http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/00/07/30/078252.shtml Windows ME - The End Of UMSDOS And BeOSfs Over Vfat?

What does this mean to future LG readers who have Win2000 and want to dual-boot Linux without using lilo? Are they SOL?

Xlib - example source code

I would like to start writing software with Xlib. I would like to find basic source code files containing small examples (opening windows, drawing lines, writing text, …) with their makefile. My purpose is to convert a GUI written in C language (gcc) for OS9 into a GUI under Linux.

Limbrée Christophe

Linux, NDS and ncpfs

Hi,

I understand that Linux 6.2 (and most likely any following versions) have support for Novell's NDS via ncpfs. And that the IPX-HOWTO explains how to configure ncp client via ncpmount.

However;

1. I could not determine how to configure NDS Tree, or Context. Is this possible? If so how?
2. Since our Novell file servers have been taken up to NDS Patch 8, the Linux boxes can no longer connect to Novell file servers.
3. Is there any documentation on how to configure the NDS side of ncpfs or ixp?
4. Is there any configuration files that I can configure for the above.
5. What documentation is there for ipx_configure and what it configures. And other ixp tools

   George.

   ---

   General Mail

   ---

   • ping ...
   • Complement to Micro Publishing series
   • Diamond Stealth Pro VL contribution in August Linux Gazette
   • Linuz Gazette article - Python
   • resolved problems ?

   ---

   ping ...

   Fri, 25 Aug 2000 15:00:37 -0700 (PDT)
   From: terry white <twhite@aniota.com>

   ... hello:

   couple of questions.

   is this 'list' on-going, or new.

   The TAG list at SSC (linux-questions-only@ssc.com) is new in that we have only instituted the Answer Gang within the last few months. It's ongoing, in that this is the way we will continue onward, to provide better technical answers.

   what should someone new to this list know ...

   Well, you would be someone who is willing to jump in and help other people. You would also be someone who is willing to visit some search engines and find people useful pointers to learn more about the subject you're helping them with. Hopefully you would be able to write clearly enough so that it is fun to read, rather than scary like certain of the HOWTOs I'm not going to name. You don't have to know HTML, though. That's my job. -- Heather

   ---

   Complement to Micro Publishing series

   Fri, 18 Aug 2000 16:01:24 -0300
   From: Bruno Barberi Gnecco <brunobg@psi.com.br>

   Though the series have covered pretty well the "hardware" part --- how to bind, etc --- I have found the software part disappointing. I have always wanted to print some books, but basically for laziness I ended printing in the single sided, A4 format and brought to the nearest copy place to add a cheap plastic cover and spiral binding. Good for software documentation, bad for real books that I wanted to keep in the shelves, instead of in the middle of one of the piles of my desk. Reducing the images by half made the letters too small, and didn't look like a real book --- too many lines.

   I suppose here that you want to print a book that you have the TeX source, or some format that you can output to PostScript modifying the page setup and, therefore, the layout. You may have trouble with texts with figures, since usually the author cared about their size and position. You'll have to follow the #1 law of laboratories: "If you don't know what's going to happen, protect your eyes and tell your buddy to do it".

   The idea is to print in A5 format. If you don't know, a A5 page is exactly half of an A4 page, cut parallel to the smallest side (works for all A? pages: A3 is two A4 pages joined by the larger side). So, you can print two A5 pages in one A4 page, without reducing; and A5 pages are the size of a book. Talk about nice.

   First thing to do is to get the PSUtils package. This is a nice set of utilities that will most of your needs of manipulating PS files. Get them at: ftp.dcs.ed.ac.uk/pub/ajcd or ftp.tardis.ed.ac.uk/users/ajcd. Compile and install.

   Generate the PostScript file. If you're using LaTeX, you can do it using something like:

   
   \documentclass[a5paper]{book}
   

   I had a problem here: when I tried to generate in the A5 format, the page was cut in half. It turned out that the problem was in dvips. If you have this problem, find the file config.ps (probably in /usr/share/texmf/dvips/config) And add the following lines:

   
   @ a5 149mm 210mm
   @+ ! %%DocumentPaperSizes: a5
   @+ %%BeginPaperSize: a5
   @+ a5
   @+ %%EndPaperSize
   

   Alternatively, you can use the following trick:

   
   \geometry{verbose,paperwidth=149mm,paperheight=210mm}
   

   on the beginning of your LaTeX file. Now convert your file to PostScript, and check it to confirm that it's really in the A5 format, and not cropped in the wrong place.

   Now comes the PSUtils. Though Mark Nielsen used mpage, it will not work for this task well, since it will reduce the page. In the PSUtils package there's an utility called pstops, which is very powerful. To do what Mark did with mpage, type the following commands:

   
   pstops "4:3L(21cm,0)+0L(21cm,14.85cm)" file.ps file1.ps
   
   pstops "4:1L(21cm,0)+2L(21cm,14.85cm)" file.ps file2.ps
   

   There is also psbook, which let's you print in large paper with a multiple of 4 pages per side, so you can fold it and it will really be like a book. The problem is to find a printer that accepts A0 paper. It's useful, however, if you can print in A3 paper, because you could print 8 pages in a single sheet (four A5 in each side).

   ---

   Diamond Stealth Pro VL contribution in August Linux Gazette

   Tue, 01 Aug 2000 16:02:58 -0500
   From: Chris Gianakopoulis <acg009@email.mot.com>

   I must apologize for passing misinformation about my Diamond Stealth Pro VL video card. I made the statement that the board uses an 80C929 device. I mistyped the device number! It was supposed to be an 80C928. I truely did proofread my mail before I posted it but somehow I missed that important piece of information. I truely understand that incorrecti information is more dangerous than no information!!!!!!

   My apologies, Chris Gianakopoulos

   ---

   Linuz Gazette article - Python

   Wed, 2 Aug 2000 19:36:16 -0700
   From: Jeremy Parks <parks@nortelnetworks.com<

   I was moreso curious why Python doesn't have self "built-in" to the _init_ method somewhat like C++ and Java do.

   Jeremy Parks

   1. Because the first versions of Python didn't have classes; they were added later. Languages such as Python and Perl which had classes grafted into them later tend to have that 'self' argument explicit, so that they can leverage the existing function-call code which expects all formal parameters to be explicit. ("Formal parameters" are the placeholder arguments in the function definition.)
   2. Because Python's author preferred to make it explicit in the syntax rather than hide it. So that people wouldn't forget it's there, I guess.

   -- Mike

   ---

   resolved problems ?

   Thu, 10 Aug 2000 12:18:58 -0400
   From: molly morris <sevenox@viaccess.net>

   Guys/Gals,

   Searched for info on how to make Canon bjc-250 work under Corel Linux. (1 found) Also found $.02 tip re: Netscape

   These are both dated 1998. I'm sure these issues have been resolved by now.

   Usually tips are posted to us because someone found or made a solution for themselves. That's why they're Two Cent Tips. Netscape has come a long way since then, but still takes a command line argument for printing - you could really use any application you want in the "print" dialog.

   Does the "Gazette" plan to link ancient history to today's solutions?

   One of the nicer things about Linux, is that is often happens that even very old solutions still work... even when better ones become available. I've seen means for using bubblejet printers via apsfilter, and magicfilter. There may be a few other things, and I'm certain there's at least one commercial grade print queue program.

   I thought this new- tomorrow Linux community was going to to be a learning curve thing but I've logged more web time on it in the last two weeks than Win (God forbid) 95 in the last two years.

   Well, yes, that's a balance point - more community, so more scattered knowledge, meaning it sometimes needs to be chased down. Combining it back into a form usable by ordinary folk is the job of the Linux Documentation Project, which the Gazette is proud to be part of.

   Since Corel Linux is a Debian derivate, it should be possible to apt-get install magicfilter, then run magicfilterconfig.

   I went with Commodore Amiga (still have running box with Utah Word Perfect) in its early stages and our user community makes the linux groups that I've encountered so far look like Sandbox 101 for verbose Unix programmers.

   M.M.

   Anyone want to lead him to more sites or IRC channels that are specifically helpful to UNIX newbies, other than a few websites I can immediately think of like linuxstart.com or linuxnewbie,org?

   Also: Perhaps when you find the sites that work for you, you can pass it along so Corel can do a better job setting new users up with some good bookmarks to follow in their next version. We'd like to hear about it too. And, last but not least, Linux Journal is looking for some hard nosed reporting on what's really good or bad in some of the latest distributions that are rolling out... if you're interested in reviewing them from a hard hitting attitude, contact Don Marti, dmarti@linuxjournal.com. -- Heather

   ---

   Gazette Matters

   ---

   Wed, 02 Aug 2000 17:26:17 -0400
   From: Srinivasa A. Shikaripura <sas@lucent.com>
   Subject: Reg. the display of email address on the gazette columns

   hi,

   I have a sugesstion on the open display of email address in the Linux Gazette columns "Help wanted" and "2-cent tips".

   Currently the pages contain the email addresses in open. This is very easy for the email bot programs to scan the page for email address and use it for building spam-lists and sell them.

   I have a suggestion. Could you please consider obfuscating the email ids as some other web news letters have started doing.

   For example you could obfuscate: user@domain.com to user at domain.com or user @ domain.com.

   I know this has drawbacks. Users can't click on the address in the article to reply directly. This is a minor inconvinience and once the user is educated about it, it shouldn't pose a problem.

   I am writing this, because, once I posted to usenet with my clear email address and I suddenly started getting a lot of spam mails.

   Cheers
   -Sas

   [It's a tradeoff between spam obfuscation and clickable mailto links. For better or for worse, the tradition in LG has been clickable links, and reader requests have been to make more mail links clickable rather than fewer. -Mike.]

   ---

   Thu, 3 Aug 2000 20:23:53 +0200
   From: Matthias Arndt <matthiasarndt@gmx.net>
   Subject: Linux Gazette

   I'm using Suse Linux 6.3 as my hobby OS. I do almost anything with it and I'd like to ask if you still seek for authors of additional articles? I would really love to prepare a few articles for the gazette because I always wanted to make a ezine. I do not have the power to create such a project myself. Instead, I'd like to put my efforts in projects that are running. And the Linux Gazette looks like it is ongoing project.

   [We are always looking for new authors. Author information is in the LG FAQ at http://www.linuxgazette.com/faq/index.html#author. In fact, Matthew did send us an article about choosing a window manager, which you can read in this issue. -Mike.]

   ---

   Wed, 23 Aug 2000 21:25:29 +0200
   From: DESCHAMPS.terra.es <DESCHAMPS@terra.es>
   Subject: Felicidades, y gracias

   Ante todo enhorabuena por el gran paso que acabais de dar, llevo esperando Linux Gazzette en español desde hace mucho tiempo, es una revista autética y sin lugar a dudas con el mejor contenido.

   Enhorabuena, me habeis hecho feliz.

   Desde España, Javi.

   Un saludo.

   Translation by Felipe Barousse <fbarousse@piensa.com>:

   Before anything else, my best wishes for the great step you just made, I have been waiting for Linux Gazette in Spanish since long time ago, which is a very authentic magazine and, without any doubts with the best content.

   My best wishes, you have made me very happy.

   From Spain, Javi.

   ---

   Tue, 1 Aug 2000 12:30:17 +0200
   From: Juan Florido <krypto@elrancho.com>
   Subject: new translation to italian

   Dear Mike,

   I have received a new free translation of the linux gazette article issue 55th, about journal file systems.

   The translation has been made by someone called Alberto Marmodoro,who transalated the article to italian.

   The url is http://trieste.linux.it/~marmo/index.html

   If you want to include a link in the original article to this translation, follow that URL.

   [I told Juan to send it to our Italian mirror site also. -Mike.]

   ---

   Fri, 25 Aug 2000 17:17:24 +0200
   From: Jan Hemmingsen <janhem@get2net.dk>
   Subject: Linux Gazette Logo

   Hi

   I like the design of your logo very much. Did you use Gimp to create it?

   If yes, i would appreciate if you could tell me how it was created.

   [Actually, the graphic designer used Photoshop. If he sends me the details sometime, I'll print them. -Mike.]

   ---

   This page written and maintained by the Editors of the Linux Gazette. Copyright © 2000, gazette@ssc.com
   Published in Issue 57 of Linux Gazette, September 2000

   "Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

   ---

   Contents: Distro News News in General Software Announcements

   LG volunteer opportunity!

   LG is looking for volunteers to help format this column. The work takes 6-8 hours per issue. We would send you an HTML file containing the raw entries, and you would decide which items to publish, move similar items together, strip marketoid verbiage, summarize press releases in one or two paragraphs, and turn URLs into hyperlinks. This can all be done with a text editor and a basic knowledge of HTML. The ability to convert MIME attachments (e.g., Word documents) to text is helpful but not required. If you would like to volunteer, e-mail gazette@ssc.com.

   Submitters, send your News Bytes items in PLAIN TEXT format. Other formats may be rejected without reading. You have been warned! As always, a one- or two-paragraph summary plus URL is preferred over an entire press release.

   ---

   

   September 2000 Linux Journal

   The September issue of Linux Journal is on newsstands now. This issue focuses on embedded systems. Click here to view the table of contents, or here to subscribe.

   All articles through December 1999 are available for public reading at http://www.linuxjournal.com/lg-issues/mags.html. Recent articles are available on-line for subscribers only at http://interactive.linuxjournal.com/.

   ---

   Embedded Linux Journal

   We're excited to introduce a Linux Journal supplemental issue which will hit the streets October 10, 2000: Embedded Linux Journal. In this upcoming special issue you can look forward to conversations about:

   • Industry news emphasizing Open Source software solutions.
   • Reviews of products to reduce development time and improve testing.
   • Case studies that will save you time.
   • Design solutions that show you why embedded Linux is the cost-effective answer.
   • Hardware vs. software considerations.

   Current Linux Journal subscribers who live within North America will receive this special supplement at no additional charge. This issue will also be heavily distributed at upcoming trade shows, other industry events, and to targeted mailing lists.

   We hope you enjoy this special issue. We welcome feedback.

   ---

   Distro News

   ---

   Caldera

   OREM, UT--July 25, 2000--Caldera Systems, Inc. today announced the availability of the Linux 2.4 Technology Developer Release Preview. This developer's preview enables early software development with a beta version of the new Linux 2.4 kernel, Sun Microsystems' Java HotSpot technology and glibc 2.1.91, KDE 2.0 Development Snapshot with the Konqueror web browser. Anchordesk UK's Evan Leibovitch did a review of the product.

   Caldera acquires SCO -- OREM, UT--August 2, 2000--Caldera Systems, Inc. and The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc., (SCO), today announced that Caldera Systems has entered into an agreement to acquire the SCO Server Software Division and the Professional Services Division. The Professional Services Division will operate as a separate business unit of Caldera, to provide services to meet the Internet and eBusiness infrastructure needs of customers. The new company will offer the industry's first comprehensive Open Internet Platform (OIP) combining Linux and UNIX server solutions and services globally. The OIP provides commercial customers and developers with a single platform that can scale from the thinnest of clients to the clustering needs of the largest data center.

   OREM, UT and SANTA CRUZ, CA-July 18, 2000-Caldera Systems, Inc. , and Tarantella, Inc. a wholly owned subsidiary of The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc., today announced the first bundling of Tarantella Web-enabling software in the Linux space. This solution, Caldera OpenLinux Application Server with Tarantella, provides centralized management and deployment of applications on a fast, stable and low-cost platform simplifying IT responsibilities while reducing business costs. OpenLinux Application Server enables authorized users with a Java technology-enabled browser to run existing Windows, Linux and UNIX applications through the company's local area network or remotely through the Internet - even on a dial-up connection. In addition, companies can instantly deliver new Web-based and existing legacy applications to their users without code rewrites.

   OREM, UT-July 18, 2000-Caldera Systems, Inc. today began shipping its first computer-based training (CBT) product - Quick Start to Linux. Quick Start is self-paced with hands-on, guided demonstrations including the preparation of a Windows-based machine for a Linux installation, the install itself and the navigation of Linux desktops. In addition, Caldera's Quick Start CBT identifies business solutions using Linux while providing historical Linux information.

   RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. (July 25, 2000) - InterLan Technologies, a managed server provider (MSP), announced today it has formed a strategic alliance with Caldera Systems. InterLan selected Caldera to provide the Linux operating systems in its state-of-the-art Internet Utility Center, as well as for its QuickStart(tm) program, an industry-first program that gets premium managed servers up and running the same day an order is placed.

   ---

   Debian

   Debian GNU/Linux 2.2, the "Joel 'Espy' Klecker" release.

