TWDT 1 (gzipped text file) TWDT 2 (HTML file) are files containing the entire issue: one in text format, one in HTML. They are provided strictly as a way to save the contents as one file for later printing in the format of your choice; there is no guarantee of working links in the HTML version.

Linux Gazette, http://www.linuxgazette.com/ This page maintained by the Editor of Linux Gazette, gazette@ssc.com Copyright © 1996-2000 Specialized Systems Consultants, Inc.

Answers to these questions should be sent directly to the e-mail address of the inquirer with or without a copy to gazette@ssc.com. Answers that are copied to LG will be printed in the next issue -- in the Tips column if simple, The Answer Gang if more complex and detailed.

Before asking a question, please check the Linux Gazette FAQ to see if it has been answered there. The AnswerGuy "past answers index" may also be helpful (if a bit dusty).

Rock Linux

I've been reading a bit about this Rock Linux distro. Has anybody used it? It's worth some coverage in LG just because it's so different.

Free Linux ISPs Revisited

Some time ago I posted a question asking about free Linux ISPs. Lots and lots of folks were kind enough to write back telling me about FreeWWWeb, a free OS-independent ISP here in the continental USA (THANKS!).

Well, FreeWWWeb just went belly up and is trying to transition its customers to Juno.

That leaves Linux users up a creek since Juno (like all other free ISP software that I'm aware of) is Windows only.

"Anyone know of any free LINUX-FRIENDLY ISP's in the continental USA?" A wide variety of access numbers would be ideal since I do travel with my Linux laptop but beggers can't be choosers, as they say. Thanks, all.

can't connect to ISP

i have Debian 2.0 and can't connect to ISP though i can connect in Win95. Below is output of plog:

TV-out Support

I have Asus AGP TNT34000 display card with TV out/in support. It works absolutely fine in Win9x. It also works fine in X-windows. But I am unable to get TV-out support in Linux.

Finally I have change the display card to SiS 6326 (with has direct output feature to tv). I am able to get the command line output to TV. But when I try to run X-Windows, I am unable to see any thing. There can be some errors in XF86Config file regarding PAL/NTSC resolution and frequency settings. Can anyone point me to some web-sites (or documentations) for TV-out support or software.

Can you suggest some other cards, which can give tv-out support. I am using 21" Color AIWA TV.

A parallel connection.

Hi there, My name Sergey, I use Slackware 7.0. I have read a document about serial connection between Win95 and Linux, but never have seen about paralel. Help me, tell me how can I use my parallel NULL modem. Is lp0 the LPT1 port?

'to be cleaned' State of DAT Drives

Request status of DAT TAPE's 'tape to be cleaned' using a.e. mt (magnet tape) command.

Is it somehow possible to detect the state 'Cleaning required' remotely. The only sign I know is the blinking LED in front of of DAT-Tape. But we have distributed Server and I 'm not happy with the idea to ask the users 'is there some kind of LED blinking in a strange way' while they are in front of allover blinking LEDs and beeping computer speakers. I am shure THEIR answer will never be the answer according MY question.

CB Radio Internet Connection

My name is Wayne. I work at an ISP in South Africa. The network administrator here told me that it was possible to use a short distance CB two way radio to be able to transfer data between two machines. Is it at all possible u ppl could be so kind, as to mail a way of connecting one of these things to my machine.

SWAT

Hi Answerguy-
Can you tell me what the PASSWORD page on the SWAT does? I have some familiarity with Samba, and I have been to the samba.org site but I still nedd help with this.
-Doug

Accessing a web server behind a Linux firewall

I have set up a linux firewall, but one of the things I would like to do with it (which I have so far been unable to accomplish) is access use port forwarding to access a web server situated behind the firewall from a client on the public internet.

I am using ipchains as my firewall mechanism, and have used redir and ipmasqadm with no luck.

I am convinced that the problem lies somewhere in my ipchains scripting, but I am not sure what to look for. I have looked through various howto's and webpages and am stuck.

What I was wondering is if you had a basic ipchains script that works in conjunction with ipmasqadm to forward port 80 through to a web server behind a firewall.

Linux Distros Install Programs

I would like to create a Linux distribution from scratch and integrate with it an installer program using my native language. I was wondering if you could assist me in finding installer programs for existing Linux distros ( GUI, cli or curses-based, and whatever language -- shell script, Python, GTK, etc). BTW, are the installer programs of Mandrake, or Red Hat like Anaconda or their curses/text-based programs/scripts GPL'ed too?

serial consoles, install, boot, etc

One thing that is really great about Sun hardware is that you can get rid of the monitor, mouse, and keyboard all together and do everything from install the operating system to change EEPROM settings via a serial console. While Intel hardware was never designed this way, I cannot find much information about setting up Linux on Intel to approximate this. Is it possible to install and boot Linux over a serial console? Log-in in this way is easy, but to be able to completely administer a system the install and boot functions are critical, especially the Lilo prompt would be nice.

Re-installing Windows 98 on a Linux (Mandrake 7.0) OS.

I have Mandrake 7.0 installed on my IBM compatible PC. I want to take tech. classes with Manpower over the Internet. They told me that they don't support Linux OS, only Microsoft Windows 95, 98, and NT. Do I install Linux Prep Tool and follow the steps to create a dual boot system over Mandrake 7.0? I'd appreciated any help you can give me!

Connection to XServer and sendmail

However command fails (when run by crond, otherwise it runs from xterm just fine) with following message:

It should be noted that 192.9.101.16 is localhost. It fails no matter if I'm root or not. What sort of authorization do I need to connect to XServer from cron?

2)My sendmail daemon takes ages to startup. When I checked the log it says few times: May 29 08:52:03 piii sendmail [24126]: My unqualified host name (piii) unknown; sleeping for retry.

It should be noted that piii is the localhost defined in hosts file. Furthermore when I tried to check the mail as a user it says it cannot find the spool file. I can create it manually but is it going to work? What sort of configuration I need to do for sendmail when I need send and receive mail only locally (mail exchange among local users only)?

procmail arguement list

So what's the question??? well it seems if I us and alieas set up for me and the "+keyword" syntax that procmail doesn't pass the "+keyword" in as the $1 parameter. E.G. $1 is found when I use myid+keyword but not with alieasId+keyword.

kppp dialer.

The compuserve login procedure requires that the port bits be set initially to 7 bit and later to 8 bit.

The kppp dialer help section on login scripts indicates there is a MODE command that make it possible to set the port bits to 7 or 8 bits. But, the problem it is not in the program in the section where you type in the login script. They totally omitted this command. Also, how do you send a ^M(I think this a control M) in the kppp login script? Also, how do handle the parity bits? I am connecting to compuserve but I am getting an error message on the setting of the 8bits.

I AM ATTACHING TO THIS EMAIL THE COMPUSERVE LOGIN SCRIPT IS USE IN WINDOWS 98. THE FILE NAME IS CIS.TXT. THIS IS A TEXT FILE.

I did check with compuserve and Red Hat Software and neither one could help me. I am using Red Hat 6.2. I am using the kppp dialer that came with the Red Hat 6.2.

If you could help me with this, I would appreciate it very much. I look forward to your comments in your Answerguy column.

MAC Address Direct Connection

Greetings. I am going crazy trying to figure out how to do what seems like a simple task. In VMS I was able to change into the NCP (Network Control Program) shell and connect to another device over layer 2 on a flat network. I believe the syntax was:

ewa-0 being the nic of the localhost, and the final number being the destination MAC address. I could establish what was basically a telnet session, but the device did not have to be configured with a correct IP address for my subnet. This is a much quicker way to configure a device than hooking up a console to it. When I was remote, I was able to telnet to VMS (when I had a VMS box) and NCP to a device on that local net.

Is there any way to accomplish this same end in Linux? I don't want my boss tauting VMS over against Linux you know!

Swapping ega for vga+

I've got an old Compaq Prosignia with onboard graphics "card". The problem is that the parallel port is located at 0x3bc, irq 7. For the console monitor, I use an HP VGA mono monitor. The problem with this is that Linux decides that it's going to use ega rather than vga+. ega then tramples over my parallel port resources so that I can't use it.

If I boot the box without a monitor, or with a colour SVGA monitor, vga+ is then used, which uses different resources, hence allowing the parallel port to work.

I've already tried to compile certain things in and out of the Kernel before I realised that simply taking unplugging the monitor lead fixed it. My question is: is there any way that I can either alter the resources (io and IRQ) that the ega driver uses, or force it to use vga+ ? The monitor I use for it is VGA anyway - and it's console only - not used for X.

Using Hindi in Emacs

I have a computer at home that has Linux (RH) 6.0 on it.. In my emacs I can set the coding to Devnagri. But I wonder how can I get anything to type on the screen. I am sure that I need to use a different inout system. But what? Additionally, what do I have to do if I want to install support for more languages.

swapoff swapon

I had heard that there is some advantage in clearing server swap space each night, by running swapoff followed by swapon as a cron job.

pop over ssh

To test it, I've been trying to retrieve e-mail which steadily accumulates on my new server, running qmail and it's pop daemon. I've also been trying to retrieve an e-mail sent to your antares.starshine.org, since I have great confidence that your pop server works.

I'm following the directions in the pop over ssh mini-HOWTO. It still doesn't work.

First, it isn't retrieving the mail. Second, it asks me for the passwords every time. I thought the idea was to automate this so I wouldn't have to type in the passwords every time.

I've run ssh-keygen on both machines and copied the keys back to the authorized_keys file on my laptop to which I'm trying to retrieve the e-mail. When I do ssh-agent getmail, it asks for the passphrase. Okay, that much I expected.

Then, as I said above, it asks for the password for each server I'm connecting to. That would be fine, if it never asked again. But, five minutes later, it's forgotten the passwords and I have to type them in again. And so it goes, on and on.

FTP restart Q

One of my clients has "seen the light" and is installing a rather heavy-duty Linux box (PIII 600 Mhz, 256 Meg RAM, and five 9 Gig hard drives configured as RAID 5) as their main server. Two of their requirements are secure ftp (I'm leaning towards sftp even if it is commercial) and, this is the kicker, the ability to restart a failed (unattended) ftp transfer.

After hitting Freshemat and Google/linux, I've found that the RFC for ftp loosely defines a restart mechanism using a marker, but I've yet to find an ftp client/server that actually implements it. The FAQ for ssh/sftp does not mention this capability.

xdm

Perhaps I cna be so bold as to ask a question. I have Debian 2.1, and xdm 3.3.?.

I reinstalled fvwm95 the other night using dselect, and now xdm will not launch any windows manager. The xserver is up and running, I get the login screen. When I type my name and password, it tries to launch a windows manager, and then, not being able to, reverts to the login screen again.

I am able to launch a windows environment by killing xdm under su, and then as user, executing xinit, and launching fvwm95 through a bash shell from the grey root screen. This is a bit of a kludge, really.

I think that it has to do with file permissions, as fvwm works fine (apart from the keyboard mappings).

There is no report of errors in .xsession-errors, or of problems in /var/log/xdm.log, other than a report of me killing it.

HELP: Crontab not running nested executable

First of all, I am sorry if it shouldn't come to you like this. Could you let me know who to send this email to, if there is a dedicated address?

I have two executable files that work when called manually. File2 is called from within File1 so that when I run File1, File2 gets called as well.

When I set a CRONTAB job to run File1 (with the nested call to File2) , File1 runs, but File2 doesn't.

The detailed version is that File1 dials out to an FTP server and downloads File2 which is then supposed to run. I stress that when I manually run File1, File2 is downloaded and runs correctly. When within a crontab job, File1 runs, but doesn't appear to activate File2.

Is there something I am missing. My only thoughts lie in the fact that perhaps I need to chmod the file in a different way, for it to be called from within a crontab job successfully.

Gnome panel left me! I want it back.

I'm a complete Linux newbie. Just installed LinuxPPC2000 on my imac. Partitioned fine, installed fine. Got the penguin, then logged into Gnome. Felt great. Went to create NewUser. Made big mistake. I created new Gnome Icon in the panel. I don't want two. So I remove the panel. But, and I'm in root of course, it removes the whole panel, not just the icon. I go to new shell and type in shutdown commands. Re-login, but Gnome has lost it's panel. How do I get it back?

I hope this mail doesn't clog up your mailbox unnecessarily, but I thought you could help.

Netware login in without IPX

The company I'm working for is using Netware 4.1. And it is the company policy not to use IPX protocol. So, all Windows clients login into the server using IP protocol.

Is there any netware client for linux that uses IP to talk to the server? So far if I have not mistaken, all (ncpfs,nwclient and mars) uses IPX to talk to the server.

If there's no available software that I can use. Is there a work around it? Can I modify some settings on those client which makes them uses IP instead of IPX?

Please tell me as soon as possible. I need the answer urgently. Thank you in advance.

ISDN and PPP

I can't seem to find any detailed information on this and wondered if you might have some ideas. Normally I deal with large ethernet/atm/etc type networks. This is my first small time network that uses

First some information. I have a server that uses PPP with an ISDN modem. I am using diald to connect. I use this server to provide network service for an internal network. Right now, everything works, but I need to have the ISDN modem drop its connection when not needed and then re-connect when someone tries to use the interent.

Any idea on how to this or where I can find any information? Thank you for your time.

Well known Port numbers

Can you provide me with a good list of well known port numbers for TCP and UDP? I am trying to decipher another netguy's packet filters and am stumped by a few. Is there an all-inclusive list somewhere???

i740 - OpenGL?? Possible ?

Gidday after readin your colum and coming across your previous post in regards to the i740 i was wondering to what extent does linux have 3d support. I have heard rumors in regards to later kernels supporting other 3d features.

To be more to the point to what extent am i likely to get linux running 3d progams on my i740? and if it is possible how whould I be likly to do this ... as you can tell Im very new to linux and have so far been astounded by it... a truly wonderfull os for the peoples .. i hope that some day gnome etc will come with afeature set for the truly dumb user (with out loosing the advanced userset!) so we can kick microsoft off its high chair.

Syslog for Linux

I am running Red Hat Linux 6.2 & am trying to get a syslog server running. I have limited Linux knowledge & just want to get it working to log messages from cisco devices. Do you know of the commands to get it working.

Linux DEVFS

Hello! Excuse the beginner question, but I was wondering how in the heck to install and run DEVFS in my RedHat 6.2 linux OS?

I never saw the option under menuconfig, and whenever I try to do something like "mount -t devfs none /devfs" it says that the kernel doesn't support it.

web upload w/Perl

Here is my question, I could not get a satisfactory answer from any of the newsgroups: comp.lang.perl.misc, comp.os.linux, etc.

I want the user to be able to upload a file via the browser's file form object. The file would go to /cgi-bin/docs directory, for about a second where it will be read into mySQL and then deleted from that directory.

Anyway, this cgi runs on Linux with Apache 1.3.9. I even downloaded the latest, 1.3.12 and compiled it with mod_put.c into it. THe docs directory has 777 permissions temporarily. The script is written in Perl. After executing the CGI script I have a 0K file created in the docs dir but the file is empty.What is going on? How could I get this working?

Chat server

Mon, 3 Jul 2000 15:55:47 -0400 (EDT)
From: Karl Pena <karl@tux.org>
Subject: Linux Bike Project

Today (July 3, 2000) I found your kind posting of a requested comment I sent a long time ago (August 1999). You could not imagine my heartfelt glee (goosebumps) when I saw it (at the URL below).

Thank you so much for putting that up, or even responding to it. Reactions to the Linux Bike Project have been extremely positive across the board, and a few wonderful open-source community players have taken interest in participating. I am still brainstorming and drafting out ideas and details for the epic bike ride, and would love to speak with you if possible (even just to say 'thank you' directly).

Sun, 2 Jul 2000 17:46:21 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Jan-Hendrik Terstegge <webmaster@linuxgazette.de>
Subject: German LG translation needs web hosting

Do you know a website hoster which is free and without advertisement? We have a problem with the German translation of the Gazette in that we don't have any space on a web server so we have to use free web space offers. Do you know if one of your sponsors can offer us an account where we can upload up to 10 or later 20 MB?

