BIND 9 is an implementation of the Domain Name System (DNS) protocols. named daemon is an Internet Domain Name Server for UNIX like operating systems. Dynamic update messages may be used to update records in a master zone on a nameserver. When named receives a specially crafted dynamic update message an internal assertion check is triggered which causes named to exit. An attacker which can send DNS requests to a nameserver can cause it to exit, thus creating a Denial of Service situation. configuring named to ignore dynamic updates is NOT sufficient to protect it from this vulnerability. This exploit is public. Please upgrade immediately.
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Look like combined company will give a tough time to both IBM and HP.
Sun Microsystems and Oracle Corporation announced yesterday that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for a total of $7.4 billion or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt.
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Virtualization is the latest buzz word. You may wonder computers are getting cheaper every day, why should I care and why should I use virtualization? Virtualization is a broad term that refers to the abstraction of computer resources such as:
- Platform Virtualization
- Resource Virtualization
- Storage Virtualization
- Network Virtualization
- Desktop Virtualization
This article describes why you need virtualization and list commonly used FOSS and proprietary Linux virtualization software.
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Linux and other Unix-like operating systems use the term “swap” to describe both the act of moving memory pages between RAM and disk and the region of a disk the pages are stored on. It is common to use a whole partition of a hard disk for swapping. However, with the 2.6 Linux kernel, swap files are just as fast as swap partitions. Now, many admins (both Windows and Linux/UNIX) follow an old rule of thumb that your swap partition should be twice the size of your main system RAM. Let us say I’ve 32GB RAM, should I set swap space to 64 GB? Is 64 GB of swap space required? How big should your Linux / UNIX swap space be?
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Finally, Adobe has released 64 bit preview version of its most popular flash player today for Linux / Solaris UNIX operating system. There is no Windows or Mac 64 bit version exists but Linux / UNIX is the first OS to get it. Indeed a good news; now we have both Java and Flash plyaer for 64 bit platforms. No need to use nspluginwrapper. From the blog post:
Furthering Adobe’s commitment to the Linux community and as part of ongoing efforts to ensure the cross-platform compatibility of Flash Player, an alpha version of 64-bit Adobe Flash Player 10 for Linux operating systems was released on 11/17/2008 and is available for download. This offers easier, native installation on 64-bit Linux distributions and removes the need for 32-bit emulation. Learn more by reading the 64-bit Flash Player 10 FAQ.
It is being made available for developers and consumers to test their content to ensure new features function as expected, existing content plays back correctly, and there are no compatibility issues.
Please note that you need 64 bit Linux operating system and 64 bit Firefox version to use this new 64 bit player.
It’s about time someone wrote this article:
I know the headline is a little bit provoking. But when you think about some comments from Linux proponents you could think so.
This is an interesting development. In the years before, there wasn’t such comments. Solaris was considered as a dead end. But then the game changed. We open-sourced Solaris. The full monty over the time. We open-sourced the cluster framework. And we won´t stop to open source further code until there is no more code to open-source. BTW: I find “Sun should contribute more” really interesting. In the moment you start up your text processor on your favourite Linux distribution you’ve gone through more code contributed by Sun than of anybody else. You´ve already traversed a large amount of code contributed by Sun when you just login into GNOME. This is a fact most people tend to ignore.
Is the Linux community afraid of Opensolaris? [c0t0d0s0.eu]
Jim Zemlin is executive director of the Linux Foundation claims Solaris UNIX is irrelevant and Linux is future. From the article:
Linux is enjoying growth, with a contingent of devotees too large to be called a cult following at this point. Solaris, meanwhile, has thrived as a longstanding, primary Unix platform geared to enterprises.
Sun officials believe the 16-year-old Solaris platform remains a pivotal, innovative platform. But at the Linux Foundation, there is a no-conciliatory stance; the attitude there is to tell Solaris and Sun to move out of the way. “The future is Linux and Microsoft Windows,” says foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. “It is not Unix or Solaris.”
Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed?
Sure Linux has great value but Solaris has its own market share. They make great OS with good features such as DTrace, ZFS and many more. Many government and defense project selects Solaris for Database and many mission critical applications, while Linux used for Web, mail and proxy services.
What do you think?
BASH shell is default on many UNIX / Linux systems. There is an interview with Chat Ramney, maintainer of BASH, the Bourne Again Shell. He talke about his experience maintaining Bash and few other things. From the page:
Bash, or the Bourne-Again Shell is a Unix shell created in 1987 by Brian Fox. According to Wikipedia, the name is a pun on an earlier Unix shell by Stephen Bourne (called the Bourne shell), which was distributed with Version 7 Unix in 1978.
In 1990, Chet Ramey, Manager of the Network Engineering and Security Group in Technology Infrastructure Services at Case Western Reserve University, became the primary maintainer of the language.
Computerworld tracked down Ramey to find out more.
=> The A-Z of Programming Languages: BASH/Bourne-Again Shell
This might come handy…
The HCL (Hardware Compatibility List) now includes OpenSolaris content. Sun’s hardware compatibility list includes the systems and components that run OpenSolaris, and the drivers and devices it supports.
=> HCL for OpenSolaris
OpenSolaris AKA project Indiana is here. Sun and the OpenSolaris community launched the official first version of the open-source OpenSolaris operating system, which has only been available in pre-release versions for developers until now. New operating system includes:
=> Single CD installation (like many Linux distros)
=> New installer and package manager
=> DTrace, Containers, ZFS and other technologies
Amazon is offering selected developers the ability to run OpenSolaris applications on its EC2 “cloud computing” servers. Participation for now is by invitation only – the service has a beta tag while the company learns how to scale up.
Companies with OpenSolaris packages available for EC2 from Monday include Gigaspaces and Zamanda, with Sun also providing Glassfish and Ruby on Rails packages.
OpenSolaris upgrades are to be released every six months.
Download OpenSolaris
The Live CD makes it simple to boot to a fully functional desktop environment, including Firefox and Thunderbird. Try it without fear — our instant rollback feature works like a giant undo button, so your system is always protected, and you’ll never lose work. And, you can load OpenSolaris 2008.05 easily in a variety of virtualization technologies including the open source VirtualBox hypervisor:
