Linux Gazette... making Linux just a little more fun!
Copyright © 1996-98 Specialized Systems Consultants, Inc.
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Welcome to Linux Gazette! (tm)
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Published by:
Linux Journal
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Table of Contents
July 1998 Issue #30
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* The Front Page
* The MailBag
+ Help Wanted
+ General Mail
* More 2 Cent Tips
+ Producing a Resume in PDF with LaTeX
+ UNIX System man Pages
+ ext2 Partitions
+ Re: bpp 16 Question
+ Network Cards
+ Tip for using Windows 95 buttons in KDE
+ PPP, SLIP and Other Remote Service
+ News Bytes
o News in General
o Software Announcements
+ The Answer Guy, by James T. Dennis
+ CHAOS: CHeap Array of Obsolete Systems, by Alex Vrenios
+ Clueless at the Prompt, by Mike List
+ 8 Reasons to Make the Switch, by Bill Bennet
+ Integrated Software Development with WipeOut, by Gerd Mueller
+ Install New Icons in Caldera's Looking Glass Desktop, by
David Nelson
+ Installing Microsoft & Linux , by Manish P. Pagey
+ Linux Expo
o Linux Expo a Smashing Success!, by Norman M. Jacobowitz
o Linux Expo Editor Wars!, by Eric S. Raymond
o The Fourth Annual Linux Expo, by David Penland
+ LinuxCAD Impressions, by Robert Wuest
+ Book Review: A Methodology for Developing and Deploying
Internet & Intranet Solutions, by Jan Rooijackers
+ New Release Reviews, by Larry Ayers
o The Blackbox Window-Manager
o Lesstif: One User's Impressions
o Sabre: An Svgalib Flight Sim
o SFM: A New GTK-Based Application
+ Portable GUI C++ Libraries, by Sean C. Starkey
+ Using Linux Instead of an X Emulator, by Al Koscielny
+ USENIX 1998, by Aaron Mauck
+ The Back Page
o About This Month's Authors
o Not Linux
The Answer Guy
The Graphics Muse Will Return
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TWDT 1 (text)
TWDT 2 (HTML)
are files containing the entire issue: one in text format, one in
HTML. They are provided strictly as a way to save the contents as one
file for later printing in the format of your choice; there is no
guarantee of working links in the HTML version.
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Got any great ideas for improvements? Send your comments, criticisms,
suggestions and ideas.
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This page written and maintained by the Editor of Linux Gazette,
gazette@ssc.com
"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"
_________________________________________________________________
The Mailbag!
Write the Gazette at gazette@ssc.com
Contents:
* Help Wanted -- Article Ideas
* General Mail
_________________________________________________________________
Help Wanted -- Article Ideas
_________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 03 Jun 1998 11:05:23 +0100
From: Maurizio Ferrari, Maurizio.Ferrari@tin.it
Subject: Photogrammetry tools for Linux?
I am looking for a Linux program to do some close-range
photogrammetry. Close range photogrammetry is a technique that enables
to reconstruct 3D images from a series of 2D pictures. There are a few
powerful (and relatively inexpensive) tools for Windows but none so
far for Linux, that I know of. There was something once upon a time
called Photo4D. Despite my massive Internet search, any occurrence of
Photo4D seems to have been wipe erased from the face of earth. It is
listed in SAL but all the links fail.
I don't want to resort to buy and use Windows software for this. Help,
anyone?
Maurizio
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Date: Sun, 07 Jun 1998 11:36:33 -0500
From: Mike Godwin, mgodwin@socket.net
Subject: Searching (somewhat in vain) for sources on shell scripting
I recently came across an excellent mini-howto on overcoming some of
the pitfalls of having a dynamic IP address
(ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/unmaintained/mini/Dynamic-
IP-Hacks).
Reading this document has refueled my desire to learn shell scripting,
sed rules and the like. My search of the Internet for information on
these topics has, however, been fruitless.
I would be most grateful if someone could point me to a good shell
scripting tutorial or book.
Thanks in advance.
Mike
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Date: Fri, 5 Jun 1998 22:58:11 +0200
From: "Himbeergarten Hummel", himbeergarten.hummel@nanet.at
Subject: X Window System on a monochrome notebook
I've a 486dx notebook with a monochrome display what shall I do to
make X windows run?
Himbeergarten Hummel
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Date: Tue, 09 Jun 1998 13:06:28 PDT
From: "Dave Stevens", davestevens@hotmail.com
Subject: kudos
I think the Coldiron article on replacing NT with Linux is the best
thing I've seen in the gazette. Congratulations. More such articles
are needed. I am especially interested in an article explaining why
Linux doesn't come with a "system requirements" box on the package (no
package??). Seriously, though, I am a computer dealer and have many
times advised people to buy their application software first then buy
a computer that will run that package. If I tell my customers to go
out and buy a 386 with 16 MB of ram and a half MB video card and a 200
MB hard drive, they will think I am [characterization deleted!] in the
head. And maybe they'll be right. How much difference does the
underlying hardware make to the user of an X application, and how can
I assess (for them) the varying cost effectiveness of a faster
processor versus more RAM versus a SCSI disk versus just a bigger IDE
disk. Maybe you can commission an article like this. (Don't even THINK
of asking me). Someone of your loyal readers must have relevant
experience to write up.
Great magazine, keep up the good work. If ever you find yourself in
northern BC I will happily buy you a beer.
Dave Stevens
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Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1998 08:49:05 -0700 (PDT)
From: Renato Weiner, reweiner@yahoo.com
Subject: Suggestion for Article
Recently I was looking at the Gazette and I think I have a good
suggestion of an article that will be very useful for the Linux
community.
I have had some technical difficulties of having two simultaneous
versions of Kernels in my system. I mean a stable one and a developing
one. I searched the net looking for information of how to co-exist
both but it's completely fragmented.
If somebody more experienced could put all this information together,
it will certainly help a lot of people from kernels developers to
end-users.
Thanks a lot for your patience.
Renato.
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Date: Tue, 16 Jun 1998 10:42:06 +0200
From: Carlo Vinante, vinante@igi.pd.cnr.it
Subject: Printing Problems
I've just updated to Red Hat 5.0, and I cannot print anymore documents
using Ghostview, or LyX or whatever. Tests are OK. Have somebody a
suggestion ?
Carlo Vinante
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Date: Mon, 15 Jun 1998 15:46:35 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Sara Briganti mat.1510, briganti@CsR.UniBo.IT
Subject: Information
We are 4 Italian students and we're just have a look about ELM's
sources. We have a lot of problems about these...
Could you ELM us? Do you know any interesting site about how ELM
works? And about sendmail?
Thank you a lot. Bye.
Sara, Elsa, Michele, Livio
_________________________________________________________________
Date: Sat, 13 Jun 1998 22:24:47 +0200
From: Daniele Verzelloni, dverzel@tin.it
Subject: Network configuring
Help me in configuring Red Hat Linux about networking. I've a ISDN
Adapter by Asuscom that I use for Internet in Windows95 and I can't
configure it! I've even got an Ethernet adapter to go to another
computer and in the same way I can't configure it! Thank you and sorry
for my bad English, I'm Italian.
Daniele
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Date: Thu, 18 Jun 1998 23:12:30 +0200
From: Eric CANAL, Eric.Canal@supelec.fr
Subject: a question
I've recently bought a CD-ROM recorder I would like to know if it is
legal to make a Red Hat CD distribution for my own use. My idea is to
copy the FTP distribution on a CD and to install it. I've tried but it
tells me that I don't have a Red Hat CD-ROM. Do I miss a particular
file?
thanks for your answer and BRAVO for your Gazette :)
a French reader, Eric Canal
(Better check with Red Hat about legalities. --Editor)
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Date: Tue, 23 Jun 1998 23:54:20 -0700
From: Ruth Milne, rmilne@mail.bulkley.net
Subject: article idea
I have been reading a lot of speculation about whether Linux can ever
displace Microsoft on the desktop. In the course of wading through a
lot of hype I haven't seen much actual experience reported about an
ordinary computer user installing Linux on their PC. I don't mean
someone who is already a Linux enthusiast and I don't mean someone
with a computer science degree either. Just an ordinary computer user
with an IQ bigger than a shoe size, sitting down with a brand new
Intel box and a Red Hat 5.1 package, say, and going through the hoops
up to the point where X starts up okay and the modem is a working
Internet device. This ought to be compared to such a person doing the
same operation with a new box and a copy of W98. I think that would
make a useful comparison.
Dave Stevens
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Date: Thu, 25 Jun 1998 03:32:11 EDT
From: RangeScale@aol.com
Subject: Need older Linux
Okay, I am pretty new to Linux and am trying to learn it. The main
problem is, is that I always have my desktop tied up doing more
important things, and also don't have the room on it to hold Linux. My
solution is to pull out my old 286 laptop (old but very good) and use
that to start learning Linux. My big problem, though, is finding a
version that will run on that. I have the Debian 1.3, but min reg. are
386+. Is there a ver. that will run on 286 - and where can I get it?
_________________________________________________________________
Date: Sun, 28 Jun 1998 00:47:14 +0200
From: B.L.Michielsen, BMichielsen@csi.com
Subject: Communication Problem
I have a problem communicating with Compuserve through Seyon since I
installed a 16650A serial card on my Dell 486DX2 66MHz running RedHat
4.1 Kernel 2.0.17. and a USRobotics SportsterMessagePlus
modem. Before, I used a 14.4 Hayes compatible modem connected to a
serial port with a 16450 IC, in that configuration everything was slow
but OK. I am connecting to a Compuserve server with baud rates to
28.800bps. The characters in the Seyon terminal form unreadable
garbage, and I cannot find out how to parameterize the connection to
get it right. To complete the information, when I make a ppp
connection to a 56kbps server of Compuserve and use Netscape
communicator, everything runs perfectly well, so I guess the Seyon
problem is not related to kernel parameters but rather to xterm?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Bas L. Michielsen
_________________________________________________________________
General Mail
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Date: Tue, 02 Jun 98 12:19:28 -0500
From: cokeydepercin@pmsc.com
Subject: Article on home networking.
I just read a reply to the home networking article by Mr. Gray and I
agree that home networking is cheap and easy. I disagree somewhat
about the 100baseT. I've just upgraded from 10baseT to 100baseT. The
hub was $100USD for an eight port hub with uplink and the cards were
$30USD (Dec Tulip chip set). I've heard there may be some cheaper NICs
now $20~25USD. My upgrade cost was $250 for 5 machines - 3 Win95,
Linux server, multi-boot Linux/win95/NT - the cable was CAT5 to begin
with. The additional cost of putting in 100 vs 10 is so slight, about
$115 in this case as the cable is the same, that it isn't worth
installing 10baseT. The advantage is that 100baseT and a reasonably
fast Linux machine allows a Win95 machine to access apps almost as
fast (in some cases faster) from the network than from its own drive.
Note that I too build from junk as much as possible and the children's
machines (the Win95 ones) are very low end Pentium and have old slow
small drives than contain only the OS and swap. Everything else is on
the server (install once use many!).
There is a caveat to this of course. 100baseT NICs for ISA machines
are VERY expensive so if you have ISA machines, your only realistic
choice is 10baseT. The one 100baseT ISA NCI I priced (3Com) cost more
than all the PCI NICs for my upgrade.
Just my $0.02 or so. Keep up the good work, I really enjoy the
magazine.
Cokey
_________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 02 Jun 1998 15:48:27 +0100
From: Raphael Marvie, raphael.marvie@cs.man.ac.uk
Subject: Comment about LG last review
It took me 3 tries to get the full article about "Replacing NT by
Linux" but I finally did it. I am very pleased to see people from the
"real-world" as they call themselves to admit that Linux can avoid lot
of people using bad softwares. There is only one thing that make me
sad, the only people who are going to read this article are Linux
users.
Is there any solution to make "real-world" people reading such
article? I not talking of a holy war against M$, but I think the worse
thing for Linux and other brilliant systems or soft is that the end
user never heard of this solution.
The fact that Netscape has moved to Open Source Software was a big
advert for the GNU/Linux solutions. I hope we will be able to take
advantage of it to say to managers "Hey, we can do every thing you
want, and in a better way than it is done yet by Micro$oft and Co. You
just have not to think in buying a solution 60,000$ each year for
updates but paying someone 60,000$ a year for building you the exact
solution you need using Open Source Software. Which means for you
having a *personal* *reliable* *IT* solution."
That is the challenge: teach them that a man or a woman is more
important than a soft, because this man or this woman can adapt
(him|her)self to the need of a firm, and is more important for the end
user as a spring of information than a bad-written manual.
Keep on LG, the job you are doing is brilliant.
