Flahed out

Not content with being the worlds most popular search engine, and Steve Balmers current obsession Google are apparently working on a mobile phone now too! Details are very limited so far, but apparently this was finally confirmed by Isabel Aguilera, head of Google Iberia, to Spanish IT site Noticias on Wednesday last. Previously a closely guarded secret within Google, when the existence of a mobile phone project was leaked to the New York Times some time ago, the alleged leakers were given the boot by Google.

What’s interesting is that by virtue of their acquisitions over the past couple of years, Google have a couple of ex-Apple veterans on board now too, namely Mike Reed, a graphics expert, and Andy Rubin, whose experiences at Danger Inc. may be more relevant, given their well-known Sidekick phone product.

While specifics are hard to come by at the moment, and there are no available estimates as to when the phone will eventually be released, I am definitely going to be keeping an eye out for this.

Well, I got back from lunch and the first thing I was hit with was a request to change the desktop on a colleague’s laptop from fvwm to Gnome.

Apparently he did a base install of SuSE 10.2 last night and of course Gnome wasn’t installed. When he installed Gnome this morning via Yast, the laptop still booted to fvwm. Not being overly familiar with SuSE 10.2, I hunted around a bit, poking through the X configuration files before I came across a reference to /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager.

Sure enough, when I looked in the above file, the DISPLAYMANAGER variable is set at the top of the file. By default it is blank, but you can set it to xdm (the default), gdm, or kdm – or indeed any other display manager you have installed.

According to an article on The Register this morning, a leak from the European Commission suggests that Microsft may be fined “less than one per cent of the company’s $51 billion cash chest”. I’d certainly be disappointed if this were the case, as this would most certainly not be a disincentive to Microsoft to continue their illegal anti-competitive policies.

Let’s hope Commissioner Mario Monti has something better up his sleeve! Well, we’ll know tomorrow anyway.

On the issue I mentioned yesterday, of the slander of the Open Source community on national radio, RTE have put a response to this on their website, at http://www.rte.ie/news/2004/0203/mydoom.html

Yesterday morning, a radio program called “Morning Ireland” on RTE radio, hosted a chat with an individual named William Campbell who is apparently a director of a training company called BUA Training. During the course of this debate, Cambell maliciously laid the blame for the recent Novarg/MyDoom virus at the feet of the Open Source community.

While many are simply amused at his blatant self-interest (BUA Training appears to train exclusively on the Microsoft Windows platform from the information I gleaned from their website) others – such as I – are more than a little concerned about the damage such misinformation could do to the reputation of Open Source Software and the Open Source community. Here is a transcript of the interview:-

David Hanley: ‘The fastest spreading email worm in history’ is how internet
security experts describe the so-called ‘MyDoom’ email worm. The MyDoom email
worm was primed to attack S-C-O’s website on Sunday. The experts say it’ll
move on to target Microsoft Corporation tomorrow. S-C-O’s website www.sco.com
remained offline last night. ‘A large scale Denial of Service attack has
started that has made the company’s website www.sco.com completely unavailable,’
the S-C-O said in a statement.

Now, we’re joined in the centre city studio by the director of BUI Training,
computer expert William Campbell.

William Campbell: Good morning.

DH: Good morning William Campbell.

WC: Good morning.

DH: Would you explain to me on behalf of others as ignorant as I am about email
and all to do with it, what is an email worm?

WC: An email worm is, is a computer virus and a computer virus is a program
that runs like Microsoft Word on your computer but it’s one that got on there
when you didn’t want it to get on, em, usually by some sureptitious means, by
somebody em, em, em sending it to you and getting it onto your computer like
that.

DH: How does it manifest itself?

WC: Em, it’s possible you mightn’t notice at all. But, if your friends have
this you’re probably getting lots of strange emails eh, from people who are,
who are, eh, perhaps familiar to you, with an attachment saying ‘Please open
this attachment’. Now, those emails are coming from the virus on somebody
else’s computer and if you open that then you’ll probably be caught.

DH: How?

WC: Em, the reason you’ll be caught is because that will then install a little
program on your computer and if you’re connected to the internet — which you
probably are if you have email — then your computer will be taken over like a
zombie and will act as though you’re trying to get through to this S-C-O
website and make millions of requests for information from it and the
cumulative effect of this, it’s like em, a million people ringing the RTE
switchboard number at the same time. It’ll just knock out the system.

DH: So you’ll be completely disabled.

WC: Em, no. The, the website will be completely disabled. You’ll be…

DH: The website, I mean.

WC: Yes, yes. and, and effectively that’s what happened. So it was, it was
successful in that respect.

DH: Why is this happening?

