Enterprise Unix Roundup: Bracing for a GPL Refresh – page 2

In Other News

» Sun announced plans to acquire SevenSpace, a management services provider. The deal is set to close by the end of March, and it will represent the eventual end of Sun Remote Services. SevenSpace's SpyGlass Portal will give Sun a management toehold in heterogeneous shops by providing tools for HP-UX, Red Hat, AIX, and Windows.

» Crackers had some fun at SCO's expense over the weekend defacing the company's site. (There's a picture of the defacement at that link.) As defacements go, it was a relatively subtle one.

SCO called the matter a "shameful attempt by a small group of individuals to undermine the legal right of the company to protect the use of its intellectual property rights on behalf of its customers, employees and shareholders."

We think it just looked like a successful defacement. And that took less words to say.

» Speaking of intellectual property, it seems to be one of the things on which Sun and Microsoft have decided they probably agree.

"One thing that I have found refreshing is how more similar than different the two companies are in protection of intellectual property and R&D," cooed Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos. He was discussing the first announcements of Microsoft/Sun cooperation in the wake of the companies' April legal truce.

For now, it looks as if the companies will be working on making Java and .NET interoperate more effectively. Other initiatives will include bringing Windows to Sun's Opteron-based servers and integrating Sun storage in Windows operations. And that's all they're going to tell us until early 2005.

» Sybase announced it's bringing its Linux-based Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) database to IBM's eServer OpenPower systems in a marketing and services deal with IBM. Availability is set for first-quarter 2005; the marketing effort is aimed at the financial services segment.

» HP revealed it has expanded its partnership with Veritas Software. Veritas' Storage Foundation products will be promoted as the preferred file system and volume management solution for HP-UX 11i environments. HP has also agreed to be the OEM for the software in these environments. HP believes this will help customers migrating to Integrity and 9000 servers.

» Shares of Red Hat's stock jumped 8 percent Tuesday after Prudential gave the company its second upgrade in two weeks. Good news for a company that took some hard hits (and still faces a few class action lawsuits) after announcing it needed to restate several years of earnings.

» Debian continues to move toward its next big release. The project announced plans to include GNOME 2.8 in the next version. That's good news for the project's GNOME team, whom Debian Release Team member Andreas Barth cited for pushing hard to fix release-stalling bugs in the desktop software. KDE fans, however, at this point, will still have to settle for KDE 3.2 due to some show-stopping bugs: "The door is only closed, but not locked for KDE 3.3. We are still open for proposals how to sort the KDE 3.3 issues out, and there has been some productive discussion of late about that — but no final decision yet," wrote Barth.

A more current desktop manifest could do a little to raise Debian's profile, if only because one of the most consistent complaints about the distribution is its slow release schedule.

Security Roundup

• Sun has patched a vulnerability in ping, the venerable network analysis tool. A buffer overflow could allow for the execution of arbitrary code with escalated privileges.
• A buffer overflow bug in Cyrus IMAPD has been patched by a number of distributors, including Red Hat (Fedora Core 2 and Core 3), Conectiva, Trustix, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo, and Ubuntu.
• Samba 3 is vulnerable to a DoS attack, even when a malicious remote user has read-only privileges for a given share. Patches are in from Red Hat (Fedora Core 2 and Core 3), Conectiva, Mandrake, Ubuntu, Trustix, and SUSE.
• Debian and Trustix patched a bug in sudo we reported before the Thanksgiving break.

Tips of the Trade

If you have a hard drive suddenly die, or you accidentally overwrite some files, or you are a secret agent who must recover deleted data from a liberated computer, chances are you can recover the data with Foremost, the open source forensic tool for Linux.

To use it, first mount the drive or media, create an image with dcfldd (dd also works, but dcfsdd is designed for this kind of work), then use Foremost to analyze the image.

Foremost looks for file headers and footers. This gives you much power and flexibility to look for any kind of file, even compressed ones. First, specify which headers and footers to look for in the configuration file, foremost.conf. Place foremost.conf and the image file in the same directory, then change to this directory. (In this example, the image file is outputfile.dd.) Then run these commands:

# dcfldd conv=noerror,sync if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/hda/outputfile.dd
# foremost  -v  -c foremost.conf outputfile.dd -o outputfile.txt

Any files Foremost locates and recovers will appear in outputfile.txt. Foremost works on any file format. Foremost also reads media directly and safely, without creating an image first; however, creating an image adds an extra layer of protection and enables you to dissect and study it without risking the media.

Data recovery is a tricky business — be sure to practice on unimportant data before trying this on something important. Check out Foremost's README, sample foremost.conf file and man foremost to learn more.

Carla Schroder writes the Tips of the Trade section of Enterprise Unix Roundup. She also appears on Enterprise Networking Planet every Wednesday.

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