LINUX NEWS
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Thursday, March 22, 2001TABLE OF CONTENTS
1) Sean’s Notes
2) Linux News
99.99% of High School Seniors can't Read PERL
Linuxgruven Still Making Headlines
Red Hat Network to Charge
IBM Targets SUN3) Linux Resources
Building a Bridging Firewall
Introducing the Z Shell
Free PHP Code
The Moron's Guide to Kerberos
Yes, You Can Sell Free Software4) App o’ the week
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1) Sean’s Notes
One of my favourite lines is “He who laughs last probably made a backup.” Having suffered through various crashes, breakdowns, misfortunes, and stupid mistakes, I have to agree.
When setting up a UNIX system, there are a few things you can do to make your system more tolerant of problems. The first, and obvious one, is a tape backup. My favourite backup software is AMANDA:
http://www.amanda.org
The neat thing about AMANDA is that it eschews the traditional full Friday backup, and daily incrementals. While that works great, the problem is that except for the full backup, you’ve got a lot of empty tape. What AMANDA does is rotate the full backups of various partitions with incrementals of other partitions. In this way, you have a near constant tape usage, allowing you to back up much more on a single tape. At a previous job, we crammed a whole bunch of workstations and servers on to one 4/8G tape. The interface is great–you can have it check the status of the servers, tapes, and clients every day before you leave. When you get into work the next morning, it can print out the tape label.
Don’t have a tape drive? How about a burner? There are a lot of programs on freshmeat.net that allow controlled backup to CD. A CD or two a week can give you peace of mind.
RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is a technique that allows you to combine multiple disks into one. In its most basic form, RAID-0, you take two disks and make them “mirrors” of each other. Writes go to both drives, so if you lose one you’re still running on one good one. Further discussions on the various RAID levels is best left to others though:
http://www.systemlogic.net/articles/01/1/raid/
Needless to say, in the absence of an expensive RAID card, you can do it in software. I’ll cover this procedure in a future issue but until then, have a look here:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/howto/Software-RAID-HOWTO
With software RAID, you don’t have to dedicate two (or more) whole drives. You can slice off a couple of hundred megs off a two drive system and make it /home. At least you’d still have your data in the event of a crash.
The last thing I’ll cover here is partitioning. It’s quite possible to build a Linux system on one partition (two if you need swap). However, if you get a filesystem corruption on one partition, you could potentially lose everything. Not that this happens a lot, but it is a risk…especially if your power has a tendency to flicker.
At the minimum, put /home on its own partition. Since it’s going to be mostly data, you’re more likely to skip corruption of that filesystem in the event of an unclean shutdown. Having /var on a separate partition is another good idea, since it constantly has log files being written to it.
Don’t carry this theory too far and put every root directory on its own!!! /etc, /lib, /bin, /sbin, /tmp, and /dev need to be on the root. What I usually do is set up separate partitions for /, /boot, /home, /usr, and /var. In addition to better recovery, this prevents log files, binaries, and users from filling up the root partition.
UNIX and Linux are very stable, but accidents do happen. Take precautions when you commission a system to ensure it can be recovered in the event of a fault, and ensure that your disaster recovery procedures work (ie, check your backups!). You’ll have the last laugh, I promise.
Sean swalberg@brainbuzz.com
Visit The Linux Newsletter Board http://boards.brainbuzz.com/boards/vbt.asp?b2
2) Linux News
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99% of High School Seniors Can’t Read PERL
What is the public education system coming to? 99.99% of surveyed seniors couldn’t pass a PERL exam. “I didn’t know what the hell any of it meant,” said one Senior, “it had lots of slashes and periods and brackets. It was so confusing. I’m feeling rather nauseous.”
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2001/03/perl_test.html
Linuxgruven Still Making Headlines
This is a bit of an update on the story I posted last week. Linuxgruven is in a bit of a transition period, to say the least. People who paid in advance for courses, and even employees, were greeted by a locked door when they came in one morning. Ouch.
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid/03/19/0013212 http://www.linuxgruven.com
Red Hat Network to Charge
Red Hat’s automatic update service is going to be charging for access. Note that you’ll still be able to download patches, but this value added service will be $10/month. Personally, I’ll either continue to do it by hand, or use Red Carpet for my limited machines, but this service will be well suited for the corporate network trying to deploy Linux.
http://www.redhat.com/products/network/service_changes.html
IBM Targets SUN
Big Blue, the big guy in the server market, is reorganizing and shuffling around product lines to get back on its feet. I saw a presentation on the eSeries machines, and have to admit, it’s pretty slick stuff. The reliability of mainframe hardware, with the power and versatility of Linux.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5079743,00.html
3) Linux Resources
Building a Bridging Firewall
Most firewalls act as a router within a network. With the powerful ip filtering and bridging capabilities of Linux, there is no reason why you can’t make the firewall act as a bridge, thus making it even more transparent. This article describes the process behind this device.
http://www2.linuxjournal.com/articles/misc/0041.html
Introducing the Z Shell
The Z shell is an alternative to the old standbys of bash and csh/tcsh. You may be intimidated at the prospect of having to learn yet another shell, but as this article will show, the Z shell is much the same but offers some advantages.
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-z.html?open&l 35,t=gr ,p=Z-Shell
Free PHP Code
One great thing about Object Oriented Languages is the ease of sharing code. This site has a good selection of pre-written PHP classes for things like form validation, popup menus, and graphics.
http://phpclasses.upperdesign.com/
The Moron’s Guide to Kerberos
Kerberos, a cryptographically secure authentication protocol, is fairly complex. Out of all the documentation on it that I’ve seen, this is the most friendly introduction to how everything works, and what all the different parts are called.
http://www.isi.edu/gost/brian/security/kerberos.html
Yes, You Can Sell Free Software
There is a common misconception that you can’t sell free software. You may be obligated to give it away if asked, but nothing is stopping you from making money off of it. This article shows how a business model can be (and is) wrapped around free software.
http://www.anchordesk.co.uk/anchordesk/commentary/columns/0,2415,71 08709,00. html
4) App o’ the week
If there is one Windows application that I can’t live without, it’s Quicken. GNUCash is a full-featured financial manager, with the goal of being a viable Linux alternative to Quicken. It’s not perfect yet, but with every release it gets closer. 1.4.11 was just released, and it’s very usable. The features in the 1.5 series mean that 1.6 is going to be a real hit. Depending on your tolerance for bugs, give one of the two versions a shot!
http://www.gnucash.org
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