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Nov 22 2001

                    LINUX NEWS
       Resources & Links From CramSession.com
            Thursday, November 22, 2001

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1) Sean’s Notes

2) Linux News

But I Thought They Stopped That
Lindows...
Case Study: Whackabilly Toy
Red Hat Makes Offer to Microsoft

3) Linux Resources

FTP Over SSH
Avantgo for Linux
Unreal Tournament for Linux
Setting Up A Web Email Archive
DOS Advice From CERT

4) App o’ the week

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1) Sean’s Notes

I really did a number on my system this week. Figuring I’d like to see what 2.4.14 has to offer, I built it for my Red Hat 7.1 system, ran lilo, and rebooted.

LI

Normally, LILO (the LInux LOader) displays LILO on the screen, then boots Linux. This time, though, it sat at LI. A quick trip to the README file for LILO told me that this meant:

“The first stage boot loader was able to load the second stage boot loader, but has failed to execute it. This can either be caused by a geometry mismatch or by moving /boot/boot.b without running the map installer.”

Seeing as I re-ran LILO, my guess was the geometry mismatch. However, the system had been running fine for quite some time. When this has happened in the past, I’ve found that /etc/lilo.conf didn’t have the “linear” option, which changes the way LILO maps larger drives.

Out comes the Red Hat 7.1 install disk, and “linux rescue” is entered at the first prompt to get me to a shell. Sure enough, lilo.conf looks fine. Just to be on the safe side, I’ll try it again.

chroot /mnt/sysimage # Rescue disk mounts the disk on /mnt/sysimage

		# so remap that to the root

/sbin/lilo # Rebuild boot sector

sync # Flush filesystems

From there, I exited until the system rebooted. Same thing.

Seeing as though I wanted to get this system back up quickly, I figured I’d make a boot disk. Back in recovery mode, I copied the kernel to the disk:

dd if=/mnt/sysimage/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.2-2 /mnt/sysimage/dev/fd0

rdev -r /mnt/sysimage/dev/fd0 /dev/hde1

The first command copies the kernel from my hard drive to the device file for the floppy. The second one sets the root filesystem flag (-r) for the image on the floppy to /dev/hde1, my old root filesystem. Reboot. Hang. Argh.

Just for fun, I grabbed a DOS floppy and tried to boot off that. Nothing. Turns out my disk drive is broken.

Now’s a good time as any to try to upgrade to Red Hat 7.2 and try out the new boot loader, GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader). The install was nothing new over 7.1, but upon reboot, I got “Hard Disk Error”, which is only slightly more helpful than my previous “LI”.

GRUB is fairly feature rich. One of the main advantages is that it understands the underlying filesystem. Therefore, it is smart enough to read your /boot system and figure out which kernel image it should load. No having to run “lilo” each time a change is made! Alas, if it can’t even boot, I can’t take advantage of those features.

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/

Skipping forward a bit, I threw in a drive into /dev/hda (primary master), and installed Red Hat 7.2 on it. Booted into that, and looked at /boot/grub/grub.conf:

title Red Hat Linux (2.4.7-10) root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.7-10 ro root=/dev/hda2 initrd /initrd-2.4.7-10.img

All I had to do then was change the “root” to /dev/hde8. Rebooted, and I was back at my old system. The upgrade had got rid of my Ximian-GNOME distribution and messed up Perl, but that was it.

So, what’s the moral of the story? I think I can draw a few.

  • Don’t panic.

  • Learn how the system boots. Had I not known, I might have panicked in step 1, and reformatted (losing my data). Also, test alternate methods of booting if you’re going to rely on them.

  • Keep data on a separate partition from binaries. At the worst, you can sacrifice the other partitions. Back up.

  • If you’re going to go outside the package management system and install software from source, make sure that the RPM isn’t left around. That’s why Perl was messed up. Apache was fine, because I had uninstalled the Red Hat package before my initial install.

  • Keep a recovery disk handy. For the longest time I used to use a Slackware rescue disk, but now I find the Red Hat install disk works much better. I saw an ad for a small (64M) USB based RAMdisk that fits on a keychain. Now that would cook! I’m also told that knowing the ins and outs of the recovery disk is essential for the RHCE.

Long live the Penguin,

Sean mailto:swalberg@cramsession.com

Visit the Linux News Board at http://boards.brainbuzz.com/boards/vbt.asp?b2

2) Linux News

But I Thought They Stopped That

A while ago, Dell stopped offering Linux as an option for its desktop line of products, citing lack of interest. They’ve come out with a letter explaining their current position, which seems to be that they’re offering it to large companies on servers and higher-end machines, but not on their regular lines of desktops. I find it somewhat annoying that you’re still forced to buy a Windows licence on a desktop, even if you want to run Linux.

http://www.dell.com/us/en/biz/topics/linux_linuxhome.htm

Lindows…

John Dvorak gives his take on what Lindows (Linux that runs Windows apps) needs to succeed. While I think he’s being pretty optimistic, he makes several good points in his article.

http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2820858 ,00.html

Case Study: Whackabilly Toy

Yea, so the company is made up, but the numbers don’t lie. This TCO study follows the transition of a manufacturing company’s move of their E-Commerce and manufacturing systems from NT to Unix. THe study does a good job of looking at the people side of the equation, such as the number of servers required to run under NT or Unix, and how many people would have to maintain them.

http://www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2001/1116.tco.case1.html

Red Hat Makes Offer to Microsoft

As part of the settlement, Microsoft is donating computers and software to schools. Of course, the majority of the donation is in software, which costs virtually nothing for Microsoft to donate. Red Hat’s offer? You spend all the money on the computers, and we’ll give the software!

http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2001/press_usschools.html

3) Linux Resources

FTP Over SSH

FTP over SSH isn’t news, OpenSSH does it quite well. However, all of those legacy applications that implement FTP themselves probably won’t run in a secure mode. Enter the port forwarding features of SSH…

http://www.bowiesnyder.com/writings/ftp_ssh.htm

Avantgo for Linux

I’ve been a Palm Pilot owner for quite some time. After picking up a cheap Palm modem, I decided to load up Avantgo (off/online web browser). No surprise, the client software is Windows only. This link is their approved Linux substitute.

http://www.tomw.org/malsync/

Unreal Tournament for Linux

Stop rebooting just to play Unreal Tournament from Windows! This patch from Loki games allows you to install the Windows CD on your Linux box and run natively.

http://www.lokigames.com/products/ut/

Setting Up A Web Email Archive

If you’d like to archive email to a web page, perhaps that from a mailing list, then this is for you. Using HyperMail and Apache, the author of this article shows how to generate a well formatted archive of email traffic.

http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue72/teo2.html

DOS Advice From CERT

CERT does their best to watch out for the Internet. This announcement talks about various denial of service (DOS) attacks, and how to prevent them.

http://www.cert.org/tech_tips/denial_of_service.html

4) App o’ the week

Tactical Operations is a mod for Unreal Tournament. Since the game itself works on Linux, it’s only fair that the mod does too. Play on either the Special Ops or Terrorists squads, and try to prevent the other side from completing their mission. Highly addictive.

http://www.tactical-ops.to/

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