This post is mainly to deal with people accusing me of how I approached Foxconn in the first place.

---------------------------------

I've been going down the comments of several blogs and news sites that link to my post on Ubuntu Forums regarding Foxconn's (I believe) willfull and intentional sabotage of Linux:

We'll start with me contacting the company after experiencing a problem with every Linux kernel and distribution I have tried, some may say that I should have approached them better, I would say I've been more than generous, my initial contact with them was around the 18th I believe, or over a week ago.

After several rounds of e-mail exchanges, with an incompetent technician that the company later admitted didn't know Linux from next Tuesday, who thought that my problem was relating to some kind of BIOS error that was preventing my computer from starting, even though I gave him a list of the loggings from /var/log/messages detailing the kernel errors and the invalid checksum of the DSDT table their BIOS passes to Linux.

I might add that their support ticket system lists many different varieties of LINUX, and I noted that I was using Linux, their support system lets you create Linux incidents, why am I to think that they don't support Linux? Sure they have shit plastered up everywhere that says "Certified for Vista", what hardware maker doesn't?

And they shouldn't have to support any particular OS, the BIOS's job is to bootstrap the PC, hand the OS various information that is supposed to be operating system agnostic, then kindly buggar off.

So why am I angry with Foxconn?

As I have stated repeatedly, I do not feel that there is any way that this was not intentional, they went to great lengths to sniff for Linux, and hand it it's very own DSDT table, which was not only inappropriate for the hardware on the board, but also failed a checksum test, had multiple compiler warnings, and so on.

Passing it the DSDT table Vista gets is far from perfect solution, but still works better, so why did they write a table for Linux, write it poorly, and then break it intentionally in several spots, the compiler toolkit by Microsoft or Intel even gives you tools to alert you if the compiled BIOS failed a checksum test, it's not something you're going to overlook.

*IF* Linux got the Vista/XP table and broke, I would assume Foxconn was just another stupid motherboard maker over in the Windows world masturbating itself instead of following the ACPI specification.

But it is quite obvious to me that Foxconn went very much out of it's way to give Linux multiple problems, and generally make Linux look like a total pile of crap, there is no other explanation.

Occam's Razor states that the simplest answer is often the correct one.

Would the "broken BIOS from stupidity/negligence" answer pass this test given what I have stated?

Absolutely not!

How about:

Item 1. Foxconn makes a lot of motherboards, with good hardware specs (sans BIOS), and sells them pretty cheaply, this comprises the bulk of the PC market.

Item 2. Linux is a free operating system, you can download it and use it without paying for anything but the CD to burn it to.

Therefore Foxconn boards and Linux seem to be a very good combination, economically speaking, based on advertised specs of Foxconn's board.

So:

User (like me): Purchases Foxconn board to use with Linux, most users don't know what the BIOS is I'll bet, in the past Linux was a lot more difficult to figure out, now Ubuntu and other distributions are easy as pie.

Microsoft takes notice, and has already had a history of trying to subvert Linux, and Bill Gates said in a set of e-mails with other Microsoft guys that they'd love to make the ACPI spec break with any other OS besides Windows.

So Microsoft comes over and dumps truckload of money/kickbacks/incentives/crate of Cuban cigars signed by Fidel freaking Castro on Foxconn.

Foxconn then breaks their BIOS so that Windows will load and work fine, but Linux is fucked.

New users, likely booting up Ubuntu will see how "unstable" it is, just assume that Linux is crap, and run back to Windows over this problem that Microsoft and Foxconn have in fact, concocted.

I'm not so angry with their non support of Linux, as them (1) Going out of their way to break it, (2) Selling their motherboard as ACPI compliant when it is NOT, (3) Having Linux support tickets just to tell the user that has ALREADY GONE THROUGH THE TROUBLE of having the damned thing paid for, shipped, and put into his/her computer to "go get Vista", or "Ship the thing back"

DAMN IT! I will _NOT_ just "ship it back" or "buy Vista"

Foxconn lied about the ACPI specification support (it relies on Windows error handling because it's not ACPI compliant), they go out of their way to break Linux, they admit that they have people writing their BIOS code that are basically intern-level and don't really know what they're doing, and they have also admitted to leaving debugging code in the final product that doesn't actually do anything, except sit there and maybe cause even more errors because they forget to remove a reference to it here or there.

