Enterprise Unix Roundup — Linux's Hot IP Summer – page 2

In Other News

» Just a tiny bit of SCO news this week: Novell asked a judge to toss out SCO's slander of title suit against it on the grounds that Novell is not being malicious when it says things could fatally wound the premises on which SCO's legal assaults against IBM are based. More interesting, in a "sick fascination" sort of way, was the profanity-strewn keynote at SCO Forum 2004 in which Rob Enderle, one of SCO's few ardent defenders, let loose a stream-of-consciousness invective against "Groklaw spies" in the audience and tales involving shotguns and spousal abuse. SCO liked the speech enough to post it on its corporate site; we're just passing it along.

» Open Source Development Labs, one of the centers of enterprise-grade Linux development, announced it's opening an office in China. Analysts report Linux growth in China is the fastest of any operating system, including assorted versions of Windows.

» Linux growth is also in the headlines in the U.S. job market. Job seeker site Dice.com reports "job listings calling for Linux skills have gone up 190 percent" in the past 12 months. Employer emphasis is less on certification, however, and more on actual Linux work experience.

» Sun President Jonathan "Just Being Quotable" Schwartz continues to blog to the approval of assorted pundits who think he's somehow "bypassing the Sun PR machine." This time he's not talking about buying Novell. Instead, he's defining the word "open" to explain why those pesky Slashdot hippies will not be able to get their hands on an open source Java. We're pretty sure the "revolutionary" part of this particular executive blog is less about breaking down barriers between the executive and the little people, and more about how people have asked for the source code to Sun's prized possession with enough force that someone in Sun feels the need to brocade the ongoing "NO."

» Addendum to last week's edition, wherein we considered the whole "Sun buys Novell out from under IBM" issue: IBM says it's not scared.

Security Roundup

• Patches to the graphics library libpng continue to come in. This week libpng fixes arrived from TurboLinux, Apple, HP, and Conectiva. Slackware released an update to ImageMagick, which addresses the png bugs as well.
• Apple released a cumulative patch that addresses the libpng issue along with a bug in Safari and a potential DoS vulnerability in the operating system's TCP stack.
• HP released patches to HP-UX that address a data corruption bug in the process resource manager, a remote DoS bug in Apache, a second Apache bug that could allow for remote execution of malicious code, a remote execution bug in PHP, and a DoS vulnerability in BIND.
• Linux kernel patches came in from Fedora, Trustix, and SUSE.

Tips of the Trade

Running a mail server is a complex, finicky job. Fortunately, Unix is awash in great mail servers — simply start out with an mail transfer agent (MTA) like Postfix, Exim, qmail, or even the venerable Sendmail, then add components as needed: POP, IMAP, SSL/TLS, mailing list managers, webmail, and so on.

The upside of this extreme modularity is it allows fine-grained control and the ability to mix-and-match. The bad news is that figuring out what to use is in itself a large job.

Courier MTA is an excellent choice for the admin who desires a one-stop shop. The complete, integrated package features mail, groupware, mailing list manager, webmail, and gobs more. It's flexible and relatively simple to configure.

For example, users can easily share folders (though you must be running the IMAP server to do this, but you'll need it for any groupware functions regardless). Shared folders remain in users' own home directories but are available for reading by other server users. To set up shared folders, create a Maildir to house them:

# maildirmake -S /var/mail/shared

Users will then link the folder they want to share, like so:

$ maildirmake --add sharedfolder=/var/mail/shared $HOME/Maildir

Users may "unshare," or break the link to the shared directory, with --del:

$ maildirmake --del sharedfolder  $HOME/Maildir

Read all about Courier MTA at Courier Mail Server.

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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