5 posts tagged “computers”

Esteemed members of Ubuntu Dallas,

Many of you who've been in the IRC room (#ubuntu-dallas on irc.freenode.net) remember either me (ZeroXR) or schpenke mentioning about what happened to our site with an announcement via an IRC meeting. If you missed out, then allow me to quote from an e-mail from Jono on the official announcement about the site takedown:

On Monday evening (UK time) it was reported that one of the hosted community servers that Canonical sponsors had been compromised.  After investigation, it became apparent that 5 of the 8 machines had been compromised.  Since it was reported that they were actively attacking other machines (and because it's What You Do), the decision was taken to shut the machines down.

On Tuesday morning we started the procedure of bringing these machines up in a safe state so that we could recover data from them. Unfortunately, this took far longer than we would have hoped or liked due to a combination of having to use remote hands, arbitrary limits imposed by those remote hands and (relative) lack of bandwidth to copy data off site.

This process is still ongoing (though only one remain has yet to be fully recovered - tiber).

How did this happen
-------------------

Unfortunately:

   a) The servers, especially zambezi were running an incredible amount of web software (over 15 packages[1] that we recognised) and of all the ones where it's trivial to determine a version, they were without exception out-of-date and missing security patches. An attacker could have gotten a shell through almost any of these sites.

   b) FTP (not SFTP, without SSL) was being used to access the machines, so an attacker (in the right place) could also have gotten access by sniffing the clear-text passwords.

   c) The servers have not been upgraded past breezy due to problems with the network card and later kernels.  This probably allowed the attacker to gain root.
[Quoted from Jono Bacon's E-mail, August 10th, 2007]

The site has been under the restoration and possibly a server move, so we're just waiting on Canonical to bring back the servers up so a few members of the Dallas team can assist with the effort to migrate to a different content management system (CMS) as we have had aggressive discussion with regard to how poor PostNuke has been to us. The main proponents of the site migration are: Myself, schpenke, JJNova, goodtimetribe, dare2dreamer, File13, and ExxonValdeez. Just there is one thing that we must know before we may proceed... What are Canonical's terms should we choose to use their hosting? What if we choose to go at it alone and manage our own server? I will post the next part of the very same e-mail with Jono below:

Loco teams/services can choose to either:

 (1) be migrated to the Canonical data centre.  This comes with both restrictions and benefits:

       + Better hardware and bandwidth.
       + Fulltime support from Canonical's sysadmin team including software maintenance and integration into our existing backup infrastructure.

       - root access will not be available.
       - Access by per-user SSH key only, limited number of accounts per loco team / service.
       - Can only support certain software (e.g. drupal, wordpress, planet, moin, ...)
       - No ability to run arbitrary CGIs.

 (2) or stay on the hosted/outsourced servers.

However, assuming anyone chooses option (2), some things will have to change with how we handle these servers.  Specifically, Canonical will continue to sponsor the servers but they will have to become entirely community run, i.e.

   + Community admin team liaise with hosting company for reboots, etc.

   + Community have sole responsibility for all aspects of administration of servers, including but not limited to day to day sysadmin tasks, backups, security, upgrades, recovery if compromised, etc.

   + Use of servers for loco team services only unless previously agreed.

   - Both the Community Council and Canonical have oversight on this
[Quoted from Jono Bacon's E-mail, August 10th, 2007]

With that being said, "what" are our options? From the same e-mail, here is what Jono lists off as approved web app recommendations...

Art-Web
Gallery
Drupal
PHPmyadmin
Wordpress
PostNuke
phpBB
SMF
Moodle
Planet
ASPseek
Moin
TaskFreak
CMS Made Simple
MediaWiki

As far as what transpired today in the meeting with regard to the LoCo team pages, here's the "Cliff's Notes" from Matthew Nuzum's e-mail to the LoCo Contacts mailing list:

Hello everyone, here is a quick summary of the meeting today regarding the canonical sponsored loco team web hosting.

