I run slackware-current on my main workstation and I should keep up to date more often than I do. Anyway, on May 8th Patrick switched over to the new compression format of xz, based on an LZMA compression algorithm. This significantly reduces the size of compressed packages. Great stuff. Anyway, I noticed this because when I ran slackpkg upgrade-all it continuously failed. I was a bit perplexed but it’s an easy fix if you are a bit late.

Grab the newest pkgtools, tar, and xz packages. They are still in tgz format. You will need these installed before you can use the xz packages. If you cannot use slackpkg to install them grab them from any slackware-current mirror. Just search for the only remaining .tgz packages in the slackware/a directory. Once those are installed, the rest of the .txz packages will upgrade just fine.

I’m currently reading Stephen Levy’s Hacker’s: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Wow! This is a fantastic book. Not only is it informative, but man is it infectious. The book tickles that fancy I have to dig into programming and electronics and just do stuff for the sake of doing. To get back to the old ways of playing instead of just going about day-to-day work.

The book also recalled to mind the first hacker I ever met. Of course, at the time, I never considered him a hacker, but my Uncle Tom Geller, or Tinker as we called, really fit the bill. He was one of the most fascinating people I ever met. Born in the late 1950′s he came to age in the 1960′s and was every bit the hippy. He had a fascination with guns, electronics and the military which was a bit odd I think. Religion and philosophy caught his fancy and rubbed off on me. He turned me on to some Buddhist literature and Perennial Philosophy when he gave me the book Remember, Be Here Now by Ram Das. I read this book for hours.

Tinker introduced me to my first computer when he brought over his Atari 800 (I believe, that is what he had at the time). He introduced me to Infocom games, and we played Zork I that one night he babysat us. I was captivated to the screen. This was a really cool machine, but I was more infatuated with the games. He talked about his work with the local user groups and the programming stuff he was doing, but I was still more interested in the games. To him, the sky was the limit with a computer.

Tinker worked for the local cable company and was good for a hookup. Which made my parents happy, and we got free HBO and PRISM. Yeah, Easter PA was Service Electric territory.

I wish I could have spent a lot more time with my Uncle growing up. But that’s how things went with my family. We saw the relatives maybe once or twice a year, but those visits with Uncle TInker were amazing. He was always into the coolest, geekiest things. Taking stuff apart, learning how things work, and willing to share.

Unfortunately, Uncle Tinker had MS, a horribly debilitating disease. As the years went on MS took its toll not only on his health, but his family life and hobbies. He could not longer work and worst of all, his mobility was suffering. I remember the last time I saw him, I was at the movies with my mother, he and his wife were coming out of the film we were going to see. I forget what the movie was but I remember he liked it. He was walking with a cane that day and we spoke about getting together sometime soon. That was the fall.

On Christmas Day of that year, Uncle Tinker took his own life down by the Lehigh River in Tamaqua. Family problems and his health compelled him to put a bullet in his head thus ending the life of the first hacker I ever knew; and my chance to really appreciate that until now.

I don’t understand it. I upgraded MythBuntu from Gutsy to Hardy (yeah, I’m way behind) fully expecting a horror show but you know what? Nothing, it just upgraded and continued on as if nothing drastic had happened. Well, let me add, though, that the picture quality is a bit better and so is the sound. I just don’t get it. I constantly hear about the horrors of Myth upgrades. Well I must be the lucky one because mine went off without a hitch. Good stuff from the MythBuntu team!

Now what shall I try to break?

To me this is a very simple question to answer. Linux does not need a unified package manager when the source to the application you are using is available for you to compile on your own. Make your own package.

“Now Dann,” you might say: “Surely you do not mean for generic desktop user Joe to compile his own software?” To that I reply: “If not him or her, then surely there is someone else in the community willing to help him or her out.”

Yeah, it may be a bit of a challenge for someone to learn how to compile their own software and/or make it into a package. I understand that. But there are thousands of people out there who can, just ask them. Those of you who can, step up and assist when you are able. That is a simple way you can contribute; so consider it.

