LXNY will have a general meeting Tuesday 3 April 2001. This meeting is free and open to the public.

Tuesday 3 April 2001 LXNY Meeting: Vagn Scott will speak on state,
time, client-sysadmin systems, and disaster recovery of whole lans
From: secretary@lxny.org
To: editors@newsforge.com
Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 04:49:29 -0400


LXNY will have a general meeting Tuesday 3 April 2001.

This meeting is free and open to the public.

The meeting runs from 6:30 pm to 9:00 pm.  After the meeting full and
precise instructions on how to get to our traditional place of refreshment
will be given in clear.

Thanks to support of the IBM Corporation, the meeting is at their building
at 590 Madison Avenue at East 57th Street on the Island of Manhattan.
Enter the building at the corner of Madison and 57th and ask at the desk
for the floor and room number.


Both source secret and free software local area networks today suffer from
a general failure to grasp that the lan is but a single device meant to
provide a well defined traditional bundle of services, at a decent level of
ease and reliability.  Instead lans are thought of as ad hoc collections of
hardware and software.  Often the very specifications of the lan are
treated as being too insignificant to even record.  Naturally in such
circumstance, costs are high, performance uncertain, and client
satisfaction low, except for those few clients willing to pay the going
price for very good custom systems administration.

Free software is transforming every sector of the computer industry and in
most cases, a big part of the change is a move to a more open and hence
more competitive market.  The free software forces now stand before every
gate of the huge walled empire called "The Desktop".  Our agents have
already seized some of the internal lines of communication of The Desktop,
such as some mail systems, print and file daemon systems, etc., but the
final battle has not yet been joined.  One of the several secret weapons of
our side, now being developed in plain view, of course, is the single
device lan.  The single device lan still needs several standardized parts,
which remain to be placed in mass production.  The way-back program is one
such critical part.  Sometimes called a "disaster recovery system", the
uses of such a flexible instrument of state recording, preservation, and
impressment extend beyond insurance against the day of gross
hardware/software failure.

Vagn Scott will speak, in general, about his approach to systems
administration, and, in particular, about his latest disaster recovery
tool, which uses one or more CD(s) as the medium of state preservation.  On
defined hardware, this tool makes possible three stroke installs of whole
working free *n*x systems.


http://www.geocities.com/fcheck2000
http://integrit.sourceforge.net
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~rammer/aide.html
http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/99/11/11/024200.shtml
http://www.angelfire.com/tn2/mondo
http://mkcdrec.ota.be/project/index.html
http://rescuecd.sourceforge.net
http://freshmeat.net/projects/cdbackuplinux
http://freshmeat.net/projects/md5backup
http://freshmeat.net/projects/multicd
http://freshmeat.net/projects/ozbackup
http://freshmeat.net/projects/plbackitup
http://freshmeat.net/projects/bootrip
http://freshmeat.net/projects/install_mode
http://www.enjoy.ne.jp/~gm/program/cpbk/index.html
http://freshmeat.net/projects/burn_baby_burn
http://freshmeat.net/projects/sise
http://freshmeat.net/projects/snapfs
http://freshmeat.net/projects/sysaudit
http://freshmeat.net/projects/recoveryispossible!
http://freshmeat.net/projects/repairlix
http://www.handshake.de/user/kroening/pgppipe
http://www.troubleshooters.com/tpromag/200104/200104.htm
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/03/22/1443259
http://www.gnusoftware.com/Emacs/Lisp/virus.el
http://www.textfiles.com/100/famous.bug
http://www.eff.org/pub/Legal/Cases/SJG/crime_and_puzzlement.1


Upcoming events:

There will be an Install Fest within the next few weeks.  We will have a
decent net connection and many helpers, so if you are new to free operating
systems, now is a good time to assemble your hardware.  The best way to
install any OS new to you is with people right there who are able and
willing to help.


Jay Sulzberger 
Corresponding Secretary LXNY
LXNY is New York's Free Computing Organization.
http://www.lxny.org

Maurice Renck writes: ”
RadioTux is an internet-radio on demand. For 14 days you have the possibility to listen to the broadcast online with the realplayer or offline as mpeg3-file.
After these 14 days a new broadcast will go online.

The station reports about Linuxevents, interviews linuxpeople and takes a look at the Linuxszene. The first broadcast is available since April the 1st 2001 and can be found at http://www.radiotux.de The broadcast is only in german, yet.

LinuxSys now online
After a long time the PlanetPenguin-Member-Site LinuxSys has gone online, too.
The site offers informations about popular distributions, a big howto section, bookreviews
and a messageboard. The different section will be published step by step.

