Liudvikas Bukys

Mark J Cox: Survivability:

So a full install of a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 box that was connected to the internet in November 2003 even without the firewall and without receiving updates would still remain uncompromised (and still running) to this day.

It’s not to say that a RHEL3 user couldn’t get compromised - but that’s not the point of the survivability statistuc. In order to get compromised, a user would have to have either enabled anonymous rsync, SWAT, or be running an open CVS server, none of which are default or common. Or a user would have to take some action like visiting a malicious web site or receiving and opening a malicious email.

Luca Deri, in Improving Passive Packet Capture: Beyond Device Polling (pdf) shows radical (and appalling) differences in packet capture performance among Windows, FreeBSD, and Linux machines, due to differences in device drivers. The paper recommends use of device polling, and the author also implemented a ring-buffer version of libpcap.
[via TaoSecurity]

Bruce Perens whitepaper: UserLinux: Repairing the Economic Paradigm of Enterprise Linux

Wired News: Yet Another Rendition of Linux:

The new version of Linux, called UserLinux, is being proposed by open-source sage Bruce Perens, who claims to have the backing of some of the world’s largest companies, across a number of business sectors. UserLinux, which will be paid for with multimillion-dollar donations from Perens’ corporate backers, will be free for unlimited use, and will be certified by large computer makers.

Red Hat users balk at Enterprise Linux licensing:

While Red Hat says the GPL gives customers the right to copy Red Hat Enterprise Linux freely, it also says it considers unauthorised copying to be a violation of its service contract - something that could lead to a breach of contract lawsuit, according to Bryan Sims, Red Hat’s vice president and associate legal counsel.

…

It will take more than that to win over customers like Argonne National Labs’ Beckman, however. He would like to see Red Hat produce a plain English document that explains what users can and cannot copy under the Enterprise Linux support licence, and he would like to see a price structure that better accommodates the needs of his class of user.

“I don’t know of any site that has lots of processors that plans on buying a per-processor licence,” he said.

SecurityFocus HOME Tools: Encrypted Virtual File System

OSI Position Paper on the SCO-vs.-IBM Complaint: Eric Raymond dissects the SCO complaint lie-by-lie.

Red Hat Linux 9 - World’s First Look at Shrike - OSNews.com

Linux Journal: Health Monitoring with lm_sensors

Vianney (IBM): Hyper-Threading speeds Linux: Multiprocessor performance on a single processor The results on Linux kernel 2.4.19 show Hyper-Threading technology could improve multithreaded applications by 30%. Current work on Linux kernel 2.5.32 may provide performance speed-up as much as 51%.