Linux and Unix devices on Amazon’s bestseller lists
Linux and Unix devices made Amazon’s bestseller lists for 2007 in several categories.
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16 posts
Projects, Linux, networks, systems, finds and internet standards from 2007.
RAID across different network shares
Hackaday shows a Linux experiment that combines NFS and SMB shares into a virtual RAID 5 array. The example needs only one Linux computer. The setup combines NFS and SMB.
Read the full postThe truth and what really happened
Ron and Frank Rieger examine how events become a socially accepted majority narrative through perspectives, selection and repetition. The announcement refers to Bruce Sterling’s term “major consensus narrative”. Consensus measures social acceptance and not automatically historical accuracy.
Read the full postScalable network servers with libowfat and opentracker
Under real load, opentracker confirmed the scalability of the event-based network abstractions in libowfat.
Read the full postShared hosting SSH with public key authentication only
Manuel Schmitt describes switching off password-based SSH logins on shared hosting servers in favour of mandatory public keys. SSH was included free of charge in the web hosting packages. Since 23 October 2007, password logins on the shared hosting servers had been disabled.
Read the full postRFC 4960: SCTP: Message-oriented transport over multiple paths
RFC 4960 defines SCTP with message framing, multihoming and several independent streams per connection. RFC 4960 was superseded by RFC 9260. Transport protocols can structure reliability differently from TCP.
Read the full postDoS hole in Cisco IOS endangers internet providers’ routers [Update]
In 2007 a DoS hole in Cisco’s IOS allowed routers to be forced to restart via the command “show ip bgp regexp” with certain regular expressions. Many providers offered such commands publicly via telnet route servers or looking glass websites; repeated restarts could cause other networks to ignore the provider’s routes. As a workaround, providers filtered the expressions or blocked the command, and Cisco recommended the “Deterministic Regular Expression Engine”.
Read the full postGentoo takes servers offline because of security holes
In August 2007 Gentoo took several servers offline after a command injection hole had been discovered on packages.gentoo.org. The affected systems were examined forensically; whether any manipulation had taken place was unclear. According to Gentoo, packages and sources could not have been changed at any time, as the server only displayed information from the Portage tree.
Read the full postB.A.T.M.A.N.: Routing for mobile ad hoc networks
The Freifunk team explains B.A.T.M.A.N. as a distributed routing algorithm for robust, adaptive and loop-free paths in mobile mesh networks. Limited local knowledge can be more robust than global state models in dynamic networks, but mesh routing has to balance control traffic and reaction speed carefully.
Read the full postCritical hole in Norton AntiVirus and Internet Security
In 2007 Symantec reported critical holes in Norton AntiVirus 2006, Norton Internet Security and SystemWorks through which a prepared website could take over a Windows PC. The cause was two ActiveX controls in NAVCOMUI.DLL that processed certain objects incorrectly. The updates were already being distributed via LiveUpdate, and the enterprise products were not affected.
Read the full postDDoS against a public DNS blacklist
Manuel Schmitt reports on a DDoS attack on ix.dnsbl.manitu.net and then considers a list of permitted query networks. ix.dnsbl.manitu.net was hit by a DDoS attack in June 2007. Bert Ungerer and Manuel discussed operating on a whitelist basis.
Read the full postAdding USB to a cheap Linux router
Hackaday shows how Sprite_TM makes the unused USB host controller of a Sweex router accessible with just a few hardware components. The project uses a Sweex router. The USB controller is already part of the processor.
Read the full postLinux virtualisation with KVM
KVM uses processor virtualisation and the Linux kernel to run virtual machines efficiently.
Read the full postLinux kernel 2.6.19.2 fixes storage bug
In January 2007 Linux kernel 2.6.19.2 fixed a critical bug that could, under certain circumstances, cause data not to be written to disk correctly. Ext3 was particularly affected, but other file systems were too; tracking down the bug took around four weeks. The version also closed security holes, for example in the Bluetooth stack, with around 50 patches in total.
Read the full postSecurity holes in the X.org X server
In January 2007 the X.org X server contained several integer overflow holes in the DBE module and the Render extension, affecting all versions since X.org 6.8.2. Faulty parameters could overwrite memory even outside the affected functions. This could only be exploited by an already authenticated client, and patches were available.
Read the full postNetwork backup Bacula 2.0 with encryption
In January 2007 the free network backup software Bacula appeared in version 2.0 and could now store data encrypted on volumes. Also new were the migration of jobs between volumes, faster restores from hard disk, better support for removable media and the BWeb web interface. Scripts could be started on server and client before and after jobs.
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