LinuxSecurity Contributors writes: “This week, among the most interesting articles on LinuxSecurity.com include ‘Filtering E-Mail with Postfix and Procmail,’ ‘Preventing File Limit Denials of Service,’ ‘Intrusion Detection: Implementation and Operational Issues,’ and ‘Use Snort for Lightweight Intrusion Detection.'”

John Gowin writes: ” In our second Grab Bag review, we’ve got some real software gems to share with you. This month, we’ll take a look at the File Roller archive management tool for your GNOME desktop and its KDE counterpart Karchiver, the awesome ROX Filer file manager and the many faces of the Xine media player. We also received some reader feedback from last month’s Grab Bag, so let’s get started!

Read more at LinuxOrbit.com.”

John Gowin writes: ” In our second Grab Bag review, we’ve got some real software gems to share with you. This month, we’ll take a look at the File Roller archive management tool for your GNOME desktop and its KDE counterpart Karchiver, the awesome ROX Filer file manager and the many faces of the Xine media player. We also received some reader feedback from last month’s Grab Bag, so let’s get started!

Read more at LinuxOrbit.com.”

John Gowin writes: ” In our second Grab Bag review, we’ve got some real software gems to share with you. This month, we’ll take a look at the File Roller archive management tool for your GNOME desktop and its KDE counterpart Karchiver, the awesome ROX Filer file manager and the many faces of the Xine media player. We also received some reader feedback from last month’s Grab Bag, so let’s get started!

Read more at LinuxOrbit.com.”

eWeek says: “GNOME 2.0 is a giant leap forward in the search for a viable Linux alternative to Windows, according to users and creators of the GNU Network Object Model Environment, but more work needs to be done on the technology.”

The story’s from ZDNet UK: “Hackers are increasingly targeting Web servers based on the Linux operating system, while the number of successful attacks on Windows systems decreases, according to a new report from UK system integrator Mi2g . The study also found that successful attacks on UK and US government sites have decreased, which may be due to tougher laws and improved security.” Supposedly, these are successful attacks Mi2g is recording, although Linux attacks are still significantly lower than Windows attacks.

Andrea Bingham writes: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) selected Linux NetworX to design, integrate and deliver what will be the largest and most powerful Linux supercomputer by Fall 2002. Multiple programs at LLNL will use the Linux NetworX Evolocity ™clustered supercomputer to support the Laboratory?s national security mission. When delivered, the Intel-based cluster is expected to be one of the five fastest supercomputers in the world.
“A machine of this size is very complex to integrate and manage. The partnership between Linux NetworX and LLNL is essential to the success of this endeavor,” said Dr. Mark Seager, LLNL?s Asst. Dept. Head for TeraScale Systems. “This Linux NetworX system will significantly expand the computing resources available to Livermore?s researchers. We are very excited about the unclassified scientific simulations that will be accomplished on this world-class Linux Cluster.”

The Linux NetworX Evolocity cluster, when delivered to LLNL, will be the fastest Intel-based or Linux cluster machine ever built, as it will harness 1,920 Intel® Xeon(tm) processors at 2.4 GHz with a theoretical peak of 9.2 teraFLOPS, or 9.2 trillion calculations per second.

“This Intel-based Linux NetworX system is historic in that it represents a viable method of using standards-based technologies to create some of the fastest supercomputers in the world,” said Lisa Hambrick, director of enterprise processor marketing for Intel. “Linux NetworX and Intel are expanding the possibilities of supercomputing into a world where the fastest machines are powered by cost-effective and very powerful Intel Xeon processors.”

Several factors enabled Linux NetworX to win this competitive procurement, some of which include:

· Clustering expertise, http://www.lnxi.com/company/index.html, gained from years of installing and supporting some of the largest clusters in the world. Linux NetworX designed and delivered the world?s first commercial Linux cluster in 1997.
· LinuxBIOS, http://www.linuxnetworx.com/products/linuxbios.php , an open BIOS alternative that can boot nodes in seconds, is remotely manageable and is designed specifically for cluster systems.

· ICE Box(tm), a href=”http://www.lnxi.com/products/icebox.php, a Linux NetworX appliance designed specifically for management of Linux clusters, providing system monitoring and control functionality such as power control and serial access.
· Sub 1U Evolocity(tm) II, http://www.linuxnetworx.com/products/e2.php, a double-density node design with an innovative architecture. *Product to be unveiled Fall 2002.
· Co-development of SLURM (Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management) with LLNL, http://www.llnl.gov/linux/slurm/slurm.html. SLURM is an open source resource management system developed for Linux clusters providing scalability, portability, interconnect independence, fault-tolerance and security.