Sun, 2 Jul 2000 17:46:21 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Werner Gerstmann <101.234011@germanynet.de>
Subject: translations of LG

Hallo there,
LG#55, general Mail, translations of LG.
I think, it is a nonsense to translate English written computer texts: it is a matter of general education to read English just as to be able to read and write in your own language or to know some basic mathematics. Regards Werner Gerstmann

The Editor wrote:

While it may be true that university-educated people in a technical field should be able to read computer articles in English, I don't think that's a reasonable expectation for everybody in the world. One of the advantages of Linux over other OSes is that it's more international, so people are on more of an equal footing than with some other OSes whose corporate headquarters is in an English-speaking country. Another advantage is that it's accessible to people who can't afford to spend a month's salary on one copy of Windows 2000. These two facts alone mean Linux will be (and is being) used in non-English speaking countries in ways that, um, No Other Operating System Has Been Used Before... <Star Trek music in background> This means that people in those countries will eventually contribute (and are contributing) Linux software that wouldn't otherwise exist.

Some of these contributions will be by people whose day job is not in the computer industry. Thus, they may have less of a reason to study English. Or, maybe they can read the English Gazette but prefer not to. Or maybe they're willing to read the English version, but would also like to share the articles with family and friends who aren't computer nerds and maybe don't speak English either. What's wrong with that? If it's making their use of Linux "just a little bit more fun", then Linux Gazette is reaching its goal, no matter what language it's in.

Werner responded:

Thank you for your mail on the translation issue, even though I wont change my opinion !

What we need, or better, what I consider desirable, is a special online dictionary on certain new terms, not too simple, in English, of course, like the Jargon File.

Take e.g. the articles in the Linux Journal: what regards language, they are of very different level, beginning with What is Linux up to the sophi sticated papers of Doc Searls and Stan Kelly-Bootle. Especially Mr. Kelly-Bootle seems to invent new word combinations and, of course, you have to think about such compositions as beyond-the-soggy-pale or cosource-sweet-value-added, even if your mothers tongue is English, I suppose. If I looked into my large Pons dictionary, I didnt find words like kludgy or to shrink-wrap. These words I found in the excellent online dictionary of Munich University at www.leo.org.

Sat, 15 Jul 2000 08:38:59 +0400
From: "Felipe E. Barousse Boue" <firaisankina@dts.mg>
Subject: Spanish translation

Well, I have not counted all emails. But we have had many many emails with congratulations about the site. There are around 70 registered translators and about 25 of those have actually done translations; the rest either are in the process of translating something or said they will do so.

With every new issue and announcement, traffic goes up very high and slowly starts fading out during the course of the month, unless some new announcement -kind of kick out everyone's curiosity- is made.

La Gaceta de Linux is being linked from several linux related sites (Spanish speaking most of them) and we are in a couple of search engines now.

In short, I guess that for two months online this is doing well. What is your opinion about it ?

Actually a great effort from volunteers within the company has been put out to build, install and manage the site.

meanwhile, Luis Diaz G. <hlod_wig137@hotmail.com> wrote:

Hola!!! Seria una buena idea que la revista estubiese traducida a otra lengua, por ejemplo al Espa�ol, por poner un ejemplo. Saludos desde Espa�a.

Felipe responded:

Recib� copia de tu mensaje del editor de Linux Gazette. Te invitamos a que visites la traducci�n de la revista Linux Gazette en http://gaceta.piensa.com/ Aqui tenemos traducci�n de los �ltimos n�mero de la revista y con ser�as intenciones de seguir traduciendo los n�mero anteriores.

Trabajamos con voluntarios de todo el mundo para realizar las traducciones al Espa�ol.

Sun, 9 Jul 2000 04:19:02 -0400
From: Dean Maluski <dean@mail.n0ety.com>
Subject: Windows Partitions

I work at a TV station as System Administrator. This week a hard drive failed in a computer, a very important computer. It controls 7 satellite dishes, the azimuth and elevation can be adjusted from this machine. Also the 7 receiver frequencies can be adjusted from this windows machine. Without it we get no video feeds and have to order shows on tape, which costs the station a great deal of money.

Now that I've given you the basics let me tell you how Linux saved the day. When this hard drive failed windows could no longer determine what type of partitions the drive had. I tried setting it up as a slave drive so I could salvage our satellite software, windows couldn't see it so I booted with Slackware rescue disks, ran fdisk and set the partitions to be Windows FAT 16. Rebooted win98 in dos prompt mode and managed to copy ini files off it. With those ini files I was able to reconstruct another system. After that I made several backups of the ini files. Linux gained a great deal of respect within Tribune Broadcasting this week!!!

Questions on Linux

I saw some of your answers in the Linux Gazette. Is this still active, if yes how do I subscribe.

After that, with volunteer effort, it is mirrored to locations throughout the world, translated, and added into most major distributions as part of the Linux Documentation Project. Back issues may be in your /usr/doc/ directory right now... The LDP's home is http://www.linuxdoc.org.

You could probably use a website page-checking service to advise you when the Front Page changes to list new issues.

Is there a simple way to change the font type & size that EMACS uses. For example in some type of resource file?

Career or Job Board Software

Hi, I am looking for an open source job center management program. Is the one you use in your jobs section open source? Can you recommend one? We are starting a small site in Phoenix and would like to integrate something useful for careers.

The Career Center on the Linux Journal site is not open source at present. Linux Gazette's "Help Wanted" section is not about job offers, but about people seeking help with different aspects of Linux. Since you're seeking help about an aspect of Linux, we've put your letter here. (Actually, in the "General Mail" section, but at least it's the same page.

We build this page, as well as 2-Cent Tips and The Answer Gang, with the aid of some hand-crafter Perl and Python scripts. We sort the letters into standard Unix mailboxes with particular filenames, and the scripts convert them to HTML. However, we also post-process each column by hand to do things the scripts can't.

Freshmeat.net is a canonical site for looking for open-source software; the CPAN project (a perl script archive at cpan.org) may also be useful.

For examples of other functioning job centers--or to find a developer to write one for you--see www.cosource.com and www.sourcexchange.com . There are also a few other companies offering a similar service.

Perhaps you can adapt one of Linux's general "trouble ticket"-tracking applications like gnats and jitterbug for your purposes.

Steve wrote back:

Thanks for your response! We decided to just have one of our open source developers write something, which turned out quite well. We actually created our entire site and run it using only modified open source.

Wed, 5 Jul 2000 20:40:47 +0100
From: Ed Brown <edbrown@go-britain.com>
Subject: Ventura under Linux

I noticed that you mentioned that you use Ventura for some of your work. Is this a beta of the Linux version due in a few months?

Sun, 9 Jul 2000 17:59:39 +0900
From: Lance Lindley <hagakure@yahoo.com>
Subject: Hi folks

PROBLEM: Not much point in having terrific information if nobody knows it is there!

SOLUTION: Add a few two-or-three word synopses of what is in each issue to your Table of Contents. Big time investment initially, but very useful in the long run and easy to maintain once you've got it in place.

Tue, 11 Jul 2000 14:05:37 +0200 (CEST)
From: Christoph Lange <langec@gmx.de>
Subject: Separate all-in-one version?

could you please offer the all-in-one version of the Linux Gazette (HTML as well as text) as a separate download? I don't understand why I have to download these two files with every issue. Separating them from the standard package would decrease it by ~ 1/3 of its size without any loss of information.

Tue, 25 Jul 2000 13:50:50 -0600
From: Doug <doug@springer.net>
Subject: Please remove bogus Posting!

Fri, 2 Jun 2000 11:48:21 -0600
From: "Tom Russell" <doug@springer.net>
Subject: How to run Windows programs on Linux

I do not know who Tom Russell is or why my email address is listed under his name, but I am tired of people sending me emails about WINE!!!! I know all about WINE, and I don't want or need a hundred people telling me to check it out!

Your roundup of cad programs for Linux misses a program called LinuxCAD mentioned as far back as issue 30 and in some more recent issues as well so it seems to be popular.

I'm sure some of the other programs mentioned in the recent issue can also be found mentioned in older issues.

Sat, 15 Jul 2000 08:38:59 +0400
From: Mr. Mamodaly <firaisankina@dts.mg>
Subject: subscribe

Wed, 5 Jul 2000 10:28:16 -0700
From: Mike Orr <mso@mso.oz.net>
Subject: Trivia for the day

This page written and maintained by the Editors of the Linux Gazette. Copyright © 2000, gazette@ssc.com
Published in Issue 56 of Linux Gazette, August 2000

Contents:

Greetings from Heather Stern

Hi everybody! Wow, it was a lot more work than I expected... but then, I also handled the Mailbag and Tips this month. It's all part of our new team effort to make Linux a little more fun!

We got a fair handful of questions about statistics, none of which went answered. I'm the statistician among us, and I've been hacking web pages and perl scripts all month. I didn't even manage time to whip up a cool new logo for The Answer Gang yet.

But I'll say this, and you can all percolate on what you think of it: stattistics developed by someone else aren't terribly useful to you - the situation they studied will be different, every difference is a statistical skew, and it doesn't take much variance to make it not only notuseful, but actually a waste of time and effort.

As contrasted with benchmarking done in-house, in your own controlled environment... where you know that the situation being tested is something you really can apply and show to your boss. But you have to have a "control" - at least one case that is not part of the experiment, but allowed to run "naturally", whatever that means. The larger the sample the more likely that you do not have a big bad skew like an observer's opinion sway their observation, or hardware problems corrupting a software test, or something like that.

By the way, the Benchmarking HOWTO over at the LDP homepage may be dusty, but it's actually still very readable, I recommend that people who care about serious comparison of systems, distributions, and OS' check it out, and apply its methodology when making their comparisons.

The smaller the sample the sillier it is. If we used the methodology of "letters that came to LG this month" why, MS Windows is still popular, but Linux outsells it by at least 4 to 1 (dual boots and crossover issues counted in favor of WIndows), maybe more ... and there were almost as many as people who submitted questions that did not involve Linux. (pant stains? car CD players? Where do these people come from?) Oh yeah, and there's my final note. Look out for subjectifying words like "almost" "nearly" "overwhelming" and other such vague quantifiers. If they aren't numbers, they're not useful. If they are numbers, they're only as useful as the correlation between how they were gotten, and your particular real life use for them.

9 out of 10 of my donuts are gone, with a 60% chance of the rest disappearing within the next 15 minutes. See you next month!

Danish Translated: Overclocking.

Well, we got about a dozen people who came forward with our solution. Not that we here at the Gazette have any better answer for tthe original querent. So, if you know some useful sites that Linux folk might enjoy for overclocking and other hardware hackery, submit them to linux-questions-only@ssc.com they will be published next month to finish this thread.

And a big hand for Aron, who sent in a very early reply that also helped me learn something, plus an offer of future help!

Dav[e?], I think that you have a good page with a lot of good, useful advice. But that's not what I want, I have a problem with which you may be able to help.I have a 450 MHz P3 CPU that I would like to overclock. I have an ASUS P2B/F14440 BX AGP ATX motherboard. I don't know if I need extra cooling for 500 MHz (my motherboard cannot go any higher). Another thing is that I don't know what to do, so I hope that you will help me. I hope that you will help me with my questions.

Regarding #36: Plug and Pray Problems.

Regarding #55: "Simple Shell and Cron Question"

But, when the cron job runs it has now default environment variables like PATH. So shouldn�t one include the full path to the top binary in order to run it properly?

Checksum Script

I have written a script that automatically connects my machine to an FTP server and downloads a set of files that I need nightly. The client downloads a file which is my indicator to any changes. In effect, if this downloaded txt file has changed, then I need to download the other files.

That part is ok. I can automatically download the check file, so I have two files (current and new dir) called the same but in different directories.

My problem seems to be even though the CKSUM results are differently when done manually, in the script they ALWAYS are equal. Is SET the wrong term to use to set a variable. Is there another way to do this altogether.

Any assistance appreciated. Email preferred, but will keep checking this here to check for any legendary solutions...

Thanks so much for the reply, I have written this using VI on Redhat6.1 - I don't know if that is the answer you need - I'm only a 2 week novice with Linux and programming of this level for that matter ... Does this answer your question?
The actual command line I want to use is

I also want to verify that the downloads are successful and not corrupted. I figured CKSUM is the best for that as well - that problem is to get tackled yet ....

Hi, I am using the default program bash (have also tried sh as other information I downloaded had this in it - are they significantly different?

when the file is compared to itself, it works. When compared to a file of the SAME NAME in another folder, if doesn't work. It's almost as if the folder is taken into account, but when I run cksum filename on the two files they give me the same CRC, no. bits and file name as they should. I would expect then that this command should work.

I am interested only in the CRC value - perhaps we could use the -eq if we can only extract the CRC value as a result instead of the other info CKSUM give us....?

FYI: I am using the command "if cmp -e file1 file2" and not using the cksum at all anymore.

Accessing an NT Fileserver

I cannot find a reference which would show me how to access data sitting on an nt server (version 4.0) in multiple directories. I want to use linux as the o/s, apache as a web-server, but the content all resides on nts as pdfs in separate subdirectories. each user has their own nt subdirectory. Any assistance would be appreciated.

Many thanks for the assistance and setting me straight on which part of the client/server I should access.

FIPS

how are you, I am new to Linux and am trying to install it as dual boot on my new 10gb seagate diskdrive i have already got windoze installed. My bios doesn't support a 10gb drive so i downloaded seagates boot manager that allows me to use the hdd full potential. When i tried to run fips it said that the last bit of it has files on it (it doesn't). And doesn't want to run anymore than that.

Removing Linux Partitions

i recently read your cooments about LI on a web newsgroup. My problem is this. I was running lunix on my machine but didnt like it so i want to go back to windows. I deleted the several partitions that linux reated and formatted the drive. Now all i get if i start my machine is "LI".(not at this point i have installed ms dos on the machine) The only way i can get to a C:/ prompt is to use a boot disk. Can you shed any light on this?

Looking for a 'dump'

I guess that in all likelihood this is the wrong forum for this question, but there are so many mailing lists for linux that I wasn't sure which one to post to. I am reasonalbly new to linux after being an admin for sun, dec etc for a few years.

I was wondering if there is a tool that will dump filesystems (similar to ufsdump or some other dump tool from other unix flavours) on RH linux 6.X. The filesystems are ext2 type filesystems and are currently backed up using cpio (SHUDDER).

MMDF Anti-Relaying?

mars.ncn.net is a Linux server which is having problems emailing us. We are having trouble with mars.ncn.net emailing us at mtc1.mtcnet.net. = They seem to think it is our MMDF mail server.

We have checked all of their reverse DNS info and it is correct. They are gettting the error Connections reset by mtc1.mtcnet.net Message could not be delivered for 5 days Message will be deleted from queue

This has been going on for 2 months. Here is the exact message as it comes to our MMDF server in our log file. /usr/mmdf/log/chan.log As you will see we get a fetch of mars.ncn.net failed

Making CDs

Please point me to a place I can read on how to create an .ios file. I want to make a CD from this file.

You are right I was asking about iso. Thanks for your help. I am on my way now.

Nevermind! Not sure why, but the pop file didn't exist in /etc/pam.d - so although everything looked to be in order in terms of connecting to port 110 attempting to get into a transaction state, POP had no idea about how to authenticate. I just rebuilt imap* from my RH CDRoms and everything's fine...

Addendum to Tech FAQ 4 ("Where do I find help")

If you prefer reading HTML to plain text, the KDE help system (program kdehelp) provides a nice interface to man pages (But of course it's supposed to be used under the kdm display manager, not on a "dumb" console.) Either type "man:<command>" (without the quotes and <>

into the URL line, or go through the main menu. It also provides an interface to the other help system (info pages) but less nicely formatted (you can type "info:<command> invocation" into the URL line but in this case I think it's easier to navigate the menu system).

linux and windows95

can u run linux and windows95 on the same computer and selecting whic operating system u want to run on the bootup?

Why, yes, yes you can. It's no easy process though, and you'll have to read a bit, so chek out

Installing Linux can mean re-partitioning, unfortunately. So be careful! There are ways to avoid re-partitioning, however. Check out:

Also, if you just wanna test out Linux, may I suggest Mandrake 7.0, which comes with a program called Linux for Windows, which will install Linux onto a FAT formatted partition.