In a nutshell, if you are using one of the "approved" webapps listed in that e-mail, you are welcome to use the hosting provided by the Canonical sysadmin team in the London based Canonical data center (CDC).

If you are not using an approved application and don't feel migration to a supported application is possible, the US based servers will still be maintained, but not allocated the same administrative resources that the CDC hosted sites will receive.

All of the above means, "don't worry, everything is going to be OK."  ;-)

Sites that had PHP, CGI or other executable code need to make arrangements to have that code replaced, since it could be compromised.

Also, each site will need to make arrangements for getting their site set up in the proper place.

To do this, follow these steps:
 * Log into #canonical-sysadmin on freenode and ask for help migrating your existing loco site. The first available sysadmin will contact you to make proper arrangements. As always, be patient. Loco teams far outnumber sysadmins. Change: Instead of logging onto #canonical-sysadmin (which has turned to chaos), file a bug at https://launchpad.net/loco-webhosting. This way you'll be notified if there are questions or when its been completed.

 * Contact us to make sure we can make DNS changes for your site by filing a bug against the loco-webhosting project in launchpad . This process is not instantaneous unfortunately.

If you do not yet have Canonical sponsored hosting but would *like* to have hosting, please understand that there will be a slightly longer than usual delay, then follow the existing instructions at

Thanks for your cooperation as we work through this event.
[Quoted by Matthew Nuzum's E-mail, August 14th, 2007 at 11:17am]

As far as which CMS everyone wants to go with for our site, the most popular choices seem to be Wordpress and Drupal. Wordpress has many advantages as there are lots of modules and plug-ins that work great with the CMS. Drupal gets notes for the ability to control management from what schpenke mentioned in the channel. If anyone has more details about Drupal, please comment and I will append this news post for the changes.

I would like to make a "state of the union" to our members at Ubuntu Dallas: Let us know which CMS you would like us to impliment and why. If you have a particular design or site template you would like us to use with a corresponding CMS, please show us and we'll let our users give their input. We also need a logo as well... dare2dreamer, JJNova, and File13 have there logos on display, but I would like to see more "competition". After all the chosen logo will be our emblem for the coming months! If you're artistic, get cracking!

I continue my reviewing of the Linux distros pulled this week. Fedora 7 was released this past Thursday, so I was glad to have hopped the torrent to pull the ISO's for both versions. Factor in Red Hat's involvement and you begin to understand how Fedora is really a great enterprise project for the Linux enthusiast.

Fedora was tested with my machine, Suzaku, for those curious...

Fedora 7
Fedora is a community version offshoot of the Red Hat Linux package that has finally found unification. Before, Fedora was spread over a number of CD ISO's or had to be burned on a DVD giving you a fully loaded OS. There was another option to burn a single CD install (known as Fedora Core) but that had you either adding extras via CD/DVD or the web.. Essentially you got the whole enchilada or you got nada. With the release of Fedora 7, The LiveCD was a great plan of attack. Fedora 7 by default is a Gnome environment. The artwork theme is "Flying High" which fits the mood of the distro as they have accomplished a lot for their 7th release.

The Fedora team took the time to create a very artistic GRUB bootloader screen. It has more of the "Flying High" balloon artwork skinned nicely to the GRUB bootloader. The GDM theme meshes very well into the theme but it is plagued by the same problem as PCLinuxOS, you're trapped at the log-in screen but a message under it has a count-down beff any Fedora KDE users want to chime in about getting that to work properly, I would appreciate it. ore it auto logs you in as Fedora. They could have done what Ubuntu's LiveCD does with a direct log-in to the OS as Gnome allows the option to do so.

The uSplash image that shows the procedure calls to load up Fedora 7 in Gnome is a themed image with a bland set of logos of all the tasks in loading. I was welcomed to a soothing blue and white theme and a great wallpaper of hot air balloons in an evening sky. Fedora was equipped with Avahi zeroconf for wi-fi networks, so picking up a wi-fi signal with a supported wi-fi card is good and dandy. I don't have another machine to test for unsupported cards and the presence of NDISwrapper, but I wouldn't assume that it's built into the LiveCD.

