Linux Security Expert Defends Debian, Dec 04, 2003

A Linux expert is defending the way Debian Project leaders handled a recent security breach that took down the servers of the 10-year-old open source effort.

Jay Beale, lead developer on the Bastille Linux project and a consultant at JJB Security Consulting & Training, told internetnews.com that it's impossible to secure any server connected to the Internet, and it's even more difficult for an open source project like Debian, which has a large group of developers accessing the servers.

But he said the steps Debian Project administrators took before the breach were key to slowing any damage the attack caused before detection.

Carefully, quietly, Vietnam is plotting another revolution. This time its foe is not a foreign army but a corporation whose reach extends worldwide.

"We are trying step by step to eliminate Microsoft," said Nguyen Trung Quynh of Vietnam's Ministry of Science and Technology. Quynh and other government tech officials want Vietnam to be on the cutting edge of a movement to embrace open-source software -- products that can be downloaded from the Internet for free and perform the same tasks as Microsoft Windows or Office.

Progeny, which calls itself "The Linux Platform Company," has made a Debian port of Red Hat's Anaconda installer. Progeny is also continuing its work on Discover, an XML-based utility that may revolutionize the way Linux detects hardware and loads kernel modules or other drivers. None of this work is immediately visible to end users, says Progeny Director of Technology John Daily, but these open source projects, and others Progeny is supporting, have the potential to make Linux easier to administer for everyone from high-end enterprise sysadmins to home users who only use their computers for simple office tasks.

Analysis of UnitedLinux’s results to date may be helpful to those thinking about jumping on the UserLinux bandwagon. This is not to say that UserLinux is destined for failure; on the contrary, Bruce’s effort to bring the same discussion to the community rather than the corporate level intrigues me.

As vice president in charge of Hewlett-Packard's Linux strategy, Fink says HP's decision to indemnify its customers against lawsuits the SCO Group files has been a boon to sales. He also sees HP making inroads with its Linux products against Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system.

The next problem in creating an instrument was to design an electronic platform that could make use of the samples, and to develop tone-generation and postprocessing applications that could turn the samples back into voices, singing out in response to an organist's fingers and feet. Since “neither of us was a hardware person,” Ogletree said, the partners and their growing team of developers turned to off-the-shelf hardware rather than custom DSP design. Upon investigation, the group concluded that a personal computer — or perhaps a linked network of PCs — with existing professional-grade sound cards could do the work.

So the team set out to develop tone-generation software running on a stock PC. Windows was quickly rejected as unreliable, and development was done on the Linux operating system. Following the death of James Murray — the key algorithm and software developer, himself an organist — new software designers joined the project, which by now was taking on a life of its own within the company. And then came the 9/11 attacks.

The market for Windows-based server systems is growing fast, but Linux-based systems are growing much faster in revenues and units, according to the latest quarterly data from market analysts at IDC.

The Windows-based and Linux-based servers are riding an overall trend in server purchases toward higher volume, lower cost sales. The same trend sees No. 4 Dell climbing in the vendor rankings to within striking distance of No. 3 Sun Microsystems.

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