Linux comes with a program called LILO (LInux LOader), which installs itself to the Master boot record, and can easily be configured to boot multiple OS's, such as Windows.

Computer Tax Credits

Is there a program or programs that accept computer trade-in for tax credit?

I did a Google (http://www.google.com) search on the phrase "computer donation tax" and got 35,000 hits. The first several appeared relevant.

However, this has nothing to do with Linux or with the free software movement. It's also not a technical question. Thus you've posted it to the wrong venue.

recherche driver son

bonjour, je recherche un driver son yamaha labway olp3-sax, pouvez vous me dire comment faire sur internet pour le trouver ?

I thought I would need to post a translation request in Help Wanted again, but our assistant editor Don Marti stepped up to the plate:

A Question!

I want to connect a Laptop and a PC both running RedHat 6.2, through an ethernet connection. I do not need any technical details, I am aware of those. I have onlyone question, which is can I use thin 10Base2 network without a hub to achieve this?

Most laptop ethernet cards that I've seen use 10Base-T, or twisted-pair, Ethernet. If you have this kind of Ethernet on both systems -- it has an RJ-45 socket, like a wide version of a phone jack -- then you can connect two, and only two, systems with a crossover cable, available at any well-stocked computer store. Or build your own crossover cable using the diagram at: http://www.homepclan.com/cabcr20.jpg You'll need a tool called an RJ-45 crimper, which is a good investment if you want to make a lot of cables in custom lengths.

If you have true 10Base-2 Ethernet, which is rare these days, both systems will have a BNC connector, which is round with two little pins on the sides. Using 10Base-2 Ethernet, you can connect any number of systems without a hub. You'll need a 10Base2 cable (which is a coaxial cable, similar to what cable TV uses but different) a BNC "T" connector for each system, and a BNC terminator for each end. All available at any well-stocked computer store.

A couple questions

I'm a newbie Linux user, and I just have a couple questions about my newly installed RedHat 6.0 system.

1. I'm trying to figure out how to run KDE from the console. Running startx brings up either GNOME, Afterstep or FVWM and I can't switch to KDE from any of those. I don't want to use GDM, and I found a script called 'kde' on my system, which of course doesn't work because the X server is not up. I found that 'X' was a symbolic link to my installed X server, and that brings up the familiar gray background and mouse cursor. I tried just switching to a console and running 'kde' again, hoping it would find the X server I just started.

Winmail.dat

Of course it would be unfair to single out Microsoft in this regard. I don't like Netscape's "vcard" attachments any less obnoxious than "winmail.dat" and I find Netscape's previously default behavior of appending HTML formatted copies of the body text to all outgoing e-mail to be almost as bad as appending .doc or other binary formats. (At least I can read between the tags if I care to).

Netscape 4.72 (& 4.73?) still defaults to HTML mail, and vCards are an open standard (http://www.imc.org/pdi) that I have found very useful.

I have a web application that, among other things, sends the user's contact information to us via email. Adding these users to our address book becomes almost trivial thanks to an Outlook add-in that imports vCards. My application includes a vCard attachment with the message and we can double-click to add the user to a shared contacts folder. We could do something similar using Netscape, or any *nix mail client that called GNOMECard as a vCard viewer if we were using *nix desktops.

As long as sending a vCard is not the mail client's default behavior, I don't have a problem with it. It has more info than a plain sig, and since it's actually plain text, it's just as human-readable as an attached text file.

SuSe Linux and Micrsoft medialess OS

I have started playing around with SuSE Linux and am impressed with the product. I have been a died in the wool Microsoft user for the last eight years. I have seen them step on a lot of folks and that is part of business. I have also put up with their mindless CD keys that make a network administrators life miserable. Not copy protected is what it said on all of their software. That was until they controlled the market now everything is copy protected.

But the latest rumor or plan that Microsoft has put me over the edge. I read the an article in the May 1, 2000 issue of INFO WORLD that Microsoft now wants to jam a "medialess OS" down our throats. The article is entitled "Users find Microsoft's medialess anti piracy play hard to swallow" explains their latest attempt to stop software piracy. This is it for me.

I have been an ardent supporter up till this. I want to convert to something else. The problems are my word, access and other apps that use MS apps. Is there a way to continue to use these apps without Microsoft OS. Or is there a way to emulate win apps or is there other apps that transparently use their files? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Well as one newbie to another, good luck, Star office will import and save in most if not all the MS formats for office, personally I was using Star office on my MS machine, so I know it works at least for word, and excel, never used access or powerpoint, so cannot tell you how well those work.

This issue with MS medialess OS? I had not heard anything about it, but sure am glad I am switching over to Linx myself. Very tired of Micr$oft and its games, was waiting until I had found the apps needed to switch over and with the release of Coreal office for linux, I figured the time was at hand. Now to convince my wife.....

I am looking over the stuff for development on the KDE platform, namely the KDevelop IDE. If Microsoft would have developed something like this, and gave it way, Windows would not be the mess it is. Alot more developers would be able to work, without resorting to piracy to get the tools needed.

USR Modem

I have a US robotics modem PCI Fax modem 3cp5610 and running Red Hat Linux. I can not get it to work. Any suggestions ?

Boot Floppy for Linux

"I was wondering if you have ever heard of anyone booting up a system with a linux boot floppy. The system previously lacks the ability to boot from a CD , but after installing linux, uses the CD drive to install another operating sytem which at teh same time will write over the Linux system."

Three different machines at work use boot floppies to start Linux. I have had problems using LILO and modifying the boot sector on two of those machines. Using a floppy gives me a safe and simple way to have Linux and Windows on the same machine with no changes to the boot sector. I did need to do an RDEV on the boot floppy's kernel to point it toward the proper partition on the hard drive. Other than that minor detail using a boot floppy works quite well.

Diamond Stealth Pro VL and X -- A Contribution, I Hope

Hello, I have been playing with Linux for about 4 months, and I would like to share some information that may already be available, but not evident to me. My system has an older VESA local bus motherboard, and the processor is a 486DX2 running at 66 MHz. It took me approximately 2 months to get Xfree86 working with my Diamond Stealth Pro VL (VESA local bus) board which used an 80C929 device. Anyway, I want to prevent other Linux people from pulling overnight hacks like I did (that will never happen), so here is the section of the XF86Config file of importance for a Diamond Stealth Pro VL video board (VL for VESA local bus).
------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------
My Linux distribution is SuSE 6.4. The parameters in the above file reference the components in my video board.

The line which really made my system work without crashing while running X was the Chipset directive. The default chipset was mmio_928. When that option was used, I would get system hangs (you couldn't even telenet via the ethernet), segmentation faults, and lots of other problems. I will make the bold (and possibly incorrect) assumption that the assumed memory locations (for memory mapped I/O) were in conflict with the memory space of a running process (possibly kernel space?) I do not know for sure, but, using s3_generic (which implies I/O mapping for device registers) fixed the problem.

I am pleased that Linux came into existance, and it is one of the ultimate hacks. Your Linux Gazette has helped me lots and lots (I read all the back issues -- I am up to May 2000), and I hope that I can achieve the knowledge to help other people the way your extensive documentation has helped me.

ext2 fs question

James, I find your Linux Gazette column to be very valuable. I have a problem that I have not been able to find the answer to: is it possible to get NT/2000 to read ext2 partitions seamlessly? I found a utility which will allow the user read-access but it is painfully slow and requires you to copy anything you want Windows apps to be able to access:

As an alternative, is there a way to transform the filesystem from ext2 to ntfs? Reformatting is out of the question as I have 30GB of data on the partition.

locate

Somebody wrote a few days ago about how modern distributions have too many files and it makes the "locate" command unusable. Because anything you type matches a whole slew of pixmap and HTML files used for the desktop interface. The person was asking the distributions to move these into tar files.

you don't get back entries containing 'bmp', 'html' or 'whatever'. You can of course adjust the egrep expression to your heart's content.

Summing up a column of numbers

Recently I had to sum up a column of numbers appearing in a tab-delimited text file. The following awk program 'summ' worked well, in conjunction with a few other tricks.

If I wanted, I could move both these operations into the awk script. The "1" in $1 could be replaced by any column number, and I could put a regular expression before the first bracket:

However, I prefer one generic script. I wanted to call it 'sum' but the name was already taken. ('sum' produces checksums.)

Return to spellcheck

In regards to spellchecking for homonyms, I have built a web search spellchecker at http://www.searchspell.com. It is a lookup database of misspellings using ePerl and MySQL on a Linux box. It allows me to customize spelling rules for particular rules, and even recommend possible corrections to words with correct spellings ("hear" for "here", "where" for "wear", etc.) Before reading your column I did not have "hoard" and "horde" in my database, but that is now fixed, and I'm tracking down more and more everyday.

Currently my database has over 2,000,000 entries, which I'm able to permute in billions of typo corrections, and each day I'm getting closer to a true "intelligent" spellchecking system.

redhat ifup/ifdown problems

I'm having some trouble with allowing regular users to control the ppp0 connection. I even enabled "Allow any user (de)active the interface" under netconf. Essentially what happens is the user types in "ifup ppp0" or "ifdown ppp0" and it sits there without ever doing anything. Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated.

Also, would you happen to know of a Linux help site that is in message board format?

Tips in the following section are answers to questions printed in the Mail Bag column or comments on AnswerGuy mail from previous issues.

ANSWER: grep

Hi Angus:
The quickest, easiest way to do what you want is just to extend your expression a bit...

Note that I added the quotes, with the trailing space. This will match all instances of "potatoe" with a trailing space (for example, a username). However, hostnames (potatoe.onthefarm.com) won't match because of the trailing ".".

ANSWER: Grep

As advice, learn about regular expressions in *nix. The first solution above, used the '^' symbol to indicate to grep to get the lines starting with potato. You could do many such things with regular expressions...

ANSWER: Netscape 2c tip

You can get a two-column printout from netscape by using the psutils packages. For letter-sized printouts, just change your "Print Command" in netscape to

pstops -q -w8.5in -h11in -pletter "2:0L@0.7(8.in,-0.1in)+1L@0.7(8.in,4.95in)" | lpr -h

You will have to edit the Makefile and set PAPER=letter if you live in North America.

ANSWER: ppp-compress-xx

Hallo Jim,
your question in LG#55: You simply have to put into the conf.modules or modules.conf file in the etc directory:

ANSWER: File formats!!!

There are definitely well defined file formats. If you are looking for Windows/Dos, the file formats are .COM and .EXE. To get to know about these formats refer to any standard assmbly language book, like "Introduction to assmbley languge" (not sure about the title) by Peter Norton and Socha.

In *nix world there are two famous execution file formats(AFAIK), "a.out" and "elf (Executable and Linking Format)". "a.out" is a little old standard and Linux came out of that format sometime back. elf is a old but very generic and good one.

There is a standards document somewhere which defines the format of an elf file. Even you could try 'man elf' and it could tell you something.

In short, elf file contains a number of sections, one for each of constant-data, un-initialized data, executable code, startup-code and debug-info tables.

May be if you look at programs like objdump or elf library (libelf.o) related header files, you would get interesting things.

ANSWER: KPPP Question

I hope you've gotten your question posted at Linux Gazette answered by now (six weeks later), but in case not, here are some suggestions:

In the KPPP Setup dialogue, under the IP Address tab there's a box "configure hostname automatically"; *un-check* this box.

KPPP does indeed edit /etc/resolve.conf, but if (under the DNS tab in Setup) you do not check the box "disable existing DNS servers" then your default DNS server (e.g., your local caching DNS server, if you've set one up) should also work, and will be tried before your ISP's DNS server is consulted.

Again, I hope this is not helpful (i.e., that you've already gotten things working again

ANSWER: about stripping libraries

Hi,
when you strip a library with strip or objcopy --strip-all you don't wipe out the dynamic symbol table, this mean that static libraries become useless but when you strip a dynamic library you don't loose dynamic symbols (have a look with nm -D or objdump -T on your stripped library) and so library functions can be still referenced

ANSWER: kppp playing up

I have a LAN, so my boxes have 192.168 addresses, but I use kppp as you do. Here are the relevant options:

IP: Uncheck "Auto-configure hostname".
DNS: If you run your own name server, the address list should have only 0.0.0.0.

Some versions of libc will not work if /etc/resolv.conf has the word "localhost" in it. If "Disable existing" is checked, the contents of /etc/resolv.conf will be commented out while you are on line.

ANSWER: Intel i810

Searching for more inormation about the i810 chipset I came across your discussion about it and Linux.

I had a similar porblem with my Linux installation, where as Linux installed fine and I could utilize the command line wihtout a problem. However I had no graphics support, that is to say no XFree86.

The soultion to this porblem is to be found at support.intel.com, under the i810 fourm site. They have the X server and Kernel module and complete instrcutions for how to install and use the software. You must however read the fourm posts as there are a few tricks to the setup procedure.

That being said, I would like to know when/if kernel support will be provided for the i810 chipset. Actually I would rather learn how to find this information for myself. If you teach a man to fish, etc....

ANSWER: fsck

When you run fsck (or e2fsck) on a filesystem, it is very important that the filesystem be mounted read-only; otherwise fsck will do further (possibly severe) damage to the filesystem being checked.

As you may know, Linux stores data in RAM buffers, so when there's a sudden power-out, a lot of data about the running system is lost. However, unless the power goes out while you're booting, I don't think you should lose configuration files like inetd.conf. That's what makes me suspect that fsck was run on a read-write filesystem.

Recent kernels (2.2.14 or later, say) are better about syncing RAM buffers to the disk every minute or so (so less data is lost in a crash), and ext3 (the new filesystem type) handles crashes better than ext2 (in theory

About desktop applications, KDE allows you to add executable icons on your desktop; right click on the desktop and select "New Application" in the dialogue box that pops up, then fill in information as directed. You should have a couple of clock programs, such as "xclock", "oclock", perhaps even "daliclock" (perhaps this is a GNOME program...?).

ANSWER: RH Upgrade Problems

After the upgrade, you have probably erased your /etc/X11/XF86Config. Now, the computer is trying to boot X upon the linux boot because you have the line:

in your /etc/inittab file. You must change the number 5 to 3. To do so, you must boot giving the 'single' option to LILO:

Then, you must edit the /etc/inittab file, change the previous line, and reboot. After that, you must use Xconfigurator, XF86Setup or any other tool to configure your X.

ANSWER: linux crash

You may have a bad sector. I had a bad sector in the inode area, and every so often a file would land there and cause havoc. The worst was when /etc/mtab landed on the bad inode. The computer couldn't tell what was mounted and refused to boot. I fixed it with fsck -c .

ANSWER: Port forwarding

Regarding your June 15 post at Linux Gazette, you might swing the desired arrangement with port forwarding on the proxy server (ipportfw, one of the IP masquerading utilities), but it may not be easy (read: impossible if you don't have root access on the proxy, merely difficult otherwise). I'm pretty sure it's impossible if the proxy is also accepting HTTP connections on port 80, since you can't (to my knowledge) run two services on the same port.

Even if the technicalities can be overcome, there are good reasons not to allow telnet connections through your proxy firewall's www port:

(That's just off the top of my head...I'm confident there are other good reasons

Well, not to lecture, but it sounds like a bad idea to me. More positively, I think you'd do better to convince your employer to run an SSH server inside the firewall, and/or to allow outgoing SSH connections.

ANSWER: re: linux booting

I have run into the problem you are describing. I added a SCSI card to my machine which hosed Win95. I never did get Win95 working but I kept hosing my boot sector trying to reinstall it. The solution is really pretty simple.

I wrote this from memory so I may have left out a step or two but I hope this will give you the idea.

ANSWER: Anyone out there know more?

I think either objcopy or strip can be used. However, the Linux Bootdisk HOWTO says that only debug symbols should be removed (--strip-debug). What would happen if everything is removed (--strip-all)? I have tried and the resulting boot/root disk seems to be OK. However, something must be wrong ...

If your bootdisk already has a depmod, then I suppose you can strip-all to save space. There maybe other reasons why you shouldn't do a strip-all that I don't know about.

