[Malvern] Playing with LINUX.

[Greg Wright]

I've been dealing with a very nasty hacking incident. Its wasted about a day
and a half of my time so far with about the same to come.
Learned a lot of new security stuff. Hackers have moved on a lot in the last
few years as sophisticated hacking toolkits have become available. I'm
fairly sure that our attackers don't have much of a clue about what they've
done or how they've done it or the annoyance they've caused. The whole thing
was a fairly subtle attempt to put back-doors into the system which were not
visible to normal (even root) users. We found out by accident a few hours
after it happened. They even closed the door by patching the system so
nobody else could get in and password protected their back door!
Unfortunately the attack involved patching one or more kernel modules so now
there is little we can do apart from rebuilding.

Otherwise, I've been developing on our favourite platform with PHP
http://www.php.net  using the Fusebox design methodology
(http://www.fusebox.org) and Smarty templates http://smarty.php.net . Its
all pretty dull however the design methodology pushes the programming stage
back to the last 10% of the project before testing. The programming can then
be farmed out to programmers all over the world. I've also been developing
automatic module testing software which is working well as I get to know
about some of the bugs before our customers now!

My ADSL line * should * be connected today but no news yet.

Is there anything anyone would like me to talk about at the next meeting?

Best wishes,
Greg

----- Original Message -----
From: "geoff bagley" <geoff@gcbagley.uklinux.net>
To: <malvern@mailman.lug.org.uk>
Sent: Thursday, March 20, 2003 7:26 PM
Subject: [Malvern] Playing with LINUX.


>
> I have been having a fling installing and re-installing  various Linux's.
>
> I have tried Slackware, Debian, Red Hat, SuSE  LINUX and FreeBSD UNIX.
>
> I have been working on three machines.  Another one already has dual boot
> Debian  and SuSE.
>
> This one is the notebook.  Although the OEM is "Evesham", the innards are
> Mitac.
> I have not yet got XFree86 to run on the Trident LCD.
> It is fine though with the CLI.
>
> Currently using Windows98 to send this.  It is also dual boot.  I have had
> lots of
> fun playing with re-sizing partitions.
>
> On another machine,  I have been using SuSE 8.0  with Gnome and
> WindowManager.
> So far not got Sawfish to work.  I'll ask Phil about that.  He uses
Sawfish.
> It is loaded, but cannot be made to run until I move the existing WM out
of
> the way.
>
> The oldest machine is a 486.   The BIOS does not permit booting from the
> CDROM.
> I use to be able to  load from the CDROM (with booting otherwise),  but
I've
> lost that
> for some reason.
>
> What have you all been up to ?
>
>
> Regards,
>
>  Geoff
>
>
>
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