“This Linux NetworX system is representative of the next stage in the evolution of supercomputing,” said Stephen Hill, Linux NetworX President and CEO. “Clustering allows organizations to achieve results quicker, with far greater flexibility at a lower cost-of-ownership than is possible with competing technologies. This is why Linux clusters are rapidly becoming the standard in high performance computing.”

System Fact Sheet
For a diagram of the system and more specific detail on the supercomputer Linux NetworX is building for LLNL, visit http://www.linuxnetworx.com/news/llnl_info.php.

Cluster Overview:

Each node within the cluster contains QsNet ELAN3 by Quadrics, 4 GB of DDR SDRAM memory per node, 120 GB Disk Space. ICE Box will also be used to help LLNL manage and maintain the clusters. Below is the breakdown of the Linux cluster system specs.
· 9.2 Tflops Linux cluster of Dual Intel® Xeon processors at 2.4 GHz

· 3.8 TB of aggregate memory
· 115.2 TB of aggregate local disk space
· 962 total nodes plus separate hot spare cluster and development cluster
· 1,920 Intel Xeon processors at 2.4 GHz
· Sub 1U Evolocity node for 924 compute nodes
· LinuxBIOS on all nodes
· ICE Box 3.0

· Blue Arc Si7500 Storage Systems with a combined storage capacity of 115 terabytes
· Cluster File Systems, Inc. supplied the Lustre Open Source cluster wide file system

About Linux NetworX
Linux NetworX (www.linuxnetworx.com) brings its powerful cluster solutions and empowering management tools to those demanding high performance and high availability systems. Linux NetworX provides solutions for organizations involved in oil and gas exploration, aeronautical and chemical modeling, biotechnology research, graphics rendering and visual effects, Web serving, ISPs, ASPs, and other technological research fields. Through its innovative Evolocity hardware, ICE cluster management tools and professional service and support, Linux NetworX provides end-to-end clustering solutions. To date, the company has built some of the largest cluster systems in the world, and boasts numerous Fortune 500 customers.

CONTACT
Brad Rutledge
Linux NetworX
801-562-1010 ext. 218
brutledge@linuxnetworx.com

David Schwoegler
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
925-422-6900
newsguy@llnl.gov

Herbert Carl Meyer writes: “Without any particular notice, Sun released a patch for Star Office 6.0 on 7/12/2002. A URL:

http://sunsolve.sun.com/pub-cgi/show.pl?target=pat ches/xprod-StarOffice&nav=pub-patches

I found it late Sunday night, looking for a fix for the spell checker in the word processor. The patch is about 36 MB for linux. Patches are also available for Window$ and Solaris.

For linux, the patch comes as a tar.Z, with a program in it. I applied the patch as root, after figuring out that root must have done a workstation install for him(it)self. The pseudo-registry for the patching user is used to locate the StarOffice installation directory.”

– By Robin “Roblimo” Miller –
I just downloaded Internet Porn from The Washington Post’s Web site. It’s one of the quirkier songs available from MP3.washingtonpost.com, a section of the Post’s site that allows local musicians to self-publish their work online for free. MP3 download sections are not yet common in daily newspapers, but if enough of them pick up on the idea, newspapers could become as strong a promotional force in the music industry as traditional record companies.

Howard Parnell, managing editor for local news at washingtonpost.com, came up with the idea of a Post-sponsored MP3 download site. He lived in the Boston area for 15 years, and liked the download area at Boston.com (which apparently closed for a while but has since returned), and thought something similar might go over well in the Washington, D.C., area. He says, “I grew up in this town, and I’m a big fan of the local music scene.”

When Howard found that the Perl code behind the Boston.com MP3 site was Open Source, and that he could get a copy free upon request, the idea of a Post MP3 download site suddenly became financially attractive, and he presented it to his bosses. “The publishers had to approve it,” he says, “but that was no problem. The idea fit in with a core part of our mission: To encapsulate the Internet for our local audience … it seemed like a no-brainer.”

Some of the Boston.com folks came down and worked on the code with the Post’s people. This was a couple of years ago. Since then, Howard says, “we haven’t had any real problems with the code.”

Howard says Post management is happy with the site. While he won’t discuss financial specifics, he says, “we aren’t losing money on it.”

The artist’s view

Cliff Mays’ band, Heydevils, is promoted almost entirely on the Internet and by word of mouth. They currently have three songs available for download through the Post’s site, and, Cliff says, “The Post has helped a lot with exposure. People go from the Post’s site to our heydevils.com site, where there are more MP3s to download, and they can buy our CDs.”

“You mean,” I ask, “you guys sell CDs through your Web site, and play concerts, and don’t have a major record contract, and you manage to make a living as full-time musicians?”

“Yes, we’re making a living, Cliff says. “We’re all full-time musicians.”

The Heydevils are not Internet beginners. At one point, about a year and a half ago, their novelty song, AOHell, was the top download at MP3.com. “AOHell was the first song we uploaded [to the Internet],” Cliff says, “and we got a lot of attention from it.”