ANSWER: Linux Voice Mail, etc.

I saw a post by you on the Linux Gazzette about Voice Mail, E-Mail, Faxes, etc. integrated on Linux. You said it was possible via scripts, but you did not cite any examples of software to use to do this.

I have seen mgetty+sendfax but it is not ready for prime-time and won't work with but a few voice modems, and even still, doesn't always work and is in the beta test stage.

Do you know of any open-sourced, shareware, freeware, or commercial Linux solutions that do all of this that costs under $200 if commercial?

This page written and maintained by the Editors of the Linux Gazette. Copyright © 2000, gazette@ssc.com
Published in Issue 56 of Linux Gazette, August 2000

"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

OLinux: Tell about your career: college, jobs, personal life (age, birthplace)

Russel Pavlicek: I was born and raised in New York state in the US. I grew up in a town called Ossining that is known for a few things, including Sing Sing Prison (a favorite reference in American gangster films in the 1940's), Peter Falk (who played Lieutenant Columbo in the long-running US TV series of the same name), and Martha Quinn (who was one of the original VJ's on MTV). I received a Bachelor's Degree from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

I joined the consulting team at Digital Equipment Corporation in 1987 and remained in place through the acquisition by Compaq. I now live in Maryland with my wife (Maryann) and children (Stephanie and Christopher) and numerous pets. We have hosted numerous exchange students over the past few years, including students from France, Italy, and Brazil. Professionally, I spent years as a VMS consultant for Digital. I had little Unix experience or interest. In 1995, I had the need to develop some Unix skills. I came across Linux (Yggdrasil Plug-and-Play, Fall 1994 edition, for those who care about such things) and started using it for training purposes. Within 2 years, it became my preferred desktop system.

OLinux: You told us that you are writing a book. What is the subject of this work? Have you published any other books? Don't forget to ship us a copy, ok ?:)

Russel Pavlicek: The book is entitled "Open Source Software Development: Adding Clarity to Chaos." It is meant to give people outside of the Open Source world an introduction to Open Source development and the people behind it. It should be useful for many people who use Open Source software, but do not necessarily understand why the community behaves like it does. I think it will also have value for people within the movement who know how the movement works but have not spent that much time considering why it works the way it does. This is my first book. And, yes, I've asked the publisher to send you a copy.

Russel Pavlicek: My current job is to help build up our Linux consulting expertise worldwide. Compaq recognizes the potential opportunity we have in the Linux consulting arena and is working to prepare our workforce. I am also a frequent speaker at Linux and Open Source trade shows and technical conferences, as well as an occasional author of articles for various Linux websites. The two topics I speak about the most are Linux Advocacy and a perspective on understanding the Open Source movement called, "Welcome to the Insane Asylum."

OLinux: Do all Compaq's systems run the Linux OS? Can you list or indicate a url where our users can find detailed technical information about those products/drives/patches?

Russel Pavlicek: Almost all Alpha systems and Proliant systems can run Linux. A few of the very early Alpha boxes used a bus called Turbochannel which is not yet supported on Linux (NetBSD apparently works, though). But just about everything else works. Some options (some video cards, for example) do not have drivers, but there are other supported options that can be used instead.

We host a site about Linux on handheld units (including the iPaq H3600) at http://www.handhelds.org/.

That site includes links to information about Linux on both Alpha systems and Proliant servers. In addition to this, there is good information about Linux on Alpha at the following non-Compaq sites: Alpha Linux information, peer-to-peer support.

Russel Pavlicek: Compaq sees room for many operating systems solutions in today's computing environment. Some customers want Tru64 Unix or OpenVMS. Others want Linux. And others want Windows 2000 or Windows 98. Compaq tries to meet the needs of customers across the board.

Compaq sees Linux being very important in a number of markets today. It is a key component for customers needing low cost but highly effective webservers. It is absolutely critical in the high performance technical computing arena, thanks to the excellent price performance value of Beowulf clusters. Linux is also making excellent progress in the handheld market (we recently released information on how to load Linux on the latest of our iPaq handheld units).

OLinux: What are Compaq's key alliances & investments with Linux companies and organizations to support this platform?

Russel Pavlicek: Compaq has partnerships with a number of key Linux companies including Red Hat, SuSE, TurboLinux, and Linuxcare. We are the only top tier solutions company that can claim to be an original member of Linux International.

Compaq realizes that we must work with the community, and we are doing just that.

OLinux: How does Compaq analyze Linux growth for past few years? Is it consistent growth in your opinion? To what extent does Compaq want Linux to succeed as an alternative operating system on the server and desktop?

Russel Pavlicek: From my personal perspective, the growth of Linux over the past few years has been nothing but spectacular. I started using Linux in 1995 and actively tracking the Linux community in 1997. By the beginning of 1997, I was entirely convinced that there was a viable industry growing out of the Linux community.

I attended the Atlanta Linux Showcase in 1997. It was held on a weekend with about 500 attendees and about 20 vendors on the expo floor. Even though it was a trivial show by computer industry standards, I walked away from the show totally energized. I knew without a doubt that Linux was going to be big -- very big. There was enthusiasm and passion I had not seen in years coming from the attendees. The reports of the new work in progress was exciting. None of the industry analysts were paying attention to Linux, but I could see that something of significance was happening here.

In 1997 I began suggesting to coworkers that we should be developing a Linux strategy. There was a fairly small group of us who understood what was going on, but before too long it became apparent to everyone that Linux was not just a hacker's project. It was turning into an exciting operating system.

Today, we have an Linux Program Office focused on the success of Linux on Compaq's platforms. There are many people working hard to make sure that Linux works well on both our Proliant systems and Alpha systems. We have had engineers working on Linux Alpha since 1994.

OLinux: What is your role representing Compaq for Linux International? How does Compaq support the project? Are there any special funds direct to li.org?

Russel Pavlicek: I just recently took the position of Compaq's representative to Linux International. I am still getting acclimated to the task. Jon "maddog" Hall had been our representative for years until his departure last year to become the full-time Executive Director of Linux International.

OLinux: In you opinion, how much has the Linux/OS community has grown and how do you see its future?

Russel Pavlicek: Since 1997, when I first joined the community, it has changed in many ways and stayed the same in others. Obviously, the number of people using Linux these days has grown dramatically. The community used to be almost exclusively programmers, but that is no longer true. In my experience, the average Linux user still has some technical background, but most are not actively contributing code to the community. I am active in a local Linux User Group and there are a number of people involved in the community these days who are technical, but not working on projects. The community is changing from primarily code hackers to technical users.

The number of non-technical users has grown significantly, as well. Even my wife and daughter, who are not technical people at all, use Linux on a daily basis without problem. This is the growing frontier.

OLinux: What are the main internet technologies that you consider extremely interesting or relevant advance for technology information?

Russel Pavlicek: I think clustering technologies will be critical on the server side in the near term. There are many things in development and more things planned, but a full, rich clustering solution will be a key development for Linux when it arrives. Linux on handheld and embedded processors will be vitally important in the near future, I believe. That is why I am proud to see that our people have worked so hard to port Linux to our new iPaq handheld. Also, system installation procedures have come a long way in the past five years, but we need to continue on to make installation incredibly simple. This is especially true on laptops.

"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

There are many packages that can supply standard mail services under Linux. Basically the UNIX/Linux e-mail model involves MTA (mail transport agents), MSA (mail storage/access agents) and MUAs (mail user agents). There are also a variety of utilities that don't really quite fit in any of these categories.

Under Linux there are several MTAs including sendmail, the most common across most forms of UNIX; and D.J. Bernstein's qmail and Wietse Venema's Postfix. These accept and relay mail. This sounds quite simple, but in practice it can be quite complex. There are a number of routing and masquerading options that can be set by administrative policy --- and these amount to programming languages that filter and modify the headers of each message as it is relayed. In addition the process of routing mail and finding user mail boxes (mail stores) can involve arbitrarily complex interactions with various directory services (DNS, passwd files, NIS, LDAP alias/dbm files, and all manner of custom databases).

These days MTAs also have to implement anti-spam features that amount to access control lists and rules about the address formats (to and from headers) that are allowed from specific domains and address ranges. (Those generally also involve queries on tables or directory services, including those like Paul Vixie's RBL (real-time blackhole list: or MAPS, mail abuse prevention system) and it's ilk, like Dorkslayer/ORBS. Recently, MTAs are being increasing required to enforce other policies and implement anti-virus/anti-worm features.

The most common cases are easy enough to install and configure. However, all that power and flexibility comes at a price. As your organization chooses to tailor its MTA to meet your special routing, nomenclature, security and anti-spam requirements you'll require more sophisticated configuration options and many of those will involve choreographing complex relationships between your MTA and various other subsystems (such as any LDAP and DNS servers you use).

Once you've selected, installed and configured an MTA you generally will also need to go through the same process for an MSA. Most organizations these days don't deliver mail directly to desktop client systems. They store the mail on servers and have the users fetch their mail via POP or IMAP. There are various protocols for managing a mail store but the only two that really count these days are POP3 and IMAP4 (there are also older versions of each of these protocols, of course). As with the MTAs there are a number of programs (daemons) can can provide each of these services. Most MSAs can work with any common MTA. In addition these systems usually do locking and/or use other mechanisms so that multiple MSAs can be concurrently in use without conflict.

That means that you can have some users who access their mail via POP, while others use IMAP and others might even log in and use a local MUA (such as pine, mutt, or elm). Individual users can swith from what mail access method to another, usually without requiring any sysadmin intervention. Clever users can often bypass the normal MSA/MUA tools and use normal UNIX commands (like cp, and mv) and FTP or rsync to move their mail around. (This is generally too clunky for normal use, but can be quite handy when fixing corrupted mailboxes, etc).

The first time I was ever called upon to set up a POP server on an existing general purpose Linux server, I was surprised to find that there was no work required. A POP daemon had been installed and enabled when I did the initial OS installation; I had disabled it (commenting out a line in the /etc/inetd.conf file) during my routine system hardening. So "setting" up the service simply require that I uncomment one line in one file, and restart one service/daemon.

IMAP is similar. Where POP generally transfers mail to the client system and removes it from the server, IMAP allows one to store the mail on server side folder, and the copies on client systems are essentially a cache or "working copy" --- this usually costs more server storage space, but it allows the IT teams to focus on server backup/recovery and allows the client systems to be considered more-or-less disposable. IMAP can be used just like POP (where the mail is expunged from the server by the clients after delivery). Operationally, there isn't much difference. Both services are normally started by inetd (the network dispatcher service; Linux's "receptionist" if you will).

A POP or IMAP server can run for years, serving hundreds, even thousands of mailboxes and users without ever requiring any special attention. Usually you're users or their e-mail correspondents will occasionally do something stupid, or some software they run will exhibit some bug that will require the system administrator to go in and do some troubleshooting or cleanup.

For example, one time I had some complaining that his POP e-mail was broken. I found out that one of his customers had sent him a bit of e-mail with a 100Mb file attachment! (It was a Netware crash dump image). This was bumping into some diskspace and speed/capacity limits on the old 32Mb 486 what we were using to serve mail to him and the other 50 people in the department. I fixed it in a few minutes with some shell commands, used some command line tools to uudecode the attachment back into a file which I put in the user's home directory. I tossed together a quick throwaway script to extract the rest of his e-mail by building a new mailbox for him. (mbox files under UNIX are simple text files. qmail mail stores are directories with individual small text files, one for each message). Any competent intermediate system administrator could have done the same thing.

So most of the problems you might encounter with MSAs and MTAs can be fixed with text editors and common UNIX filters and utilities.

There are many MUAs that will work with POP and IMAP servers, including Microsoft's Outlook. Under Linux many people use 'fetchmail' to fetch their mail to a local mail spool (mailbox). Then they can use any MUA (elm, pine, mutt, MH/exmh, EMACS' rmail, vmail, mh-e, gnus, and the plethora of GUIs like Balsa, Mahogany, etc). Many other Linux users choose Netscape Communicator's built-in mail client.

Under Linux and UNIX there are other tools like procmail, vacation, biff, and fetchmail which, as I said before, don't fall into any of the three classic categories (MTA, MSA, MUA) that I describe earlier.

procmail is usually used as a "local delivery agent" and as a mail processing agent. It's generally used to filter the part of the final delivery of a message to its end recipients. This allows a user to write scripts to automatically refile, reject, respond to, forward or otherwise work with selected bits of mail as they are received. (It can also be used to post process mailboxes and as a more general e-mail programming language/library).

(vacation is an old program that can be used to simply provide an automated response to e-mail upon reciept. It was originally used to warn correspondents that the recipient was "on vacation." This can be also done with a simple two line procmail recipe).

biff is a utility to notify a user that mail has arrived. (There are various similar utilities for doing this in GUIs, displaying icons, animations, emitting music or vocal announcements, relaying biff notifications over a network and using various backend MSA protocols, etc).

"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

An Overview of ping

Ping is an diagnostic tool for verifying connectivity between two hosts on a network. It sends ICMP Echo Request packets to a remote IP address and watches for ICMP responses. The author of the initial version of the ping program that we use today was Mike Muss. Many other people have tweaked, rewritten, and variously abused ping since then.

The name ping itself is somewhat colorful. Some people will claim that it is an acronym standing for the Packet INternet Groper, this is not the case. Ping was named after the sound of a sonar tracking system. There is even a story claiming that a system administrator wrote a script which repeatedly pinged a host on the network and made an audible "pinging" alert for each success. The system administrator was then able to methodically go through his network checking BNC connectors until he found the dodgy connector that had been plaguing his network — when the noises stopped, he'd found his culprit.

Ping used to be a very good indicator of a machines ability to receive and send IP packets in general. If you could ping a host, you could also make an ftp or http connection. With the wider advent of packet filtering for security, this is becoming less true. Many firewalls explicitly disallow ICMP packets on the twin grounds that,

1) people don't need to know what your internal network looks like,

2) and, any protocol can be used to launch an attack, even ICMP.

Deciding whether to let ICMP through your firewall is a tough call to make. There are certainly good uses for ICMP, but there are also attacks based on ICMP (e.g., the "Ping of Death", which used oversized ping packets to overload the IP stack of the target — with often spectacular results). If you choose to allow ICMP into your network make sure you've thought about the repercussions.

There are additional flavors of the ping command that have been written for other purposes. Among the most common is the fping command. Which was written to ping a range of addresses, and is commonly used in network scanners and monitors like saint and mon (both of which are covered in this chapter). Another variation is the Net::Ping module, which provides a perl implementation of Ping functionality that can easily be used from within a script without calling an external program. You might use the script something like this:

Example 1. Using Net::Perl

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Net::Ping;
	  
my $host = $ARGV[0];
	  
my $p = Net::Ping->new("icmp");
	  
if ($p->ping($host)) {
    print "$host is alive.\n";
} else {
    print "$host is not reachable.\n";
}

ping at Work

Ping is most often used without additional arguments and shut off with a Ctrl–c. The results look like this:
[pate@cherry pate]$ ping mango PING mango (192.168.1.1) from 192.168.1.10 : 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from mango (192.168.1.1): icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=0.5 ms 64 bytes from mango (192.168.1.1): icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=0.3 ms 64 bytes from mango (192.168.1.1): icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=0.3 ms 64 bytes from mango (192.168.1.1): icmp_seq=3 ttl=255 time=0.3 ms 64 bytes from mango (192.168.1.1): icmp_seq=4 ttl=255 time=0.3 ms 64 bytes from mango (192.168.1.1): icmp_seq=5 ttl=255 time=0.3 ms --- mango ping statistics --- 6 packets transmitted, 6 packets received, 0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max = 0.3/0.3/0.5 ms [pate@cherry pate]$
This output can split into three sections. The first section, the single line starting with the word "PING", shows an overview of the command. The second section, the lines beginning with "64 bytes" show a running tally of the responses received. The third section, everything after the line "--- mango ping statistics ---", shows a summary of the results. In this case, the results are good, none of the packets were dropped and they were all passed fairly quickly.

This example also shows another important point, you should not rely on a single packet to diagnose your network. A series of five or ten is much better, as you can count up to 40% data loss as congestion on a network, and even a single packet dropped can be attributed to a busy host on the other end.