WC: Oh, oh, oh. This goes back to what’s called the ‘Browser Wars’ whereby
Microsoft put, effectively put Netscape, eh out of business by giving away a
competitor product for free using their, all their money to do that. They did
much the same with Apple, although Apple hasn’t gone out of business and em,
the people who are behind this virus I would suspect are people who, who, em,
are promoting what is called Open Sof… Open, eh, eh, …. Open System
Software whereby eh, you can em, eh, have competitors for the Microsoft
products which, are essentially free.

DH: But would the attackers then eh, almost by definition be competitors?

WC: Em, no because, … these competitors, they don’t really exist as a
company, although there are some companies such as openoffice.org and eh em,
StarOffice and eh Lynux but em, Microsoft has essentially put all the
_commercial_ competition either out of business or they’ve bought them up or
whatever. Eh, em Open Source Software is developed by eh, volunteers and,
anybody can go into a website, have a look at how the program is developing and
throw in a suggestion and say you know, you should include my little …

DH: yeah.

WC: … my little suggestion.

DH: The experts say they’re going to move on Microsoft tomorrow. Eh, is this
worm an expression of hatred of Microsoft?

WC: Absolutely, that’s exactly what it is. And, and also the reason this S-C-O
company was targetted was because eh, if you go to a website such as
openoffice.org you can …, you can download a free copy of what is a
competitor for Microsoft Office. So an equivalent of Microsoft Word, an
equivalent of Microsoft Excel which probably most of your listeners have on
their computers.

DH: William, is their any protection against this?

WC: Em, eh, yes. Two things you can do. Number one, em, if you have Windows
and you have Microsoft Office get the updated versions by connecting to the
internet and, and go into the Microsoft website and downloading it, but if you
have … that won’t protect you if you have the virus already and if you do the
thing to do is, first of all do no harm so unplug your computer from the
internet and plug it out of the network if you’re connected to a network and
then use a different computer, maybe go to a, a, a, em, a web cafe to go to
sophos.com who, who, which is an anti-virus company and you can download onto a
floppy disk their, em, a free eh, eh, cleaning utility which will clean up your
computer.

DH: Very good. William Campbell, director of BUA Training, computer expert,
thank you for that. It’s ten minutes to eight….

–END OF TRANSCRIPT–

Here is RTE’s audio recording of the relevant part of the Morning Ireland program:-

Morning Ireland interview with William Campbell, BUA Training

And now, for your continued enjoyment, here is the Irish Linux Users Group‘s press release in response to Mr. Campbell’s interview:-

2nd February 2004
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

For more information about Linux in Ireland:

Contact: AJ McKee
Phone: 353(0) 86 380 93 64
353(0) 1 278 96 26
Email: pro@linux.ie
Web: www.linux.ie

Irish Linux Users Group Refutes Claims made on Morning Ireland about
MyDoom and Linux/OSS community

Dublin, Ireland, 2nd February 2004.

ILUG (Irish Linux User Group), strongly refutes the claims made by
Mr. William Campbell on RTE Radio 1′s Morning Ireland, in relation to
the “MyDoom” virus currently spreading across the internet and that the
virus can be attributed to the Linux/Open Source community.

Although not directly affected by the “MyDoom” virus, ILUG and the
Linux/Open Source community joins in the condemnation of this and all
other computer worms and viruses as being a violation of the computer
user’s right to use their computer and serve only to further inhibit
free, open information & knowledge exchange. We do however feel that
the RTE report lacked objectivity and represented our community in a
misleading light.

A number of statements were made by Mr William Campbell of Bua Training,
which grossly misrepresented the Linux & Open Source Community in
Ireland.

Mr Campbell stated he suspected the open source community of developing
and deploying this software. We find this statement offensive,
irresponsible and made without any reasonable thought or evidence to
suggest any Open Source Software community involvement.

Furthermore, the suggestions that Linux, OpenOffice.org and Star Office
are companies are simply wrong. Linux is a free operating system
developed
by many people and companies world wide in the spirit of cooperation,
with no one individual owning the rights to the software. This is also
true for OpenOffice.org while Star Office is a product of Sun
Microsystems. Linux & Open Source Software is in use successfully by
many Irish Companies, including RTE.

SPAM and Viruses represent serious issues for Linux and the Open Source
Community, and as such the Open Source Community has spent many man
years developing ways to prevent spam and viruses from affecting
computer users. SPAMASSASSIN which helps combat junk email was created
and is maintained by Irish Open Source Developers. SPAMASSASSIN and
other Open Source Software Community products such as Clam Anti Virus
can detect and safely remove the “MyDoom” virus before it can reach
users of vulnerable commercial operating systems

Linux & Open Source Software companies employ many Irish people and
enjoy continued success both nationally and on the global arena and
welcome fair and level competition with larger commercial operating
system vendors.