   The Debian Project is pleased to announce the latest release of the Debian GNU/Linux Operating System. This release has been in development for approximately 18 months, and has been extensively tested by several thousand developers and end-users.

   With the addition of the PowerPC and ARM architectures, Debian GNU/Linux now supports a total of six architectures -- more than any other distribution. Packages for all architectures are built from the same source packages. Debian GNU/Linux now runs on iMacs and Netwinders, and of course Intel PC's, Sun SPARCs, Alphas, and older Macintosh and Amiga hardware are still supported.

   Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 features a more streamlined and polished installation, including automatic network setup via DHCP, a simplified software selection process (just indicate the tasks your Debian GNU/Linux system will be used for), and a simplified configurator for the X Window System. Debian GNU/Linux can be installed via CD, or from the network and a few floppies:

   For detailed documentation about installing and upgrading Debian GNU/Linux, please see http://www.debian.org/releases/2.2/.

   Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 is dedicated to the memory of Joel "Espy" Klecker, a Debian developer who, unbeknownst to most of the Debian Project, was bedridden and fighting a disease known as Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy during most of his involvement with Debian. Only now is the Debian Project realizing the extent of his dedication, and the friendship he bestowed upon us. So as a show of appreciation, and in memory of his inspirational life, this release of Debian GNU/Linux is dedicated to him.

   ---

   Kondara

   KONDARA MNU/LINUX 2000 claims to be the first and only multilingual distribution on a single binary. While other major Linux distributions have multilingual support, you have to completely reinstall Linux to switch to a new language. Kondara, on the other hand, lets you read, write, edit and print in Japanese, English, Chinese, Spanish or over 40 other languages all on the same desktop. "One World, One Version."

   Kondara also offers multi-platform support on a single source code. Now users can make a single change to the source code and have it affect both the Alpha and Intel platforms.

   The kernel is 2.2.16

   www.df-usa.com

   ---

   Linux for Windows

   INDIANAPOLIS, Indiana-July 18, 2000-Macmillan announces the update to their popular Linux® for Windows® product is currently available in stores. With this software, first-time Linux users can try the Linux environment without losing the Windows® functionality that they are familiar with. Linux for Windows 7.1 includes the Linux-Mandrake 7.1 operating system, most noted for its ease of use and user-friendly tools.

   The technology included with Linux for Windows 7.1 removes the need for disk partitioning or reformatting, thus making an excellent gateway for new users interested in Linux. Free 24-hour technical support is also provided via Internet and fax for installation issues.

   ---

   Lute

   Argent Resources Ltd. has signed an agreement dated July 12, 2000, with Lute Linux.com Corp. that will result in Argent acquiring 100% control of Lute. Completion of the transaction is subject to shareholder approval on a majority of the minority basis, CDNX acceptance and the resulting company meeting minimum listing requirements as a Tier 2, Category 3 Technology Issuer. http://www.argentresources.com/news/071200.asp

   LuteLinux.com has been voted site of the month by InternetBrothers.com in the Helpware and Community category. According ro InternetBrothers.com, the main crieteria for this honour is a "sound functional interface". InternetBrothers.com strongly believes that "A primary key to any successful web site is the user interface."

   Features that make LuteLinux exceptional are their commitment to the Linux community, and their fostering of interactive information exchange with that community. They also provide useful tips and information for the non-Linux user, helping to open Linux up to a wider audience. LuteLinux.com is committed to bringing Linux knowledge to the businessman, hobbiest, and newbie alike.

   ---

   Mandrake

   San Jose, August 14, 2000 - MandrakeSoft, announced that Linux-Mandrake, has been ported to Sun Microsystems' SPARC(tm) and UltraSPARC(tm) platforms. Based on the Linux-Mandrake 7.1, the Corporate Server 1.0 provides all the tools needed to rapidly and easily set up the main server functions. WizDrake assistants will additionally guide the user in setting up a full range of services and applications like e-mail, Web servers, firewalls and routers.

   ---

   Progeny

   Progeny Linux Systems is a new company headed by Ian Murdock (Debian founder) and Bruce Perens (former Debian head guy).

   Progeny is doing two things:

   a.) Progeny Debian - a stripped down version of Debian with some improvements like the installer, based on extensive testing of the latest version. Progeny Debian will have limited circulation in pre-loads, downloads, and (probably) with third party companies. Progeny won't be selling it directly in the stores, although the third parties might be. Basically, Progeny Debian's main use will be as a basis for Linux NOW.

   b.) Linux NOW (Network of Workstations) - an Open Source product.

   More information can be found at http://www.progenylinux.com/news, and in the /debian and /now pages.

   Debian Founder Launches Commercial Company (Linux Magazine article)

   ---

   Red Hat

   RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C.--July 10, 2000--Red Hat, Inc. today announced the Red Hat High Availability Server 1.0, a specialized version of Red Hat Linux 6.2.

   Red Hat High Availability Server is an out-of-the-box clustering solution that delivers dynamic load balancing, improved fault tolerance and scalability of TCP/IP based applications. It lets users combine individual servers into a cluster, resulting in highly available access to critical network resources such as data, applications, network services, and more. If one server in the cluster fails, another will automatically take over its workload.

   The Red Hat High Availability Server has built-in security features designed to withstand common attacks. Systems Administrators can setup sand traps, providing for redirection of IP traffic from a potential attacker to a secure address. Out of the box, finger, talk, wall, and other daemons are disabled or not installed. In addition, multiple traffic routing and scheduling techniques along with virtual IP addresses allow you to create a security barrier for your network.

   ---

   Rock

   Rock Linux is a distribution that's "harder to install" than the others.

   There, did that get your attention? If so, Rock Linux may be for you. It aims to be "sysadmin friendly" rather than "user friendly", to get out of the way as much as possible from between you and your applications. This means you configure the system using Unix's traditional command-line interface and shell scripts. Oh yes, X-windows is included.

   Serious geeks will love the fact that you get to compile your own distribution (optionally putting it on a CD) before installing it.

   http://www.rocklinux.org

   http://e-zine.nluug.nl/pub/rock/GUIDE.html

   [I'd really like to see an article or some Mailbag items about people's experience with this. Has anybody tried it? -Ed.]

   ---

   Slackware

   Slackware 7.1 is out at www.slackware.com and mirrors.

   ---

   Storm

   VANCOUVER, British Columbia--Stormix Technologies Inc., announces the launch of Storm Linux 2000 Starter Edition. The Storm Linux 2000 Starter Edition provides Windows® users who want to try Linux with a full featured, easy-to-install distribution at a low cost. This new product is intended for people who want to easily access the power of Linux without an abundance of third party software. The Storm Linux 2000 Starter Edition is the first member of the Storm Linux 2000 family based on Debian/GNU Linux 2.2 ("Potato").

   The Duke of URL has a review of Storm Linux 2000.

   August 10 -- Vancouver, British Columbia -- Stormix Technologies Inc., today announced the launch of Storm FirewallTM, a flexible, scalable network security solution targeted at small office and home office (SOHO) users.

   Storm Firewall is the first in a line of dedicated network products from StormixTM. Capitalizing on the natural protective features of Linux, it is one of the most powerful tools available for network protection. Storm Firewall uses a graphical user interface to simplify the once complex process of installing a Linux firewall. The choice of simple options or advanced setup gives users ultimate control over network traffic. In addition, users will benefit from IP masquerading which allows for multiple computers to share a single Internet connection.

   VANCOUVER, British Columbia - User Friendly Media Inc. and Stormix Technologies Inc. today announced an agreement for the sponsorship of the inaugural three month's publication of an online interactive newsletter for fans of the popular UserFriendly.org IT Web site. The e-mail newsletter, known as The Static Cling, offers subscribers access to several exclusive features, including unique cartoons and artwork, a trivia contest with prizes and links to a threaded comment section. UserFriendly.org is the leading online entertainment and community destination for the global IT community.

   www.stormix.com

   ---

   SuSE

   The German version of SuSE Linux 7.0 is out. The English version will ship in September.

   English version: http://www.suse.com

   German version: http://www.suse.de/ http://www.suse.de/de/produkte/susesoft/linux/index.html

   ---

   Trustix

   We are proud to announce the release of Trustix Secure Linux 1.1. You can download it at: http://www.trustix.net/download/ or directly from http://www.trustix.net/mirrors.php3.

   This is primarily a maintainence release, but some new features like database support and improved mail filtering have been added. In addition we've added Lynx with SSL support and various other utilities to simplify the every day maintainance of your server.