I will _ALSO_ not shut up until it is fixed, because I think many other Linux users might buy this product and face similar problems.

It also became obvious that I was getting nowhere with their representatives, and that I may have to resort to other methods, to bring this to their superior's attention.

Their behavior towards me, as a customer, as a customer having difficulties with features that they proudly proclaimed "industry" level compliance with, that Linux would have no trouble with if they really were implemented to spec, is totally unacceptable, and I defend my attitude towards Foxconn on that.

Who knows? Maybe even Windows users will get a better BIOS out of this?

Imagine a world without choice.

Unnatural. Natural.

Imagine choice.

When simple elements create complex systems choice is multiplied.

Power is distributed and the system finds the best way. It's not the cells, it's the system.

Technology. Connected.

Naturally.

Open Source = Freedom

Open Source = Power Open Source

Part of this article is a sales job for Red Hat, but still it covers a lot of useful ground.

Clic en la imagen para agrandar

Here's a little "cheat sheet" of common, basic Linux commands - just to get you started - you'd be wise to study this subject further if you're serious about administering a Linux box.

In a recent test performed by Network World, three enterprise class operating systems - Windows, Red Hat, and SUSE - were pitted against each other to contend for the title of "Most Energy Efficient Operating System". The operating systems were installed on identically spec'd IBM, Dell, and HP 1U rack mount servers and run through a battery of 16 tests using both default and optimized power settings.

"We ran multiple power consumption tests using Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition, Red Hat's Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.1 and SUSE Enterprise Linux 10 SP1 on four, popular 1U server machines, one each from Dell and IBM and two from HP. The results showed that while Windows Server 2008 drew slightly less power in a few test cases when it had its maximum power saving settings turned on, it was RHEL that did the best job of keeping the power draw in check across the board."

Network World went further to add that the efficiency of the operating systems could be even further enhanced by fine tuning system power settings or kernel parameters, but not without drawbacks.

"Tuning servers for optimized power savings could yield better results, but would create a new painstakingly tedious server management discipline required to constantly control the deep complexities of the configuration variables involved."

Depending on the applications required to run your business effectively (e.g., point-of-sale software), migrating to another operating system may not always be an option. However, it may be in your best interest to consult with an IT professional to investigate tuning your existing OS or possibly upgrading to a newer version in order to take advantage of power efficiency enhancements.

By briansrapier

"Linux Captures the 'Green' Flag, Beats Windows 2008 Power-Saving Measures"

[Via: Network World]

This is not meant to be all inclusive, just looking at some popular file systems, and an old favorite of mine, XFS.

You'll never know what a filesystems is when you use Windows or the Macintosh, because you have no choice in the matter, and now matter how good or bad they are at meeting your needs, you get whatever Microsoft or Apple will give you, you will shut up, and you will use it.

But as we all know, even Microsoft and Apple's addresses give them away, "One Microsoft Way" and "One Infinite Loop".

But the file systems......*cough*

Right, well I would like to start with Ext3, which is currently the most used, if not the best option.

Ext3 is an extension of the older Ext2, which in turn was largely inspired by the UNIX File System, Ext3 is essentially the same as Ext2 only a bit slower, and it uses more disk space due to journaling.

If I had to guess, I would say that Ext3 is the product of all this "enterprise crap" that has gathered up in Linux, in the words of Con Kolivas.

Ext3 also has no way to defragment your hard drive (where Ext2 can), luckily fragmentation is not much of an issue in Linux, but it *does* happen, and any sufficiently long lived file system will start to suffer for it.

Ext3 also supports file system encryption and compression much more reliably than ext2, and the journaled data makes it extremely recoverable (as far as that goes in the world of hard disks) in the event of an unclean shutdown, or a disk crash.

