Practical Technology

for practical people.

August 19, 2008
by sjvn01
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Check Point Marries Virtual, Physical Security for VMware Servers

Running virtual machines is easy. It’s managing and securing them that’s the problem, according to both users and analysts. Check Point Software Technologies thinks it has an answer: the VPN-1 VE (Virtual Edition).

The VPN-1 VE is a VMware-certified virtual application, which is designed to secure VMware virtual servers and applications by making them act as if they were on separate physical servers. While Check Point claims that it’s the “first company to provide unified security management for both physical networks and virtual applications,” the concept is used by other vendors in the still new field of virtualization security. For example, Apani’s EpiForce VM takes a similar approach.

Check Point’s VPN-1 VE will, however, integrate with pre-existing Check Point security infrastructure. This should result with in a significant management saving since administrators will be able to run both virtual and the more usual server and network security tasks from one interface.

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August 19, 2008
by sjvn01
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MSNBC Spam-O-Rama

Just when you thought it was safe to look in your in-box again, a new wave of malware spam has arrived. Lucky us.

This morning I found my Gmail spam box stuffed with “BREAKING NEWS” purporting to be from MSNBC. Headlines have range from the semi-plausible: “McCain Plans Vietnam Campaign Tour;” to the unlikely, “Nation Morns the Tragic Loss of Britney Spears;” to the utterly unbelievable: “Paris Hilton Lectures on Dickens and Dostoevsky.” For more, much more, you can see a listing of spam subjects used to date on the MSNBC.com Spam page.

If this sounds familiar, it should. In early August, a flood of similar spam messages poured out. These pretended to be from CNN and also had over-the-top headlines with links to bogus sites. Once there, you’d get a message telling you that you had to upgrade your Adobe Flash Player. If you’d had gone that far your only choice was to either download the “Flash Player,” which was actually one of several malware packages or quit your browser.

This is a replay of the same malicious spam game. As a Linux user, it doesn’t do anything to me except fill up my inbox with junk. For naïve Windows users, though, it’s a real threat.

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August 18, 2008
by sjvn01
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If it’s animation or special effects, it’s Linux

When I was a kid, I used to make crude little animated cartoons in my notebooks using the flipbook technique. Walt Disney had nothing to worry about. I was awful even by the 3rd grade standards of White Pine elementary. Today, I could be great, because almost all top animation and special effects artists are Linux users.

My colleague Eric Lai discovered recently that while top animation and FX (special effects) programs are run on Macs and some of them, like RenderMan Pro Server are being ported to Windows, it’s on Linux clusters that the really serious movie and television visual effects are created. As Robin Rowe writes at LinuxMovies.org, “In the film industry, Linux has won. It’s running on practically all servers and desktops used for feature animation and visual effects.”

Rowe’s not just being a Linux booster. It’s the Gospel truth. The animation and FX for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull; Star Wars: The Clone Wars; WALL-E; 300; The Golden Compass; Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix; and I Am Legend, to name but a few recent movies, were all created using Pixar’s RenderMan and Autodesk Maya running on Linux clusters.

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August 15, 2008
by sjvn01
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Linux to Windows and back again with Samba

I see my buddy in technology writing, Preston Gralla, is having trouble getting his new Wubi-based Ubuntu 8.04 system to work with his Windows file systems and vice-versa. While some Linuxes, like Xandros and SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) come Windows network ready, most, like Ubuntu, require some Samba work.

Samba is an open-source program that provides file and print services to SMB (Server Message Block) and CIFS (Common Internet File System) clients and servers. What that means in English is that a Samba-equipped Linux system can both use and provide file and printer services for all three basic kinds of Windows LANs: P2P (peer-to-peer), NT Domain, and AD (Active Directory).

Of course to do any of that you have to have Samba installed in the first place. In Ubuntu, like any Linux, you can install and setup Samba with command-line tools. Most documentation assumes you’re going to use Linux shell commands and manually edit configuration files, but you don’t need to bother with all that. You can set up basic Windows file and print sharing with Samba in Linux as easily in Windows. Actually, more easily since, Vista, for example, by default fails with Samba-powered NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices. You can fix that problem, by the way, by following my notes on how to get Vista to work and play with Samba and NAS hardware.

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August 15, 2008
by sjvn01
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Windows apps on Linux the CrossOver way

Who says you have to give up your must-have Windows applications when you migrate to Linux? If you can’t leave some crucial Windows program behind, you can run it using CodeWeavers‘ latest version of CrossOver Linux.

Though today there are many great Linux end-user applications, some people still have “must-have” Windows applications — Quicken instead of GnuCash, for instance, or Photoshop instead of the GIMP. That’s where CrossOver Linux 7 comes in.

