It’s official: Debian 3.1 “sarge” is now stable. For those of you wondering (I was), the precedent for EOLing a previous version of Debian as far as maintaining security updates has been around 12 months, but it depends on the security team. So, this is the timeframe you’ve got to move servers from woody to…
It’s not official yet, but today is D-Day. The mirrors are starting to change over as “stable” points at “sarge”, and you can grab the ISO here. No torrent seed yet until the mirrors are updated. I am going through my machines and doing s/stable/woody/ like I should have been from the beginning so I…
A friend of ours, Jackson Miller, sent this highly interesting article our way. It touches on the points of Push, Pull, and Push/Pull when it comes to computing shifts. Here is a small excerpt: No. 1, the Law of Pull. That which is CHEAPER pulleth more mightily than that which is easier to use. Ease…
A brief update on the release of Debian 3.1 “Sarge”. Originally, Sarge was slated to release today, but: Well, just in case it wasn’t obvious to everyone from looking at the release-critical bug stats, we should probably come out and say it: the the count of release critical issues affecting sarge is still going down,…
I have written articles in the past about ways to use passphraseless SSH keys in a secure manner, by using the the “command” parameter in the authorized_keys file. The one inconvenience with this method is that it only lets you specify one command. What if you want an account to be able to execute, say,…
Bruce Schneier discusses the viability of a SSH worm using the simple fact that ~/.ssh/known_hosts contains visited hostnames and keys, along with the fact that a compromised user/password on one machine will likely work on any of the other machines listed in ~/.ssh/known_hosts.
An interesting article at the National Post discusses the possible ramifications of a new open-source PBX package, Asterisk: Although little-known, Mr. Spencer has developed open-source software called Asterisk that lets businesses install telephone switches that are much less expensive than systems sold by suppliers such as Alcatel SA, Nortel Networks Corp. and Avaya Inc. ……
We at CentreSource are huge proponents of the Debian distribution of GNU/Linux, which is why it delights me to see that Sarge (3.1) has officially been frozen. No word on hell, yet, but I would expect it should follow closely after the pigs fly. In all seriousness, Debian’s release timelines are not one of its…
Undeadly is reporting that OpenBSD 3.7 CDs have begun arriving. Among the new features are some interesting ones: New iwi(4) driver for Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG/2225BG/2915ABG IEEE 802.11a/b/g wireless network adapters. There goes one excuse for me to not to be running OpenBSD on my laptop.. ospfd(8), implementing the OSPFv2 routing protocol. This is great news….
Debian has some handy directories for dropping scripts into regular cron rotation, /etc/cron.hourly/, /etc/cron.daily/, /etc/cron.weekly/ and /etc/cron.monthly/. I spent a long time wondering (but never really looking) into why certain update scripts I had in there weren’t running. Turns out these scripts are called via “run-parts”, and, well, turns out it’s my stupid fault for…
