Clamav 0.88.5
October 17th, 2006Clamav antivirus software – multiple security issues addressed with release of 0.88.5
VMware server usb devices not listed on Mandriva host
October 17th, 2006I’ve been using vmware server quite a bit of course, I’ve mentioned it before. I had never played around with accessing a usb device in the guest environment though. When I tried (host operating system is Mandriva 2006)…. nothing was listed, in spite of several devices being plugged in (and unmounted from the host.) So, I looked around and found that according to this…. that vmware feature requires USBFS to be mounted on /proc/bus/usb …. Some systems that don’t do this by default are…. Ubuntu Linux 6.06, SUSE Linux 10.1, SUSE Enterprise Linux Server 10, Mandriva Linux 2006, SLES9 SP3 64 bit……………. so how do you fix it?
Clearing the deck….
October 17th, 2006As you mgiht can tell, I’ve been trying to “clear the deck” of posts that I’ve been meaning to put up. Some are just links to several pages that I’ve kept up for a few days because it was interesting. But just so you know we’re in the midst of a post flood.
CLI Magic with curl
October 17th, 2006I saw this great article from enterprise.linux.com giving some good ideas on some of the interesting things that can be done with curl. (Curl is a command line application for accessing URL’s (web/ftp/etc.))
Would you like spyware with that? Apple too….
October 17th, 2006These stories come up from time to time. A free giveaway of some sort and it turns out that there’s spyware or a virus embedded, company gives a big “whoops” and fixes things by replacing them…. McDonalds had a promotion going where up to 10,000 people could win a flash based mp3 player they also received a trojan horse preinstalled…. They’ve apologized and are swapping the infected players and giving information on how to clean up a pc with the keylogger. According to f-secure it was infected with the QQPass password-stealing trojan. Just imagine how things would have turned out if the Greeks had looked that gift horse from the trojans in the mouth first…..
*Nix Nvidia binary root exploit
October 17th, 2006There appears to be a working root exploit against the binary NVidia driver for *nix based systems. It’s reported at kerneltrap.org It was resolved a few weeks back by the release of version 1.0-9625 of the Nvidia binary graphic driver. Linux has been primarily mentioned in these stories, but likely other Unixes (Unices)? are affected as well. (Since it seems to be the binary driver from Nvidia at fault.)
Firefox 2.0 RC3 out
October 17th, 2006Baring big problems, the final release candidate for the new 2.0 version of Mozilla Firefox is out reported here and here.
Mozilla.com page for the RC is here.
Meta tag analyzer
October 17th, 2006Meta tags are not as useful as they once were, but…. if you’re still trying to make sure that your description and keywords tags are done right (and match the consistency of the page) you might want to look at this metatag analyzer. It also looks at the text on the page to give you the frequency of keywords.
Using DNS servers other than your ISP’s
October 17th, 2006As I mentioned earlier, Bellsouth seemed to be in the midst of a big DNS meltdown when I got up this morning. I spent some time getting various bellsouth customers “worked around” the issue by setting up an alternate DNS server for them. For starters…. DNS translates addresses like google.com into numbers (like 72.14.207.99) Think of it as a telephone directory lookup service… you can’t pickup a phone and punch in the letters of someones name to call them, you have to dial a number and first you have to see what the number is…. in networking, the computer does the DNS lookup for you when you type google.com in your browser bar. (Or when the browser tries to load it’s home page for instance.)
Major Bellsouth DNS issues
October 17th, 2006This morning, I’m noticing some of the machines I monitor having big DNS problems. It seems to be Bellsouth.net’s dns servers gone sideways – none seem to respond. On one network in particular we’re having trouble getting a secondary (outside network) dns server to respond. From outside the bellsouth network things seem fine though. As usual dslreports is a good place to check if others are having the same issue. It appears as though this issue is affecting ALL of bellsouth’s network and has been since at the latest 11:30PM last night (the 16th of October.)