Linuxly yours, Raphael
_________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 02 Jun 1998 13:36:06 +0000
From: Andrew Josey, a.josey@opengroup.org
Subject: Web resource - UNIX 98 Spec online
With the recent announcements concerning Linux and conformance to the
UNIX 98 specification, I thought it would be useful to send you the
URL where the online specification can be browsed, searched and
downloaded.
Its at http://www.UNIX-systems.org/go/unix/
Perhaps you could include this as a tip in the next Linux gazette.
best regards, Andrew
_________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 2 Jun 1998 12:19:44 +1000 (EST)
From: Con Zymaris, conz@cyber.com.au
Subject: Article ideas...
It would be of general interest, and help the linux/open source
community, if people out there were introduced to the concept of
advocating that their local University had its Computer Science
students' major final year projects written as open-source. For
reasons why the students would want to do this, check out:
http://www.cyber.com.au/misc/frsbiz/students.htm
Cheers, Con
_________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 1 Jun 1998 16:04:12 -0700
From: "Travis Clark", hilt@telepath.com
Subject: Simple Suggestion
To further Linux in this world of ours, I think it fitting that Linux
Programmers look at two different ways this can be accomplished:
1. Applications - This does not end in Word Processors... Desktop
Publishing systems, a simple database system, Accounting Software,
the whole nine yards. If we focused on software that companies use
at a lower price (or freeware) than Windoze, and comparable or
better performance, then Linux would be more acceptable world
wide.
2. Games - As much as I hate to admit it, Games are a must in this PC
world. There are versions of popular games for linux, but there
are no MAJOR companies designing games for Linux. If we can get a
Doom/Myst/DeerHunter type game specifically designed for Linux,
then Linux will definitely have more interest in the market.
That's my two cents...
Travis Clark
_________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 22 Jun 1998 14:50:45 -0400
From: Brian Catlin, Brian_Catlin@BayNetworks.COM
Subject: Suggestions to improve readability
First, I would like to express my appreciation to all the authors for
taking time to write excellent articles.
I do, however, have a suggestion or two that will make the
accessibility of the zine that much better.
As background, I am one of your readers that prints out the zine, then
reads it. It is much easier for my tired old eyes that way, and I also
get a nice resource to use when the screen is cluttered with windows
of different things for the project I am working on.
With that said, I have a couple problems that can be easily solved.
* The first thing is links in the articles. The usual standard one
sees on the net is to put the URL in the body of the article and
then link it. This way us off-line readers can fire up a browser
later and go directly to the site mentioned without having to find
the link in the online version of the article.
* Secondly, and this came up in the latest issue BTW, when giving
source code, config or other text-based examples, please keep them
as text. Putting backgrounds behind the code makes them hard to
read, and if they are in fact graphics, one has to type in the
code by hand. A better way is to delineate it with some sort of
blocking character string and use the appropriate HTML tag to show
it is an example. I tend to use the following to start and stop
sections of code:
#-----------------------------
(Note: it is a pound sign with a bunch of dashes).
This will speed loading into browsers online, allow cut and paste
operations, and ensure readability for the off-line printout
readers. (I know that more people that just I do this!)
Thanks again for a great zine!
Brian
(Okay, one, I'm guessing you are objecting to the practice of using
word instead of the address in the link so the text version only
shows the word and drops the address. I can make sure this happens
in sections that I do myself, but I really don't have time to do it
for every article. I will print your letter and maybe that will
give authors a push in the right direction. Second, I use whatever
the authors send as listings and most do keep them between
tags without backgrounds. Mr. Coldiron article last
month did use backgrounds. His article has been quite popular.
Thanks for writing, --Editor)
_________________________________________________________________
Published in Linux Gazette Issue 30, July 1998
_________________________________________________________________
[ TABLE OF CONTENTS ] [ FRONT PAGE ] Next
This page written and maintained by the Editor of Linux Gazette,
gazette@ssc.com
Copyright © 1998 Specialized Systems Consultants, Inc.
"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"
_________________________________________________________________
More 2¢ Tips!
Send Linux Tips and Tricks to gazette@ssc.com
_________________________________________________________________
Contents:
* Producing a Resume in PDF with LaTeX
* UNIX System man Pages
* ext2 Partitions
* Re: bpp 16 Question
* Network Cards
* Tip for using Windows 95 buttons in KDE
* PPP, SLIP and Other Remote Service Support
_________________________________________________________________
Producing a resume in PDF with LaTeX
From: David M. Cook davecook@hotmail.com
Date: Mon, 01 Jun 1998 23:05:24 +0000
LaTeX and the resume.sty package are an easy way to produce a very
attractive resume under Linux. One just needs to fill in the
boilerplate provided. resume.sty is available from any CTAN archive,
such as cdrom.com:
htp://ftp.cdrom.com/.1/tex/ctan/macros/latex209/contrib/resume
However, I've found that windows users are often not familiar with the
usual Postscript output of the dvips program or how to view it.
Luckily, Ghostscript provides the ps2pdf program for converting
Postscript to Adobe's Portable Document Format, which is fairly
familiar to windows users.
However, converted ps documents that were produced from LaTeX source
using the default Computer Modern fonts look very poor when read with
the Adobe PDF reader. The trick is to use the times package, which
changes all the fonts produced by your LaTeX source to one the Adobe
reader can handle. Just include the package like this in your
document:
\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{resume,times}
%other preamble commands
\begin{document}
%document body
\end{document}
Some other things worth mentioning here: PStill, another PS->PDF
converter; pdfTeX, which produces PDF instead of DVI files from TeX
input; and finally the TeX User's Group page which has tons of great
links:
ftp://ftp.cstug.cz/pub/tex/local/cstug/thanh/pdftex/
http://www.this.net/~frank/pstill.html
http://www.tug.org/interest.html
--
Dave Cook
_________________________________________________________________
UNIX system man pages
From: Andrew Josey a.josey@opengroup.org
Date: Wed, 03 Jun 1998 10:10:41 +0000
Hello, included is a possible tip for the Linux Gazette.
Ever needed to know what the official UNIX man page for a particular
command or function says? A new web resource from The Open Group is
the Common Access to the UNIX Man Pages, a hypertext html set of
browsable pages common to all UNIX 95 and UNIX 98 branded systems.
To try it out see http://www.opengroup.org/common_access/
--
Andrew Josey
_________________________________________________________________
ext2 Partitions
From: Albert T. Croft acroft@cyber-wizard
Date: Mon, 08 Jun 1998 14:57:03 -0500
I recently ran into a small problem, and I think the results of it
might be helpful to others. I was recently helping out a friend with a
problem on his Linux machine, and we needed to find a
file-unfortunately, neither of us knew where it might've been
installed.
Having both ext2 and vfat partitions, we realized that doing a find
command might take a while, and would probably give some false
results. We knew there might be files with similar names on his vfat
partition-files we were sure were not the ones we were looking for. We
knew the files we were looking for would only be on the ext2
partitions.
We started looking for an answer with the -mount option for the find
command; unfortunately for us, it only looked at files on the same
device as the path given to the find command. (A look at the results
of the mount command shows why that would be a problem for us.)
/dev/hda2 on / type ext2 (rw)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
/dev/hda6 on /home type ext2 (rw)
/dev/hda8 on /tmp type ext2 (rw)
/dev/hda7 on /usr type ext2 (rw)
/dev/hda1 on /win95 type vfat (rw,umask=0111)
We tried writing a batch file, using grep and gawk to get the mount
points for the ext2 partitions and handing them to find. This proved
unworkable if we were looking for patterns, such as h2*. We then tried
to write just a find command, using gawk and grep to get the mount
points. This was somewhat better, but using a print statement in gawk
to get the names of the mount points wouldn't work. Some help came
with remembering that gawk has a printf statement, allow.
Our final product, which we found quite useful and now have in our
.bashrc files as linuxfind, is the following:
find `mount|grep ext2|gawk '{printf "%s ", $3}'` -name
To use as an alias:
alias linuxfind="find `mount|grep ext2|gawk '{printf "%s ", $3}'` -name "
Written this way, other options to the find command can be specified,
such as -perm, -exec and -type. To use it, we simply type something
like:
linuxfind less
linuxfind h2*
linuxfind x* -perm -2000
The only problems we can see with this command so far are (1) if there
are drives mounted at login that are unmounted during the session, the
mount points are still searched, and (2) if a drive is mounted after
login, it is not included unless the .bashrc files is sourced.
--
Albert Croft
_________________________________________________________________
Re: bpp 16 Question
From: Michael Huttinger mhutt.removespam@netnitco.net
Date: Sun, 14 Jun 1998 19:56:41 +0000
In regards to the question on starting X with 16 bitplanes instead of
8 (LG#28)...
I have done the following (assuming you are using XFree86)
Open up and edit your XF86Config file.
Look for the "Screen" section you are using. Add an entry right after
that specifying the default colors of the format:
DefaultColorDepth 16
This will default your screen to 16 bit planes.
My example screen section follows:
Section "Screen"
Driver "accel"
Device "STB Velocity 128"
Monitor "My Monitor"
DefaultColorDepth 16
Subsection "Display"
Depth 8
Modes "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
ViewPort 0 0
EndSubsection
Subsection "Display"
Depth 16
Modes "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
ViewPort 0 0
EndSubsection
Subsection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
ViewPort 0 0
EndSubsection
Subsection "Display"
Depth 32
Modes "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
ViewPort 0 0
EndSubsection
EndSection
--
Mike Huttinger
_________________________________________________________________
Network Cards
From: Wari Wahab wari@tecnologist.com
Date: Sat, 13 Jun 1998 21:36:27 +0800
Hi, there just like to give some tip or two regarding Network cards
you have in you Linux Box.
I have a 3Com 3c90x in my computer and it's not working up to speed, I
replaced it with anther one of the same kind and the most I get out of
ftp transfers from my machine is a measly 220 KB/s.. Samba acted
weird.. I thought that it's my network that caused the problem,
indeed, it is the problem..
Our network is all Cisco and there seems to be some disagreement
between the two brands, Changed my card to an Intel 'eepro100' and I
can max out at 800 KB/s on a 10 Mbs network.. Cool.
So, if you find out that performance is not as cool (those Win NT guys
may be laughing at you as they did to me wondering why Linux is Super
Slow) as it should be, it could be the network card itself..
Regards,
Wari Wahab
_________________________________________________________________
Tip for using Windows 95 buttons in KDE
From: Jochen A. Stein jst@writeme.com
Date: Fri, 19 Jun 1998 21:05:21 +0200
Following up to Andreas Ehliar's 2cent article in the June Linux
Gazette, I took the same approach and made a patch for KDE to shift
some functionality from ALT to the W95 key. Full instructions and
patch against Beta-4 can be found on
http://home.pages.de/~jst/kde-w95.html.
--
Jochen Stein
_________________________________________________________________
PPP, SLIP and Other Remote Service Support
From: Daniel Blezek blezek@worldnet.att.net
Date: Wed, 17 Jun 1998 22:40:48 -0500
Hi, here's a short tip:
Recently, I started working from home on a UNIX system. The system I
was working on did not support PPP, SLIP, or any other remote service
except shell sessions over a 9600 baud modem. So I decided to download
SLIrP(a program to emulate PPP/SLIP using only a shell session) to the
remote system to emulate PPP over a shell connection. Here is the
snag, the remote system did not support zmodem, ymodem, kermit or any
of the other file transfer protocols. Since I had no TCP/IP
connection, I could not use rsh, or ftp. Solution? I used uuencode to
convert the SLIrP binary to text, started vi on the remote system, and
copied and pasted the entire text(all 360K) into the remote shell
session. After eating dinner, I returned to write the uuencoded binary
to the remote hard disk, uudecoded it, uncompressed it, and started up
SLIrP on the remote system. After pppd came up on my LINUX system, I
was fully connected.
Ain't LINUX fun?
--
Dan
_________________________________________________________________
Published in Linux Gazette Issue 30, July 1998
_________________________________________________________________
[ TABLE OF CONTENTS ] [ FRONT PAGE ] Back Next
_________________________________________________________________
This page maintained by the Editor of Linux Gazette, gazette@ssc.com
Copyright © 1998 Specialized Systems Consultants, Inc.
"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"
_________________________________________________________________
News Bytes
Contents:
* News in General
* Software Announcements
_________________________________________________________________
News in General
_________________________________________________________________
August Linux Journal
The August issue of Linux Journal will be hitting the newsstands July
10. The focus of this issue is Navigating Linux and our feature
article is an interview with Marc Andressen and Tom Paqin of Netscape
done by Doc Searls. interview.html is the introduction to this
interview. Check out the Table of Contents at
http://www.linuxjournal.com/issue52/index.html. To subscribe to Linux
Journal, go to http://www.linuxjournal.com/ljsubsorder.html.
