CONTENTS

Introduction

Eighth Layer News

Not in The Fine(?) Manual

IT Business in the South West

Industry News

Recommended Web Sites

Subscription Details

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Introduction

This month - our experience with free software - some

rather heavy Unix technical tips - and the dangers of mobile

phones.

Hope you enjoy this issue.

Simon

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Eighth Layer News

As promised, Simon's experiences with 'free software'.

What is free software?

----------------------

I was first introduced to free software by the GNU Chess

project back in the late 1980's, when Windows 3.0 was just

starting to crash peoples Office machines. The City of London

University (unwittingly) hosted my copy of GNU Chess,

which soundly beat me most of the time, mainly because it

was hosted on a mighty number-crunching machine for civil

engineering projects, whilst I had usually just retired

from the university bar.

The "GNU" in "GNU Chess" comes from the Free Software

Foundation and means 'Gnu Not Unix' (Would you trust a man

who thinks recursive acronym's are funny?).

The Free Software Foundation have a very clear definition

of 'free software' - this is software where the source code

is distributed free of restrictions on copying, and with

protection in the Copyright (Or Copyleft as they call it)

governing copying and modification such that it will remain

free.

Eighth Layer's definition of free is that it doesn't cost

anything (beyond media distribution costs). This means some

software - such as Star Office - is regarded as free for

the purposes of this exercise, but not by the Free Software

Foundation (who would point to the fact that SUN

Microsystems retain ownership of the source, and could

charge for future versions if they wished to).

So what Free Software did you use?

----------------------------------

The main products were:

Redhat Linux 6.1

Star Office 5.1

Netscape Communicator 4.61

I got a copy of Redhat 6.1 with a book on Linux (the

book cost about 10 GBP). Linux could more correctly be

called 'Gnu Linux' as it uses large amounts of FSF software

in core areas - such as file utilities. Some components of

Redhat Linux are also not free of licensing information.

The purist must tread carefully to avoid these parts.

The Star Office CD was ordered soon after SUN announced

its intention to distribute the product freely. It has

versions of Star Office for most platforms (including

Microsoft Windows and Linux). Delivery at the time was from

California and cost about 20 USD.

Netscape Communicator is another product that the FSF might

take umbrage with, as it is a licensed product of Netscape.

However Netscape has spawned the Mozilla project

(www.mozilla.org) which is worth a mention in this regard.

What unexpected problems did you encounter?

-------------------------------------------

Well other than a minor hardware error (and Windows 95

finally giving up the ghost) the problems were rather few.

A few e-mail messages got bounced due to me forgetting the

rather unusual way Demon Internet chooses to deliver e-mail.

I was already familiar with Star Office having been using

it on MS Windows. Eighth Layer Limited never owned or

used MS Office.

Irritatingly, I haven't found a good free grammar checker

(can anyone point me in the right direction?).

Netscape Communicator presented some interesting challenges.

Communicator is both browser, newsreader (online only) and

e-mail client to me at the moment.

Firstly I needed to get a copy of Netscape for Windows as the

Linux version doesn't include filters for the Windows

address book (and I have a big address book). Fortunately

Grahame had noticed a copy was shipping with PcPro

Magazine for May 2000, and lent me his CD.

Secondly I have not been impressed by some aspects of

Netscape 4.61 - it is lacking in security features, and seems to

have a few stability problems (not too major but

irritating). Of course 4.61 is quite old, and I need the

patched 4.73 version to be safer in my Internet shopping -

so an upgrade is planned.

Definitely the hardest problem was getting Redhat Linux to

support the video adapter correctly. We got it 95% there

and usable quite quickly but a silly cursor glitch kept

appearing every now and then. Eventually this was solved by

upgrading XF86 from 3.3.5 to 3.3.6.

As a bit of a techie did you do anything odd?

---------------------------------------------

Yes - IMAP for E-mail !

Bizarrely for a desktop system I am using IMAP for my

personal e-mail.

The IMAP protocol allows the sharing of e-mail

folders between e-mail client programs. Thus if I have a

folder for a particular Supplier ('HP' say) anyone in the

company can file any correspondence there (assuming they

have permission), so we can all easily access any relevant

correspondence.

The main reason for doing it in such a small company (other

than planning for growth) is the flexibility it affords.