With this new version, you can run more Windows programs on Linux than ever. Such popular Windows programs as Microsoft Office — from 97 to 2007 — Internet Explorer 6, and Quicken run almost as well on Linux as they do on Windows. Other programs, like Adobe Photoshop CS3, run decently albeit not perfectly on Linux with CrossOver.

CrossOver is based on the open source project Wine, an implementation of the Windows API on top of the Unix/Linux operating system family. Wine is a very mature project, which, after 15 years of development, has reached the 1.0 mark.

You don’t need CrossOver Linux to run Windows applications on Linux. Wine alone is enough. Wine, however, requires more technical expertise to use properly. What CrossOver gives you is an automated Windows application installation and technical support. For most users, who just want to run their Windows programs and not bother with the nuts and bolts of Wine, CrossOver Linux, which retails for $40, is worth the money. CodeWeavers also offers CrossOver Mac, which brings the same functionality to Intel-powered Macs.

To see how well this Wine 1.0-powered edition of CrossOver Linux works I tested it on two systems. The first was my main openSUSE 11 desktop, a Hewlett-Packard Pavilion A6040N Desktop PC powered by a 1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6320 dual-core processor with 2GB of 533MHz RAM and a 320GB SATA (Serial ATA) hard drive running at 7200 RPM. It’s a good 2007-era PC.

I also put CrossOver 7 through its paces on an older Gateway 503GR running Ubuntu 8.04. It comes with a 3GHz Pentium 4 CPU, 2GB of RAM, an ATI Radeon 250 graphics card, and a 300GB SATA drive. Both systems had more than enough raw horsepower power to run Linux, CrossOver Linux, and multiple Windows and Linux applications simultaneously.

CrossOver requires very little from a system. CodeWeavers claims that any 32-bit system that runs at 200MHz can run CrossOver. The program will run on 64-bit systems, but only if they have the 32-bit compatibility library installed. CrossOver also requires that your Linux includes Glibc 2.3.x or greater and X11R6 3.3 or greater. XFree86 4 with XRender and FreeType support is recommended. The bottom line is any modern Linux can run CrossOver.

The program can be installed in several different ways. The sure-fire way of installing it on any Linux is to use its shell script. Once you have it installed, CrossOver presents you with a GUI that works equally well with both KDE and GNOME. Here, you choose which Windows applications you want to install from a supplied list of supported applications.

Installing Windows applications is a snap. It’s a pick and clip operation. You can also install non-supported applications. Some, such as my favorite HTML editor, NoteTab, even though not technically supported, will run, albeit with some problems.

You should also keep in mind that, while CodeWeavers is trying to support the most popular Windows applications on Linux, it doesn’t support every program. Check the company’s compatibility pages to see if anyone has tried to run your particular favorite program with CrossOver and how well it has gone for them.

Once in place, the supported Windows applications ran without a hitch. I spent most of my time working on Word 2003 documents, Excel 2003 spreadsheets, IE 6, and fairly complicated Quicken 2006 financial statements. The programs ran well. As a matter of fact they ran better on Linux than they did on Vista. Quicken, in particular, took better to CrossOver than it did to Vista. With a little research I found out that this was not just me. Vista is known to have trouble with several versions of Quicken.

Some Windows software runs better on Linux than it does on the latest version of Windows — who knew?

CrossOver isn’t perfect of course. While I was able to run Photoshop CS3, I sometimes had trouble rendering the CS3 interface. A screen refresh usually took care of the problem, but some users will doubtlessly find that annoying.

I would also sometimes need to force a screen refresh when one Windows application’s window covered up another. When I’d reveal the “lower” application, the part of it that had been covered by the other Windows application wouldn’t render properly. After doing anything with the new foreground application, such as running a command, the foreground program’s screen reappeared as it should.

CodeWeavers also offers CrossOver Linux Professional, which costs $70, can be used for multiple users, and comes with CrossOver Games. This addition includes advanced support for DirectX, Microsoft’s graphics application programming interfaces for games. With this, many Windows games will run well on Linux. I can personally attest that zapping your enemies and other baddies in World of Warcraft and Guild Wars is just as much fun on Linux as it on Windows. CrossOver Games is also available separately for $40.

Not sure if CrossOver is right for you? You can download a free 30-day trial version of CrossOver Linux and a seven-day trial edition of CrossOver Games. You should find that more than enough time to see if these programs deliver the Windows goods for you.

A version of this story first appeared in NewsForge.

August 13, 2008
by sjvn01
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The VMware blues

Would you believe a major software vendor released a patch for their flagship program that made it impossible to run their software? Believe it. That’s exactly what happened with VMware.

On August 12th, users throughout the U.S. Tired to turn on their ESX 3.5 Update 2 and ESXi Server 3.5 Update 2 hypervisors and… were told that their VMware licenses had expired. That’s always a great way to win friends and influence software license sales.

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