Fedora 7's package is a bit light for my tastes... Sure, you can use YUM to download and add modules/programs to the LiveCD, but you may want to have a good amount of RAM to try that, as I actually locked up from the system being overloaded from reading the CD and installing Beryl through Yum. If you're trying to gauge for stability, don't overload the procedures on the LiveCD as the need to read from the CD and run the OS completely on the RAM will not give an accurate idea of how the system can run. If you want more to play with... I would suggest holding out for the next review.

My only big pet peeve with Fedora 7 was the lack of built-in support for multimedia keys on laptops. Like earlier when I was trying to play with the Fedora 7 LiveCD in a coffee house... the loud sounds on boot were a bit embarrassing. For some reason, the keyboard shortcut association would not accept my hardware keys for the volume controls. I would have expected that the alsamixer would have been in the system tray at boot and not tucked away... but that's a whole different tangent. If any Fedora or Red Hat user would like to educate me or show me how to resolve that, I wouldn't mind.

Fedora 7 KDE
I was actually really more impressed with Fedora 7 KDE than I was with Fedora 7. Most of the things that I have said hold true even in the KDE version... Except for a few things...

The KDE shell is significantly lighter on the RAM usage than the Gnome shell. This has been common knowledge in the KDE vs. Gnome arguments, but the scale of the differences was almost dramatic. The wireless network manager in the KDE environment is the KNetworkManager which I am no stranger to, as my parent's Kubuntu machine uses it. Fedora has the KDE system bar set at a one level setting, which works well as to help go with their wonderful wallpaper.

The software library in the LiveCD of Fedora 7 KDE is significantly larger than the Fedora 7 LiveCD. You get to try a whole lot of software, like the KOffice suite, the K-Games suite... heck, even the Beryl packages to play with the Beryl window compositor. That impressed me a lot. The thing that scared me was the fact that in KDE with Beryl loaded and running from the Fedora 7 KDE LiveCD, my favorite burn effect was rendered better and faster than it is on Ubuntu Gnome! I would say that I liked the variety of software on the Fedora 7 KDE LiveCD more. The inclusion of the SELinux package was interesting, for those who are security paranoid... though not totally necessary.

Though Fedora 7 KDE was not without its flaws... Once again, I was unable to adjust my volume or mute with my hardware keys on Suzaku. On trying to associate my volume keys through KMixer, it wouldn't even recognize the media keys! Dynamic CPU scaling was not fully operational as I could not force the processor to run at pure performance mode or power-saver mode. In the Gnome version, Yum was accessible through the "Add/Remove Programs" button in the Gnome menu bar. I couldn't find the same KDE equivalent, unless I totally missed it... The last one was more of a bother than anything... On ending the LiveCD, Fedora does not force-eject the CD on finish. That means you'd have to forcibly eject the drive with the push button for a media drive or power up the machine and eject right on boot-up. Most of the other LiveCD distros eject right on shut down and then ask for the user to press enter to finish power-down.

Overall, I respect Fedora 7 and the KDE version... It is definitely not for the beginner, but I can say that both versions of Fedora 7 will be with me at all times. They have made it a nice polished release and hopefully, Things will get better once Fedora 8 rolls by. I was browsing some of the Fedora forums didn't quite reflect a newbie user friendly as I am acquainted to experience... The level of expertise is much higher in Fedora; I can understand why the level of knowledge must be higher to appreciate the Fedora project.

Ever since I was 12, when we got computer, a first generation Sony Vaio with a Pentium I with MMX (Beast v1) and Windows 95... My parents have asked me to try to teach them how to use Windows. Even my attempts to teach them Windows 98 and Windows XP failed... The complaints of "How do you kids do it? It's so hard and unfriendly!", "I can barely remember how to launch web browser", and the like were things I could never get them to beat the learning curve! Even now, it's hard for them to use my sister's newer model Vaio with XP on there and I hear them gripe there as well!

