Enterprise Unix Roundup: Is AIX a Big Blue Canary? – page 3

Security Roundup

• It's been a bad month for graphics library vulnerabilities. First libpng, and now libtiff, which appears to have bugs that could allow the execution of arbitrary code. Patches are in from Gentoo, OpenPKG, Red Hat, Debian, Conectiva, and Mandrake.
• Speaking of that libpng bug, Debian has fixes out for libpng and libpng3.
• Mandrake and Caldera have patches that address a bug in CVS that could allow attackers to determine the location of files and directories outside a CVS tree.
• Debian has two patches out (1, 2) for the Cyrus-SASL bug we mentioned last week.

Tips of the Trade

This week's entry in Cool Tools for the Omnipotent Sysadmin is ... Fanterm. Fanterm simultaneously runs interactive text mode commands on multiple machines. Use it to send a single command to a shell or application running on many target systems. This is a great utility for mass remote administration or just messing with the minds of your users. It works like this:

Open an xterm, and use the fansetup command to open the remote sessions:

# fansetup user@host1 user@host2 user@host3 user@host4

A new xterm will open on your PC for every remote session. Type your commands in the original terminal, and you'll see it echoed in every remote session. A screenshot on the Fanterm home page shows it in action.

Fanterm requires SSH, so you'll need to have your keys already set up, and you'll probably want to use keychain to handle authentication — unless you enjoy repeatedly typing your passphrase.

You'll find Fanterm at stearns.org.

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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