_________________________________________________________________
An Invitation: The Future of Linux with Linus Torvalds
On July 14, 1998, at 6:00PM, Taos Mountain ( http://www.taos.com/ ) in
association with the Silicon Valley Linux User Group
(http://www.svlug.org/) will present a panel discussion on THE FUTURE
OF LINUX. Linux is a freely available version of the UNIX operating
system.
Panelists will include Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux; Robert
Hart from retail Linux distributor Red Hat Software; Larry Augustin of
the Silicon Valley Linux User Group and director of Linux
International, a non-profit consortium of Linux users and vendors; and
Jeremy Allison, the developer of SAMBA. Phillip Hughes, publisher of
Linux Journal, will question the panelists.
Complete Press Release
For more information:
Michael Masterson, MMasterson@taos.com
_________________________________________________________________
LINC: Linux conference in Silicon Valley, California
Mon, 15 Jun 1998 23:56:32 +0000
LINC, the International Linux Conference and Exposition, will be held
in Silicon Valley, California next January.
We have just issued a Call for Papers, and we encourage Linux
developers to send abstracts for talks or tutorials.
More info at: http://lincexpo.org/
Complete Press Release If you have any questions, please mail me.
For more information:
Don Marti, dmarti@electriclichen.com
_________________________________________________________________
Position Available: network security - development/maintenance
Tue, 23 Jun 1998
SecurePipe Communications is currently accepting resumes for a network
security support and development position.
Responsibilities will include support of installed firewalls,
development and maintenance of open-source network security solutions,
and support of existing mail and web servers.
For more information:
http://www.securepipe.com/jobs.html
Joshua Heling, jrh@securepipe.com
SecurePipe Communications, Inc.
_________________________________________________________________
GNU Utilities Integrated Development Environment project
Mon, 15 Jun 1998 08:47:02 GMT
GUIDE: GNU Utilities Integrated Development Environment
The purpose of this project is to merge existing GNU and GPL utilities
into a graphical GPL Integrated Development Environment, which contain
editor, class browser, debugger, profiler, man generator, code
checking, testing, animation, and management.
Go to http://sunsite.auc.dk/GUIDE/ and join the mailing list.
For more information:
Knud Haugaard Sxrensen, khs@mi.aau.dk
_________________________________________________________________
WWW: Linux search engine in beta
Mon, 15 Jun 1998 08:50:18 GMT
Take a look at http://linux.ncg.net/search/
A search engine with a different twist.... We index only Linux related
web pages, and in addition to searching in the robot index, we'll look
up the keywords in our resource listings as well.
The engine uses heuristics to exclude most pages that aren't relevant
to Linux. Currently the engine is in early beta, with a small index of
about 75.000 documents as of 11th June, and growing at a rate of a few
thousand documents pr. day. It might seem small, but the index
contains most of the important Linux sites already, and is getting
quite useful.
Since we track what subjects that are most popular to search for, you
also help us improve the resource listing by testing the engine.
As soon as the indexer is well enough tested, we'll increase indexing
speed dramatically (from 10 documents at a time currently, to about
300).
For more information:
Vidar Hokstad, vidarh@ncg.net
_________________________________________________________________
The Freefire Project (IT security solutions)
Wed, 17 Jun 1998 13:26:28 GMT
After some time in the dark I am happy to Announce the Freefire
Project
The Freefire Project tries to support Developers and Integrators in
building IT Security Solutions (especially Firewalls) based on Free
Tools (Open Source). It is not Operating System dependent, but a lot
of the Tools on the Page can be used with Linux.
The Project features a web site where you can find a lot of useful
links to free Security Tools and Resources. There is a monthly
Bulletin giving some articles about recently discovered tools.
There is a Mailing list for Developers. You DO NOT need to subscribe
if you don't develop tools on your own. In this case it will be enough
to enter you= r E-Mail in the Announce-Form on the Web Pages or
monitor the Web-Pages.
http://www.inka.de/sites/lina/freefire-l/index.en.html
The Start page is also available in German:
http://www.inka.de/sites/lina/freefire-l/index.de.html
Also searching for contributors to the Bulletin and for Links to Tools
which are not yet on the Pages.
For more information:
Bernd Eckenfels. ecki@lina.inka.de
_________________________________________________________________
Linux Links
The Trove Project Press Release: trove.txt
Open Source Devloper Day Press Release: opensource.pr
The Open Source Index: http://home.maine.rr.com/sickthing/osi
List of Linux Mailing Lists: www.linuxrx.com/Lists/Lists.perl
Linux Buyers Guide: http://www.linuxbuyersguide.com/
Linux Applications: http://www.cynetcity.com/cyberzone/497/ Linux Book
Guide: http://members.bellatlantic.net/~ptgeiger/guidehome.htm
Article about Linux in Computer Currents Magazine:
http://www.currents.net/magazine/national/1612/inet1612.html
The Linux Console Tools: http://www.mygale.org/~ydirson/en/lct/
Article "How Linux Could Kill Windows NT":
http://www.zdnet.com/chkpt/adem2fpf/www.anchordesk.com/story/story_224
1.html
Linux Rally: http://www.penguincomputing.com/svlug-rally.html
Time Magazine Article:
http://cgi.pathfinder.com/netly/article/0,2334,13820,00.html
_________________________________________________________________
Software Announcements
_________________________________________________________________
PC-Internet
Check out the new PC-Internet at http://www.pc-internet.com/ (the site
is in Spanish only)
_________________________________________________________________
WrapBit 0.2.1 - virtual object storage and programming environment
Thu Jun 25 12:47:56 1998
The WrapBit version 0.2.1 is now available. Read more about it from
the active server at http://public.comput.com/WrapBit/ WrapBit is a
virtual, persistant, write once object storage and programing
environment. A small kernel serves forge proofed data, meta data and
dynamic views (object invocation). XML is featured (but not imposed)
for object control messages.
_________________________________________________________________
w3mir 1.0.3 - HTTP copying and mirroring tool
Thu Jun 25 12:56:55 1998
w3mir 1.0.3 has been released and is available at
http://www.math.uio.no/ now.
Fixes include
* -R/remove option to remove files is no longer more destructive
than intended.
* Files with 'unsafe' characters in their filename is now saved as
"foo bar" instead of "foo%20bar"
* The -B switch works once again.
w3mir is a all purpose HTTP copying and mirroring tool. The main focus
of w3mir is to create and maintain a browsable copy of one, or
several, remote WWW site(s). Used to the max w3mir can retrive the
contents of several related sites and leave the mirror browseable via
a local web server, or from a filesystem, such as directly from a
CDROM.
w3mir supports HTML4, and has partial support for CSS, Java, ActiveX
and Adobe Acrobat (PDF) files.
_________________________________________________________________
Alphanumeric Paging Software beta test
Mon, 15 Jun 1998 09:02:46 GMT
EtherPage(TM) is now available on Linux
Calling beta testers for our EtherPage product running under Linux. If
interested, you can download software and request an evaluation
license code from http://www.ppt.com/eval/version30.html
EtherPage is a client/server based product for delivering messages
from computers to wireless messaging services such as alphanumeric and
numeric pagers. The product includes a web interface for interactive
use and administration, a command line interface and a C API.
_________________________________________________________________
tomsrtbt-1.4.66
Mon, 15 Jun 1998 09:01:35 GMT
tomsrtbt-1.4.66.tar.gz is available at Sunsite.unc.edu to be placed
into system/recovery and http://www.toms.net/~toenser/rb/.
It is a boot/root rescue/emergency floppy image with more stuff than
fits. Bzip2, 1722Mb formatting, and tighter compilation options helped
jam it on. tomsrtbt is useful for "learn unix on a floppy" as it runs
from ramdisk, includes the man-pages for everything, and behaves in a
generally predictable way.
The home page is: http://www.clark.net/~toehser/rb/.
_________________________________________________________________
MpegTV Player 1.0 released for Linux/Alpha
Mon, 15 Jun 1998 10:30:37 GMT
MpegT@ Player 1.0 has been released for Linux/Alpha. MpegTV Player 1.0
is a realtime software MPEG Video player with audio/sync.
MpegTV Player is a Shareware (US$10) for personal and non-profit use.
Commercial licenses available.
Key features include support for 8 bit, 16 bit and 24 bit display,
random access, frame capture and a VCR-like graphic front-end.
Download MpegTV Player 1.0 (mtv) for linux-alpha from:
ftp://ftp.mgegtw.com/pub/mpeg/mpegtv/player/alpha-unkown-linux/
_________________________________________________________________
Motif Interface Builder VDX 1.2
Mon, 15 Jun 1998 11:16:16 GMT
Release 1.2 of VDX, the Motif Interface Builder for Linux is ready for
download. The VDX provides the interactive design of user interfaces
based on OSF/Motif and generates portable C and C++ source code. Tools
like Resource Editor, Browser and the interactive WYSIWYG View make
the design process very easy. Their object oriented interface and the
adaptable code generation are cool features.
Interested? Visit the VDX Home Page at http://www.bredex.de/EN/vdx/
_________________________________________________________________
R 0.62.1 released: statistical computation and graphics
Wed, 17 Jun 1998 13:20:17 GMT
R version 0.62.1 has been released and will propagate through the CRAN
mirrors within the next few days. The have been lots of changes, any R
user should definetely upgrade to this version.
R is a system for statistical computation and graphics. It consists of
a language plus a run-time environment with graphics, a debugger,
access to certain system functions, and the ability to run programs
stored in script files.
CRAN is a network of ftp and web servers around the world that store
identical, up-to-date, versions of code and documentation for the R
statistical package. Please use the CRAN site nearest to you to
minimise network load.
The CRAN master site can be found at the URL
http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/
_________________________________________________________________
Mobitex Radio Modem Driver
Wed, 17 Jun 1998 13:21:40 GMT
Announcing the release of a new network driver which implements the
MASC data link layer protocol, enabling Linux to use Mobitex radio
modems as network devices. Armed with radio modems and a subscription
to a Mobitex operator, you can create a network interconnecting two or
more Linux systems wirelessly using TCP/IP or your own custom
protocol.
The driver has been verified to be stable on 2.0.30 through 2.0.33
kernels and is hence ready for release. The package includes a basic
FAQ list, a HOWTO document, driver source and a couple of tools.
Take a look at ftp://ftp.linuxrx.com/pub/linux-contrib/
_________________________________________________________________
sfm 1.4 - Simple File Manager
Wed, 17 Jun 1998 14:02:46 GMT
Announcing the release a new version of sfm. There's a lot of great
improvements between this version and the 1.1 version.
Some important changes:
* you can associate actions with files (using its extension or its
type given by file(1))
* a popup menu gives you the available commands and shortcuts
For more information look at http://www.chez.com/prigaux/sfm.html
You can find there a binary (i386, glibc, gtk+) version. It has been
tested (not fully) on i386 and solaris.
Any remarks and bug reports are welcome at pixel_@geocities.com.
_________________________________________________________________
Linux Router Project v2.9.2 - networking centric mini-distribution
Sat, 20 Jun 1998 17:32:40 GMT
v2.9.2 of linux router is out. LRP is now fully glibc based, and this
is a very solid release.
You can download it from: ftp://ftp.psychosis.com/linux/linux-router/
And get more info from: http:/www.psychosis.com/linux-router
_________________________________________________________________
Slidedraw-0.10 - drawing/presentation program
Sat, 20 Jun 1998 17:29:11 GMT
Slidedraw is a drawing program for presentation slides.
Some new features added:
* distinct canvas-window/drawing/print size
* grouping of objects, creating composites
* new and improved menu hierarchy
Get it at http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/Incoming
_________________________________________________________________
SFS Software's iavaZIP
04 Jun 98 0100 WN
SFS Software announced a new version of it's certified 100% pure Java
compression utility iavaZIP. The full-featured, pioneering file
compression program offers some unique features.
iavaZIP's key advantage is that it lets you create archives containing
files from multiple folders and subfolders--even from different
volumes--in the same session.
iavaZIP is compatible with PKZIP, supports 10 compression levels and
runs cross-platform on every Java 1.1 supported operating system like
Windows 95/NT, Unix, Linux, SGI, AIX and OS/2. The Java Archive format
(JAR) is also supported. The product is available now through
shareware distribution and is priced at $49 for the standard single
user license. Also available are Academic Single user licenses ($29)
and attractive high volume discounts.
SFS Software's WebSite at http:www.sfs-software.com
_________________________________________________________________
Protecting Networks w/SATAN
Mon, 8 Jun 1998 15:48:49 -0700 (PDT)
Because SATAN (Security Administrator's Tool for Analyzing Networks)
could detect weaknesses on other systems (as well as your own) through
its web interface, it earned notoriety when released in April 1995 as
the tool that would "wreak havoc" on the Internet. The Oakland Tribune
even wrote: "It's like randomly mailing automatic rifles to 5000
addresses. I hope some crazy teen doesn't get ahold of one."
