SecurityFocus: “Attackers have begun favoring particular chunks of Internet address space that are more likely to contain Windows machines than others, said Kevin Houle, a researcher with
the government-funded center, speaking to approximately 600 engineers and network administrators at a meeting of the North American Network Operators’ Group (NANOG).
“If I’m an intruder and I want to install my tools on Windows machines, its very easy to find subsections of the network to search,” said Houle.”

ZDNET: “Clearly,
the most outspoken Linux
proponents hate Microsoft, but they
surely see some value in
developing Web services that
interact in some way with
Windows-based systems. The most
outspoken Microsoft proponents
have realized that Linux is not a
threat but another platform that has
attracted smart people who are
developing rich applications.”

Wired: “While some Linux aficionados downplay Windows XP as a non-issue in terms of hurting Linux’s chances in the operating system wars, an exec at Red Hat feels the need to point out all of XP’s supposed flaws.”

ZDNET: “Busch said it was easy to migrate to Linux because of its similarities with Unix. The Linux servers are used in the
engineering and scientific departments of Intel. The company’s business lines, which rely on accounting software
and other office software still use Microsoft’s Windows 2000 as the operating system of choice. There are not
enough robust office software packages that run under Linux, he said.

Nonetheless, using Linux is not much cheaper than Windows 2000. Although Linux as an operating system is free,
the real costs are related to the computers, support and maintenance, Busch said.”

BSDToday: “The FreeBSD Handbook is the primary source of documentation produced by the FreeBSD Documentation Project. This new edition contains over
650 pages of material about FreeBSD and has been completely updated to reflect FreeBSD 4.X and 5.0-CURRENT.”

LinuxSecurity: “The squid proxy server can be crashed with a malformed request, resulting
in a denial of service attack. After the crash, the squid proxy must be
restarted. The weakness can only be triggered from an address that
is allowed to send requests, as configured in the squid configuration
file.”

ZDNET: “Online retailer Amazon.com shaved millions of dollars from its technology costs last quarter by switching to
the Linux operating system, a disclosure that could provide some guidance for other companies seeking to cut
expenses in a stagnant economy.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the e-commerce giant said it was able to cut technology
expenses by about 25 percent, from $71 million to $54 million.”

Dave writes: “Redhatbox.org – Changelog:pre6:
– me: remember to bump the version number 😉
– Hugh Dickins: export “free_lru_page()” for modules
– Jeff Garzik: don’t change nopage arguments, just make the last a dummy one
– David Miller: sparc and net updates (netfilter, VLAN etc)
– Nikita Danilov: reiserfs cleanups
– Jan Kara: quota initialization race
– Tigran Aivazian: make the x86 microcode update driver happy about
hyperthreaded P4’s
– me: shrink dcache/icache more aggressively
– me: fix up oom-killer so that it actually works
http://www.kernel.org/mirrors/“

– by Jack Bryar –

Last week, I pointed out that many Linux and open platform developers
tend to be so focused on the technical aspects of the products they
sell that they ignore the requirements of their customer. Those customer
requirements may be couched in technical terms but the business issue
the customer is trying to solve is probably much more than a
technical issue. That’s why “better” technologies frequently fail in the
marketplace. The customers aren’t necessarily interested in a better
technology — they want a better business solution. That’s why, whenever I see a see a product that is technically
superior to any competing system out in the marketplace, I look at the
vendor’s marketing plan before I get too enthusiastic.

This past week I saw one of those better products. And I looked at
the company’s marketing plan.

The system in question is a Linux-based hardware platform developed
by a Marlboro, Massachusetts, hardware startup called Egenera Corp. Founded by Vern
Brownell, the former CIO of Goldman Sachs, along with his secretary
and his favorite IT consultant, Egenera has married Linux clustering
technology together with “blade” form factor servers and some
proprietary management code from Turbolinux to create the best
damn transaction server system I’ve seen in a long time.

It doesn’t necessarily mean they are going to sell any of their
“BladeFrame” systems, however.

The company was founded by Brownell to solve a major technical issue.
In transaction environments, servers cannot be allowed to fail — ever.
System availability needs to be 100%. There is almost nothing as
catastrophic as a system failure. Transaction environment managers
routinely double or triple the resources needed to service daily
transaction volumes in order to avoid downtime from equipment
failures or demand bursts. At the same time, this strategy for insuring
against system failure is bumping against another hard fact. The value of
each transaction is falling to through the floor. In market after market,
from retail grocery transactions to stock market trading-room floors,
the pressure to lower transaction costs is growing intense. Managers
need to find ways to drastically reduce processing costs.

What Egenera has done to solve this seems so obvious it’s a wonder
everyone isn’t doing it. The company has used Red Hat Linux to logically
cluster servers together to create a redundant, nearly crash-proof system with
mainframe performance characteristics. Impressive, from a cost a
performance perspective, but no major advance. Egenera has also used
tiny footprint “blade” servers, the better to stack together as many as 24
two- or four-processor blade servers at a time. This is also a good
idea, but not particularly innovative.

However, the company has gone another step and eliminated all the
connectivity hassles associated with bundling all these systems
together. What it’s done is integrated all the connectivity into
the rack itself. The individual blades are little more than trays of
processors connected together in a “smart” rack bearing all the
controller and connectivity resources needed to make this rack into
a network — in this case a built-in high-speed ATM backbone. There’s no
fiddling around with connectivity equipment. Individual blades can be
hot swapped in and out in a couple of seconds. The whole unit can be
treated as if it were a single, inexpensive Linux mainframe made up
of pluggable processor trays.

The company has added to this virtual mainframe functionality by
bundling it with Turbolinux’s PowerCockpit systems management
software. When Turbo released this Linux-but-closed-source product not long
ago, its marketing team talked about the software’s ability to deploy
identical software configurations onto dozens of raw machines
simultaneously, and PowerCockpit could also perform administrative tasks on dozens of nodes simultaneously. That functionality syncs up well with the Egenera architecture, resulting in a system that can be treated as one logical unit, but which can be taken apart
and put back together while running .

So what is the problem? The problem is that the company wants to
sell these direct to end users, and as stand-alone products rather than as
part of an array of equipment that a vendor or an integrator might
configure into a “solution.” That makes the company’s prospects far
more problematic. Will potential customers understand how Egenera’s
systems can solve their management issues? Why would a systems integrator
champion a system being sold direct rather than through the channel?

A potentially bigger problem for the company is getting its systems
in front of potential customers. The company has opted to keep its
sales force small in order to keep costs in line. Unfortunately, that also
means that the company’s geographical reach is effectively limited,
at least for a while. While one could argue that there’s plenty of
business for transaction systems just in metropolitan New York City,
strategically this is a real problem. Among the firms likely
competitors are companies like IBM, a firm with a global reach, direct and
channel sales programs, and a business-savvy solutions team.

So will better technology guarantee that Egenera succeeds in the
marketplace? We’ll see.

Kelly McNeill writes “Our attention is now being directed to the exclusive trailer for “Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones” that will only appear before showings of the new Disney/Pixar flick, “Monsters, Inc.,” which opens Friday. Steve Jobs — the president of both Apple Computer and Pixar Animation Studios — is able to attest to the benefits that can be had when connecting a product with the unveiling of a Star Wars episode.”