Category: IT

Did you know that Gentoo Linux 2004.2 ships with a GCC ready for Stack-Smashing Protection? (SSP overview). For verification, just execute ‘gcc -v’ and see whether there is a SSP flag, e.g. like

gcc-Version 3.3.3 20040412 (Gentoo Linux 3.3.3-r6, ssp-3.3.2-2, pie-8.7.6)

To enable SSP for any newly compiled binary by default, just add -fstack-protector to your CFLAGS in /etc/make.conf.

IBM models for Neptun IV – autumn/fall 2004 (Neptun site)

I think IBM’s notebooks are better than my current notebook/TabletPC m200 by Toshiba. Some quick notes about the IBM notebooks above:

IBM X40:

+ small, lightweight
+ SD card reader
+ long battery runtime
+ Bluetooth
– relatively weak CPU, only a 1.2 GHz Pentium M (not a Dothan core)
– small HDD
– very weak graphics chip (Intel Extrem Graphics 2)
– no DVI out (only VGA)
– bad design (tapered/slanted bottom/keyboard)
– no external drives included
– has a trackpoint, but no touchpad

IBM T42 medium:

+ nice and fast CPU (Pentium M 735 Dothan)
+ Bluetooth
0 CD-RW/ DVD-ROM Combodrive (adds weight; should be a DVD+/-RW nowadays)
0 moderate weight (neither lightweight nor very heavy)
– small HDD
– low resolution screen (only 1024×768 even if it’s 14.1″)
– average GPU (ATI Mobility Radeon 7500/32 – equals in about a Nvidia FX Go 5200, but without DirectX9 support)
– short battery runtime
– no DVI out (only VGA)

IBM T42 large:

+ nice and fast CPU (Pentium M 735 Dothan)
+ Bluetooth
+ high resolution screen (1400×1050/14.1″ ideal! – 1400×1050 is more adequate for a 14.1″ than for a 12.1″ screen such as with my Toshiba M200)
0 CD-RW/ DVD-ROM Combodrive (adds weight; should be a DVD+/-RW nowadays)
0 moderate weight (neither lightweight nor very heavy)
0 average/large HDD
0 long battery runtime (though only thanks to a 9-cell battery pack)
– fast GPU (ATI Mobility Radeon 9600/64 – drawback: demands a lot of battery power. IBM should have included the ATI Mobility Radeon 9700/64 like Apple with its Powerbooks. The 9700 uses less power and is even faster than the 9600.)
– the 9-cell battery pack increases the depth of the notebook (huh? despite of a decreasing battery runtime, they should have rather used a standard size battery pack IMHO)
– no DVI out (only VGA)

I’m curious how the Apple models will look like. The biggest plus of an Apple Powerbook is probably its nice overall design and well-balanced, powerful functionality and of course MacOS X (which is the only truly user-friendly OS at the moment). The biggest minus is the fact that everybody is expecting a soon release of 1.) a dual-core G4 Powerbook 2.) a single-core G5/64bit Powerbook. So people eventually decide to wait another half a year.

A nice HowTo for Gentoo:

Gentoo Forums :: View topic – Email System For The Home Network – Version 2.1

Other nice docu:

Postfix SASL, PostfixManager, Courier imap SSL, Quota, Maildrop, MySQL, Spamassassin, Amavisd-new, Clamav Antivirus, Squirrelmail, ProFTPD with MySQL, BIND, APACHE and PHP Tutorial

Postfix with SMTP-Auth

Nice list: Top 75 Network Security Tools (found in a /. story about Kismet)

Ingo Molnar has just notified me, that his exec-shield patch is now part of the kernel 2.6 SRPMs by Arjan who will keep them updated. It’s a pity there aren’t any current plain-text patches of exec-shield anymore. Perhaps I’ll adjust my watchdog script and mirror plain-text exec-shield patches here.

OSCOM – OSCOM 4 in Zürich, Switzerland (Sept 29th – Oct 1st, 2004)

I attended OSCOM 1 back in 2002 which I remember as an interesting and “crispy” conference. I’m not sure whether I’ll have time to attend OSCOM 4 though. Further there aren’t any student/early bird discounts (a somewhat strange marketing policy for a) a OSS community event and b) considering that ETH is a public university). A wise decision? We’ll see..

(via Gregor)

Did you notice a severe performance decrease after having installed Windows XP SP2? You’re not alone. Unfortunately, I lack the time for an in-depth performance comparison of XP with and without SP2. So I just ran the demo benchmark of 3DMark2001, once with SP2’s new Data Execution Prevention (DEP) enabled, once disabled (I rebooted my box before running each test).

3DMark2001 results on my box (higher values are better; the absolute values don’t matter here unless you’re interested in the absolute 3DMark2001 performance of a Toshiba Portégé M200 with 768 MB of RAM):

XP SP2 with DEP disabled (AlwaysOff): 4601
XP SP2 with DEP enabled (OptOut OptIn, i.e. the default setting for SP2): 3299

Oh my! I did expect a performance decrease, but not such a big one! And it’s even a 3D benchmark (“normal” application benchmarks might even show worse results for DEP)! So, according to these measurements (don’t quote these measured results please; they’re statistically not significant as I haven’t measured a series of test-runs, only one run per test), enabling DEP (enabled by default after installing XP SP2) results in almost 30% lower 3DMark2001 performance! It’s your choice whether the improved security of your box is worth this huge performance hit. For a server it might be (it’s still alarming though), but for my M200 TabletPC, it definitely isn’t. If you like to disable it too, here’s how to do it:

1. disable write-protection of c:\boot.ini (see the properties dialog)
2. in c:\boot.ini, replace “/NoExecute=OptIn” by “/NoExecute=AlwaysOff” using a text editor (e.g. notepad)

Further details about how to enable/disable DEP on a per-application basis are explained on this page at microsoft.com.

PS. Note that a similar execution protection for Linux, Ingo Molnar’s exec-shield, affords a performance decrease of a few percents only. I really wonder how MS managed to burn that many clock cycles..

NoMachine recently released their NX server as OSS (Download). Now you can get similar terminal server (X11, VNC) performance as previously only Citrix was able to deliver – for free!

The performance gain is impressive (review at Orange Crate). Using NX, you can access your X11 desktop even from a Sharp Zaurus or a HP IPAQ..

Need to install it ASAP. Conveniently, there are already Gentoo ebuilds for NX :)

i’ve just stumbled over a nice, grassy-like wallpaper for gnome users: gu4dec_wallpaper.jpg

Every now and then a nice guide: Virtual Mailhosting System with Postfix Guide. Originally written for Gentoo, but suitable for any distro.