Cliff designed the Heydevils Web site himself. He says, “The ‘Net’s been good to us.” The Heydevils had their own site up, and were using it to sell CDs and announce upcoming appearances, long before they knew the Post had a music download site. In fact, they didn’t go looking for MP3.Washingtonpost.com. The Post found them.

A secret weapon named Maria

Howard says, “There are only two people working on MP3.washingtonpost.com, and they only spend some of their time each week on it.” Those two people are tech guy Rhome Anderson and writer/producer Maria Villafana, and Maria says she spends much more than “some of her time” working on the site.

Well, maybe only some of the time she spends in the office — she has editorial duties on other Post-owned Web sites — but she says she works on the music download site “more than full time … I’m in bars and clubs seven nights a week.” Some of that time is spent recruiting bands for the download site. Cliff Mays of Heydevils says he first heard about mp3.washingtonpost.com from Maria in a Georgetown nightclub: “She said we should upload some songs to her site, so we did.”

Knowing that this kind of personal recruiting is way above and beyond the normal call of duty, I ask Maria, “Is this a job or a labor of love?”

Maria says, “It’s more than a job. It’s what I’ve always done for fun and a living.”

Before going to work for washingtonpost.com’s predecessor, Digital Ink, back around 1995, Maria worked with the Washington Area Music Association (WAMA). This experience is what got her into Digital Ink, where she wrote about music, especially night club acts. When the Post decided to start featuring MP3 downloads, she was already on staff, and she was eager to take on the new responsibility. “When Howard approached me about doing this site,” she says, “it was kind of like WAMA, except it had funding and the Post name.”

Maria says she listens to every song that goes on the site. “I try not to be judgmental,” she says. “It’s fun, but it can be a real pain. I filter things because some people can take the freedom to do what they want just a little further than they should. Somebody once uploaded something glorifying date rape. That’s the only song I ever turned down.”

Beyond basic yea/nay MP3 posting decisions (and recruiting), Maria feels a large part of her job is featuring groups that deserve exposure over and above the basic “band pages” they all get free for the asking. She describes the features she writes about outstanding groups for the front page of the MP3 section like this: “If there’s something that’s really good, I say to the rest of the community, ‘Hey, take a listen!'”

Maria claims she has only had one conflict, ever, with Howard over editorial policy, and that was the time she wanted to write a feature about a band called Da Vinci’s Notebook, whose song, Enormous Penis, was getting downloaded like mad. “Enormous What???!!?” is Maria’s recollection of Howard’s reaction, so she held off on the story about Da Vinci’s Notebook until the group had other songs available for download. (Now Da Vinci’s Notebook has two more MP3s on the Post’s site: Ally McBeal and Internet Porn, and they are both as funny as Enormous Penis.)

All kinds of music

A look at the Post’s top downloads shows an amazing variety, from rock to rap to go-go (an ultra-danceable local funk variant) to country to — at least in the weeks right around July 4 — The Star Spangled Banner. There’s bluegrass, klezmer, techno, classical, punk, jazz, and groups that are not easy to classify by genre. MP3.com may have more titles and bands listed, but the Post carries more than enough kinds of music to satisfy almost any taste.

Quality varies. Howard says, “We have rock and roll hall-of-famers on here, we have some kids from local high schools. This is an outlet for self-expression. We don’t make many quality judgments here.” He tells of one kid who recorded a song about his graduation from high school. “It was about what you’d expect,” he says, “but it got a lot of play around graduation time, even made our ‘Top 50’ list for a while. A lot of people liked it and downloaded it.

“There’s a certain old-school Internet thing about this site,” Howard says, “like the commitment to self-expression. And the real power of it is the focus on local community.

“MP3.com, sites like that, are not really competitors,” he points out. “They’re a national thing. This is about the local music scene, Maryland, Virginia, D.C., West Virginia. You have to assert some localness …”

There is a certain beauty in listening to an MP3 from a local band and realizing that you can not only buy CDs directly from them, but that you can probably hear them perform live if you’re so inclined.

Maria also sees another piece of beauty in hooking music makers and music listeners up with each other through the Internet: “Destroying the record industry as we know it … that part makes me feel good,” she says.

We all know the current “major label” record industry, with its chronic emphasis on a few pop groups and near-exclusion of all other music, its archaic distribution structure, and its resistance to technological innovations, is on the way out. The real question has become, “What will replace it?”

