Okay, i never really got into it in the first place. Move along. I’m too busy to to do it, and don’t think anyone cares to read it. Go read Digg.com or Slashdot.org… If all else fails, Wikipedia will suck up some of your time and you might actually learn something. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for… Move along…
Archive for the 'Mindless Rambling' Category
YouTube yanks a video clip posted by a member claiming “copyright infringement”. Only problem is, the people who asked for the clip to be removed DON’T own the copyright. To make matters worse, there are 15 other clips from the same program STILL on YouTube.
read more | digg story
One picture shows the true impact of hurricane Katrina.
A must see, it’s not anything remotely close to whatever you could be expecting the photo to be of.
read more | digg story
I just registered a new domain for a client. We use Network Solutions, exclusively–Hey they’re the ones in control of .com.
During the registration process, i was presented with no less than three pages of add-ons for the domain. Each page had 5-10 items to choose from. From "secure" email, to canned web site development. It seems that everything but fries were listed.
2006 was another busy year for the five Regional Internet Registries: together, they gave out 161.48 million IPv4 addresses, just shy of the 165.45 million given out in 2005 as measured on Jan 1, 2006. The US holds 57% (down from 60% in 2006) of the IPv4 address space in use. The other countries in the list together hold another 34% (up from 32%).
read more | digg story
As 64-bit processing becomes mainstream, the next major computing platform shift is due to arrive by 2008. If the open source community doesn’t step up to the plate and address major impediments to widespread desktop adoption, Linux could be left behind.
read more | digg story
Database of popular windows apps and their linux equivalent
read more | digg story
I’m an Ubuntu fanboy, i admit it. Single disk install — Which also serves as a LiveCD. I like bells and whistles. Before that i had used Linspire (another single CD distro).
When i say "use" i mean on my primary system. I’ve been using Linux in other capacities since 1992 when installed Slackware from a handful of floppies.
Redhat has been my Linux of choice for sometime, but i tried other flavors over the years (Mandrake, Gentoo, SuSe, just to name a few).
Anyhow, back on topic. I needed a machine to do a vulnerability scan, so i needed nmap and nessus.
Nessus has a windows port these days (as does nmap), but i don’t get warm fuzzies about Win32 as a scan engine just yet.
So i installed Ubuntu, then downloaded the debian packages for Nessus.
The server installed without a hitch. For the client, i would need to compile from source. The source compilation failed because of some dependencies. I’m used to that–So i went on a mission to find and install the missing files it was unhappy about.
I spent the better part of a day googling the various error messages, the dependancy that killed me was GTK+-2.0. I never did find a proper way to make that error go away. After several hours of frustation, i threw in the towel and went to Fedora.
I knew it was a good sign when the Nessus (Tenable) site had rpms for Core 2 - Core 6–FC must be well supported. It was! I has nessus server and client installed in about 4 minutes (after the 2 hour download/build of FC6 that is).
After having no luck solving a whacky gtk+ dependency issue in Ubuntu 6.06 (another blog post will follow with those gory details), i set out to install another distro on my spare laptop.ÂÂ
Fedora was my “old” favorite distro, so that was my first choice. It’s also widely supported, RPMs for most software can be found for a variety of fedora versions.ÂÂ
One thing i really like about Ubuntu, is the single CD installer. Here i am, faced with installing a new distro, one for which i have no media. No problem — It’s open source and i know where to find it. I browse to my favorite mirror and find that Fedora has grown to a hefty 5 CDs. Wtf? 5 Cds!? I won’t be installing until tomorrow — And that’s if no one else at the office wants access to the T1 today (unlikely).ÂÂ
Then i got a brilliant idea (yes, that’s rare)! In the past, at various Linux install fests and once at SANS, i had installed from an http server as a source. Why can’t i do the same for this install? That was my mission, to find a way to avoid downloading 5 CDs of which i will probably use only 10-15% of the content (i needed a pretty bare install).ÂÂ
Previous versions of RedHat had a “netboot” (or maybe it was “boot” plus “network” — I forget). I set out looking for that. Browsing through the directory structure of the files, i found “boot.iso” in /os/images/ and started there. I downloaded and burned to a CDRW (RW just incase i had to start over, plus i had one kicking around…), popped it into my laptop and booted into the installer. After answering the locale info, i’m asked what my source will be: CD-Rom, Hard Drive, NFS, ftp, http. Voila! http and ftp! Joy! I choose http, then anaconda (the installer) asked for the server name and source path. ÂÂ
I used: fedora.lsu.edu (no “http://”) for the server and “dist/linux/core/6/i386/os/” (note there’s no leading slash but there is a trailing slash, and don’t type the quotes–duh) for the source path.ÂÂ
If you’re not sure, the installer lets you keep trying until it is happy with your selection and installation can proceed. I browsed the LSU mirror a bit before making my first guess to get an idea of their directory structure.ÂÂ
If you use that URL in a browser, you’ll be browing the OS RPMs: http://fedora.lsu.edu/dist/linux/core/6/i386/os/ at Louisiana State University (gotta love the .edu bandwidth :-)). You can of course, substitute your favorite mirror, the key is that they have the RPMs available for download and not just the ISOs. My install is still running, and it’ll be done way before a 5 CD download would have been done. “Remaining time” shows 145 minutes, not the hours and hour the 3.3GB would have taken – Rock on!ÂÂ
ÂÂ
The last remaining hippos in eastern Congo face extinction and could be wiped out in many parts of a national park by the end of the year due to intense poaching by militiamen, conservationists said Saturday.