But as more and more "mission critical" applications are accessible
through the web, administrators are turning their attention to the
danger of attempted intrusion from outside the networked host. SATAN
is a powerful aid for system administrators. It performs "security
audits," scanning host computers for security vulnerabilities caused
by erroneous configurations or by known software errors in frequently
used programs. O'Reilly's latest release, "Protecting Networks with
SATAN", is an invaluable tool for network and security administrators
working with SATAN.
Protecting Networks with SATAN
By Martin Freiss
1st Edition June 1998 (US)
112 pages, 1-56592-425-8, $19.95 (US$)
http://www.oreilly.com
_________________________________________________________________
Conix 3D Explorer
Wed, 17 Jun 1998 19:51:05 -0800
Conix Enterprises, Inc. announce the release of Conix 3D Explorer on
Linux. With a single command 3D Explorer brings your Mathematica
graphics to life in an interactive OpenGL window, providing advanced
rendering capabilities previously reserved for high-end rendering
systems.
3D Explorer provides a new graphics type, GLGraphics, with extended
graphics primitives and directives. New features include continuous
surfaces, display lists, inline transformations, and per-element
control over all graphics options.
3D Explorer comes with online documentation, including user's guide,
reference manual, programming examples, and demos. Quality email
technical support is provided by Conix Enterprises Inc.,
tech@conix3d.com. For more information, see http://www.conix3d.com
_________________________________________________________________
LinuxCAD v 1.55
Thu, 18 Jun 1998 06:34:43 +0000
Software Forge Inc. announcing the availablity of LinuxCAD v 1.55 at
July 25 , 1998. LinuxCAD v 1.55 includes all hardcopy capabilities
namely:
* output to LaserJet family of printers,
* output to PostScript Black and White as well as Color,
* output to HP-GL compatible plotters,
* output to LinuxCAD MS-Windows print server, in the base version.
LinuxCAD v 1.55 will be priced at the same level $75+tax and shipping.
All users who will prepay LinuxCAD v 1.55 before July 25, will get
extended free upgrades until July 1999.
To learn more about LinuxCAD visit http://www.linuxcad.com
_________________________________________________________________
Nighthawk 2.1 and FunktrackerGOLD 1.5 (announcement)
Mon, 22 Jun 1998 23:13:50 +0930 (CST)
Nighthawk 2.1 (nighthawk-2.1.tgz) and FunktrackerGOLD 1.5
(funktracker-1.5.tgz) have now been released. You can find them on:
http://www.downunder.net.au/~jsno/rel/unix_projects
Nighthawk is an X11 arcade game with sound and music. FunktrackerGOLD
is a digital music tracker. Read my page for more details on them.
Take a look at http://www.downunder.net.au/~jsno both come under the
GNU GPL.
_________________________________________________________________
CYBERSCHEDULER FOR LINUX v2.1
Wed, 24 Jun 1998 18:34:09 -0700
CrossWind Technologies offers CyberScheduler, web-based calendaring
and scheduling software for workgroups. It has been designed to
leverage an organization's existing web resources:
* running on Apache's web server
* with end user access from any desktop browser.
More information about CrossWind Technologies and a live on-line demo
of CyberScheduler is available on the Web site at
http://www.crosswind.com
_________________________________________________________________
Published in Linux Gazette Issue 30, July 1998
_________________________________________________________________
[ TABLE OF CONTENTS ] [ FRONT PAGE ] Back Next
_________________________________________________________________
This page written and maintained by the Editor of Linux Gazette,
gazette@ssc.com
Copyright © 1998 Specialized Systems Consultants, Inc.
"Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"
_________________________________________________________________
(?) The Answer Guy (!)
By James T. Dennis, linux-questions-only@ssc.com
Starshine Technical Services, http://www.starshine.org/
_________________________________________________________________
Contents:
(!)Greetings from Jim Dennis
(?) Linux and SCO Keymap --or--
SCO Compatible Console Keymaps?
(?) linux kernel security --or--
Breakin' Out of the chroot() Jail adding "disabilities" to
Linux
(?)Dosemu and virtual terminals? --or--
Clipper/xBase Capacity Problems --- DOSemu as a Solution? "I
don't think so."
(?) NT Domain and Linux --or--
Linux as a "Domain Controller" for a WinNT Domain? Not Yet!
Linux use of an NT PDC/BDC for authentication?
(?) DAO software for linux? --or--
"DAO" (Disk at Once) CDR? Stump Me!
(?)tn3270 security
(?)readdress COM port to 3 or 4
(?) Lilo won't boot --or--
Installed on a Secondary SCSI HD: Lilo Stops at LI
(?)help on unix --or--
Running Unix/Linux Under Win '9x
(?)winprinters & MTAs: Pointers and Corrections
(?) FoxPlus for Linux? --or--
Dreaming about xBase tools for Linux
(?)auto response for email ?
(?)Connecting Linux to Win '95 via Null Modem
(?) PC lockups --or--
Hardware Lockups due to Graphics Load
(?) gzip from C program --or--
Compression Libraries to Link into a C Program
(?)LOVE THE NEW LOOK!!!!
(?)please, advice about Linux and C500 --or--
Linux PPC on the Umax C500 SuperMac: Not A Good Idea
(?)printing Solaris->Linux --or--
Remote lpd from Solaris to Linux
(?) Help Wanted --or--
User Shell on Virtual Console 1
(?) Memory deallocation problems --or--
Linux Memory Usage vs. Leakage
(?)tv cards and dual monitor
____________________________
Greetings from Jim Dennis
Well another month is upon us. This last month was particularly busy
since I was able to afford the USENIX technical conference, in New
Orleans --- the best annual gathering of fellow Unix and Linux nerds
I've ever found. If you can get your boss to send you to just one
computing technical conference in the next year --- ask for it to be
this one (or the USENIX/LISA --- Large Installation Systems
Administration which will be in December).
Linus was there with his wife, Tove, and their two baby daughters. He
agreed to host an "intimate little BoF" (Birds of a Feather
discussion) which turned out to have over half of the conference
attending it (much to his surprise).
The '97 USENIX in Anaheim had a "parallel track" for Linux. This year
had one for "Freenix" (collectively referring to FreeBSD, NetBSD,
OpenBSD, and the GNU HURD, in addition to Linux). It's important for
us (Linux users) to recognize that Linux wasn't the first "free" Unix
kernel, and it is by no means the only one.
I've been trying to encourage the free *BSD users (all variants) to
come out of the woodwork and show up at their local Linux user's group
meetings. I know they'll be welcome at the Silicon Valley LUG
(http://www.svlug.org) and I sincerely hope that they'll be welcome at
other Linux events. Now that we're getting enough market share to get
noticed in the press, and to have some effect on the decisions of
hardware and software vendors (particularly in the areas that relate
to documentation and NDA's) --- it would be a very bad time for us to
get embroiled in the sorts of infighting that's been stifling the
commercial Unix vendors for so long.
I noticed an interesting press release (forwarded to me by my wife)
regarding Microsoft's new "WISE" (Windows Interface Source
Environment: http://www.microsoft.com/win32dev/base/wise.htm) which
basically looks like a scheme to bolster the commercial Unix vendors
up in their battle against the free Unix clones (by providing them
with some limited support for running Windows '95 software). (From the
looks of it the WINE and Bochs projects may eventually be more
capable).
Luckily these, and the other interesting user space projects that are
going to make Linux more accessible to non-technical users, like
GNOME, KDE, and GNUStep are portable. Linux has been a primary
development platform for many of these projects --- but they all run
under other versions of Unix.
So, while it may look like Linux is "taking over the world" --- it is
also opening up a world of opportunity for all of the other Unix
variants. There are now a few million users of Linux that will feel
right at home in just about any Unix on just about any hardware.
Perhaps that's why Sun and SGI are both supporting Linux projects.
_________________________________________________
(?) SCO Compatible Console Keymaps?
From Jim Kjorlaug on 25 Jun 1998
I work for a company that sells vertical solutions using SCO unix as a
platform. We are currently looking at linux as another possible
platform and I have found a possible contention. Does there exist a
keytable that causes the linux keyboard to behave like an SCO console.
I have already worked out the termcap for SCO ansi to work on linux
but some of the keymaps have me stumped. Any suggestions or advice
would be greatly appreciated. I realize that we could modify our
application but it would be much easier if it were possible with a
keytable.
Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.
Jim Kjorlaug
Teleflora Technologies
(!) I don't know how a SCO console keymap is supposed to behave ---
but Linux does have utilities to remap the console keyboard to your
heart's content. All of the popular distributions include the
'loadkeys' and 'dumpkeys' programs (parts of Andries Brouwer's
'kbd' package). You can look at the man pages for these for
details.
I've never used these packages much --- just once to set up "sticky
shift" keys for a friend who lost most of the use in one arm to a
stroke a couple of years ago and again to answer some other
question back before I started this column.
It does seem quite odd that you'd go for console specific binding
rather than using the more portable termcap/terminfo
(curses/ncurses) interfaces which would allow your app to be
accessed via terminals, over modem/dial-up connections, across
telnet sessions and from within xterms. However, I'm sure you have
your reasons.
Yann Dirson is working on a package called "Linux console tools"
which enhances the kbd package.
There is also a console fonts package (the 'setfont' command is
also included with many Linux distributions; it allows you to
choose from among about 100 different VGA/EGA compatible console
fonts, some of which are quite silly). Andries Brouwer is
apparentlly the co-author of the console fonts package, too.
Good luck on the port and welcome to the club.
_________________________________________________
(?) Breakin' Out of the chroot() Jail
Or: adding "disabilities" to Linux
From Ron Arts on 25 Jun 1998
Hello,
I saw a post by your hand from 26 Apr 98 in
comp.os.linux.development.system where you said a lot of noteworthy
things on linux security. Also I have been talking to Jos Vos from
Xopen Systems (who wrote the ipfwadm package).
Both you and he noted the possibility to break out of a chroot jail
(once you become root there). It seems that devices are the weak
factor.
(!) It seems that letting anyone "become root there" is the weak
factor! If we can reduce the need to "become root" --- by providing
mechanisms other than "SUID" and "SGID" programs for accessing
"privileged" operations than we have made some progress.
One approach would be the POSIX.1e "capabilities" (which are more
like VMS style "privileges" than true "capabilities"). There is a
bit of preliminary work being done on this in the 2.1.x kernels ---
but nothing is likely be usable in 2.2 (so you're looking at Linux
2.4 before there is "stable" support for any of that).
Another approach is to limit the damage that 'root' can do using
something like the BSD securelevel features. Last I heard on the
Linux kernel mailing list they had dropped plans to put in simple
'securelevel' support in favor of a "more flexible" approach ---
which would mesh better with the eventual POSIX.1e ("Orange Book")
work.
* (The implementations of 'securelevel' in all of the popular BSD
variants, free and commercial have been vulnerable to a few
attacks via the /proc filesystem and more recently via ptrace()
--- so having Linux adopt one of those designs might not be a
sound idea. We'll see).
I'm a little shy on the implementation details and design but I
think they said it would essentially be a bit field of limitations
that would be set on a per process basis. There would be bits to
prevent various syscalls like mknod(), chroot(), mount(), etc. In
the POSIX.1e model this would later become the "maximum privileges
mask" --- and the individual privileges would be set by meta data
on the executable files (think of that as a list of about 80 "P"
bits rather than just the SUID and SGID bits we have now).
The argument for this is that we could set any set of this bits we
want on the 'init' process (PID 1) to accomplish the same
limitations as we get with BSD's 'securelevel'.
That's a pretty compelling argument so far as I'm concerned. My
main hesitation beyond that has to do with code complexity. The BSD
crowd has been trying to get their 'securelevel' implementations
right for years --- and the ptrace() bug was just found a couple of
weeks ago.
It's not a simple problem. NT's "object" model (and I use the term
"object" very loosely) provides ACL's on files, registry keys, and
all sorts of other OS elements. There is work underway to add ACL
support to Linux --- over some filesystems at least. However, I'm
convinced that ACL's are a fundamentally flawed security model ---
and that opinion is based on some pretty good academic work.
Unfortunately the true capabilities security model entails a
completely different programming paradigm --- it doesn't translate
to Unix conventions at all. In my research (purely "armchair" or
"book larnin'") I spent most of my energy trying to unlearn the
Unix, Netware, and NT approaches.
You can read more about the capabilities security model at Jonathan
Shapiro's "EROS" (extremely reliable OS) web site:
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~eros/
(EROS is an ongoing research project which will hopefully
eventually be available as a production operating system).
