LINUX NEWS
http://www.Cramsession.com
July 25, 2002 -- Issue #91TABLE OF CONTENTS
1) Sean’s Notes
2) Linux News
Free Blender
Enough With The Holiday, Just Give Me Loot!
Retail Therapy
Mandrake 9.0 Beta3) Linux Resources
BIND Views
A Brief History Of Debian
Hiding Digital Data the Stenographic Way
USB Help For Linux
USB Solid State Hard Drives4) App o’ the Week
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1) Sean’s Notes
One of the best learning experiences you can have with Linux is to set it up as an Internet server on your high speed connection at home. You wouldn’t want to run a commercial web site off of a cable modem, but it’s great for putting up some pictures, and perhaps running your email.
The first thing you need is a domain name. You can either register it through a registrar, or go under someone else’s subdomain. In the first example, you’d pick a name like example.com, and head on over to some place like http://godaddy.com (not a paid endorsement, it’s just the one I use), pay your $9US per year, and claim your piece of the Internet. The second option is to go under an existing subdomain. dhs.org provides such a service, they’ve recently gone to a $5US lifetime membership, where you can get myname.dhs.org.
After you have a domain, you need some name servers. People who read last week’s newsletter might say “Linux makes a great name server, I’ll use that!”. From experience, I’ll tell you it’ll work, but you really want a static IP address for DNS. Pick a service like http://zoneedit.com or http://granitecanyon.com which give you free DNS for small domains (i.e. a handful of records, up to five domains). The nameservers you are given when you sign up are required by your registrar from the previous step.
Now that you have a DNS server, you’ll want to point records toward your own machine so that people can send you email, and hit your web page. Assuming your IP address is 1.1.1.1, the following records will direct web traffic there:
example.com. IN A 1.1.1.1 www.example.com. IN CNAME example.com.
The first record creates an Address record pointing “example.com” to 1.1.1.1. The second record creates an alias from www.example.com to example.com. Thus, both “example.com” and “www.example.com” point to your server. As a small note, doing it the opposite way around (making www the A record and example.com the CNAME) is illegal as far as DNS is concerned. Since you’ll also have NS (name server) records for example.com, you can’t mix CNAMEs with other record types. A and NS records for the same item are fine, CNAME and NS don’t mix (and while you’re at it, the NS and MX records (which we’ll discuss next) can never point to a record that’s a CNAME). The reasons are complex, you can read STD#13 ( ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/std/std13.txt) and the documents it references if you’re really interested (or need a cure for insomnia), but take my word for it, you’ll encounter fewer problems if you keep your zones simple.
Speaking of the MX record, its job is to tell people where to send the email. When an MTA (message transfer agent, such as sendmail, the Exchange IMC, etc) sees an email address such as “info@example.com”, it looks for an MX record, then an A record. We’ll have both, but in a larger setting you might not want your email to go to your web server.
example.com. IN MX 10 example.com.
So, when a mail server out there sees “info@example.com”, it strips off the stuff before the @, searches for an MX record, and uses that host to deliver the mail. Here, we’ve sent it to our web server, which is the only server for now in our little world. Note, again, that we’re pointing mail to something that’s referenced by an A record – had we sent it to www.example.com, we’d be committing a DNS faux pas.
And another note, there’s no reason that your email has to go to anything under example.com. If you and your friends want to share hosting duties, you can send your email to their host, as long as they’re configured to accept it.
That “10” might be sticking out, it’s the MX priority. Lower priority wins, equal priorities are tried in round-robin fashion. It’s useful if you want to send your mail somewhere else if you go down, which can be often on a cable modem or DSL. Adding the following record…
example.com. IN MX 20 myfriend.com.
…will send your email to yourfriend.com if example.com can’t be reached. His server won’t read it, instead it will (well, should) queue it until you come back up.
Now that I’ve spent this column telling you how to set up DNS to support your home server, it’s up to you to set up your services. Shut down the services you’re not ready to deal with, monitor your logs, and keep up on patches. I’d suggest getting your feet wet with Apache before moving on to email and FTP.
Running your own Internet services on a small scale is great fun, but it’s a lot of work. It’s also great experience!
Long live the Penguin,
Sean swalberg@cramsession.com
Note – Where I gave you URLs to companies providing services, either free or commercial, they’re just examples of ones I’ve used. There are many others (and I’d appreciate hearing about them.)
2) Linux News
Free Blender
Blender is a 3D program that has become very popular. Originally, it was closed source but readily available, until the company went bankrupt. There’s now a big drive by the Open Source community to purchase the product, and to put it under a licence that ensures that it will always be available and Free.
http://newsforge.com/newsforge/02/07/23/1713210.shtml?tid
Enough With The Holiday, Just Give Me Loot!
Being a systems administrator is hard work, and is rarely noticed or appreciated. But, think of where the world would be without us? Friday is “System Administrator Appreciation Day”. Make sure this URL finds its way to your boss’s eyes before then!
http://www.sysadminday.com/
Retail Therapy
“Harry Roberts says he is not anti-Windows, he’s just ‘anti- spending-money’. That’s why the chief information officer at Boscov’s, a $1 billion department store chain based in Pennsylvania, is slowly moving big chunks of its technology operations onto Linux.” Yet another great Linux case-history.
http://www.forbes.com/home/2002/07/17/0717casestudy.html
Mandrake 9.0 Beta
Some bleeding edge software in the latest Mandrake offering, including a release candidate of the 2.2.19 kernel, updated hardware detection, and better configuration tools.
http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/90beta.php3
3) Linux Resources
BIND Views
Split DNS lets one box serve two different sets of records for the same zone, usually so that internal and external hosts end up with a different view of the domain for security purposes. Previously, you’d have to run two instances of BIND, each bound to a different IP address. With Views, introduced in BIND 9, you can set up different views based on the IP address of the requester.
http://sysadmin.oreilly.com/news/views_0501.html
A Brief History Of Debian
Sanjay posted this link in the Linux-General forum, it’s all about the history of the Debian project. Chapter Four is of particular interest, as it covers the detailed release history.
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/
Hiding Digital Data the Steganographic Way
Cramsession author Deb Shinder brings you an excellent introduction to steganography, a way of embedding data within other data to avoid detection. One example would be passwords or small notes hidden within digital images.
http://infocenter.cramsession.com/techlibrary/gethtml.asp?ID48
USB Help For Linux
USB can be quite the pain to configure under Linux, which is why I’ve tried to stay away from it (except for the CueCat, which took long enough to get going). Here’s a great article explaining one person’s experience getting a camera, hard drive, and mouse running on his USB bus.
http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue80/nielsen2.html
USB Solid State Hard Drives
I can’t remember how long ago it was that I made mention of a USB solid state hard drive that fits on a keychain, but I remember that it generated a few curious emails. Here’s a listing on Think Geek; there’s no mention about Linux support, but I can’t see those guys sell something that doesn’t work under our favourite OS.
http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/computing/5994.shtml
4) App o’ the Week
I’m still on the lookout for something to help deal with all the spam I get. The Active Spam Killer takes an interesting approach. If you get an email from an unknown address, it responds on your behalf asking for a confirmation. Once the confirmation is received, that person is clear to send forever. I’m not sure I’m ready to take such drastic action, but some of you fed up with spam might like it…
http://www.paganini.net/ask/
(C) 2002 BrainBuzz.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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