June 2001 - main - earth.li

Re: [Alug] Virus on Linux?
by MJ Ray 22 Jun '01

22 Jun '01

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). 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. -- MJR

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Disappearing messages
by Adam Bower 22 Jun '01

22 Jun '01

David mentioned earlier that he saw a reply to a message he sent before the message turned up and the same has happended to me several times now today. Is this affecting anyone else? Adam -- This message is Copyleft - all rights reversed Adam

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Re: Microsoft is right Re: [Alug] Microsoft FUD
by MJ Ray 22 Jun '01

22 Jun '01

David Freeman <david_freeman(a)rocketmail.com> writes: > 2)And how much does it cost to employ a MSCE certified tech to run the > NT servers which need more care than a *nix box? Amen. Sadly it seems to mean the nux admins are losing permanent jobs again, though. Maybe that's just what I'm seeing, or maybe we're about to have a resurgence where they *stop* employing busloads of NT/2k admins to patch that service together and employ nux admins to roll out a stable service. > 4)Lack of availble software, on this one they are right, there is > limited stuff for an epos system to use. But for office/desktop and > server applications there are loads of pkgs avaible for free! I thought EPoS had a few options (some commercial) on Linux now, including those used by some large chains. The details elude me, as it's not something I have much of an interest in just now, so I don't pay much attention to it. > 8)Increased labour costs? now this one could be fair, but I don't see > it as much of a problem, but spending money on lots of licenses for > each user will cost more! Wait until they get sued for the mental anguish of 2k/NT admins ;-) > 9)LIMITED DEVELOPER TOOLS! what bollocks, I have on my machine some of > the best tools on the planet with much nicer Ui and better EOU, GCC > with Vi and GDB is everything I need and more with out spending a > penny. Atleast I don't need to spend out on a new compiler every so > often! I've been doing some UI work again (cue flame from Brett) and I'm quite happy with the results so far, if I do say so myself. Anyone else out there tried ROX, http://rox.sourceforge.net/, yet? At last someone's taking the good ideas from RISCOS. > As for the subject, Microsoft are right on a couple of small points, > but it all comes down to how you massage the facts. Anything is > provable given enough imagination. Nothing is provable except logic. Everything else just gathers empirical evidence until it is disproved. -- MJR

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Re: [Alug] Virus on Linux?
by brodders＠cwcom.net 22 Jun '01

22 Jun '01

This is useful: http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue65/lg_toc65.html "A Private Home Network" By Jan Stumpel Here, Jan goes though the steps needed to isolate a linbox from the outside world & still be able to use internet. Some other good articles in that issue too. Steve >on Fri, Jun 22, 2001 at 09:18:51AM +0100, Vanisa Surapipith scribbled: >> >> Can virus attact a linux system? People with MSWindows are constantly >> affected and need to update their Norton or McAfee virus scanner. Is there >> a similar thing in linux world? >> > >Yes. <http://www.big.net.au/~silvio/> >However initial infection can be harder because of the multiuser nature of >gnu/linux (and peer review). Worms are far more common. ><http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5080656,00.html> ><http://www.computeruser.com/news/01/01/23/news13.html> > >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. > >If you do minimal as root, then you significantly reduce the affect of any >infection. Avoiding inherently buggy programs is another useful thing (eg, >wuftpd, pine, bind, vixie's cron, uw imap, qpopper, sendmail). Running minimal >services exposed to the outside world is a must. > >There are scanners, but an ids might be more useful if you're especially paranoid >about such things (snort! rocks. <http://www.snort.org/>) although there is a >tendancy for turning up false positives. > > > >_______________________________________________ >alug, the Anglian Linux User Group list >Send list replies to alug(a)stu.uea.ac.uk >http://www.anglian.lug.org.uk/ http://rabbit.stu.uea.ac.uk/cgi-bin/listinfo/alug >See the website for instructions on digest or unsub! >

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Insurance Co. charges more if a company uses NT than Open Source
by George Waring 22 Jun '01

22 Jun '01

See: http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/stories/news/0,4164,2766275,00.html Offered in counter-point to the M$ claim that was made in "That Word Document." The greater security that M$ claims with their OS is not making much of an impression in the insurance industry. Insurance against the damages caused by hacking bears a 5 to 15% higher premium for Windows NT. George.

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Virus on Linux?
by Vanisa Surapipith 22 Jun '01

22 Jun '01

Hello, I just join ALUG and have a newly installed Red Hat 7.1 on my PC. I hope to explore it fully but there comes a concern on virus. Can virus attact a linux system? People with MSWindows are constantly affected and need to update their Norton or McAfee virus scanner. Is there a similar thing in linux world? Cheers, Vanisa. &------------------------------------------------------------------------& Ms Vanisa Surapipith (Research Postgraduate) School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia, Norwich, Norfolk /_____T NR4 7TJ, United Kingdom. (x)\/(x) ~~~~~~~~

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Re: [Alug] Virus on Linux?
by MJ Ray 22 Jun '01

22 Jun '01

Vanisa Surapipith <V.Surapipith(a)uea.ac.uk> writes: > Can virus attact a linux system? People with MSWindows are constantly > affected and need to update their Norton or McAfee virus scanner. Is there > a similar thing in linux world? Viruses could exist on Linux, but they would have trouble infecting other users on the same system, assuming most of your programs are installed as root and you log in as another user. That's why people say you should be very cautious about doing anything other than the bare minimum as root. Worms and intrusions are more common. That's why everyone says to keep up to date with patches and security updates. As your machine was professionally installed, I assume they installed all known security updates? With RedHat, I don't know if there's an automated tool with it, but you can keep safe by reading either the "Security" page of LWN, http://lwn.net/ (out every Thursday), or the regular Security newsletter (out most Saturdays) from http://www.linuxsecurity.com/ -- MJR

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Re: [Alug] Documentation, network cards and printers
by Jenny_Hopkins＠toby-churchill.com 22 Jun '01

22 Jun '01

David Freeman wrote: >Network cards: This was what was stopping me getting my printer to >work, my FA311 is dud, the 3Com card works fine, but only at 10Mbps :o( I ought to be an expert on 3com card configuration by now. Is it a 509? have you tried either using the debian 3c5x9utils or the 3c5x9config dos batch file where you can change the card settings? Or more simply, isn't there a config file hanging round somewhere where you specify whether the card will use 10Mbps or 100 or whatever? Jenny

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RE: Microsoft FUD
by Earl Brannigan 22 Jun '01

22 Jun '01

Hi all, Had to download that article .... fantastic! (Literally.... pure fantasy). Just a comment, the output from running strings on it is actually visible via the document properties if you have MS WORD -file->properties->custom (I'm writing this at work.) Just for clarity , the line "our latest anti-linux paper" is actually the _EmailSubject property. Huh? Well, that means it was the working title used whenever the document was emailed internally. Thus (presumably) it wasn't meant to remain with the article, ... M$ are quite adept at this 'small oversite' completely destroying their arguments thing, ie. No need to read the article, you can see where its coming from. But it will be intersting to check back in a week or so and see if this line has been removed.... cheers Earl

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Its interesting that M$ now appear to be getting very worried about
by tom potts 22 Jun '01

22 Jun '01

Seems to have found a good way to stop penguins doing anything useful... Do we need to preach to the converted? TOm ____________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.co.uk address at http://mail.yahoo.co.uk or your free @yahoo.ie address at http://mail.yahoo.ie

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