When importing my 2000+ e-mails from Outlook Express - all

I did was create an IMAP folder with the same name (within

Outlook Express) and drag all the messages from obscure

Microsoft format to the more accessible IMAP protocol using

drag and drop.

Now if someone e-mails me a Windows executable, I can

easily log into my (virus checking) Win95 PC, fire up

Outlook Express and see my 'InBox' within Outlook Express

(without stopping Faye from surfing the Internet on the

Linux machine).

Yes - SAMBA for a very small Office !

Similarly my Linux machine shares all the Linux 'home'

directories across the Eighth Layer Intranet (Both

machines). This means all my Linux files are readily

accessible to my Win95 box should I need to access them

from a Microsoft OS. Of course this means a virus could

also get at them from the Win95 box.

Yes - Apache as a Web Cache !

My desktop box has Apache server installed - and I

configured it to act as a web cache. This means that my

Windows 95 machine can easily be configured to surf the web

via the dial-up Internet connection the Linux machine

establishes. (The Win95 box has a modem and can dial

directly - just in case). Just as soon as we get unmetered

Internet access in Woodbury Salterton we will switch to

dial on demand.

Of course all these unusual things are typical Linux things

in larger Offices. I was merely taking the opportunity to

gain experience whilst building an easily expandable Office

environment.

What are the worst aspects of the new 'free' system?

----------------------------------------------------

Handling of MS Office documents is not perfect in Star

Office - it struggles with documents that have frames

outside margins (yes people do it all the time), or

complex tables. I am considering purchasing Applixware 5,

but wanted to stick with free software as long as it doesn't

affect the business adversely.

The printer I have is a Windows 95 only device.

Fortunately(?) it has reached the end of its useful life,

and will shortly be replaced by something more suited to a

small business which can also be driven by Linux.

The PC motherboard has onboard everything (modem, sound,

Ethernet), and the manufacturer (PC Chips) has fairly poor

Linux support. Currently RealPlayer doesn't work correctly

with the sound card. We have taken to an external modem for

reliability, and performance reasons, over the onboard

modem. Similarly an unbranded Linux compatible network card

replaced the SiS900 onboard Ethernet (which worked

reasonably well in Linux but had driver conflicts with the

other onboard hardware).

Netscape doesn't do off-line newsreading - which is

irritating. I will probably set up a proper newsfeed - so

that relevant newsgroups are made available to every

machine of the Eighth Layer Intranet.

Tesco's home shopping offline version is Windows only.

My mobile phone's backup software is Windows only.

What are the best aspects of the new system?

--------------------------------------------

Well, performance is up - including Internet connectivity.

Stability is up - we are using the KDE desktop, and

although we sometimes see problems with kpanel - it is a

lot more solid than Windows95/98.

The operating system stability is rock solid - whilst we

lost the ability to control the system from the keyboard

once, we have never lost the LAN connectivity or had an OS

crash (it didn't even crash when the hard disk went wrong).

Good bundled applications - Redhat 6.1 ships with a huge

selection of free applications - from imapd, samba,

and a C++ compiler to GNU chess. Some excellent strategy

games and puzzles (I didn't load the arcade games). Many of

these are available on Windows, or can be downloaded, but

the excellent installer (Redhat Package Manager) means that

they can be installed with the OS and work without

configuration changes. Remember I have only used 2 CD to

build my desktop machine.

Star Office whilst not obviously more stable than MS Office

has a 'save on crash' facility - such that when it crashes

it saves your document as it was at the point it crashed

(reminds me of the old 'vi' editor). In case you're wondering,

it usually only crashes when reading and writing MS Office

compatible formats.

Flexible configuration - when I dial up my Unix machine

with a SLIP connection I have a script that does exactly

what I want. When I do the same in Windows 95 it does all

sorts of unwanted things that you have to edit the registry

to avoid.

Variety of software! I remember when the complaint about

non-Microsoft Operating Systems was lack of software, but I

was spoilt for choice. I still want to try out KIMAP - a

variant of KMail that supports IMAP - as well as many other

pieces of software. Clearly this is the diversity that

flourishes when one company doesn't dominate the market. I

could only find Kriegspiel on Linux for free - alas the

program plays an apalling game of Kriegspiel (Kriegspiel is

like chess, but you don't see the opponent's pieces. Not

as hard as it sounds to play - but very hard to play well).

