Publishing Plans, Webmail, Kernel Hacking, and PHP Logging

Courtesy: Girish

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Linux newsletter, a catch-all category of the new and intriguing in the open source worlds of security, administration, development, and even a little policy.  Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Linux newsletter, a catch-all category of the new and intriguing in the open source worlds of security, administration, development, and even a little policy. Your editor spent last week with the other O'Reilly editors, both from book publishing and online publishing. We're planning the next year right now for both sides. The plan for Linux and open source coverage is more of the same, with three or four articles per month on a particular topic from several sides. We'll also revisit some of our "classic" articles, updating them with new information and techniques. As always, your feedback is greatly appreciated, from general questions to article and site feature suggestions. We're building a community here with conversation at its heart. With that in mind, let's jump right to this week's new articles: Noel Davis led off with Denial-of-Service Attacks, another Security Alerts column. Remote vulnerabilities may exist in Apache, Perl CGI programs, OpenSSL, lsh, Teapop, ProFTPD, TclHttpd, MPlayer, the FreeBSD kernel, and mpg123. Please check your version with your vendor for updates. In the PHP world, John Coggeshall wrapped up his PHP Security series in PHP Security, Part 3. Preventing people from being able to do things you never intended is good, but it's not enough. Keeping good logs—-and knowing how to look for anomalies-—-can provide a safety net that will help you catch bad guys before they can strike. Running your own secure and powerful mail server is quite convenient until you (or your users) go on the road. (This is particularly personally painful.) Secure IMAP and POP3 work for certain occasions, but dealing with large volumes of email over a slow connection can be painful. Not everyone wants to or can SSH into the mail server to run mutt. That's where a nice webmail package comes in. In Building an Advanced Mail Server, Part 2, Joe Stump explains how to install and configure Apache and SquirrelMail to allow remote users to access their mail through a handy web interface, safely and securely. Kernel programming can sometimes seem like a black art. Sure, most people never need to do it, but the bare-metal coding has a sort of primal appeal. While you may not need to tweak a filesystem or a virtual memory manager, you may find yourself needing lower-level access, say to a new piece of hardware or to provide an extra compatibility layer. New author Kevin Lo's Adding System Calls (an OpenBSD Example) demonstrates why and how to modify a kernel to add a system call. Though the example is OpenBSD-specific, the techniques are similar no matter which open Unix you run. This week's weblogs feature Alan Graham promoting International Spam Awareness Day, your editor reminiscing about innovation in library card catalogs, Anton Chuvakin introducing SANS top 20 vulnerabilities, Andy Oram camping out at FOO (Friends Of O'Reilly) Camp, and William Grosso covering uncovered FOO Camp sessions. (Your editor is the pensive one at the end of the table.)

 

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