Linux4us with new layout
The german Linuxinformation-site is now online.
It offers news linuxtipps and reports.

Apps4Linux searches for help
The german software-archive is searching for members, who are interessted to add new applications into the database and to update the existing data. Interessted people should mail to mails@apps4linux.org Of course user are still able to post software on the homepage.

New Linuxuser are now able to search for software-alternatives. They can search for windows-programs and get alternative linuxsoftware. This feature can be found at http://www.apps4linux.org/searchalter.php3

http://www.planetpenguin.org
http://www.apps4linux.org
http://www.holarse.de
http://www.linux4us.de
http.//www.linuxforce.de
http://www.linuxsys.de
http://www.radiotux.de“

ZDNET.co.uk: “The security of digital certificates has been called into question after a
security provider unwittingly gave two of Microsoft’s encryption
certificates to fraudsters. As a result, IT managers are being warned
to check all security contracts carefully for liability -­ especially
concerning the provision of digital certificates ­- and to guard against
potential security breaches.”

ZDNET.co.uk: “A security hole in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser can
cause the browser to automatically open e-mail attachments that
could be used by an attacker to execute malicious code, the company
has warned.”

MSNBC tells us: “When trying to install Microsoft Visio 2000, the Accept radio
button is missing from the Accept the End User License
Agreement (EULA) dialog box. According to Microsoft, the
Next button is unavailable in this state. To work around this
problem, put on your x-ray glasses to see the invisible Accept
option or point your browser here for instruction on how to key
through the EULA dialog box to select the invisible Accept
radio button.”

The Register: “Several crews got busy on April Fools Day to make a mockery of Microsoft security
by targeting Web sites running MS’ IIS server over Windows NT/2K for defacement.

Among the higher-profile victims were the Walt Disney Company; the Wall Street
Journal’s WebWatch; British Telecomms; HSBC; the US Navy’s Center for Tactical
Systems Interoperability (NCTSI); the US Army Training and Doctrine Command
(TRADOC); Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus; and the American Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA).”

Brad Hards writes: “With the release of the 2.4 kernel, Linux users gained serious USB
support for a wide range of devices. The Linux USB subsystem,
integrated in the kernel and already supported by most Linux
distributions, supports all necessary features like plug-and-play,
USB bandwith allocation and more than 100 ports per bus. This USB
support is key to the emerging Linux desktop market.

Linux supports both the Universal Host Controller Interface (UHCI,
used by Intel and Via motherboard chipsets) and the Open Host
Controller Interface (OHCI, used by Compaq, Apple, SiS, OPTi, Lucent
and ALi chipsets), making USB support available to anyone with a
modern motherboard, or with a spare PCI or PcCard slot available to
add in a cheap USB host controller board. Linux also supports USB
hubs, which provide expansion for additional devices.

Linux 2.4 provides USB support for devices conforming to the USB Human
Interface Device class, which includes USB keyboards, USB mice and
touchpads, USB joysticks and USB graphics tablets. These devices are
supported such that they can appear as normal keyboards, mice and
joysticks. This means that applications do not need to be changed to
use the new kernel capabilities. In addition, the devices can also
appear on a new “event” interface, which allows customised
applications to take advantage of the additional capabilites offered
by USB devices.

Another popular USB peripheral is a USB printer. These devices usually
conform to the Printer class defined by the USB Implementers Forum,
and Linux USB supports the Printer class. Some manufacturers have
produced printers that require special “escape” codes to enable the
USB port, however this is normally fairly easy to configure in Linux
using the normal printer tools (such as lpd and CUPS).

Althought there is no official USB parallel port class, Linux USB
supports a wide range of parallel adapters because many of them
conform to the USB printer class driver. Linux USB natively
supports the Lucent USS720 parallel port adapter which can appear as
either a printer or as a parallel part. Linux USB also supports a
large range of serial devices, including ConnectTech Whiteheat, the
Handsprind Visor, the range of Keyspan devices, Belkin and Peracom
single port converters, some of the Digi Accelport converters, and the
Empeg car MP3 player. Some serial devices are not yet supported
because of a lack of technical information from the manufacturers.

Linux also supports the USB Mass Storage class, used by a wide range
of conventional storage devices (such as floppy disks and the Iomega
Zip disks), and also used for emerging standards such as Compact
Flash, Smartmedia and the Sony Memory Stick. Some manufacturers have
used the Mass Storage device class to make digital cameras appear as
normal disks, allowing the full range of Linux file utilties to be
used for image manipulation.

Linux has provided scanner support through the SANE package for some
time, and Linux provides support for a small range of USB scanners
with a set of kernel space drivers and the SANE tools provided with
most distributions. Further support is possible, but depends on
availability of documentation from scanner manufacturers.