Ext3 is not a very good performer because of all the journaling it has to do and the block by block referencing it has to do to all take their toll on the drive's performance, and it misses many many things that make a *good*, modern unix-like file system.

Did I mention the 10% of the disk that it reserves?

The reserved area is there for root's use. The reason being that the system gets really pissed off if you completely run out of room on / (especially on /var, or /tmp). Programs won't start, weird errors will pop up,etc.

Of course the 10% thing could make more, or less sense depending on your drive size, when ext3 was developed this meant nothing, the hard drives were 20 GB or such, 2 GB reserved, reasonable....

Now Seagate announced recently a 1.5 Terabyte hard drive, so on ext3 you immediately lose 150 gigabytes!

So more advanced file systems are out there, that aren't completely ridiculous on modern systems, there may be catches though!

JFS and Reiser3: I've never liked these much anyway, and they're not even an option in Fedora's Anaconda installer because SELinux will barf all over them, you can override the installer and disable SELinux and install to them, but seriously, they are not a good idea, they're barely supported in any Linux, Hans Reiser murdered his wife and is in prison, and IBM has all but given up development of JFS, they're both dead ends, do not use them. (Suse has one person working on Reiser3 just cause Suse Professional uses it, and JFS has 1 IBM employee working on it, for similar reasons)

Reiser4: Never will be merged, but it would have been fantastic.

Which brings us to two excellent file systems you can use in Fedora 9:

XFS and Ext4

XFS: Originally was written in 1994 for SGI's IRIX UNIX, for ultra high end, top of the line graphics workstations, as a side note, SGI is also the company behind OpenGL/IRISGL (2d/3d graphics libraries that compete with Microsoft's DirectX, but are much more capable).

XFS has pretty much everything you could want in a file system:

It has metadata journaling, sparse files, extents, delayed allocation, and more.

You can even check your current fragmentation threshhold and defrag your partitions while they're mounted, with xfs_db and xfs_fsr.

I told you I wouldn't be benchmarking, but from every meaningful benchmark I've seen (like Intel's tests), XFS totally blows away ext3 in performance, and it's very very efficient with disk space usage, and much more resilient to fragmentation than pretty much any other UNIX filesystem out there.

XFS throws every file system trick in the book to guarantee great performance, very little fragmentation, good recoverability, and very very low CPU usage requirements (Other filesystems can take 2-3 times as much CPU time as XFS)

Did I mention there's no reason to run a file system check after a power outage or other unclean shut down? XFS can check the volume in a matter of seconds, every time it mounts it and heal itself on the fly.

If I could find anything to fault XFS for, you can't shrink the partition (but who does anyway?), you can grow it with xfs_growfs, but not shrink.

Ext4dev: The development branch of Ext4, as far as I know, only Fedora 9 lets you use it (yet), Ext4 is a major departure from Ext3 and the two don't even really compare, Ext4 behaves somewhat like XFS in the sense that it is a 64-bit journaling filesystem based around extents, the downside to using Ext4 instead of Ext3 will be the same as XFS vs Ext3, you lose a bit of recoverability in exchange for a major boost in performance.

Ext4 still doesn't perform quite as well as XFS, but it's very close, and this will be the next de facto Linux filesystem, the Fedora 9 implementation is so new that a few features of the file system aren't even supported by the kernel yet (nothing that important), and e2fsprogs (the disk maintenance and file system check tools) that ship with Fedora do not work with ext4dev, but there are versions that just today landed in Fedora Testing, Koji, and Rawhide as RPM's, which I've had a chance to try out a little bit.

The bad news is that the defragmentation program, e4defrag, is still AWOL, the good news is that fragmentation was never a serious issue on any Linux filesystem, and it's even less of one now, but what performance fanatic is going to be satisfied without this? Well, not me. But it'll get here folks, it'll get here.

Using XFS or Ext4 in Fedora 9:

GRUB (the Linux bootloader), does not love XFS or Ext4dev, yet, so to boot up without seeing the "GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB" message that everybody hates, you need to have a 100 meg or so partition mounted on /boot as ext2 or ext3, and force it to be primary (sda1), then make sda2 your XFS or Ext4dev and mount it on /, and then sda3 your SWAP.

