Linux | Nothing of Any Quincyquonce

ZLM7 – mirroring from update.novell.com

by ezs | Nov 10, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Linux, Uncategorized, ZENworks

More snippets from the oft-promised white paper:

This post describes in detail how to mirror content (updates and patches) from Novells update service – update.novell.com.

update.novell.com contains updates for Novell Linux Desktop, Open Enterprise Server and Novell Linux Small Business Suite.

I hope to publish similar articles in the coming days on how to do this for Red Hat Network (for Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and YaST Online Update (for straight SUSE Linux Enterprise Server).

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Open Invitation Network

by ezs | Nov 10, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Linux, Uncategorized

This hit the wires this morning – the Open Invitation Network – Novell, Red Hat, Philips, Sony and IBM are funding this initiative.

From the website:

Open Invention Network (OIN), a company that has and will acquire patents and offer them royalty-free to promote Linux and spur innovation globally, was launched today with financial support from IBM, Novell, Philips, Red Hat, and Sony. The company, believed to be the first of its kind, is creating a new model where patents are openly shared in a collaborative environment and used to facilitate the advancement of applications for, and components of, the Linux operating system.

There has already been coverage on Groklaw, NYT, CNN, Novell Open PR and probably others during the day.

Cool.

ZLM 7 whitepaper

by ezs | Nov 9, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Linux, Uncategorized, ZENworks

Sigh.

I keep getting other priorities. Sorry to anyone who is waiting.

I’ll post a mindmap of where I am soon – problem is that there are still a lot of questions that I need to get answered on this.

My main pain right now is getting SLES 9 support packs cleanly into ZLM7 – this is driven by a customer request. My other pain is some of the internal workings of ZLM and how to best document that.

Thanks for your continued patience.

Lupper – Linux worm

by ezs | Nov 8, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Linux, patching, Uncategorized

ZDNet and others are flagging a new Linux worm.

Quoting McAfee:

The worm blindly attacks web servers by sending malicious http requests on port 80. If the target server is running one of the vulnerable scripts at specific URLs and is configured to permit external shell commands and remote file download in the PHP/CGI environment, a copy of the worm could be downloaded and executed.

There are some well understood methods to minimise this risk.

Practice good security. A good robust perimeter firewall – I use IPcop; along with a good patch regime is vital. I (naturally) use ZENworks Linux Management to keep my Linux servers up to date.

One other addition is application hardening – I blogged a while ago about Novell AppArmor – I run this on my outward facing and internal Linux servers. If anything untoward happens – AppArmor is my final line of defence keeping my servers in good health.

[Edit – also to note – keep your applications themselves up to date; if they are RPM based – ZENworks Linux Management can deliver the updates. My blogging software is WordPress – they posted a note saying the updated versions are not affected.]

KDE vs Gnome

by ezs | Nov 8, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Linux, Uncategorized

There has been a lot of discussion recently about Novell dropping KDE in favour of Gnome on its corporate desktop offering Novell Linux Desktop.

[Note – I really don’t think this matters on a server – clean up your servers; reduce the bloat; reduce the risk – remove X and a desktop from your servers 🙂 Believe me – ssh is your friend]

I’ve posted before on this – my personal opinion is that the real battle is not over KDE vs. Gnome. It’s about making a more productive, good looking, consistent desktop; one that you can “Just Use” (TM). It would be great to see components of KDE running nicely on Gnome, Gnome pieces running on KDE, common themes – can you see my paradise here?

This should not be a religious argument. There has been much work between the two communities – even as far back as the 1.0 versions (common menuing for example).

There have been some notable efforts in this space more recently. freedesktop.org tries to drive interoperability for all GUI/WM environments on X – with some success; even more recently last month the Tango Project was launched to try and deliver a common user experience.

These are all good efforts. I believe Novell has supported several of these initiatives; as well as promoting choice within (over 50% of Novell employees are using NLD as their primary production OS).