Enterprise Unix Roundup: Linus' Law in Effect – page 2

Security Roundup

• A vulnerability in NFS we first mentioned last week has been patched by a few more distributors: Gentoo and Trustix both have fixes out for the remote denial of service bug.
• Ordinarily, one might not think of a text editor as a vector of attack, but vim, the popular vi variant, seems to be suffering from a privilege escalation vulnerability in its modeline code. Patches are in so far from Gentoo and OpenPKG.
• A potential exploit and a denial of service vulnerability have been found in Samba. SGI patched the version it distributes for Irix customers, and a patch is in from TurboLinux as well.

Tips of the Trade

Linux and Unix power the Internet. Linux, as we keep hearing, is the fastest-growing segment of computing. Yet hardware manufacturers still treat Linux users like pariahs. The problem is especially acute with wireless network cards. Some wireless chipset manufacturers refuse to support Linux at all or support it very weakly, like Broadcom and AdmTek.

As usual, fearless free and open source coders have come to the rescue. NdisWrapper (Network Driver Interface Specification) lets you use Windows drivers for your wireless NIC by translating the driver's calls to the Windows kernel to useful native Linux calls.

To use NdisWrapper, first see if your NIC is on the list of supported cards. Even if it isn't specifically mentioned, chances are your card is supported because a limited number of chipsets are used across all brands. You must, however, be using the 2.4.26 kernel or newer.

To find your kernel version, run

$ uname -rs

Linux 2.4.26

To find your chipset, run

$ /sbin/lspci -v 

02:07.0 Network controller: Linksys: Unknown device 8201 (rev 11)

Subsystem: Accton Technology Corporation: Unknown device 3201

...

This shows a Linksys card using the AdmTek chipset, which required some serious Googling to discover. The various manufacturers love to mix and match chipsets without changing the model name, or documenting it anywhere. Once the chipset is determined, visit NdisWrapper for complete installation and configuration instructions.

Carla Schroder writes the Tips of the Trade section of Enterprise Unix Roundup. She also appears on Enterprise Networking Planet and Linux Planet, covering Linux from the desktop to the server room.

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