To get access to Ext4dev in the installer, you have to hit Tab on the boot menu on the installer DVD, and add "ext4" on the end of the line.

I *HIGHLY* recommend that you do not use Ext4dev yet, but it's your call, it's too new to be trusted in a production environment.

That having been said, I caught up with Eric Sandeen from Red Hat, he's the product manager for file systems in Red Hat Enterprise Linux:

(The conversation is a little scattered and Red Hat obviously never endorsed me using any of this here, so take it for what you will, I would like to thank Mr. Sandeen for being approachable and helpful, Mr. Sandeen has worked on both the ext4 and XFS projects and I congratulate him and many other people involved on such great work.)

baron1984> sandeen_: When do you think ext4 tools will be in Fedora?

<sandeen_> baron1984, they are in rawhide and in f9 testing today

<sandeen_> e2fsprogs-1.41.0 is the first release with ext4 support.  not that there probably aren't still some bugs

<baron1984> is the tool to convert ext3 files to ext4's extents format available?

<sandeen_> you can mount ext3 fs's as ext4 and new files will be in ext4 format

<sandeen_> there is a planned offline conversion tool but it's not really ready AFAIK

<baron1984> is e4defrag included yet?

<sandeen_> no

<sandeen_> nor is large fs support, nor is delalloc in the upstream kernel yet

<baron1984> define large?

<sandeen_> > 2^32 blocks, or 16T for 4k blocks

Un recente test indipendente ha posizionato Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 al di sopra di SUSE Linux Enterprise e Microsoft Windows Server 2008 in fatto di efficienza nei consumi energetici. Il test ha valutato il consumo energetico su macchine IBM, Dell e HP in tre condizioni: modalità attiva ottimizzata per il risparmio energetico, modalità attiva ottimizzata per le performance e modalità tranquilla (quiet mode).

RHEL 5 detiene il singolo vantaggio più ampio con il 12 % di efficienza in più rispetto a Windows Server 2008, su IBM x3350; i risultati variano in base all’hardware ma RHEL ha le migliori performance in 13 test su 16 e in diverse prove batte Windows di circa il 10%.

La vittoria di Red Hat ha ancora più valore se si considera l’assenza del tickless idle dalla distribuzione presa in considerazione, visto che questo dovrebbe aumentare ulteriormente l’efficienza energetica; tickless idle è già integrato in Fedora ma non approderà in RHEL prima della versione 6.

[via: osnews.com]

Spacewalk funcionara de forma paralela como un proyecto libre que permite una facilidad de administración, actualización, control de paquetes, etc... para distribuciones de Linux o cualquier proyecto de software libre.

Penguin Mail is a feature that is going to soon be added to Club Penguin. It will allow you to save postcards, ignore postcards and delete them as well. You will also be able to send mail to offline buddies. Here is a picture of how Penguin Mail is going to looK:

You will be able to see your mail by clicking the mail icon at the top of the screen. Comment on whether or not you like the idea of penguin mail. I cant wait anymore!! It must be awesome!

polrus

Repackaged Red Hat Enterprise Linux

The biggest benefit of CentOS is that it has all the benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). You get support from many independent and third-party entities, such as hardware and software vendors. If it says it support RHEL, you can be pretty sure it supports CentOS. This is a big deal in the business world. If you need to have a certain application and it only officially supports RHEL, CentOS gives you the option to use it without too much trouble. Of course, the reason you would use CentOS instead of RHEL is to save on support subscription offered by Red Hat.

We all can see how much good work Red Hat is doing. I would like to support it with my (or my company's) money. On the other hand, CentOS is doing some good work of making Red Hat's work available to the masses. They also deserve our support. My compromise, to keep me and the bigwigs happy would be to use CentOS on development and testing servers. Then move to RHEL for production. The boss is happy to pay someone (Red Hat) for production support and you can maybe provide some of that support money to CentOS. Such workflow could keep most people happy.