(?) I have been thinking about disabling the mount() or better the
mknod() systemcall when executed from chroot'ed programs (patching the
kernel).
(!) I think the "capabilities" (or Linux "securelevel" or
"privmask") patches will allow you to disable access to these sorts
of syscalls. I also suspect that these "disabilities" (a more apt
description really) will be inherited by all forked processes. They
will certainly need to be immutable (by the process) and will have
to imply certain disabilities with regards to kmem and /proc access
by the 'root' processes that are running within these process
groups.
You can look at the existing patches (in the recent 2.1.1xx
kernels) and possibly build on that.
(?) Do you think that would be worth the effort? We currently run
ftpd, telnetd, sshd and some more things chroot'ed in a very minimal
linux environment. Based on the false assumption that even when you
make it to becoming root you cannot break out of that.
(!) The assumption that the chroot() jail is inescapable by rogue
root processes is very bad. You've discovered that.
The main advantage for chroot() have to do with limiting the number
of SUID/SGID programs that are accessible in the effort to exploit
various vulnerabilities that are used to get root or other
unauthorized access. The other advantage is that you can limit the
amount of snooping that a class of users (anonymous and guestgroup
ftp, for example) can perpetrate on other users on the system.
In other words you can limit the exposure of your "general" users
from some classes of other users. For a long time the most
important element of this was to prevent FTP users from grabbing
your passwd file and running 'crack' on it. With the advent of
shadow password systems that has been much less of a concern.
These days the most common approach to securing systems is to
create special, sacrificial hosts for each service and class of
users. Linux and {Free|Net|Open}-BSD have made this an increasingly
economical and attractive option since we can put any old "junker"
386 or better to work in this sort of role (some people are giving
away 386 and 486 systems these days). This is easy enough for
commercial sites --- but more of a problem for ISP's and
educational sites, which traditionally still have shell access to
at least some of their machines.
(?) I think very few programs use mknod(), and that probably are the
programs you wouldn't allow in a chroot'ed environment anyway. I also
think it would be a relatively small patch, I've done some digging and
- not being a kernel expert - it seemed pretty easy. The only thing
left to find out is how to detect in the kernel that the current env
is chroot'ed.
(!) The kernel obviously already tracks the 'root' directory
(device:inode) for every process. I think it's a field in the uarea
struct (a data structure maintained by the kernel for every
process).
(?) Can you offer any thoughts on this, I'd like to know if I am on
the wrong track (again) here.
Thanks in advance,
Ron Arts
Netland Internet Services
(!) Look at the existing (2.1.x) sources for references to
"securelevel" and "capabilities" --- I'm sure they're in there
somewhere. You can also consider contributing to the Linux Security
Audit project. See the following URL's for more details:
The Linux Weekly News article on it (search on the keyword "audit"):
http://www.lwn.net/980625/
Their currently archives/web site:
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/Pubs/Mail/archive/linux-security-audit/
If your organization needs these features and is willing to donate
some web space and some personnel time and expertise to the project
--- you'll be doing yourself and all of us alot of good.
_________________________________________________
(?) Clipper/xBase Capacity Problems --- DOSemu as a Solution?
"I don't think so."
From Steven Jackson on 25 Jun 1998
Hi AnswerGuy,
I was reading an article on the web about diskless workstations and
redhat when I recognised your name, (I think you helped me out with
redhat a long time ago, thanks).
(!) You're welcome.
(?) I look after a small network of 4 pcs at a doctors surgery which
runs an accounting package and an appointments diary compiled under
Clipper. System Manager is run on the host pc which does all of the
local processing of these applications and the clients run as virtual
terminals.
(!) I don't know what you mean by "system manager" --- from what I
remember/know of dBase and Clipper these were designed as
single-user database systems. The multi-user deployment of xBase
applications normally relies on "record locking" (similar to file
locking but allowing one to request exclusive access to a portion
of a file).
In this model the .DBF files are normally stored on a network
filesystem (Netware, LANtastic, and later WfW among others). I
don't know if Samba or the Mars-NWE (Netware emulator) supports
these forms of record locking.
It is unclear from your description how your are running this. You
mention 4-PC's and Clipper (a DOS based compiler/developement
package for dBase programming), which leads me to think of
networked DOS systems --- then you mention "virtual terminal" which
suggests that you're using a multi-user OS (like Linux).
Are you running DR or CCI's "Concurrent DOS" (or their later
"M-DOS" or "Multi-user DOS") or something like TSL's "PC-MOS"
(another multi-user MS-DOS clone)? Is "System Manager" yet another
multi-user DOS?
(?) Over the past year or so the system has run slower gradually to
the point where it is getting annoying. I'd like to try running linux
on the fileserver and somehow run the dos based clipper programs under
dosemu. I think it would be wise to keep all the *.dbf files on the
server rather than sending them over the network. I got the idea from
the recent Linux Journal article about the Latvian Police dept.
(!)
The first question is:
Why is the performance degenerating?
The obvious suggestions are:
Have you been regularly "pack"-ing your databases (purging
deleted records and transactions)?
Have you been maintaining your indices? (Indexing is usually a
vital key to db performance).
Have you been defragmenting your filesystems regularly?
Has your system utilization increased in some marked way
(you've added *lots* more customers, etc)?
Does your current design have any features or support for
migrating old and inactive records to "archival" or
"historical" databases (tables) so that the "active" db
routines are maintained at feasible sizes?
Are there other activities on your LAN that might be causing
network congestion?
Regarding the notion of running the existing program under DOSemu .
. .
I don't know if that will do any good at all. Since we don't know
what is causing the problem, it seems premature to recommend
solutions. My first thought is that moving the processing from four
systems onto a single one (even a single system under a superior
OS) is unlikely to improve overall performance.
(?) Do you have any ideas about how I could embark upon this?
Thanks,
Steve Jackson
(!) I have many ideas. The first, and most obvious, would be to
port the application to a client/server database design --- one
that's designed to be multi-user and scalable at the outset.
Another, less radical approach would be to take the existing
Clipper sources and port them to Flagship (an xBase to C
development package from WorkGroup Solutions).
... their web pages suggest that they will soon be shipping betas
of a "visual" frontend for xBase programming. That should be
interesting for all those "VB" and "VC++" developers that are still
clinging desperately to Microsoft's platform.
Or you might try X2C from:
http://www.on-the-net.com/x2c/
The questions I asked above may give you some ideas for some
"stopgap" measures (re-index, defrag, migrate inactive records,
etc). In the long run you'll want to do some analysis to see if the
current system can continue to meet your needs.
If you do decide to go with a client server model you have many
choices that run under Linux. There are the free and shareware
packages like mSQL, Beagle and MySQL and there are a number of
commercial packages like InfoFlex Adabas, and the JustLogic SQL.
Rather than give URL's to all of these I'll just point you at the
definitive guide to RDBMS packages for Linux --- maintained by
Christopher B. Browne at:
http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/
http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/rdbms.html
... and another excellent list of Linux business applications
maintained by Linas Vepstas (NOT to be confused with Linus the
kernel guy) at:
http://www.linas.org
http://www.linas.org/linux/db.html
I should mention that you aren't limited to just xBase or SQL ---
there are a number of alternative DBMS system that are available to
Linux and other Unix users and programmers --- including a number
of object-oriented and hybrid systems. Allegedly there's even Linux
support for the venerable Pick system.
_________________________________________________
(?) Linux as a "Domain Controller" for a WinNT Domain? Not Yet!
or: Linux use of an NT PDC/BDC for authentication?
From Cesar Augusto Kant Grossmann on 25 Jun 1998
Hi James!
Again a problem to me, and a exercise to you.
Is it possible to make the Linux Box do login authentication requests
from a NT Domain Server?
(!) Not yet. The Samba team is working on this and hopes to have
something ready within a couple of months. Lest you think this is
all wasted effort (on the thought that Microsoft will ship NT 5.x
in a year or so) --- the indications seem to be that the MS NT
implementation of Kerberos will still rely heavily on the data
structures that they currently use in their PDC/BDC protocol. So,
the work being done now is an investment to the future as well as a
hope for the near-present.
(?) I have a Linux box in a TCP/IP network, part of a large NT Domain,
and want to allow NT domain-users to log in the Linux Box and access
Internet in it. The idea is provide access to the Linux Box without
having to register every user. The users don´t need a regular account,
with home directory, because Internet access is not frequent (thanks
to a low connection) and they only use it to surfing (not email, not
FTP).
(!) Hmm. It looks like I read too much into your first paragraph.
This sounds like you want Linux to be a client to an NT domain
controller. I think there is a PAM (pluggable authentication
module) for doing this.
Since the whole PAM project is still in beta (and not moving nearly
fast enough for my tastes --- not that I've contributed to it nor
that the programmers would want me to) I can't make any promises on
how well it will work.
However the state of PAM can speak for itself at:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/pam/
(Andrew Morgan's pages on the Transmeta sponsored Linux site).
The module you might want to play with is by David Airlie and is
at:
http://www.csn.ul.ie/~airlied/pam_smb/
Other modules (for things like one-time passwords, authentication
on a Netware server, a couple of different "SecureCard" and
"DESGold" cards, RADIUS, and support Kerberos realms, etc) can be
found by browsing around at:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/pam/modules.html
(?) No, I don't want to make the Linux Box act as a firewall (I don't
have authorization to do that). And, again, sorry my bad english...
TIA
Cesar Augusto Kant Grossmann
Uruguaiana - RS - Brasil
(!) Given the muddy murky nature of the term "firewall" the
difference between what you're doing and "acting as a firewall" may
be purely a matter of semantics. However, if it'll keep your
management happy I'll go into a Brazilian court of law as an
"expert witness" to state my opinion that this is not a "firewall."
If by "surfing" you mean that your users will only be using the
Linux system as a web proxy --- why are you fussing with
authenticating them at all? Why not just install Apache and
configure it purely for caching/proxy use --- or use Squid (there
are RPM's avaiable --- they were included with my copies of
S.u.S.E.
Apache, CERN, and Squid can all be configured as caching web
proxy/servers and can all be configured with a variety of
limitations on which systems are allowed through in which
directions. Do you really care which user is logged into the
workstation that is using these proxies? That seems like an odd
requirement unless you're also trying to enforce some other
policies (like certain classes of employees are only allowed to
"surf" during their lunch hour, etc).
I suggest you actually review your requirements a bit further. It
sounds like you are complicating matters more than the situation
requires.
_________________________________________________
(?) "DAO" (Disk at Once) CDR?
Stump me!
From Mark Heath on 25 Jun 1998
Hi there,
I've been searching high and low for DAO (disk at once) CDR recording
software for linux. Does any exist, Commercial or otherwise?
I've email Jeff Arnold about a Linux port and he bluntly refused.
I've email'd HyCD who have a tool that appeared to support DAO and
claimed UNIX support. But their software didn't support DAO and they
weren't interested in a Linux port. I've informed them of this hole in
the Linux software market.
The closest thing that appears to be available is that Joerg
Schilling's cdrecord supports DAO MMC-3 (err i think that is the spec)
Of course my CDR (HP 4020i) isn't MMC compatible.
I've had a look at writing my own but it appears that every CDR has a
different command set to write in DAO mode. I think is was a little
out of my depth, since I couldn't even get the CDR to read raw
sectors.
So your help would be much appreciated. Thanks.
Mark.
(!) Well, you have me stumped.
I don't know anything about the difference between DAO and other
forms of CDR recording. Normally, I'd spend an hour or two hunting
around on Alta Vista, Yahoo!, Savvy Search, DejaNews, etc and
pulling out more of my hair to find out. However, I have a book to
write and a wife to feed, and it is just too close to my deadline
for me to wait until tomorrow.
So, what is DAO and why would you need it? What is the difference
between cdrecord and cdwrite (the one I use with my Ricoh CDR)?
Have you tried them both? What is MMC? Who is Jeff Arnold? Who are
HyCD and should we care enough to start another Linux grassroots
"petition-the-vendor" campaign or should we just write more code to
"do-it-ourselves"?
I'll publish this one --- and let you and the rest of my readership
nail me with the answers. (Naturally I'll bounce you copies of the
other responses as they trickle in).
_________________________________________________
(?) tn3270 security
From Art Blair on 25 Jun 1998
When I try to use tn3270 or X3270 on my redhat 5.0 box to connect to
our school's system I get
TELNET Server: Session security is required.
TELNET Server: Good-bye!!!
Connection closed by foreign host.
Is there a different version of tn3270 that has session security or
some way to enable it with what I have?
Thanx, Art Blair.
(!) Are you sure you want to be using tn3270 (or x3270) to make this
connection? Are you connecting to an IBM mainframe or minicomputer
(presumably using the 3270 "block mode" --- full-screen protocol ---
and EBCDIC)?
