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

22 Jun '01

"John Seago" <john.seago(a)btinternet.com> writes: > Railing against the defensive manoeuvres of Microsoft does little for your > stress levels and nothing to defeat their public relations drive. Talking about it inside groups like this releases the stress of having this sort of thing waved in our faces by the pointy haired ones, reminds us just *why* it's flawed and does less damage than talking about it in public. Then we can go out and put together some good pro-Linux material, right? (Hey, where's the stuff for the web site that people said they would do?... hrm, where's the piece I'm supposed to write, too? ;-) ) -- MJR

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Re: Microsoft FUD
by John Seago 22 Jun '01

22 Jun '01

Having read the comments on the Microsoft 'Press Release', May I make a comment? It appears to me that the way to deal with such matters is, as the Americans put it, 'not to get mad but to get even', the way to combat such propaganda is to counter it in public, not to execrate it in private. Promotion of an operating system with which you are all so obviously involved will do more good than venting your ire to each other. I finally took the plunge having read many of the 'Linux' web sites and installed a linux operating system on my computer. At the same time I managed to convince my daughter's boyfriend to do so on his. Each time you gather a new convert you are making another ally for the Free source/Open source movement which will, in time, I am sure become the prevailing operating system. Railing against the defensive manoeuvres of Microsoft does little for your stress levels and nothing to defeat their public relations drive. John Seago

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

22 Jun '01

David Freeman <david_freeman(a)rocketmail.com> writes: > The point is people will beleive him, why should they listen to a group > of geeks? What linux lacks is the marketing machine which can put out > the reverse FUD on MS and thus balance things? I've been quite impressed with the recent xinit and DNUK efforts, but they're still focusing on preaching to the choir in order to sell more of their machines. Hopefully one or both will start in the mainstream Real Soon Now. > [...] Will the mac > with linux/BSD/OS X be able to compete finally on the open market? No. > Apple have got the Ease of use thing down to an art, linux and the FS > communitee have power and reliability down to a tee, so why not mix > both together and we could then really rock the planet? Apple make some quite fundamental user interface errors in the more recent versions of their interface (it's a long time since 1984). I think that looking at all interfaces which have gone before and mixing bits up, picking the best from each, but focusing on simplicity, is the way to heaven. It's what I'm trying to do, anyway. I'll let you know if I succeed... ;-) -- MJR

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

22 Jun '01

Adam Bower <abower(a)thebowery.co.uk> writes: > I find it very amusing, to think that a few years ago M$ had their head in > the sand and issued statements along the lines of "Linux is for niche > markets" and "specialist applications" now they have to resort to lies. First they ignore you, etc. I like that phrase this week, don't I? -- MJR

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

22 Jun '01

Steve Fosdick <fozzy(a)pelvoux.demon.co.uk> writes: > Yes, there is more than one GUI toolkit, as it GNOME/KDE, and > though applications written for one toolkit are hard to port to the > other, each environment can run applications written for the other > one by installing the necessary libraries. Interesting. Isn't there also more than one interface library to the Windows toolkit? Is that significantly different from having a few different widget libraries? I only seem to use three with any regularity, anyway: GTK, Xaw and Tk. -- MJR

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pppd problem
by A Glover 21 Jun '01

21 Jun '01

Hi, (Im new to the list too!) 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.

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Microsoft FUD
by Adam Bower 21 Jun '01

21 Jun '01

Apologies if you have already seen this, but I had to post this link. This could be the document with the worst use of grammer (not that mine is great but then hey I'm not an advertising exec) and the greatest FUD (Fear Uncertainty Doubt) from Microsoft ever. Its interesting that M$ now appear to be getting very worried about Linux, where a few years ago they only called it a niche market that would never be serious competitor. http://www.microsoft.com/business/downloads/retail/linux_in_retail_and_hosp… oh yeah if you run strings against the doc you see these classic lines at the bottom :-) Our latest anti-linux paper.. timbel(a)microsoft.com Tim Belvin Microsoft Word Document MSWordDoc Word.Document.8 Adam -- This message is Copyleft - all rights reversed Adam

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Re: [Alug] New Member
by Jenny_Hopkins＠toby-churchill.com 21 Jun '01

21 Jun '01

Neill newman wrote: >I don't want to sound all high and mighty (because I'm not!), but imho >Mandrake is probably the best for beginners. Once they are up to speed >they can then explore other offerings... There are bound to be several re-installations...I started with Red Hat 6.2, installed EVERYTHING available not knowing which packages i would need, reinstalled a few times, played with it for 6 months, and then installed debian, with an absolute minimum. I probably wouldn't have liked to begin with debian - the install gave me some grief with various bits and pieces that i wouldn't have understood if i'd begun with it. Nutter wrote: >oh i also have bad spelling due to the fact im sydlxeci Oh, David and I got excited thinking there was another Ian M Banks fan in our midst ;-) I'm officially no longer the alug newbie now, then.....does this mean i don't have to bring buns and biscuits to the next meeting and make the tea???

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Re: [Alug] Microsoft FUD
by Jenny_Hopkins＠toby-churchill.com 21 Jun '01

21 Jun '01

In reply to Adam's link: Whoever wrote that sounds like a petulant child and bullshitter of the first degree, wonder what he got paid to spout that one out? (I'd have done it for a few grand less....) Seriously, that does have a desperate tone to it. D'you think Bill sees his profit margin decreasing to just the few hundred billion? Just remember, all, - Linux is NOT FREE, your system can be hacked into by ANYONE due to the open source software, and there are NO DRIVERS for ANY of it so it WON'T WORK. The trouble is, of course, that there are a lot of people out there who will read that and believe it. When I first installed linux, the attitude from my peers (and the now infamous windows network administrator..) was "what do you want to go back to that old command-line shit again for? There aren't any applications written for linux, and no drivers...."; an opinion based on articles such as these rather than any known facts. (The same people are now beginning to say they fancy having a look round linux in slightly more impressed tones, you'll be glad to hear). We need a good hacker to hack up a link on that ms page to The Truth. Jen

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Re: [Alug] Hello im new =)
by NuTTeR =) 21 Jun '01

21 Jun '01

>Allegro as in lisp? >Can't spell? You'll fit in on IRC ;-) >Greetings from North End. >-- >MJR No allegro as in the C games programming lib. Its multi platform windowz, QNX, DOS, BEos, MAC and Linux witch is good coz that way there are loadz of games the can just be ported with little trouble... well unless they decided to use some platform specific stuff(DirecX). Try www.allegro.cc its not the official site but has loads of games listed (most with code =). Ye IRC'z ok but i gota use mirc =( coz i dont have my linux machine connected. lol don't think the rest of my family would like an old version of linux the next time they try to do some work on it. hhhmm that's a point is there any linux programs that can make MS word readable files? i think i have been told about one be4... just cant remember much about it =( Dennis -- _______________________________________________ Get your free email from http://www.graffiti.net Powered by Outblaze

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