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By admin, October 25, 2009 13:11

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Released to the public on October 22 Canonical’s latest and greatest Ubuntu yet “Karmic Koala 9.10“.  For many folks using a Linux distribution probably ranks up there with a visit to the dentist, but I have to say that as the kernel keeps improving in leaps and bounds the software wrapped around it can just work on the majority of hardware without issue.

Sure many folks may try it out and find out that it ‘does not work’ with their specific hardware, but compared with last years 8.10 the numbers are down with the sad exception of two particular vendors; ATI and Intel.  ATI recently dropped support for much of their older hardware, but then released a new series of drivers that do support.  Thankfully using the older drivers or using the open source communities versions can at least get them working, if you have problems with the more supported drivers.  Intel on the other hand has basically thrust it’s middle finger up at the linux community with a blatant refusal to provide open source to allow many distributions to be able to integrate support, so for many it means booting to a broken system, and downloading proprietary drivers and praying it works.  Obviously this isn’t the end of the world, but from my perspective a seriously ‘good’ reason to avoid using Intel hardware,  especially if you want to use wine to run Windows games or applications, you’d do so much better with non-Intel chipsets.  nVidia has the best support out of the box for most people not only linux users, but also windows users that it’s becoming a staple requirement.  Don’t get me wrong, Intel does provide drivers, but do not expect them to work directly from installation.  In some cases the generic drivers get installed and it works, in other cases you’re faced with non-working hardware and off to the various support forums seeking a solution.  Thankfully they are available.

In my situation I decided to get a new laptop and specifically bought a Compaq CQ60 which features NO Intel or ATI hardware, simply so I could avoid any hassles.  I’m pretty good at fixing these issues, but if I am spending money and the amount is equal, why buy something with hardware that will not work?    So without further adieu, I release my notes on installing Ubuntu 9.10 x64 on this laptop.

Continue reading 'Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” Release Candidate – Installation Notes'»

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By admin, October 24, 2009 16:06

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For those that have been following me since January of this year you may be aware that I took advantage of downloading the open beta version and testing it on a few machines.

I had really good luck with various systems and even installing it in VMware.  My only real hangup was my main gaming rig which runs Windows XP SP3, simply refused to detect the DVD drive.  Which was very strange since it was booting and running the setup from the very same drive.  All the VMware machine I build used the same drive also although I’m aware VMware does use it’s own drivers but that was it.  Every other box, method I tried worked without major problem

Today Saturday Oct 24, 2009 I took the liberty of installing both Windows 7 Ultimate x64 AND Ubuntu Desktop 9.10 Karmic Koala Release Candidate x64 on the exact same laptop a Compaq presario CQ60 laptop which came with Vista Home Basic which I really did not want.  If you want to find out about my Installation for Ubuntu check out the next story.  I’m publishing this one first so it should be the one right after or the newer one.

Continue reading 'Windows 7 Release – Installation notes'»

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By admin, January 13, 2009 14:47

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Microsoft has announced Windows 7 is now open for public download.

There are many conditions and it’s a timed-beta common with many Windows beta products. You will require a Windows Live ID to connect to the download site, submit a bit of personally identifiable information, and you will then be given a download choice for 32 bit or 64 bit. I chose both. Then you will be given a java download manager which will then provide you with a location for saving the ISO’s for each download.

You will then need to be able to burn DVD ISO’s in order to get any use from this. Instructions are available on the download page, but I highly recommend that you also review the Installation instructions.

So head on over to the Windows Beta site before the beta download experience is over!!

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dd353205.aspx

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By Admin, May 21, 2007 17:09

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I recently took the challenge to try out the new Snort 3.0 alpha that Marty Roesch released upon the world. I was glad to see a new version of this tool available and was eager to see it work. I have had extensive use of snort over the years and can say I’m quite happy with the current 2.6.x.x builds. They are however very good working builds and are capable of doing what they’re configured for but they seem overly complex for the job at hand.

Honestly I can say that the instructions are very good at installing but like most people…who follows instructions? Don’t we all want to trailblaze?

I was at the time running Ubuntu 6.06 and getting ready to upgrade to 7.04 and decided to do the upgrade before I tried to build snort. I had a current 2.6.x build installed and also a 2.7.0.1 beta that were working. I removed the 2.6 build and left the 2.7 beta1 which managed to work with a bit of fixing.

After confirming this was fine and did a complete image backup of the computer. This ensures I can reload this image to disk and reboot the computer immediately. In fact I use disk partitions but I think you get the idea. This is my saving and backup method of choice. I use Restorer 2000 Pro Net to perform these tasks to a networked storage box. Restorer allows you to mount images also to partially restore or to test backups. Image backups can be quite handy let alone time saving.

Well I decide to pop in the 7.04 cd and start the upgrade process. What? No upgrade process? Cheap buggers, well I’ll just have to make my own. Using the Synaptic Package Manager, I run a full upgrade check and compare against the latestest versions on the CDROM. Then I force it to apply all upgrades.

This gets to about 25% of the way and then fatally errors with something I don’t recall. The system now boots but not completely and even though to some degree I can use it, really it’s not.

