e, and zlib-1.2.3. Its goal is to make it easy to get a Ruby on Rails development environment running in no time.

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FreeBSD Lighttpd fastcgi php configuration and installation

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FreeBSD find out RAM size including total amount of free and used memory size

How do I find out RAM size / memory size in FreeBSD? How do I display amount of free and used memory in the system? ...

Monitoring PF firewalls for health and performance

The PF (packet filter) firewall package was introduced in OpenBSD 3.0, and has since been ported to the FreeBSD and NetBSD Operating Systems. PF contains a stateful packet inspection engine, the ability to replicate state information to a backup firewall, a flexible self optimizing rule engine, QOS support, and the ability to collect performance metrics. These metrics can be useful for gauging the performance of a firewall platform, and provide a way to trend firewall performance over time. This article will describe several utilities that can be used to monitor the health and performance of a PF firewall.

/proc/filesystems: Find out what filesystems supported by kernel

/proc/filesystems is the file used to detect filesystems supported by running kernel. You can quickly run grep or cat command to display the list of all supported file system. nodev indicates that the file system is not associated with a physical device such as /dev/sdb1. If you see ext3 or vfat, it means you will be able to mount ext3 and vfat based file systems.

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How to find .debs (even if you think they don't exist)

One of the biggest strengths of Debian (and derivatives like Ubuntu) is support for the .deb package. After all, it provides a one-click method of easily installing programs. Best of all, these programs are automatically updated via the official Debian repositories. Unfortunately, the official repositories aren’t always the best. Some programs aren’t always up to date (the latest version of Thunderbird is 2.0. However, the latest version in the repositories is 1.5). Worse, some packages aren’t in the repositories at all (Glest is a good example). True, you could build the program from source, but there are a number of reasons why that is undesirable (finding the dependencies, having to download the program again to uninstall it, not automatically adding itself to the menu, etc.). How do you find good Debian software?

FreeBSD Setting up Firewall using IPFW

IPFW is included in the basic FreeBSD install as a separate run time loadable module. The system will dynamically load the kernel module when the rc.conf statement firewall_enable=”YES” is used...

How the FreeBSD Project Works

While at Google a couple of weeks ago, I gave my "How the FreeBSD Project Works" talk. The video from that is now online:

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-4400856579609253323

This is the same talk I've given previously at EuroBSDCon, AsiaBSDCon, UKUUG, and LinuxForum in the last six motnhs; it's significantly enhanced from the version that I gave at BSDCan last year (the first time I gave it).

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge

martes, 3 de julio de 2007

Slackware 12.0 Released

Among the many program updates and distribution enhancements, you'll find two of the most advanced desktop environments available today: Xfce 4.4.1, a fast and lightweight but visually appealing and easy to use desktop environment, and KDE 3.5.7, the latest version of the award-winning K Desktop Environment. We have added to Slackware support for HAL (the Hardware Abstraction Layer) which allows the system administrator to add users to the cdrom and plugdev groups. Then they will be able to use items such as USB flash sticks, USB cameras that appear like USB storage, portable hard drives, CD and DVD media, MP3 players, and more, all without requiring sudo, the mount or umount command. Just plug and play. Properly set up, Slackware's desktop should be suitable for any level of Linux experience.

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lunes, 2 de julio de 2007

OpenMoko, el iPhone Open Source

OpenMoko es un esfuerzo para desarrollar la primera "plataforma móvil Open Source de comunicaciones". Entre sus características destacables están una pantalla táctil similar al del iPhone y un sistema operativo extensible basado en Linux. El lanzamiento de su modelo Neo 1973 estaba previsto para este pasado Marzo, pero el mismo fué retrasado hasta Octubre debido a “bugs críticos de hardware”.

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TrueCrypt Tutorial: Truly Portable Data Encryption

TrueCrypt is a free software that encrypts data “on-the-fly”. Right now the newest version released is version 4.3. You can create an encrypted hard drive, a separate partition or a directory with TrueCrypt. It doesn’t simply encrypt the content of files, but their names and the names of the directories they are in as well. Moreover there is no way to check the size of the encrypted directory/HDD/partition.

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The pkgsrc-2007Q2 Branch

The pkgsrc developers are very proud to announce the new pkgsrc-2007Q2 branch, which has support for more packages than previous branches.

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Repositorios Linux de Google

Ya se encuentran disponibles los repositorios oficiales de Google para Linux con los paquetes de todas sus aplicaciones publicadas para ese sistema operativo.

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Xvid 1.1.3 released

This release is Xvid 1.1.3 bugfix release. It fixes and replaces previous Xvid 1.1.2 release. This release fixes a potential security problem and update is recommended.

How to detect hardware problems in Solaris 10

There was many great new features included in Solaris 10, including SMF that I blogged about earlier on how to utilize it to detect problems. Another wonderful tool is the Solaris Fault Management. It is part of the Self Healing technologies available in Solaris 10. It monitors your system and if it detects errors it will flag them, log them and whatever you may like.

Fortunately Sun has made it really easy to use it as a monitoring system.

Sun to Open Cluster Code

High availability clustering technology has long been the domain of expensive, proprietary systems.

Sun Microsystems may well be changing that; the systems vendor will open source its Open HA (High Availability) Cluster code to Sun's OpenSolaris community in stages over the next 18 months.

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Conky?

Conky is a light-weight system monitor under active development.

How To Fully Encrypt Your Ubuntu Installation

I found this little "how-to" guide on doing a full hard drive encryption of Ubuntu. Fully encrypting your operating system can prevent people from getting access to your files using some form of live CD or other methods.

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tcpxtract - Extract Files from Network Traffic AKA Carving

tcpxtract is a tool for extracting files from network traffic based on file signatures. Extracting files based on file type headers and footers (sometimes called “carving”) is an age old data recovery technique. Tools like Foremost employ this technique to recover files from arbitrary data streams. tcpxtract uses this technique specifically for the application of intercepting files transmitted across a network.

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Spam Firewall?

A spam firewall is a hardware device that sits between your internet firewall and LAN. It is called a "firewall" because it provides data filtering of email packets, and blocks the packets that meet the criteria of "spam". Spam firewalls can also provide anti-virus protection, anti-spyware, anti-spoofing and anti-phishing services, depending on the model you choose. A spam firewall is not designed to protect your network against intruders such as hackers - you will need a regular internet firewall for that.

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Creating openssl certificates

I got so much response on my post about the certificate problems with apache2 and Firefox that I decided to post a howto about creating valid certificates with openssl.

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Recognizing Your Own Handwriting As A Password

A new online authentication system called Dynahand could make logging in to websites a little easier. With Dynahand, users simply identify their own handwriting, instead of entering a cryptic password or buying a biometric device to scan their fingerprints.

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