From Linux Journal: “In the 2.4.X kernels, Rusty Russell, the Linux packet-filter guru, and his crew of coders have implemented Netfilter into the kernel. Netfilter is the replacement
for ipchains or ipfwadm. Fortunately, Netfilter permits you to keep using ipchains or ipfwadm until you can come to grips with iptables by adding a
compatibility layer via a kernel module that permits these older packet filters to run. But Netfilter has so many exciting new additions, you’ll want to convert
those rules as soon as possible. One word of caution, though, if you load the ipchains or ipfwadm modules, you can’t load ip_tables (and vice versa). So it’s
all or nothing. After reading this article, however, making the change should be easy.”

From I.T.: “It’s late on a dark, rainy Friday night as a team of some of Europe’s best network security
experts trawl the woods for a rogue base station.
They weave between ghostly birch trees to hunt the hacker who has commandeered part of
the wireless local area network (LAN) from inside his tent.
Holding out laptops with antennas stuck to the top, the posse tracks base signals. They
compare signals until they find one that doesn’t match their map – the rogue station.
But instead of hauling in the hacker, they politely ask him to turn off the offending station.
It’s all in a night’s work at HAL2001, Europe’s largest open-air hacking festival.”

San Francisco, California (August 27, 2001) –

Penguin Computing Inc., the first company that is “Simplifying the Solution Process” by removing the complexity involved in developing and deploying fully customized, Linux-based solutions, today announced the first addition to its new line of AMD server products, the Altus 1240.
The Altus 1240 incorporates dual Athlon MPTM processors, a 266 MHz front side bus, and provides up to 4 GB of DDR RAM and four hot-swappable SCSI drives. The Altus 1240 also includes an integrated dual port 10/100 NIC and allows for a single full-size PCI card.

“Our recent partnership with Scyld Computing Corporation has confirmed our commitment to producing high-end clustering solutions,” said Marty Seyer, chief executive officer for Penguin Computing. “Now, with the revolutionary Altus 1240, we are prepared to offer a unique platform for massive, clustered data-processing. Additionally, the Altus 1240 has been designed with significant, high-throughput storage, allowing it to excel in such non-clustered capacities as media streaming and online data-archiving.”

The Altus 1240 is available with a variety of support and professional service options, and with Penguin Computing’s clustering solution, can be deployed en masse for environment-specific Beowulf clusters. Full technical specifications, along with information on pricing and Penguin Computing’s STS customization capabilities are available at www.penguincomputing.com.

About Penguin Computing

Penguin Computing Inc. (http://www.penguincomputing.com) is the first company that is Simplifying the Solution (STS) process by removing the complexity involved in developing and deploying fully-customized, Linux-based solutions. Founded in 1998 by Open Source advocate Sam Ockman, Penguin Computing is based in San Francisco, California and is privately held.

IDC predicts that the market for Linux servers will reach 1.9 million units by 2004, which Penguin Computing estimates to be equivalent to $5.7 billion. Penguin Computing pursues this emerging market by delivering fully integrated infrastructure solutions, professional services and support through cutting edge customization capabilities.

Alan Cox delivers the latest Linux kernel, calling 2.4.9-ac2 an experimental release to resynchronize the MIPS merge: “It isn’t worth running over -ac1.” Changelog and links below.

ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/linux-2.4/

                 Intermediate diffs are available from
                        http://www.bzimage.org

*
*       Experimental release.
*
*       This is just for resychronizing the mips merge with the mips 
*       folks. It isnt worth running over -ac1.
*

