Enterprise Unix Roundup — A Renaissance in Cupertino – page 2

In Other News

» Apple announced the release of updated versions of Rendezvous for POSIX platforms and Windows. Rendezvous is Apple's rebrand of the budding zeroconf standard, which allows devices on a network to peer up without the benefit of DHCP or other name service infrastructure.

» Speaking of DHCP and DNS: Last week's tip of the trade featured dnsmasq, a lightweight way to manage DNS behind a firewall without delving into the intricacies of bind. A full-blown tutorial on dnsmasq is now available at Cross Nodes.

» Linux desktop project KDE announced the release of KDE 3.3 on Wednesday.

» Missed last week, but noteworthy: Novell announced the release of ZENWorks 6.5. The new release includes "ZENWorks Linux Management," which corporate Linux users will recognize as the former Red Carpet Enterprise. It's a management tool that runs on either Red Hat or SUSE Linux systems and handles the sticky problem of resolving package dependencies during software installation as well as managing software upgrades across enterprises. Novell's gone for the pricing jugular with this release as well: Users migrating from LANDesk, Altiris, Novadigm, Microsoft SMS, Tivoli, ON Technology, Marimba, or CA Unicenter get a 50 percent discount.

» BEA announced the release of WebLogic for Solaris x86 running on Opteron and Xeon and Opteron.

Security Roundup

• HP reports a fix for an integer overflow bug in HP Tru64 UNIX.
• Several distributions have patched vulnerabilities that could allow local users to escalate their privileges: Mandrake, Gentoo, Red Hat/Fedora (1, 2), and SUSE.

  Since those updates were patched, a number of other kernel vulnerabilities have been published on Bugtraq, which tells us we'll be back next week with more kernel patches.

• We also noted a few published vulnerabilities in the popular Webmin management package, which means we should be seeing some vendor updates in addition to Debian's next week as well, especially since one of the vulnerabilities "allows remote attackers to bypass access control rules and gain read access to configuration information for a module."

Tips of the Trade

Administering a mixed Linux/Unix/Windows network presents a number of interoperability challenges and vexations. A useful tool for your Windows users who also need Unix functionality is Cygwin. Cygwin creates a native Unix environment on a Windows PC, and it comes with a large assortment of useful Unix utilities, such as development tools, shells, backup utilities, editors, image editing and manipulation, X Window, and a whole lot more. If you want something that is not already built into Cygwin, chances are you can compile it on Windows and make it work.

Installing Cygwin is as easy as falling over. Head over to the Cygwin home page, and click the "Install Cygwin Now" button. This will download the Cygwin setup program, setup.exe. Click on setup.exe; this opens a package menu, showing the default packages, and all other available packages. Simply click to select the ones you want. Anytime you want to add or delete packages, run setup.exe again.

Be sure to install Cygwin into the Program Files directory, such as C:\Program Files\Cygwin. Do not install it into the root directory, C:\; it's a bad practice to put program files there, and it may cause Cygwin to not work correctly.

You'll find Cygwin, a package list, and all manner of good documentation at Cygwin.com

Carla Schroder writes the Tips of the Trade section of Enterprise Unix Roundup. She also appears on Crossnodes every Wednesday, and is the author of the site's popular Scripting Clinic, which deals with Unix/Linux scripting issues.

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