There are several useful options to the ping command. These are summarized in the following table:

Table 1. Ping Command Options

Switch	Description
`-c` `count`	Stop sending and receiving packets after `count` packets.
`-d`	Set the SO_DEBUG on the socket used.
`-f`	Send the packets as fast as possible. (flood)
`-i` `wait`	Set an interval of `wait` seconds between packets.
`-I` `〈device〉`	Sets the output interface.
`-l` `preload`	Sends `preload` packets as fast as possible, then drops back to normal mode.
`-n`	Don't look up hostnames, just give IP addresses. (numeric)
`-p` `pattern`	Specify up to 16 bytes of "pad data" to be sent with the packet.
`-q`	Output only summary lines. (quiet)
`-r`	Don't use routing tables to send the packet, just drop it out the local interface.
`-R`	Set the Record Route option.
`-s` `packetsize`	Set the number of data bytes sent to `packetsize`.
`-T tsonly`	Sends a ping with the timestamp option.
`-T tsandaddr`	Collects timestamps and addresses
`-T tsprespec` `[host1 [host2 [host3 [host4]]]]`	Collects timestamps and addresses from prespecified hops.

These options can be combined to make ping even more helpful. One thing that you cannot see is that the ping command used in the previous section is likely to take several seconds to run and report back. Using the -f switch will reduce the time spent waiting for the command. Combining this with the -c 10 and the -q switches will give you quick results and easier output to read:
[root@cherry /root]# ping -c 10 -fq mango PING mango (192.168.1.1) from 192.168.1.10 : 56(84) bytes of data. --- mango ping statistics --- 10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max = 0.2/0.2/0.9 ms [root@cherry /root]#

Note: The -f and -l switches can only be used by root, as they can cause serious network degradation if misused.

It might be of some benefit to test larger packets, using ping -c10 -s 1024 -qf will send larger packets for you. This can be especially useful where you suspect problems with fragmented packets.

To see the route that your packets are traversing, you can use ping -c10 -R. This command produces the following output:
PING tbr.nailed.org (206.66.240.72) from 192.168.1.10 : 56(124) bytes of data. 64 bytes from bigfun.whirlycott.com (206.66.240.72): icmp_seq=0 ttl=239 time=217.2 ms RR: 192.168.1.10 216.41.39.90 serial0.mmgw32.bos1.Level3.net (209.244.39.25) 208.218.130.22 166.90.184.2 so-6-0-0.mp2.NewYork1.level3.net (209.247.10.45) 137.39.52.10 180.ATM7-0.BR2.NYC9.ALTER.NET (152.63.22.229) lo0.XR2.NYC9.ALTER.NET (137.39.4.175) 64 bytes from bigfun.whirlycott.com (206.66.240.72): icmp_seq=1 ttl=239 time=1940.8 ms (same route) 64 bytes from bigfun.whirlycott.com (206.66.240.72): icmp_seq=2 ttl=239 time=250.6 ms (same route) 64 bytes from bigfun.whirlycott.com (206.66.240.72): icmp_seq=3 ttl=239 time=230.3 ms (same route) 64 bytes from bigfun.whirlycott.com (206.66.240.72): icmp_seq=4 ttl=239 time=289.8 ms (same route) 64 bytes from bigfun.whirlycott.com (206.66.240.72): icmp_seq=5 ttl=239 time=1261.4 ms (same route) 64 bytes from bigfun.whirlycott.com (206.66.240.72): icmp_seq=6 ttl=239 time=469.4 ms (same route) 64 bytes from bigfun.whirlycott.com (206.66.240.72): icmp_seq=7 ttl=239 time=1272.3 ms (same route) 64 bytes from bigfun.whirlycott.com (206.66.240.72): icmp_seq=8 ttl=239 time=353.1 ms (same route) 64 bytes from bigfun.whirlycott.com (206.66.240.72): icmp_seq=9 ttl=239 time=1281.1 ms (same route) --- tbr.nailed.org ping statistics --- 10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max = 217.2/756.6/1940.8 ms

Note: The record route option specified by the -R switch is not honored by all routers and hosts. Further, it contains only a limited space to hold router addresses, traceroute may be a better tool for identifying the path packets follow through a network.

The ping command is a very useful tool for your troubleshooting kit, and should not be overlooked.

This article is copyright 2000, Pat Eyler and New Riders Publishing. It is presented under the Open Publication License, with no additional terms applied. It is a draft version of a section of the book Networking Linux: A Practical Guide to TCP/IP, which will be published by New Riders Publishing in the winter.

Copyright © 2000, Pat Eyler and New Riders Publishing
Published in Issue 56 of Linux Gazette, August 2000

"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

Tools of the Trade: nmap

By Josh Flechtner

nmap - the Network MAPper

Author: Fyodor

Required: flex, bison

Homepage: http://www.insecure.org/nmap

Current stable release: 2.53

License: GPL

Platform ports: Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, IRIX, BSDI, SunOS, HP-UX, AIX, Digital UNIX, Cray UNICOS and Windows NT.

I. Introduction

The intent of this article is to familiarize the reader with the network scanner nmap. As Lamont Grandquist (an nmap contributor/developer) points out, nmap does three things: It will ping a number of hosts to determine if they are up. It will portscan hosts to determine what services they are offering and it will attempt to determine the OS (operating system) of host(s). Nmap allows the user to scan networks as small as a two node LAN (Local Area Network) or as large as a 500 node LAN and even larger. Nmap also allows you to customize your scanning techniques. Sometimes a simple ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) ping sweep may be all you need. If not, then maybe you're looking for a stealth scan giving back reports on UDP (User Datagram Protocol) and TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) ports that are available and as to what operating system the host is using? Still want more? You can do all that and log the data into either human-readable or machine-parsable format. In this article I will be covering some basic to intermediate scanning techniques to get you off and running with nmap. If you love it enough then I would suggest reading the the nmap man pages 50 times and then translating it into the foreign language of your choice;)

II. Getting Nmap

Some Linux distributions come with nmap as part of the install. If you do not have nmap then let's begin with grabbing the latest copy and getting it up and running. The version I will be covering here will be the source code tarball, optionally you have both rpm and source-rpm to choose from . The Linux distribution I am using is Red Hat 6.1. Download the nmap-latest.tgz file into your home directory. Once the download is complete perform tar -zxvf nmap-latest.tgz and this will unpack the source code into your home directory. Go into the newly created nmap-latest directory and read both the README and INSTALL files. Ideally the next step would be to perform configure, make and (as root) make install in the top level of the newly created directory. This will install the nmap binary into /usr/local/bin. From here we're ready to run nmap.

III. Using Nmap

Scanning types

Without further ado, let's get down to business with nmap. First we will need an address to scan against. If you are working from a LAN then pick a number of one of your hosts. Let's say that your LAN consists of two machines: Adam and Eve. Adam (192.168.0.1) is the unit we'll be running nmap on. Eve (192.168.0.2) is the machine we will be scanning. From the command line I would type the following:

nmap 192.168.0.1

Here is a sample output from the scan:

Example 1

        Starting nmap V. 2.53 by fyodor@insecure.org (www.insecure.org/nmap)
        Interesting ports on Eve (192.168.0.2):
        (The 1511 ports scanned but not shown below are in state:closed)
        Port                State            Service
        21/tcp             open             ftp
        23/tcp             open             telnet
        25/tcp             open             smtp
        79/tcp            open             finger
        80/tcp             open             http
        98/tcp             open             linuxconf
        111/tcp           open             sunrpc
        113/tcp            open            auth
        513/tcp            open            login
        514/tcp            open            shell
        515/tcp            open            printer
        6000/tcp          open            X11

Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 1 second

What the above example did was run a vanilla TCP scan against the designated address. As we can see from this sample output our host is up and gives us a list of available ports that are listening. This of course is the most basic of all commands and can be run without any special privileges. The disadvantage of this call is that any host running logging software will easily detect this sort of scan. The output of this call would be the same as adding the option -sT to the command line so it would look like this: nmap -sT 192.168.0.2. (Note that this call is allowable by normal users).

Not on a local LAN? Working from a single host dial-up machine? No problem, run ifconfig (or use your favorite text editor to view your /var/log/messages file, look for the last entry in the messages file that contains a remote IP address) to obtain your IP address and go from there. Let's say my IP address is 206.212.15.23, we can use that as a premise to base our scans on. So with that in mind let's check on our "neighbor":

nmap -sT 206.212.15.22

Here is the sample output:

Example 2

    Starting nmap V. 2.53 by fyodor@insecure.org (www.insecure.org/nmap)
    Interesting ports on find2-cs-4.dial.ISP.net (206.212.15.22):
    (1522 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)
    Port                State            Service
    139/tcp          open             netbios-ssn

Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 20 seconds

This is a very basic example of nmap's capabilities but it atleast gives the beginner some grounds to work off of if not on a local LAN.

-sS Now let's say that that you wish to use a more stealthy scan to prevent detection, you would then use our previous example only with the -sS (SYN) call so it would look like this: nmap -sS 192.168.0.2.The -sS (SYN) call is sometimes referred to as the "half-open" scan because you do not initiate a full TCP connection. The output will read the same as example 1 only with a lesser chance of detection from the other end. Unlike running the -sT call this call requires root privileges.

-sF -sX -sN Now for the truly paranoid or instances when the target may be running filtering or logging software that detect SYN we can issue a third type of call with the -sF (Stealth FIN), sX (Xmas Tree) or -sN (Null) scan. Note: Since Microsoft insists on doing things their own way, neither the FIN, Xmas or Null scan modes will work on Windows 95/98 or NT boxes. So if we were to get a listing of available ports running either the -sT or -sS options but "All scanned ports are: closed" running the -sF, sX or -sN option, then we can safely assume that the target is probably a Windows box. This really isn't a necessary procedure to verify a Windows machine since nmap has built in OS detection which we will cover later. These three commands also require root privileges.

-sU This option tells nmap to scan for listening UDP (User Datagram Protocol) rather than TCP ports on a target host. Although this can sometimes be slow on Linux machines it runs particularly fast against Window boxes. Using our previous examples of Adam and Eve, let's run (once again root privilege is required) a -sU scan against Eve:

nmap -sU 192.168.0.2

Here is the sample output from the scan:

Example 3

    Starting nmap V. 2.53 by fyodor@insecure.org (www.insecure.org/nmap)
    Interesting ports on Eve (192.168.0.2):
    (The 1445 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)
    Port                State                Service
    111/udp          open                 sunrpc
    517/udp          open                 talk
    518/udp          open                 ntalk

Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 4 seconds

As we can see nmap scanned 1455 ports on Eve and gave us a listing of the UDP ports it found to be listening. We can gather from examples one and two that we are looking at a Linux install. With that in mind if you remember in the introduction I mentioned that nmap performs three things: It pings, it portscan's and it detects the target's (operating system). Now that we've briefly covered the first two uses let's move onto OS detection

IV. OS detection

-O This is the option to be used to determine the operating system of the given target. It can be used in conjunction with our above mentioned scan types or by itself. Nmap uses what is called TCP/IP fingerprinting to try and accurately determine the OS of the given target. For a more complete reading on OS fingerprinting please see Foyer's article titled "Remote OS detection via TCP/IP fingerprinting" found here. Now with that in mind let's get right to our next example. Using our target host (Eve) from Example 1, I would type the following: (Note that the -O option requires root privileges)

nmap -O 192.168.0.2

Here is a the sample output from the scan:

Example 4

    Starting nmap V. 2.53 by fyodor@insecure.org (www.insecure.org/nmap)
    Interesting ports on Eve (192.168.0.2):
    (The 1511 ports scanned but not shown below are in state:closed)
    Port                State            Service
    21/tcp             open             ftp
    23/tcp             open             telnet
    25/tcp             open             smtp
    79/tcp            open             finger
    80/tcp             open             http
    98/tcp             open             linuxconf
    111/tcp           open             sunrpc
    113/tcp            open            auth
    513/tcp            open            login
    514/tcp            open            shell
    515/tcp            open            printer
    6000/tcp          open            X11

    TCP Sequence prediction: Class=random positive increments
                                                 Difficulty=1772042 (Good luck!)
    Remote operating system guess: Linux 2.1.122 - 2.2.14

Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 1 second

Notice that nmap reports the same available port data as it did in example 1 due to the default -sT option, but also the OS of the machine (in this case Linux) and the kernel version...not bad ehh?! Nmap comes equipped with an impressive OS database.

V. More fun with Nmap

Instead of limiting ourselves to scanning just one target., let's broaden our horizon's to bigger and better things. In example 2 we used our IP address to base a scan against. Using that address again we can get a look at numerous targets in our "community". At the command line type the following (substituting a valid address of your choice of course):

nmap -sT -O 206.212.15.0-50

What this does is instruct nmap to scan every host between the IP addresses of 206.212.15.0 and 206.212.15.50. If you happen to find many interesting feedback results from this or a larger scale scan then you can always pipe the output into your choice of a human readable file or a machine parsable file for future reference by issuing the following option:

To create a human readable output file issue the -oN<textfile name> command into your nmap string so that it would look similar to this:

nmap -sT -O -oN sample.txt 206.212.15.0-50

Rather have a machine parsable file? Enter the -oM <textfile name> to pipe the output into a machine parsable file:

nmap -sT -O -oM sample.txt 206.212.15.0-50

*Back when I was becoming aquatinted with all the nmap options, I ran my first large scale scan against 250 consecutive machines using an arbitrary number (nmap -sX -O -oN sample.txt XXX.XXX.XXX.0-250).To my great surprise I was confronted with 250 up and running virgin Linux machines. Another reason why Linux enthusiasts should NEVER become bored.

-I This is a handy little call that activates nmap's TCP reverse ident scanning option. This divulges information that gives the username that owns available processes. Let's take a look (Note that the host has to be running ident). At the command line issue this command against your target, in this case our default Eve running Linux:

-iR Use this command to instruct nmap to scan random hosts for you.

-p Port range option allows you to pick what port or ports you wish nmap to scan against.

-v Use verbosity to display more output data. Use twice (-v -v) for maximum verbosity.

-h Displays a quick reference of nmap's calls

VI. Gleaning the Cube

Now that we have looked at nmap's three basic usage types and some of it's other options, let's mix and match them.

nmap -v -v -sS -O 209.212.53.50-100

This instructs nmap to use a maximum amount of verbosity to run a stealth scan and OS detection against all machines between IP addresses 209.212.53.50 and 209.212.53.100. This command will also require root privileges due to both the -sS and -O calls. Of course this will display a very overwhelming amount of data so let's log our results into a human readable file for future reference:

nmap -v -v -sS -O -oN sample.txt 209.212.53.50-100

Now let's make nmap run a stealth scan and instruct it to look only for machines offering http and ftp services between the addresses of 209.212.53.50 and 209.212.53.100. Once again we will log the output (I'm a log junkie) for future reference into a human readable file called ftphttpscan.txt:

nmap -sS -p 23,80 -oN ftphttpscan.txt 209.212.53.50-100

Remember the -iR option mentioned previously? Let's use it to take a random sampling of Internet web servers using the verbatim example from nmap's man page:

nmap -sS -iR -p 80

Last but certainly not least, while gleaning information, don't forget to nmap yourself. Just type at the command line: nmap 127.0.0.1 This is especially useful and recommended if you're a newcomer to Linux and connected to the Internet via DSL or cable modem.

VII. Nmap GUI's

Now for those of you who would rather not work on the command line (shame on you) there are graphical front ends for nmap.

NmapFE - NmapFE, written by Zach Smith, comes included in the nmap-2.53.rpm and uses the GTK interface. NmapFE can be found at http://codebox.net/nmapfe.html

Kmap - Kmap, written by Ian Zepp, uses the QT/KDE frontend for nmap at can be found at http://www.edotorg.org/kde/kmap/

KNmap - KNmap, written by Alexandre Sagala, is another KDE frontend for nmap and can be found at http://pages.infinit.net/rewind/

VII. Conclusion

This wraps up our quick and dirty look and nmap. I hope you find the application as enjoyable as I do. Comments or questions can be sent to either myself jafgon@bright.net or fyodor@insecure.org. Happy scanning.