Also does your site use Kerberos or some form of SNA security
(encryption or host-to-host authentication)?
The sad fact is that I know nothing about 3270 emulation or about the
SNA protocols. You'll want to contact your site admin or help desk to
find out more about their requirements. They should also be able to
let you know if there are any freely available client/terminal
emulation packages that are suitable for use with their facilities.
(?) please do not publish my email address or use it for advertising
(!) We usually strip out e-mail addresses from the published
version of the column.
_________________________________________________
(?) readdress COM port to 3 or 4
From PJ on 25 Jun 1998
can you tell me how to readdress COM port2 to port 3 or 4? I need to
use COM port 2 for other device.
(!) No. I can't. You'll want to refer to the documentation that
should have come with your hardware (this is almost certainly a
hardware issue that is completely unrelated to the OS or software
that you're running). The details vary among manufacturer, devices
and models.
If you have a couple of COM ports built into your motherboard it is
possible that you can disable or reset the I/O addresses, IRQ's and
other details for your COM ports via the CMOS setup program (the
interface through which you set the date and time, the hard drive
type and geometry and various other firmware settings that are
stored in extra registers of your PC's clock chip --- a chip which
uses CMOS technology so that it dissipates very low power
consumption and is thus suitable for operation off of a battery
while the system is powered down).
This "setup" program is usually (almost always) stored in the
system firmware (the BIOS ROM's on your motherboard) and is
typically accessible at boot/power-up via some system dependent
keystroke. Usually there is a message that is briefly displayed to
note what the magic keystroke would be --- something like:
"Press not to enter Setup"
If that doesn't work (either because your COM ports are not on your
motherboard or for other reasons) you can open up the case and look
at the various DIP and/or "berg" (jumper pins) settings that you'll
find. Some of them may be labelled. There might also be a
manufacturer's mark that might lead you to a website or phone
number where you can get support and documentation for the device.
If you can't find any documentation for some cheap multi-function
(IDE, floppy, COM, and parallel port) card --- your best bet is to
buy a new one (typically $10 to $35 US) and toss the old one into a
drawer as an emergency spare.
As a final note: please consider what it's like to answer such a
question. You give no details about what sort of system you have,
what you've tried (do you have any docs, have you looked at them),
what device you're trying to add (odd that it must be on COM2 ---
how do you know that), what OS distribution and software you're
running, etc.
You send a two line question which cannot be reasonably answered in
less than fifty. In IRC and on most newsgroups and mailing lists
you'd either be ignored or flamed. We're all volunteers here and
the one thing we ask is that you do your homework before you post.
I'm not saying this just to sound crabby (if I was going to be
irate, I'd've just deleted this). If you don't do your homework ---
and put considerably more thought and energy into your questions
than you won't get any satisfaction out of the Linux community.
_________________________________________________
(?) Installed on a Secondary SCSI HD: Lilo Stops at LI
From Rick V Smith on 9 Jun 1998
(?) I have installed linux on my second scsi drive the swap on a small
partition on my first scsi. and lilo on a big mbr for my win 95. the
start of linux went well but when I shut down and went to restart all
that happens is Li and the system hang's
Any Idea's.
Thank's Rick
(!) I don't know what you mean by "and like on a big mbr" --- all
MBR's (master boot records) are the same size on PC's --- one
sector!
It sounds like your BIOS can't "see" the 2nd SCSI drive -- so Lilo
can't "see" it either. The easiest solution would be to install
LOADLIN into a DOS/Win '96 directory --- with a copy of your
kernel(s). The kernel doesn't rely on the BIOS to access your
drives (since it provide 32 bit native drivers for your SCSI card
--- etc) so it will find its root filesystem with no problem.
Another think to try is to add the "linear" switch to your
/etc/lilo.conf --- and then rebuild the boot block and boot map
using the /sbin/lilo command. Read the lilo man pages and/or look
at the lilo "user" and "tech" .dvi files using xdvi (under X
Windows) for details.
There may be other settings that you'll have to tweak to get it
working. This is particularly true if you have a large SCSI drive
(my guess is that your second drive is bigger than 2 Gb -- and your
first one isn't). Look in the CMOS/Setup settings (or whatever your
SCSI card provides) for things that suggest that it is doing
something "fun" to make the large drive "DOS compatible").
Jim,
(?) I found the following line you wrote in a responce to someone else
and this cured my hair loss problem, that probably worked better than
Rogain. Thank's for the time and insight.
Rick
# The stanza for booting Linux.
image = /vmlinuz # The kernel is in /vmlinuz
label = linux # Give it the name "linux"
root = /dev/hda2 # Use /dev/hda2 as the root
filesystem
vga = ask # Prompt for VGA mode
append = "aha152x=0x340,11,7,1"
# Add this to the boot options,
# for detecting the SCSI controller
http://sunsite.unc.edu/LDP/HOWTO/Installation-HOWTO-8.html#ss8.2
_________________________________________________
(?) Running Unix/Linux Under Win '9x
From John Riddoch on the comp.unix.questions newsgroup on 05 Jun 1998
Jeff wrote:
I need a question answered. I am running Windows 95 and soon 98. ...
I was wondering if there is any way to run the unix program itself in
a program window in Win 95,
unix is not a program; it is an operating system. You _cannot_ run two
operating systems at the same time on the same hardware. Dual-booting
is a different matter.
(!) And running an OS under simulation or under a VM is also a
"different matter." Also not that the phrase "OS" is not so
precisely defined that you can defend this position. For example
the IBM mainframes support VM's (virtual machines) that would allow
the concurrent use of multiple OS'. Also consider the case of Tenon
Systems' "MachTen" a microkernel OS that support MacOS running as a
personality under the microkernel.
(?) just like you can run win 95 the same way on a mac.
???? I sincerely doubt it. Perhaps the mac had an emulator that ran
win 95 programs. Apart from anything else, win 95 is i386 only and
won't run on a 68000 (or whatever macs use these days).
(!) He's probably referring to VirtualPC --- an emulation of the
hardware, including CPU, video, disk, I/O, and ethernet chipsets.
There's also RealPC. These are the most popular PC emulators under
MacOS.
Modern Macs run the G3 (PowerPC) processor, and the performance of
Win '95 under VirtualPC is tolerable (about equivalent to a Pentium
90 on a 250 Mhz G3 Powerbook (laptop) and about a Pentium 75 on a
180 Mhz Performa).
Getting back to the original question:
There is a shareware package (distributed as source code and
available for free evaluation) by Kevin Lawton called Bochs.
This started as a PC emulator (hardware) emulation for Unix
(including Linux) that is allegedly capable of supporting Win '95
under emulation. It apparently isn't quite up to supporting NT
(apparently the CPU emulation is only 386 and NT requires 486 or
Pentium emulation). For info on that look at the Bochs web site:
(http://world.std.com/~bochs/). It looks like Kevin will be
upgrading the processor emulation as time (and possibly funds)
allow. Apparently you can License this package for $25. (I haven't
used it yet, but I might send him the money just 'cause I'm so
impressed by the effort).
I know this doesn't answer the question Yet but hang with me a
moment. Someone named David Ross seems to have ported Bochs to the
Win32 platform, thus allegedly allowing one to run Linux, FreeBSD,
or (presumably) most other forms of x86 Unix.
(?) if you can gimmie a hand and maybe tell me some sites where i can
download some software please tell me.
(!) See above.
(?) You might try http://www.linux.org/ for a few pointers. Do some
web searches for linux and read some stuff. RedHat linux 5.0 is a
reasonable version which is nicely pre-packaged for you and fairly
easy to install (http://www.redhat.com/).
(!) Having answered the basic question (where can you find a PC
emulator for Win '9x) I have to add my own suggestion:
Don't do it.
You can buy a cheap PC (even an old used 486) for next to nothing
(I've recently had one 40Mhz 386 given to me for free); and you can
install Linux on that.
(My main household server is a 10 year old 386/33 with 32 Mb of
RAM. Eventually I'll install some extra RAM and a new disk into
that "new" 386 and throw it up as an extra server on my LAN).
Once you have a machine (give it at least 16Mb and at least a 540Mb
drive) then you can just slap a null modem between it and you
desktop machine, or toss in a couple of ether cards and a
cross-over 10BaseT cord (or even by a little 4 or 5 port hub). Once
that's done you can use a terminal package (like Hyperterm, Telix,
or K95 -- Columbia U's Kermit for Win '9x), or even Kermit for DOS)
to connect to the Linux box. If you go the ethernet route you can
use Win '95's 'TELNET.EXE' or you can still use K95 (it's also a
telnet client --- and it's terminal emulation is far less buggy
than Microsoft's --- so you won't need a custom termcap/terminfo
file to run "curses" (Unix/Linux "full scree" terminal/console)
applications).
There are two reasons for me to suggest this approach:
First, you are likely to be very unhappy with the performance of
running any form of Unix under emulation. Although Linux performs
adequately on a 386 with only 16Mb of RAM --- and some kernels can
run in as little as 2Mb --- you'll probably just find emulation to
be too frustrating to be useful --- particularly when using any
Unix networking utilities.
The only two viable reasons I can see for the mode of operation
that you've requested are:
* You want to play with Unix to learn it.
* You want to use Perl/awk, or other text processing tools that are
considered to be "Unix" utilities.
You won't learn as much about Unix by running it under emulation
--- and you'll probably end up being too frustrated by its
performance to come away with a realistic appreciation of it.
In the other case you can get versions of Perl, awk, and most other
Unix utilities, shells, editors and many other tools that have been
ported to Win32 (and even to DOS, often using the GNU'ish Go32 "DOS
extender").
The other reason for my suggestion is that Linux, even on a lowly
386, makes a great server. My box has over 6Gb of online storage
(which I'll probably double in the 40Mhz) a magneto optical drive,
a CD-ROM and a CDR recorder, a 4mm DAT autochanger, a modem line
(which handles uucp, incoming and outgoing fax, dial out
terminal/BBS'ing, dial in terminal, and dial out PPP and will
handle dial-up PPP when I get around to configuring it), a null
modem into the living room (for use from an old XT laptop) and some
other toys.
The machine has currently been up for about three months.
I forget why I rebooted three months ago, maybe I built a new
kernel for it or maybe I just made some changes to the startup
files and wanted to make sure it would come up automatically. It's
been used as my mail gateway and newserver for a few years --- and
it was used as my primary interactive machine (mostly text editing)
for years. My wife and our various house guests sometime still use
it or the dumb terminal to read their mail (if they don't want to
use one of the Pentium's in the living room or in my bedroom).
Sometimes I dial into to it from a client site (I'm a consultant)
or even from some local coffee house using the Ricochet wireless to
telco gateway (offered in selected areas by Metricom:
(http://www.metricom.com/).
You can use Linux as a gateway. Its kernel offers an optional
feature called "IP Masquerading" which is a special form of
"network address translation" (NAT) that allows you to hide a whole
network of computers (using "private net IP addresses" like
10.*.*.*, 192.168.*.* and others defined in the RFC 1918). It is
trivial to install a package called 'diald' that will dial up your
ISP on demand (automatically when any of you computers try to
access the Internet -- or any other non-local nets) and will
automatically drop the line after a configurable period of
inactivity. This puts virtually no load on a machine (not
measurable on my 386!).
Another handy server role you can assign to your Unix box (Linux or
otherwise) is as a household schedule/reminder service. The Unix
'cron' and 'at' facilities are just perfect for this. You can write
simple scripts and schedule them for periodic execution (cron) or
for one time execution in the future (at). With slightly more
complex scripts (using the GNU 'date' command, and simple shell
conditionals and tests) you can do arbitrarily complex scheduling.
It is truly easy to set this up to automatically e-mail you
reminders post them to your "intranet web server" or to even page
you (using a normal modem) as an alarm service.
Eventually I expect someone to release a set of CGI scripts to act
as a front end to a reminder/alarm service --- which you could toss
up on your "intranet" server.
Using a little box as an "intranet" web server for a household or
small business also takes almost no memory or CPU power on a Linux
or FreeBSD box. I think the overhead is about 70K for a small web
server, and you can even configure them to be "dynamically" loaded
if you're really pressed for RAM. The little box can also function
as a fileserver for you Win '95 box by using Samba, a Unix package
that provides Windows/NT compatible file sharing. It's easy to run
all of these functions on the same box, they don't conflict with
one another at all, and most of them present very little load on
the server.
On top of all that you can use the old clunker to run household
appliance over the old BSR X-10 "Powerhouse" interface (also sold
as "ActiveHome"). Larry Wall just gave a talk at the Silicon Valley
Linux user's group showing us a demo of how he's automated his
house. It was incredibly amusing. He has a detector on his clothes
dryer, in the garage, that announces through the household PA
system when the laundry is done; and motion sensors on the walk way
leading up to the front door to announce visitors, and scripts to
tell his wife and kids when they get mail (presumably he gets too
much mail to want such an announcment for himself).