Could newspaper Web sites, combined with musicians’ own sites, be part of the answer? Daily newspapers have faced circulation losses for years, and, so far, few of them have managed to make up those losses with their Web sites. But newspapers still have cachet and clout. A band that gets mentioned in the local paper — or on the paper’s Web site — has a greater chance of success than a band that doesn’t. Conversely, music downloads offer newspapers a way to reach young readers they probably would not otherwise capture. Extend the concept one step further: Imagine a “music version” of the Associated Press getting into the act and carrying the top five or 10 MP3s from hundreds of local newspaper MP3 sites. Suddenly bands would have a chance to find big-time fame and fortune without being forced to sign recording company contracts to get “exposure.”

The marriage of newspapers and MP3 downloads is — on the surface — an unlikely match. But if it gives me interesting and innovative music to listen to, and a chance to support the people who produce that music by going to their performances, and a chance to buy their CDs directly from them instead of from a record company that only shares a tiny fraction of its income with the people who actually make the music, I’m all for it.

Altadena and City of Industry, CA, July 15th 2002 – To meet the growing demand for low-cost and fully-featured personal computers, MandrakeSoft, Inc. and Microtel Computer Systems will be
offering PCs preloaded with Mandrake Linux at Walmart.com. Prices start at $389.
Mandrake Linux is famous in the Linux world for providing an easy-to-use yet powerful Linux operating system. These new Mandrake/Microtel systems are loaded with applications for surfing the
Web, exchanging e-mail, listening to musical CDs and MP3s, and other functions plus the complete StarOffice® 6.0 office suite. StarOffice 6.0 provides applications for word processing,
spreadsheet, presentation, graphics, and database capabilities. StarOffice features an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) and is compatible with files created with other desktop suites, such as
MS-Office.

The Mandrake/Microtel systems, available only at www.walmart.com, are completely preconfigured and ready to use. Owners will find everything needed for a productive workstation including:

Mozilla — a world-class web browser, news & email reader
The GIMP — a powerful image editing program
GnuCash — personal finance manager
XMMS — a multimedia player with custom “skins” and visualization plugins

And dozens of games, graphics, sound, video, and educational programs.

Plus, MandrakeSoft’s famous graphical configuration utilities — for setting up hardware peripherals — are just one click away on the KDE or GNOME desktop.

Advanced users who want to configure their Mandrake/Microtel system as a powerful Linux server will be pleased to know that these systems include the “Mandrake Linux OEM Application” CDs
for easily installing & configuring the Apache web server, Samba file & print server, plus many other popular services.

The advantage of buying a Microtel PC preloaded with Mandrake Linux at Walmart.com is two-fold: mainstream shoppers can now enjoy a stable, secure and virus-free computing experience, plus
save money at the same time. An equivalent system preloaded with a proprietary OS, proprietary office suite and other equivalent proprietary applications could cost hundreds of dollars more. “This
partnership with Microtel & Walmart.com is an important step in the growing worldwide adoption of Mandrake Linux as an alternative operating system, particularly in the USA”, said Jacques Le
Marois, CEO of MandrakeSoft.

Microtel Computer Systems preloaded with Mandrake Linux operating system will answer a growing demand for affordable and powerful systems. We have worked with MandrakeSoft to make
Microtel systems with Mandrake 8.2 and StarOffice 6.0 truly exciting and powerful,” said Rich Hindman, Vice President of Microtel Computer Systems. He also added: “Walmart.com has identified a
need for choice in the computer industry and once again is bringing choice to the customer by offering computers pre-installed with MandrakeSoft Linux operating system to address the growing
Linux market.”

About Mandrake Linux

Mandrake Linux is a powerful operating system available for the Intel Pentium®, AMD Athlon®, and PowerPC® processors. Mandrake Linux includes many graphical administration assistants &
wizards that make the operating system intuitive and easy to use while providing all the power and robustness of Linux. Hundreds of included applications make Mandrake Linux an ideal solution
for both enterprises and individual users. Mandrake Linux is widely known as the most feature-rich, multi-purpose Linux operating system available.

About MandrakeSoft

MandrakeSoft provides a trusted interface between users of information technology and Open Source developers. The company offers its enterprise, government and educational customers a
complete range of GNU/Linux and Open Source software and related services, plus user-friendly and highly competitive information technologies. Additionally, MandrakeSoft offers technologists
committed to Open Source software and courseware a trusted channel to offer their services.

MandrakeSoft has technologists in over 20 countries, and is traded on Paris Euronext Marche Libre (Euroclear code: 4477.PA; Reuters code: MAKE.PA) and the US OTC market (stock symbol
MDKFF). “Born on the Internet” in late 1998, MandrakeSoft has established headquarters in the U.S.A., Montreal, England and France. Please visit the website: http://www.mandrakesoft.com for
more information.

About Microtel

Microtel Computer Systems through its built-to-order business model, designs, manufactures and customizes products and services to customer requirements, and offers an extensive selection of
software and peripherals. Microtel desktop PCs are sold through U.S. retailers, System Integrators, and VARS/VADS. Visit www.buymicrotel.com for more information.