Conclusions?

------------

Well 'free software' has come a long way in the last decade.

It is clearly possible to build a robust and feature-rich

Office server with free software, and this route offers

many advantages over Microsoft NT (Not least cost, and

stability).

Generally I found Linux easier to configure than

Windows 2000, as it allowed me to do what I wanted, rather

than how Microsoft thought it should be done. But then I have

many years Unix administration experience which I could

re-use, whilst my NT experience was less useful with Windows

2000.

It is not clear that the current leading free Linux desktop

applications (Netscape and Star Office) offer a

complete replacement for MS Office and Internet Explorer for

everyone.

I would suggest anyone looking at a Linux desktop should look at

the commercial Office suites as in comparison to Star

Office. Applixware is still cheaper than MS Office, and a

new offering from Corel has just been released.

The free software scene is coming alive, with KOffice, KDE

version 2, XF 86 v4 and others either just released or due

for immediate release.

Are you paying Microsoft for stuff that would better be

done in Linux?

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Not in the Fine(?) Manual

Our tradition of rather heavy technical articles continues

- if you don't know your inode from your anode (and don't

want to) skip to 'IT Business in the South West'.

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Building a Bastion Server (HP-UX)

Browsing the newsgroups, we found a reference to this

excellent document by an HP employee.

http://people.hp.se/stevesk/bastion11.html

A Bastion server is a server that provides a service (such

as Web server or file server) to users coming in from the

Internet.

This document is excellent reading for those interested in

securing any HP-UX (or other UNIX) box in a sensitive

environment.

******************************************

HP-UX NFS Performance Document

For those UNIX-types trying to sort out NFS performance.

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0x1c97e8644a22d411ade70090279cd0

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UNIX the Sticky Bits

One common theme with UNIX scripts is to create a temporary

file. UNIX even provides a directory or two (/var/tmp and

/tmp) in which to do it. But can people fiddle with the

contents of these? Setting the sticky bit on these

directories is one way to reduce the risks (of course you

always set the file permissions correctly in your scripts,

don't you?).

You can set the sticky bit with 'chmod +t /var/tmp'

The output of 'ls -l /var/tmp' shows:

drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 4096 Jun 15 14:58 /var/tmp

The lower case 't' indicates 'Sticky bit plus

others have execute', an uppercase 'T' indicate 'Sticky bit

without others having execute permission'.

Sticky bits are often confused with 'suid' and 'sgid' bits.

The 'suid' and 'sgid' bits produce as 's' in the mask not a

't' and relate to permissions inherited when a program

is run.

Most UNIX flavours ship with the sticky bits set on /tmp

and /var/tmp. HP-UX is an exception. In most cases you can

just set the sticky bit on these directories and enjoy your

very marginally improved security without side-effects.

(NB: A recent exploit in the man command on HP-UX , due to

not having the sticky bits set, has received a lot of

publicity recently - you know what to do!).

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IT Business in the South West of England

AllVoice court case mentioned in UK Parliament

----------------------------------------------

Mr Mitchell at AllVoice reports that the publicity

surrounding their court case against IBM has attracted some

potential investors.

Several Members of Parliament commented on how slow the

American court system seems to be in working in this case.

There was speculation as to whether it would work so slowly

if it were an American company persuing IBM for

infringments of intellectual property rights.

Search for AllVoice in Hansard - as the links seem to

change.

http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/

Nortel Recruitment

------------------

It seems like every job agency in the country is recruiting

for Nortel. The last big local Nortel story was the closure

of the semi-conductor facility, so good news is nice to

report. Apparently it is all driven by demand for Optical

Fibre.

Nortel have also won a contract to supply

telecommunications equipment to Brazil, although I do not

know if that will have an impact on the Devon site.

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Industry News

Some judge suggested Microsoft should be split into two - an

operating system and an applications company. I'm not sure

how this will stop Microsoft following anti-competitive

practices but it will be interesting to watch.

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Recommended Web Sites

New Scientist magazine has an excellent web site.

The NS Plus section contains supplementary articles to

the magazine. Subscribers can also get the archive, I

believe.

This article discusses proof that mobile phones can upset

aircraft equipment - so do switch off your mobiles when

flying.

http://www.newscientist.com/nsplus/insight/phones/dangersignals.html

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