I remembered how my conversion to Ubuntu made computers make sense to me. With moving back home, I was barely using Beast V5, because I lacked a desk. I used Suzaku more as It fits my mobile lifestyle. The passing weeks with living in my parents, I would get the request of "Some day, you're going to have to help us learn how to get around online... All of our friends use the internet and we're still in the dark ages!" I would just tell them "Someday..." in hopes having them relax, because I had to make sure that I could consider the right package of Linux that was stable (so nothing that's bleeding edge would break the system) as well as easy to use (KDE was a must) for their purposes. I went with Kubuntu as it was a little bit of familiar ground for me, so things like updates and upgrades could be done with relative ease.

The week before, the Beast was already prepped for modification... just well, I needed to get a compatible network card, as the one in the machine was one I had enough difficulty fighting with. I snagged a Netgear WG311T from a local computer retailed and did the transplant and from there, all was good. After the final preparation was complete, everything was ready for the presentation to my parents. I woke up to noise and chaos Sunday... Sol was on his machine going to websites on my parent's request. I had woke and told my family "I have a machine I would like to donate to you. It's easy to use and if you have any questions... Let me know." I had set the machine up to automatically log-in on boot and shifted the default browser from Konqueror to Firefox. The machine had Flash and all the proprietary codecs installed so that would allow basic support for them to be able to go about without having to teach them the command line. I even made a desktop shortcut for them to instantly launch Firefox and begin browsing the web instantly.

Tomorrow will mark 1 week of Linux immersion for them in Kubuntu and they have yet to have had any problems or issues arise. They haven't learned to open their eyes to the web as they seem to have one site they go to for cultural videos or plays that are hosted on YouTube or Google Video. I wish they could just immerse themselves and see what all is out there on the web. Like the fact that the news can be read straight off of the web or heck... Streaming video feeds of news casts!

My friend, Noir, pointed out a good point last night on why their conversion went rather well...

They weren't former Windows users. Their exposure was rather minimal. The result, the found that Kubuntu was easy to use.

That's actually a great observation though, because when I think about my beginnings in Windows 95... It was a rather difficult time and I was 12 years old when I got my first computer. To think that my parents converted without much immersion, that's a much steeper learning curve, but their Kubuntu machine has proved otherwise. I have found that my father is a bit of a net addict, as he's been up late night watching Vietnamese films or reading old folktales, narratives, and poetry. If they can get into e-mail, IM/chat, and VoIP/Skype... I dare say they will always have a gateway to contact family. Just by then... They will have to seriously consider getting higher bandwidth services, as bandwidth is strained enough from, now, 3 users fighting for bandwidth.

So I decided to go on a bit of a Linux distro testing "spree" this week so to speak... I figured "Why not see what else is out there? Can't be prejudice to the other distros as they all have their merits." I decided to run LiveCD tests as I no longer have a spare machine to randomly install and destroy partitions just for fun and the sake of reviewing. LiveCD's are a great thing... the ability to contain an entire basic frame work of an operating system. This is great for potential converters to test their hardware and make sure that compatibility will not be questioned.

Due to the size of this entry, I have decided to break it into separate posts.

I would use Alice's Sony Vaio to test out the first distro on review.

PCLinuxOS 2007
An American derivation of the French Mandriva project (formerly known as Mandrake Linux) has aims to simplify the Linux experience for the non-tech savvy user. After much refinement, their 2007 release has finally arrived to the general public after much polishing. Naturally, fascination would draw me into the project to see if it was worth keeping in my repertoire of great Linux distros. After a few hours of downloading through http sources, I would burn the ISO and begin testing on Alice's machine.

On boot-up, PCLinuxOS loads up a log-in screen that has the following message on the top left corner:

To log in as root, use the password: root
To log in as demo, use the password: demo

To me, I feel that this could have been avoided. The point of a great LiveCD is the ability to get into the OS in one shot and begin to play! So I have to dock a bit of my appreciation for PCLinuxOS on that part. I will say that the KDE User Log-in screen is quite well done in a sharp and presentable style. Presentation is always a good as it should appeal to the user. But enough on the log-in screen...