   Trustix Secure Linux is a Linux distribution aimed towards the server market.

   For a more complete list of features, please see http://www.trustix.net/products/trustix-1.1/

   Unix phoenix. On Unix openness, Unix history, and Linux. Another Anchordesk UK article by Evan Leibovitch.

   ---

   News in General

   ---

   Upcoming conferences & events

   O'Reilly's conference next year on emerging enterprise-class Java applications has a call for papers. Submission deadline is September 15, 2000.

   Linux Business Expo (co-located with Networld + Interop event)	September 26-28, 2000 Atlanta, GA www.key3media.com/linuxbizexpo
   Atlanta Linux Showcase	October 10-14, 2000 Atlanta, GA www.linuxshowcase.org
   ISPCON	November 8-10, 2000 San Jose, CA www.ispcon.com
   Linux Business Expo (co-located with COMDEX event)	November 13-17, 2000 Las Vegas, NV www.key3media.com/linuxbizexpo
   USENIX Winter - LISA 2000	December 3-8, 2000 New Orleans, LA www.usenix.org
   LinuxWorld Conference & Expo	January 30 - February 2, 2001 New York, NY www.linuxworldexpo.com

   ---

   $399 Linux computer with monitor

   July 17, 2000- Introducing the PortalPC, our new solution to the computing and networking market. After thorough development and extensive testing, we are proud to bring to the consumer this revolutionary new product. The unique design of the PortalPC gives the users numerous options and versatility with their computing needs without the expense. With a starting price of $149.99, this computer is a perfect base for all of the functions a traditional PC can provide. Complete packages that include CD-ROM, Floppy, 4.3GB HD, 15 Monitor, 32 Mb PC100 Ram, Keyboard, Mouse and free copy of Red Hat 6.2 start at $399.99. The on-board technology includes, 10/100 network card, Dual USB, PS/2 port, Parallel port, Com port, VGA display, Disk On Chip Socket 8 to 144Mb and PC/104 16BIT Expansion Connector. This unique configuration enables the PortalPC to be uniquely small (approximately 12x5x9). Using the PortalPC to build your private network, you can have 6 workstations at the cost of a traditional tower computer.

   www.portalpc.net

   ---

   Linux Square

   ITsquare.com is pleased to announce the launch of Linux Square, a supplement to the existing b2b marketplace for IT services at http://www.ITsquare.com/. Linux Square provides access to scores of established Linux development firms. Through use of a web-based framework, clients are able to securely and efficiently procure the development of Linux applications.

   ---

   MaxSQL

   Helsinki, Finland and Carlisle, Massachusetts, USA--August 9, 2000--MySQL AB and Sleepycat Software, Inc. today announced the release of MaxSQL, a new Open Source, high performance, and fully transactional SQL server. MaxSQL, developed jointly by the two companies, combines the industry-standard interface of MySQL's data access language with the high-performance transaction services of Sleepycat’s Berkeley DB. MaxSQL is available immediately via download at no charge from www.maxsql.com.

   MaxSQL is the first Open Source relational database engine to offer the reliability, scalability, and performance that commercial users demand. The software provides the ability to perform transactions with full recoverability for committed changes. It manages databases up to 256 terabytes in size, accommodates many concurrent users, and survives power failure or system crashes without losing data. Those features, combined with MySQL's enormous popularity make MaxSQL a potent threat in the SQL marketplace.

   The full source code for MaxSQL is available for download at www.maxsql.com. The software is distributed under the GNU Public License (GPL).

   ---

   The Napster battle has implications for free-software developers

   Salon article: "As the long arm of the law reaches Napster and its lookalikes, programmers could be held responsible for what others do with their code."

   "Free speech, copyright, piracy and the fundamental nature of source code -- ever since the Internet began its surge to cultural and economic prominence, these concepts have swirled around each other in a confusing and contradictory morass. Now, in courtrooms from coast to coast, judges are attempting to bring order to the burgeoning online chaos. And from the first indications, programmer freedom may end up coming under the most sustained assault yet seen."

   "We are on the verge of defining software and determining the responsibility of software developers to control the uses of their work."

   http://salon.com/tech/feature/2000/08/07/yoink_napster/index.html

   ---

   Linux Brains Sought for New Tech Support Site

   August 15, 2000, Vancouver, BC -- IQLinux.com has launched a new technical support website for the global pool of independent Linux experts to meet the support need of Linux users.

   "IQLinux.com is a combination of Ebay and Onvia.com for the Linux community. The site's potential is like a rocket and I encourage Linux enthusiasts to take a ride", said Mark Kuharich, publisher and editor of Softwareview.com.

   IQLinux.com membership is free. The site's seamless negotiation process fully manages the negotiation of open source products and their supporting services.

   IQLinux.com's combined features make it a unique opportunity for the Linux community to interact. It allows members to easily form business relationships, manage virtual consulting teams, negotiate agreements and contracts, set prices, define deliverables and carry out technical support transactions, while being assured of payment.

   ---

   Overseas internships for Canadian nationals

   Hello from Ottawa. I am the recruiting officer for NetCorps Canada with Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO Canada). Currently I have 2 6-month internships open to Canadian citizens or landed immigrants between the ages of 19-30 to go overseas in September. On is for a linux administrator to go to Jamaica for 6 months, the other is for someone with e-commerce skills to go to Guyana for 6 months.

   Interested applicants should forward their CV and brief cover letter to Wendy Street, NetCorps Program Officer, VSO Canada. Applicants who are accepted need to be prepared to leave no later than September 20th, 2000. wendys@vsocan.com, fax: +1 (613) 234-1444, http://www.vsocan.com

   ---

   "Dilbert Killer" on-line games

   User Friendly Media Inc., and SuSE Linux announced the launch of the first in a series of challenging and diverse on-line games currently under development for the new game section on UserFriendly.org.

   "This first game focuses on geek trivia and allows our very intellectual audience to compete head on in a variety of challenging information categories. The combatants move up the pyramid until there is only one... there can be only one", said Wildcard, lead coder for User Friendly Media Inc. and creator of "Pyramid of Trivia".

   The site also has an animated cartoon series now. This caused technicians to scramble for 300 GB of additional bandwidth for the debut. (Requires Flash player; episode 1 is 2.5 MB / 7 minutes.)

   ---

   Linux Links

   The age of cyborgs is coming closer. "Scientists are attempting to create molecular electronic circuits using DNA. They say that they could potentially create circuits 10,000 times smaller than with current technology." Yahoo via Slashdot.

   www.linuxlookup.com is "Your Source For Reviews, HOWTOs, Guides & Gear".

   A searchable distribution database.

   SiliconPenguin.com is an index of information on embedded Linux. The information is not gathered by web spiders, but by humans who evaluate each link.

   LinuxLinks.com now has a web-based calendar.

   The Duke of URL articles:

   • Scrolling the mouse wheel HOWTO
   • Mozilla milestone 16 review.
   • Voodoo5 5500 AGP review.
   • Linux Buyer's Guide review.
   • Pogo's Winux Box Pogo's Winux box, powered by VMWare.
   • LinuxWorld happenings.

   Linux laptop info. Another laptop page. (Turn off Java for the second one to avoid Geocities popups.)

   Sony plans a notebook computer with Transmeta's Crusoe chip and a digital camera by year's end. http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-2523739.html

   Linux Means Business is a collection of articles on how businesses can make use of Linux.

   Hardware-Unlimited has lots of reviews about video cards and other hardware. Includes a price comparision guide of graphics cards and dealers. Here's a review of the D-Link MP3 player.

   How Linux's falling stock prices are only temporary. (Anchordesk UK article by Charles Babcock)

   Complete Reference Guide to Creating a Remote Log Server. LinuxSecurity article. Note that this is "log" in the sense of "logging error messages to a file", not "logging in remotely".

   The Right to Read by RMS is a short science-fiction story about the implications of widespread anti-piracy measures on electronic books.

   www.wininformant.com is a source of information on Microsoft's activities. The site has a pro-MS bent, but is honest about MS's shortcomings. One article the persistent rumor that MS is porting Office applications to Linux, which the company denies it is doing. Meanwhile, CNET news.com attempts to sort out the rumors.

   ---

   Software Announcements

   ---

   FIASCO

   I am pleased to announce the first public release of FIASCO.

