RedHat have reannounced the dropping support for some old versions (ands April 2004, still lots of warning). I say reannounced due to the fact they originally announced this December 2002. And have had it on their website ever since (very clearly). If you want a supported RedHat distro now (by supported I mean the fixing of security and functional bugs) you either neeed to pay for and use one of the RedHat Enterprise Linuxes, or use the Fedora Project distro. The RHEL versions are released every 18 months and supported for 5 years. Fedora looks to be an ongoing thing, but community supported. Lots of freeloaders are moaning and complaining. They don’t seem to understand that if you don’t have the skills to pay the bills (and patch, fix and recompile software yourself) you pay somebody else to do it for you. This support system is how people are expected to make money from GPL/open source software (and yes, people ARE allowed to make money). It sounds like it’s mostly coming from morons who list “cost” as the main benefit of using GNU/Linux as a server operating system. Get a clue.
Tag: linux
Linux Access Point
Most 802.11g cards allow only Managed or Ad-Hoc modes. With the hostap Linux driver for Prism based wireless cards, the Master mode becomes available, allowing to run your own access point. I now have my central box (babaracus) as an access-point and the client laptops in Managed mode. This has severly increased throughput as I could usually only manage less than 1Mb but now can utilise the full 11. Using the userspace hostapd you can do clever things like Radius authentication and dynamic WEP keys, but I’ve not played with that yet. I’ve had a few problems (lock ups on an SMP and loss of clients after restarting the AP) but it’s early days yet.
horribly ported
My port of that pptpd exploit to Linux was apparently so horrendous that it prompted ‘r4nc0rwh0r3’ of ‘blightninjas’ to take the time to do it properly. In my defence, the original code really sucked, and I myself only needed the testing part to work (which seemed to work for me). It also compiled fine for me with gcc 3.2.3 (worksforme(tm)). And I in no way proclaim myself to be a good C programmer! Anyway, my laziness and lameness was thoroughly ridiculed by them here. Find their own fixed version here. At least I got my name on Bugtraq. Roll on fame and the big dollar.
PowerPC and Debian
I’ve moved architecture and Linux distro by upgrading to a PowerBook G4.
I think we’ve finally given up on try to get Macromedia Coldfusion MX anywhere near stable on our Linux distro. Macromedia are making us jump through a lot of troubleshooting hoops, I don’t even think we can reproduce the problem yet. We’re helping the client implement some Windows servers now instead. The only really difficult or unsolvable problems we have always involve closed source software. I really rather dislike working with it. Matt started documenting some of our ‘progress’, but I doubt the results we have are coherent enough for anyone to find useful.
Linux 2.5 Trials and Tribulations
I’ve been tinkering with Linux 2.5 recently and will be documenting my progress online . I’ve already run into a little problem with ORBit/Evolution and built an RPM to fix it, so read all about it.
subversion endianness and xbox
It turns out the Berkely DB format that Subversion uses (or subversions use of it) is Endian specific. This means I can’t just move my repository from my PowerPC to my x86. I needed to dump it on my ppc (svnadmin dump ~/subversion > svn.dump) and load it into an empty repository on my x86 (svnadmin load ~/subversion < svn.dump). Bleh.
I've been fiddling with my Microsoft subsidised games console. I've cleaned up the code provided by the xbox-linux project to create a Linux kernel with xbox partition and file format (FATX) support). The patches for 2.4.22 and some RedHat 9 RPMS are available. I'll write it all up soon and provide 2.4.23 patches.
Advanced routing with FreeSWAN IPSEC
We had advanced routing working with FreeSWAN on Linux. I’m amazed it works, especially with the bridging we had in place between 2 other interfaces on the same box (I’m just a tad cynical about the FreeSWAN stuff sometimes) (read: all the time).