Linux provides experimental support for a range of USB networking
devices, with the 10/100Mbps USB to Ethernet devices (using the ADMtek
chipset) providing the most mature support so far. Support for other
devices, including the various USB-to-USB devices and USB to Ethernet
devices using KLSI and CATC chipsets, are under active development.

About the Linux USB project

The Linux USB project is developing USB support for the Linux 2.2 and
Linux 2.4 kernels. The Linux USB homepage is http://www.linux-usb.org
Supporters of Linux USB development include: 3Com,APC, CATC, Compaq,
Datalux, Iomega, Keyspan, Kodak, Netchip Technology, Sandisk, SuSE and
Y-E Data.

Contact information

For further details, contact Brad Hards (bhards@bigpond.net.au).

“

We went live last August with a “beta” version of the site but didn’t get everything going full-tilt until October, and now — much sooner than we expected — we have passed the 10,000 story mark. But this is only the beginning. Some of what has happened with NewsForge has surprised us all, and we have more surprises coming up before long.The original intention here was to be nearly a pure aggregator concentrating on Linux and Open Source news, with most NewsForge content coming from our NewsVac backend software (written by Jamie McCarthy) that does keyword-based searches of over 200 online news sources every day.

We figured we’d run three original columns per week and do a little feature writing, over and above the aggregating, because we didn’t feel right about taking from the worldwide pool of online tech journalism without putting something back into it.

But something funny happened: we started scooping other news sources on stories within our little Open Source niche without even trying, and our own original NewsForge Reports started getting more attention (and readers) than the NewsVac feed.

NewsForge now runs more original stories, and links to more stories published elsewhere, than any other single Web site that concentrates on Linux and Open Source news. We expected to get to that point after a year and a half or two years, not after less than seven months of full operation. You can now read NewsForge once a day and get a pretty good idea of everything that is going on with Linux and Open Source. There are stories we leave out, but that is mostly because they are duplicates; once you’ve seen a Reuters story on Yahoo! News, for example, there is no point in reading the same story again on MSNBC.

Working on NewsForge has been a great lesson on how tech news is reported, by the way. We all “knew” a story written by one reporter for one news outlet would often become the basis of stories written for other news outlets, and that much of the online “reporting” we were seeing was either rewritten press releases or rehashes of stories published elsewhere, perhaps with a little background material from a company Web site tossed in to add depth. But with that NewsVac crawler showing us all the news, every day, it was soon obvious to us just how prevalent this style has become. Our desire to break this pattern was a huge part of our motivation to pick up the phone and go get stories for ourselves rather than be part of the herd, even though doing real, hard-core reporting is tedious and often unrewarding work.

Most of the credit for NewsForge’s metamorphasis from “NewsVac feed with a little bit of original work tacked on” to full-blown, authoritative news source goes to managing editor Grant Gross and news editors Tina Gasperson and Dan Berkes. They are the only full-time NewsForge employees. Programmers Jamie McCarthy and Cliff Wood work part-time on NewsForge, but primarily write and code for Slashdot. Designer Wes Moran works on almost all OSDN sites. I, too, am divided; as editor-in-chief for all of OSDN, I can’t put nearly as much time into NewsForge as I’d like. We also have several excellent freelancers who help give the site its character, but Grant, Tina, and Dan are the day-after-day backbone and deserve most of the credit for its rapid growth.

Where do we go from here? Obviously “more of the same” is the first answer. But we also have some changes coming. Before long there will be comments attached to each NewsForge Report instead of a single catch-all discussion page (although we’ll leave that going for general commentary). We will have polls, although we’re not quite sure whether to have a single daily one or to attach polls to each NewsForge Report or what. (Please let us know your thoughts on the matter, either through the NewsForge discussion page or by email).

And we have some nice surprises coming up, too.

No, we won’t tell you what they are; keep reading and you’ll find out soon enough. 🙂

– Robin “roblimo” Miller
NewsForge editor in chief

Segfault: “As usual, on the first of April, hundreds of people wrote in to Slashdot with stupid stories and ‘Ask Slashdot’ questions, which were posted on the page. The official explanation has been that they were ‘April Fools’ jokes, and that they were posted for laugh value. The truth, however, was later revealed by the Slashdot crew.”

“Some corporate customers see echoes of its preantitrust behavior in
Microsoft’s .Net and HailStorm initiatives. By embedding Passport
authentication technology into its core products and services, then
launching products such as HailStorm on top of it, Microsoft is
repeating its competitive practices of the past, the CCIA’s Black said.” More at ZDNET.