Practical Technology

for practical people.

March 30, 2009
by sjvn01
2 Comments

100% cure for Conficker

On April 1st, the Conficker worm, perhaps the most wide-spread malware program in history, is set to activate. We don’t know what Conficker will do, but it’s a safe bet it won’t be anything nice to the hundreds of thousands of Windows PCs that have been infected with it. Will it strip out every credit-card number within these PCs? Launch a massive DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack? Subscribe you to PETA porn!? We don’t know.

I don’t want to find out myself. There are several ways you can try to protect yourself from Conficker. These include disabling AutoRun, since Conficker can spread by infected USB drives; using current anti-virus software; use Windows’ own malicious software removal tool; or, switch to OpenDNS for your DNS service. There are many ways to try to stop these attacks, unfortunately, the bad guys are always working on getting newer and better ways to infect your system.

The sad truth is no matter what you do with Windows, whether you’re running XP, Vista, or the Windows 7 beta, you’re not safe. Now, however there’s a patch that will stop Conficker, and almost all other malware programs, in their tracks. It’s called Linux.

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March 30, 2009
by sjvn01
3 Comments

Brace Yourself: DDoS Attacks Ahead

In 2009, the crème de la crème of Web sites are still vulnerable to DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks. Indeed, entire countries, such as Estonia, have had their Internet capabilities crippled by DDoS attacks. Chances are decent we’ll all get to see a massive DDoS sometime on, or after, April 1st, when the hundreds of thousands of Conficker-infected zombied Windows PCs are put to work.

DoS (Denial of service) attacks are exactly what they sound like: attempts to prevent your server from delivering services. Attackers can do this in many ways. For example, you could describe the old Outlook e-mail worm Melissa and its ilk as DoS agents because they cause their damage by making Outlook clients flood e-mail servers with worm-laden messages to the point that the servers collapse under the load.

This is an important point. People tend to think of DoS attacks as causing havoc by jamming network bandwidth with useless traffic. While that’s certainly one kind of DoS attack, another succeeds by devouring server resources. That means it’s possible for a successful DoS raid to be made over a low-speed modem connection if it attacks server resources. To really protect a network against attacks, both network and servers should be armed and ready

Usually, DoS attacks are aimed straight at your network’s TCP/IP infrastructure. These assaults come in three varieties: those that exploit weaknesses in a given TCP/IP stack implementation; those that target TCP/IP weaknesses; and the tried and true brute force attack. These days, the last, thanks to armies of zombied Windows PCs, are easier to do than ever

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March 28, 2009
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Good-Bye XP. Hello Windows 7

Microsoft has wanted to kill Windows XP for years. There was only one problem. The users refused to let it die. Now, that Windows 7 is almost ready to go, Microsoft is, once more, trying to ax XP.

Microsoft did this to themselves. Vista was a flop. Even now, according to Net Applications’ Market Share, Vista has only a lousy 23% of the desktop market. For a while, Microsoft ignored the fact that even their own executives were horrified by just how bad Vista was. But, then the Linux-powered netbook came along, and Microsoft was frightened enough by its early successes that it un-retired Windows XP Home.

Now, Microsoft wants to kill off XP again. Step one will be bringing free support for XP to a close on April 14th. Step two is letting anyone and their uncle get a free copy of the Windows 7 release candidate sometime in May. The timing is by design.

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March 26, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11: A true Windows replacement

There are lots of Linux distros being touted as great desktop operating systems for PCs. However, there’s only one that I can wholeheartedly recommend to business owners as a Windows replacement: Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (SLED).

SLED 11, which was released on March 24, stands above its competitors because it works and plays well with existing Windows business networks, data files and application servers. You can, of course, add this functionality to other Linux distributions — if you’re willing to do it manually. SLED gives you pretty much the full deal out of the box.

This new desktop is based on openSUSE 11.1. If you’ve already used openSUSE, you might think at first glance that SLED 11 is little more than openSUSE with a $120 annual service contract. It’s more than that, though. Here’s what I found in my recent run with it.

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March 26, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

How to make a half-a-billion bucks with Linux

I find it hard to believe that there are still fools out there who don’t think you can make money, serious as heart attack money, with Linux and open source. Let Red Hat spell it out for you.

Red Hat reported its 4th quarter results last night, March 25th. I quote: “Total revenue for the quarter was $166.2 million, an increase of 18% from the year ago quarter and 1% from the prior quarter. Subscription revenue for the quarter was $139.4 million, up 14% year-over-year and 3% from the prior quarter. For the full year, total revenue was $652.6 million, an increase of 25% over the prior year, and subscription revenue was $541.2 million, up 20% year-over-year.”

