Advisories for both OpenSSH and Sendmail were released over the past few days. Both packages had remotely exploitable bugs.
I forgot to blog this yesterday, but the RPMs available from Red Hat are also on apt-rpm. Just do an apt-get upgrade to upgrade your server.
kasia posted about using mrtg which got me thinking about using it as well. It comes installed with Red Hat 9 (and I’m sure earlier) so it’s on all our servers.
apt-get install mrtg was easy.
Copying her script and configuration over was a sinch too. Just put it into /etc/mrtg/
Then I managed to get the linux_stats.pl script working with the aid of this email.
Finally, I managed to record stats about Apache using the script here and with help from here. The killer was trying to debug why the Perl script wasn’t working. It took me a while to figure out I should have the ?auto at the end of the server-status url. bah!
I’m going to try MySQL next!
The latest IBM Linux advert is crap. Oh well, they’ve produced better in the past. (Here’s a link to the quicktime version.)
I just found another apt repository: DAG: Apt RPM repository
This has Epiphany, a browser based on Galeon. Should make it dead easy to try out! 🙂
I’m clearing out old stuff from one of my drives (in a bid to consolidate all my photos in one place for burning. FSlint helped so much in finding dupes – thanks Padraig!)
In the process, I discovered an easter egg in Redhat 9, which also exists in Redhat 8!
The egg is supposed to be a scrolling list of credits with music playing in the background, but it looks like RH9 didn’t get the full egg as no credits appear and the only message is ‘There is no easter egg’ :(.
I ran the egg, /usr/libexec/redhat-credits but didn’t get any music, but you can still play /usr/share/redhat-credits.ogg using xmms instead.
Ok, I logged onto MSN this morning to find the following message which I got a good chuckle out of.
messenger@microsoft.com: You are running a version of messenger that requires an immediate security update. Please visit http://messenger.msn.com/Help/Upgrades.aspx to complete the update.
I didn’t visit the upgrade page, as well, I’m running Gaim on Linux and what could Microsoft offer me?
I happened upon the Gaim website later and found this disturbing page. It seems that on October 15th, 3rd party software won’t be allowed to access MSN without a license. The protocol is changing and that’s why an upgrade is required.
Take a look at the above page for more details but it’s not certain if MSN will be supported by Gaim or others after this date. 🙁
Kevin Lyda attempted to license his several Linux installations at home from SCO. He didn’t do too well however. Maybe the lawyers are more clued in than the sales staff?
And for completeness, Kevin emailed the BSA wondering when they’d be enforcing the SCO licensing requirements.
Err, wow! I just booted into Linux 2.6 and am shocked at how speedy everything is. The mouse cursor acts like it’s on steroids. Browser windows pop up really fast. The GIMP loaded quickly.
I loaded 3 photos from the baseball game on Sunday into the GIMP. Each is 2560×1920 pixels, or between 1.8MB and 2.2MB in size. I ‘auto-corrected’ the colour on each to build up a large cache and the system is responding well. The auto-correction is quite intensive, both in CPU and memory terms. If I had done that while running 2.4 my machine would have ground to a halt while the images swapped in and out of memory (I also have Moz FB, xchat2, MGT, and Kmail open)
Another test – when working on the GIMP and large images, if I swap desktops it takes a few moments for the images to swap out and my browser and mail client to come back in. Not now! The images take about 1/2 second to redraw, and moving back to my browser desktop I can start typing here again immediately.
Of course, it’s not a completely fair comparision. I’m using the open source Nvidia driver, not the propreitary one I used before. I’m going to get the propreitary one working next.
(Tested on an overclocked 300 -> 500Mhz PII, 300MB RAM)
Almost forgot – I’m recompiling the kernel as well..