"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

The Future Depends on What We Do Now

By Nicolay Alfredo GIRALDO Leiva
Translated from the Spanish by Rory Krause

Some time ago, Bill Gates and Paul Allen thought that it was just not fair to have to pay for processing time on expensive mainframes. And they thought the solution was the personal computer. They bet all of their future on it. It was only an idea. They were even startled to see the debut of Altair computers in an electronics magazine. ``The future is passing us by,'' they thought. And they believed fervently in their idea, enough to make it a reality. Then they built Microsoft into the giant that it is today. Maybe, if Bill Gates an Paul Allen had not existed, the only personal computers that we might own would be Japanese, and would only work for playing games. Although, with out a doubt, we would have Quake III Arena, with a Japanese name, of course. And it would be a role playing game.

Likewise, Richard Stallman thought that it was not fair that people pay large sums of money for the software that they used, especially if it was not quite up to the quality they would prefer. And so he created the GNU project. He also be his future on his idea. And he believes fervently in it. He believes that the GPL license of his software it the best license in the world, and it is possible that he is right. Several years ago I read some articles written by industry analysts, that predicted that although the cost of hardware would decrease steadily, the cost of software would only continue to increase. Maybe, if Richard Stallman had not existed we would no be paying licensing fees of $1000 or more for a software package worth less that a tenth of that fee.

And then we have Linus Torvalds. The fundamental idea that he had was to realize at some point that the software that he had created in order to connect to the server at his university had certain similarities to an operation system, or rather the kernel of an operating system. Furthermore, the idea to try to improve the operating system on an ongoing basis with the help of its users. This was the fundamental step. Linus it the leader. If Linus had not existed... no, I don't even want to imagine it.

Richard Stallman simply wrote his manifesto, made his software, and put his license on it, but his has not done anything of such significance since then. Any chance he gets, he gives his opinion of all types of licenses (e.g. the Motif libraries). The license on software is not its most important part. If it was, people would have stopped using Windows a long time ago. It needs something more. It need people who will do for each application and each library what Linus did for the kernel.

Furthermore, consider the fact that both ideas, the idea of Bill Gates and Paul Allen of not having to pay for processor time by using a personal computer, and the idea of Richard Stallman, of not having to pay for the software that you use on the computer converge to one idea. They converge to Linux: Free distribution for personal computers.

Now that Linux is entering very very slowly, but quite surely in the personal computer arena, we should place our attention on its graphical interface. I say that it is entering the arena quite surely, because once a user is satisfied with his Linux installation, he has all his hardware supported, he has tested all his application, is is possible that he will never return to Windows. But it is slow also, because only a small percentage of the people that try Linux are satisfied with the experience. The rest return to Windows. I contend that the single most important aspect is the graphical user interface. Because out there in the real world, there are more than 200 million users, that only know how to use a computer in this fashion, without text consoles, without two letter commands.

In this way, we are duplicating effort and advancing at half the speed or slower than what we should be doing. The teams of programmers working on the KDE and GNOME environments are working on the same problems, on creating an interface that is consistent, a standard for programming, incredibly personalizable, so the users of the graphical environment feel at home, and the programmers know that they can choose any group of libraries and their programs are going to work on whatever Linux system without problems or the necessity for the user to install additional components. Definitely we are duplicating efforts.

One of the first things I learned in college was that in programming, we should not try to reinvent the wheel each time we write a program. It is for this reason that function libraries exist and are standardized.

The KDE environment is complicated, it has many features, and supplies a consistent interface that is at the same time personalizable for any user. It is extremely easy to use and this allows for increase productivity with any user and eliminates the learning curve accompanied with a migration from a Windows system to a Linux system. In spite of this, I have seen messages from our local group of Linux users who detest KDE, more for ideological reasons (the Qt library license) than for anything practical. They would never recommend it in a business environment in spite of the benefits that its use might have.

"I have a K carved into my forehead," was the expression used by one of them.

GNOME also has problems with its users. It is an excellent tool, and its GTK programming kit is GPL'ed on all the platforms to which it has been ported. It has several innovative technologies and notable features. But it also has some problems not just in itself, but also in its acceptance by some people. Some programmers that prefer BSD licenses detest anything that has to do with GPL. It doesn't have a consistence interface across all installations. No sir, this is not a bug, this is a feature. This is the phrase that is used in these cases. Because you can try out various window managers and choose your favorite. But many user don't even have a clue about what a window manager is.

To put this in a different perspective, let us suppose that the Hurd kernel from the GNU project had been ready in 1996 before the commercial explosion that Linux had last year, and there were some distributions with the Linux kernel and others with the Hurd kernel and some with both. There would be fanatical users of one or the other kernel. There might be some saying "I have penguin carved into my forehead," even though he was, like all of us, dedicated to the project of liberating us from the 64,000 bugs for $400 or more, to which we are still tied to by industry forces. And maybe I would find "I have a penguin carved into my forehead" in the list of messages from our local user's group.

This comparison is not exact, but it gets the point across. It is not exact because both kernels can execute the same programs ant the programmer does not have to do anything special for this to happen. In graphical environments KDE applications use one set of libraries and standards while the Gnome applications use different ones. Additionally you can use the Qt libraries without complying with the KDE standards or GTK without complying with Gnome standards. The users must have both sets of libraries in order to run both types of programs.

The rest of the applications use other available libraries. There are a tremendous number of libraries for programming in a graphical environment. Maybe this is a good thing, maybe not. A programmer who knows C or C++ and wants to write an application for use on Linux soon discovers a confusing mess of standards and libraries. The is no consensus on which set is the best. It is possible that our hypothetical new user might spend more time deciding which programming libraries and which environment to use, than the time he uses learning to use these libraries for writing his program. It is also possible that someone might use Gnome only because it is installed by default on the RedHat distribution. Only GPL fanatics will use Gnome. But this is only a possibility.

It would be nice to find a way to unite the KDE and Gnome projects. Perhaps there could be a leader to coordinate the projects, just like Linus does with the kernel. This would give motivation to the people who want to program and make Linux better. We would have increasingly more and more programmers, almost exponential growth, just as we have seen happen with kernel development since its beginnings.

In spite of this, Linux has to solve other problems of equal urgency. I I believe that Linux is an important operating system in the computing industry and the hardware manufacturers should recognize it as such. Instead of letting the open source community write all their drivers, the hardware manufacturers should write their own drivers. If they want, they can make them open source so that the users can correct errors or add functionality for the hardware. Even if they write drivers and release only binaries it would be a tremendous help.

Let's take the case of software modems, better known as "winmodems". Lucent wrote a driver and released the binary for the RedHat 6.1 distribution, which supported modems with the Lucent chips. Lucent has only written this driver, (it has some bugs) because they were only asked once. Lucent has announced the it will not make drivers at the request of users, but rather at the request of business that sell Linux distributions. It is a good policy. It saves time and money in technical support and it is possible that many hardware manufacturers might have a similar policy. Maybe they are only waiting for a Linux distribution to ask for the drivers. Everyone who has at some time written divers knows that it is much easier to write drivers for Linux than for Windows.

Linux distribution companies lack the sense of leadership that they need right now. Some companies announced a little while ago that, "we have hired programmers to work on X project for X amount of time". Two programmers are to few. Especially the distributions with leading sales numbers like RedHat and Caldera should contract all the programmers that they can for Linux programs. Even though they have already hired some programmers, the more the better. The same goes for all the other distributions.

Linux is still not strong enough. The companies that make their money selling Linux have the responsibility to make it stronger. But they leave many things up to the "open source community" to do. Linux is a good software package to improve and make more compatible and friendly. Other open source projects are not. A project is no necessarily of good quality just because it is open source. They should not try to support all the open source projects that there are just because they are open source or because they are "alternative" operating systems. For this reason, among others, we should not see it as strange when the value over there stock shares go down.

Some people have speculated that the triumph of Linux could be based on the success of one application (the killer application), a software program that very good and that only works on Linux, which will make everyone want to have it. And some thought that such an application could be an office suite or something similar. The people at Microsoft think in a similar fashion. For this reason, they will try to make the next version of office (code named office 10) include integrated voice recognition. And we all know that such version might sell well, but the voice recognition will not work really well until the next version, or until two or three versions later.

The creators of RedHat created the RedHat Package Management System (RPM) and on that idea they based their distribution. They did a good job. Everyone who has needed to update slackware or another version or even Windows, knows that the best method is to erase everything and reinstall from nothing. And this is now a problem with Linux, thanks to the folks at RedHat.

Maybe the answer is not the one application. Maybe it is many applications. These are known as games. The first effort to make Windows an acceptable platform for games was called WinG. It worked on top of Windows 3.1 with extensions in 32 bits called "Win32s". It was terribly bad. The only game that I remember that used Win32s was something like Wolfenstein. And it was also quite bad. There was no comparison between the game for DOS, like DooM, Descent, or Warcraft and the simple Windows games. Even with Windows 95, the support for games was terrible. It was not until 1996 that the DirectX libraries appeared. The first respectable game that worked well on Windows that I could see was DooM II. Then there was MS Fury. And then the industry slowly changed. The rest is history. It can be seen that it was never an easy trip for Microsoft, most of all for their model for writing drivers.

The advantage for the companies that made games for DOS, was the total control that they had over the hardware. The advantage that they have now to make games for Windows9x is that they do not have to worry about compatability with an innumerable amount of hardware that is out there on the market, because the DirectX libraries allow them to use a series of standard routines to control the hardware that the systems has. Linux does not allow the total control of the hardware, and for now it does not have a series of standard libraries either that allow interaction with the hardware in an efficient way. Although there are some video libraries, they still lack sound and control mechanisms and more.

It is thanks to games that I still keep a working copy of Windows 95 on my computer. Linux, like everything else has evolved faster than Windows and now supports graphics acceleration with OpenGL on some cards and Xfree 4.0 promises much more of this type of thing. Many server of Quake III Arena run Linux. But the competition will not stop. We need more and better ideas. Especially now that Win2000 has copied everything that it can from Linux systems. And the next version will also copy everything that it can.

We need ideas that change the future of technology and benefit everyone; Ideas like those of Bill Gates and Richard Stallman. And we need leader like Linus Torvalds that can coordinate the efforts of people around the globe to make those ideas reality. I hope that those potential visionaries and leaders are reading this article and they will be moved to risk all of their future for those ideas. Surely then, both the innovators as well as the rest of us, will have a better future.

"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

Tuxedo Tails

By Eric Kasten

[Introduction and conclusion written by the LG Editor.]

"Tuxedo Tails" is a new series of single-panel cartoons Eric Kasten is drawing for Linux Gazette. I asked Eric how he builds his cartoons and how much he uses Linux. He replied, "I pretty much use Linux for everything that I do electronically any more (other than my tax software and occasion forays into Photoshop or Illustrator). The drawing is still done largely by pen and ink and then scanned and colorized and assembled. I mostly use the Gimp for interactive work and ImageMagick for scripts and such."

Eric also draws a multi-panel strip called Sun Puppy. It's about--you guessed it--puppies. Read the strip at http://www.sunpuppy.com. Most of the cartoons are not computer related, but two of the funniest computer-related episodes were May 22nd and May 24th. The second one may or may not remind you of biff, the program that alerts you when mail has arrived.

"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

Linux Site O' The Month: SourceXchange

By Sean Lamb

What's This?

This article is the the current installment in an ongoing series of site reviews for the Linux community. Each month, I will highlight a Linux-related site and tell you all about it. The intent of these articles is to let you know about sites that you might not have been to before, but they will all have to do with some aspect of Linux. Now, on with the story...

SourceXchange (`http://www.sourcexchange.com/`)

In past columns we looked at places to find information about troubleshooting your Linux installation. We looked at some language and development sites. We looked at some of the tools that you can use to put together GUI-based apps quickly and efficiently. So, now that you're an accomplished developer-hacker... Wouldn't it be nice to get paid for developing open source applications?

You bet yer sweet petootie it would be nice. After all, that new dual Athlon system was a little more than chump change for the month's allowance. This month, we look at SourceXchange.

SourceXchange is a member of the Collab.net network that has been getting a bunch of press this month, especially with Sun's announcement that they'll be opening the source to Star Office (yes, I'm already on that mailing list, and I hope to be able to help out with some documentation or code), and hosting the project on Collab.net servers. SourceXchange offers quite a bit to the budding and established open source developer, including peer reviews, project hosting, spec writing and the chance to get paid for your work.

We'll get to the money in a little bit, but let's take a look at what else is there first. SourceXchange's goal is to unite open source developers with projects that fit a need. If you've taken a look at some of the development boards recently, there's a growing list of developers who are looking for projects to work on. The "what should I do now?" question seems to be popping up more often.

With this site, the developer doesn't have to spend the time and energy to work up a challenging project, hop over to the RFP (Request For Proposal) section and see if any of the unbid projects are of interest. As this article was being written there were RFPs for accessing image manipulation utilities, developing a message board in PHP, and a few different RFPs for BXXP support in various utilities. Each RFP includes what the contractor is looking for in terms of skills and deliverables and how much the contractor is willing to pay, both in cash and materials. If one of the RFPs strikes your fancy, you can comment on it and express interest in offering your services to the project.

If you want to help out but don't want to work on the code itself, SourceXchange also offers Peer Reviewer positions. The Peer Reviewer is just that, a peer reviewer; this is someone who will help the developer and guide and review the progress toward the goal, acting as a third-party mediator to ensure that the project is both completed and done well.

Once all the players are selected, and the teams are finalized, the work can begin. SourceXchange provides a convenient place to post the status of the deliverables as well as the developer and reviewer information, project location and mailing list information and other pertinent details about the project. Developers are free to use whatever tools and hosting methods they need, according to the terms that have been decided between them and the project sponsors.

When the projects are complete, SourceXchange ensures that the developers recieve the peer review that is necessary to provide complete, accurate and robust code, as well as the compensation that they were promised from the project sponsors.

You can view the RFPs and project invormation without registering, but to really get the most out of this site, you do have to sign up and work. If you want to be a part of a growing interest in open source development by big business, you owe it to yourself to register as a developer and get on one of these projects. These projects may be substantially more than the Hello World applets that we all know and love, but the compensation offered is nothing to sneeze at either.

"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

Micro Publishing, part II (Mark's Update)

By Mark Nielsen

References
Introduction
Choose your Printer
Choose how you want to fold the paper.
Buy or make your own Book Press.
Choose the type of Glue.
Use the software to make your print outs.
Make your book!
Now, copy your book if you need multiple copies.
Conclusion

References

Micro Publishing -- article located at Linux Gazette and ZING.

Introduction

The first document by Rick Holbert is Micro Publishing. This article is an update about Mark's experience making books. Mark has added some of his tips for when he is making books. Mark using a duplex printer, paper folder, and a cheap book press. Mark is using all free software (though Acrobat Reader is not open sourced).

This article will provide several methods for the process that the original Micro Publishing article covered.

Choose your Printer

Please buy a laser printer. It is much nicer to use a duplex printer when making books. I have noticed that the laser printer goes much much faster, and when it comes to really intensive documents, even the laser printer can take a while to print, which on a DeskJet printer would be horrible. If you want the quality, the ease, and duplex capability, get a laser printer. I got a HP Laserjet 4050. Later on, I bought the stupid expensive duplex add-on, which was just a 50 cent piece of plastic that they charge an outrageous amount for. The duplex add-on was a rip-off, but I had to buy it. It cost somewhere around $1,500 for the printer, and a few hundred for the duplex add-on.

Or, use any other printer. A Deskjet will work fine, but it will be a lot slower and you will have to print on the paper twice (once on the back, and once on the front), and the quality of the print won't be as good.

Choose how you want to fold the paper.

Please buy a paper folder. They cost around $600 or so. I got one from OfficeZone.com which was a Model 1501 (CV-7) AutoFolder. Please buy one. It gets tedious to fold books.

The only other option is to fold it by hand, which I refused to do, but which Rick did happily. Children are great slaves for folding paper.

Buy or make your own Book Press.

You can make your book press using the steps in the article Micro Publishing or you can buy it on the internet. It is my hope that different designs will come out which will make it easier to build and use book presses. I have some ideas on how to change the current design.