   FIASCO is an image and video compression system for low bit-rates based on fractal coding which outperforms the well known JPEG and MPEG standards. License GPL.

   FIASCO consists of command line applications (like cjpeg/djpeg) to encode images and videos and to decode and display generated FIASCO streams. Moreover, library functions are available for reading and writing FIASCO files.

   http://ulli.linuxave.net/fiasco

   ---

   Other software

   Linux for Astronomy is precompiled astronomical software.

   SMSLink 0.48b-2 implements a client / server gateway to the SMS protocol (the short messages sent to mobile phones). This version is mostly a bugfix release. License GPL.

   Corel PHOTO-PAINT is a photo-editing, image composition and painting application, now available for free download.

   Metrolink has released Open Motif with Metro Link's enhancements and bug fixes, available for FTP download.

   Sun's StarOffice 5.2 office suite is available for download in eleven languages.

   Proven CHOICE Accounting is a complete business accounting system for Linux. New is the time billing module.

   CRYPTOAdmin 5.0 protects Apache, iPlanet and Microsoft IIS Web servers from unauthorized access - right down to the page level. The new feature, WEBGuard, ensures access to protected pages is only permitted with the correct one-time challenge/response generated from a CRYPTOCard hardware or software token. Web severs communicate directly with CRYPTOAdmin, enabling ASP (Active Server Page) or JSP (Java Server Page) security. CRYPTOAdmin is included with industry leading products such as Cisco Secure ACS and Red Hat Linux at no charge. Established in 1989, CRYPTOCard is a Canadian company based in Kanata, Ontario.

   Servtec's iServer is now available for Dallas Semiconductor's TINI board, an embedded Internet computer. iServer TINI Edition is a full featured Application/Web Server written entirely in Java running on TINI. 90-day free preview.

   Perl Builder 2.0 is a major upgrade to Solutionsoft's Perl IDE. Includes a CGI Wizard, debugger, and the ability to test CGI scripts on the desktop. 14-day evaluation copy available for download. (Note: "no route to host" error during final proofreading.)

   Helios PDF Handshake 2.0 is in beta. It allows PDF documents to be created remotely via a "Create PDF" print queue. A print preview queue is also available.

   The Linux Arabization project announces Aedit, an Arabic editor that supports bidirectional text and features specific to the Arabic language. Aedit is meant to be an international editor with support to other languages. Aedit is based on the internationalization support available in Gtk+-1.3. License GPL.

   Mainsoft has a porting application that turns Windows Code into native Unix.

   Loki news: Loki will maintain and support the Linux version of Unreal Tournament by Epic Games, Inc. Loki has also teamed up with BSDI to ensure Loki's games run on FreeBSD using its Linux-compatibility features. Certified games will be fully supported by Loki.

   Intel's Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) Software Development Kit (SDK) 1.0 is available through an open-source license.

   Magic Software news: Magic announced support for mobile e-business (mBusiness) in its web applications eService and eMerchant, allowing them to support remote transactions via the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP). Magic also announced an intention to acquire CoreTech Consulting Group, Inc., a provider of e-business professional services. This will enhance Magic's ability to offer consulting and professional services in North America. PerlMX embeds Perl in Sendmail as a mail filter engine. This allows you to use Perl code for spam control, keyword scanning, custom routing, etc. By ActiveState.

   CURSEL is a freeware FMLI (Forms and Menu Language Interpreter) implementation for Linux and UNIX. CURSEL interprets Menu description files, which are simple text files, describing a character GUI (Menus, forms, text files) for character terminals (xterm, vt100, etc.). Pipes, shell escapes, backquoted expressions, and file redirection are supported, and when compiled with ncurses 5, CURSEL supports color. CURSEL also supports coroutines, and descriptors to create, send data, or receive data, from an another process via named pipes. License GPL.

   ---

   This page written and maintained by the Editors of the Linux Gazette. Copyright © 2000, gazette@ssc.com
   Published in Issue 57 of Linux Gazette, September 2000

   Contents:

   ¶: Greetings From Heather Stern

   Linux 'read'

   File with Device Information

   10BaseT Connection

   shell script

   Telnet to linux box from NT workstation in NT LAN --or--

   Connection Refused

   connecting red hat workstation to nt server --or--

   Linux in a Windows NT Domain (under a PDC)

   ACLs on Linux

   ---

   Greetings from Heather Stern

   Well, folks, it's another month, and yet another hefty mailbag. We've got more people asking strange hardware questions (though you won't see them here) and a few more interesting Windows questions than we usually get. Like, what about that new version, 2000ME. Is the "Millenium Edition" really Win2K Lite (a bunch of "server" features stripped off) or win98 with a Win2K GUI tacked on and the ability to reach the command line ripped out? Estimates are pointing more toward the latter, but really, we can't tell for certain except by behavioral analysis -- there's no source, not even a "non free" source view like the Sun Community License.

   Honestly, what are you gonna do if you're stuck in the Windows way? The slashdotters think it's pretty easy - "If your system works, don't upgrade". Hmmm. Once upon a time rsh worked great. It's not even that it's broken - as an application, as a server, the "r" tools still run like they always did. But, the environment around them has changed; they are so inherently unsafe that I know few sysadmins who don't use ssh and the analogous family of tools instead, even if they have a captive lab such as the environment the "r" tools grew up in. Besides, I took a fresh look at the licenses as posted at MS.

   Let's say you don't want to upgrade, but you just hired 12 people, and you want windows95 sp 2 for all their systems. For the purposes of argument let us also say that you are not in the Silicon Valley, so you cannot simply run down to the leftover software shop and pick up one from last year -- they're long gone, even w98 are hard to come by, all you might buy are win2k in one of its forms.

   You should read your EULA on the package of Win2k you'd like to get. Oh yeah. Forgot, you have to buy one to get far enough into the package to read that. Doh! One copy can't hurt the ol' pocket too much right? Maybe. So, you read it with a magnifying lens and maybe it says it's a license to this or any older version of Microsoft Windows (tm). Better check your lotto ticket at the same time, they have about an equal chance of being a winner.

   Probably no mention whatsoever of older versions. Okay. You visit Microsoft's website. The EULA posted there:

   http://www.microsoft.com/PERMISSION/copyrgt/cop-soft.htm

   ...says basically, if and only if you bought it in a store (you did! wow! full pop was worth something!) then you can write to them for permission to downgrade it. One copy at a time.

   Hoo boy. "Permission to downgrade" and they'll probably blow you off. You're not one of their "Select Customers" by a long shot. Even if they say yes, you'll have to figure out how to get copies from the media you already have to cooperate with the idea of having multiple instances in the office.

   You hardly have a choice, you think. It's an OS learning curve for the new version's differences, or a technical doan-and-dirty to make the old dog play new tricks.

   They've certainly come a long way from when I wanted to upgrade a useless copy of Windows to one of their more helpful products like a mouse, a joystick, or a book.

   You might be right. You have no choice about some things in this world. But the choice you lack is control over your external environment -- you can still control your own response. You are Mr. Bill's external environment. He has fairly little power over you.

   So, if you're about to go through this headache, it should make Linux, FreeBSD, and BeOS look a lot friendlier. Sure, it will be different, but perhaps not as amazingly different as you'd expect. If you have anyone technical enough to take Microsoft on as a challenge, Linux with its source and a lot of people trying to make it easy might not be such a bad thing to try.

   Ooo, owie, no UNIX experience here! you cry. Ah, but there's this. There are a world of people - not all of them programmers - out there contributing something to make life easier. Not necessarily for you. Chances are they've never heard of your 40 person startup. But, they're trying to make it easier for themselves... and then posting it for others.

   Now I'm not just talking about companies that make their living serving a niche specialty. I mean, sure, I even work for one (Tuxtops, selling laptops) and don't get me wrong, I think it's great that people can consult or sell products to meet specialty needs. But the companies that are doing the best, are the ones whose confidence in their solution is so strong, that they have no problem giving at least parts of it back to the community.

   It's plain folks and small groups that make the difference here. The more likely that you are similar to any of these other folks that might be working on something, the more likely that something that will work very well for you already exists in Linux. Or, the more likely that you'll see a bit of fame and friendship, if you post your solution to that very same everyday problem, first.

   Between this and more active local user groups, your chances of doing well with Linux really have improved quite dramatically in the last couple of years, It's possible to find Installfests with local gurus in a lot of places. It's our way of paying back those early days when we got some help after we realized we were lost. We all had to start somewhere.