Anyone want to bet Red Hat’s total revenue will top a billion in 2011?

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March 25, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

Five great, obsolete operating systems

Before jumping into my own list, I should say up-front that not all of these systems are dead, or really even obsolete. My first two, OS/2 and NeXTStep, actually live on in evolved versions.

1) OS/2 Warp – Put aside all the fan-boy ranting about how it was the greatest thing since TOPS-20 (and if you get that reference, congratulations you really are a fellow operating system geek), OS/2 really was a great, solid 32-bit operating system, when everything else running on a PC was 16-bit.

Even now, there are parts of OS/2 I’d like to see revived and made open-source. In particular, I think OS/2’s SOM (System Object Model) could work well in Linux today.

So, if it was so wonderful why aren’t we using it? In part, it’s because Microsoft made it impossible for the PC vendors to profitably install any other desktop operating system. OS/2 was Microsoft’s first serious PC rival, and they did their best to bury it. The other reason why OS/2 isn’t a household name is that IBM never really gave it the support it needed to be successful.

OS/2, however, isn’t dead. It lives on in Serenity System’s eComStation desktop. If you want to see for yourself what all the excitement was about, try eComStation. Heck, you may even find yourself becoming a new OS/2 user.

2) NeXTStep – I was lucky enough once to own a Color Turbo NeXTStation. I still wish I had one. To this day, that 33MHz system gave me the smoothest combination of graphics, interface, and hardware I’ve ever seen on a PC. Mac OS X, the next best thing, is a direct descendant of NeXTStep.

You don’t have to have a Mac, a NeXT box, or a copy of the old NeXTStep for 486 installation disks, to see why I liked it so much. The Linux/Unix Window Maker GUI is designed to look and feel like the NeXTStep GUI. If you want to build NeXTStep-style programs, the 21st century version of the application framework, GNUStep, which uses a Cocoa/OpenStep API (application program interface), is still an active open-source project.

3) Interactive Unix SVR3.2 and RVR4 – Long, long before there was Linux, I was using Unix on everything from PCs to mini-computers. My first PC Unix was SCO/Microsoft Xenix on a 4.77MHz 8086 processor. Yes, you read that right; SCO and Microsoft once worked together and release a version of Unix. And, yes, Xenix on that processor was S L O W. The first Unix I really liked on the x86 family though was Interactive Unix back in the late 80s.

It worked well and it was quite fast. Unlike many Unix users, I didn’t have any trouble picking up System V’s command syntax, so I didn’t have the almost allergic reaction that many BSD Unix users had to Interactive and all the other System V Unixes of the late 80s and early 90s. To this day, System V style commands spring to my fingers faster than BSD equivalents.

Sun bought Interactive Unix and that was pretty much the end of it. Sun went on to create Solaris from System V Unix and its own BSD-based SunOS.

4) SunOS 4.1.4 – Speaking of SunOS, I’m one of those cranky people who still liked ye old Sun operating system. It’s always seemed to me that while adding System V goodies to SunOS was a fine idea, Solaris ended up having too many odds and ends added to it.

SunOS, which I used back in the day on everything from Sun-3 workstations to SPARCstations, was a very clean and fast operating system. OK, I admit Solaris has a lot of good stuff in it, like Dtrace and ZFS, but I’m sure I’m not the only one that liked the mean, trim, and ready to process SunOS.

5) BSD/OS – The BSD Unix operating systems, such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DesktopBSD and NetBSD, are all alive and well, but BSD/OS didn’t make it. I always rather liked BSD/OS, which was a commercial BSD, and I’m sorry that it disappeared from the scene.

It was fast, it has commercial support, and, unlike SunOS, it was going stay true to its BSD roots. It wasn’t to be though.

In a way, it’s because of BSD/OS that we have Linux now. BSD/OS’ creator, (BSDi) Berkeley Software Design Inc., ended up in what you could describe as the first of the open-source lawsuits — AT&T/USL vs. BSDi-in 1992. After Novell bought Unix and AT&T’s Unix System Laboratories, Novell dropped the lawsuit. In the meantime, though, little work was done with any of the BSDs. And, so a Finnish college student named Linus Torvalds decided to build his own Unix-like operating system. And, the rest as they say, is history.

A version of this story first appeared in ComputerWorld.