The next step is internet configuration. This step honestly was not something I was expecting. It's a simple dialog that asks the user "Which method do you use to connect to the internet?" From there, the user picks which one their computer uses. For Alice's machine, she uses a Buffalo WLI-USB-54G adapter which was detected by PCLinuxOS. The only problem was that her adapter used a proprietary driver, but this is where I was impressed the most... PCLinuxOS loads the NDISwrapper module to find the Windows driver for the USB wifi dongle. At the time, I did not have the driver on me, so unfortunately, I could not test this feature... I will definitely revisit this when I get another chance to play on her PC

The KDE splash screen mentioning which modules are loading is actually well thought out. There's a string of text telling you what module is loading, while on the bottom are gray spheres that glow softly in blue as a percentage marker of the loading procedures. The splash screen encompasses the entire screen very well, unlike the default KDE small splash screen just displaying icons of the load procedures. After the processes finish, you are dropped into a very simple but sophisticated looking form of KDE. There aren't too many applications to play with unfortunately, but that may have been due to me lacking an internet connection to really let loose and do downloads or play with the package manager. The system is nice and robust for being unique to try offering a user friendly experience.

I will definitely be revisiting PCLinuxOS 2007, but for now, it has earned its spot in my Linux distro wallet.

Many wonder what got me into Linux and Open Software and boy, do I have a story to tell.

Windows has frustrated me for a very long time. Viruses, worms, trojan horse root-kits, and anything of the like have pissed me off to no end for years... Anyone remember the good old Blaster worm? I happened to have Windows XP and on dial-up of all things. That was my first horrid encounter with computer security problems... I had to crash the RPC procedure call with Alt - Ctrl - Del and have the update slowly pull onto my machine, where I would locally load it into a floppy for my cousin and fix his machine. The download was an unbearable 3 - 4 hours... Then there was sharing my tower with my sister... It tracted so many viruses and malware that a low level wipe was the only saving grace that could pull the machine out of its misery. That low-level wipe ran me a good 5 - 8 hours. It would happen to me again and again with my machine. Then the event would finally break me open...

Here's an excerpt from my blog posted at Ubuntu Dallas, this documents the final battle I had with Windows being on my machine:

What began as a simple Friday night of post-work relaxation on my Windows XP machine, BEAST v5, became one of anger and madness. The date was February 9th at about 9:30pm, I logged on just to check forums, read the news, use Outlook for personal e-mails and just relax to some music to ease away a very stressful week. Unfortunately, the common plagues of the Windows world came knocking on my door this unfortunate night. My copies of ZoneAlarm and Spybot Search & Destroy threw all the warning bells saying malicious code was infecting my system but couldn't be removed. The annoying issue that arose from this was the constant pop-ups screaming that the virus' attempts to access the outside world were blocked. But it seems that the virus only got more infuriated at me and became more persistent, so persistent that it crashed my anti-viral and spyware protection and began eating my resources. This would ultimately turn my machine into a proverbial zombie...

To think, that mess came about when I planned to just play some Guild Wars! From that, I began soul searching for another operating system... I ran into Ubuntu Linux by Canonical and the rest is history.

I wanted to give back to the promise of open source as it has been good to me. I began to go join up the Ubuntu Dallas Local Team to help out users in the Dallas area. I was invited by the administrator Shawn to be a forum moderator. Eventually, I would be asked to help moderate the mailing list and eventually, being promoted to assistant administrator! I have been proud of my promotion and even more proud to be of service of to Canonical in the Dallas area.

I have converted 3 machines. Two being my own, a desktop called BEAST v5 and a laptop known as Suzaku. They have served me well since the conversion and they have been reliable as a rock. I assisted in salvaging a friend's HP Media Center PC which proved to be a great task. I have shown friends my hard work and it is great!

Enclosed with this post are images and video of my machine. The pictures are more recent work of Suzaku, as I have been trying to perfect the "Burn" effect to run smoothly and rendered damn well.