June 2001 - main - earth.li

Re: [Alug] Documentation, network cards and printers
by MJ Ray 25 Jun '01

25 Jun '01

David Freeman <david_freeman(a)rocketmail.com> writes: > Documentation: Does any one know of a javadoc equivilent for C? Is this "literate programming"? -- MJR

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Weekly IRC meeting reminder
by Adam Bower 25 Jun '01

25 Jun '01

This is the automated ALUG irc meeting reminder sent to remind you that there is an irc meeting tonight (Monday) at 8.00pm. The meeting takes place on the irc server irc.openprojects.net in the #alug channel, you can take a look at www.openprojects.net to get more info on the openprojects network. Popular irc clients include tkirc, bitchx, xchat and ircII on Unix, and Mirc under windows. Here are some links to help you get started with irc. Unix http://www.bitchx.com http://www.xchat.org http://freshmeat.net http://www.epicsol.org/ (for Brett!) Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!)

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Re: [Alug] Problems with Mandrake, silly questions and the result.
by Jenny_Hopkins＠toby-churchill.com 25 Jun '01

25 Jun '01

John Seago writes: >Having seen how easily his Red Hat went in I installed it in my >computer, the installation was about a 1000% easier than...... Hey! Told ya! Everyone should listen to my wise and knowledgable advice ;-) Your two mails arrived together, John. Go and have a look in the rc.d scripts ( /etc/rc.d/)(I think) to see what happens when the computer is booting up, so if you get a nice red failed message again you can start to see where the problem is. If when booting, the log says "entering runlevel 6" (I think that is the default on Dead Rat) you want to look at rc6.d. This will show you which scripts are started up. >.....buying a hardware >upgrade to make Windows/Office 2000 work. You had a lucky escape then! Jenny.

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Re: [Alug] pppd problem
by MJ Ray 25 Jun '01

25 Jun '01

"A Glover" <Flexifoil(a)btinternet.com> writes: > After over a year away from Linux I decided to install it again, > unfortunatly Ive forgotten how to fix small problems. The current one > and im having no success finding an answer for is disconnecting straight > away with pppd. Distribution is Debian, using the script pon. Add "debug" to /etc/ppp/options and tell us what appears in /var/log/debug please. Thanks. (Remember to take the debug line out when you're done, unless you want to eat disk.) -- MJR

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Stupid question from John Seago
by John Seago 25 Jun '01

25 Jun '01

I have made a start on 'Running Linux', and have got to the passage which entreats beginners NOT to ask simple questions. The problem is whilst I can work the word processor etc., in windows, I don't know how to do much else, so I'm ignoring the sound advice and asking stupid questions, I have no doubt that there will be others. Having, by a combination of a faulty CD, a CD drive which didn't like the first disk of Mandrake 8 had to reinstall Mandrake 8 I have in the long list of script which scrolls down at the beginning 1 item marked [FAILED] in red. The item refers to the Kernel libraries, my question is: Is this Failed notice appearing because I didn't use the second disk, if so how do I put the contents of the second disk in please? John Seago

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Re: Microsoft is right Re: [Alug] Microsoft FUD
by MJ Ray 25 Jun '01

25 Jun '01

"Mark Wilkinson" <mark(a)wiggis.com> writes: > Whoops... Time for a list etiquette reminder: - put your reply at the bottom, not the top - trim irrelevant material (esp sigs) from the quote - no HTML email - no attachments, not even automatic ones -- MJR

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Re: [Alug] Disappearing messages
by MJ Ray 25 Jun '01

25 Jun '01

Adam Bower <abower(a)thebowery.co.uk> writes: > Is this affecting anyone else? It's OK here. It might be a local problem to your ISP causing some messages to be queued for retry, so they arrive out of order. -- MJR

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Re: [Alug] Virus on Linux?
by Earl Brannigan 25 Jun '01