Open Source Software is written and subsequently licensed under what is
known as an Open Source Licence. This software has been placed under
that licence voluntarily by the author. The author may be a company or
an individual who may or may not receive any payment for the work, but
in fact a lot of work is done by employees within commercial companies
(e.g. IBM, Sun, HP and SCO). This is then provided to members of the
general public free of charge as a viable alternative to other
commercial software.

ILUG respectfully requests that Mr. Campbell publicly clarify his
statements made in relation to the Linux and the Open Source Software
community in Ireland. Additionally, we request that RTE allow us to
refute Mr. Campbell’s statements publicly so as to help undo some of the
damage we feel may have been caused to our organisation.

About ILUG

The Irish Linux Users Group (ILUG) was set up in 1997 to promote
awareness of the Linux operating system within Ireland. The ILUG also
acts as a focal point both for developers wishing to contribute to the
Open Source Software movement and for users of all levels seeking to
solve their individual technical issues. Much of the everyday
interaction revolves around our free mailing lists. Additionally our web
site contains a lot of valuable information for everyone including a
list of hardware and software vendors who deal with Linux, an area for
beginners, a library containing books and software CDs for loan, and a
downloads area where software written by members of the ILUG is freely
available. Membership of the ILUG is free and is open to anyone. For
more information about ILUG and Linux in Ireland, please visit
www.linux.ie

– END –

Writing a small php application to create tab-delimited files containing a specified number of fields and prompting for the data a row at a time. Simple when you know how. I’d forgotten about the nightmares formatting text and fields in HTML used to give me though. And when THAT works, the next phase is to set up authentication using Micromuse Netcool/Omnibus’ user database. And then… well, one thing at a time.

Trying to watch “Die Another Day” at the same time isn’t helping, but I have to bring the DVD back to Xtra Vision tomorrow so I’ll be damned if I’m going to miss it.

Reading, reading, reading… I KNOW it’s not complicated, I’m just blanking on it. I’ll have to learn more about Apache. In the meantime, I have only a couple of days before I need to have everything moved off JTLnet’s servers and onto the box at home. Well, at least the e-mail is working. Bought a new domain last Sunday week too, to play with til I move tech-mad.org across… stylesoftware.org (My (defunct) limited company is Style Software Solutions Ltd).

Any pointers to documentation appreciated. NOT the “official” docs though.

Got courier imapd up and running yesterday, just finished the last of my tests on it, and it works perfectly Now to get Apache up and running with virtual domains. If I was ever unsure about configuring anything, it’s virtual domains in Apache. Well, better get started, I’ll be in London for the week, with limited (if any) internet access.

After much f***ing around, qmail and pop3d are installed and running on the server. And working very well. The I got bored and installed a caching, forwarding DNS server using djbdns too. Next up is the web server with virtual hosts. If I could figure out the Apache docs. I want to set up name-based subdomains on this box. It’s probably in the virtual hosts section of the docs, but nothing I’ve read there seems analogous to what I’m trying to do.

Well, I’m sure I’ll get it running sooner or later. I have the weekend.

Nearly forgot about this, but there are new Conexant {L,W}inmodem drivers out, updated for the latest Linux distro versions. I’m typing this on a Mandrake 9.1 Dell Inspiron 4150 with a HSF {l,w}inmodem, so obviously they work fine on Mandrake 9.1. Can’t attest to any other distros though.

Thanks to murble who introduced me to hermesAP, I now have my Buffalo cards in HostAP mode. To clarify, let me explain that prior to the release of hermesAP, only the Prism 2+ cards had HostAP, which is a pain in the neck as the Buffalo cards – based on the Lucent/Agere chipset – tend to be cheaper and at least as widely available.

To the best of my knowledge, the Orinoco cards use the Lucent/Agere chipset too, for all you Orinoco users out there.

Still waiting for EsatBT to give me my DSL. Apparently everything has now been done, bar them sending out the technician to “turn it on”. Bollocks. Eircom have already turned it on for my line as their part in this is concluded. I am currently in an indefinitely long queue to have a technician come out to my apartment to plug in a DSL modem and tell me what my static IP is.

I have a DSL modem at home (thanks AJ). If they’d give me my I.P. address, then I could bloody well get this up and running myself at this stage. Or even if they had a DHCP server on the other end, I’d be okay for the moment. But they won’t. Their sales guy (who shall remain nameless) says the technical department won’t give him the I.P. address to hand over to me.

I wonder if there is a maximum time limit for this laid down by ComReg, because after four weeks I’m getting well and truly p***ed off. Especially now that my wireless stuff is nicely set up!