   I'm still lost sometimes. That's why I love going to the trade shows, so I can meet all the cool folks with different specialties than my own. And if I can give a little back by being a local guru at the Installfests, I like that. A lot.

   (By the way, Tuxtops will be doing an Installfest for Laptop Users at the Atlanta Linux Showcase. If you want to meet me sometime, that's your best chance. I think it will be a lot of fun.)

   But that's what I'm really doing here, anyway. A few hours of my time every month can make a lot of people around the world happy, because we've're "Making Linux a Little More Fun!"

   See you next time, everyone.

   ---

   Linux 'read'

   From Curtis J Blank to tag on Mon, 21 Aug 2000

   Answered by: Jim Dennis, Dan Wilder

   I've run into a problem where Linux's 'read' is not reading input from stdin when it is piped to. Here's a quick example:

   [Jim Dennis] Of course it is. Try:

   ps wax | while read pid tty x x cmd args ; do
echo $pid $cmd $args
done

   (Note that the whole while loop is done within the subshell, so the values are available to use between the do and the done tokens).

   In your example using awk, naturally the awk print function is being executed from within awk's process. So the variable being read is within scope in this case.

   
   #!/bin/ksh
   #
   dafunc()
   {
   echo 1 2 3
   }
   #
   # MAIN
   #
   dafunc | read a b c
   echo $a $b $c
   #
   

   Running this script produces a blank line instead of '1 2 3'.

   I also tried this command line and it did not work that way either:

   
   echo 1 2 3 | read a b c
   echo $a $b $c
   

   But piping to awk works:

   
   echo 1 2 3 | awk '{print $2}'
   2
   

   I've tried this using the 2.2.14 kernel, on both SuSE 6.4 and Red Hat 6.2. I've used this technique on Solaris UNIX and Tru64 UNIX just fine, but for some reason the Linux 'read' from stdin is not picking this up.

   Any ideas why or what I'm overlooking?

   [Jim Dennis] When studying shell scripting it's also useful to learn that shell and environment variables are not the same thing. A shell variable is "local" in the sense that it is not "inherited" by children of that process. When teaching shell scripting one of the first concepts I introduce to my students is the memory map of their process. I point out that the shell is constantly spawning child processes (through the fork() system call) and that it is frequently executing external programs (through the exec*() family of system calls). I then explain out a fork() simply makes a clone or copy of our process, and how the exec() overwrites MOST of the clone's memory with a new executable. I draw pictures of this, and label the part that is NOT over-written as the "environment."

   The export command simply moves a shell variable and value from the "local" region of memory (that would get over-written by an exec() call) into the environment (a region of memory that is preserved through the exec() system call).

   Using this set of pictures (by now I've filled the whiteboard with a couple of copies of our hypothetical processes and their memory blocks) it becomes obvious why changing the value of an environment variable in a child process doesn't affect any copies of that variable in OTHER processes. Just to drive that point home I then write the following reminder in big letters:

   The environment is NOT a shared memory mechanism!

   (Then I might also explain a little bit about SysV shared memory --- generally pointing out that the shell doesn't provide features for accessing these IPCs).

   Incidentally if you really want to do something similar your examples but using bash try this sort of command:

   read a b c < <( echo 1 2 3 ) echo $b

   In this case we are using "process substitution" (and perfectly normal redirection). Since our read command is happening in the current process (and the echo 1 2 3 command is in a sub-process) the variable's value is accessible to us.

   I think process substitution is a feature that's unique to bash. Basically it uses /proc/fd/ (or /dev/fd/*) entries, or temporary named pipes (depending on the features supported by your version of UNIX) to provide a file name that's associated with the output of the sub-process. If you do a command like:

   echo <( echo )

   ... you should get a response like: /dev/fd/63 (On a Linux system using glibc).

   I suspect that process substitution could be used in just about any case where you would have used the Korn shell semantics.

   Nonetheless I would like to see the next version of bash support the Korn shell (and zsh) semantics (putting the subshell on the "left" of the pipe operator). I'd also like to see them add associative arrays (where the index to our shell variable arrays can be an arbitrary string rather than a scalar/integer) and co-processes (where we can start a process with a |& operator, which puts in in the background, and we can use a series of echo or printf -p and read -p commands to write commands to that process and read responses back. Co-processes are handy for shell scripts which need to access something like the bc command, feed it operatings, reading back results and doing other work with those result; possibly in a loop.

   [Dan Wilder] I think you'll find this a ksh (or pdksh) problem, not a Linux problem.

   To quote the pdksh man page:

   
   BUGS
   [ ... ]
   
   BTW, the most frequently reported bug is
        echo hi | read a; echo $a   # Does not print hi
   
   I'm aware of this and there is no need to report it.
   

   [Jim Dennis] Actually it's just a consequence of the way that pdksh, bash, and older versions of ksh (Korn's original and '88 versions) handle the pipe operator (|).

   Whenever you see a pipe in a command line you should understand that a subprocess has implicitly been created. That must exist in order for there to be an un-named pipe. Remember that the pipe in an "interprocess communication mechanism" (IPC). Therefore we have to have multiple processes between/among which to communicate.

   In most shells (including Bourne, older Korn, bash, and pdksh) the subprocess was created to handle the commands on the right of the pipe operator. Thus our 'read' command (in the examples below) is happening in a subshell. Naturally that shell exits after completing its commands; and the variables it has set are lost. Naturally the subshell can only affect its own copies for any shell and environment variables.

   With newer versions of ksh and zsh we find that the subshell is usually created on the left of the pipe. This allows us to use commands like "echo foo bar bang | read a b c ; echo $a $b $c" with that effect that most people would expect. Note that the follow will work under bash, pdksh, etc: "echo foo bar bang | ( read a b c ; echo $a $b $c )" (We have to do everything with our variables within the subshell).

   All of this is really quite obvious once you realize that a | operator is necessarily creating a subprocess.

   [Dan Wilder] Try #!/bin/sh.

   ---

   File with Device Information

   System Inventory File?

   From Paul Haigh on Thu, 17 Aug 2000

   Answered By: Jim Dennis

   Hi

   I once looked at a file in linux which had a listing of all devices found during the installation process. For example it listed the Video card of the PC I had just installed. I was using Redhat 6.0. What is the name of this file? Where is it? I for the life of me can't remember. nor find it I thought it was in /proc but that isn't correct. Sorry to be so forgetful. Thanks, your help is appreciated.

   Paul

   Hmm. The installation process is specific to each distribution. So that list would depend on whether you were using Red Hat, Debian, Mandrake, etc. I also don't know what filename it would be under, nor which distributions and versions store this information.

   Indeed the whole issue is rather more complicated than you question implies.

   A Linux kernel does a certain amount of probing to find devices. This depends on the list of device drivers that were linked into the kernel. Obviously if you leave a device driver out of a kernel, that kernel won't probe for those devices. It's not as obvious, but the kernel also won't probe for devices for which the drivers were compiled as modules. To be more precise the kernel won't probe for any device until its device driver is loaded.

   So, you may find that some devices are completely ignored (undetected) until you've loaded the appropriate kernel module, or rebuilt a kernel with the necessary support.

   Some devices may also go undetected because they are set at some set of addresses (I/O or memory mapping) that is unusual for them, or is likely to be in conflict with other devices. The kernel doesn't scan the entire I/O address space for each card. Not only would that be slow, it would probably hang the system. Devices must be accessed using the correct protocols --- and some of those will go into a catatonic state, or will lock up the whole system if they are accessed incorrectly. (The Linux kernel avoids most of these "dangerous regions" by default, and only looks for most devices in the common places).

   All of this much less of a problem in recent years. Most platforms have adopted the PCI bus which has standard methods for discovering and identifying devices, and for avoided conflicts among them. In essence your PCI bus is a network of semi-intelligent adapter cards interoperating over the PCI "protocol." This has always been true of SCSI as well (though with SCSI we still need to manually set unique device IDs). USB and firewire are also much more intelligent and less problematic than the old ISA PC bus.

   That brings us back to the question at hand. How do we determine what hardware is installed in a PC without opening the case and getting the (all-too-often unavailable and/or inadequate) specification sheets.

   You can start with /var/log/dmesg. This file should have a copy of all the messages that your kernel printed during the initial boot process.