SELinux

I am interested in learning more about SELinux and how to best use it to secure computers. CentOS comes with it and gives everyone a chance to utilize its benefits. But why choose SELinux? Well, if it helps me learn more about security while also keeping my computers secure, I am all for it. I am not such a philosophical freak to take sides. Best tool for the job, is what I believe in.

EPEL

Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) is a repository of software for RHEL which is not "officially" included in RHEL. It gives CentOS the best of both worlds: officially supported packages along with some other packages you may need to get your job done.

RPM Repositories

You can combine CentOS with repositories other than EPEL and get even more packages. These include, but are not limited to, rpmforge and atrpms.

Fedora

If you are running CentOS, then Fedora compliments your choice on the desktop. So if in my ideal compromise you have CentOS running on development and testing servers, then maybe your desktops could be running Fedora. According to Fedora website, "Fedora now forms the basis for derivative distributions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux". In effect, you are trying out a possibly future version of CentOS before it even comes out.

Fedora on its own is a very good distribution. It has quick releases and the newest technology around. What more could you want from a Linux distribution?

Conclusion

If you are in a business environment where you need RHEL, CentOS can be a great resource. If you are not, then CentOS gives you all the benefit of RHEL without the cost. It is a great distribution for different purposes. Combine it with the RHEL-environment, such as Fedora, and you may not need another Linux distribution. Of course, if CentOS is your choice, maybe Scientific Linux deserves some love as well.

La distribución elegida para hacer funcionar el monstruo ha sido Red Hat Linux (lástima de una buena Debian)

La maquinita en cuestión tiene un diseño híbrido (la primera supercomputadora híbrida del mundo-mundial) que combina 6.948 procesadores de doble núcleo AMD "Opteron" con 12.960 microprocesadores Cell de 8 núcleos, estos últimos conocidos por su uso comercial en la PS3. Ahí es nada.

La supermáquina ha sido construída para el "Departamento de Administración de Seguridad Nuclear Nacional" que lo ubicará en el Laboratorio Nacional de los Álamos en Nuevo Mejico/xico.

Con su Red Hat en el timón la maquinita es 2 veces más rápida que su predecesor como plusmarquista mundial computadoril, "Blue Gene". Su nombre, "Roadrunner" ("Correcaminos", no deja de tener gracia).

Como la inmensa mayoría de los supercomputadores más rápidos del mundo, este "Correcaminos" de más de 100 millones de dólares prefiere ser capitaneado por un sistema GNU/Linux (que también sabe ser muy amigable con el usuario de a pie) y, como la mayoría de ellos, corre multiples instancias de este supersistema operativo sobre un enorme cluster de computadoras interconectadas.

Los números son asombrosos, ¡80 GB de RAM! (osea que hasta el Vista podría llegar a mover sus efectos) y unos ¡1.000 trillones de operaciones por segundo! comparables a unos 100.000 ordenadores portátiles conspirando al 100% de su capacidad. ¡Manda huevos! (Copyleft Federico Trillo).

El consumo de energía también es bestial, menos mal que dicen que alcanza los ¡376 millones de resultados por watio! De hecho parece que también en este aspecto es más eficiente que "Blue Gene".

"Correcaminos"  está alojado en 288 racks tamaño frigorífico, ocupa unos ¡558 metros cuadrados! y pesa aproximadamente ¡226 toneladas y media!. El sistema está equipado con 10.000 conexiones Ethernet Infiniband y Gigabit, y requiere ¡casi 92 Km.! de fibra óptica. Esta fabricado completamente con componentes de tecnología disponible en el mercado y han contribuído a su construcción compañías como Emcore, Flextronics, Mellanox, Panasas y Voltaire, de las cuales yo no conozco ninguna.