My epic journey towards having a decent internet access scenario at home has taken another step forward. I’ll be getting a nice new D-Link DL-615+ Wireless Access Point on Saturday for the bargain price of 125 euro. That’s all I needed to complete my setup at home. Now, I’ve just got to wait for eircom to get their head out of whatever dark place they have it shoved, and get my DSL set up in the exchange.

In other news, I’ll be in Dublin over the weekend, if anybody wants to buy me meet me for a pint

Been looking at Wireless (802.11b) Access Points recently, with a view to getting a reasonably cheap one over the next couple of weeks. There are a lot of good ones out there, but the really nice ones seem to be available in Ireland for about three times what they are available for in the US. And as for Germany… well their prices are unbelievably low, but I can’t read German, and their sites are (generally) not in English.

Any suggestions for AP/Routers from Irish vendors greatly appreciated.

Looks like we’ll be getting into offering official Red Hat training here (Eirteic Consulting) in the next couple of months if people are interested enough. This is good, because if we do start to make a few bob out of it, I’ll probably get to go on a course myself, and sit the trainer’s exam.

Also ordered my two Buffalo wireless PCMCIA cards and a PCI adapter from PC Pro on the company account earlier today and they’ll be delivered tomorrow! Things are looking up. Now just waiting on my DSL line, but hopefully that won’t be long. Maybe another week, or two at the outside.

As I may have mentioned (or not) I’m looking for wireless kit. Linux-supported wireless kit, to be more specific. So after much hunting I decided yesterday upon two Linksys cards, a WMP11 and a WPC11 from Amazon in the UK, as it seems to be common knowledge that these cards use a Prism 2/2.5 chipset (which is well supported under Linux).

Then, this morning, while doing a bit of searching for various bits of wireless info, I discovered a few sites which claim that the current rev of the Linksys kit uses a totally unsupported (in Linux) el cheapo Broadcom chipset. Needless to say, I hit the roof.

However, it looks like my employer is coming to the rescue, as we have an account with PC Pro, who I have been informed stock Buffalo 802.11b cards, which use the aforementioned Prism 2 chipset.

Nice one. I may yet get this wireless network off the ground. And when my DSL arrives… well let’s just say I wouldn’t be averse to working from home occassionally not often, maybe 4 days a week?

Hooray for me, I beat the system

If you’ve been reading my ‘blog, you’ll know from yesterday about the stumbling block with regard to getting DSL. I needed account details from eircom, to forward to Esat BT, to confirm our ownership of the line, so that they’d put in the DSL. If you can’t follow that, don’t worry… I can barely understand it, and it’s happening to me.

Anyway, I discovered that the contract form that eircom had sent us to sign has the relevant details on it, so I faxed a copy of it to the sales person in Esat BT. When I spoke to him this afternoon he confimed that he now has everything he needs to go ahead.

Now, the long wait – Esat BT’s agreement with eircom provides for up to a four week lead time on these jobs. However, I’m optimistic. After all, I was quoted 4 weeks for telephone line installation and they did it in two days!

Ah, at last… the big stumbling block I was waiting for has arrived. Esat want a copy of either a phone bill or a letter from eircom including the phone account number, line number, name and address. As the line went in less than two weeks ago, I have neither of those and eircom refuse to supply me with a letter. When I queried this, I was then forwarded to their “Credit” department for some reason. This led to me being put on hold for nearly 15 minutes and then hung up on. Not that I expected any better from eircom, but this is infuriating. No wonder so few people have availed of DSL in this country, if this is the kind of crap they have to put up with.

My next call is going to be to the data protection commissioner, as I believe I am entitled to have eircom send me the details I have requested.

The memory profiling app I’ve mentioned on the ILUG mailing list and the IRC channel (#linux) is taking shape.

I’m absolutely dreadful at C string manipulation – which is something I will have to look into – and was having trouble getting VmSize in a usable form from /proc/pid/status. Last night, I got fed up and decided to just rip off some of the source from “top”, and in doing so, discovered that top and the other packages in the procps package get their data from the libproc library! Alleluia!

However, it’s pointed out to me that I really am going to have to get to grips with the string stuff in C. Any pointers to related resources would be gratefully received.

After much F-ing and blinding, I got the DSL application forms faxed out to me this morning Now all I have to do is get Louise’s signature on them (the phone line is in her name) and hopefully I’ll be all set.

Though they did say that they have to ask a few basic credit-related questions of me too, so you’d never know. I can’t imagine that my credit is all that good right now. That said, I have been with my bank for 16 years, and will be paying by direct debit… hopefully points in my favour.

Incidentally, thanks to longword on #linux I now understand the essential difference between PPPoA which Esat are using for their residential customers apparently and PPPoE which they’re using for their business customers (i.e. me). The upshot of it is that MAC address info is not visible to Esat over PPPoA, so it doesn’t matter how many PCs you put on the end of your residential line, though the contract does limit you to one.