Generally, most of the software you could want will be available for the major distrobutions. Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, and OpenSuse all have pretty big software repositories, chock full of software choices for the desktop user. But should you find a piece of software you want not in your repository, having access to they source negates the need for a “standard package format” since you can compile and install the software yourself; even making a package for your system if you so choose. It is only when the software sources are not available, when the software is not Free or open that the package format debate comes into play.

Case in point. I wanted gwibber for Debian Squeeze. There was no package I could find, but the sources were available. So I pulled them down from launchpad, compiled the source and in less that 5 minutes was up and running. Had gwibber been closed source, I would not have had that capability. I would have had to use a tool like alien (which is a fantastic tool) or tried to force install the Ubuntu package. Both avenues court failer and jeopardizing the system and package manager stability.

Would it be nice and convenient to have a package format that installs on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Slackware, Arch and Gentoo? I could see the benefit of that; but then again that would require all those distributions to be library compatible. I do not find that appealing. I am not using Linux for convenience, I am using it because of it”s flexibility and power. Having access to the source provides that to me.

Well I was getting sick of the dropped wifi connection on the Meso. The odd thing was that Azimuth, from Linux Cranks, has the same model I do and he was not having any problems. To rule out a software issue I decided to try a different distro and settled on Debian.

The install for Debian was quite problematic. I had the Debian-5.0 net install and figured I would go with unetbootin. Well for some reason I could not get that running. It would boot to the install system but complain it could not find the cd to continue the install. Well I ran over to the Debian website and read through some of their docs for installing from a sd card. Well to make a long story short I tried so many different things before I realized that I must be using the wrong version of the netinstall iso. I had 5.0 and 5.01 was out so I had to download that. I did try the mini.iso but could not get any of their installers to find this iso.

Once I had the netinstall going the rest of the installation was a snap. The only thing I had to pull down onto the system was the firmware for the rt2573 wifi card. After that I switched right away to wicd from network manager and things were running smooth. I dist-upgraded to squeeze and now I seem to be running just fine.

The wifi seems a lot more stable but I do notice drop outs at work especially when I am idle for a while. I was having this issue with my eeePC though too so I am not overly concerned just yet. The real test will be Wednesday night on TLLTS and I will see whether I can use sip as I do the eeePC without having it drop out constantly.

The next step may be disassembling the system and see if there is a card loose or something. We shall see.

Other than the wifie the system runs fantastic. I’m loving it.

I just want to make something clear regarding my previous post: “They came a knocking and webmin let them in.” Understand that while the cracker’s did exploit webmin, it was by no means the fault of Webmin and entirely my own. I did not take the proper steps to secure webmin. I firmly believe Webmin is a fantastic tool for cross-distro, even cross-platform support The software is extremely powerful but what it is not is idiot proof. If one does not take the proper steps to configure and secure Webmin, then resulting damages are not the fault of Webmin.

Like any other piece of software, the responsibility rests squarely with the administrator to ensure security. For that I failed.

Today was a sad day. I found out my streaming mirror/microblog server had been cracked. They exploited webmin and set up shop. Alas, there is no one to blame but myself. This is how I believe it went down.

About a month ago I tried to ssh into the streaming server but could not get in. Since this is a co-lo vms I contacted support informing them of the problem and asking them to kick the server. I suspected it was from a sour upgrade. They replied back that they found a problem in the sshd_config file and that things were back to normal.

This server had been running some three or more years now, it was the same debian install just upgraded. The company, tektonic, had gone through some changes with their systems and I never kept up with their administrative interface changes as I always used ssh, not their tools. Thus, having found myself in this predicament a few times in the past I figured I should find another way to remotely kick the system.

I looked around at their docs and tools but could not get access to my system. I figured it was just because I never bothered to sign up when they changed tools those few times. Thus, I thought I would try out webmin. I slapped that on and then got pulled away with something else and eventually forgot about it.