   Then take a look at /proc/pci. As you probably know, the /proc directory is usually a mount point for a special "virtual" filesystem. The various "files" and directories that appear under /proc don't exist as real files on any disk drive. They are sort of like a "RAMdisk" except that they don't take up memory in the same way. The "files" under /proc are actually a representation of the kernel's state or of specific data structures as they are maintained by the kernel. The entries under /proc are dynamic --- the contents of these "files" will appear to change as the state of the kernel changes. (In fact under the /proc/sys directory tree there are many nodes or "files" which can be modified by the system administrator to change the state of the kernel).

   After looking at /proc/pci, peruse /proc/interrupts and /proc/ioports and explore some of the other files thereunder. Note: All of the /proc/XXXX dircectories, where XXXX is a number are "processes." These represent all of the state about each process that is accessible to programs like 'ps' and 'top'. The original purpose of the /proc directory in UNIX (and Linux) was to allow for a cleaner interface to process data and to allow programs like 'ps' to be run without requiring them to have 'root' access. The Linux /proc goes beyond that to contain lots of information about the process state.

   In the next version of the kernel (2.4.x) you'll see yet another way to discover hardware that's installed in your system. The 2.4.x kernels will support a feature called "devfs" (a "device filesystem"). This is similar to /proc in that it's virtual and that it dynamically represents the state of a system as the kernel "sees" it. There are significant differences. However, we'll skip further comparison of /devfs to /proc.

   What's more interesting here is a comparison of /devfs to the traditional /dev/ directory. The /dev/ directory normally contains a set of "nodes" (basically special empty files with funny numbers instead of a filesize). Those "nodes" have all the attributes of regular files (owners, group associations, permissions, and dates. They come in two types, character and block. On a typical UNIX or Linux system the /dev/ directory contains a list of all the common devices that might be on a system. This list can be quite large (over a thousand entries on my laptop). Obviously no system actually has all of those devices. However, most systems contain the entries for them as a bit of bookkeeping baggage.

   With /devfs we'll see only a list of those devices which were detected by the kernel. As we load kernel modules we'll see new nodes appear under /devfs. It's also possible to manually create nodes under /devfs. Those will persist until the next reboot. Thus it may be necessary for some systems to restore a list of device nodes under their /devfs directory every time you reboot. (That would probably be most easily done by simply adding an rc.* script to extract a .tar or cpio file into the newly mounted /devfs directory).

   Of course this new model won't just appear overnight. It will be interesting to see how the distribution maintainers (Caldera, TurboLinux, etc) each choose to integrate this new feature into their offerings.

   Meanwhile there are things like Red Hat's "kudzu" package which tries to detect newly added hardware when it is first installed into your system (upon the next reboot). That may also help you.

   Sometimes, you'll probably still have to grab a screw driver and pop open the case. Worse, sometimes you probably will have no practical way of knowing about some of the hardware that's in your systems. PC manufacturers have gotten lax about providing technical documentation with their equipment.

   ---

   10BaseT Connection

   For more about this style of small networking, also see the Home Network article in this issue.

   ---

   From mercdragon on Mon, 28 Aug 2000

   Answered by: Don Marti

   Why did you send the connect a laptop "off round the barn"???? It is far cheaper and much simpler to connect a hub up to the desk unit and then plug into the hub. A small four or five port hub can be found at most computer stores for $50(US) and the cables are not that expensive. The advantage of the hub is the visual connection, data transfer indicators. Tells you they are programmed correctly and communucating with the hub.

   This is the way I have my system set up.

   The original questioner had only old-fashioned 10Base2 network cards, and needed to get the appropriate coax cable and accessories. After I made sure this is what he had, he ended up getting it working just fine.

   I suggested the crossover cable for connecting two 10BaseT systems without a hub, which works. You can use the link lights to make sure you're hooked up correctly. Just be sure to label your crossover cables clearly so you don't try to use them where a straight-through cable is more appropriate.

   I have four systems connected this way and it is much less hassle than trying to work through the crossover cable blues when I forget to set up a connection properly. A quick glance at the hub says it needs to be setup.

   One advantage of a crossover cable over a hub: you don't need to rig up a battery for the hub if you want to play two-player deathmatch video games on airplanes.

   ---

   shell script

   From Peter Truong on Mon, 28 Aug 2000

   Answered By: Ben Okopnik

   I have a directory consisting of:

   
   test01.in   test05.in   test99.in  <-- in files
   test01.out  test05.out  test99.out <-- out files
   

   this is my code:

   
   infile=`test[0-9][0-9]*.in`
   outfile=`test[0-9][0-9]*.out`
   

   This is at least one of the reasons it doesn't work. What you seem to be trying to do here is create a list of files under the "$infile" and "$outfile" labels - but by putting the right side of the equation in backquotes, you're asking the shell to _execute_ it. That won't work; in fact, you should get an error message when you run this.

   
   for input in $infile
   do
     for output in $outfile
     a.out < $input > $output
   

   What this will do is execute "a.out" and use the current value of "$input" as the file for it to process, then output the result into the filename that is the current value of "$output" (overwriting whatever was in there originally). You didn't mention this part of the script in your explanation of what you want the script to do, but this _will_ wreck your "*.out" files. This "double" loop will also repeat the above process as many times as there are output files (if the original "list of files" equation worked) for each input file, i.e., if you have 50 "*.in/*.out" pairs, the inside loop will execute 2500 times - and the end result will be the "processed" value of the last file in the "input" list written to every file in the "output" list.

   
     cmp $input $output
   

   This part, of course, becomes useless after the above procedure: either "a.out" changes "$input", in which case it will always be different, or it does not change it, in which case it will always be identical.

   
     echo $?
   done
   

   but this however, doesn't work. what I want it to do is:

   • get each of the individual pairs of files (ie. test01.in & test02.out)
   • and compare each pair until there is no more to compare.

   All right; try this -

   --------------------------------------------------------------------
   #!/bin/bash
   #
   # "in_out" - compares all <fname>.in to <fname>.out files in the
   # current directory
   
   for n in *.in
   do
     cmp $n $(basename $n in)out
   done
   --------------------------------------------------------------------
   

   It's basic, but worth repeating: the "hash-bang" line comes first in any shell script and must be contiguous (no spaces). If the script requires input, write an error-checking routine and print usage instructions on an error; otherwise, as in this one, comments will help you remember what it does (you may remember it today, but not 3 years and 1,000 scripts down the road.) Next, the loop - for each "in" file, we generate the "out" filenames via "basename", by chopping off the "in" extension and tacking on an "out". Then we perform the comparison and print a message for every pair that fails: "cmp" exits silently on a "good" comparison, and prints a message on a bad one. If you want numeric output, you can use "cmp -s" (for "silent" output, i.e., it only sets the status flag) and "$?" to print the status value.

   Good luck with your shell-scripting,
   Ben Okopnik

   ---

   Connection Refused

   From Yu-Kang Tsao on Wed, 26 Jul 2000

   Answered By: Jim Dennis

   Hi James:

   Now I am setting up a linux red hat 6.2

   server box in our NT LAN and I am trying to telnet connect to that box from one of the NT workstation in our NT LAN. But it gives me connectiong refuse message. Would you help me telnet connect to linux box ? Thank you very much.

   Sincerely
   Nathan

   You probably don't have DNS, specifically your reverse DNS zones (PTR records) properly configured.

   Linux includes a package called TCP Wrappers (tcpd) which allows you to control which systems can connect to which services. This control is based on the contents of two configuration files (/etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny) which can contain host/domain name and IP address patterns that "allow" or "deny" access to specific services.

   You could disable this feature by editing your /etc/inetd.conf file and changing a line that reads something like:

   telnet	stream	tcp	nowait	telnetd.telnetd	/usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/sbin/in.telnetd
   

   to something that looks more like:

   telnet	stream	tcp	nowait	telnetd.telnetd	/usr/sbin/in.telnetd /usr/sbin/in.telnetd
   

   (Note: THESE ARE EACY JUST ON ONE LINE! THE TRAILING BACKSLASH is for e-mail/browser legibility)

   My processing script knows about these backslashes and restored them to a complete line. But it may be worth knowing that most versions of inetd these days will allow you to use \ at the very end of line to continue it onto the next. It will not work if you have a space after it though. Think of it as escaping the newline character. -- Heather

   some of the details might differ abit. This example is from my Debian laptop and Red Hat has slightly different paths and permissions in some cases).

   You should search the back issues of LG for hosts.allow and tcpd for other (more detailed) discussions of this issue. It is an FAQ. Of course you can also read the man pages for hosts_access(5), hosts_options(5) and tcpd(8) for more details on how to use this package.

