Security, Paul Vixie, Palmtop NFS, An Advanced Mail Server, and iPod Linux

Hello everyone. This is the Linux newsletter, prepared in advance, covering this past week's events on ONLamp.com. It's been quite a week. Let's dig in:

As unfortunate as it is, security patches and breaches are a fact of software. That's why Noel Davis writes his Security Alerts column every couple of weeks. Remote exploit possibilities include sendmail, OpenSSH, pine, gtkhtml, and Solstice AdminSuite. Please take a few moments to ensure that your versions are patched and safe.

VeriSign's a popular whipping-boy these days. The difference is, it's well-deserved. While some people are quick to throw around phrases such as "abuse of a public trust" and "should be punished severely", Paul Vixie takes a more measured tone. His name is almost synonymous with DNS. We talked to Paul last week to get his reactions to this little saga. Read what he had to say in Paul Vixie on VeriSign. (Thanks to Roger Ward and Phil Barbier for quick typo-checking.)

Running a free Unix on a palmtop computer gets you a lot of geek credibility, sure (especially if you put it there). Can it be practical as well? The problem of compiling and installing software seems hard to overcome, but BSD columnist Michael Lucas cannot be deterred. Expanding Small NetBSD Systems explains how NFS and other tricks make it possible to compile and install software on a palmtop.

A plain-jane, telnet and pine email server just doesn't cut it these days. (Your editor notes that he's dropped some 50,000 viruses on his personal account alone in the past several weeks.) Security, filtering, and remote access are all important. That's the idea behind Joe Stump's three-part article series. Part one, Building an Advanced Mail Server, explains how to set up qmail, vpopmail, and Courier IMAP to serve POP3 as well as secure IMAP to users on, potentially, billions of virtual domains. You may have more modest needs, but Joe will steer you right.

Finally, from the "it's a computer, so why not?!" department, Howard Wen explores the wacky world of Linux running on Apple's iPod. Linux on iPod features an interview with Bernard Leach, the programmer behind the project. Why would you want to do this? Besides Ogg support, why not?

This week's weblogs have Andy Lester volunteering to talk testing to your user group and announcing the Perl Phalanx Project. ALso, Chris DiBona marks Samba's 3.0 release, and Bob DuCharme ponders one-to-many links, and your editor finds something good in VeriSign's SiteFinder (having shamelessly stolen the news from Casey West).

That's all for today. See you next time!

It's Friday afternoon here,

chromatic
chromatic@oreilly.com
Technical Editor
O'Reilly Network

ONLamp.com and Linux Devcenter Top Five Articles Last Week

1. Paul Vixie on VeriSign
   Paul Vixie discusses VeriSign's recent redirection of nonexistent URLs to an advertising page.

2. Installing Oracle 9iR2 on Red Hat 9
   While Oracle's understandably proud of their Linux support, Oracle 9i is unsupported on the latest and greatest Red Hat. That doesn't mean it doesn't work, just that you'll have to do a little tinkering. Roko Roic demonstrates how to install Oracle 91R2 on Red Hat 9.

3. Porting Linux to the iPod
   A new piece of unknown hardware is a challenge; what can it do? To Bernard Leach, Apple's iPod was just waiting for a Linux port. Thanks to his work, you can play music on an iPod running Linux. Howard Wen recently interviewed Leach on the goals and process of porting Linux to the iPod.

4. Inside Prelude, an Open Source IDS
   Keeping the bad guys out is important. Knowing whether, not if, they're in is even more important. Prelude, an open source IDS, takes a hybrid approach to security, collecting information from various sensors. KIVILCIM Hindistan talks to Yoann Vandoorselaere, Prelude's lead developer.

5. Cleaning and Customizing Your Ports
   One of FreeBSD's biggest benefits is its ports collection. It seems like magic, but a little maintenance can make it work even better for your system. Dru Lavigne explains how to keep your ports collection clean and how to customize individual ports.

Return to list of Linux Newsletters.

Return to the Linux DevCenter.