Choose the type of Glue.

Good rubber cement glue is the ultimate preferred method, but it is clumsy to use in my opinion. I have contemplated pouring the stuff into a squeezeable bottle to see if it will be easier to use.

Use the software to make your print outs.

Follow these steps in order to make your book for printing. The first set of steps convert your postscript or pdf documents to a postscript level II document (or level I) -- which only has to be done if you are using postscript level III fonts or if the process doesn't work out quite right. I have noticed that on some postscript documents I download from the internet, that converting it to pdf and then letting Acrobat convert the pdf document back to a postscript cleans out a lot of mistakes when using "psbook" and "mpage". The second set of steps will create the pdf documents for printing (or postscript). You can use "psnup -2" instead of "mpage -2" in the steps below.

If your document is in postscript format, execute this command,

Take DOCUMENT.pdf, and view it in Acrobat Reader for Linux.
Print the document, select postscript level II fonts, and instead of printing to a printer, print to a file and overwrite "DOCUMENT.ps". I assume you have a copy of the original elsewhere.

Now, follow these steps. First, the set of steps to using a duplex printer. The second set of steps for a non-duplex printer.

psbook -s4 DOCUMENT.ps > Temp.ps
mpage -2 Temp.ps > NEW.ps
ps2pdf NEW.ps

Or to get rid of step 2,
psbook -s4 DOCUMENT.ps | mpage -2 > NEW.ps
ps2pdf NEW.ps

Now you have both NEW.ps or NEW.pdf. View NEW.pdf in either gv or Acrobat Reader! It will look a little weird since you are printing books. Please remember to set your duplex printer to print on the short edge, and not the long edge.

Now, for the non-duplex printers (most printers), follow the steps in the article Micro Publishing.

mpage -O -b Letter -o DOCUMENT.ps > front.ps
mpage -E -b Letter -o DOCUMENT.ps > back.ps
ps2pdf front.ps
ps2pdf back.ps

Now, what you have to do, which is a pain, is too print one side, then flip it over and print the other file on the other side.

Make your book!

Make your book as described in the original Micro Publishing article.

Now copy your book for multiple copies.

If you need to make multiple copies of a book, print out another copy. If you know you are going to need more, then use a photocopier to make more copies. Printing out postscript files can take a long time, and photocopying can save a lot of time. You might even want to go down to your local office store to make the photocopies or buy a risograph or other tools for making copies in large amounts.

Remember to specify you want double-sided printing at your local office store.

Conclusion

There are several ways to make books. The suggested way is to use a postscript duplex laser printer. If you don't, and you make more than a few of these books, it will be a pain in the butt. It is also suggested that you get a paper folding machine. If you make more than a few of these books, it is a pain to fold the paper, it is tedious, and it is not fun. I personally think churches, libraries, and non-profit companies could benefit from a process like this. Just make the final product professional looking, and everything is okay.

Several people have also told us of cheap places, which will make books for you, that can be cheaper than making the books yourself. This is true. But ....

If you want to make it now, it is much easier to do it immediately when you have your own setup.
If you just want a few copies because they change all the time, making the books yourself can be nice.
Not everyone in the US is located near a place that can make books for you.
It is just cool to be able to make your own books.

Personally, I, Mark, hate to be dependent on other companies. I try to be independent as much as possible, and so, I will be making my own books anyways.

I truly hope people will band together to make their own books so that the technology behind it gets cheaper, faster, and easier to manage. People with better ideas will come along, and make the process better. In short, get involved in the free software movement and the free documentation movement.

I will most likely post another update in the next 6 months. I want to

Get better Glue.
Find a cheap way to have a good-looking book cover (laminated).
Develop a better book press.
Find a way to cut down the fonts on the books and to reduce the overall size of the pdf documents without using commercial software, but free software. I recently saw a Perl Module which might help out with this. If you can get the source code for documentation in Tex or LaTex, it makes the process easier and the fonts are usually pretty good.
Be able to make at least one book every 10 minutes.

Mark works as a computer guy at The Computer Underground and also at ZING and also at GNUJobs.com (soon).

"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

An Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming in Python

By Michael Orr

Somebody asked Michael Williams if he could do Python and Java versions of his article An Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming in C++. Here's a Python version of the code. I'll comment on the differences between C++ and Python. Perhaps somebody else can write a Java version?

I am assuming you know the basics of Python. If not, see the excellent Tutorial and the other documentation at http://www.python.org/doc/.

Houses and more houses

To represent Michael's house (in section Classy! in the C++ article), we can use the following code: (text version)

#! /usr/bin/python
"""house.py -- A house program.
This is a documentation string surrounded by triple quotes.
"""

class House:
	pass

my_house = House()
my_house.number = 40
my_house.rooms = 8
my_house.garden = 1

print "My house is number", my_house.number
print "It has", my_house.rooms, "rooms"
if my_house.garden:
	garden_text = "has"
else:
	garden_text = "does not have"
print "It", garden_text, "a garden"

If we run it, it prints:

My house is number 40
It has 8 rooms
It has a garden

What does this program do? First, we define what a generic house is in the class block. pass means "do nothing" and is required if the block would otherwise be empty. Then we create an instance (that is, a particular house) by calling the class name as if it were a function. The house is then stored in the variable my_house.

This house initially has no attributes--if we were to query my_house.number before setting it, we'd get an AttributeError. The next three lines set and create the attributes. This is a difference between the languages: Java instances start out with certain attributes which can never change (although their values can change), but Python instances start out with no attributes, and you can add or delete attributes (or change their type) later. This allows Python to be more flexible in certain dynamic situations.

We can initialize the instance at creation time by including a special __init__ method. (A method is a function which "belongs" to a class.) This program: (text version)

#! /usr/bin/python
"""house2.py -- Another house.
"""

class House:
	def __init__(self, number, rooms, garden):
		self.number = number
		self.rooms = rooms
		self.garden = garden

my_house = House(20, 1, 0)

print "My house is number", my_house.number
print "It has", my_house.rooms, "rooms"
if my_house.garden:
	garden_text = "has"
else:
	garden_text = "does not have"
print "It", garden_text, "a garden"

prints:

My house is number 20
It has 1 rooms
It does not have a garden

Because the class has an __init__ method, it's automatically called when an instance is created. The arguments to House are really the arguments to __init__. Although most programs don't, you can also call __init__ yourself as many times as you want: my_house.__init__(55, 14, 1). This tells the object to "reinitialize itself".

Note that __init__ is defined with an extra first argument, self. But we don't specify self when we call the method. All Python methods work like this. self is in fact the instance itself, and Python supplies it behind the scenes. You need self because it's the only way the method can access the instance's attributes and other methods. Inside the method, self.rooms means the instance's attribute rooms, but rooms means the local variable rooms. Local variables, of course, vanish when the method ends. Python's use of self is parallelled in Perl and other OO languages as well.

Michael didn't tell you, but C++ has a this pointer which works like Python's self. However, in C++ you don't have to type this->house if there is no local variable house, and you never type this on a method definition line. In other words, C++ (and Java) do the same thing as Python and Perl; they just hide it from the programmer.

In fact, self in Python is just a conventional name. You can call it this or me instead if you like. I actually like me better. However, I stick with self so that if somebody else has to maintain my work later, it will be easier for them to read. In contrast, C++'s variable this is magic and cannot be renamed.

In the C++ program, garden is a boolean attribute. Python doesn't have boolean attributes, so we use an integer instead. The expression my_house.garden is true if the attribute is 1 (or any non-zero, non-empty value).

Don't be square

This section corresponds to the "Member Functions" section in Williams' article. I prefer the term "method" over "member function", as Pythoneers usually do. Michael's square.c program would look like this: (text version)

#! /usr/bin/python
"""square.py -- Make some noise about a square.
"""

class Square:
	def __init__(self, length, width):
		self.length = length
		self.width = width

	def area(self):
		return self.length * self.width

my_square = Square(5, 2)
print my_square.area()

prints

area should be self explanatory because it works exactly like __init__ above. To reiterate, all the selfs in square.py are required. I have chosen to give Square an __init__ method rather than setting the attributes later, because that's what most Python programmers would do.

Function definitions outside the class definition

Nothing to say here. Python does not allow methods to be defined outside the class. Of course, this doesn't apply to ordinary (non-class) functions.

Public or private?

Not much to say here either. All Python attributes and methods are public. You can emulate private attributes and methods via the double-underscore hack, but most Python programmers don't. Instead, they count on the programmer not to abuse the class's API.

Class constructors

The __init__ method is the constructor.

Arrays and classes

Williams' array example can't be coded literally because of differences between the languages, but one equivalent is: (text version)

#! /usr/bin/python
"""person.py -- A person example.
"""
class Person:
	def __init__(self, age, house_number):
		self.age = age
		self.house_number = house_number

alex = []
for i in range(5):
	obj = Person(i, i)
	alex.append(obj)

print "Alex[3] age is", alex[3].age
print

for alexsub in alex:
	print "Age is", alexsub.age
	print "House number is", alexsub.house_number

This prints:

Alex[3] age is 3

Age is 0
House number is 0
Age is 1
House number is 1
Age is 2
House number is 2
Age is 3
House number is 3
Age is 4
House number is 4

Python has no equivalent to person alex[5] in the C++ program, which creates an array of five empty instances all at once. Instead, we create an empty list and then use a for loop (which sets i to 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4 respectively) to populate it. The example shows a loop subscripting a list by index number, another loop which gets each element in the list directly, and a print statement which access an element by index number.

"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

The Quanta HTML Editor

By Martin Skjøldenrand

[This is part III in a series on HTML editors. Part I focused on CoffeeCup's HTML Editor ++. Part II was about Bluefish. -Ed.]

This will conclude my look into HTML editors for now. I've gotten a few questions about other HTML editors and I'll look at one of them in this article. There are lot's of HTML editors out there - many of which I haven't used at all, or recently. A few seem unmaintained (like asWedit, Ashe) and frankly I find little point in using unmaintained and quite limited software when there are very good alternatives. Which leeds us on to ....

Quanta

http://quanta.sourceforge.net

v 1.0

OK - I cheated I grabbed a rpm on the quanta site and installed from there. No problems at all it just slipped in to my Mandrake machine. Just like an install should behave. First thing that meets the eye is that Quanta follows the new standard of tabbed tool palettes instead of multiple button rows. This is definately a Good Thing (TM) as otherwise the button rows easily grab too much screen real estate. The palettes are more limited than those in Bluefish lacking CSS and PHP "wizards" to name two.

Another thing that meets my eye is a problem with all KDE applications. It's ugly. Yes, a wholy subjective notion I agree but nevertheless visual impressions play some part in forming an opinion about a piece of software. That said I think that some of the tool buttons are better than those found on (e.g.) Bluefish.

A third pretty obvious feature of Quanta, one which I like, is the directory tree on the left hand side of the screen. Double-clicking a file in the tree opens it in the editor screen. I miss this in Bluefish. There is no drag-and-drop between the directory tree and the editor screen though.

Writing and editing text

I will turn to a couple of thing that has been bugging me about Quanta in the past - and there still is a problem in this respect. Firstly - how do I make the editing screen wrap lines? Continuing this line for more than what's visible produces a very long line. This is the standard setting, which in my humble opinion is dumb. I found the wrap lines settings is Options/Editor Options. So that is a problem less. The second irritant is that the default font for Quanta is Courier, a serif font set a 12 pt. Two things about this, I think most people agree now that a sans-serif font is best for the screen, and a serif font, if acceptable, is hard to read at 12 pt on a 1024x768 screen. Changing the setting to 14 pt Clean is OK for me. Just noticed that writing this sentence and formating "is" as bold re-formated the display. Now I get much smaller margin for writing. Weird. Apparently what happened was that the word wrap doesn't take hold until another tag has been completed.

Minor irritants as these migh be, a thing that is a problem, and seems to be a bigger one at that, is the handling of extended ASCII. Opening a page written in Swedish you might be excused to believe that some kind of DOS virus has mirculously struck in Linux. Where there once was beautiful extended characters like ä and ö there is white space. This is because Quanta does a "on-the-fly" translation of these characters to the entities equivalents. But - this feature is only one way. If you've written a page full of extended characters Quanta isn't smart enough to translate these when opening the page. And, to make matters worse - the entity translation is buggy. It manages ä and ö but fails on å and ü, handling the latter as seperate dots and the letter u.

To end this section on a possitive note there is context sensitive help and in place tag editing. Highlighting a tag and then pressing the right mouse button you get a context menu including context help, tag attributes and tag edit. For the two latter you select either and simply fill in your attributes. Quanta does the rest. Neat. Selecting context help naturally opens the relevant passage in the hypertext HTML reference document. Which goes to prove that the best Linux HTML editors are catching up with HomeSite. Next evolutionary step would be linux-questions-only@ssc.completion where you (even more simply) type SPACE within a tag and get a list of attributes to select, and so on.

Document preview

A neat feature of Quanta is the possibility to have a preview of the page you are working with unfortunately this is not a real-time feature but seems rather to be a snapshot of the document as some time in the past. When doing this review I've had problems in getting Quanta to understand that I want a preview of another page. Loading a page brings you the preview of that page. Loading another and making it active changes the preview. Here the problems start. Changing between the loaded documents doesn't change the preview. Nor does unloading the document that is previewed. The only way to refresh the review window (I've found) is to exit Quanta and reload the documents.

The lefthand frame

To do Quanta justice I must mention the left hand frame once more. In it you have four separe tabs. The default shows you the complete directory tree, although why it doesn't default to the working directory is beyond me. It is very useful for quickly finding your files wherever they may be. You've got a Struct tab which shows you the structure of the document you are working with, broken down into separate major tags like P, IMG and Hx. Clicking on one of those brings you to that place in the doc. Neat and useful. Even neater would be if you could drag those tags around and thereby rearrange the document in the editor. Perhaps in some future version. The fourth tag is for HTML documentation. It is hyperlinked document providing all the information you might ever need for writing correct HTML 4 documents. There is also a tab for Project management - which I haven't used for this review.

Summary

There has been some time since I looked at Quanta and I must admit to being a bit impressed at the progress of the editor.All in all Quanta is a very nice HTML editor, very powerfull but with a major bug for non-English users that rely on extended ASCII for their webpages. I've also found somewhat more minor irritants in Quanta than when using Bluefish.

File handling, document structure and HTML documentation, is very impressive and something that I miss in Bluefish. It might be enough to give Quanta a lead over the latter for those that are not dependent on extended characters for their documents.

"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

Jay Beale and the Bastille Linux Project

By Dave Wreski
Originally published at LinuxSecurity.com ( original article)

Recently I got an opportunity to speak with Jay Beale, the Lead Developer of the Bastille Project. Jay is the author of several articles on Unix/Linux security, along with the upcoming book "Securing Linux the Bastille Way," to be published by Addison Wesley. At his day job, Jay is a security admin working on Solaris and Linux boxes. You can learn more about his articles, talks and favorite security links via http://www.bastille-linux.org/jay.

LinuxSecurity.com:� Can you briefly describe the bastille-linux project? What is the goal/objective of bastille?

Jay Beale:�Bastille Linux is a project to harden, or "lock-down," Linux systems. It asks the user a number of questions, which it uses to provide the most comprehensive security, without removing needed functionality. We're trying to make a more secure environment for every class of user, without restricting them too much.

We've been very successful so far - Bastille can stop almost every single root grab vulnerability that I know of against Red Hat 6.x. In the case of the well-known BIND remote root vulnerability, we had secured against that one before it was even discovered!

LinuxSecurity.com:� How was it started?

Jay Beale:� Bastille started about almost two years ago, when Jon Lasser began making UMBC Linux, a secure distribution that he could give out to students and faculty, without worrying that their new boxes would be quickly "rooted." While at a SANS conference, he met a number of people who were doing the same thing. Through a beer-enabled Birds of a Feather (BoF) session, they decided to stop duplicating effort, banding together to create the new Bastille Linux distribution.

