Incoherent mumblings
Posts tagged ‘linux’
All I needed to do was fill the hard disk with zeros. Simple right? It turned out not to be. My Ubuntu liveCD is broken, it hangs when I get to the keyboard chooser. My Phlak live CD didn’t cut it either. My minimal System Rescue CD couldn’t handle the SATA disk… Off to the Knoppix home page and one burnt and booted CD later I have a funtioning Linux system. Thank DYOC (Deity of Your Own Choice) for Knoppix!
I’ve just “finished” installing Arch Linux. (I don’t think I’ll ever be finished for real since Linux is such a dynamic place. However, I’ve installed enough of Arch Linux to be writing this using Epiphany, running on a slick GNOME desktop.)
So far Arch has proven to be a nice, well designed system with a lean feel to it. Being used to Debian (lately Ubuntu) and its extreme attention to detail, Arch does give a more rough impression. It’s a price I think is worth paying, and believe me, it’s not as bad as it sounds. I’ve spent about 2 hours getting the base system, postfix, X.org, and GNOME installed and configured properly. A few small details remain, but I would have to attend to those no matter what distro I choose (getting HAL to refrain from mounting one of the partitions on my USB stick isn’t something that comes pre-configured in any distro I know of 
).
The only thing left doing now is building proper Arch packages for muttng and keysafe.
When it’s not enough to just read and write files on a VFAT file system there’s a good change mtools can help. The only problem is that mtools work with drive letters. To assign a letter to your device you need to edit /etc/mtools.conf. This is the line I use to access the VFAT partition on my USB stick:
drive d: file="/dev/sdb1"
After this I can use mlabel to set the label of the partition:
mlabel d:MyLabel
A few days ago I stumbled on this article by Mr. AkaImBatman. I posted a message on the Ubuntu developer’s list. A reply mentioned a rather long rant on the article. I couldn’t help but comment on it (under the name Magnus of course).
I’ve finally found the time to check out OWASP‘s WebGoat. I have been putting this off for a while now, but it’s kept my interest enough to make me keep the zip-files on my desktop for a few weeks already.
My first impression wasn’t too good. I tried running it on Linux first (preferred platform for work/play/goofing around, yes anything) but installation failed miserably. The zip-file containing JDK1.5 only contains Java for Windows. Luckily I have Sun’s JDK1.5 on my Ubuntu machine already so I switched to using the StandAlone version. Now began the fun. There are numerous problems with the shell-scripts:
JAVA_HOMESo, after a call to ‘chmod’ to make everything writable, a few calls to dos2unix and chmod +x on the script files, a quick edit of webgoat.sh to set JAVA_HOME to something sane I thought I’d be off. Oh, no! Running webgoat.sh results in nothing. netstat -lpt reveals there is some java app listening on port 8005, but pointing my browser to it results in nothing. The total lack of documentation on how to use it didn’t help in my frustration.
After browsing the WebGoat Archives I turned off my Apache2 to free up port 80. Rerun webgost.sh, still nothing!
Some more browsing the archives revelead that I’m not only one having problems
running WebGoat on Linux , the answer wasn’t too encouraging. I decided to try my luck on (yuck) Windows. Unzip, run the bat-file, point a browser to http://localhost/. Wow, worked perfectly!
Ok, on to the next problem, where are the lessons? Again, bitten by the lack of documentation it seems. Well, the archive has been saving me before… Again, I’m not the only one having problems the answer was there as well:
http://localhost/WebGoat/attack
Username: guest
Password: guest
Worked again, and now I can start taking the lessons. Not a great start, but after this bumpy ride I got to the destination. I do hope the WebGoat developers improve on the Linux support and documentation though!
I’ve just read the interview with Theo de Raadt(TdR) and I just need to get my thoughts into words.
First I need to say that of course he is right. You don’t get to run the OpenBSD project without knowing what you talk about most of the time. The only problem, from my point of view, is that he’s evaluating OpenBSD from an administrator’s point of view.
I’ll address a few of the points where I think he’s overly negative about Linux and I’ll end with a few of my own points.
Well, of course he’s right, but I think TdR would agree that they are in good company. Especially if one considers the bigger picture. The kernel on its own is useless piece of code without the rest of software that makes up a useful Linux system. That software is largely shared with *BSD, and several large pieces in there are supported by corporations, GNOME, Qt (the GUI toolkit used in KDE), GCC, Apache… The list goes on and on. All of these things are available on *BSD as well, and they make those OSs usable as well.
He’s probably right. The *BSD maintainers are well-known for being demanding when it comes to what code makes it into the kernel. The problem with Linux adopting a similar style is that it’d reduce the momentum that Linux enjoys at the moment, without that momentum Linux would become less popular. It’d probably lead to several kernel developers moving onto some other OS project where they have a chance of getting there code in. Linus has a hard job balancing quality and speed of implementation, so far he’s been doing a good job. Sure, a few patches have been merged that should have been left out, but so far the Linux community has reacted fast enough to avoid disaster.
TdR also forgets to point out a crucial difference between *BSD and Linux. All of the *BSDs are both a kernel and a distribution. In the case of Linux there is a separation between kernel and distributions, for good and for bad. What it does allow is a more relaxed attitude with the kernel. There’s more freedom since some of the work is shifted to others. In this case it works in favour of Linux, even though it works against it in other situations.
Yes. I can’t argue with that. It’s getting big, yes, but Windows’ biggest problem–the backwards-compatability requirement–is not weighing Linux down at all. Entire subsystems have been replaced with better solutions, and the old code is being phased out. I don’t believe Microsoft has ever done that.
He continues: “We do it becuase we love Unix.”
“All generalisations are evil!” 
I wonder if TdR hasn’t been reading too many Linux vs. Windows postings on /.. It’s just such a silly statement!
I recently bought a Toshiba laptop. I installed Ubuntu on it, and almost everything worked on it right away. I needed to tweak a few things, install a few more packages to get it to the point where Linux was a replacement for Windows (functionality-wise I mean, I wasn’t even considering running Windows as my main OS on it). Could I have done it with *BSD? Maybe! I don’t know. Looking at *BSDs laptop pages suggest some success with installing them on laptops. My particular model is not mentioned anywhere–there are two pages, besides my own, on running Linux on it. I am absolutely sure I would have to spend a considerable amount of time configuring a *BSD system on it if I got it to install successfully.
That is the kind of experience a modern OS has to offer in order to attract regular users today. AFACS *BSD doesn’t offer it! As long as they don’t they will be satisfied with being second to Linux in most user’s eyes. Administrators, or power users, are a different matter.
It might even be that TdR should be thankful for Linux. User-friendly Linux distributions are attracting much attention from people today. Chances are many of them will be bitten by Unix bug and then they might be moving onto *BSD for their server needs. When I buy a server for home use I know I’ll be putting OpenBSD on it.