IBM está desarrollando software para que este caro gigante pueda ser usado en un amplio rango de actividades a partir de un "ecosistema de código abierto" que permita desarrollar aplicaciones para aprovechar sus increíbles capacidades en servicios financieros, exploración de la energía, medicina y como aplicaciones potenciales se pretende que abarque cálculos sobre causas y efectos en los mercados financieros en tiempo real y visualización de tejidos y estructuras oseas en tiempo real mientras los pacientes son examinados. Aunque dicen las malas lenguas que su función principal es la simulación de explosiones nucleares para poner a prueba la fiabilidad del arsenal nuclear estadounidense y de paso diseñar nuevas armas. De ser así sólo espero que se les cuelgue antes de "Guardar como", no te... Si es para eso para lo que piensan utilizarlo podían haberle puesto el Vista de paso. Parece que para asesinar gente no quieren sino lo mejor, no se les vaya a escapar alguno.

Oye, yo quiero uno de estos para Reyes y que me calcule cuanto va a subir el petróleo de hoy a mañana, aunque no sé yo si híbrido o no dará para tanto.

If your are a member of the Dallas Rules Group (DRG) and you don't subscribe already to the Drools RSS feed at http://feeds.athico.com/DroolsRSS, maybe you might should since most of "All Things DRG" are Drools-centric. Of particular interest is the "latest and greatest" early editions of version 5 from the Drools Team for two reasons:

(1) The Drools Team is beginning the late-September release of Drools 5 that will include a BRMS implementation. Admittedly, their initial implementation might be just a bit behind that of ILOG or Fair Isaac BUT, and this is the important part, it includes basic BRMS functionality AND (wait for it.... wait... here it comes.....) DROOLS IS FREE.

(2) The Drools team lives on the globe. Literally. Mark Proctor (their fearless leader) is in London. Edson Terelli is in Canada. Mic Neale is in Australia. And the others are scattered around the globe. BUT they work together to produce a product that is making giant leaps and bounds from that "freeware" tag into what used to be the exclusive domain of $20K or $50K starter BRMS tools.

Here's another thing: More and more companies are using shareware or freeware products such as Linux, Open Office, Java, Eclipse, Net Beans, JBoss to run those $500K (final installed price) BRMS packages. Now they're going to have another really good package to add in there; Drools. The line between commercial BRMS vendors and freeware vendors is becoming more and more blurred and, with the next year or two, should disappear altogether.

Remember when JBoss was free and big companies would not use it because it did not have "support" from a "real" vendor? So they paid through the nose for BEA (formerly Tuxedo) Web Logic (now owned by Oracle) or IBM Web Sphere. And all of the software ran on either Sun Solaris or IBM AIX. But then "A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum" - small companies, then bigger companies and bigger companies started using Linux, that Unix work-a-like for Linus Torvalds. Totally unexpected. Fast forward three years and now major companies are not only using Linux, they are beginning to use JBoss. But they continue to use ILOG, Fair Isaac, Pega, Corticon, Visual Rules, etc. BECAUSE the OPSJ, Drools, CLIPS and Jess folks just could not produce a "real" BRMS product.

So, fast forward three more years - companies at that time were beginning to use Jess and Drools in places where they never did before BECAUSE Jess and Drools were using the Eclipse interface and debugging tools and Ant and all of that other stuff that their geeky programmers loved so much and used anyway - until they got caught and reprimanded. (They used it even after that because they could not get that vaunted "tech support" from the commercial vendors.)

Today we, the BRMS and rulebase programmers, rule engineers and knowledge engineers, stand on the cusp of an historical incident much like the Rete Algorithm gave us almost 30 years ago in 1979: A FREE BRMS !!! It's coming! The first editions are here! That "pre-alpha" part where there are more problems than features. But judging on the history of the Drools Team, those problems will go away. If you are a BRMS consultant, get ready and be prepared. Meaning you had better download Drools and begin getting used to their syntax rather than that of the big commercial vendors.

My prediction is that within the next three years those dinosaurs of the BRMS world will be rapidly slipping into the tar pits of obscurity and we will have copy-cat BRMS freebies. They won't be as well done as Drools, but we will begin to see more and more BRMS products (note that I did NOT say more and more rulebased products) that are, for the most part, free. Maybe the Drools logo now should be a giant purple dinosaur surrounded by a large red circle with a bar through it. Meaning, STOP THE DINOSAURS. :-)

SDG
Yaakov

As you can see in the table below, total revenue growth has averaged 31%/quarter since fiscal 1Q08.  Surprisingly though, Sales & Marketing and R&D have grown 32%/quarter and 37%/quarter over the same period.  More evidence to refute the myth that open source doesn't need sales, marketing or R&D investments.