   Note: You should also consider banning telnet from your networks. I highly recommend that you search the LG back issues for references to 'ssh' for discussions that relate to that. Basically, the telnet protocol leaves your systems susceptible to sniffing (and session hijacking, among other problems) and therefore greatly increases your chances of getting cracked, and greatly increases the amount of damage that an intruder or disgruntled local user can do to your systems. 'ssh' and its alternatives are MUCH safer.

   ---

   Linux in a Windows NT Domain (under a PDC)

   From Maenard Martinez on Tue, 25 Jul 2000

   Answered By: Jim Dennis

   Is it possible to connect the Linux Red Hat 6.0 (costum installed) to the network wherein the PDC is a Windows NT 4.0 Server? Do I need additional tools to connect it? Is it similar to UNIX X-windows?

   Thanks, Maenard

   Basically all interoperation between Linux (and other forms of UNIX) and the Microsoft Windows family of network protocols (SMB used by OS/2 LANManager and LANServer, WfW, Win '9x, NT, and W2K) is done through the free Samba package.

   Normally Samba allows a Linux or other UNIX system to act as an SMB file and print server. There are various ways of getting Linux to act as an SMB client (including the smbclient program, which is basically like using "FTP" to an SMB server, and the smbfs kernel option that allows one to mount SMB shares basically as though they were NFS exports).

   Now, when it comes to having Linux act as a client in an MS Windows "domain" (under a PDC, or primary domain controller) it takes a bit of extra work. Recently the Andrew Tridgell and his Samba team have been working on a package called "winbind." Tridge demonstrated it to me last time he was in San Francisco.

   Basically you configure and run the winbind daemon, point it at your PDC (and BDCs?) and it can do host and user lookups, (and user authentication?) for you. I guess there is also a libnss (name services selector) module that is also included, so you could edit your Linux system's /etc/nsswitch.conf to add this, just as you might to force glibc linked programs to query NIS, NIS+, LDAP or other directory services.

   Now I should point out two things about what Tridge showed me. First, it was under development at the time. It probably still is. You'd want to look at the Samba web pages and read about the current state of the code --- but it may not be ready for use on production systems. (I hear that some sites are already using it in production, but basically that's because it's their only choice). The other thing I should mention is that I got the basic "salesman's" demo. That's not any fault of Tridge's (he wasn't trying to "sell" it to me and he certainly can get into the technical nitty gritty to any level that I could understand). It's just that we didn't have much time to spend together. As usual we were both pressed for time.

   I'm writing this on a train, which is why I can't look for more details at the Samba site for you. So, point your browser at: http://www.samba.org for more details.

   ---

   ACLs on Linux

   In reply to Ivan Sergio Borgonovo on the SVLUG list

   Answered By: Rick Moen

   I thought you might be interested in the thing that follows, because of what I've heard you say in the past about capabilities models.

   Jim Dennis has been quite verbose about the difference between the current Linux privileges model and true capabilities systems like EROS (eros-os.org). -- Heather

   A guy posting to the SVLUG list from Italy, Ivan Sergio Borgonovo, asked whether there were any general summaries of ACLs on Linux.

   I looked around, was astonished to find that there weren't any, and decided to write one. It follows -- used within VA Linux's Knowledgebase, now, but I see no reason it can't be used anywhere else, as well. I hope you'll find it of interest.

   And so, it's posted here for all of you, dear readers. -- Heather

   Q: Is there support for ACLs (Access Control Lists) in Linux?

   A: Yes, there is -- from multiple development projects, with divergent approaches, all aiming to allow the administrator some means of specifying what capabilities a process is to be allowed, and other fine-grained permissions (including Mandatory Access Control labels, Capabilities, and auditing information). At this time (August 2000), all require modifications (third-party, unofficial kernel patches) to the Linux kernel's filesystem and VFS code (umask and access-control modifications), which sometimes take a while to catch up with new kernel releases. The kernel maintainers have not endorsed any one approach. Thus, implementing any of these approaches remains an advanced topic using experimental code.

   Further, there is not broad agreement on what filesystem it is best to use with ACLs. The obvious choices are ext2 + extended-attributes extensions, Steven Tweedie's ext3 (ftp://ftp.linux.org.uk/pub/linux/sct/fs/jfs), the AFS implementations from IBM/Transarc (http://www.transarc.com/Product/EFS/AFS) or the Arla Project (http://www.stacken.kth.se/projekt/arla), GFS (http://www.globalfilesystem.org), or ReiserFS (http://devlinux.com/projects/reiserfs).

   Adding further confusion is that the leading candidate for an ACL standard, IEEE Std 1003.1e, was withdrawn by the IEEE/PASC/SEC working group while it was still a draft, on Jan. 15, 1998, and thus was never formally included in POSIX (http://www.guug.de/~winni/posix.1e). It nonetheless remains influential.

   Generic "capabilities" support is included in 2.2 and greater kernels, including a control in /proc called the "capabilities bounding set". Many "capabilities" operations will also require libcap, a library for getting and setting POSIX 1003.1e-type capabilities, which you can find at ftp://ftp.de.kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/security/linux-privs/kernel-2.2 . See also the Linux Kernel Capabilities FAQ: ftp://ftp.de.kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/security/linux-privs/kernel-2.2/capfaq-0.2.txt

   The VFS patches, filesystems extensions or other filesystem facilities to store ACLs, patches for fsck utilities (preventing them from "cleaning up" your extended attributes), patches for GNU fileutils, patches for the quota tools, and administrative tools must be provided by the various unofficial ACL-on-Linux projects, of which there are several.

   In addition to applying any applicable patches to your kernel, you will have to enable three kernel-configuration options (all in the "filesystems" section): "Extended filesystem attributes" (CONFIG_FS_EXT_ATTR), "Access Control Lists" (CONFIG_FS_POSIX_ACL) and "Extended attributes for ext2" (CONFIG_EXT2_FS_EXT_ATTR). In order to be offered these configuration options, you must also select "Prompt for development and/or incomplete code/drivers" (CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL) in the code-maturity level options, towards the beginning of kernel configuration.

   The AFS distributed storage system, originally developed at CMU, generically has built-in support for ACLs. As such, it seems reasonable to suspect that IBM/Transarc's leading AFS implementation on Linux, due to have an open-source (GPLed) development fork on the near future, would include ACL support. We have been unable to confirm that from Transarc's documentation, thus far. This may change as Transarc completes its open-source rollout.

   The pre-existing Linux AFS project, the Arla Project, has reportedly been moving slowly. The quality of its ACL support is likewise unknown.

   The existing documentation for AFS on Linux, unfortunately, makes no mention of ACLs or capabilities support: http://www.rzuser.uni-heidelberg.de/~x42/linuxafs/linuxafs.html http://web.urz.uni-heidelberg.de/Veranstaltungen/LUG/Vortraege/AFS/AFS-HOWTO.html

   There have been two main attempts to implement POSIX ACLs on ext2 + extensions. One was the LiVE Project, at http://aerobee.informatik.uni-bremen.de/acl_eng.html . That effort appears to be now defunct.

   The other, and probably your best bet for ACLs on Linux today, is Andreas Gruenbacher's Linux ACLs project, http://acl.bestbits.at . Gruenbacher has a well-developed ACL implementation with storage extensions for ext2, linking the extended attributes to inodes, and with ACLs among the data storable in those extended attributes. He expects that porting his subsystem to ext3 will be easy.

   The Samba Project favours/encourages Gruenbacher's approach, and aims for Samba to directly support POSIX ACLs on Linux if they are ever incorporated into the standard Linux kernel source tree: http://info.ccone.at/INF (http://www.inter-mezzo.org) in the near future implementing extended attributes similar to Gruenbacher's, making future ACL support on that filesystem (which is still in early beta) likely.

   The LIDS Project (http://www.lids.org) implements some "capabilities" ideas, but not ACLs.

   Last, Pavel Machek maintains an "ELF capabilities" kernel patch and matching utilities, which allow the admin to strip specified capabilities from binary executables at execution time. It does not provide other ACL-type capabilities. The information on what capabilities to drop for a given binary upon execution is stored inside the ELF header, in a manner compatible with ordinary Linux operation. The advantage to this approach is that it does not require extended-attributes support in the underlying filesystem. Full details are at http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/elfcap.html .

   "Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

   ---

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