2.4.9-ac2
o       Last small bits of the PPC merge                (Paul Mackerras)
o       Fix compile bugs in airport driver              (David Gibson)
o       ITE8172 ide updates                             (Steve L)
o       Add i2c drivers for the ITE board               (Hai-Pao Fan)
o       AC97 register naming fix                        (Ralf Baechle)
o       TI 3912 serial driver                   (Harald Koerfgen, Jim Pick,
                                                         Steven Hill)
o       GPIO driver for the ITE board                   (Hai-Pao Fan)
o       ITE general updates                             (P Popov)
o       Remove double init of SGI streamable device     (Ralf Baechle)
o       Update SGI indy drivers                         (Ralf Baechle)
o       Qtronix keyboard driver updates                 (P Popov)
o       Philips Nino port update                (Steven Hill, Pavel Machek)
o       Add tx3192 frame buffer support                 (Steven Hill)
o       MIPS frame buffer updates                       (Ralf Baechle)
o       Move vino.h into driver directory               (Ralf Baechle)
o       Ocelot updates                  (Jun Sun, G Lonnon, S Kranz, Steve J)
o       DDB5 updates                                    (Jun Sun)
o       MIPS jazz update                                (Ralf Baechle)
o       SGI wd33c93 update                              (Ralf Baechle)
o       Baget updates                                   (Ralf Baechle)
o       SNI updates                                     (Ralf Baechle)
o       Alchemy Au1000 support                          (P Popov)
o       MIPS eval board updates         (Ralf Baechle, Carsten Langgaard)
o       Update Decstation serial support                (Maciej W. Rozycki)
o       NEC Vrc5477 audio driver                        (Steve L)
o       General MIPS32 updates          (Jun Sun, Ralf Baechle, Matt Porter,
                                         Kevin Kissell, Carsten Langgaard,
                                         Jan-Benedict Glaw)
o       MIPS scsi updates                               (Ralf Baechle)
o       Notifier signal oops fix                (Benjamin Herrenschmidt)

2.4.9-ac1
o       Merge the fat and iso changes from 2.4.9
o       Merge the sunrpc changes from 2.4.9
o       Merge (hopefully correctly) the nfs changes
o       Switch to the 2.4.9 emu10k1 driver
o       Merge vfs directory type changes
o       Merge other oddments
        - This leaves min/max and the vm/buffer changes
          both of which are pretty dubious anyway
o       lock_kiovec page unwind fix                     (Velizar B)
o       do_swap_page recheck pte before failing         (Linus, Jeremy Linton)
o       do_swap_page doesn't mkwrite when deleting      (Linus)
        | From 2.4.9 with extra comments etc            (Hugh Dickins)

Help Net Security posts posts word of a security issue with PHProjekt, an Open Source groupware suite written in PHP4. By modifying the ID number in links a user can view, modify, or delete other users’ data. This affects versions of PHProjekt up to 2.4.

BBC News: “Just how hard is it to kit out your PC with Linux, the free software
operating system which was first announced 10 years ago on
Saturday?

The answer is: It depends.

If you have enough technical confidence to install a new hard drive
or graphics card in your system, you are probably easily capable of
dealing with Linux.

And if your machine is reasonably modern and does not have too
many unusual add-ons, Linux will probably run without too many
hitches.”

Sunday Herald reports that Borders will become the first retailer in the world to deploy CCTV face-scanning technology. The company plans to use SmartFace (a.k.a. FaceIt) to photograph customers as they enter stores, and compare those images against a database of known shoplifters. The program will be tested in the chain’s 11 UK stores.

Reported at News.com: “On Monday, iPlanet–Sun’s joint venture with AOL Time Warner–will introduce key
Web-services integration software, more than six months after Sun first announced its entry into
that market. Sun executives told CNET News.com that in coming weeks the company will lay out
additional details of its plan, including a competitor to Microsoft’s HailStorm Web-services
initiative. Sun’s renewed push will be its first announcement since unveiling its Sun One Web-services
initiative in February, an event the company has backed with little substance.”

According to a report at Wired News, it’s now easier than ever for college students to swap songs over the Internet and they can thank the court-ordered shutdown of Napster for this development. Citing (among other reasons) bandwidth issues, many colleges blocked student access to Napster but hundreds of new programs and services have sprouted in the wake of its closure. That, asserts the report, makes it impossible for admins to create individual firewalls to thwart each program.

Posted at LinuxPR: “oday, the VP of
Technology for Bynari Inc., Tom Adelstein, and the CIO of the City of Largo,
Harold Schomaker, announced deployment of an “All-Linux” groupware solution
for the west Florida community. The City chose Bynari’s Insight solution for
messaging and collaboration, to replace their existing system running Novell’s
GroupWise product. This announcement follows the July disclosure by Dave
Richards, Systems Administrator for the City that they had gone live with the KDE
Linux desktop.”