It is good to see that R&D is growing faster than Sales & marketing.  However, it's not sustainable for R&D and Sales & Marketing to grow faster than revenue for long periods of time.  It'll be interesting to see which of these two items get crunched the most in an effort to raise profitability.  (Hint: a 7% profit growth is pretty weak).  On one hand, spending on sales and marketing is required to close deals.  On the other hand, spending on R&D ensures product competitiveness.

BTW, I wanted to ensure that Red Hat wasn't playing games with deferred revenues in order to make their quarterly revenue targets.  (I'm overly suspicious of SEC filings since finishing my second accounting and finance courses and realizing how easy it is for management to manipulate financial results). It does not appear that this is occurring.

Overall, Red Hat is performing well, but watch for reductions in its cost structure.  Alternatively, if Red Hat could grow revenue significantly they'd be able to maintain the levels of R&D and Sales & Marketing spending.  Fun times ahead...

Anyhow, happy Fourth of July and we'll catch you next week!

Sotto il nuovo nome di Spacewalk troviamo un applicativo web in grado di gestire l’installazione e gli aggiornamenti di pacchetti in maniera centralizzata, effettuare l’inventariato (software e hardware) del nostro parco macchine, monitorare lo stato dei sistemi, personalizzare e distribuire configurazioni ad-hoc e molto altro ancora.

Spacewalk supporta le principali distribuzioni derivate dai prodotti Red Hat: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, CentOS e Scientific Linux.

gallery Red Hat Spacewalk qui

[via: ossblog.it]

sudo apt-get install ttf-liberation

• Se ha encontrado un fallo en las rutinas de copia de memoria en el kernel de Linux al ejecutarse en ciertos sistemas AMD64. Si falla un intento de copia de memoria del kernel, las rutinas no ponen a cero las porciones de memoria que fueron copiadas en destino, lo que podría ser aprovechado por un atacante para ganar acceso a información sensible.

• Existe un fallo en la emulación de los kernel de 32 y 64 bits que podría ser aprovechado por un atacante para causar una fuga de datos por medio de un binario especialmente manipulado.

• Existe una falta de comprobación de límites en el subsistema DCCP (Datagram Congestion Control Protocol) del kernel de Linux. Esto podría ser aprovechado por un atacante local sin privilegios para elevar sus permisos en el sistema mediante la ejecución de código arbitrario al aprovechar un desbordamiento de búfer.

La actualización también solventa otro fallo de menor importancia. Se recomienda actualizar a través de las herramientas automáticas up2date.

* Existe un fallo en la emulación de los kernel de 32 y 64 bits que podría ser aprovechado por un atacante para causar una fuga de datos por medio de un binario especialmente manipulado.

* Existe una falta de comprobación de límites en el subsistema DCCP (Datagram Congestion Control Protocol) del kernel de Linux. Esto podría ser aprovechado por un atacante local sin privilegios para elevar sus permisos en el sistema mediante la ejecución de código arbitrario al aprovechar un desbordamiento de búfer.

La actualización también solventa otro fallo de menor importancia.

Se recomienda actualizar a través de las herramientas automáticas up2date.

Opina sobre esta noticia:
http://www.hispasec.com/unaaldia/3532/comentar

Más información:

kernel security and bug fix update
https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2008-0519.html

Laboratorio Hispasec
laboratorio@hispasec.com

Virtualization and Linux: Red Hat Unveils New Vision

Red Hat announced a trio of virtualization initiatives today and staked out its own turf in the virtualization battle. Here's a look at what these technologies mean to you, starting with the new Embedded Linux hypervisor

BTW, the song is "Man".  It's an incredible song, and I love the background harmonies her two background singers make.  Bravo.