Cut to today. Pat was having trouble getting gwibber working properly and it’s largely because I don’t have apache2 ssl running. So I figured it was high time I rectified that. I went in to get the system up to date and configure ssl. That’s when I noticed problems. Apt error-ed out complaining that ufc and openssh server could not be upgraded. I kept getting bad hashes on ufc files. After some frantic searching around the web I set to some other tasks which led me to learn that I would get the weird errors using common command like cp. In particular, bad address when preserving permissions. That’s when I knew something was amiss.

Whoever cracked the machine did not do a good job cleaning up after themselves or hiding their work. I found a suspect process running and tracked it down to a hidden directory in /tmp. There I learned they had exploited a hole in webmin and were using my system to find other targets running webmin. Well needless to say I shut that down, tried to preserve what I could from the system and wiped it clean.

It’s a good thing I don’t use the same passwords everywhere. Even more, most of the data on there was not critical. The big downside though was that this was the laconica server. So we pretty much lost that, the posts, subscriptions and users on there. While I preserved what I could, it was little use.

Long story short, after some fussing with Laconica for a fifth time, I finally got it up and running again successfully. I am at the latest version and it’s running pretty smooth. So if you had an account on the microblog, you will have to re-create it. If you were subscribed to someone on there you will probably have to re-subscribe. For that I am ashamed and apologize.

It really stinks though, three+ years running and they finally get in because of my oversight. That’s how it happens, one little slip up and you leave yourself wide open. But, events like this help one learn and you can bet I won’t make that same mistake again, at least not for a long time.

So remember: 1) Do your backups, 2) Keep your systems up to date, and 3) Never run any services you do not absolutely need and those you do; make sure you lock them down as tight as possible.

Have a happy, I go to hang my head in shame.

Netapplications comes out declaring that GNU/Linux has broken the 1% barrier and the interwebs go berserk. I have seen at least 5 articles today, and more the day before, and I suspect more are on the way ballyhooing and praising this statistic while a few just proclaim a simple: “Meh.”

Now there was a tllts forum post about this before and some discussion was made on how Netapplications acquires their statistics. In a nutshell they aggregate their data from all hosts using their service in conjunction with “430+ referral sources identified as search engines. Aggregate traffic referrals from these engines are summarized and reported on. The statistics for search engines include both organic and sponsored referrals. The websites in our population represent almost all countries on earth.” What does that actually mean? I myself am not too clear on that. But is seems to me again, these are sites under the Netapplications banner; sites utilizing their services. Is this an accurate representation of overall internet utilization?

The Net Applications website – Global Marketshare claims their “data provides valuable insight into significant trends for internet usage.” Perhaps there is some validity here but I would proffer that what many reporters get wrong is how they represent these statistics. Linux market share has not reached or surpassed 1% based on these statistics. No, Linux desktop market share has surpassed 1% based on sites using the Net Applications services. We cannot cannot extrapolate that this statistic is an accurate representation of the entire population of desktop users. There is a big difference there.

What I do find interesting and important about the Net Application stats is that at the beginning of March they reported Linux desktop usage at 0.88% and now they report it at 1.02%. That is a nice little jump. Let us keep an eye out to see what happen in June/July.

I do believe that Linux Desktop usage is very under-reported. Over the past few years we have heard more and more reports of mass desktop roll outs particularly overseas. I keep hearing Linux in the mainstream more and more these days. The explosion of netbooks has launched Linux into very interesting avenues. More and more OEM’s are offering pre-installed Linux options and companies dedicated to strictly providing Linux machines are posting outstanding profits. I suspect will start seeing these numbers continue to rise, that we will.

Ha ha ha! Someone has been visiting sites they should not be. But no more! After a stern talking to I implemented dansguardian to filter content from specific machines in the house that little fingers have access too. Now I understand there is a level of curiosity here and we do monitor their activity but one cannot be 100% on top of things all the time. It’s best to have a safety net.

Dansguardian was a snap to set up on my debian virtual machine. Took all of 5 minutes, the beauty of debian. I set the browser proxies on two systems to go through this machine. While I know there is a lot more that can be done, and I will implement that, it’s a start.

Today was day one and the logs show no DENIED or questionable sites. Tomorrow maybe I will yell at them through the mythtv box. They so much enjoy that!