Naturally you can put a sound card in the PC and run PA/Speakers
off of it to do various cool things.
The point is that you can't do all of this when you're running Unix
in an emulator under Win '95 (since the chances are too great that
you'll need to reboot it, and also since your emulator won't have
access to most of the hardware that we're talking about --- it can
only access the virtual/emulated hardware. The other problem is
that Win '95 is generally not nearly as stable as any form of Unix.
Even NT doesn't come close to Linux, FreeBSD, or any of the popular
forms of Unix for stability.
For the same reasons you won't benefit nearly as much from a dual
or multi boot configuration. There's not much point to having a
"server" that you keep rebooting to play Doom (which is available
for Linux, BTW) or to read that MS Word document.
Although I've focused on Linux (and I prefer it for my personal
use) all of what I've said applies to FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD
among others. (There are some differences, the *BSD's don't have
their NAT/masquerading and packet filtering in the kernel -- it's
run as a user process, things like that. If you're learning Unix
for professional reasons I'd definitely suggest that you clock in
some time and practice on any one of the BSD systems as well as on
a Linux box. Potential employers (in Unix savvy companies) will be
far more intrigued by entry level applicants who've worked with
BSD.
Also, if you want to play with the X Window system (the dominant
tehnology for supporting GUI's under Unix --- though, technically,
it is a communications protocol and programming API --- and not a
"GUI") you won't want to run it on less than a Pentium. In that
situation I'd put one (character only) installation on the
cheap/used PC and install a dual boot configuration on your main
(Win '95) workstation. The best way to do that is to install an
extra hard drive on the workstation (so you don't need to
repartition your existing drives).
Even you decide to put one of the BSD's on your cheap/used server
you should probably still put Linux on your Win '9x workstation.
There are two reasons for this:
1. there are more commercially available productivity applications
available for Linux (WordPerfect, StarOffice, Applixware, Cliq,
Wingz, etc).
2. Linux has very good support for DOS, and Windows filesystems (and
even some, read-only and even NTFS and HPFS). You can even install
a small Linux distributions directly into a DOS subdirectory.
You could install Linux on the workstation and have it access most
of its files (almost all of them) over the network (over NFS). All
you need on a Unix box is a fairly small "root" filesystem. 20 Mb
is enough for all the "root" files (all you really need is /etc,
/dev/, and /sbin -- the rest can all be mounted over the LAN though
I'd suggest adding a local swap file or partition, and a local /tmp
directory).
If you do an installation like this: (with one server installation
on a dedicated PC and another on your workstation -- say FreeBSD on
the server and Linux on a multi-boot for your Win '9x box) you'll
get the maximum benefits and you'll learn enough about Unix to
qualify for professional work in the field.
So, in conclusion: You won't learn nearly as much about Unix from
any form of "emulation" or dual-boot arrangement. The principle
advantage of Unix has always been the client server model it uses.
Unix "wants" to be a server. It's as important to learn this
philosophy as it is to learn the syntax for a couple hundred Unix
commands. So, that's the best approach to installing and learning
it around your house.
_________________________________________________
(?) winprinters & MTAs
Pointers and Corrections
From John Levon on 05 Jun 1998
Hi, two points:
1) for win printers, someone has written a PPA driver. i don't have
the URL, but it was mentioned in 2 cent tips a while ago i think. This
possibly enables win printers to be used with linux
(!) In fact I had heard of it. However, it had not progressed far
enough along, last I checked, to be worth mention in LG. It's a
tough call for me whether to go dig up the latest scoop on a
digression or whether to gloss over it in the interests of
conveying the more important message.
The important message is that "Winprinters" and "Winmodems" are a
big lose for everyone involved (even for Windows '95 users, who may
find them "abandoned" in future versions of Windows and NT). These
are not "progressive" developments in the hardware market. The
other important message is that we shouldn't have to reverse
engineer these protocols.
While I admire the heroic efforts of people like Andrew Tridgell
(original architect of Samba, who implemented it by analysis of the
packets off "the wire")
For those that are interested in some info on the HP PPA printer
drivers for Ghostscript and Linux look at:
Ghostscript Printer Compatibility
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/printer.html
... and follow their link to:
(Tim Norman's) PPA for the masses
http://www.rpi.edu/~normat/technical/ppa/index.html
... and for other printer stuff for Linux try Goob's:
Linux Links: Software : Utilities : Printer
http://www.linuxlinks.com/Software/Utilities/Printer/
(?) 2) instead of www.faq.org, try www.faqs.org. this is a top site
that automatically contains HTML versions of FAQs on rtfm.mit.edu
thanks,
john.
(!) Doh! I looked for that by memory and tried "faq.org" first. I
didn't think to try "faqs.org" (and it wasn't in the bookmark file
on the machine I was typing from at that moment). I remember being
impressed with faqs.org and as disappointed when I look "back"
(finding the wrong one).
Thanks for catching that!
_________________________________________________
(?) Dreaming about xBase tools for Linux
From Michael "Mookie" Kepler on the L.U.S.T List on 04 Jun 1998
Is there a FoxPlus program for Linux ? When I use the SCO FoxPlus on
Linux with iBCS module running, it can not read the data files.
Thanks,
Jyh-shing Chen
Michael "Mookie" Kepler
Ha! Dream on! I'm decloaking and posting just because I'm glad to meet
another living dinosaur. I, too, have too much experience with and an
irrational attachment to FoxPlus.
(!) I presume Fox-Plus is an xBase product related or similar to
FoxPro. If so you might look at WorkGroup Solutions "Flagship"
(http://www.wgs.com/fsad.html).
This is a full dBase compatible system, and xBase compiler.
(Actually I think it does a "compile to C" --- then you'd use gcc
to actually produce your binaries. That makes it more portable I
suppose).
You could also look at Christopher B. Browne's incredible annotated
link farm of Linux business and productivity applications:
http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/
... which has a page specifically one xBase dbms packages for Linux
at: http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/rdbms05.html
Oddly enough Christopher doesn't mention Versasoft's dbMan (dbMan
IV or dbMan 5.x). Perhaps the product has been discontinued. I
couldn't find any URL for it though there are a number of
references. I just guessed at "versasoft.com" and glanced at their
web site, which only mentions one product (VersaTOOLS; a FoxPro
add-on?). I've blind-copied the one e-mail address listed thereon,
so that he can respond with any info on the fate of dbMan, if he
feels so inclined.
So in answer to your question:
Yes! Dream on! There are dbms apps for Linux, and you DON'T have to
use SQL.
(Also, if you ever want to work with a dbms package that's less
like "DOS" and xBase, nothing like SQL and more like Unix shell
script programming, look at Revolutionary Software's package: /rdb
-- they have a Linux version. Apparently this /rdb is related to
Rand/Hobbs RDB -- Christopher's pages talk about this a little bit.
(?) I made my living pushing the limits of Sco FoxPlus for five years,
starting in 1989, making it do things it was never meant to do. It is
frustrating that so many people think that SQL and Relational are
synonyms, and that Relational and XBase are mutually exclusive. Every
database application I created with FoxPlus conformed to the
Relational data model. There is nothing in FoxPlus to prevent this.
Please let me know if you find anything FoxPlus-esque that works under
Linux. I've been looking myself and have found nothing comparable. If
they would just release the source code, we could get somewhere.
Whenever I encounter a trivial programming task, especially ones
involving tabular data, I always think of how much quicker and easier
it would be to turn it out in FoxPlus than 'C', or _shudder_ PlSql
(yuck!).
____________________________
(?) From Thomas Good on the L.U.S.T List on 5 Jun 1998
Jim - I have the opposite problem. I want to lose foxpro in favour of
SQL. I run an odd mix of dbs including Postgres, Progress and FoxPro.
The foxpro is sitting on a dos box and is need of extinction. It is
(obviously) single user and so the person who sits on the box has to
do all of the data input and answer the phone - doing queries as
requested.
I am moving her data onto a linux box and I want to shift the code
from foxpro to SQL. Any converters out there? Front end is not too
important as I will use perl (5 with DBI 0.91 and DBD-Pg 0.69). I just
need to rework the existing queries...thanks!
Tom
----------- Sisters of Charity Medical Center ----------
Department of Psychiatry
Thomas Good, System Administrator
North Richmond CMHC/Residential Services
(!) Look at Christopher's web pages (I cited it in my longer
message but it's at: http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/)
Specifically he lists a some conversion utilities and .DBF
libraries at: http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/rdbms05.html
Also don't forget to check the LSM (Linux Software Map). Here's a
couple of entries from there (not listed on CBB's pages):
.......
Title: Light DBF client/server dbms (LDBF)
Version: 0.9.9 beta
Entered-date: 17NOV95
Description: This is client/server dbms that operate with
DBF files and compatible with Foxpro CDX indexes.
Clients connecting with server via TCP/IP
and works with databases as on local machine.
Supports transactions,multi-user operation,
stored procedures,triggers,
password security,logging all operations,
flexible configuration.Implemented main suite of
xBase operators.
Includes DLL of LDBF API for Windows.
Keywords: LDBF,ldbf
Author: vlad@torn.ktts.kharkov.ua (Vlad Seriakov)
Maintained-by: vlad@torn.ktts.kharkov.ua
Primary-site: sunsite.unc.edu (/pub/Linux/Incoming)
707 Kb ldbf-0.9.9.tar.gz
930 b ldbf.lsm
Alternate-site: ftp.kiae.su ( /linux/misc )
Original-site:
Platforms: Linux 1.2.0 or later with IPC support
Copying-policy: Freeware
.......
Title: dbview
Version: 1.0.0
Entered-date: 20APR96
Description: dbview is a little tool that will display dBase III and
IV files. You can also use it to convert your old .dbf
files for further use with Unix.
Keywords: database dbase view convert
Author: joey@infodrom.north.de (Martin Schulze)
Maintained-by: joey@infodrom.north.de (Martin Schulze)
Primary-site: sunsite.unc.edu /pub/Linux/apps/databases
10kB dbview-1.0.0.tar.gz
Original-site: ftp.infodrom.north.de /pub/Linux/Devel/dbview
10kB dbview-1.0.0.tar.gz
Copying-policy: GPL
.......
Title: libdbf
Version: 1.4
Description: Tools for manipulating dBase files
Keywords: unix dbase
Author: beacker@sgi.com
Maintained-by: Nobody to my knowledge
Primary-site: Wherever you put it.
Original-site: news::comp.sources.misc
Platforms: Unix (This copy linuxified)
Copying-policy: No commercial use, no charging for distribution (see README).
Entered-date: 01JAN96
Those were all found just using the "dbf" search string on a local
copy of the LSM (just a text file I keep around since I do so much
Linux support work).
There's are several Linux Software Map search engines and
searchable Linux Software Database sites out on the web. I don't
even have a "favorite" one any more.
Try:
Linux Search Database
http://www.egypt.pca.net/LSDB/lynx.html
... which found this one:
Title: AppGEN
Version: 0.2 alpha
Entered Date: 11JUL96
Description: Database application generator and 4GL for Postgres95 and
HTTPD. DBase DBF file to SQL Convertor.
Key Words: Application Generator 4GL SQL Web WWW Forms Postgres95 DBF
Author: Andrew Whaley
Primary Site: sunsite.unc.edu /pub/Linux/apps/databases/postgres
appgen-0.2-alpha.tar.gz
Alternate Site: GPL'ish End
... or try:
Linux Links (by Goob!) at:
http://www.croftj.net/~goob/
(The search engine is not too hot, but the hierarchy of links is
great). There is a reference there to a semi-free package called
X2c (the portable xBase compiler). X2c seems to have some features
for creating binary CGI interfaces to your DBF databases. Which
might be an alternative to converting it to SQL, if you aren't
worried about some of the concurrency and integrity and business
rules enforcement that are associated with SQL --- or even if you
just need a quick interim solution to use while you're doing the
xBase to SQL port.
Another place to check into is:
The #LinuxOS Webpage: Linux Software Search Engines and Indices
http://www.linuxos.org/Lsoftsearch.html
As the name suggests that site is maintained by principals of the
#LinuxOS IRC channel on EFNet and it contains a list of Linux link
farms, search engines and indices (what a surprise!).
So, I'd say there's plenty of places to look.
____________________________
(?) From Michael Kepler on the L.U.S.T List on 5 Jun 1998
I'd just like to thank you (Jim Dennis) for your very comprehensive
and helpful responses to the XBase question. I had no idea there were
so many database options available for Linux. I joined this
conversation out of idle personal interest, but now I think I see some
possibilities for solutions for current needs we have at our company.