25 Jun '01

Hi all, tell its Friday, Earl get's a little time out to post. > Message: 16 > To: xsprite(a)bigfoot.com > Cc: alug(a)stu.uea.ac.uk > Subject: Re: [Alug] Virus on Linux? > From: MJ Ray <markj(a)cloaked.freeserve.co.uk> > Organization: Cat-killingly bad > Date: 22 Jun 2001 12:49:23 +0100 > > xsprite(a)bigfoot.com writes: > > > If you have a high amount of bandwidth, or your isp provides a > > service such as cable, you are likely to get scanned (I do atleast > > once every two days or so) whether the scan is for open netbios > > shares or the latest s'kiddie 0day. > > My home dial-up machine gets scanned pretty much every evening for > samba shares. I intend to develop a small samba share of poisoned > files padded out with 0s (so they compress well and go up the modem > fast). > The most likely culprit here is sharesniffer. (www.sharesniffer.com) It's looking for Windoze (but will of course find any SMB public shares) I have a load of virus algorithms in zip form I could let you have if you wish to set up a SMB 'honeypot' - sorry about the misappropriation. I was actually thinking of doing something like this, put a load of XL/Word files on a drive which are actually just these things. Some are disk crunchers, others boot sector infectors (TSR as well), others just lock your cpu into infinite loops etc. The 'nice' approach would be to just call them MyVeryImportantCreditCardsDetails.doc or something, and the lame script kiddie who has just scanned your machine for things will download it and probably try to open it in Word straight away, excited at the perceived goodies. ..... one would hope that such a donkey is not running a good virus checker. Many are in Assembler for easy inclusion into any proggie..... Been looking for an excuse to use them (only have them for research purposes .... honest..!) Cheers Earl > Yes, don't let anything listen to the external interface unless > absolutely necessary. netstat -a will show what's listening. inetd > always seems to want to listen to everything, but you can use "ALL: > ALL EXCEPT 127." in hosts.deny (man hosts_access) to pin that down to > only the local machine (change to taste) for most services it starts. > Commenting out some lines in /etc/X11/*/Xaccess is also good, as in > running X with -nolisten tcp if you don't use that. > > And use ipchains/iptables just to be sure. > Good Advice .... > -- > MJR > Sorry, I was to have been at the last meet to do a little security demo but couldn't make it at the last minute. This is still a plan if it is still required. Sorry I've forgotten but I know there are a few others who are into this sort of thing (to the point of test-hacking their own machines, playing with nmap/nessus and others. It would be a good idea to collaborate for this, and do a proper job of it as a team... Mail me off list guys and let's start planning, we could have a nice little demo together for the next meet. Cheers Earl Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Albert Einstein)

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RE: Microsoft is right Re: [Alug] Microsoft FUD
by Laurie Brown 22 Jun '01

22 Jun '01

22/06/01 15:02:43, "Mark Wilkinson" <mark(a)wiggis.com> wrote: >I find that the occasional reboot on NT helps to keep things a bit more >stable. About once a week does it for me... My old faithful 486 DX-4/120 with 64meg of crappy old memory and a slow HDD, which runs our firewall has an uptime of: laurie@firewall:~ > uptime 3:27pm up 315 days, 20:30, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 I'd like to see *any* windows box do that, even if all it does is route and filter traffic between three NICs... Cheers, Laurie. --- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Laurie Brown laurie(a)brownowl.com PGP key at http://pgpkeys.mit.edu:11371 ---------------------------------------------------------------------

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Re: Microsoft is right Re: [Alug] Microsoft FUD
by Laurie Brown 22 Jun '01

22 Jun '01

22/06/01 15:47:39, Neill Newman <neill(a)entora.co.uk> wrote: >Laurie Brown wrote: >> >> >> My old faithful 486 DX-4/120 with 64meg of crappy old memory and a slow HDD, which runs >> our firewall has an uptime of: >> >> laurie@firewall:~ > uptime >> 3:27pm up 315 days, 20:30, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 > >cool, don't get caught out by the 497.1 day uptime bug as I did a few >weeks ago.. I thought I had been hacked, turns out the uptime couter >wraps ;).. I remember that one, and saved the mail for future reference! In fact, it'll have to come down soon, to be replaced with a P200 running 2.4.x and iptables. Shame, cos it'd be nice to see it hit a year. In fact, the last power down was the result of a server-room refit, and I've forgotten how long it was up before that. It has never fallen over, and for sure has run for more than a year with no problem of its own making. Let's just say it's been reliable! Here's the ifconfig on the internet-facing NIC (3C-509): laurie@firewall:/home/laurie > ifconfig -i eth0 eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:C0:F0:4D:2F:E4 inet addr:213.155.158.242 Bcast:213.155.158.243 Mask:255.255.255.252 UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:28597916 errors:2 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:2 TX packets:28085146 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:35357 txqueuelen:100 Interrupt:10 Base address:0x6000 It's fairly active for an old girl! Cheers, Laurie. --- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Laurie Brown laurie(a)brownowl.com PGP key at http://pgpkeys.mit.edu:11371 ---------------------------------------------------------------------

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