So, back to the drawing board I restore the original partition and decide to do the proper upgrade to 6.10. Well this worked very well. I was quite happy with myself so much I made another backup after successfully using my 6.10 installation. Then I went ahead and did the 7.04 upgrade. This worked also very well. Afterwards I found myself enjoying my new Ubuntu package I recalled that I was doing this for my snort alpha testing!

Back to work I get the snort alpha copied over to this box using wget, awesome. Unpacking the tar.gz I review the README to discover I need LUA and LIBDNET and UUID in addition to LIBPCAP. Well I have libpcap working fine as I have snort 2.7 working fine. Ok, so I need to get lua and libdnet (at this point) for sure since I’m pretty confident I have e2fsprogs installed fine (which was the recommended means to get the UUID stuff). I attempt to get the source for lua and compile it, but I get stupid errors with readline. I realize the *dev package doesn’t version match the readline package and as a consequence doesn’t want to compile nice and easy.

Cursing, I decide either I figure out how to get readline to compile or I find out how I revert back to an older libdnet/lua. Then I remembered that Marty mentioned that it worked with 6.10 so I figured this must have had a matching revision for these packages to their devel counterparts! So I went back to the 6.10 install and then tried the same thing. This was a better success, but still ended up encountering errors with libdnet. This was befuddling but this time the errors were specific to finding the files that ‘should’ be there. Guess what? They weren’t. I hadn’t installed the devel packages so I realized that I needed to actually ‘make’ these installs instead of using synaptic. While I was running around looking for the actual downloads, I realized the ’3rdparty’ directory that actually included both these tar files. Sure lets use these. First I did libdnet and it worked fine. Attempted to make snort again, and it still didn’t work, but this time I had no errors on libdnet. So I decided to go ahead and make lua from the snort package and then attempted to make snort. It got past lua and then found a new complaint.

This time it complained about UUID. In fact I did not have the UUID headers and again was dumbfounded over the missing headers. I did a quick google however and came up with a forum for some other product with a similar problem, and everyone complaining about having to download the entire e2fsprogs-devel package to get them. Someone then stated that the uuid-dev package would have them (for debian) and have been recently added to the 3rd party repo’s for this very reason. A quick ‘sudo apt-get install uuid-dev’ did the trick for me I’m quite happy to say.

After this I completed the make of snort and was able to quickly start testing it out.

It looks to have some very effective ways to process traffic, but have only finished the suggestions of the README. I’m curious to see how well it develops into a future version. Using LUA was a big concern for me, but really doesn’t seem to be causing any resounding concerns. I’ve become accustomed to it for now, but I’m not actually using it for development either. Hopefully I’ll update my experiments with it in short time.

For now Snort 3.0.0.a1.4 gets a thumbs up as a usable alpha program, now back to testing!

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By Admin, February 18, 2007 11:00

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In the latest of the current software we are ready to wrap up our final review of Internet Security packages from the major vendors.

We did not review Norton’s/Symantec’s or McAfee’s offerings due to the popularity of these items in the store and the fact that they are the most primitive and intrusive software install offerings in the market. Installing one of these packages in the past usually left us with a box we had to completely rebuild. We tested them out earlier in 2006 when they were available to beta testers and we decided not to bother. If you have used their older versions these are not that different nor better or improved.

To the topic we are discussing CA’s offering.

Computer Associates has a slogan that people have associated with it which says "The place good software goes to die". We certainly agree with this slogan. This company in 2005 bought our favorite firewall product Tiny firewall. This software has completely disappeared and now has been brought back to life in a ‘less filling’ option called CA Firewall. The ISS package comes complete with anti virus, anti spam, anti spyware, and firewall.
This package is one of the better offerings in this field only in the sense that the package is very intuitive to use and requires very little input from the user. If your users are not security savvy or like being dialogged by software to make decisions, then this package is it.

The anti virus offering is below par, but still decent enough to not miss any of our test patterns. The anti spyware is pestpatrol which is one of the better packages on the market and CA still offers access to its wonderful database of files. The anti spam is basic white/black lister so nothing special here, other than its clean and works well to protect you immediately. However its not complete alone so we would not recommend this product on its own, but with the ISS package features anti virus so it can also help prevent infection in addition to blocking. The firewall is very well done, but simply is missing very critical components that were part of Tiny Firewall. I assume that this is only being offered now with commercial products.

The real downside of this whole package is its lack of documentation, a feature comparison, its lack of instruction, its terrible help file and its just strange terminology.

Sure there isn’t much to set or change, but for experts who want more control this software is simply inadequate especially coming from Tiny’s excessively tweaky interface, your constantly feeling like you are missing things, and rightfully you are.

It doesn’t prevent anything like keyloggers from working or stealth dll intercepts or global hooks (except in a generic sense which doesn’t give enough detail to determine good or evil intent) so it’s still not going to deter any 0 day vulnerabilities but for the lightweight user or for your kids computer this is a competent package.
We give this a 6 out of 10, which if I’m not mistaken is the best rating we have given a ‘Integrated Security Solution’ ever.

Surprise to us that its from Computer Associates. Maybe this is a change to that old slogan but they are still paddling up the river with the same old boat. Good job guys, maybe next year we get a new boat to float in.