Thanks again,
Michael Kepler
VP Systems Development
Metro One Telecommunications
_________________________________________________
(?) auto response for email ?
From Ted via the L.U.S.T List on 04 Jun 1998
Whatever you do, don't do this if you are on a mailing list. Think
about the consequences...
Ted the Lurker
(!) Ted, when replying to L.U.S.T. messages, please remove the
extraneous quoting.
(?) Hi,
How does one set up sendmail for automatically responding to an email
indicating that one is out of the office and will be responding to the
incoming emails at a later date ?
Thanks,
Jyh-shing Chen
(!) Normally one doesn't set up 'sendmail' to do the automated
response. Normally one would put in a .forward file with something
like:
"| /usr/local/bin/vacation...."
(or something like that).
There is an old program named "vacation" (written by Eric Allman,
author of sendmail) which can be used for this purpose. You can
read the man page for it if you like. It does some checks to
prevent replies to mailing lists (looks for a "Precedence: bulk"
header line) and system accounts (Mailer-Daemon, Postmaster, etc).
It also maintains a "cache" of addresses to which the "vacation
message" (or other auto-response) has been sent to prevent spurious
(and very annoying) duplicate responses to the same address.
(In other words, if you really are "on vacation" and someone
routinely copies you on some sort of mail, usually as part of a
workgroup list, they only need to hear about it once. I think
vacation defaults to an eight day limit between responses).
That would be one way one might do it.
However, this is Linux and there are even better ways. Most Linux
distributions default to 'sendmail' as the MTA (mail transport
agent) and use procmail as the MDA (mail delivery agent). (You
presumably use elm, pine, MH, or whatever you like as your MUA ---
mail user agent).
'procmail' is a "mail processing package" consisting of a few small
programs that you call upon via your own .procmailrc scripts. I
wrote an article about them for Linux Gazette about a year ago. You
can still find it, and some hot links, at the
http://www.linuxgazette.com/ web site.
The procmail documentation is a bit confusing so let me offer a
couple of quick notes: procmail is a very simple scripting
language. A procmail program consists of a list of "recipes" When
an item arrives (is delivered via procmail) the procmail binary
traverses the script from the top, scanning for the beginnings of
recipes (usually starting with a line like):
:0
... or
:0 B
(where B is a "flag" --- and there are several of those which mean
different things).
The rest of each recipe consists of some number of "conditions"
(patterns) and one "action" (disposition). Each of the condition
lines is of the form:
* ^From:.*foo...
... where ^From:.*foo... is a regular expression that is checked
against portions of the mail message that is currently "in hand"
(as it were). Usually your patterns will only be applied to the
messages headers. If you use the B flag on the recipe line or you
can put flags on your condition lines using a syntax like: * B ??
$PATTERN (where you replace $PATTERN with the regex for your
pattern).
All of the conditions which are logically AND'ed for each recipe
--- so something like:
:0
* ^From: joe.*
* ^Precedence: bulk
... would match mail that was from joe (in this case any joe at any
address) AND had a header indicating that is was of "bulk"
precedence.
After any/all of your condition lines, in a given recipe you have
an action line. The actions you can take are:
"file it"
"forward it"
"pipe it into a program" (such as an autoreply 'bot).
To "forget it" you just "file it" to /dev/null. In general any
filename on the action line will be consider to be a mail folder.
Any filename with no path elements will be considered standard mbox
(elm/pine compatible) folder under your ~/Mail directory (??).
(Normally you'll have a MAILDIR variable set. You can assign and
reference variables in procmail in pretty much the same ways as in
sh (Bourne shell)).
A name that refers to a directory will cause procmail to write each
message into a separate file in that directory (this is called a
"directory folder"). If you use a folder of the form: foo/. then
procmail will write the messages into the $MAILDIR/foo/ directory
using an MH compatible name and format.
To forward your mail you start the action line with a "!" (bang)
and simply give it an address. Be very careful about forwarding to
any address that might have its own procmail or other forwarding
agent attached. Otherwise you'll create a mail loop. For this
reason most procmail wizards never use the "!" forwarding operator
--- they pass the message to a pipe, adding their own headers and
formatting the message to the new address (still forwarding it --
but with some checks and changes in the headers).
So, here's how you pipe the message (to forward or autoreply) You
start your action line with a | (pipe) symbol and the rest is just
the command line. The procmail suite comes with a program called
'formail' (FORmat some MAIL headers).
So if you pipe mail to formail with the "-r" switch it will format
a "reply" and if you add the -A switch it will "Add" a custom
header line (replacing any previously matching header).
Here's an example:
:0
* !^FROM_MAILER
* !^FROM_DAEMON
* < 10000
* ^Subject: info
* !^X-Loop: info@starshine.org
| ((formail -rk -A "Precedence: junk" \
-A "X-Loop: info@starshine.org" ; \
echo "Info Request received on:" `date`) \
| $HOME/insert.doc -v file=$DOC/general.info) | $SENDMAIL -t -oi
-oe
... note this one is unusually complex since I am "keeping" the
senders message, checking if the whole thing is over 10K, appending
the date on which I received the message, and inserting (via a two
line awk script named "insert.doc") a response. Also those
"FROM_MAILER" and "FROM_DAEMON" patterns are a couple of "magic"
patterns that procmail recognizes --- they are actually expanded to
some hefty regexes internally.
... in other words, this action line is doing alot more than most
auto-reply. The point is that I can use formail to create the reply
headers (which it gets by filtering the header as procmail passes
the header and body of the mail into the pipe). I can then ship the
results of that to some other process (to do other processing on
the body or whatever) and finally passing that all to a copy of
sendmail (the full, local path to which is conveniently stored in
the $SENDMAIL variable). The -t switch on 'sendmail' means: "Take
the 'to' addresses from the headers on your standard input" ---
this is the safest and cleanest way to pipe messages into sendmail.
That's a short course on procmail. The tutorial I wrote for Linux
Gazette is even more basic than that --- so if I rattled through
some of that too fast: go read it.
One last note: There are 5 man pages on procmail, one for the
binary, one on the rc file syntax (the programming language) one
that's full of examples, and another on the "weighted scoring"
extensions (which allow you to add and subtract values to a
"weight" using various conditional patterns, which can be sensitive
to how many times a pattern appears in a message --- so you could
automatically descriminate against messages that were more than
have "quoted" lines).
The weighted scoring stuff is high wizardry --- I don't use it. The
examples are mostly suitable for cut and paste.
Keep in mind that you can call all sorts of programs, not just
'formail' --- so you could write a simple procmail script call on a
"sendpage" program when someone really important sends you mail
about something "really important"
Also 'formail' has the -D switch, which means one thing if used in
conjunction with -r (the combo means, "Don't duplicate" our reply
-- like vacation; where it checks for the ). It means something
else when used without the -r (don't deliver to this folder if this
is a duplicate according to the Message-ID: header line). Both
meanings have quite a bit to do with "duplication" --- but are much
different in usage.
If you subscribe to lists, like L.U.S.T, I suggest procmail for
auto sorting your mail. When you want to add auto replies --- even
if you're just going to call on Eric's 'vacation' program, you
should add that as a recipe after any procmail sorting (and spam
filtering) and with the * !^FROM_ and X-Loop: patterns. That will
prevent auto-replies to mailing lists that don't put in their
"Precedence: Bulk" line, and that might be from daemons and mailers
(other auto responders) that 'vacation' doesn't "see" ('procmail'
and 'formail' are more recent and benefit from a few more years of
experience with Internet "standards drift").
One of these days I may write a whole book on procmail. It would be
pretty short (like the O'Reilly 'vi' book, or their one on
"termcaps"). It's a very powerful utility that currently is passed
on as an "oral tradition" among sysadmins and Unix hacks. I think I
heard that TDG (the dotfile generator) provides a menu-driven
(GUI?) front end to creating .procmailrc files --- among many
others. That would probably be a good place to look for more info.
[He may have read about it in issue 17's article -- Heather]
_________________________________________________
(?) Connecting Linux to Win '95 via Null Modem
From Chris Gushue on 04 Jun 1998
I have two systems, a 486 and a K6, and I was wondering how (if) I
could connect them using a serial (null modem) cable. One system will
be running Windows 98, the other running Linux. I can't seem to find
any info on the LDP or other webpages. Thanks.
(!) Certainly you can connect them for some purposes.
I don't know anything about Win '98 but I presume it comes with
some sort of terminal emulation package (like the Hyperterm that MS
licensed from Hilgreave for Win '95, or that cheesy old "Terminal"
that they used to ship with Windows 3.x).
You could also get any of several shareware, free, or commercial
communications packages such as Telix (Windows or DOS), Kermit
(DOS) or K95 (Windows), etc.
All of these should have a "direct" or "null modem" option listed
among their "connection/modem" types.
This will give you a basic, character modem terminal login to your
Linux box. This not a networking connection --- it is just like
connecting a dumb terminal to the machine (which still gives you
access to most of the applications and almost all of the utilities
and programming tools on your Linux system).
If you want networking between these two systems, over the serial
line; that's a different story. You should be able to establish a
SLIP or PPP connection between the two. Once you've done that you
could run any of the TCP/IP protocols over the line. However, it's
much trickier to do that --- and I have no idea how Win '98 will
handle it.
(Under early revisions of Win '95 I remember complaints that the
supplied PPP drivers and their user interface was configured to
work with MSN (Microsoft Network --- their ISP) and that it
required some utility from the "Plus Pack" to allow one to create
and maintain a "chat" script --- a way to log in and
configure/establish a PPP session with any other ISP.
It seems that MS also added features in their NT 4.x (RAS?, RRAS?)
that allow these systems to act as recipients of the stock Win '95
MS-CHAP authentication method. I guess this was a bid to convince
ISP's to adopt Windows NT for their work.
Meanwhile Gert Doering (and others?) released the AutoPPP
extensions or patches to 'mgetty.'
'mgetty' is Gert's very popular "modem getty" line that allows a
modem line to be shared between terminal, fax, network and even
voice (with some modems) for both incoming and outgoing use. One of
the features of 'mgetty' is that it can be configured to recognize
certain login strings ("user name patterns") as a directive to use
an alternative 'login' program.
Thus you can configure you modem line to use ppplogin when given a
"user" name of the form: Pmaryjoe, and to use a traditional 'login'
when presented with others.
I personally haven't set up AutoPPP. However, a quick Yahoo! search
on the string: "+mgetty +autoppp" gives about 450 Alta Vista hits.
Most of these are from the Linux ISP mailing list. I didn't spot
any that covered AutoPPP over a null modem.
Trying a search string like: + "null modem" +mgetty +win + "95"
... didn't help either. Though it did return a bunch of links to
Linux Gazett mirror sites carrying issues 18, 25, and 28 (false
hits in this case)
Somewhere on the Linux ISP mailing list archives I found a thread
about "null serial" that was on target but not very informative.
Someone mentioned that the Win '95 PPP couldn't handle direct
connection --- and suggested Trumpet Winsock (a third party TCP/IP
suite for Windows --- and DOS --- for years before MS had ever
heard of TCP/IP).
So, it may not be easy to get networking configured over a null
modem line so long as Win '9x is on one end of it. However, I bet
it would be possible. You should probabl create a "modem emulation"
driver for Linux that would allow the Win '9x box to work as though
it were sending AT commands to a modem. The "modem emulation"
driver could implement a small AT command subset (responding to
every valid +++AT sequence with "OK" or the
appropriate response).
In the long run it's probably far easier to buy a couple of
ethernet cards (less than $30 each) and a 10baseT "cross over"
cable (necessary if you're not going through a hub, and sometimes
necessary to cascade one hub off of another). Not only is ethernet
much faster than serial --- it is currently much easier to
configure and support (for networking). Another advantage is that
you can later expand; buy a 4, 5 or 8 port ethernet hub and you can
wire up the whole house (actually I've almost filled two 8 port
hubs here --- but I'm a little different).
Conclusion: You can easily use the serial/null modem for simple
terminal access. You might be able to get it working as a
networking interface, but you might have quite a bit of trouble
convincing Win '9x to do PPP over a "direct" or "null modem"
connection. So you might have to look for a third party PPP
replacement (which may need to be upgraded between the Win '95 and
Win '98 versions) --- or you might be able to write some weird
"modem emulation" on the Linux side. For networking it will be much
easier to buy a couple of ethernet cards.
____________________________
(?) Linux help
From Chris Gushue on 04 Jun 1998
Thanks a lot for your thorough and quick response! It was just what I
was looking for, just a basic login to my Linux box to play around
with it until I get around to buying a hub and network cards. It kind
of funny though, using my K6/233 Win98 machine as a dumb terminal to
my 486/100 Linux box :-)
(!) I was using that VAResearch machine that I reviewed for the
Linux Journal ("betelgeuse": a 266