Fast forward a few months. As many would-be distribution makers quickly learn, this group found out that making a new distribution was very hard work, before you even tried to secure it. They shifted strategy, and instead decided to modify the existing Red Hat distribution. This was faster and could be far more comprehensive. I joined up then, bringing a rather long Perl script with me that would turn a virgin Red Hat 6.0 box into more secure one. Jon and I became partners, Lead Coordinator and Lead Developer, and I posted a "modules wanted" sign in the form of a Spec Document for the script.

At that point, we were joined by the people that make up our core team, including Pete Watkins, who brought his strong and comprehensive IPCHAINS firewall, Sweth Chandramouli, who's helping me with architecture design, and Mike Rash, who's working on Intrusion Detection. We've got a great team on board, really, with a number of people dedicated to testing Bastille and generating ideas.

LinuxSecurity.com:� Can you describe your background? How long have you been involved with security and Linux?

Jay Beale:� Two years ago, I was a mathematician with an interest in computing and physics. I became interested in computer security when I took my first sysadmin job about two years ago. Security is one of the few areas of computing that is rather complex - yet, there's an underlying structure running through the entire field. It really fascinated me from the beginning, so I read everything I could find and started tinkering at home and at work.

Later on, I began working as a security admin., doing everything from writing host-based Intrusion Detection, to handling hacker break-ins, to writing hardening scripts. Bastille's main module development started as an extension of ideas I implemented for Solaris, actually. Now, I'm writing a book on applied Linux Security for Addison Wesley and writing articles for various sites, in addition to keeping up with Bastille, which is no small task.

LinuxSecurity.com: Do you ever expect vendors to ship Linux in a configuration that obviates the need for such a project?

Jay Beale: This really is possible, though it's a long shot... The problem is that users need their systems to "work" and, more and more, they don't have the time to tinker with them a great deal first. So, most vendors ship with ftp on, Apache with server-side-includes/cgi enabled, and no password on single user mode.

You see, to secure a system, you'll have to remove some functionality. This is due to a basic premise of computer security: to fully secure a system, you really have to grind it into dust, scatter the pieces to the wind, and hope that Entropy does it's part. Since you can't do this, you make tradeoffs.

I think things like Bastille will always be around for three reasons. First, vendors have incentives to make systems easy to use - Bastille works against this, but educates the admin/user to compensate. Second, we're going to keep researching, creating and implementing ideas before the vendors. Third, much of what we do isn't necessarily the vendor's "job" - implementing an intrusion detection system is usually a third party function. Bastille does a great deal to systems and we're about to start doing even more - we're growing beyond a simple hardening system into more facets of system security.

LinuxSecurity.com: What are the most difficult challenges you've faced while developing it?

Jay Beale: The toughest problems are really in the architecture, rather than features. Bastille's original goal to make a new distribution, press our own CD's and such. Then, we were still making a new distro, by installing Red Hat and modifying that directly after install. Now, we can modify a year-old system, but that took an architecture overhaul and an intense code audit to implement. This wasn't so much an added feature, as the problem was getting redefined after we implemented our first solution!

Actually, another problem that we're considering over time is that as Bastille does more and more, it has to ask a lot more questions! Right now, if you read all the explanations, it takes about an hour to run through the interactive portion. It's nowhere near as bad as a Linux kernel, but it annoys some users who just want a quick fix. Rather than abandoning these users, we're making "One Shot" configurations, where they can choose a sample configuration that matches their own and deploy that. While they miss a crucial part of securing the system (Secure the Admin!) they still get a safer system...

LinuxSecurity.com: What type of user would be most interested in running bastille?

Jay Beale: I think Bastille is accessible to every class of user, from the newbie to experienced admins. Every class of user tends to find it more comprehensive than anything they do by hand. Newbies find it useful because it explains everything it wants to do and asks questions, so as not to break anything. Experienced sysadmins find it useful because it automates what would normally take many man-hours, especially when you scale it to hundreds of systems. Further, many experienced sysadmins haven't ever had the time to learn about or implement security on their systems. They find themselves trying to make time, in the middle of the night, right after someone "hacks" their systems.

LinuxSecurity.com: What do you think of the state of security today on Linux?

Jay Beale: I think Linux security is getting better, but we're in a tough arena. Given the accessibility of Linux, most crackers have it on hand and are coding exploits for it first. Using Open source makes a program that much easier to audit for holes, so people are discovering some of the vulnerabilities very quickly and not all of them are White Hats. It's also a difficult situation, in that development is moving so much faster than audits.

Honestly, we've also got an amazing advantage: we've got the numbers, baby. The "Ping of Death" vulnerability was corrected in, if reports are to be believed, 1 hour for Linux. No vendor came close to that! While Linux may have had many more security vulnerabilities than Solaris in the past three years, these holes get patched a whole lot faster. Kurt Seifried's report on this noted that while Sun has, on average, only six announced vulnerabilities per year, it takes then around 90 days to fix them - this doesn't even account for all the programs, like WU-ftpd or BIND 8, that you generally add to a Sun box. The thing to remember, though, is that every operating system will have holes. It is human nature to make mistakes, no matter how many geniuses work on a system. Further, there are many creative, bright people in the cracking community - they will win many battles here.

LinuxSecurity.com: What features does it offer the average Linux user?

Jay Beale: Bastille is very accessible to the average user. It doesn't just start securing, but instead asks permission for every step it takes. Further, it educates. This key feature came out of a design problem I faced about a quarter way through writing the first script. The average Linux user tends to install their distro with everything installed and everything turned on, because they're not sure what it all does and they don't want to miss something. Bastille was asking the user questions, like "can we disable routing daemons?" when we hadn't explained what a routing daemon was or why they shouldn't need one. Pete and I ended up writing explanations for each question, so anyone could make educated choices, whether they were a newbie or an experienced sysadmin.

Bastille also has lots of other nice features: it can be re-run to keep a system secure after patches, everything it does can be undone, and it's fairly comprehensive. It tightens user account security, configures a well-tuned firewall, configures Apache, makes sane boot security choices, configures some smart PAM options, chroot's your DNS server, restricts access within your FTP server, sets better file permissions and audits your Set-UID root programs. It also configures stronger logging, locks down Sendmail a bit, and tries to turn off services and daemons that you don't need. This is really just the start, though! We're expanding this right now with new modules, including a basic network IDS system and a number of other modules under development.

LinuxSecurity.com: What new features are you working on?

Jay Beale: Expect some really incredible news on this in a few months. We're kicking around some great architecture ideas with the help of Yoann Vandoorselaere, from Mandrake. Sweth and others are helping us move rapidly to support far more than just Red Hat and Mandrake. We're eyeing FreeBSD, Solaris, Irix, Slackware, Debian and everything we can possibly generalize this to.

LinuxSecurity.com: What do you think are the biggest security concerns with using Linux today?

Jay Beale: Honestly, there aren't too many other security concerns that are specific to Linux. All of it generalizes to Unix and most of it applies to operating systems as a whole.

I think too many programs run with superuser privilege. We can kludge this, the way we do with programs that drop privilege, but we can also stop making this an all-or-nothing, user-or-root game. We should think beyond the basic security mechanisms present in Unix/Linux. Let's start implementing our programs using capabilities and dropping the number of programs on the system which use root.

Actually, I think computer security as a whole is a very tough problem. We're trying to make computers easier and easier to use, often at the cost of security. Cracker activity has grown immensely, as many more would-be script kiddies get Internet access. When I got my first shell account, the Internet was well known mostly among the University crowd - now, everyone's got access to the Internet and it's becoming a rougher neighborhood. I'm not saying world-wide Internet access is bad - it's an amazing resource, but one that some people are choosing to abuse.

LinuxSecurity.com: Security is always about tradeoffs. What tradeoffs do you face while developing bastille? Certainly it would be easiest to just remove rlogin, telnet, and other inherently-insecure programs, but this isn't always possible.

Jay Beale: Well, I think we've got a nice solution here. We're letting the user decide what tradeoffs to make and we're providing the user with the background to make that decision. Bastille is highly granular, taking many actions and asking the user about each one. In the end, the user decides whether or not to kill telnet, but we try to help them make an educated decision, by presenting facts like these: telnet is cleartext, so that someone eavesdropping can steal your account from under you - using programs like hunt, they can even steal your entire session!

Educating the end-user and letting them make all the decisions was a new approach, but we felt it was the only one that worked for a community as diverse in background as the Linux community.

LinuxSecurity.com: Thanks for taking the time with us today, and we wish you and your team members the greatest of success with this project!

"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

The Back Page

About This Month's Authors
Not Linux

About This Month's Authors

Shane Collinge

Part computer programmer, part cartoonist, part Mars Bar. At night, he runs around in a pair of colorful tights fighting criminals. During the day... well, he just runs around. He eats when he's hungry and sleeps when he's sleepy.

Fernando Correa

Fernando is a computer analyst just about to finish his graduation at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Now, he has built with his staff the best Linux portal in Brazil and have further plans to improve services and content for their Internet users.

Jim Dennis

Jim Dennis is the proprietor of Starshine Technical Services. His professional experience includes work in the technical support, quality assurance, and information services (MIS) departments of software companies like Quarterdeck, Symantec/ Peter Norton Group, and McAfee Associates -- as well as positions (field service rep) with smaller VAR's. He's been using Linux since version 0.99p10 and is an active participant on an ever-changing list of mailing lists and newsgroups. He's just started collaborating on the 2nd Edition for a book on Unix systems administration. Jim is an avid science fiction fan -- and recently got married at the World Science Fiction Convention in Anaheim.

Pat Eyler

"pate" is a linux/unix/networking geek who enjoys playing on the command line. When he's not puttering with or writing about computers and networks he likes to play with his kids, cook, and read. Talk to him at pate@gnu.org.

Nicolay Alfredo GIRALDO Leiva

I'm an undergraduate ex-student of Computer Sciences. I left the university for economic reasons and now I'm technical consultant and writer. I have been programming since the age of 15, but I made my first real programs when I was in the university, except for a tetris clone.

Eric Kasten

I'm a software developer by day and an artist, web developer, big dog, gardener and wine maker by night. This all leaves very little time for sleep, but always enough time for a nice glass of Michigan Pinot Gris. I have a BS double major in Computer Science and Mathematics and an MS in Computer Science. I've been using and modifying Linux since the 0.9x days. I can be reached via email at kasten@sunpuppy.com or through my website at http://www.sunpuppy.com.

Sean Lamb

I'm currently working on completing my BS degree in Computer Science at Lakeland College (begun earlier at the University of California, Riverside). I've been involved in computer support for the past 6 years, via phone, fax, and email, and I have created documentation for use by end users (some articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base) and other support staff (published in-house as either individual documents or on the support intranet), and I contributed some chapters to "Special Edition Using KDE" from Que publishing (now in print). I have done some application development on MS-DOS platforms and have begun developing a pair of applications for my Linux box. I am currently employed as a software developer working in C++ with Informix on a mix of Linux and AIX servers. When I'm not playing with or writing about Linux, I can usually be found working on my model railroad.

Mark Nielsen

Mark founded The Computer Underground, Inc. in June of 1998. Since then, he has been working on Linux solutions for his customers ranging from custom computer hardware sales to programming and networking. Mark specializes in Perl, SQL, and HTML programming along with Beowulf clusters. Mark believes in the concept of contributing back to the Linux community which helped to start his company. Mark and his employees are always looking for exciting projects to do.

Krassimir Petrov

Krassimir has a PhD in Agricultural Economics from Ohio State University. He also has an MA in Economics and a BA in Business (Finance, Accounting, Management).

Mike Orr

Mike is the Editor of the Linux Gazette. You can read what he has to say in the Back Page column in this issue. He has been a Linux enthusiast since 1991 and a Debian user since 1995. He is SSC's web technical coordinator, which means he gets to write a lot of Python scripts. Non-computer interests include Ska/Oi! music and the international language Esperanto.

Martin Skjöldebrand

Martin is a former archaeologist who now does system administration for a 3rd world aid organisation. He also does web design and has been playing with computers since 1982 and Linux since 1997.

Dave Wreski

Dave has been involved with Internet and computer security for five years, and has contributed to the development of Linux since the early 1990's. He was recently commissioned by a major technology publishing firm to write a definitive book on Linux Security. Dave has acted as the Internet security architect for United Parcel Service, the author of several Linux security articles, and co-authors the Linux Security HOWTO.

Not Linux

There's been a flurry of activity behind the scenes this month. The Answer Gang is finally on track and has taken over all tech-support questions to the Gazette. We're also experimenting with ways to improve the TAG index and LG FAQ to make it easier to find previous answers to (and articles about) frequently-asked questions.

This issue also marks the debut of the new cartoon series Tuxedo Tails.

News Bytes was not available by the publishing deadline and will return next month.

Happy Linuxing!

Michael Orr
Editor, Linux Gazette, gazette@ssc.com

August 2000, Issue 56 Published by Linux Journal

Visit Our Sponsors:

Table of Contents:

Copyright © 1996-2000 Specialized Systems Consultants, Inc.

"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

The Mailbag!

Contents:

Help Wanted -- Article Ideas

Rock Linux

Free Linux ISPs Revisited

can't connect to ISP

TV-out Support

A parallel connection.

'to be cleaned' State of DAT Drives

CB Radio Internet Connection

SWAT

Accessing a web server behind a Linux firewall

Linux Distros Install Programs

serial consoles, install, boot, etc

Re-installing Windows 98 on a Linux (Mandrake 7.0) OS.

Connection to XServer and sendmail

procmail arguement list

kppp dialer.

MAC Address Direct Connection

Swapping ega for vga+

Using Hindi in Emacs

swapoff swapon

pop over ssh

FTP restart Q

xdm

HELP: Crontab not running nested executable

Gnome panel left me! I want it back.

Netware login in without IPX

ISDN and PPP

Well known Port numbers

i740 - OpenGL?? Possible ?

Syslog for Linux

Linux DEVFS

web upload w/Perl

Chat server

General Mail

The Editor wrote:

Werner responded:

meanwhile, Luis Diaz G. <hlod_wig137@hotmail.com> wrote:

Felipe responded:

Questions on Linux

Career or Job Board Software

Steve wrote back:

This page written and maintained by the Editors of the Linux Gazette. Copyright © 2000, gazette@ssc.com Published in Issue 56 of Linux Gazette, August 2000

Contents:

Greetings from Heather Stern

Danish Translated: Overclocking.

Regarding #36: Plug and Pray Problems.

Regarding #55: "Simple Shell and Cron Question"

Checksum Script

Accessing an NT Fileserver

FIPS

Removing Linux Partitions

Looking for a 'dump'

MMDF Anti-Relaying?

Making CDs

HELP

Binfmt/Exec Format Errors in /linuxrc on initrd

Mandrake and the Missing Modem

Making the Laptop's Fan Run

MX Records and Precedence Values

Re: unable to open a initial console

Also: A Short Guide on How to do Backups and Recovery:

unable to open a initial console

RE: uninstall

Basica Fascist SysAdmin's Laundry List

More on TCP Wrappers and telnet Connection Delays

Linux in a Windows NT Domain (under a PDC)

automating windows telnet to linux

Telnet Clients for Windows and Linux

Port 80 Telnet

Connection Refused

Loadlin trouble

Linux vs. MS Exchange for Mail Server

Linux (and free software) vs. MS NT + MS Exchange for E-mail

This page written and maintained by the Editors of the Linux Gazette. Copyright © 2000, gazette@ssc.com
Published in Issue 56 of Linux Gazette, August 2000

Binfmt/Exec Format Errors in `/linuxrc` on initrd

This page written and maintained by the Editors of the Linux Gazette. Copyright © 2000, gazette@ssc.com
Published in Issue 56 of Linux Gazette, August 2000

Copyright © 2000, Shane Collinge
Published in Issue 56 of Linux Gazette, August 2000

By Fernando Ribeiro Corrêa
This and other interviews are on the OLinux site

Copyright © 2000, Fernando Ribeiro Corrêa
Published in Issue 56 of Linux Gazette, August 2000

Copyright © 2000, Jim Dennis
Published in Issue 56 of Linux Gazette, August 2000

Copyright © 2000, Pat Eyler and New Riders Publishing
Published in Issue 56 of Linux Gazette, August 2000