Tux magazine has a comparison of su and sudo as ways to administer a linux system. Many people are under the mistaken impression that you just login as root (gui or otherwise) and that’s the only way to do it. In fact, I’ve used su primarily. Although in some circumstance sudo has it’s benefits.
Month: August 2005
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Exchange alternatives
Eweek is running a round up of some of the alternatives to Exchange. Bynari’s Insight server, Communigate Pro Real-Time Collaboration, Gordano Messaging Suite, and Scalix Server are all mentioned and compared. (No mention of Kolab or other open-source alternatives which, depending on the feature set required can serve for the task.)
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Late in updates
I haven’t covered anything this morning mainly because I’ve been fighting with a Windows XP install. I’ll give details on it later. I think I’m finally in the last stages of that and will try to do some updates while I wait. It is bogging down the system a bit. (The install is into a virtual hard drive via qemu).
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IBM donating DHTML accessibility code to Firefox
Firefox 1.5 will have DHTML accessibility code donated from IBM. DHTML is code that makes some of the dynamic web pages like google maps as interactive with desktop-like application responsiveness. The accessibility code will help pages be narrated to the viewer, or magnified for easier reading. Also it will assist in navigating pages using the keyboard as opposed to the mouse.
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Computer security software nets $2.6 Billion over last two years.
SecurityFix is talking about the computer security industry. Further, computer users spend $9 billion a year on computers repairs from spyware and antivirus. This reminds me of a recent story of a man that threw out a perfectly good machine because it was infested with spyware. For starters, I do computer repair. I charge $40/ hour and even at that rate I’ve had people balk at 3-4 hours of heavy cleaning versus the Dell ads. How many people take this route instead of repairs? It’s hard to say overall. In his blog, Brian Krebs lays part of the blame at Microsoft’s door and I think rightly so.
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Zotob updates
A couple of late afternoon updates at the handlers diary at incidents.org (sans institute). For starters, it looks like there may be a variation of zotob that has a mass mailer included. I didn’t specifically see this in SARC’s writeups of zotob.a or zotob.b, so, I’m wondering if this is going to be a .c? This variant connects to the same IRC server as the others, but a different channel. (The IRC connection was to allow remote control.)
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Zotob details
Here are some details on the zotob worm (s) culled from several sources….
It copies itself to the Windows system folder as BOTZOR.EXE, it modifies the hosts file to frustrate attempts to access antivirus sites. The .b variant copies itself as csm.exe in the Windows System folder. Both variants create a Mutex so that only one copy can run at a time.
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Google Adwords infringement case…
Geico, sometime back, has sued Google (also Overture, but that was settled out of court) over a couple of issues with Adwords. For starters, Geico does not advertise through Google. Their competitors do and in some cases their competitors have appeared with the keywords Geico and Geico Direct. (In other words the advertisors said those are keywords they’re paying to be associated with.) The other issue was with the text in the ad mentioning Geico and Geico Direct.
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Google search engine crawling experiment
Recently I’ve had an experiment with the way Google crawls a site. I had a client site that had not been spidered in spite of being submitted to Google a good while back. I looked at the site and saw nothing amiss. There was plenty of text on the page everything looked good. I found their page in google but their was no cached text.
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Hylafax / hylamonster how to
Hylafax is a linux server application that can be configured to be the central fax gateway for your business (or home.) Essentially it can deal with queing and sending faxes and receiving them. Faxes can be saved as tiff or pdf files.